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Navigating Iran pp 47–68Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The Reagan Administration’s Balancing Act

Confusion in Washington and Tehran

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Abstract

On taking office in January 1981, President Ronald Reagan announced a dramatic break from his predecessor’s foreign policy. In a novel mixture of muscular realism and moralism, the new administration called for challenging communism and its standard-bearer, the Soviet Union. Reagan’s philosophy, subsequently dubbed neo conservatism, asserted the Soviet Union was “on the wrong side of history” and would be consigned to the “dust-bin of history.” To expedite the process, the White House helped democracy develop in Eastern Europe and increased Moscow’s “cost of doing business” elsewhere by, for example, helping anticommunist insurgents in Nicaragua.

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Notes

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© 2012 Ofira Seliktar

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Seliktar, O. (2012). The Reagan Administration’s Balancing Act. In: Navigating Iran. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137010889_4

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