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In April 1985, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer suggested that "Ronald Reagan is the master if the new idea.... He has produced the Reagan Doctrine . . . [which] proclaims overt and unabashed American support for anti-communist revolutions'' Other analysts described this initiative as a "distinctive"2 or "signature"3 policy of the Reagan administration. Even President Ronald Reagan and certain of his advisers called attention to it as one of the administration's most significant efforts.4 These characterizations illustrate two tendencies: attributing policy to the executive branch alone; and linking the attitudes, beliefs, and values of the president and a few key advisers to policy. In fact, it is quite common to speak of U.S. foreign policy as that of a particular administration, and analysts who address the link between policymakers' beliefs and U.S. policy almost invariably focus on the president or a handful of high-level executive branch officials.5 Few analysts look beyond the executive branch, which is unfortunate because evidence suggests an increasing willingness by Congress to get involved in the postVietnam era, and a greater role for Congress in the aftermath of the Cold War.6 Likewise few analysts study the beliefs of members of Congress, perhaps because of the difficulty identifying them among so many individuals and determining how those beliefs are translated into congressional actions. Yet members affect policy and so their beliefs and values are significant. My analysis of one foreign policy strategy, the Reagan Doctrine, suggests that attention to the beliefs of only one group of American policymakers fails to provide an accurate or sufficient account of U.S. policy, and reveals that these tendencies are either false or misleading.
The origin of the Reagan Doctrine seems to support the noted tendencies. This strategy emerged from the ideology of President Reagan and key administration officials, who interpreted international developments and prescribed a course of action in response. In fact, the administration was exceptionally homogeneous in its ideology. Most high-level officials saw two camps in the world, good and evil, and blamed the Soviet Union for instigating all trouble. As Reagan stated in a June 1980 interview, "let's not delude ourselves, the Soviet Union underlies all the unrest that is going on. If they weren't engaged in this game of dominoes, there wouldn't be any...