Reagan Doctrine

Based on Wikipedia: Reagan Doctrine

The Cold War's Great Reversal

For forty years, America played defense against the Soviet Union. Contain them. Stop their spread. Hold the line. Then Ronald Reagan walked into the Oval Office with a different idea entirely. When asked about his strategy for the Cold War, he put it simply: "We win and they lose."

That wasn't how things were supposed to work.

Since the end of World War Two, American foreign policy had operated under a doctrine called "containment." The idea, developed by diplomat George F. Kennan and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was essentially defensive. Don't let communism spread to new countries, but don't try to push it back from places it had already taken root. The reasoning was straightforward: directly challenging the Soviet Union risked escalation, and escalation risked nuclear war. Better to build walls than tear down theirs.

Reagan rejected this logic. Under what became known as the Reagan Doctrine, the United States would actively support anti-communist guerrilla movements fighting to overthrow Soviet-backed governments around the world. Not just in one country. Everywhere. From the mountains of Afghanistan to the jungles of Nicaragua, from the savannas of Angola to the rice paddies of Cambodia.

It was, in the language of Cold War strategists, "rollback" instead of containment. And it would reshape the final decade of the superpower struggle.

A Tradition of Presidential Doctrines

The Reagan Doctrine didn't emerge from nowhere. American presidents have long announced grand strategic frameworks bearing their names, each responding to the challenges of their era.

The tradition started in 1823 with the Monroe Doctrine, when President James Monroe declared that European powers should keep their colonial ambitions out of the Western Hemisphere. In 1904, Theodore Roosevelt added his corollary, asserting America's right to intervene in Latin American affairs to maintain stability. These weren't just policy statements. They were declarations of American power and intent that shaped decades of foreign relations.

The Cold War spawned a whole new generation of doctrines. Harry Truman's doctrine in 1947 committed the United States to supporting Greece and Turkey against Soviet pressure, establishing the template for containing communist expansion. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter all followed with their own frameworks, each adapting to new circumstances while maintaining the fundamental posture of containment.

Reagan's contribution was to flip the script entirely.

Charlie Wilson's Obsession

Here's a curious detail about the Reagan Doctrine: one of its most important components actually predated Reagan himself.

In December 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, installing a puppet government and sending tens of thousands of troops to pacify the country. President Jimmy Carter, not exactly known for hawkish foreign policy, authorized covert military assistance to the Afghan mujahideen, the Islamic guerrilla fighters resisting the occupation. Carter's National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had pushed for the program. The goal was simple: make the Soviets bleed.

But it was a Texas congressman named Charlie Wilson who transformed this modest covert operation into something far more ambitious.

Wilson became obsessed with Afghanistan. Using his seat on the House Appropriations Committee, which controls federal spending, he maneuvered to dramatically increase funding for the Afghan resistance. This was tricky politics. Many of Wilson's fellow Democrats were loudly criticizing Reagan for the CIA's secret war in Central America. Yet Wilson convinced them to vote for Afghan war money, with the quiet blessing of Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill. The web of relationships was so complex that journalist George Crile wrote an entire book about it, aptly titled "Charlie Wilson's War."

Wilson partnered with a gruff CIA officer named Gust Avrakotos to build a support network that reached far beyond American resources. They charmed leaders from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and China into contributing to the anti-Soviet effort. The aid flowed through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, run under the watchful eye of Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq.

Avrakotos brought in Michael Vickers, a young paramilitary specialist, to completely overhaul how the mujahideen fought. New tactics. New weapons. New logistics. Better training. The guerrillas became dramatically more effective.

The most consequential change came when Pentagon official Michael Pillsbury and CIA officer Vincent Cannistraro convinced the agency to supply Stinger missiles to the rebels. These shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons changed everything. Soviet helicopters, which had dominated the battlefield, suddenly became vulnerable. Pilots started flying higher and faster, reducing their effectiveness. The casualty calculus shifted.

The Heritage Foundation's Playbook

While Wilson was building the Afghan operation from the ground up, conservative think tanks in Washington saw an opportunity to expand the concept into something much larger.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative policy organization, became the intellectual engine of the Reagan Doctrine. Their foreign policy experts argued that what was working in Afghanistan could work everywhere the Soviets had established client states. According to political analysts Thomas Bodenheimer and Robert Gould, Heritage "translated theory into concrete policy" by targeting nine nations for regime change: Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Iran, Laos, Libya, Nicaragua, and Vietnam.

Michael Johns, Heritage's principal Reagan Doctrine advocate, didn't just write policy papers. He traveled to conflict zones, meeting with resistance movements in Angola, Cambodia, and Nicaragua, then returned to urge the Reagan administration to provide military and political support. Heritage published detailed recommendations in their "Mandate for Leadership" books, which served as comprehensive playbooks for Reagan administration officials.

The result was rapid action. Unlike Afghanistan, where support had built up gradually over years, aid to resistance movements in Angola and Nicaragua flowed quickly once the Reagan administration embraced the doctrine.

Four Theaters of Conflict

In practice, the Reagan Doctrine concentrated its efforts on four main battlegrounds, with Afghanistan serving as the centerpiece.

Angola had been locked in civil war since gaining independence from Portugal in 1975. The Soviet Union and Cuba backed the Marxist government, while the United States supported the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola, known by its Portuguese acronym UNITA, led by the charismatic Jonas Savimbi. For years, the Clark Amendment had prohibited American military aid to UNITA. Once Congress repealed that restriction, weapons and money began flowing openly. Savimbi himself addressed the Heritage Foundation in 1989, calling their efforts "a source of great support. No Angolan will forget your efforts."

Nicaragua presented a different challenge. The Sandinista government, which had overthrown the American-backed Somoza dictatorship in 1979, received substantial Soviet and Cuban support. Reagan authorized aid to the Contras, a loose coalition of rebel groups fighting the Sandinistas. He called them "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers," a description that proved controversial given subsequent reports of human rights abuses and allegations that some Contra leaders were involved in cocaine trafficking.

Cambodia posed a moral dilemma. The largest resistance movement fighting the Vietnamese-backed communist government was composed largely of former Khmer Rouge members, the same regime that had perpetrated one of the twentieth century's worst genocides. Reagan couldn't support them without becoming complicit in their rehabilitation. Instead, he authorized aid to a smaller coalition called the Khmer People's National Liberation Front, led by Son Sann, hoping to end Vietnamese occupation without empowering mass murderers.

Mozambique received less attention but followed the same pattern: American support for rebels fighting a Soviet-aligned government.

Heritage Foundation analysts pushed to expand the doctrine further still, arguing that the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1980s resulted from the military and agricultural policies of Mengistu Haile Mariam's Soviet-backed regime. They warned that Mengistu's decision to allow Soviet naval and air forces to use Red Sea ports threatened American strategic interests throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

The Critics and the Converts

Not everyone embraced the Reagan Doctrine, even on the political right.

The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, argued in 1986 that "most Third World struggles take place in arenas and involve issues far removed from legitimate American security needs." Intervening in these conflicts, they warned, "expands the republic's already overextended commitments without achieving any significant prospective gains. Instead of draining Soviet military and financial resources, we end up dissipating our own."

Yet even Cato acknowledged the doctrine's political power. It had "fired the enthusiasm of the conservative movement in the United States as no foreign policy issue has done in decades." Rather than supporting government intervention, Cato suggested Congress simply remove legal barriers preventing private citizens and organizations from aiding these resistance movements on their own.

Within the Reagan administration, however, the doctrine commanded near-universal support. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger embraced it. So did United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick. A succession of National Security Advisors, including John Poindexter, Frank Carlucci, and Colin Powell, all signed on.

Reagan himself was the doctrine's most vocal champion. "We must not break faith with those who are risking their lives on every continent, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, to defy Soviet aggression and secure rights which have been ours from birth," he declared in his 1985 State of the Union address. "Support for freedom fighters is self-defense."

Naming Rights

The policy didn't actually have a name until 1985, when columnist Charles Krauthammer wrote an essay for Time magazine labeling it the "Reagan Doctrine." The name stuck.

Krauthammer later explained his thinking:

I basically came to the conclusion that the Soviets had overextended their empire, and they were getting what the West had gotten with its overextended empire decades before: a reaction, they got a rebellion, they got resistance. And the Soviets were now beginning to feel it, and the genius of Reagan, although I don't think they had a plan in doing this, is he instinctively realized that one of the ways to go after the Soviets was indirect, and that is you go after their proxies, you go after their allies, you go after their clients, or even in Afghanistan you go after them directly. So that's what I called the Reagan Doctrine, it was sort of the opposite of the Brezhnev Doctrine, which was whatever we control we keep. And Reagan was saying, no you don't.

The reference to the Brezhnev Doctrine is illuminating. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had declared in 1968 that once a country became communist, it would remain communist, with the Soviet Union intervening militarily if necessary to prevent any backsliding. The invasion of Czechoslovakia that year demonstrated he meant it. Reagan was essentially announcing the mirror image: communist gains would be challenged, rolled back if possible.

The Strategic Logic

Why did the Reagan Doctrine appeal to so many in Washington? Two practical advantages stood out.

First, supporting guerrilla movements was cheap. Relatively speaking. Supplying rifles, ammunition, and training to insurgents cost a fraction of what the Soviet Union spent maintaining client state governments, with their armies, bureaucracies, and economic subsidies. Every dollar America invested forced the Soviets to spend many more in response. It was asymmetric warfare applied to superpower competition.

Second, no American soldiers died. Unlike Vietnam, where fifty-eight thousand Americans lost their lives in a direct military intervention, the Reagan Doctrine operated through proxies. The mujahideen, the Contras, UNITA fighters—they bore the casualties. American involvement remained largely covert, deniable, politically sustainable. The United States could confront Soviet allies without flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover Air Force Base.

Reagan and his supporters also framed the doctrine in moral terms. The Soviet Union, Reagan declared, was an "evil empire." Supporting those who fought against its expansion wasn't just strategically sound. It was the right thing to do.

The Dark Side

The Reagan Doctrine's legacy remains deeply contested, in large part because of what happened on the ground in these proxy wars.

In Nicaragua, historian Greg Grandin documented disturbing patterns of Contra behavior. "The U.S.-backed Contras decapitated, castrated, and otherwise mutilated civilians and foreign aid workers," he wrote. "Some earned a reputation for using spoons to gouge their victims' eyes out. In one raid, Contras cut the breasts of a civilian defender to pieces and ripped the flesh off the bones of another."

Professor Frederick Gareau catalogued Contra attacks on civilian infrastructure: "bridges, electric generators, but also state-owned agricultural cooperatives, rural health clinics, villages, and non-combatants." American involvement went beyond mere support. "CIA commandos launched a series of sabotage raids on Nicaraguan port facilities. They mined the country's major ports and set fire to its largest oil storage facilities."

When Congress ordered this intervention stopped in 1984, the Reagan administration continued it illegally, leading to the Iran-Contra scandal. Officials secretly sold weapons to Iran, which was under an arms embargo, and used the proceeds to fund the Contras despite the congressional prohibition.

A CIA training manual for the Contras, titled "Psychological Operations in Guerrilla War" and leaked to the media in 1984, recommended "selective use of violence for propagandistic effects" and instructions to "neutralize" government officials. Gareau characterized these activities as "wholesale terrorism" conducted by the United States.

Blowback

The September 11, 2001 attacks cast the Reagan Doctrine in a new and troubling light.

Critics pointed out that American support for the Afghan mujahideen had facilitated the transfer of enormous quantities of weapons into a region that later became a sanctuary for al-Qaeda. The training programs that made guerrillas effective against the Soviets also created a generation of skilled fighters, some of whom eventually developed hostility toward the United States.

This phenomenon, sometimes called "blowback," raised uncomfortable questions about the long-term consequences of Cold War proxy conflicts. Did the Reagan Doctrine contribute to the conditions that enabled the September 11 attacks?

Defenders of the doctrine note that no direct link has ever been established between American aid and Osama bin Laden or his immediate affiliates. The mujahideen were a diverse collection of groups, many of which never developed anti-American sentiments. The weapons and training went to Afghan fighters; the foreign jihadists who later formed al-Qaeda operated in parallel but separate networks.

The debate continues, a reminder that the consequences of foreign policy decisions often take decades to fully reveal themselves.

Victory and Its Price

Did the Reagan Doctrine work?

The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Communist governments fell across Eastern Europe. The Cold War ended, and the United States stood as the world's sole superpower. Reagan's supporters credit the doctrine as a crucial factor in this outcome, arguing that by forcing the Soviets to fight expensive proxy wars on multiple fronts, it accelerated the empire's economic and political collapse.

Afghanistan proved particularly costly for Moscow. The Soviet military never found a way to defeat the mujahideen. Casualties mounted. Resources drained. The war became unpopular at home, a Soviet Vietnam. When Mikhail Gorbachev finally withdrew Soviet forces in 1989, it marked a turning point in the Cold War's final chapter.

But victory came at a price that extended far beyond dollars and American lives. The people of Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Mozambique paid in blood for a conflict between superpowers neither of which had their interests at heart. The regimes that eventually emerged in some of these countries proved no better than those they replaced, and often worse.

The Reagan Doctrine represented a fundamental choice: that winning the Cold War justified the means employed to achieve that victory. Whether that choice was right remains one of the most consequential questions in modern American foreign policy.

What's undeniable is that Reagan changed the game. For forty years, American presidents had accepted that communist gains were essentially permanent, that challenging them risked catastrophe. Reagan rejected that assumption and acted on his conviction. The world that emerged was different from the one he inherited, shaped in ways both intended and unforeseen by a doctrine that bore his name.