The Resurrection and Death of the Cold

War, 1977–1988

2023

In March 1988, the contras signed a cease-fire with the Sandinistas,

agreeing to lay down their arms in return for negotiations leading
to an opening of the political system

Abstract
By the middle 1970s, the world had changed. Twenty years of rapid economic growth in
Western Europe and Japan allowed those industrial nations to produce twice as much as the
United States. Robust expansion stopped, however, in the wake of a tripling of energy costs.
Poorer nations, concentrated mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, demanded greater shares
of the world’s prosperity. They pressed for a “new international economic order” to replace
sterile Cold War competition between East and West as the centerpiece of world politics.
Some Americans, stung by the bad memory of Vietnam, also hoped to focus attention on
social and economic issues rather than military confrontation. Cyrus Vance, the new
secretary of state, had grown dismayed by the waste of resources in Vietnam when he
served as delegate to the peace talks in 1968. Harold Brown, Jimmy Carter’s choice as
secretary of defense, a physicist who once served as secretary of the air force, also doubted
the relevance of the application of military force to social questions. Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Carter’s national security adviser, sought to combine a commitment to advancing the
interests of postindustrial Western societies with competition with Soviet-style
communism. The new ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, a black former
congressman from Carter’s home state of Georgia, looked forward to improved relations
with the southern, nonwhite regions of the world.

Findings
In late June 1979, Carter went to Tokyo for the annual meeting of the heads of the seven
largest economies in the nonCommunist world (the United States, Great Britain, France,
West Germany, Italy, and Japan). He heard complaints from each of his fellow summiteers,
who hated the sinking dollar, wondered when the United States would reduce its inflation
rate of 13 percent, and pressed Carter to halve American oil imports
Over 75 percent of the money raised for his defense remained with the fund-raisers and
never reached his legal team

Scholarcy Highlights
 Poorer nations, concentrated mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, demanded greater
shares of the world’s prosperity. They pressed for a “new international economic order”
to replace sterile Cold War competition between East and West as the centerpiece of
world politics
 Cyrus Vance, the new secretary of state, had grown dismayed by the waste of resources
in Vietnam when he served as delegate to the peace talks in 1968
 In May 1977, he told a commencement day crowd at Notre Dame University that “an
inordinate fear of communism has led us to embrace any dictator who joined in our
fear.”
 On January 1, 1979, the American embassy in Taiwan changed into a “foundation” while
the United States upgraded its Beijing office to a regular embassy
 In March 1988, the contras signed a cease-fire with the Sandinistas, agreeing to lay
down their arms in return for negotiations leading to an opening of the political system

Scholarcy Summary

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
By the middle 1970s, the world had changed. Twenty years of rapid economic growth in
Western Europe and Japan allowed those industrial nations to produce twice as much as the
United States.

Poorer nations, concentrated mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, demanded greater shares
of the world’s prosperity

They pressed for a “new international economic order” to replace sterile Cold War
competition between East and West as the centerpiece of world politics.

Campaigning for the presidency in 1976, Jimmy Carter demanded that “we replace balance
of power politics with world order politics.”

He predicted that “in the near future issues of war and peace will be more a function of
economic and social problems than of the military security problems which have dominated
international rela-.

From 1977 to 1979, the United States pressed human rights, sought a “North-South
dialogue” on economic issues, and moved to limit the global arms race

None of these initiatives reached its goals.

Despite these high sentiments and his acceptance of the fact that the oceans represented the
“common heritage of mankind,” Richardson was unable to reach agreement before the
election of 1980

THE PANAMA CANAL TREATIES AND CENTRAL AMERICA

Carter found more success following a traditional path of negotiation to heal the seventy-
year wound left by Theodore Roosevelt’s high-handed actions during the Panamanian
revolution of 1903.

DeConcini offered his support only after Carter accepted a “condition” allowing the use of
American forces in Panama to keep the canal open after 1999.

Torrijos held his tongue about this violation of his country’s sovereignty.

The Carter administration accommodated a revolution in another Central American state,

Nicaragua.

Over the remainder of the Carter administration relations between the United States and
Nicaragua deteriorated.

He continued economic aid to Nicaragua in the midst of the 1980 election campaign, despite
Republican charges that he was permitting the development of another Cuba in Central
America.

The Carter administration laid the groundwork for a more assertive course against
Nicaragua as it planned to stop economic assistance

MEDIATING BETWEEN ISRAEL AND EGYPT

Carter’s most surprising accomplishment occurred at Camp David, the presidential retreat
in the Maryland mountains, in September 1978, where he brokered a settlement between
two old adversaries, Egypt and Israel.

Fear that American efforts to arrange a “comprehensive settlement of the Palestinian

problem” might backfire encouraged Sadat to take an unprecedented trip to Jerusalem to
address the Knesset, or Parliament, on November 19, 1977

Both Israelis and Egyptians had squirmed when Carter publicly called for a “homeland” for
the displaced Palestinians in the summer of 1977.

The suspicious Israelis tried to separate the Egyptian and Palestinian questions

They insisted that any agreement with Egypt void commitments Cairo had with Arab states
to join a war against Israel.

Fearful of being labeled an obstacle to peace, Begin put forward ambiguous language
suspending for a time new Jewish settlements on the west bank of the Jordan River
He explicitly agreed to total Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula and the
dismantlement of Jewish settlements there.

By May 1980, the date set for an agreement on West Bank autonomy, Sol Linowitz, the
American delegate to the talks, glumly announced that a final arrangement eluded his grasp

PLAYING THE CHINA CARD

The Carter administration completed the opening to China begun by President Nixon when
it exchanged ambassadors with the People’s Republic in January 1979.

On January 1, 1979, the American embassy in Taiwan changed into a “foundation” while the
United States upgraded its Beijing office to a regular embassy.

At stops in Washington, Houston, and Seattle, Deng pointed fingers at the “hegemonists” of
the Kremlin and warned of a new war unless the West woke up.

He donned a ten-gallon hat, accepted “honorary membership” in NATO, and was roundly
cheered by workers in a defense plant.

Two weeks after his return to China, Deng put his anti-Soviet rhetoric into practice by
ordering the People’s Liberation Army to attack Vietnam.

That friend of the Soviet Union had recently invaded Cambodia, an ally of China

THE FAILURE OF ARMS CONTROL

The opening to China helped poison relations with the Soviet Union, and the signing of a
new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II) in June 1979 could not stop further
deteriorations.

In two years of bargaining, Soviet and American negotiators in Vienna, Washington, and
Moscow hammered out a treaty acknowledging essential “parity” in the nuclear forces of
both sides

They produced a design to lessen the dangers posed by “destabilizing” weapons systems,
that is, those which raised fears that the other side planned a first strike.

When Carter called his principal advisers to Camp David in July, he dressed Young down as
an “embarrassment to this administration.”

He decided to keep him because of his appeal to black Americans.

Did Young occupy a highly visible position in the administration, but he had helped change
American policy toward Africa

At his urging, the United States joined Great Britain in arranging majority rule in Rhodesia,
renamed Zimbabwe after 1979.
The public did too in 1980, replacing him with an administration that tried to restore
American preeminence

THE REAGAN FOREIGN POLICY APPROACH

Ronald Reagan and his principal foreign policy advisers came to power in 1981 with a clear
idea of reversing the course of the last fifteen years of United States foreign policy.

They looked back to the decades immediately after the Second World War when the United
States was the unquestioned leader of an anti-Soviet alignment.

It looked forward to battling Third World Communists from Nicaragua to Afghanistan

It pledged to elevate the fight against terrorism over the Carter administration’s
concentration on human rights.

As relations between the United States and the Soviet Union improved in 1987 and 1988
over two-thirds of the public approved of Reagan’s handling of foreign affairs at the end of
his term

FROM CONFRONTATION TO DETENTE WITH THE SOVIETS

United States–Soviet relations underwent a remarkable transformation in the eight years of
the Reagan administration.

In the four years, Reagan had more meetings with the leader of the Soviet Union than any of
his predecessors

He and Mikhail Gorbachev had summits lasting from two and a half hours to four days in
Geneva in November 1985; in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986; in Washington in
December 1987; in Moscow in June 1988; and in New York in December 1988.

Gorbachev and Reagan met once more, before the expiration of the American president’s
term, when the Soviet leader, president as well as party chairman, addressed the United
Nations General Assembly in New York on December 7, 1988

He announced that his country would unilaterally reduce its military forces by five hundred
thousand men and ten thousand tanks over the two years.

The New York Times headlined this sort of detente “ANOTHER OBSTACLE FALLS: NANCY
REAGAN AND RAISA GORBACHEV GET CHUMMY.” By the end of the Reagan administration,
the detente promised in the early 1970s had revived, and serious people contemplated the
end of the Cold War

CRISES IN CENTRAL AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN

It helped keep the revolutionaries from power in El Salvador, militarily overthrew the
Marxists on the Caribbean island of Grenada, but failed in its principal objective—making
the Sandinista government in Nicaragua “cry uncle,” as the president once put it.
Support for the contras strained relations with friendly states in the hemisphere, provoked
public protests at home, angered Congress, and led to the greatest foreign policy scandal of
the Reagan administration.

In September 1983 President Reagan signed another finding authorizing support to the
contras for the vague purpose of “putting pressure on the Sandinistas” to stop sending arms
to the leftist guerrillas in El Salvador

Since this finding did not promise the overthrow of the government, it circumvented the
first Boland amendment.

In March 1988, the contras signed a cease-fire with the Sandinistas, agreeing to lay down
their arms in return for negotiations leading to an opening of the political system

MUDDLING IN THE MIDDLE EAST

The Reagan administration wrestled with the problems of the Middle East for eight years
but had little success in resolving them.

A public opinion poll taken in April 1985 revealed that Americans regarded the Camp David
accords, brokered by Jimmy Carter in 1978 and 1979, the greatest achievement of recent
foreign policy, while they considered the Reagan administration’s involvement in Lebanon
in 1982–1984 its greatest failure.

The PLO chairman recognized Israel’s right to exist, observed that two UN Security Council
resolutions adopted after the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli war provided a framework for
negotiations, and “renounced” terrorism

Shultz made it easier for his successors in the Bush administration to act as a broker
between Israel and the Palestinians.

Reagan appointed a special review board chaired by former senator John Tower (R., Tex.)
working with former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft and former secretary of
state Edmund Muskie

They investigated from December 1986 to February 1987 and found that the initiative to
Iran was the brainchild of McFarlane, CIA director William Casey, North, several Israelis,
and an Iranian go-between.

Voters appreciated Reagan’s accomplishments with the Soviets and felt comfortable with
the continuity promised by Bush

Findings
In late June 1979, Carter went to Tokyo for the annual meeting of the heads of the seven
largest economies in the nonCommunist world.
He heard complaints from each of his fellow summiteers, who hated the sinking dollar,
wondered when the United States would reduce its inflation rate of 13 percent, and pressed
Carter to halve American oil imports.

Over 75 percent of the money raised for his defense remained with the fund-raisers and
never reached his legal team

THE REAGAN RECORD

The foreign policy record of the Reagan administration was one of the most surprising of
the twentieth century.

Throughout his presidency Reagan held a series of simple ideas about foreign policy.

He believed in strength—especially of the military sort—the moral virtues of the United

States, and the evils of communism.

Reagan exercised real political leadership in his dealings with the Russians

It was to Reagan’s credit that he understood the changes in Soviet policy undertaken by
Mikhail Gorbachev, and he thereupon dropped his hostile anti-Soviet rhetoric, allowing the
Cold War to end.

The ability of Ronald Reagan to seize the moment contributed to lifting the fear of nuclear
annihilation that had made the Cold War a nightmare