Continuity and change in the United States' Soviet policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations
- UNCW Author/Contributor (non-UNCW co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Ronnie Hugh Odom Jr. (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina Wilmington (UNCW )
- Web Site: http://library.uncw.edu/
- Advisor
- Glenn Harris
Abstract: This thesis is a work of American intellectual history that attempts to explain how
the foreign policy of the United States was concocted and shaped in the late 20th century.
Specifically, it focuses on the end period of the Cold War from 1975 to 1985, and
Soviet/American relations concerning the issues of détente, arms control, and national
defense. It examines American social and political trends as causal forces that played a
role in the United States’ policy turn against détente with the Soviet Union, and the turn
toward a posture of confrontation by the late 1970s. Social trends included the changing
mood and opinions of the American public, and the rise of a neo-conservative movement
that increasingly relied on intellectuals, and think tanks, to promulgate and legitimize
their ideas to the public and the political leadership simultaneously.
These social, intellectual, and political trends were evolving constants, they
developed irrespective of changes in White House leadership. As such, they account for
many of the continuities in Soviet and national defense policy between the
administrations of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. Continuity and the evolving
spectrum of change that occurred during these years is the other major theme of this
thesis. The Carter and Reagan administrations are often thought of as having been
dramatically different in their approaches to the Soviet Union. However, this thesis
attempts to illuminate that between these two administrations there was an evolving
strategy that led the United States to Cold War victory. A confluence of the domestic and
the foreign, the governmental and the private, the social and the political accounted for
the paradoxical changes and continuities during this time.
Continuity and change in the United States' Soviet policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations
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Created on 1/1/2009
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- A Thesis Submitted to the University of North Carolina at Wilmington in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Degree of Masters of Arts
- Language: English
- Date: 2009
- Keywords
- Carter Jimmy 1924-, Reagan Ronald, Soviet Union--Foreign relations--United States, United States--Foreign relations--1977-1981, United States--Foreign relations--1981-1989, United States--Foreign relations--Soviet Union
- Subjects
- United States -- Foreign relations -- Soviet Union
- Soviet Union -- Foreign relations -- United States
- Carter, Jimmy, 1924-
- Reagan, Ronald
- United States -- Foreign relations -- 1977-1981
- United States -- Foreign relations -- 1981-1989