The Conduct of American Foreign Policy: Testing the Hard Line

Foreign policy is not ordinarily conducted in controlled laboratory circumstances, but 1982 gave Ronald Reagan that opportunity to an unusual degree. A self-confessed anti-communist, he had come to the White House insisting on the requirement for a hard line, and in his first year he had capitalized on it by winning congressional support for a five-year defense plan of $1.357 trillion (in 1983 dollars)-in peacetime and in a period of economic crisis, no less. On the eve of his second year, there occurred an event-the declaration of military law in Poland-which lent itself well to validating the premise of Soviet menace and mendacity on which the President's whole anti-communist stance rested. In those conditions of evident domestic support for a world view freshly authenticated by the main enemy, Reagan had an excellent chance to prove that his analysis of the central problem of American foreign policy was sound. With one year of experience under his belt, and two years to go before elections, 1982 seemed destined to be a good year.

It was not. For Reagan the year was not a disaster of the magnitude that mid-1979 to mid-1980 spelled for Jimmy Carter, who lost his political mandate in that period. But it was a year of frustration, raggedness and uncertainty, reducing the President at one point to observing apologetically that at least the Soviet Union had committed no new aggression on his watch. There were no clear successes to point to, and the one diplomatic success claimed in 1981, the Lebanon cease-fire, disintegrated. Among the allies and in American public opinion, Reagan's efforts to ease the general nervousness felt about his hard line did not keep resistance to his policies from growing. This article will deal largely with political considerations, but economic considerations-recession and threatening depression on a world scale-increasingly shadowed Reagan's policy. On the one hand, he had reason to fear that economic anxiety here and abroad would dilute his intended anti-communist focus and, on the other, that gathering catastrophe might lead to basic alterations in the global balance of power.