As Ronald Reagan flies off into the California sunset after eight years in the White House, as George Bush succeeds the nation's first two-term president since Eisenhower, the assessments of the Reagan administration begin. One such assessment—that of U.S. foreign policy under the Great Communicator—is presented by James Nathan in this issue. In Mr. Nathan's view, foreign policy under the Reaganites seemed "subject to only two criteria: would it "fly" on the evening news; and, would the president "look all right".... To be sure, national goals still existed, husbanded by the remnant civil service. But serious public discourse was circumvented by the judicious use of blue lights and zingy one-liners. For six years, much of U.S. policy dreamily wandered in the realm of the pretend and the demi-real."
A professor of international relations at the University of Delaware, Mr. Nathan is a former member of the United States Foreign Service. He is a former Scholar-in-Residence at the Naval War College, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He served as a worldwide lecturer for the U.S. Information Agency in 1981—1982, 1983, and 1987. He has been a consultant to the Strategic Research Center and the Department of the Army, and was a Senior Fulbright Scholar in Australia during 1987. He received his doctorate from the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and is the co-author of Foreign Policy Making and the American Political System first published by Little, Brown in 1983 and republished in a second revised edition in 1987. He has also written on international relations for numerous periodicals, including the Journal of Strategic Studies, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Foreign Policy. He did a similar assessment of President Carter's foreign policy for VQR in its Winter 1981 issue.
A prolific author and noted scholar, Russell Fraser is a professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. His most recent book is the biography, Young Shakespeare, published last summer by Columbia. He is also the author of The Three Romes—the Rome of the Caesars, the Constantinople of the Emperors, and the Moscow of the Czars. He has written half a dozen other books, including A Mingled Yard: The Life of R.P. Blackmur, and The Dark Ages and the Age of Gold, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1973. His VQR essay, "Wadi Bashing in Arabia Deserta," published in the Spring of 1987, has recently been selected and published in The Best American Essays 1988, edited by Annie Dillard and Robert Atwan.
