Political positions of Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan was the 40th President of the United States (1981–1989). A Republican and former actor and governor of California, he energized the conservative movement in the United States from 1964. His basic foreign policy was to equal and surpass the Soviet Union in military strength, and put it on the road to what he called "the ash heap of history". By 1985, he began to co-operate closely with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev–they even became friends–and negotiated large-scale disarmament projects. The Cold War was fading away and suddenly ended as Soviets lost control of Eastern Europe almost overnight in October 1989, nine months after Reagan was replaced in the White House by his vice president George H. W. Bush, who was following Reagan's policies. The Soviet Union itself was dissolved in December 1991. In terms of the Reagan doctrine, he promoted military, financial, and diplomatic support for anti-Communist insurgencies in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, and numerous other countries. For the most part, local communist power collapsed when the Soviet Union collapsed.

In domestic affairs, at a time of stagflation with high unemployment and high inflation, he took dramatic steps. They included a major tax cut, and large-scale deregulation of business activities. He took steps to weaken labor unions and found a bipartisan long-term fix to protect the Social Security system. Although he had the support from the Religious Right, he generally avoided or downplayed social issues such as abortion, homosexuality, and racial integration. He spoke out for prayers in public schools but did not promote a constitutional amendment to allow it. Fighting drugs was a high priority. He also appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court. He became an iconic figure who has been praised by later Republican presidential candidates.

Leadership

"Ronald Reagan was convivial, upbeat, courteous, respectful, self-confident, and humble. But he was
also opaque, remote, distant, and inscrutable," says historian Melvyn P. Leffler According to James P. Pfiffner, University Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University, Reagan was a larger-than-life character, a formidable politician, and an important president. His complexity produced a "presidency of paradoxes," in which dramatic successes mingled with unfortunate failures. His strengths included broad vision and clear direction. Voters appreciated his optimism, geniality, and gracious nature, which made his ideals seem all that more attractive. He believed that all national problems were simple problems and had faith in simple solutions. That strengthened his resolve but also led to failures when there were deep complications. Paradoxically, his victories depended on his willingness to make pragmatic compromises without forsaking his ideals.

Reagan himself made the major policy decisions and often overruled his top advisers in cases such as the Reykjavík Summit in 1986, and his 1987 speech calling for tearing down the Berlin wall. He was concerned with very broad issues, as well as anecdotal evidence to support his beliefs. He paid very little attention to details and elaborate briefings. When senior officials did not work out, such as Secretary of State Alexander Haig, they were fired. Reagan went through a series of six national security advisers before settling on people he trusted. Indeed, one of them, John Poindexter, was trusted too much. Poindexter and his aide Oliver North engaged in a secret deal with Iran called the Iran–Contra affair that seriously damaged Reagan's reputation. Reagan had rarely travelled abroad and relied on an inner circle of advisers who were not foreign policy experts, including his wife, James Baker, Edwin Meese and Michael Deaver. Haig had the credentials to be Secretary of State, but he was arrogant and unable to get along with the other top aides. He was replaced by George P. Shultz, who proved much more collaborative and has been generally admired by historians. Other key players included William J. Casey, director of the CIA, William P. Clark, national security advisor, and Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ambassador to the United Nations. Casper W. Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, successfully rebuilt and expanded the military but did not coordinate well with the foreign policy leadership.

Foreign policy

Cold War

Reagan served as President during the last part of the Cold War, an era of escalating ideological disagreements and preparations for war between the United States and the Soviet Union. Reagan in 1982 denounced the enemy as an " evil empire" that would be consigned to the "ash heap of history" and he later predicted that communism would collapse.

He reversed the policy of détente and massively built up the United States military.

He proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a defense project that planned to use ground and space-based missile defense systems to protect the United States from attack. Reagan believed that this defense shield could make nuclear war impossible. Reagan was convinced that the Soviet Union could be defeated rather than simply negotiated with.

Policy toward USSR

Reagan forcefully confronted the Soviet Union, marking a sharp departure from the détente observed by his predecessors Nixon, Ford, and Carter. Under the assumption that the Soviet Union was financially unable to match the United States in a renewed arms race, he accelerated increases in defense spending begun during the Carter Administration and strove to make the Cold War economically and rhetorically hot.

Reagan had three motivations. First he agreed with the neoconservatives who argued that the Soviets had pulled ahead in military power and the U.S. had to race to catch up. Stansfield Turner, CIA director under Carter, warned in 1981 that, "in the last several years all of the best studies have shown that the balance of strategic nuclear capabilities has been tipping in favor of the Soviet Union." Second, Reagan believed the decrepit Soviet economy could not handle a high-tech weapons race based on computers; it was imperative to block them from gaining western technology.

Third, was the moral certainty that Communism was evil and doomed to failure. Reagan was the first major world leader to declare that Communism would soon collapse. On March 3, 1983, he was blunt to a religious group: the Soviet Union is "the focus of evil in the modern world" and could not last: "I believe that communism is another sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose — last pages even now are being written." His most detailed analysis came on June 8, 1982, to the British Parliament, stunning the Soviets and allies alike. Most experts assumed that the Soviet Union would be around for generations to come, and it was essential to recognize that and work with them. But Reagan ridiculed the USSR as an "evil empire" and argued that it was suffering a deep economic crisis, which he intended to make worse by cutting off western technology. He stated the Soviet Union "runs against the tide of history by denying human freedom and human dignity to its citizens."

A year later in 1983 Reagan stunned the world with a totally new idea: the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), labeled "star wars" by the media, after the current movie. Reagan, following the ideas of Edward Teller (who invented the H-Bomb in 1950) called for a defensive missile umbrella over the U.S. that would intercept and destroy in space any hostile missiles. It was an unexpected, new idea, and supporters cheered, as SDI seemed to promise protection from nuclear destruction. To opponents, SDI meant a new arms race and the end of the Mutual Assured Destruction ("MAD") strategy that they believed had so far prevented nuclear war. The Soviets were stunned—they lacked basic computers and were unable to say whether it would work or not. Critics said it would cost a trillion dollars; yes said supporters, and the Soviets will go bankrupt if they try to match it. The SDI was in fact funded but was never operational.

Defense spending

The Reagan administration made dramatic increases in defense spending one of their three main priorities on taking office. The transition to the new professional all-professional force was finalized, and the draft forgotten. A dramatic expansion of salary bases and benefits for both enlisted and officers made career service much more attractive. Under the aggressive leadership of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, the development of the B-1 bomber was reinstated, and there was funding for a new B-2 bomber, as well as cruise missiles, the MX missile, and a 600 ship Navy. The new weaponry was designed with Soviet targets in mind. In terms of real dollars after taxation, defense spending jump 34 percent between 1981 in 1985. Reagan's two terms, defense spending totaled about 2 trillion dollars, but even so it was a lower percentage of the federal budget or have the GDP, then before 1976. There were arms sales to build up allies as well. The most notable came in 1981, a $8.5 billion sale to Saudi Arabia involving aircraft, tanks, and Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS). Israel protested, since the AWACS would undermine its strategic attack capabilities. To mollify Israel and its powerful lobby in Washington, the United States promised to supply it with an additional F-15 squadron, a $600 million loan, and permission to export Israeli-made Kfir fighting aircraft to Latin American armies.

In its first term administration looked at arms control measures with deep suspicion. However, after the massive buildup, and the second term it looked at them with favor and achieve major arms reductions with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Nuclear weapons

According to several scholars and Reagan biographers, including, John Lewis Gaddis, Richard Reeves, Lou Cannon and Reagan himself in his autobiography, Reagan earnestly desired the abolition of all nuclear weapons. He proposed to Mikhail Gorbachev that if a missile shield could be built, all nuclear weapons be eliminated and the missile shield technology shared, the world would be much better off. Paul Lettow has argued that Reagan's opposition to nuclear weapons started at the dawn of the nuclear age and in December 1945 he was only prevented from leading an anti-nuclear rally in Hollywood by pressure from the Warner Brothers studio.

Reagan believed the mutually assured destruction policy formulated in the 1950s to be morally wrong. In his autobiography, Reagan wrote:
:The Pentagon said at least 150 million American lives would be lost in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union—even if we 'won.' For Americans who survived such a war, I couldn't imagine what life would be like. The planet would be so poisoned the 'survivors' would have no place to live. Even if a nuclear war did not mean the extinction of mankind, it would certainly mean the end of civilization as we knew it. No one could 'win' a nuclear war. Yet as long as nuclear weapons were in existence, there would always be risks they would be used, and once the first nuclear weapon was unleashed, who knew where it would end? My dream, then, became a world free of nuclear weapons. ... For the eight years I was president I never let my dream of a nuclear-free world fade from my mind.

Reagan and Soviet leader Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987 (and ratified in 1988), which was the first in Cold War history to mandate the destruction of an entire class of nuclear weapons.

Iran-Iraq

Originally neutral in the Iran–Iraq War of 1980 to 1988, the Reagan administration began supporting Iraq because an Iranian victory would not serve the interests of the United States. In 1983, Reagan issued a National Security Decision Directive memo which called for heightened regional military cooperation to defend oil facilities, measures to improve U.S. military capabilities in the Persian Gulf, directed the secretaries of state and defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to take appropriate measures to respond to tensions in the area.

Economic policy

Economic plans, taxes and deficit

Reagan believed in policies based on supply-side economics and advocated a ''laissez-faire'' philosophy, seeking to stimulate the economy with large, across-the-board tax cuts.Cannon, Lou (2001) p. 99Appleby, Joyce (2003), pp. 923–24 Reagan pointed to improvements in certain key economic indicators as evidence of success. The policies proposed that economic growth would occur when marginal tax rates were low enough to spur investment, which would then lead to increased economic growth, higher employment and wages.

Reagan did not believe in raising income taxes. During his presidential tenure, the top federal income tax rates were lowered from 70% to 28%. However, it has also been acknowledged that Reagan did raise taxes on eleven occasions during his presidency in an effort to both preserve his defense agenda and combat the growing national debt and budget deficit.

In order to cover the growing federal budget deficits and the decreased revenue that resulted from the cuts, the U.S. borrowed heavily both domestically and abroad, raising the national debt from $1.1 trillion to $2.7 trillion.Cannon, Lou (2001) p. 128 Reagan described the new debt as the "greatest disappointment" of his presidency.

Free Trade

Reagan was a supporter of free trade. When running for President in 1979, Reagan proposed a "North American accord", in which goods could move freely throughout the U.S., Canada and Mexico. Largely dismissed then, Reagan was serious in his proposal and once in office he signed an agreement with Canada to that effect. His "North American accord" later became the official North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), signed by President George H. W. Bush and ratified by President Bill Clinton.

Reagan understood free trade as including the use of tariffs to protect American jobs and industry against foreign competition. He imposed a temporary 100% tariff on Japanese electronics as well as other tariffs on a variety of industrial products, which resulted in some free market advocates criticizing his policies as protectionist in practice.

Healthcare

Reagan was opposed to socialized healthcare, universal health care, or publicly funded health care. In 1961, while still a member of the Democratic Party, Reagan voiced his opposition to single-payer healthcare in an 11-minute recording.See Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine The idea was beginning to be advocated by the Democratic Party. In it, Reagan stated:

One of the traditional methods of imposing statism or socialism on a people has been by way of medicine. It is very easy to describe a medical program as a humanitarian project ... Under the Truman administration, it was proposed that we have a compulsory health insurance program for all people in the United States, and of course, the American people unhesitatingly rejected this ... In the last decade, 127 million of our citizens, in just ten years, have come under the protection of some owned medical or hospital insurance. The advocates of ocialized healthcare when you try to oppose it, challenge you on an emotional basis ... What can we do about this? Well you and I can do a great deal. We can write to our

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Reagan_was_in_favor_of_making_Social_Security_(United_States).html" "title="Congressmen, to our Senators. We can say right now that we want no further encroachment on these individual liberties and freedoms. And at the moment, the key issue is we do not want socialized medicine ... If you don't, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as well have known it in this country, until one day, as Norman Thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism. If you don't do this and if I don't do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free.

Social Security

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