[…] Whatever the case, Biden’s national security team might familiarize themselves with the diplomatic strategy as carried out by US President Ronald Reagan and his secretary of state George Shultz at what historians often point to as among the two most dangerous periods (the first being the Cuban Missile Crisis) of the Cold War.
“The basis of a free and principled foreign policy,” said former California governor Ronald Reagan in a speech accepting the 1980 Republican nomination, “is one that takes the world as it is, and seeks to change it by leadership and example; not by harangue, harassment or wishful thinking.”
But the very early years of his administration were indeed marked more by harangue (“Evil Empire”) than by diplomacy. A New York Times profile of the Soviet Ambassador to the US, Anatoly Dobrynin, noted that he could not “recall a period more tense than the present….On his visits back home, he finds his relatives asking him, for the first time, if there is going to be war with the United States.”
The nuclear scare resulting from NATO’s Able Archer exercise of 1983 served as a wake up call to the president – as did the ABC television movie The Day After, which is said to have made a deep impression on the president. […]
The departure, in July 1982, of secretary of state Al Haig and the arrival of former Nixon labor and treasury secretary George Shultz as Haig’s replacement, set the stage for a new approach to the Soviets.
In a memo to the president, Shultz called for “intensified dialogue with Moscow.” Läs artikel