Deciding to Intervene – The Reagan Doctrine and American Foreign Policy [BOOK]
by James M. Scott

In large part, those who advocated the Reagan Doctrine blamed the international developments that called for the strategy on the inaction of the United States. In their view, détente had created a situation in which the Soviets were able to expand their influence without fear of punishment and at the same time derive benefits from U.S.-Soviet relations.
In particular, Reagan charged that the Soviets took advantage of the atmosphere of détente to promote and support a series of successful communist revolutions throughout the Third World (Melanson 1991, 139). The policies of President Carter were singled out:
Carter, Reagan insisted, had ignored growing Soviet power and influence, abandoned friends, and acquiesced (or assisted) in Marxist revolutions.
President Carter was therefore to blame for the new Marxist governments that came to power peacefully or through revolution on three different continents from 1974 to 1980 (in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome, Cape Verde, Grenada, Suriname, and Nicaragua).
Key individuals in the early Reagan administration, including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Secretary of State Alexander Haig, and CIA Director William Casey, viewed these developments as a serious threat to U.S. interests (Lagon 1991, 222–45), with Casey reportedly referring to them as “a noose tightening, a rope woven of Communist victories around the globe” (Persico 1990, 217).
They believed Soviet influence (and momentum) was increasing and U.S. influence was diminishing, and that the United States needed to halt this trend, to “checkmate them and roll them back” (ibid., 225).
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