9.3 The End of the Cold War

Reagan rejected détente as a bad deal for the U.S. In a 1983 speech he called the Soviet Union an 'evil empire.' He pushed the largest peacetime military buildup in U.S. history, adding new missiles, bombers and ships. In March 1983 he proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a plan for space-based defenses to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles. Critics nicknamed it 'Star Wars' and doubted it could work, but it worried Soviet leaders, who feared they could not afford to match it.

Under what became known as the Reagan Doctrine, the U.S. backed anticommunist forces fighting Soviet-supported governments. It armed the mujahideen, Islamic fighters resisting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, and the Contras, rebels fighting the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. In 1983 U.S. troops invaded the Caribbean island of Grenada to remove a Marxist government. That same year, a truck bomb killed 241 U.S. servicemembers in Beirut, Lebanon, and Reagan soon withdrew the Marines.

Congress passed the Boland Amendment to cut off military aid to the Contras. Members of Reagan's National Security Council staff then secretly sold weapons to Iran, partly to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon, and sent some of the profits to the Contras. When the scheme came out in 1986, investigations led to criminal charges against several officials. Reagan said he had not known about the money going to the Contras, but the scandal hurt his reputation and raised old questions about presidents acting around Congress.

Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet leader in 1985. He knew the Soviet economy was stagnating and that the war in Afghanistan and the arms race were draining it. He introduced glasnost (openness, allowing more criticism) and perestroika (restructuring the economy). Reagan and Gorbachev met at summits in Geneva (1985) and Reykjavik, Iceland (1986), and in 1987 signed the INF Treaty, which eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles, the intermediate-range ones, for the first time. That same year in West Berlin, Reagan challenged Gorbachev to 'tear down this wall.'

Gorbachev also signaled that the Soviet Union would no longer use force to keep Eastern Europe communist. In 1989 communist governments fell across the region, mostly peacefully, and on November 9 East Germany opened the Berlin Wall. Germany reunited in 1990. In December 1991, after a failed coup by hard-liners, the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 independent countries, and the Cold War was over.

• U.S. pressure: some historians argue Reagan's military buildup, SDI and the Reagan Doctrine pushed a weak Soviet economy past its limits.
• Soviet and Eastern European causes: others stress the Soviet Union's long economic decline, the costly war in Afghanistan, Gorbachev's own choices, and popular movements such as Poland's Solidarity labor union.
• Diplomacy: still others credit Reagan's willingness to negotiate with Gorbachev after 1985, which built trust and led to real arms cuts.
• A strong answer weighs these factors rather than giving all the credit to one.

President George H. W. Bush spoke of a 'new world order' based on international cooperation. In 1989 U.S. troops invaded Panama and removed its dictator, Manuel Noriega. When Iraq's Saddam Hussein invaded oil-rich Kuwait in 1990, Bush built a UN-approved coalition of more than 30 nations. In the Persian Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm, January–February 1991), the coalition quickly drove Iraq out of Kuwait.

Under Clinton, Americans debated humanitarian interventions. A peacekeeping mission in Somalia ended after 18 U.S. soldiers died in a 1993 battle in Mogadishu, and the U.S. stayed out of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. NATO air strikes helped end the war in Bosnia (Dayton Accords, 1995) and stopped Serbian attacks in Kosovo (1999). Clinton also hosted the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians and promoted trade through groups like APEC. NATO began adding former Soviet-bloc countries in 1999.