ABSTRACT
Reagan was a conviction politician whose instincts were to confront the Soviet Union in an ideological way. In 1983 he denounced the Soviet Union as an ‘evil empire’. Yet this confrontational attitude did not translate itself into a confronta-tional policy. George Schultz, who was appointed Secretary of State in 1982, called for arms control with Moscow and Reagan himself said, ‘we are ready for constructive negotiations with the Soviet Union’, only one year after the ‘evil empire’ speech.2 The Soviet
Union, under its new leader, Yuri Andropov, warned that the two countries were on a collision course if the United States continued to pursue a policy of military superiority.
