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The Reagan Paradox: U.S. Foreign Policy In The 1980s

Coral Bell
Reviewed by By Gaddis Smith
Spring 1990
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Coral Bell
Rutgers University Press
1990
182 pp.
$30.00

For three decades Coral Bell, perspicacious Australian analyst, has been writing pithy studies of American foreign policy. Here she elaborates on the many gaps between the ideological, bellicose declaratory policies of the Reagan years and the pragmatic, cautious operational policy. In almost every sector the results of the Reagan foreign policy by 1988 were at odds with the words of the early years of the administration. Future historians will have to tackle the question of how much this was a matter of deliberate personal decisions on the part of Reagan.

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