ABSTRACT
Ronald Reagan promised to restore the country's national pride after the "weakness" of the Jimmy Carter presidency and the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis. Reagan's policy could be portrayed as an attempt to reverse the "communist inroads" made under the "weak and appeasing" Carter administration. Reagan's policies were based on the presumptions that the Soviets had inherently aggressive intentions in the Third World and through Jimmy Carter's weakness had managed to overtake the United States in both conventional and nuclear forces. Reagan's doctrine reaffirmed that the United States had a "moral responsibility" to accept "free world" leadership. The lesson that the Reagan administration has drawn from Vietnam is that prolonged involvements of US troops on foreign soil are politically unsupportable. More US citizens become directly dependent upon the military apparatus for their livelihood, which is supposed to translate into political behavior.
