Reagan Administration

Frances FitzGerald's new book demolishes the myth that Ronald Reagan's beloved Star Wars program was the straw that broke the Soviet camel's back.

The memoirs of Moscow's ambassador to the United States from Kennedy to Reagan reveal little about U.S. presidents but much about the ossified and ill-informed Soviet foreign policy apparatus. Anatoly Dobrynin's lament for Gorbachev's rule and the end of the U.S.S.R. advances a disquieting stab-in-the-back theory.

George P. Shultz rescued the Reagan administration from its dogmatism. By using America's growing strength, yet insisting on negotiations, Shultz created a commandingly favorable position for the United States at the dusk of the Cold War.

Thinking about post-Cold War US foreign policy has been led astray by three conventionally-accepted but mistaken assumptions about the character of the post-Cold War environment (1) that the world is now multipolar, whereas it is in fact unipolar, with the USA the sole superpower, at least for present policy purposes (2) that the US domestic consensus favours internationalism rather than isolationism (3) that in consequence of the Soviet collapse, the threat of war has substantially diminished.