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The New Outlook of the
Reagan Years
1981-1988
Chapter 21
Section 3
Central America and the
Caribbean
 As
president, Ronald Reagan took a
different view of politics in Latin
America from prior presidents.
 He believed that the United States
should readily intervene with military
force if its interests were threatened.
 This was in line with the traditional
containment policy of opposing
communism.
The Grenada Invasion
 Grenada,
an island nation in the
Caribbean Sea, has a population
of only 94,000.
 A few hundred American
students were attending a
medical school on the island
when, in 1983, an uprising led to
the overthrow of the democratic
government by Communist
forces.
 Shortly
thereafter, believing that
the medical school students were
in danger, President Reagan
ordered U.S. troops to invade the
island.
 The invasion force quickly defeated
the Cuba-backed Communist
defenders and restored democratic
rule to the island.
 Opinion polls showed that most
Americans were pleased to see
U.S. troops win this localized war.
Aid to El Salvador
Throughout the 1980s the Central
American nation of El Salvador was
torn apart by civil war.
 President Reagan was convinced that
the rebels forces, if successful, would
establish a Communist government in
El Salvador.
 To prevent this, he urged Congress to
vote millions of dollars in military aid
for El Salvador’s government.

 Despite
more than $600 million in
U.S. aid, the civil war continued.
 Tens of thousands died in the bloody
conflict.
 Finally, in late 1991, UN negotiators
persuaded both sides to agree to a
cease-fire and peace settlement.
Aid to the Nicaraguan “Contras”
 Meanwhile,
in nearby Nicaragua,
U.S. aid was helping a rebel
group to fight Nicaragua’s
Communist government.
 That government, which came to
power in 1979, was known as the
Sandinistas.
 In 1982 and 1983, President
Reagan urged Congress to supply
the “contras” with financial and
military aid.
The Iran-Contra Affair
President Reagan did not expect the
civil war to end peacefully.
 Because Congress had refused to vote
military aid for the “contras” in 1984,
he had urged supporters of his
policies to make private donations to
the rebel cause.
 At the same time, in the Middle East,
the president was having trouble
freeing U.S. citizens who were being
held hostage in Lebanon.

What connection could there be
between hostages in Lebanon
and aid to the “contras” of
Nicaragua?
 In
1988 members of the press
thought that they had found the
missing connection.
 They discovered that U.S.
officials had secretly arranged
to sell weapons to Iran.
 This act alone violated a law of
Congress banning the sale of
U.S. weapons to that country.
 In
addition, members of the press
strongly suspected that the arms
sale was made with the intention
of winning the release of the
American hostages in Lebanon.
 Finally, money from the illegal sale
of arms was secretly channeled to
the “contras” of Nicaragua.
 This secret operation was carried
out by a presidential aide and
Marine lieutenant colonel, Oliver
North.
Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, a
congressional committee questioned
Colonel North about his money-channeling
operation.
 North testified that President Reagan
knew nothing about his efforts to pass
money from the Iranian arms sale to the
“contras”.
 Although Colonel North’s actions may not
have been undertaken directly under
orders by the president, some Americans
compared the scandal to the Watergate
Affair.
 Others believed that North had acted in
the interests of his country.

Oliver North
Marines in Lebanon
The
Beirut barracks bombing was a
major incident on October 23, 1983,
during the Lebanese Civil War.
Two truck bombs struck separate
buildings in Beirut that housed United
States members of the Multinational
Force in Lebanon killing 299
servicemen, including 241 U.S.
Marines.
 The
blasts led to the withdrawal of the
international peacekeeping force from
Lebanon, where they had been stationed
since the Israeli 1982 invasion of Lebanon.
 The organization Islamic Jihad took
responsibility for the bombing, but that
organization is thought to have been a
faction for Hezbollah or a group that would
later become part of Hezbollah receiving
help from the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Economic Competition,
Cooperation, and Boycott
Early in the 1970s, Americans
discovered that they were buying
more and more goods from Japan.
 Ever since World war I, the United
States had been a creditor nation.
 In other words, the value of U.S.
made goods sold abroad (exports)
was greater than the value of foreign
made goods sold in the United States
(imports)

 In
each year of the 1980s and 1990s,
however, just the opposite occurred.
 Instead of being the world’s largest
creditor nation, the United States
had become the World’s largest
debtor nation.
 By far, the widest gap between
exports and imports was in U.S.
trade with Japan.
 Reagan left U.S. tariffs low because
he feared if he raised them it would
cause a tariff war and hurt the world
economy as well as the U.S.
economy.
Questions
 Is
this a problem today where we
are the world’s largest debtor
nation instead of the world’s
largest creditor nation?
 What countries are considered
creditor nations to us today?
 Should anything be done to fix
this issue?
 Who is being harmed in our
country by this discussed above?
South Africa
 Apartheid
was a
system of legal
racial segregation
enforced by the
National Party
government in
South Africa
between 1948 and
1994 when people
of Dutch decent
took it over from
the British.
Racial segregation in South Africa began
in colonial times, but apartheid as an
official policy was introduced following the
general election of 1948.
 New legislation classified inhabitants
people into racial groups and residential
areas were segregated by means of forced
removals.
 Blacks were stripped of their citizenship,
legally becoming citizens of one of ten
tribally based self-governing homelands,
four of which became nominally
independent states.
 The government segregated education,
medical care, and other public services,
and provided black people with services
inferior to those of whites

Apartheid sparked significant internal
resistance.
 A series of popular uprisings and protests
were met with the banning of opposition
and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders.
 As unrest spread and became more
violent, the Afrikaner government
responded with increasing repression and
state-sponsored violence.
 Many protests of apartheid also went on in
the United States and Congress issued an
embargo/boycott on South Africa until
they ended their apartheid policies.

Reforms to apartheid in the 1980s failed
to quell the mounting opposition, and in
1990 President Frederik Willem de Klerk
began negotiations to end apartheid,
culminating in multi-racial democratic
elections in 1994, which were won by the
African National Congress under Nelson
Mandela.
 Nelson Mandela then became South
Africa’s first black president. This
transition to multiracial democracy led to
an end of all U.S. boycotts of South Africa
and increased cooperation between the
two nations.

United States-Soviet Relations
 In
1972 president Nixon went to
Moscow to meet with the Soviet
leader, Leonid Brezhnev, and
signed the first Strategic Arms
Limitation Talks Treaty (SALT I).
 Such missiles, which intercepted
and destroyed attacking missiles,
were known as antiballistic
missiles, or ABMs.
 The
United States and the
Soviet Union agreed to set an
upper limit on the number of
ABMs that each would
produce.
 Soviets and Americans alike
hoped that this treaty would
significantly reduce the risk
of nuclear war.
 In
1979 President Carter and
Soviet Premier Brezhnev signed
a second strategic arms treaty,
SALT II.
 It established a ceiling on the
number of long-range offensive
missiles that each superpower
could produce.
 It also limited the number of
cruise missiles (low flying
weapons), which could be
launched from an airplanes and
submarines.
Defense Spending and “Star
Wars”
Ronald Reagan never believed that
the Soviet Union could be trusted.
 In his 1980 campaign for the
presidency, Reagan promised to
increase military spending so that the
United States could once again take a
lead in the arms race.
 Congress approved $1.5 trillion spent
over a 5 year period on bombers,
submarines, and missiles.

 The
most ambitious and
controversial of Reagan’s proposals
was to develop a “space shield” the
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).
 Critics of the idea thought it
sounded like the popular movie Star
Wars.
 The weapons, as conceived by
defense experts, would orbit the
Earth and, from outer space, shoot
down Soviet missiles before they
could reach U.S. targets.
Gorbachev and Soviet American
Relations
 Leonid
Brezhnev, the Soviet
leader since 1964, died in 1982.
 His first successor died only after
15 months in office, the second
after 13 months.
 In March 1985, the Soviet
Communist party selected as
leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
 Gorbachev
realized that the Soviet
economy could not improve if a large
percentage of the nation’s resources
went to its armed forces.
 He observed that, because of
Reagan’s arms buildup, the United
States might soon be far ahead in the
arms race.
 His country could no longer afford to
strain its economic resources in an
attempt to match U.S. armaments.
Gorbachev was
therefore eager to
meet with U.S.
leaders and reduce
the costly and
dangerous arms race.
 Gorbachev and
Reagan established
1990 as the year
when Europe would
be completely free of
intermediate-range
nuclear weapons.

Berlin Wall Comes Down
 The
Berlin Wall came down as a
result of Reagan’s cold war
policies in 1989.
 The fall of the Berlin Wall paved
the way for German
reunification.
 The Fall of the Berlin Wall
became a symbol that the Cold
War was official over.
Berlin Wall Video
 http://video.google.com/videoplay?d
ocid=-181898405138602708