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Increased Defense Spending
While Reagan sought to cut funding for programs he considered welfare, like Medicaid or Medicare, student loans, or mass transit, his administration also nearly doubled the defense budget. With programs like the Strategic Defense Initiative—nicknamed “Star Wars”—military planners sought to get a technological edge on the Soviet Union by creating systems designed to shoot enemy ballistic missiles down before they could hit the United States. Budgets for new bombers, naval ships, and intercontinental nuclear missiles ballooned. The Navy increased from 450 to 600 ships.
Late Cold War Interventions
Détente, a cooling of tensions, had lasted between the superpowers from the end of the 1960s. Yet, with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and a communist uprising in Nicaragua the same year, the Cold War began to heat back up. The U.S. military was directly involved in an intervention in Grenada in 1983 to prevent the installation of a communist government. It backed anti-communist efforts against leftist governments in Nicaragua—helping to fund and train rebels (“contras”) to fight the communist Sandinistas—and in El Salvador. The Reagan administration’s desire to support the contras resulted in one of the biggest political scandals of the 1980s: the Iran-Contra Affair. Seeking to support U.S. efforts to stop communism in Nicaragua, Reagan’s advisors used funds from illegal arms sales with Iran to provide them with aid. These actions broke laws requiring congressional oversight of such sales and made it look as if Reagan’s advisors, not Reagan himself, had the final say in American foreign policy.
Decline of the Soviet Union
Fortunately for Reagan and the rest of the world, Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. His policies focused on reforming the failing government of the USSR and emphasized glasnost (political openness), perestroika (economic restructuring), and demokratizatsiya (democratization). The results of his reforms allowed for the growth of activism focused on political transparency and economic liberalism in the satellite nations surrounding the USSR. As a result, Eastern European nations began to hold more free and open elections, sometimes resulting in the communist party losing. Beginning in Poland, a series of uprisings and social revolutions led to countries declaring themselves free from the Communist Bloc. Eventually, the Berlin Wall, the once-feared symbol of the Iron Curtain, was torn down in 1990, and Germany reunited. The same year, a trio of Soviet republics—Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—declared their independence from the USSR. After a failed coup attempt, the remaining republics disbanded the Soviet Union. The USSR’s experiment with communism ended in 1991, ending the Cold War and leaving Russia a stand-alone nation.
Post-Cold War Interventions
With the end of the Cold War, America became the world’s only superpower. Its security obligations were spread across the globe. For example, an intervention in Panama to remove autocratic ruler Manuel Noriega in 1989 was justified as an attempt to prevent drug trafficking, not stop communism. When the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded his oil-rich neighbor Kuwait, the United States and its allies in the United Nations declared the Persian Gulf War of 1991—a lightning-fast invasion of Iraq, obtaining victory in a 100-hour campaign. The goal of overthrowing Hussein was not accomplished, however, since he remained in power once the war was over.
