Reagan's Doctrine and the Iran Issue OP-ED

In the words of an address given at the Naval Academy in the spring of 1984 by Robert C. McFarlane, this made ''obsolescent'' the earlier policy of containment. Because the Soviets were now ''militarily strong and adventurous enough to leapfrog the buffer states and jum...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inThe New York times
Main Author month., Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, will become a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next
Format Newspaper Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, N.Y New York Times Company 21.12.1986
EditionLate Edition (East Coast)
Subjects
MOYNIHAN, DANIEL PATRICK (SEN)
REAGAN, RONALD WILSON (PRES)
UNITED STATES ECONOMY
UNITED STATES INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
Iran
WASHINGTON
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Summary:In the words of an address given at the Naval Academy in the spring of 1984 by Robert C. McFarlane, this made ''obsolescent'' the earlier policy of containment. Because the Soviets were now ''militarily strong and adventurous enough to leapfrog the buffer states and jump anywhere in the world that suits their own strategies,'' it was necessary to go ''beyond containment.'' Mr. McFarlane was justifying the mining of Nicaraguan harbors and describing the anti-Communist resistance there that gave particular elan to the new doctrine. In an article in Strategic Review, a State Department official put it that the '' 'Reagan doctrine' has evolved in pace with a remarkable phenomenon of global dimensions: the spontaneous combustion of resistance to direct and surrogate prongs of the Soviet Union's expansion in such disparate regions as Asia, Africa and Central America.'' Marxist-Leninist insurgencies in the third world are the aftermath of colonial experience that took young Asians to the Sorbonne, Africans to London, Latinos to Barcelona. We may predict that between now and the year 2000 between four and 11 such regimes will come to power. I would, for example, put Haiti on a list of candidates if we don't act. And, of course, sometimes it won't matter if we do act. What then? We need a better policy than behaving as if the Western world were at risk. When a small tropical nation goes Communist, we need a better policy than debasing our own conduct in the course of resisting theirs.
ISSN:0362-4331