As the world entered into a tense and unstable period after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, many politicians and military leaders of countries possessing space technologies were looking into the heavens for a promise of effective defense or strategic superiority. In the United States, the first administration of President Donald Trump created the…
Tag: Ronald Reagan
H-Dipo | RJISSF Review Essay 119: Bateman on Brunet, ed., NATO and the Strategic Defence Initiative
[dropcapThe Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), more commonly known as “Star Wars,” remains one of the most controversial aspects of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Frequently misrepresented as a science fiction fantasy focused on space lasers, in reality SDI was a multi-billion-dollar group of research projects into technologies with civilian and defense applications. Technological realities aside, Reagan hoped…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-6 on Freeman, Dreams for a Decade
In today’s context of heightened nuclear dangers, nuclear disarmament may seem like a faraway dream. Today’s nuclear landscape is characterized by threats of nuclear use, states modernizing and sometimes expanding their nuclear arsenals, violations and withdrawals from arms control treaties, and the possibilities of new states developing nuclear weapons. The prospects for arms reductions, let…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-54 on Inboden, The Peacemaker
William Inboden’s The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is an ambitious book that covers the entirety of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy. Inboden is a distinguished scholar and tireless mentor who served in high-level positions in the Department of State and National Security Council staff, where he observed…
H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 15-43 on Schmidli, Freedom on the Offensive
The reviews in this forum demonstrate that William Michael Schmidli’s Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and US Interventionism in the Late Cold War is an “impressive account,” as Molly Avery puts it, of how human rights and democracy promotion shaped US foreign policy in the late Cold War, specifically towards revolutionary Nicaragua….
H-Diplo | RJISSF Article Review 162: Akhtar on Bateman, “Keeping the Technological Edge”
On 22 December 1984, shortly after a meeting at Camp David, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher publicly confirmed her government’s support for the Reagan Administration’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a proposed US plan to establish a ground- and space-based missile defense system. Stating that she had told the American President of her “firm conviction” that…