Word: reaganism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Between those two milestones, 19 years apart, the U.S. had a President who never bought the theory of mutual deterrence or its perverse-sounding corollary, mutual vulnerability. Ronald Reagan dreamed of pure, total defense. His Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, was a testament of faith that Yankee ingenuity could produce exotic missile-killing satellites that would render offensive weapons "impotent and obsolete...
Most American scientists think an impregnable astrodome over the U.S. is sheer fantasy. Yet even a faulty SDI would force the Soviets to take costly countermeasures. Gorbachev put Reagan on notice that if the U.S. proceeded with SDI, the Kremlin would have no choice but to pull out of START. Soviet officials reiterated that warning last week...
Bush has never been a true believer in SDI, although as Vice President he paid lip service to the program as part of the catechism of the Reagan Administration. SDI is still sacred to the Republican hard right, so Bush lets his Vice President, Dan Quayle, champion the latest Star Wars brainstorm: "Brilliant Pebbles," an orbiting complex of miniaturized rockets that makes about as much sense as the name suggests. Since even the testing of space-based interceptors is prohibited by the ABM treaty and would therefore jeopardize Moscow's continued compliance with START, Brilliant Pebbles is more...
...Reagan was also immensely confident, both about himself and about the ultimate victory of capitalism over communism. Therefore he didn't mind letting Gorbachev take his bows on the world stage. Reagan had trouble comprehending, not to mention caring about, the difference between ballistic and cruise missiles, but he understood intuitively the significance of what Gorbachev was doing. Asked during a summit meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow in 1988 if he still regarded the Soviet Union as an "evil empire," Reagan replied, "No, I was talking about another time, another era." And, he might have added, another kind of Soviet...
...first, Bush was less sure than Reagan about how to deal with Gorbachev, in part because he was less sure about himself. He fretted not only about Helms & Co. but also about his standing with the broad center of American and international public opinion. He knew he had a problem with "the vision thing." Gorbachev's genius for making a public relations virtue out of political and economic necessity made Bush look bad by comparison. Bush's favorite word, prudence, often sounded like an alibi -- or a euphemism for timidity...