agan was the first post-war president to take the offensive both ideologically and geostrategically. From the time of Reagan's inauguration, his administration pursued two objectives simultaneously. The first was to combat Soviet geopolitical pressure until expansion had been stopped and then reversed and to launch a rearmament program designed to stop the Soviet quest for strategic superiority and turn it into a strategic liability (Kissinger 772). Reagan moved away from containment and headed right for shrinking the Soviet Union, which due to its over extension into foreign affairs had left it vulnerable. Most of the Soviet gains of the 1970s were reversed - though several did not take place until the Bush administration. The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia was ended in 1990, elections were held in 1993, and refugees prepared to return home. Cuban troops withdrew from Angola by 1991. The communist backed government in Ethiopia collapsed in 1991. In 1990, the Sandanistas in Nicaragua were brought to accept free elections, a risk no communist government had ever taken before. Perhaps most importantly Soviet armies withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. All of these helped to break the Soviet Union. Reagan had successfully pushed back the Red Tide (Kissinger 773-774). The Reagan administration achieved these successes by putting into practice what became known as the Reagan Doctrine: that the United States would help anticommunist counterinsurgencies wrest their respective countries out of the Soviet sphere of influence. Reagan's strategic policies helped bring an end to the Cold War. The two most decisive of these decisions were NATO's deployment of American intermediate-range missiles in Europe and American commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative (Kissinger 774). By sticking to his main points Reagan was able to put and end to the Cold War and crumble the Soviet Union....
