After a period of relaxation between the two greats, the decade of the 1980s marked a revival of hostilities on the part of the United States with the return to power of the Americans.
With his slogan “America is back” and his Manichaean speech on the Evil Empire, explicitly targeting the Soviet Union, Reagan, elected President of the United States in 1980, undertook a policy of firmness considered as aggressive. During his presidency, Reagan repeated several times that the communist episode was coming to an end. To weaken the enemy, the Reagan administration does not hesitate to finance anti-communist guerrillas, notably in Africa but also in Asia and Latin America. The CIA thus continued to arm the Afghan mujahideen during the 1980s, to fight the Red Army which invaded the country. In the Iran-Iraq conflict, while diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States have been officially broken since the episode of the hostage-taking at the American embassy in Tehran, Reagan sides with Saddam Hussein and brings its support for Iraq. More directly, the United States decided to overthrow the Marxist regime on the island of Grenada in 1983. The same year, in the midst of the Euromissile crisis, the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Air Lines plane containing 269 civilians, following a navigation error that caused the violation of Soviet territory: this attack provoked Reagan’s indignation and reinforced his Manichean vision of the world. In 1985, Reagan also decreed an embargo against the Sandinista regime of Daniel Ortega and Marxist obedience in Nicaragua. Finally, the bombing of Gaddafi’s Libya in 1986 generated only timid protests from the Soviets.
In addition, through the implementation of “reaganomics”, Ronald Reagan led a recovery policy of the military-Keynesian type, which enabled the United States to reconnect with strong growth. During his two terms, Reagan revived the arms race, somewhat attenuated until then. He is notably at the initiative of the Strategic Defense Initiative (IDS) project, which aimed to protect American territory by setting up an anti-ballistic shield using satellites capable of detecting possible missiles. However, the realization of such a project would invalidate the balance of terror and would make the USSR vulnerable. Moscow, faced with such desires, does not have the financial means to counter this project without which its economy, already seriously weakened by spending in Afghanistan, would become increasingly weak. From then on, Gorbachev preferred to continue talks for a gradual disarmament of the two superpowers, leading to the abandonment by the United States of the IDS project in the early 1990s. Several conferences for disarmament were thus held during the second term. of Reagan, leading to the START I treaty signed in 1990. But the revival of the arms race by the United States contributed notably to the Soviet slowdown of the 1980s.
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