Introduction

In April 1985, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer (1985, 54) claimed that "Ronald Reagan is the master of the new idea.... [After his political achievements] all that was left for him to turn on its head was accepted thinking on geopolitics. Now he has done that too. He has produced the Reagan Doctrine ... [which] proclaims overt and unabashed American support for anti-Communist revolutions. The grounds are justice, necessity and democratic tradition." With these words Krauthammer labeled a foreign policy strategy that originated in the worldview of Ronald Reagan and his conservative supporters. The Reagan Doctrine represents one of the most interesting and significant strategic initiatives developed by the Reagan administration. Its authors believed the doctrine would reverse Soviet advances in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Central America; rebut the Brezhnev Doctrine; and reassert U.S. power and purpose in the post-Vietnam world by providing aid to anticommunist insurgencies intent on overthrowing Marxist regimes.

This publicly declared policy of intervention was both a product and an innovation of post-World War II foreign policy. It may be seen as a logical extension of other postwar presidential doctrines of foreign policy (Kirkpatrick and Gerson 1989, 24). For example, the Truman Doctrine, the Eisenhower Doctrine, and the Carter Doctrine all shared an overriding concern for preventing "outside powers" from gaining control of certain governments or geographic areas: the Truman Doctrine emphasized Greece and Turkey, though its language was universal; the Eisenhower Doctrine stressed the Middle East; and the Carter Doctrine focused on the Persian Gulf. The Reagan Doctrine was a corollary of the principle behind these earlier credos: while they were concerned with prevention, the Reagan approach emphasized cure. If outside powers happened to gain control of key areas, then a strategy for wresting control from them must exist.

In a more important sense, however, the Reagan Doctrine represented the abandonment of Containment. Its advocates held the view that containment was a defeatist strategy that ceded control of important areas to the Soviet Union without offering a remedy. In light of the events of the 1970s, which many interpreted as a period of major advances and victories by the Soviet Union, to continue only to contain the Soviet Union in those places where its influence already existed meant acceding to Soviet inroads into the Third World and acquiescing in the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Hence, from this perspective, the containment strategy had failed and a new approach was required. This is precisely what the Reagan Doctrine offered: a guide for U.S. policy when containment failed.

The origin of this strategy had its roots in the highest levels of the Reagan administration and stemmed from the right-wing skepticism of containment dating back to the 1950s. However, the attempt to convert the idea into policy reality (i.e., to implement the initiative in concrete instances) involved a much wider group of policy makers. In fact, the process by which this strategy was formulated and applied was complex, messy, and laden with individual, organizational, and institutional conflict, compromise, and cooperation. Policy emerged from the shifting interactions between the White House, Congress, bureaucratic agencies, and groups and individuals from the private sector. Hence, the formulation and application of the Reagan Doctrine illustrate a characteristic of U.S. foreign policy in general: what goes on inside the American political system is as important for the resulting policy as what goes on in the world without.

This book uses the comparative case study method known as "structured, focused comparison" (see, e.g., George 1979, 1982; George and McKeown 1985) to examine the historical, intellectual, and ideological origins of the Reagan Doctrine and its application to Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua (Chapter 2 treats the "noncase" of Ethiopia). Both the subject and the method are particularly appropriate for several reasons. First, the Reagan Doctrine has been described as the "distinctive" (Tucker 1989, 14) or "signature" (Lagon 1992, 40) policy of the Reagan administration. Even President Reagan (1989) and certain of his advisers (e.g., Shultz 1993) called attention to it as one of the administration's most significant efforts. It was thus a key strategy in the last phase of the cold war.

Second, as a strategy, the Reagan Doctrine had several distinct applications, or policy implementations. Only six cases were covered by the Reagan Doctrine: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Nicaragua. This means that it is possible to examine the entire universe of Reagan Doctrine cases in one volume. Moreover, the problem the strategy was created to solve required a sustained policy of some duration (the entire two-term Reagan administration at the least), offering a long-term window into policy making.

Third, the cases themselves should reveal general patterns and lessons of American foreign policy making, since they cover a range of issues. For example, while they fall primarily into what Ripley and Franklin (1991, 22-24) and Ripley and Lindsay (1993, 18-22) termed "strategic policy" (long-term, noncrisis policy which identifies the basic goals and tactics of the United States toward other countries and organizations and develops the basic strategies toward achieving those objectives), the cases also exhibit aspects of crisis (short-term reactions to a high-threat situation) and structural policy (which includes procuring and locating personnel and materiel and providing funds for assistance and other programs).

Although this strategy and its application are significant enough to warrant careful analysis, any broad conclusions or inferences about American foreign policy or policy making must be drawn carefully. It is possible that unique or idiosyncratic factors may limit its generalizability, such as the international setting (the end of the cold war), the Reagan administration, President Reagan's management style, or factors stemming from the particular characteristics of the Reagan Doctrine and its application (e.g., that it relied on U.S. financial assistance and thus congressional appropriation). If, in the end, the patterns or themes that emerge from these cases are limited, the background, context, process, and idiosyncratic features of the Reagan Doctrine and the policy makers who formulated and implemented it are an adequate reason for conducting the study.

Two distinct threads in this analysis can be identified: substance and process. The first, focusing on the policy substance,...