Foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration

The foreign policy of the Ronald Reagan administration was the foreign policy of the United States from 1981 to 1989. The main goal was winning the Cold War and the rollback of Communism—which was achieved in Eastern Europe in 1989 and in the end of the Soviet Union in 1991. It was characterized by a strategy of "peace through strength" and an escalation of Cold War tensions 1981-84, followed by a warming of relations with the Soviet Union, 1981-89.

As part of the policies that became known as the "Reagan Doctrine", the United States also offered financial and logistics support to the anti-communist opposition in central Europe and took an increasingly hard line against socialist and communist governments in Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua.

Reagan escalated the Cold War with the Soviet Union, marking a departure from the policy of détente by his predecessors Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter. The Administration implemented a new policy towards the Soviet Union through NSDD-32 (National Security Decisions Directive) to confront the USSR on three fronts: decrease Soviet access to high technology and diminish their resources, including depressing the value of Soviet commodities on the world market; increase American defense expenditures to strengthen the U.S. negotiating position; and force the Soviets to devote more of their economic resources to defense. Most visible was the massive American military build-up.

The administration revived the B-1 bomber program that had been canceled by the Carter administration and began production of the MX "Peacekeeper" missile. In response to Soviet deployment of the SS-20, Reagan oversaw NATO's deployment of the Pershing II missile in West Germany to gain a stronger bargaining position to eventually eliminate that entire class of nuclear weapons. Reagan's position was that if the Soviets did not remove the SS-20 missiles (without a concession from the US), America would simply introduce the Pershing II missiles for a stronger bargaining position, and both missiles would be eliminated.

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