Ronald Wilson Reagan

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Ronald Wilson Reagan : biography

06 February 1911 – 05 June 2004

Administration’s position to the sphere of preservation and crediting was one of the reasons of crisis of saving and credit field (in 1980 and 1990), though there isn’t an agreement on the question whether the reason of crisis was singular. To pay off new growing deficit of USA budget the country made big loans in the country and abroad, national debt increased from 997 billion dollars to 2,85 trillion dollars. Regan described a new debt as “the biggest disappointment” of his presidency.

Reagan iteratively appointed Paul Walker to the post of chairman of federal reserve system and in 1987 changed him by a monetarist Alan Greenspan. Reagan stopped the control of prices for petroleum in the country what at the beginning of 1970-s led to energetic crisis. Afterwards, oil’s price lowered, and in 1980 there weren’t deficits of fuel. Reagan fulfilled the promise he had made in the pre-election campaign-1980, abolished the tax on unforeseen income, which in the past had increased dependence of foreign oil. Some economists, such as Nobel laureates Milton Fridman and Robert Mundell consider that Reagan’s tax politics emboldened American economics and made a contribution in the economic boom of 1990-s. other economists, for example, a Nobel laureate Robert Solow, think that the deficit was the main reason of the fact, that Reagan’s successor George Bush renounced his pre-election promise and increased taxes.

American peacemaking forces in Beirut, which were acting as a part of multinational forces in the Lebanon civil war and were expanded by president Reagan, were attacked on the 23d of October in 1983. The Attack on American quarters by a suicide attacker, driving a lorry full of explosives in Beirut, led to death of 214 American soldiers and injuries of 60 others. Four days later Reagan sent a detachment from the White House, which was commanded by the vice-president George Bush. Reagan called this attack “despicable”, promised to preserve military presence in Lebanon and planned to attack quarters of sheikh in Baalbek, but afterwards the mission was abolished. On the 7th of February in 1984 president Reagan ordered marine to start leaving Lebanon. In April of 1984 he made an appeal to 20 thousand present on the convection of Jerry Fallwell “Baptist fundamentalism – 1984” in Washington and read the first report about this attack, which was written by a naval chaplain Arnold Reznikov, who was asked by Bush and his detachment. Osama bin Laden later called Reagan’s withdrawal of troops a sign of American weakness.

On the 25th of October in 1983, after two days Reagan ordered American troops to return to Grenada, the operation was called “A flash of fury”. In 1979 owing to governmental revolution an independent Marxixt-Leninist government came to power and joined the movement of non-alignment. The official address from the organization of OECS to USA caused invasion of American troops. President Reagan appealed to a threat, which was made by Soviet-Cuban military building in the Caribbean sea, and a concern about security of several hundreds of American students of the University of Saint George as adequate reasons for intervention. The operation”A flash of fury” became the first big military operation of American forces after Vietnam war. Several days of struggle led to American victory, 19 Americans died, 116 soldiers were injured. In the middle of December, when the new government was appointed by general governor, American troops left Grenada.

Reagan intensified the Cold War, quickened deviation from the politics of relaxation, which had started in 1979 after Soviet troops entered Afghanistan. Reagan was an initiator of making a National Endowment for Democracy in 1983, it was a non-government organization with a purpose to “encourage nation’s desire for democracy”.

With the British prime-minister Margaret Thatcher Reagan accused the Soviet Union for its ideology. In his famous appeal from the 8th of June in 1982 to the British parliament in the royal gallery of the Westminster palace he announced: “a march to freedom and democracy will leave Marxism-Leninism on the dump of history”. On the 3d of March in 1983 he predicted that communism would be collapsed and claimed that “Communism is another sorrow, a strange chapter in human history, and its last pages can be read nowadays”. In his speech, which was addressed to the national association of evangelic from the 8th of March in 1983 Reagan called the Soviet Union “the empire of evil”.