ABSTRACT
For Ronald Reagan little had changed in thirty years, as far as the Soviet threat was concerned. The Ronald Reagan who had testified as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the late 1940s and the Ronald Reagan who assumed the presidency in 1981 both saw in the Soviet Union an unrelentingly aggressive and malign presence on the international scene. What was remarkable about his attitude in the 1980s was not his anti-Sovietism but the intensity of his anticommunism. His was a visceral and profoundly ideological opposition to communism. He could not accept the notion that the Soviet Union was a very large and dangerous but in all essentials ordinary nation-state. In this respect he was out of step with the dominant pragmatism of American leadership circles, whether conservatives or liberals, no less than the bulk of academic experts since the mid-1960s. Even Jimmy Carter, who was an idealist in his own way, took a pragmatic line when it came to seeking agreements with the Soviet Union. And when he was in the idealistic vein, his liberal universalism had little in common with Reagan’s fighting conservative faith. This emerged clearly in their attitudes towards human rights. Carter announced a single standard which applied in principle to friends and enemies alike. Reagan was frankly disinclined to place pressure on friendly nations whatever the character of the governments or their records on human rights (Dallin and Lapidus 1987: 222). Reagan was, in short, the most unashamedly ideological of post-war presidents.
