Word: reaganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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FOREIGN POLICY. Reagan was supposed to be -- and was -- naive on foreign matters. He thought the evil empire could be stymied with a magic weapon, the "defensive" Star Wars. He also thought that weapon so purely defensive that its technology could be shared with the Soviet Union. Reagan outdid both extremes of his own party. He dismayed the hard-liners he had himself assembled and taken to Reykjavik by calling for total disarmament, but not before he had dismayed the moderates with obstructive measures like the all- or-nothing "zero option" for European missiles. Reagan started slowly in foreign affairs...
When the Berlin Wall came down on Bush's watch, he seemed the beneficiary of Reagan's massive defense buildup. Conservatives said that buildup had brought down the mighty U.S.S.R. -- though they had earlier claimed that totalitarian regimes never undergo internal change. The strain of a half-century of conflict could give way for Bush's new world order...
...been. The fall of the Soviet Union came so rapidly that surprise and relief blotted out analysis. Could anything come to pieces so fast if it had not been essentially hollow? Had we been scaring ourselves with bogeys? The evidence is very strong that the "window of vulnerability" that Reagan armed us against was as false an alarm as the missile gap in Kennedy's day and the bomber gap in Eisenhower's. Had we outspent not only our enemy but also ourselves in battle with a phantom, becoming a debtor nation to accomplish a victory without spoils...
...Bush, as it turned out, was the last to encourage those or any other new reflections on world order. His boasted expertise in world affairs was largely a matter of knowing many foreign leaders. Deng Xiaoping he knew from the days of President Ford, and Mikhail Gorbachev from President Reagan's -- which just meant he was slow to respond to new situations after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the rise of Boris Yeltsin. Bush's is an inertial view of the world, meant to retain old ties as long as possible, a kind of male-club loyalty to things...
...comparative advance toward modernity for Bush to re-enter the cold war of the 1950s by raising McCarthyite doubts about Clinton's trip to Moscow. At any rate it is hard to find anything new in Bush's new world order. Even before communism's fall, Reagan was far readier to imagine a different world arrangement, to adapt and dream, than Bush has been. The opportunity offered by the rapid changes in Europe continues to slip away...