The Reagan Doctrine was a United States foreign policy strategy implemented by the administration of President Ronald Reagan and continued under the George H. W. Bush administration designed to overwhelm the global influence of the Soviet Union during the final years of Cold War. The doctrine was a centerpiece and policy priority of the Reagan administration.
Reagan initially described the doctrine in his State of the Union Address on February 6, 1985, saying: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives—on every continent from Afghanistan to Nicaragua—to defy Soviet-supported aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth."Chester Pach, 'The Reagan Doctrine: Principle, Pragmatism, and Policy" Presidential Studies Quarterly, March 2006. p 75 The doctrine was a centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy from the early 1980s until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Under the Reagan Doctrine, the United States provided overt and covert aid to anti-communist guerrillas and resistance movements in an effort to roll back Soviet-backed pro-communist governments in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The doctrine was designed to diminish Soviet influence in these regions as part of the administration's overall strategy to win the Cold War.
Background The Reagan Doctrine followed in the tradition of U.S. presidents developing foreign policy doctrines, which were designed to reflect challenges facing international relations, and to propose foreign policy solutions. The practice began with the Monroe Doctrine, implemented by U.S. president James Monroe in 1823. It continued with the Roosevelt Corollary, sometimes called the Roosevelt Doctrine, introduced by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.
Following World War II, in 1947, the Truman Doctrine was implemented, under which the U.S. supported Greece and Turkey as part of a Cold War strategy to keep both nations out of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. It was followed by the Eisenhower Doctrine, the Kennedy Doctrine, the Johnson Doctrine, the Nixon Doctrine, and the Carter Doctrine, all of which defined the foreign policy approaches of these respective U.S. presidents on some of the largest global challenges of their respective presidencies.
Origins Carter administration and Afghanistan
At least one component of the Reagan Doctrine technically pre-dated the Reagan administration. In Afghanistan, the Carter administration began providing limited covert military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen in an effort to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan following their 1979 invasion and occupation of the country, or at least raise the military and political cost of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The policy of aiding the mujahideen in their war against the Soviet occupation was originally proposed by Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and was implemented by U.S. intelligence services. It enjoyed broad bipartisan political support.
Democratic congressman Charlie Wilson became obsessed with the Afghan cause, and was able to leverage his position on the House Appropriations committees to encourage other Democratic congressmen to vote for CIA Afghan war money, with the tacit approval of Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, even as the Democratic Party lambasted Reagan for the CIA's secret war in Central America. It was a complex web of relationships described in George Crile III's book Charlie Wilson's War.
Wilson partnered with Gust Avrakotos, a CIA officer, to create a small team that expanded U.S. support for the mujahideen, which was channeled through Pakistani president Zia-ul-Haq’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). Avrakotos and Wilson charmed leaders from various anti-Soviet countries including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and China to increase support for the rebels. Avrakotos hired Michael G. Vickers, a young paramilitary officer, to enhance the guerilla's odds by revamping the tactics, weapons, logistics, and training used by the mujahideen., pp. 246, 285, 302, and elsewhere Michael Pillsbury, a Pentagon official, and Vincent Cannistraro pushed the CIA to supply Stinger missiles to the rebels. Reagan's covert action program has been given credit for assisting in ending the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.Peter Schweitzer (1994). Victory: The Reagan Administration's Secret Strategy That Hastened the Collapse of the Soviet Union (Paperback), Atlantic Monthly Press, p. 213
Origin and advocates
With the arrival of the Reagan administration, The Heritage Foundation and other conservative foreign policy think tanks saw a political opportunity to significantly expand Carter's Afghanistan policy into a more global "doctrine", including U.S. support to anti-communist resistance movements in Soviet-allied nations in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. According to political analysts Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould, "it was the Heritage Foundation that translated theory into concrete policy. Heritage targeted nine nations for regime change: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua, and Vietnam".
Throughout the 1980s, the Heritage Foundation's foreign policy expert on the Third World, Michael Johns, the foundation's principal Reagan Doctrine advocate, visited with resistance movements in Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and other Soviet-supported nations and urged the Reagan administration to initiate or expand military and political support to them. Heritage Foundation foreign policy experts also endorsed the Reagan Doctrine in two of their Mandate for Leadership books, which provided comprehensive policy advice to Reagan administration officials.
In practice, U.S. aid under the doctrine was primarily concentrated in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaragua, and, to a lesser extent, Mozambique, while Afghanistan was the centerpiece of the doctrine.
The result was that, unlike in Afghanistan, the Reagan Doctrine was rather quickly applied in Angola and Nicaragua, with the United States providing military support to the UNITA movement in Angola and the Contras in Nicaragua, but without a declaration of war against either country. Addressing the Heritage Foundation in October 1989, UNITA leader Jonas Savimbi called the efforts "a source of great support. No Angolan will forget your efforts. You have come to Jamba, and you have taken our message to Congress and the Administration". U.S. aid to UNITA began to flow overtly after Congress repealed the Clark Amendment, a long-standing legislative prohibition on military aid to UNITA.
Following these victories, Johns and the Heritage Foundation urged further expanding the Reagan Doctrine to Ethiopia, where they argued that the Ethiopian famine was a product of the military and agricultural policies of Ethiopia's Soviet-supported government under Mengistu Haile Mariam. Johns and Heritage also argued that Mengistu's decision to permit Soviet naval and air presence on the Red Sea ports of Eritrea represented a strategic challenge to U.S. security interests in the Middle East and North Africa.
The Heritage Foundation and the Reagan administration also sought to apply the Reagan Doctrine in Cambodia. The largest resistance movement fighting Cambodia's communist government was largely made up of members of the former Khmer Rouge regime, whose human rights record was among the worst of the 20th century. Therefore, Reagan authorized the provision of aid to a smaller Cambodian resistance movement, a coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, known as the KPNLF and then run by Son Sann; in an effort to force an end to the Vietnamese occupation.
While the Reagan Doctrine enjoyed strong support from the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, the libertarian-oriented Cato Institute opposed the Reagan Doctrine, arguing that, "most Third World struggles take place in arenas and involve issues far removed from legitimate American security needs. U.S. involvement in such conflicts expands the republic's already overextended commitments without achieving any significant prospective gains. Instead of draining Soviet military and financial resources, we end up dissipating our own."
However, even the Cato Institute conceded that the Reagan Doctrine had "fired the enthusiasm of the conservative movement in the United States as no foreign policy issue has done in decades".
Following the end of the Cold War, The Wall Street Journal reported that, during Mikhail Gorbachev's summits with Reagan during the late 1980s, Gorbachev complained that he believed the Heritage Foundation's extensive and unyielding support for the Reagan Doctrine was contributing to Reagan's unwillingness to abandon the doctrine."What Time Is It at the Heritage Foundation?" , The Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2023
Reagan administration advocates Within the Reagan administration, the doctrine was quickly embraced by nearly all of Reagan's top national security and foreign policy officials, including Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, and a series of National Security Advisors appointed by Reagan including John Poindexter, Frank Carlucci, and Colin Powell.
Reagan himself was a vocal proponent of the policy. Seeking to expand congressional support for the doctrine in his 1985 State of the Union Address in February 1985, Reagan said: "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives ... on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua ... to defy Soviet aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth. Support for freedom fighters is self-defense".
As part of his effort to gain congressional support for the Nicaraguan Contras, Reagan labeled the Contras "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers", which was controversial because the Contras had shown disregard for human rights. There also were allegations that some members of the Contra leadership were involved in cocaine trafficking."The Contras and Cocaine" , Progressive Review, testimony to U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Hearing on the Allegations of CIA Ties to Nicaraguan Contra Rebels and Crack Cocaine in American Cities, October 23, 1996.
Reagan and other conservative advocates of the Reagan Doctrine advocates also argued that the doctrine served U.S. foreign policy and strategic objectives and was a moral imperative against the Soviet Union, which Reagan, his advisers, and supporters labeled an "evil empire".
Other advocates Other early conservative advocates for the Reagan Doctrine included influential activist Grover Norquist, who ultimately became a registered UNITA lobbyist and an economic adviser to Savimbi's UNITA movement in Angola, and former Reagan speechwriter and former U.S. congressman Dana Rohrabacher, who made several secret visits with the mujahideen in Afghanistan and returned with glowing reports of their bravery against the Soviet occupation."Profile: Dana Rohrabacher," Cooperative History Research Commons, September 17, 2001. Rohrabacher was led to Afghanistan by his contact with the mujahideen, Jack Wheeler.Gregory L. Schneider, The Conservative Century: From Reaction to Revolution (NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 165-66.
Etymology In 1985, as U.S. support was flowing to the mujahideen, Savimbi's UNITA, and the Nicaraguan Contras, columnist Charles Krauthammer, in an essay for Time magazine, labeled the policy the "Reagan Doctrine," and the name stuck.
Krauthammer later said:
"Rollback" replaces "containment" and "détente"