Cold War: 1980s

Period of tension and competition between two superpowers—the United States and the Soviet Union—lasting from 1945 to 1991

The Cold War defined U.S. foreign policy during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, who famously referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” As a result, the threat of nuclear annihilation haunted the American popular imagination throughout the 1980’s. At the end of the decade, however, the Cold War came to an end, as the Soviets instituted liberal reforms and the Berlin Wall was torn down. At the beginning of the 1990’s, the so-called evil empire collapsed, and Russia and its former republics and satellite nations embarked on a project of rebuilding and transforming their governments.

The 1980’s began only a week after the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan on December 25, 1979. The decade ended only three days after the end of communism in Czechoslovakia on December 29, 1989, capped an autumn defined by the collapse of communist regimes across Central Europe. In between, three American presidents governed during a decade that witnessed, first, a return of competitive and confrontational politics reminiscent of the worst days of the Cold War and, then, an abrupt about-face toward superpower cooperation, even in highly sensitive areas.

Afghanistan, Carter, and the Cold War

By 1980, the Cold War had passed through several distinct stages. Born out of a series of Soviet aggressive maneuvers and U.S. responses to them during the 1945-1947 period, the Cold War had crystallized with the American decision in March of 1947 to make the containment of communism the anchor of its postwar foreign policy. There followed a fifteen-year period of U.S.-Soviet competition and increasingly global, confrontational politics that ended only when the Cuban Missile Crisis in October of 1962 brought the two superpowers to the brink of thermonuclear war. A mutual desire to avert future confrontations led to a shift in U.S.-Soviet relations in the 1960’s. Pre-1962 confrontation politics gave way to a six-year interim period, during which both superpowers sought to minimize the danger of an accidental nuclear war, even while continuing to pursue their competition with one another for international influence. This approach was augmented in 1969 by President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger. The Nixon administration made a concerted effort to achieve a détente, or relaxing of tensions, first with the Soviet Union and later with China.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan put an official end to the détente era. President Jimmy Carter had criticized the détente policy as too one-sided when campaigning in 1976, on the grounds that Moscow had often exploited the United States’ desire for better relations to advance its self-interest. After his election, though, Carter had continued the policy, although he rarely referred to it by name. In 1980, however, he proclaimed it to be over, announcing that the United States would boycott the upcoming Olympic games in Moscow in response to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and calling upon other nations to join a U.S. grain embargo of the Soviets until they withdrew their forces. Nor did the U.S. response end there. At a time when Ronald Reagan was promising to increase military spending by 7 percent per year during his 1980 presidential campaign against Carter, Congress reacted to Moscow’s action by substantially increasing the military budget. The Cold War was thus already getting warmer when Reagan became president in January, 1981.

Reagan’s First Term

As President Reagan’s first term began, the Soviet Union was juggling three major problems: A discontented population at home was growing tired of waiting for long-promised improvements in availability of consumer goods; the war in Afghanistan was becoming increasingly open-ended; and the Soviet economy, already strained by domestic woes, was increasingly burdened by the need to subsidize Moscow’s client states in Eastern Europe. Reagan, a hawk by instinct, sought to exploit these weaknesses by ratcheting up the costs of Cold War competition on three fronts.

First, Reagan continued the arms buildup in response to renewed Soviet aggressiveness that had begun during Carter’s last year, annually augmenting a military budget that had been substantially enlarged before he entered office. His strategy, designed to ensure U.S. military superiority over the Soviet Union, included two particularly provocative elements. On the offensive side, U.S. nuclear missiles were deployed in European sites so near the Soviet Union that, in the event of a confrontation, they might have to be launched “on warning,” rather than in response to a confirmed Soviet attack. Meanwhile, on the defensive side, Reagan proposed committing significant resources to the development of a controversial, satellite-based antimissile defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, known colloquially as “Star Wars”).

Second, Reagan chose to fight a war by proxy against the Soviet units in Afghanistan. Using Pakistan as a staging ground, the Reagan administration funneled large amounts of military and economic assistance into the hands of the various anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan, including foreign Islamic fighters who traveled to Afghanistan to join the insurgency. Among the items supplied were Stinger missiles, which were subsequently credited with defeating the Soviet mission by denying Soviet aircraft the command of the skies upon which Moscow’s military strategy depended.

Finally, in order to erode Soviet influence in the developing world, the United States intervened indirectly in several low-intensity conflicts in developing nations. The strategy of rolling back Soviet influence in such areas became known as the Reagan Doctrine , and the principal battleground was the Western Hemisphere, where the United States actively aided the right-wing Contras in the conflict in Nicaragua and sought to topple El Salvador’s leftist government as well. The U.S. support of the anti-Soviet fighters in Afghanistan also fell under this doctrine, as did such other U.S. initiatives as the 1982 deployment of a peacekeeping force in Lebanon, where Soviet ally Syria was attempting to influence the outcome of the ongoing civil war.

Throughout his first term, President Reagan’s rhetoric generally matched or exceeded his hawkish policies. The Soviet Union was stigmatized as “the Evil Empire,” and assorted other issues, such as state-sponsored terrorism, were often attributed to its machinations. Even the succession to power in 1985 of the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev did not initially halt the flow of Cold War rhetoric, with Reagan famously challenging Gorbachev to prove his liberalism in Berlin (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”). Consequently, the first meeting of these two heads of state ended in a chilly swap of Cold War shopping lists, and U.S.-Soviet arms reduction talks collapsed when Gorbachev tied Soviet arms reductions to the abandonment of the U.S. SDI project.

Reagan’s Second Term

Gradually, meetings between the two world leaders became more cordial, as it became clear that Gorbachev was sincere in his efforts toward reform. The communist leader introduced programs to restructure the Soviet Union’s command economy (perestroika) and open public discourse (glasnost). More important, by the end of Reagan’s second term in office, U.S.-Soviet relations had moved rapidly from confrontational policies and rhetoric, through a return to détente—including cordial summit meetings in Washington (1987) and Moscow (1988)—to cooperation in that most sensitive of areas, arms control.

In December of 1987, the two superpowers negotiated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty , an arms-limitation treaty calling for the dismantling of short- and medium-range offensive missiles and the establishment of an international inspection system to police the process. Such a treaty would have been unthinkable only two and one-half years earlier, when Gorbachev came to power at one of the lowest points in U.S.-Soviet relations.

The Bush Presidency and the Soviet Collapse

Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush , continued to preside over the winding down of the Cold War, maintaining the relationship of personal trust with Gorbachev that Reagan had developed by the end of his term. In 1991, Bush concluded negotiations that had been begun by Reagan in 1982, when he signed the first Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I), which placed limits on long-range nuclear weapons. He signed a second treaty, START II, in January, 1993, the same month his presidency ended.

By then, the Soviet Union had lost its empire in a series of popular uprisings against Eastern European communist regimes during the summer and fall of 1989, and it had itself dissolved following a failed military coup against Gorbachev during the summer of 1991, which unleashed dissident forces in the Soviet Union’s non-Russian republics that Gorbachev was never able to overcome. With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the United States declared itself the victor in the Cold War.

Impact

The fall of the Soviet Union triggered a debate, all too often shaped by partisan considerations, regarding the impact of Reagan’s policies on the collapse of communism there and throughout Eastern Europe. The more laudatory analyses of Reagan’s influence hold that, in standing up to Soviet aggressiveness in the 1980’s, President Reagan forced Gorbachev to reform at home, setting into motion the series of events that culminated not only in the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in February of 1989 but also the U.S. victory in the Cold War.

Detractors argue that the Soviet Union was already mortally damaged, largely by self-inflicted wounds, when Reagan assumed the presidency. This argument stresses the Soviet Union’s prior unwillingness to decentralize its inefficient command economy during the 1970’s, which resulted in the widespread domestic economic dissatisfaction that Gorbachev inherited in the mid-1980’s. It also focuses on the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which further strained an economy already overtaxed by the Soviet Union’s need to subsidize the equally inefficient economic systems of its clients in Eastern Europe. Viewed from this perspective, Reagan is occasionally reduced to being the man who happened to be in the White House when a modernizing leader assumed power in the Kremlin, loosened the reins of control on both the Soviet economy and cultural and political discourse, and engaged in a by-then-unavoidable scaling back of Soviet international adventurism.

The truth probably lies somewhere between these two arguments. While the often infirm old guard continued to rule in the Kremlin during the early 1980’s (Leonid Brezhnev until 1982, Yuri Andropov from October, 1982 to February, 1984, and Konstantin Chernenko from February, 1984, to March, 1985), Reagan’s revival of an arms race raised the costs of continuing Cold War competition with the United States to levels the Soviet economy could no longer bear. The same arms buildup also added massive deficits to the federal budget in the United States, but the latter had a larger economy and—even in the global recessionary years of the mid-1980’s—one better able to withstand the strain in the short term. It is therefore likely that Gorbachev was forced to move faster in liberalizing policies at home than he might otherwise have done and that the Politburo was pressured to go along with these policies. It is equally likely that he was pushed into arms reduction agreements by these economic realities at home as much as by his awareness of the dangers of nuclear confrontation and his growing trust of President Reagan.

At the same time, however, given Gorbachev’s vulnerability, the U.S. “victory” over communism came at a cost: Gorbachev’s willingness to compromise with liberals at home and cold warriors in the United States were the reasons cited by those who sought to depose him in the summer of 1991. While he survived the coup, he did not survive much longer politically, and by August, 1991, power in the Kremlin was in Boris Yeltsin’s hands. Gorbachev’s fall had much to do with Reagan’s Cold War rhetoric and policies. It was very difficult for Gorbachev to consolidate his hold on power at home while simultaneously adopting a more dovish position toward the United States, an extremely hawkish opponent. After the Cold War, moreover, the debt accumulated by the United States to end it continued to grow for decades, becoming a seemingly permanent part of the U.S. federal budget.

Bibliography

Brune, Lester H. Chronology of the Cold War, 1917-1992. New York: Routledge, 2006. A lengthy (seven-hundred-page), authoritative, and detailed summary of the Cold War that faithfully takes readers through its final moments during the 1980’s and into the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1991-1992.

Cannon, Lou. President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991. One of the best accounts of the man widely praised for winning the Cold War, written by his longtime biographer.

Collins, Robert M. Transforming America: Politics and Culture in the Reagan Years. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. More scholarly than Cannon’s work, this volume offers specific chapters on Reagan’s relations with the Soviet Union and his role in winning the Cold War.

Hook, Steven W., and John Spanier. American Foreign Policy Since World War II . 16th ed. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2007. A standard short text on the topic, with outstanding chapters on the revival of confrontation politics during the 1980’s and the Cold War’s conclusion at the decade’s end.

LeFeber, Walter. America, Russia, and the Cold War, 1945-2006. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2006. Widely available work that carefully places the events of the 1980’s into the context of the superpower conflict that dominated international affairs for nearly half a century.