The measure of "greatness" in American presidents is often the
retrospective appreciation of their willingness to "stay the course"
in the face of determined opposition from powerful opponents. So it
was with Jefferson and Jackson, Polk and Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt
and Harry Truman. By this standard, Ronald Reagan must be regarded as
one of the most successful presidents of the twentieth century,
particularly in foreign policy.

Reagan confronted powerful forces of cynical, defeatist elites whose
memories of Vietnam had led them to abandon belief in America as a
force for good in the world, and unlike Richard Nixon, who is often
credited with the most successful Cold War foreign policy, Reagan
refused to let scathing criticism from Congress, the media, and the
universities grind him down. He also avoided the cynicism of Nixon
and Henry Kissinger, believing that America, as Reagan himself often
put it in Governor Winthrope's memorable words, "was a shining city
upon a hill."

Most important, of course, he succeeded, and he succeeded because he
was right. The record speaks for itself.

Shocking the Elites

In no foreign policy arena was Reagan's personal influence more
pronounced than in policy toward the Soviet regime, and in no other
area was his judgment so roundly criticized by "experts." The Soviet
Union was ruled, in Reagan's view, by a sclerotic group of oppressive
apparatchiks intent on world domination, but its economy was a
"Mickey Mouse system" on the verge of collapse, a collapse Reagan
intended to hasten. By engaging them in an arms race they could not
win, and isolating them from Western commerce (with the notable
exception of American grain), Reagan hoped to win the Cold War. "I
had always believed that, as an economic system, Communism was
doomed", Reagan noted in his memoirs. Once in office, his
intelligence briefings confirmed that belief, showing that "the
Soviet economy was being held together with baling wire; it was a
basket case, partly because of massive spending on armaments. . . . I
wondered how we as a nation could use these cracks in the Soviet
system to accelerate the process of collapse." As early as June 1981,
Reagan publicly made the remarkable prediction that "I think we are
seeing the first beginning cracks: the beginning of the end."

One weapon in Reagan's arsenal was an ample use of his formidable
rhetorical skills to take the offensive against Marxist-Leninism.
Within days of his inauguration, Reagan accused the Kremlin
leadership of recognizing no morality except that which would advance
their cause; that they reserved to themselves "the right to commit
any crime, to lie, to cheat." This was a shockingly blunt accusation,
particularly in light of the rhetorical restraint exercised toward
the Soviet Union by the immediately preceding administrations.
Reagan's rhetorical assault on the Kremlin reached its peak on March
8, 1983, with his address to the National Association of
Evangelicals, perhaps the most famous one of his presidency--the
"Evil Empire" speech. After noting America's own legacy of evil
regarding its treatment of minorities, Reagan asked his audience to
pray for those who lived under totalitarian rule. He went on to note
that as long as these regimes continued to "preach the supremacy of
the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict
its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the
focus of evil in the modern world."

With this statement, Ronald Reagan was seen by foreign policy experts
as diverse as Richard Nixon and Strobe Talbott to have crossed a very
dangerous line. Talbott accused Reagan of bearing the bulk of the
responsibility for worsening U.S.-Soviet relations by not accepting
military parity as the basis of relations with Moscow, and by
challenging the legitimacy of the regime as an "evil empire" doomed
to fail. Reagan's use of the bully pulpit to "bait" the Soviet bear
"made a bad situation worse." As Talbott asserted, "when a chief of
state talks that way, he roils Soviet insecurities." Talbott's basic
view was shared by the recently rehabilitated Richard Nixon, whose
Watergate sins were overlooked by some of the media in light of his
more conciliatory tone toward the Soviets. Talbott had conducted a
highly publicized interview with Nixon, published in December 1982,
in which they seemed to agree that isolating and publicly criticizing
the Soviet Union was a mistake. Talbott saw Nixon as the last
president capable of conducting a coherent and "successful policy for
managing the rivalry between the superpowers." Nixon (himself
inherently incapable of delivering a speech with the theme of good
versus evil) rejected Reagan's belief that the Soviet Union could be
weakened through external pressures.

We've got to make them understand that we're not out to get them. I
know there's a school of thought that if we can fence them in with
sanctions, their whole rotten system will come tumbling down. There's
a school of thought that hard-line policies on our part will induce
change for the better on their part. I wish that were the case, but
it's just not going to happen.

Nixon made it clear that he hoped to see a change in both the tone
and substance of Reagan's dealings with Moscow.

Looming over this question of Reagan's "provocative" rhetoric was the
notion that the superpowers were drifting toward nuclear war. A deep
sense of unease pervaded large sections of European and American
public opinion, particularly among the media and academics, but also
among many members of various legislative bodies. Reagan's rhetoric,
frequently criticized for its "harshness", was more than matched by
that of those urging accommodation. Senator Edward Kennedy remarked
in 1982 that "the arms race rushes ahead toward nuclear confrontation
that could well mean the annihilation of the human race." Former
Secretary of State Cyrus Vance found the Reagan administration's
treatment of the Soviets "needlessly provocative . . . bear-baiting",
and added that "the clock is ticking . . . and the pace of
development of weapons is proceeding at a rapid pace." Senate
Minority Whip and 1984 presidential candidate Alan Cranston was fond
of quoting a report of the American Psychiatric Association, which
found "that half the children of America are presently so concerned
with the nuclear war threat that they don't know what to do about
their careers, marriages, families. That's a terrible nightmare
hanging over our children." Cranston lost out in the Democratic
primaries to former Vice President Walter Mondale, who pledged that
if elected he would get on the hotline to Moscow and say to Mr.
Andropov, "Let's sit down in Geneva this afternoon . . . and I would
say . . . in the name of humanity can't we negotiate a verifiable
nuclear freeze on nuclear weapons?" Some Reagan opponents went so far
as to applaud the efforts of the British historian and anti-nuclear
activist, E. P. Thompson, who argued that the United States was "more
dangerous and provocative" than the Soviet Union, and that it was "in
Washington, rather than in Moscow, that scenarios are dreamed up for
theater wars . . . and . . . that the Alchemists of Superkill . . .
press forward." Thompson preferred a Soviet occupation to nuclear
war, because an occupation, at least, offered "the possibility, after
some years, of resurgence and recuperation." Thompson's missive was
warmly received by, among others, John Kenneth Galbraith, George
McGovern, William Appleman Williams, and Robert Heilbroner. "It's the
question, after all, of whether we, our children and our
grandchildren will live", was Galbraith's sophisticated way of posing
the issue.

Reagan also had to deal with a massive nuclear freeze campaign on
both sides of the Atlantic, a campaign described by Speaker of the
House Thomas P. O'Neill, Jr., as "one of the most remarkable
political movements I have ever seen during my years in public
service." The movement reached its peak in 1982 and 1983 in the
months leading up to the deployment of Pershing II and cruise
missiles in Western Europe. One of the leaders of the American freeze
effort, Dr. Helen Caldicott, personified the movement's appeal to a
universal order free from the "artificial distinctions" imposed by
male politicians: "We're thinking of our babies; there are no
Communist babies; there are no capitalist babies. A baby is a baby is
a baby." The electronic media was quick to jump on the freeze
bandwagon, with ABC's "The Day After" depicting the impact of a
nuclear strike on Kansas. Its showing followed by days the arrival of
the first cruise missiles in Britain and appeared on the eve of a
vote in the West German parliament to accept the Pershing II
missiles. Commercial time was purchased by the Cranston campaign and
various freeze groups; one advertisement featured actor Paul Newman
inviting viewers to write or call for a "nuclear war prevention kit."
Television news divisions fed the frenzy, with NBC broadcasting a
documentary (on the eve of a massive anti-nuclear demonstration in
New York City) entitled "Facing Up To The Bomb." Promotions for the
program fostered the notion that doomsday was just around the bend,
with lines like, "The Nuclear Strategy Game: Are We Nearing
Checkmate? . . . Watch this broadcast as if your life depends on it.
It may."

Perhaps most worrisome to the Reagan administration was the support
for the freeze among the American Catholic Bishops. Catholic voters
represented a substantial bloc within the Reagan coalition, and as
the election of 1984 neared, the prospect of a confrontation with
some of the Bishops was troublesome. In October 1982, a five man
Committee on War and Peace chaired by Chicago Archbishop Joseph L.
Bernardin issued a statement branding elements of U.S. nuclear
strategy immoral. The Committee condemned the first use of nuclear
weapons under any circumstances and stated that even if U.S. cities
were attacked first, "no Christian can rightfully carry out orders or
policies deliberately aimed at killing noncombatants." Reagan and his
advisors tried to persuade the Bishops that their proposed stance
would weaken the American arms control position, but to no avail. The
administration sensed that the Soviets were attempting to manipulate
Western opinion when, two days after the Bishops' statement was
revealed, Leonid Brezhnev announced that the Soviet Union would
expand its arsenal because the United States was threatening to "push
the world into the flames of nuclear war." The Reagan administration
appeared momentarily helpless to stop the freeze juggernaut.

The message to President Reagan in all of this was, according to the
media, that "the consensus that has supported the U.S. strategy of
nuclear deterrence for thirty-five years is breaking apart."
Unquestionably, that consensus in the United States and among its
European allies was under great stress during Reagan's first term.
His radical program to hasten the downfall of the Soviet Union was a
frightening prospect to many in the West who had become somewhat
complacent (or resigned) during the détente of the 1970s. Reagan told
the world in a highly publicized address to members of the British
Parliament that he intended to launch a "crusade for freedom", the
long term goal of which was to "leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash
heap of history." Reagan would later state that this was part of his
consistent attempt to "speak the truth about them [the Soviets] for a
change, rather than hiding reality behind the niceties of diplomacy."
Reagan's June 1982 Westminster speech was seen as further evidence of
his lack of foreign policy sophistication. Concern that he was unable
to fathom the complexities of foreign policy was shared by Europeans
and Americans alike. The New York Times reported that the speech was
one of the "dark spots" that marred an otherwise successful trip to
Britain: "The stark, democracy-versus-Communism language of Mr.
Reagan's speech . . . stunned many Britons. . . . Andrew Alexander, a
conservative columnist for the conservative Daily Mail . . .
described Mr. Reagan's speech as an 'oversimplified view of the
world.'" A pessimistic Times editorial dismissed the speech as
"Ronald Reagan's Flower Power" by stating that Soviet society had
always endured great hardship to resist foreign danger and that only
during periods of "East-West thaw" did the potential for change occur
in the Soviet bloc. Prior to Reagan's speech, former Prime Minister
James Callaghan declared that "the Europeans have a better
understanding of the complexities of the present world difficulties
than the United States." Former French Foreign Minister Couve de
Murville echoed Callaghan when he wrote that he "dream[ed] . . . of a
real American foreign policy which takes realities into account."
Robert Kaiser, writing in The International Herald Tribune, observed
that "it seems hard to be a sophisticated European and also an
admirer of Ronald Reagan", citing--and presumably agreeing with--a
conservative British editor who judged that the Reaganites have
"alarmingly simplistic beliefs that divide the world into goodies and
baddies."

In the wake of the Westminster speech, and in light of the
considerable pro-freeze opposition arrayed against him, many
observers wondered how Reagan intended to carry out his offensive
against Soviet Communism. Persistence was one way. The refusal to
halt the deployment of the intermediate range missiles in the face of
stiff domestic and international opposition represented one of
Reagan's most impressive triumphs. He stayed the course and, making
full use of the "bully pulpit", Reagan outmaneuvered, not just the
Soviets, but the freeze movement as well. As time wore on, the
credibility of this movement was weakened as repeated predictions of
an imminent Armageddon proved false. The Strategic Defense
Initiative, announced in March 1983, weakened its broad appeal still
further. Moreover, Reagan adroitly paced himself in using his
anti-Soviet rhetoric; he would launch stinging attacks on the Soviet
Union--and then pull back and reassure Western public opinion that he
would not take the West into war. Evidence that Reagan's rhetoric
stung the Soviet leadership was attested to by Sovietologist Seweryn
Bialer, no admirer of the president's foreign policy. Based on his
three visits to Moscow in 1983-4, Bialer reported that:

"President Reagan's rhetoric has badly shaken the self-esteem and
patriotic pride of the Soviet political elites. The administration's
selfrighteous moralistic tone, its reduction of Soviet achievements
to crimes by international outlaws from an 'evil empire'--such
language stunned and humiliated the Soviet leaders . . . [who]
believe that President Reagan is determined to deny the Soviet Union
nothing less than its legitimacy and status as a global power . . .
status . . . they thought had been conceded once and for all by
Reagan's predecessors."

Through his first term, Reagan won many Americans over to his view of
the Soviets, and by the time of his November 1985 summit meeting with
Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva, a majority of the American people agreed
with his description of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and an
expansionist threat. The Soviets themselves also came around to his
position on certain issues, for instance agreeing to the so-called
zero-zero option on intermediate-range ballistic missiles that most
pundits had greeted initially as non-negotiable on the Soviet side
and therefore unserious.

By reminding his countrymen and their allies repeatedly of his
conviction that free societies were legitimate and totalitarian
regimes were not, and by refusing to be bogged down by "experts"
who settled for the status quo, Reagan rejuvenated the West and
contributed to the decline of the Soviet Union. He did what many
considered not only truly dangerous in an age of nuclear weapons, but
unjustified in a relativistic world: He conducted foreign policy in
such a way as to make clear that he viewed the American political
order to be clearly superior to that of its main rival. By Christmas
Day of 1991 the Soviet Union had ceased to exist. It was the victim,
in part--as former Soviet Former Minister Alexander Bessmertnykh put
it--of Reagan's policies, particularly the Strategic Defense
Initiative which, Bessmertnykh believed, "accelerated the decline of
the Soviet Union." In the end, Reagan proved the advocates of the
status quo wrong, though many, such as Strobe Talbott, are still
loath to admit it. It did not matter, for this unsophisticated
B-grade actor had seen his vision become reality.

The Reagan Doctrine and the "Quagmire"

There was another dimension to Ronald Reagan's anti-Soviet plan--what
came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine. As with many of his
policies, the "Reagan Doctrine" was not the result of careful
analysis and planning. "Not one nano-second" went into crafting this
"doctrine", recalled Reagan's National Security Adviser Robert
McFarlane, and the term itself was actually coined by Charles
Krauthammer in Time magazine and was never officially adopted by the
Reagan administration. Yet despite its slapdash evolution, it
provided the intellectual underpinnings for a highly effective covert
campaign to topple a number of Soviet client states. Krauthammer
arrived at the "doctrine" by extrapolating from a passage in Reagan's
1985 State of the Union address, which argued that "we must not break
faith with those who are risking their lives--on every continent,
from Afghanistan to Nicaragua--to defy Soviet-supported aggression
and secure rights which have been ours from birth." In practice, not
breaking faith was to come to mean launching an offensive that,
unlike previous policies, "supports not the status quo but
revolution."

One of the first battlegrounds in this offensive was Poland; in May
1982 President Reagan signed a secret order, National Security
Decision Directive 32, to destabilize the Polish government. This
destabilization was to be accomplished by keeping the Solidarity
movement alive, with help from the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul
II himself. This union between the Reagan administration and the
Catholic Church was "one of the great secret alliances of all time",
according to Reagan's first National Security Adviser, Richard Allen.
Money for the outlawed union came from the CIA, the National
Endowment for Democracy, secret Vatican bank accounts, and Western
trade unions. The network created by the Vatican and the United
States funneled tons of communications equipment into Poland. With
this equipment, numerous underground newsletters flourished (over
four hundred by 1985), and Solidarity routinely broke into government
radio programming with messages like "Solidarity Lives!" or "Resist!"
By 1987, the pressures exerted by Solidarity and the Catholic Church
had forced the Soviet-backed government of General Wojciech
Jaruzelski to begin discussions with the church that ultimately led
to the election of Lech Walesa as president of Poland.

In Afghanistan, the Reagan administration enjoyed bipartisan support
for a bold covert operation to bolster the Afghan mujaheddin and
force the withdrawal of the Soviets. The foundation for Reagan's
campaign was his approval in March 1985 of National Security Decision
Directive 166, which sought the defeat and complete removal of Soviet
troops. About two billion dollars worth of aid was provided to the
freedom fighters. The key item in this aid was the Stinger
anti-aircraft missile, the arrival of which tilted the war in favor
of the mujaheddin. But it also included satellite data on Soviet
targets, intercepts of Soviet communications, the establishment of
clandestine communications networks for the mujaheddin, long-range
sniper rifles, wire-guided anti-tank missiles and a targeting device
for mortars that was linked to a U.S. Navy satellite. Seven weeks
after the Stingers made their first kill in September 1986, Mikhail
Gorbachev held a Politburo meeting in which he made clear his
impatience with the war, and in December it was announced that the
Soviets would withdraw no later than December 1988.

Many of the American skeptics who were critical of Reagan's nuclear
policies also doubted his ability to influence Soviet conduct in
Afghanistan. Newsweek reported in 1984 that "the mujaheddin can never
be strong enough to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan", andas late
as 1987 the magazine claimed that "the anti-Communist insurgents can
never hope to defeat their better equipped adversaries." Nicholas
Daniloff reported in U.S. News and World Report that "defeating the
Soviet Army is an impossible dream", while Richard Cohen in the
Washington Post wrote in 1985 that "we are covertly supplying arms to
guerrillas who don't stand the slightest chance of winning. . . .
Afghanistan is not the Soviet version of Vietnam." (Three years
later, as the Soviet collapse in Afghanistan was evident, the title
of a Cohen piece in the Washington Post read "The Soviets' Vietnam.")

Despite the skepticism in some quarters, Reagan's policies toward
Poland and Afghanistan enjoyed widespread bipartisan support. The
same cannot be said for his efforts in Central America, a region
where guilt over America's past interventions cast a shadow over any
attempt to prevent Marxist-tinged nationalist movements from
acquiring power. "We have unclean hands", declared Congressman Vic
Fazio during a 1986 debate over Contra funding.

In Nicaragua, Reagan chose once again to reverse a Carter policy that
accepted the status quo--in this instance the legitimacy of
Nicaragua's Sandinista government. As Carter administration official
Anthony Lake put it, "seeking either to overthrow the victorious new
Sandinista government or to sever completely the long-standing ties
between its leaders and their friends in Cuba seemed unrealistic."
These sentiments were echoed by Carter's Under Secretary of State
Warren Christopher, who in 1979 judged the Sandinista government to
be "moderate and pluralistic", with a very diverse leadership
desirous of "close and friendly relations" with the United States. In
December 1981, President Reagan began the process of reversal by
signing National Security Decision Directive 17, which authorized $19
million to set up a five-hundred man force designed to disrupt the
infrastructure he believed Nicaragua was using to supply guerrilla
forces in El Salvador.

In waging war covertly against the Sandinistas, Reagan was defying
the prevailing opinion in Congress, academia, and among columnists
that America was on the wrong side of history in resisting Third
World "nationalist" movements. As Senator Christopher Dodd of
Connecticut, the Democrats' main spokesman on Central American policy
argued, "the Sandinistas may not be winners, but right now we are
backing sure losers." Dodd added that the United States needed to
"move with the tide of history rather than stand against it." One of
the chief architects of President Carter's Central American policy,
Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Viron Vaky,
urged the Reagan administration to "accept what has happened in
Nicaragua as a deplorable fait accompli that it cannot reverse at an
acceptable cost." As the Boston Globe put it, "Have we grown enough
through experiences as different as losing the Vietnam War and seeing
the Third World anew through Peace Corps eyes to understand that it
is possible for the United States to get ahead of the curve of
history if we want to?"

The argument that was initially most effective in terms of weakening
public support for Reagan's policies was that Nicaragua was "the next
Vietnam", and one of the more impressive accomplishments of Reagan's
term of office was helping to disabuse the nation of the idea that
whenever America used force it inevitably headed into--the favored
term--a quagmire. The idea was given expression by, among others,
columnist Mary McGrory, who insisted that "the Great Explainer cannot
delete their [the public's] memories of Vietnam. They hate jungle
wars; they know military aid is followed by U.S. troops." During the
debates over supplying aid to the Contras Senator Jim Sasser pleaded
that "as the father of a seventeen year old son, I say Mr. President,
let's not rush blindly into that quagmire. We've done that before",
while one of his Democratic colleagues accused the president of
wanting "a Tonkin Gulf resolution for Central America." Indeed, many
members of Reagan's own party had doubts about the wisdom of the
Contra war and raised the specter of Vietnam: "I'm a conservative
who's been with them all the way, but Vietnam is a lesson",
Congresswoman Lynn Martin noted in 1983. But the core of the
opposition came from House Democrats, whose leader, Speaker Tip
O'Neill, denounced the Contras as "butchers and maimers." He added,
"I don't think the president of the United States will be happy until
U.S. troops are in there." Nonetheless, and in the face of this
emotional outpouring, Reagan publicly declared that his goal was to
"remove" the Nicaraguan government.

Reagan has been criticized by some conservatives (including Jeane
Kirkpatrick, Caspar Weinberger, William Casey, and Judge William
Clark) for not being sufficiently overt in his opposition to the
Nicaraguan regime, perhaps even resorting to a conventional assault.
But there is simply no way that Reagan, even at the peak of his
communicative skills, could have sold that option to the American
people.

In the end, despite faltering support for efforts to destabilize the
Sandinistas on the part of the Bush administration, and a Sandinista
campaign of violent intimidation, Violeta Chamorro's forces won the
February 1990 election. Without the application of military pressure
by the Contras, the Sandinistas would have solidified their hold on
the country, and would have felt no need to engage in diplomatic
negotiations, which led, despite the best efforts of the Sandinistas,
to a relatively fair election. As Mexican author Octavio Paz noted,
"thankfully, this part of the world has finally given up Marx for
Montesquieu." Yes, but it needed a little help from Ronald Reagan.

Relegitimizing The Use of Force

While fear of another Vietnam was a constant source of criticism
against Reagan's covert campaigns, it was an even larger factor in
conflicts where American forces were engaged overtly. Though it is
now fashionable to deride Reagan's use of force against Grenada and
Libya as meaningless sideshows against third-rate powers, they were
not viewed that way at the time. Again, they were seen by many as
revealing Reagan's inability to learn the lesson of Vietnam: America
would experience only more pain and suffering from projecting force
in the Third World.

The invasion of Grenada, which came on the heels of the bombing of
the Marine barracks in Lebanon, showed that Reagan would not be
immobilized and intimidated by even a serious setback, but would move
with dispatch. His critics did the best they could by contending that
Reagan had launched the Grenada operation to erase Lebanon from the
public memory, but planning for the assault had in fact begun well
before the bombing of the Marine barracks. While the administration
had been expressing concern about the Grenadan regime's connections
to Cuba for several months, it was the overthrow of the government of
Maurice Bishop by a group of harder-line Marxists that prompted
American intervention. The Reagan administration was concerned about
the presence of American medical students on the island, and the
reaction of neighboring Caribbean states to a heightened Cuban and
Soviet presence in their region.

Once the attack was underway in the last week of October, 1983, the
barrage of criticism was steady, reflecting the anxiety that for the
first time since the Vietnam War the United States had committed
ground forces to an attack. Speaker O'Neill declared that "we can't
go the way of gunboat diplomacy. His policy is wrong. His policy is
frightening." Senator Daniel Moynihan observed that, "I don't know
how you restore democracy at the point of a bayonet", while Senator
Gary Hart argued that "we are dealing with an administration that is
not inclined to obey the law."

Foreign reaction was also highly critical; most disturbing to the
administration was that of Margaret Thatcher, who strongly condemned
Reagan's action against a member of the British Commonwealth whose
head of state was the queen. François Mitterrand described it as "a
surprising action in relation to international law", and Helmut Kohl
stated that "if we had been consulted we would have advised against
it." The UN General Assembly denounced the invasion in a 108 to 9
vote, while seven Democratic members of the House, led by Rep. Ted
Weiss, moved to impeach Reagan. For the New York Times, Grenada was
an exercise in moral equivalence, "a reverberating demonstration to
the world that America has no more respect for laws and borders, for
the codes of civilization, than the Soviet Union."

The repercussions from the invasion were felt throughout the
Caribbean, with the Cubans emerging as the big losers because of
their inability to come to the aid of an ally. The government of
Surinam, which had been warming up to Castro, gave his diplomats and
military advisors one-way tickets to Cuba, and the Nicaraguan
government informed the United States that anytime Reagan wanted to
evacuate Americans from their country they would be happy to make
appropriate arrangements. The Grenadan people welcomed Reagan as a
hero when he visited the island in February 1986, but, more
importantly, Reagan paved the way to restoring force as an option for
his successors, an option that would be exercised to great effect in
actions ranging from Panama to Kuwait to Haiti.

Another arena where Reagan projected force was in the Middle East,
against Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Qaddafi. Reagan was involved in
series of low-level confrontations with Qaddafi, beginning in the
early months of his first term and lasting up until the final days of
his second administration. In contrast to Carter, who sought to avoid
confrontations with Qaddafi, Reagan seemed almost to welcome the
opportunity to get into a scrap with him. When, in early August,
1981, at a White House meeting about planned maneuvers in the Gulf of
Sidra, one Cabinet member asked, "What about hot pursuit?", Reagan's
response was, "All the way into the hangar." The first incident
occurred shortly afterwards, on the night of August 18, 1981, when
two U.S. Navy f-14s flying inside Qaddafi's so-called "Zone of Death"
shot down two Soviet-built su-22s.

This relatively insignificant skirm