The Intellectual Roots of Reagan’s Foreign Policy

Abstract

As unlikely as it might have seemed at the time in academic and elite circles, Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy legacy soared to extraordinary heights following the peaceful end of the Cold War. This newfound admiration for Reagan’s actions led his successors to draw inspiration from his ideas, so much so that George W. Bush pursued a grand strategy much closer to Reagan’s than to that of his own father’s in terms of its global support for democracy around the world. Or, for another example, current Republican leaders with views as opposite on international engagement as Marco Rubio on the interventionist side of the spectrum and Rand Paul on the isolationist end both claim to follow the grand strategic ideas of Reagan. This widespread admiration from political leaders aside, there is some level of confusion in what different experts really mean when they talk about Reagan’s “grand strategy.” In order to clarify the sources of Reagan’s grand strategy and draw some lessons from it for our current era, this chapter explicates the enduring values and ideas guiding Reagan’s strategy, presents the formal strategic plans he laid out early in his tenure and analyzes how the policy decisions made over the remainder of his time in office fit with his initial strategic ideas and plans.

The original version of this chapter was revised: The affiliation information for this chapter has been corrected. The erratum to this chapter is available at DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-39987-4_11

An erratum to this chapter can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39987-4_11