Looking Back On The Reagan Presidency
The authors of these essays on the Reagan presidency agree that its importance in changing the issues of government and the direction of foreign policy was immense. They cannot claim to predict how lasting these changes will be. The evaluations are mixed, but more positive than negative. Relatively little attention is devoted to items on the liberal agenda such as poverty, cities, child care, education and the environment.
Related
One should approach the subject of Africa with caution. Like a horse, it is dangerous at both ends and uncomfortable in the middle. 1981 has been dominated by continuing conflicts in southern Africa and in the Western Sahara, Chad and Eritrea. In northeastern Africa, past and present conflict has swollen the flood of African refugees to almost half the total number of refugees in the world, at a time when a gravely worsening economic crisis, exacerbated by unusual climatic conditions stretching over a period of years, has brought to millions in sub-Saharan Africa the prospect of death by starvation. The assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat in October was a dramatic reminder that Africa's troubles cannot be insulated from the rest of the world, that external dependence which ignores internal political and economic realities is dangerous--that there are limits to America's ability to control events in Africa.
For more than three decades East Asia has had its share of buffeting by the rivalry of the great powers. The region has been the site of America's two most recent wars--in Korea and Vietnam--which reflected the interplay between local conflicts and efforts of the Soviet Union, China, and the United States to safeguard vulnerable frontiers, establish alliances with which to countervail the expansion of rivals' influence, and secure the interests of allied states.
The election of Ronald Reagan in November 1980 may not have actually led to victory parties in the capitals of the more conservative military regimes of Latin America, but it seemed clearly to indicate that there would be a significant change in U.S. policy toward that area. While Jimmy Carter's Latin American policy was not a central issue in the 1980 campaign, it appeared from statements by Reagan's advisers and from the conservative "think tanks" that prepared policy papers during the transition period, that there was likely to be a shift in Latin American policy as dramatic as the one that marked the early days of the Carter Administration--in an exactly opposite direction. While the furtherance of human rights would not be completely abandoned as an objective of U.S. policy (Roger Fontaine, one of Reagan's Latin American advisers, had told a Chilean audience in September that "a concern for human rights did not begin with the Carter administration nor will it end with it"), it was to receive a much lower priority; and with friendly governments it was to be promoted through "quiet diplomacy" behind the scenes rather than through public denunciations and aid cutoffs.
