11.2 Foreign Policy: "Evil Empire" and SDI

Reagan's Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union

Reagan's "Evil Empire" Rhetoric

When Reagan took office in 1981, he broke sharply from the détente approach of the 1970s. Rather than seeking coexistence with the Soviet Union, Reagan framed the Cold War as a moral struggle between freedom and tyranny.

• In a famous 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Reagan called the Soviet Union an "Evil Empire," casting the conflict in stark ideological terms rather than purely strategic ones.
• He rejected the SALT II arms control agreement (negotiated under Carter but never ratified by the Senate), arguing that previous administrations had been too willing to make concessions to the Soviets.
• Defense spending surged under Reagan, rising from about $\$171$ billion in 1981 to over $\$300$ billion by 1989. The goal was to outspend the Soviets and demonstrate that the US would not accept military parity.
• Reagan also backed anti-communist forces worldwide through proxy wars: funding the Contras in Nicaragua, supplying the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and supporting anti-Soviet movements in other regions. This approach is sometimes called the Reagan Doctrine.

Impact of the Strategic Defense Initiative

In March 1983, Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a proposed missile defense system designed to intercept Soviet nuclear warheads before they could reach American soil. Critics quickly nicknamed it "Star Wars."

The concept involved advanced technologies like space-based lasers and ground-based interceptor missiles. Whether or not SDI could actually work became one of the most heated debates of the decade.

• Soviet alarm: Soviet leaders believed SDI could give the US a first-strike advantage. If America could block a retaliatory strike, the logic of mutually assured destruction (MAD) would break down. The Soviets also argued SDI violated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty, which limited missile defense systems.
• Arms race pressure: The Soviets felt compelled to develop countermeasures, which strained their already struggling economy. This economic pressure is one reason historians point to SDI as a factor in the Soviet Union's eventual collapse.
• Feasibility questions: Many American scientists and engineers doubted the technology could work as promised. The program consumed billions of dollars without producing a deployable system, and Congress grew increasingly skeptical of its cost-effectiveness.

Even so, SDI gave Reagan a powerful bargaining chip in negotiations. The Soviets desperately wanted it off the table, which gave the US leverage at the summits that followed.

Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War

Summits and Arms Reduction

Despite his confrontational rhetoric, Reagan proved willing to negotiate once the right partner emerged. That partner was Mikhail Gorbachev, who became Soviet General Secretary in 1985 and brought reformist energy to a stagnating superpower.

Reagan and Gorbachev held four major summits between 1985 and 1988:

1. Geneva Summit (1985): The two leaders met face-to-face for the first time and established a working personal relationship. No major agreements came out of it, but the tone shifted toward dialogue.
2. Reykjavik Summit (1986): Reagan and Gorbachev came remarkably close to agreeing to eliminate all nuclear weapons. The talks collapsed when Reagan refused to limit SDI research, but the summit showed both sides were serious about arms reduction.
3. Washington Summit (1987): The breakthrough moment. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles (those with ranges between 500 and 5,500 km). This was the first treaty to actually reduce nuclear arsenals rather than just cap their growth.
4. Moscow Summit (1988): Largely symbolic, but it signaled how far relations had come. Reagan walked through Red Square and, when asked if he still considered the USSR an evil empire, said "No, that was another time."

Gorbachev's domestic reforms also mattered enormously. Glasnost (openness) loosened censorship and allowed public debate, while perestroika (restructuring) attempted to modernize the Soviet economy. These reforms, combined with diplomatic progress, helped ease Cold War tensions from the Soviet side.

Evaluating Reagan's Foreign Policy

Reagan's approach produced significant results, but also carried real costs and unintended consequences.

What worked:

• The combination of military pressure and diplomatic engagement helped accelerate the end of the Cold War. Increased defense spending and SDI strained the Soviet economy at a time when it was already struggling under the weight of inefficiency and overextension.
• The INF Treaty was a landmark arms control achievement that meaningfully reduced the nuclear threat.
• The summits built a framework of trust that carried into the George H.W. Bush administration, which oversaw the fall of the Berlin Wall (1989), German reunification (1990), and the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1991).

What proved controversial:

• Support for anti-communist groups created long-term problems. The Mujahideen in Afghanistan, armed with US weapons, helped drive out the Soviets, but some of those fighters later formed the Taliban. The Iran-Contra affair, in which officials secretly sold arms to Iran to fund the Contras, became a major scandal.
• Critics argue that the Soviet Union collapsed primarily because of its own internal weaknesses and Gorbachev's reforms, not because of US military pressure. The relative weight of these factors remains one of the most debated questions in Cold War history.

The bottom line: Reagan's foreign policy combined hard-line pressure with genuine diplomacy. Whether you credit his strategy or Gorbachev's reforms (or both), the result was the most significant shift in global politics since World War II.