ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evolution of Ronald Reagan's initial revived Truman Doctrine-styled view of the Soviet Union as an "evil empire", the importance of his anti-nuclear sentiment, and the effects of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reforms in enabling a transformed superpower relationship. It highlights the ways in which Reagan's liberal worldview was qualified by an aversion to the intellectual rigidities of the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) doctrine, motivating his nuclear abolitionism and openings to Gorbachev. The chapter argues that an absence of intersubjective consensus left the George H. W. Bush and Clinton administrations to struggle sustain a pragmatic internationalism, as each confronted tentative post-Cold War isolationisms from the Right and the Left. Indeed, given the absence of consensus, while George W. Bush condemned Clinton-era policies that shifted "from crisis to crisis like a cork in a current", his campaign and initial presidency evinced a similar ambivalence.
