Conservative Reaction and the End of the Cold War

The era of the **Conservative Reaction and the End of the Cold War** lasted from about 1980 AD until 1990 AD. It began with the election of Ronald Reagan as the 40th president of the United States. It then ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

In the aftermath of the 1960s radical counterculture and the economically troubled 1970s, many people eagerly embraced a new conservatism in social, economic and political life, characterised by the policies of US president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The Cold War escalated rapidly as President Reagan scrapped the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, but the arrival of Mikhail Gorbachev in the second half of the decade saw a dramatic easing of tensions, and ultimately the total collapse of Soviet Communism. In China, economic reform had brought massive growth rates, but the lack of corresponding liberal reforms boiled over in the dramatic events of Tiananmen Square. Meanwhile, the Middle East remained highly unstable, with prolonged conflicts including the Lebanese Civil War, Iran-Iraq War, and Soviet–Afghan War, and radical Islam becoming a powerful political force. The AIDS epidemic was recognised in 1981, and has since killed an estimated 39 million people.

## History

### United States and Ronald Reagan

Well known already to the public as a Hollywood and television actor in the 1940s and 50s and then as a successful governor of California (1967-75), Ronald Reagan challenged Democrat incumbent Jimmy Carter for the presidency in 1980. Reagan ran a smooth and effective campaign, simply asking voters, "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" Most were not; Carter was soundly defeated by an electoral margin of 489-49. Though the oldest person yet elected to the presidency at 69, **Ronald Reagan** (1981-89) brought a new glamour and relaxed mood to the White House, with his affable personality, folksy charm, and brilliance at delegation. Dubbed “the Great Communicator”, Reagan became a popular two-term president, winning re-election by a margin of 525-13; the largest number ever won by an American presidential candidate. Yet he had an alarming start to his time in office. Just over two months after his inauguration on 30 March 1981, an assassination attempt was made on his life by John Hinkley, a man with a history of psychiatric problems. Reagan suffers heavy internal bleeding and a punctured lung but recovers quickly.

In his inaugural speech in January 1981, Reagan had rhetorically announced that "*government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.*" His economic and social policies, which become known as Reaganomics, were based on reducing the federal government’s reach into the daily lives and pocketbooks of Americans, on the premise that companies and individuals would thrive, adding wealth to the economy. The chief means was to reduce both individual and corporate income taxes. The idea of wealth redistribution played no part. This was strongly displayed in Reagan's Tax Reform Act of 1986, which reduced the top rate of income tax from 50% to 28% while raising the bottom rate from 11% to 15%, justified by what became known as “Trickle-Down Economics”. He also reduced measures to regulate business, significantly cut certain social-welfare programs for the poor including Medicaid, and curtailed trade union power; in August 1981, Reagan fired 11,359 striking air traffic controllers who had ignored his order to return to work. By 1983, the nation’s economy had begun to recover and enter a period of prosperity that would extend through the rest of Reagan’s presidency. Tax revenues actually increased overall in Reagan's period in office because of broadening the base of what was taxable and the efficient closing of loopholes. His supporters would hail this as “*the longest peacetime expansion in American history*”. However critics charged that the gap between rich and poor had grown wider, and that deregulation of the Savings & Loan industry in the Reagan era, led many institutions to expand recklessly and eventually collapse. The same policies were applied in a similar shake-up in Britain by Margaret Thatcher, and she and Reagan became close friends.

Ronald Reagan was by any standards a hawk on issues of foreign affairs. He believed that the United States had lost the respect it once commanded in world affairs, after crises such as the failed intervention in the Bangladesh War of Independence (1971), the Oil Crises of 1973 and 1979, the Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-81), and the rise worldwide of terrorism. Reagan's fervent anti-Communism had been evident since his early days in Hollywood, when he regularly passed the names of actors whom he suspected to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). During his presidency an unrelentingly aggressive attitude to the Soviet Union, who he dubbed “the evil empire”, became national policy, after some years of détente by previous US administrations. Key to his administration’s foreign policy initiatives was the Reagan Doctrine, under which America provided aid to anti-Communist movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Yet during his second term, Reagan forged a more accommodating relationship with the reform-minded Mikhail Gorbachev, who became leader of the Soviet Union in 1985. In 1987, the Americans and Soviets signed a historic agreement to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles; the **INF Treaty**. That same year, Reagan spoke at Germany’s Berlin Wall, a symbol of Communism, and famously challenged Gorbachev to tear it down. Twenty-nine months later, Gorbachev allowed the people of Berlin to dismantle the wall.

Aiming to restore the United States to a position of military pre-eminence in the world, Reagan spent massive sums on increasing the size and capabilities of the armed forces. The most expensive and very controversial part of this programme was his Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI), dubbed “**Star Wars**” after the popular science-fiction movie. Introduced as a government project in 1983, its purpose was to develop missiles, some on the ground and some in space, that could identify and destroy any incoming enemy missiles. Many believed that it was technologically impossible, but if it could be achieved it would make useless the Soviet's huge stockpile of nuclear missiles and make the United States the only superpower in the world. It would also have required the United States to repudiate numerous previously ratified treaties. Yet it has never been put in place, though some of the technologies developed in the research have become valuable parts of other projects.

The two main direct unilateral interventions of Reagan's time were the invasion of Grenada and the bombing of Libya. Grenada, a small island nation in the Caribbean, had gained her independence from Britain in 1974, and long been much afflicted by military coups. A coup in 1979 brought to power a Communist regime under Maurice Bishop. Though the regime was highly unstable with numerous charges of leadership, in 1983 US aerial photos revealed that Grenada was building a new airfield with an unusually long runway. The response of the Reagan administration was that the runway could only be intended for the use of Soviet military and intelligence aircraft; an interpretation widely disputed at the time and since. Reagan warned of the threat posed to the nation by a Soviet-Cuban militarisation of the Caribbean, and a US invasion began on 25 October 1983. It proved far from easy, taking several days for nearly 8000 US soldiers, sailors and airmen to subdue a force of some 2200 Grenadians. There was widespread international condemnation, including from the United Nations who condemned it as “*a flagrant violation of international law*”. There was also a brief campaign in the House of Representatives to impeach President Reagan. Britain's Margaret Thatcher publicly supported the intervention, but privately criticised the lack of notice she received; Grenada was and is a member of the British Commonwealth. Meanwhile, Reagan's bombing of Libya on 15 April 1986 was a response to the track record of Colonel Gaddafi in sponsoring terrorist attacks against Western targets, often with major loss of life. The event that made Reagan take action was the bombing earlier in April of a discothèque in West Berlin frequented by US soldiers, in which 3 people were killed and 229 injured. On previous occasions evidence of Gaddafi's involvement had been circumstantial, but this time the West Germans gained access to cables sent to Libyan agents in East Berlin. The targets of the US air strikes were airfields and military barracks including Gaddafi’s own headquarters at Bab al-Azizia in Tripoli. There were 40 reported Libyan casualties, including one infant girl whose body was shown to American reporters with claims that she was Gaddafi’s own recently adopted daughter; this was likely untrue.

Yet Reagan's best-known intervention in a foreign country was less successful and resulted in a major scandal; the **Iran-Contra Affair**. The convoluted story involved four separate countries; Lebanon, Iran, Israel and Nicaragua. It began with seven American citizens who had been taken hostage in Lebanon by Hezbollah, a paramilitary group with Iranian ties. The United States had no way of putting pressure on Lebanon to release them, but Iran was in the midst of the costly and protracted Iran-Iraq War and was known to be desperately short of arms. If arms were sold to them, Iran promised to do everything in their power to achieve the release of the hostages. Yet official US policy, endorsed by Reagan, was a ban on the sale of arms to Iran. Meanwhile, Reagan was already secretly selling arms the Contras, a right-wing group opposed to the Communist but freely-elected government of Nicaragua. The Contras were in effect a terrorist group with an appalling civil rights record. They were also always short of funds. Reagan's administration hatched a subtle plan involving these two widely separate conflicts. The US would sell anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles to Israel, who would then smuggle and re-sell them to Iran. The money received would then be diverted to a secret fund to purchase weapons and supplies for the Contras. Both steps were illegal. News of the arms-for-hostages deal, first made public in November 1986, rapidly became a scandal. Oliver North, a member of the National Security Council, and several other high officials involved were subsequently convicted of obstructing justice and related offenses; their convictions were overturned on a technicality on appeal. Reagan accepted responsibility for the arms-for-hostages deal but denied any knowledge of the diversion.

Reagan's enlargement of the United States military during his presidency had the effect of raising the defence budget by over 40%, and trebling the national debt from $997 billion to $2.85 trillion. It would prove the greatest problem confronting his successor, George H.W. Bush. Even critics agree that Ronald Reagan’s legacy was enormous, solidifying the conservative agenda for decades afterwards, restoring American pride, revived faith in the presidency despite the Iran-Contra Affair, and contributing to victory in the Cold War.

### Britain and Margaret Thatcher

In the wake of the widespread strikes of the Winter of Discontent, the Conservative Party decisively won the election of 1979, and **Margaret Thatcher** (1979-90) became prime minister, the first woman to hold Britain’s highest political office. A 1976 speech condemning the Soviet Union had earned her the nickname “*The Iron Lady*” from a Soviet journalist, a moniker that she was delighted to embrace. Mrs. Thatcher’s eleven years in office heralded a sea change in Britain, replacing the old mood of consensus, with an aggressively adversarial stance. On moving into 10 Downing Street, Mrs. Thatcher introduced a series of political and economic initiatives intended to reverse Britain's ongoing recession, including lowering taxes and reducing regulation on business to stimulate the economy, as well as cutting certain social-welfare programs for the poor and selling-off publically owned housing. She strongly believed that free market forces were the best regulator of the economy. In what became a key part of her legacy, Mrs. Thatcher privatised British Telecom, British Gas, British Airways, Rolls-Royce and a number of other state-owned companies. By the end of her term in office, few aspects of British life had escaped the most sweeping transformation of Britain since the post-war reforms of Clement Attlee. This new version of economic liberalism divided the nation as nothing had for many decades. “Thatcherism” become a familiar word in the national vocabulary, revered and reviled with equal passion by the antagonist camps. From 1981, the Thatcher years coincided with the presidency of Ronald Reagan in the United States, and their shared right-wing, pro-business political philosophies became extremely influential around the world. Her relationship with her European neighbours was more complicated, particularly as she adopted a steadily more hostile attitude toward Europe Union integration, believing it should remain merely a free-trade area. Her views on the European Union were not shared by others in her Cabinet, a division within the Conservative Party and British politics that persisted until the Brexit decision in 2015, and even beyond.

The unflinching application of Thatcherism brought hardship to many in Britain. As unemployment soared to levels not seen since the Great Depression (1929-39), Mrs Thatcher’s popularity waned, but she was saved by her resolute handling of the **Falklands War** (April-June 1982). In April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, a sparsely populated British colony 300 miles from Argentina and 8,000 miles from Britain, that had long been a source of conflict. Taking swift action, Mrs. Thatcher dispatched British troops to the region. In May, a British submarine controversially sank the ARA General Belgrano, an Argentine light cruiser that was outside of the official exclusion zone, killing over 300 people on board. Later in the month, British troops landed near in East Falkland and captured the capital of Port Stanley. Argentina surrendered on 14 June 1982.

The war and an improving economy propelled Thatcher to victory in the election of 1983. During her second term, Mrs. Thatcher handled a number of crises, the most jarring of which may have been an assassination attempt; the Brighton Hotel Bombing (October 1984). In a plot by the Irish Republic Army (IRA), she was meant to be killed by a bomb planted at the Conservative Conference in Brighton. Undaunted and unharmed, Thatcher insisted that the conference continue, and gave a speech the following day.

Meanwhile, Mrs. Thatcher’s government also took on the trade unions, requiring them to hold a secret ballot before any work stoppage, and refusing to make any concessions during the **UK Miners’ Strike** (April 1984-March 1985). This was a fight for which she had been spoiling. Conservative prime minister Edward Heath had called an election in 1974 to obtain a mandate to face down the miners’ strike in 1974, but lost. Now in 1984, she was determined to face them down. After an exceptionally bitter and violent confrontation lasting eleven months, the miners return to work without winning a single concession. As Mrs Thatcher intended, this event was a turning point in the progressive loss of power of trade unions in Britain; a development greeted with rejoicing by her supporters, and with dismay by opponents. Yet it could not halt the steady decline of Britain’s traditional manufacturing and engineering industries, as the economy shifted increasingly to services.

By 1987, although unemployment remained high, those with work were making good money particularly in areas such as financial services, and inflation was sharply down from its 1970s peak. The mood in Britain was swinging to the right, and Mrs Thatcher won a third term in office in 1987. However, the defects in her leadership style were also beginning to tell. With an apparent sense of invincible power to push through unpopular policies, Mrs. Thatcher lowered income tax to a post-war low, and also pushed through an unpopular **Poll Tax**, a flat-rate tax on every adult. A Poll Tax had not been seen in Britain for six centuries, and Mrs. Thatcher failed to learn from that cautionary tale; the Peasants Revolt (1381). In the spring of 1990 there were poll-tax riots throughout the country, the largest in central London on 31 March 1990 with a crowd of 200,000 according to the police report. This was followed by a well-orchestrated campaign of non-payment. Mrs Thatcher's cabinet colleagues urged her to abolition her flagship policy, but she would not back down. After a string of high-profile cabinet resignations, former Defence Minister Michael Heseltine challenged her for leadership of the party. Although Mrs. Thatcher won the first ballot, the margin was too small for outright victory. That night, her cabinet colleagues visited her one by one and urged her to resign, which she eventually did on 28 November, after helping to assure that John Major and not Heseltine would replace her. The downfall of Margaret Thatcher would leave a sense of betrayal felt by her faction of the Conservative Party, that blighted the party for the rest of the decade, and helped lead to the rise of New Labour.

### Soviet Union and Mikhail Gorbachev

After years of declining health, Leonid Brezhnev died in November 1982 and was quickly succeeded as party leader by Yuri Andropov, the first transition of power in Soviet history to occur completely peacefully. As the former head of the KGB, Andropov was probably the best-informed man in the Soviet Union. He recognised the need to reverse the economic stagnation of the Brezhnev era, which was creaking under the cost of the long Soviet–Afghan War (1979-89). Appalled at the corruption, poor discipline, and alcoholism that had grown rife, and aware that Soviet citizens were chafing under their relatively poor standard of living and lack of freedom, Andropov set about reforms. Under Andropov a group of reformers r
ose to prominence, including Mikhail Gorbachev. Andropov's industrial and agricultural policies were quite sensible, but overly cautious, for the economy was already in terminal decline, only propped up by oil revenue. Yet Andropov died from kidney failure after just 15 months in office. Wary of Gorbachev, the Central Committee plumped for aging Konstantin Chernenko to succeed him, though Gorbachev became Second Secretary with responsibility for chairing the Central Committee when Chernenko was away, which turned out to be quite often as he was suffering from emphysema. Meanwhile, Cold War tensions increased in September 1983, when an over-zealous Marshal shot down a Korean Air Lines passenger flight after it had strayed into Soviet airspace, killing all 269 passengers and crew aboard.

In March 1985, when Chernenko also died, **Mikhail Gorbachev** (1985-91) stepped onto the world stage as the new leader of the Soviet Union, and the last. He was still the youngest member of the Central Committee. Gorbachev inherited all the issues that Andropov and Chernenko had been struggling to tackle, but Gorbachev’s youthful energy and enthusiasm gave the Soviets hope that a new generation of leaders geared toward positive change had taken charge. He took a shocking new approach toward addressing these problems in a reform program that embodied two overarching concepts. *Glasnost*, meaning “openness” sought to ease the strict government controls on personal freedom, allowing greater freedom to the media and religious groups, to make the country's government transparent and open to debate, and to release many political prisoners. The accompanying concept of *Perestroika*, meaning “restructuring”, referred to the entire restructuring of the Soviet Union's economy, to put a greater reliance on market forces, to modernise and computerise, as well as to increase productivity and reduce waste. He also overhauled the top membership of the Communist Party itself, and by 1989 organised democratic elections that required Party members to run against non-Party members, turning it into the Soviet Union’s first parliament. On 15 March 1990, the Congress of People’s Duties elected Gorbachev the first president of the Soviet Union.

In foreign affairs, Gorbachev from the beginning cultivated warmer relations and trade with the developed nations of both West and East. He proved a brilliant diplomat. When Margaret Thatcher first met him in December 1984 she famously remarked, "*I like Mr. Gorbachev; we can do business together*". Ronald Reagan, fervently anti-Communist, was initially distrustful and aggressive when he first met with Gorbachev at the Geneva Summit in November 1985, but gradually the two leaders managed to find common ground. He also cultivated strong ties with West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Gorbachev’s primary foreign concern was that the weak Soviet economy was unable to cope with the renewed arms race that Reagan had initiated during his first term in office, including the potentially game-changing Star Wars program.

Glasnost and gradually improving US-Soviet relations were put to the test on 26 April 1986 when the **Chernobyl** nuclear power plant in the Ukraine nuclear power plant suffered a catastrophic meltdown and exploded, caused by operator error and inherent design flaws. Yet, the Soviet government kept its own people in the dark about the event, and the rest of the world first learned of it two days later when Sweden began measuring dangerously high levels of radioactivity in their atmosphere. It was more than two weeks afterwards that Gorbachev released a report of the catastrophe, and years for the full story to emerge. 2 people died immediately from the effects of the blast, 31 more from radiation exposure within the first three months, and it roughly estimated that cancer deaths in the among the wider population reached about 4,000 in the following years. Birth defects among people living in the area have increased dramatically, and a 20-mile area around Chernobyl may be uninhabitable for centuries. In light of Gorbachev’s policy of “openness,” some considered his reaction hypocritical, and in the aftermath the regime became much more open. Yet in some ways, it also helped forge closer Soviet–US relations through bio-scientific cooperation. Gorbachev and Reagan took part in five summits between 1985 and 1988. Their discussions resulted in the signing of the historic Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987, whereby not only would their countries stop making certain types of nuclear weapons, but they would actually eliminate 2,692 missiles that they had accumulated. The productive dialogue was the result of fresh thinking on both sides, but progress on many points began with Gorbachev’s willingness to abandon long-held Soviet positions.

Gorbachev's reforms as well as his warm and open demeanour won him accolades from around the world, including the Nobel Peace Prize in 1990. However, the loosening of government control led many within the Soviet Union to criticise him, both from hard-line Communists who argued that reforms had destabilised the nation but not revitalise the economy, and from reformers such as Boris Yeltsin who held that yet more changes was needed. Meanwhile, ethnic tensions and anti-Semitism re-emerged, relatively dormant for years, as well as diverse and often competing nationalisms. Nevertheless, the Gorbachev reform that had the most far-reaching effects was loosening the Soviet grip on her eastern European satellite states. In a landmark speech at the United Nations in December 1988, Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union would allow the Eastern Bloc nations to freely determine their own internal affairs, and significantly reduce the number of troops based there. He had hoped that his initiative would revitalise and modernise the Soviet Union. Instead, it unleashed social forces that in 1989 brought down the Communist regimes in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania. By the end of that year, the Berlin Wall had been dismantled.

Despite his willingness to reform, Gorbachev remained committed to the principles of socialism, and determined to maintain it in Russia itself. However in August 1991, angry hard-line Communists attempted to stage a coup and put Gorbachev under house arrest. The coup ultimately failed due a short but effective campaign of civil resistance led by Boris Yeltsin, who emerged as the country’s most powerful political figure. The final nail in Gorbachev’s coffin came on 8 December 1991, when Yeltsin met secretly with leaders of Ukraine and Belarus and together they agreed to dissolve the Soviet Union. Before the end of the year, the Soviet Union had crumbled into 15 individual republics, and on 25 December 1991 Gorbachev inevitably stepped down from the presidency of a nation that no longer existed.

### Eastern Bloc Disintegration

In 1989, a wave of revolutions swept across the Soviet Eastern European satellite states; sometimes called the Autumn of Nations, a play on the term Spring of Nations used to describe the Revolutions of 1848. The disintegration of the Eastern Bloc began in Poland. In 1980, a long drawn-out strike at the Gdańsk Shipyard led by **Lech Wałęsa**, had forced the Communist government to accept the establishment of Solidarity, an independent trade union. Solidarity quickly spread nationwide, eventually gaining a membership of almost 10 million, despite government efforts to suppress it, during which it was forced underground. Within Solidarity an independent press flourished becoming a conduit for wide-ranging debate, and over time became a political force. The leadership of Mikhail Gorbachev in the Soviet Union from 1985, gave stimulus to democratic reforms all through Eastern Europe. By early 1989, the Polish leader Wojciech Jaruzelski had softened his position and allowed the opposition to challenge for 35% of parliamentary seats. Under the charismatic Lech Wałęsa, Solidarity swept all but one of the freely-contested seats in the elections of June 1989. In the aftermath, though Jaruzelski retained the presidency, Solidarity member Tadeusz Mazowiecki was installed as prime minister.

This power-sharing deal, with the first non-Communist prime minister in Eastern Europe since World War II, paved the way for the domino-like collapse of Communism throughout the Soviet Eastern Bloc. Many of the transitions were largely peaceful. In Hungary, it was simply the culmination of a reform process already well-underway since the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. In Czechoslovakia, demonstrations and strikes just grew and grew, until the entire top leadership of the Communist Party simply resigned. In Bulgaria, an internal Communist Party coup led to elections, and the dubious honour of being the first country of the former Soviet Bloc to elect Communists back into power; although they lost the subsequent election in 1991. Of all the Soviet Bloc countries, only Romania’s government transfer ended with a dead leader. Romanians had suffered painfully during the 25-year dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife. Thousands had been imprisoned and often disappeared by the much-feared secret police, and the population lived in abject poverty, while huge sums of money were squandered on grandiose megalomaniacal projects. A week of street protests and brutal reprisals culminated with a demonstration in Bucharest on 21 December, that was suppressed by the police with the use of a tank, leaving 1033 people dead. The army, many of whom had already joined the rebels, seized Ceauşescu and his wife attempting to flee the country. On Christmas Day 1989, they were convicted in a show trial on charges of genocide, and immediately executed. Yet democracy did not end the suffering of the Romanian people, who have been plagued by corrupt and incompetent governments ever since; it remains one of the poorest countries in Europe.

### Germany and Fall of the Berlin Wall

After 1973, like other countries, West Germany had been hard hit by the worldwide economic crises, soaring oil prices, and stubbornly high unemployment and inflation. Yet it also prompted an economic transformation as many factories to begin to concentrate on high-profit specialty items, and growth resumed. Meanwhile the East and West Germany détente, established in 1974, was further buoyed when Chancellor Schmidt paid an often-postponed official visit to East Germany in December 1981. Meanwhile by 1986 the SED government were allowing nearly 250,000 East Germans to visit West Germany each year, albeit only one family member at a time, and virtually all returned home. In 1987, the East German leader Erich Honecker at last received a reciprocal invitation by Helmut Kohl (1982-98) to visit Bonn, seemingly confirming the acceptance of the permanence of the East German state. Yet behind the Honecker government’s facade of stability, East Germany was losing its legitimacy. The opportunities for travel to West Germany produced bitter discontent; a consumer-oriented society with an abundance of high-quality goods, where East Germans had to materially depend on Western relatives because their own currency was virtually worthless outside East Germany.

The swift and unexpected downfall of East Germany was triggered by the East German SED crackdown in reaction to Gorbachev’s liberalising reforms, and the decay of the other Communist regimes in Eastern Europe. By the summer of 1989, the Berlin Wall was effectively breached when a reformist Hungarian government began allowing thousands of East Germans to flood to the West through her newly open borders. By September, widespread discontent boiled over into ever larger demonstrations. Then on 9 November 1989, the decision was made to gradually allow direct travel to the West, but the confused announcer gave the impression that it would come into effect that same day; famously stuttering "As far as I know, it takes effect immediately, without delay". That same night, thousands of people streamed past unprepared and stunned border guards into the West. Millions more followed in the coming days, and the dismantling of the Berlin Wall began soon after. Yet mass protests continued, demanding a voice in government, and in mid-November East Germany finally responded with reforms. In the free multiparty elections in March 1990 the SED, now renamed the Party of Democratic Socialism, suffered a crushing defeat, and the route was open to the speedy reunification of Germany.

### Iran–Iraq War

For centuries there had been territorial disputes between Iran (known as Persia prior to 1935) and her western neighbours, whether it was the Ottomans or Iraq. In early 1979, Iran's Shah was overthrown by the Iranian Revolution, thus giving way to an Islamic republic led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Iraqi military dictator **Saddam Hussein** (1979-2003) felt directly threatened by the revolution in Iran: as a Sunni Muslim leader of a predominantly Shia nation, his position was already somewhat precarious; and as a secular ruler, he feared the Ayatollah’s radical religious rule would spread. Yet it also provided an opportunity. The volatile situation in post-revolution Iran could be taken advantage of, by an opportunistic leader like Hussein. The Ayatollah had made a lot of enemies: the ongoing Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-81) meant relations with the United States were deeply antagonistic; and the Soviets, traditionally an Iraqi ally, were annoyed that the Communist Party in Iran had been banned. Indeed, throughout the war Iraq would receive financial aid and supply of arms from numerous foreign countries, while Iran received comparatively few, despite complications like the Iran-Contra Affair.

In September 1980, Hussein launched a surprise invasion of oil-rich southern Iran, encountering only weak border units before reaching their logistical limits; the **Iran-Iraq War** (1980-88). Meanwhile, he also supported ethnic Kurds to revolt in Iran. These Kurd would achieve worldwide attention in April 1980 when they attacked the Iranian embassy in London, which was eventually brought to an end by SAS special forces. Yet, Hussein had underestimate how much the far lager Iranian population had been energised by the revolution, and hundreds-of-thousands volunteered to fight in this “patriotic war” for the new revolutionary government. By 1982, they had regrouped and launched a successful counter-attack. The Iranian recapture of the port city of Khorramshahr in May 1982 was a turning point in the war.

After losing most of their territorial gains, Iraqi forces retreated behind their pre-war borders. To stop the advancing Iranians, Saddam Hussain offered a cease-fire including war reparations, but Iran rejected it, determined to drive into Iraq and install an Islamic government. Iran launched an invasion into Iraqi territory in July 1982 to capture Basra, Iraq’s second city and main port, but the Iraqis were able to fend them off in part through the use of chemical and biological weapons. It would prove in the first of many attempts. The war descended into a stalemate. Cut off from foreign supplies, and with many senior officers having been driven into exile during the revolution, Iran never managed to reconstitute an effective modern army. Only by costly human-wave attacks could she breach the Iraqi entrenched positions from time to time, but never penetrate deeply enough to achieve a decisive breakthrough. These assaults would continue unsuccessfully for the rest of the war, in what had become a war of attrition. Meanwhile, Iraq used her air superiority to bomb Iranian cities notably Tehran, as well as oil installations, industrial plants, and shipping, but it failed to break the Iranian morale. The Iranians also aligned themselves with the Kurdish minority of northern Iraq, but after years of guerilla warfare in 1988 Saddam Hussain authorised the use of chemical weapons on his own people; a mixture of mustard gas and the nerve agent Sarin were used. It is believed that 50,000 Kurds were killed, although Kurdish officials have claimed the figure could be far higher. In response to Iraqi attacks on Iranian shipping, Iran tried to use her superior navy to blockade of Iraq, but this only brought the superpowers into the war. In 1987, desperate to maintain the supply of oil from the region, several nations including the United States sent fleets to protect the oil tankers.

In the aftermath, it was very apparent that the world was not going to let the Iranians win the war. In July 1988, Iran’s deteriorating economy and war-weariness finally compelled Iran to accept a United Nations-mediated cease-fire. Half a million Iraqi and Iranian soldiers, with an equivalent number of civilians, are believed to have died in what proved to be a very long and very costly stalemate. Although, Saddam Hussain tried to claim victory, characterising it as a defensive war to stop the spread of the Islamic revolution, the country was now deep in debt, and Iraq's economic plight was one of the factors that led Saddam to take the fateful decision to invade Kuwait in 1990. In Iran, the war extinguished much of the zeal of the Islamic revolution, and, with the death of the Ayatollah Khomeini less than a year later in June 1989, the country entered a new and more introspective era.

### China and the Tiananmen Square Incident

By the mid-1980s, China was in transition. The far-reaching market-economy reforms of Deng Xiaoping (1978-92) had brought massive growth rates, improved the quality of life for all, and dramatically reduced poverty. Yet it was becoming increasingly difficult to balance socialist principles with capitalist effects of a host of social problems. Common grievances included the growing inequality gap, as well as corruption and nepotism, especially among many members of the Communist Party who used their position to enrich themselves, their families, and their friends. While economic reform continued apace, Deng was unrelenting in his stance on the one-party political system. A deep political chasm opened within the top leadership of the Communist Party over the pace of economic reform and the lack of liberal reform.

Meanwhile, the universities in particular were a hotbed of popular discontent, where the graduate job market depended on connections not talent, and professors were paid a pittance in comparison to a waiter in a foreign hotel; the Communist regime had long been intolerant of intellectuals, who’d often been beaten during the Cultural Revolution. The dramatic events of 1989 were prompted by the death in April of Hu Yaobang, a prominent advocate of liberal reform, who had been ousted from the top level of the Communist Party in the aftermath of student protests three years earlier. On the day of his funeral, tens of thousands of students occupied Tiananmen Square demanding democratic reforms, freedom of the press, and free speech; the **Tiananmen Square Incident** (April-June 1989). The unprecedented demonstrations continued for week. By early-May, a student-led hunger strike galvanized support for the demonstrators around the country and the protests spread to some 400 cities. The events drew international attention in mid-May, when Mikhail Gorbachev visited of Beijing; at its height, almost a million people were assembled in Tiananmen Square. Deng denounced the protests as counter-revolutionary, and on 20 May martial law was declared in Beijing. However, an attempt by the troops to reach Tiananmen Square was thwarted when Beijing citizens flooded the streets and blocked their way, and the army withdrew. In the aftermath, even liberal reformers urged the students to back down, and most did. On 3 June, tanks and heavily armed troops were ordered to use any mean necessary to clear Tiananmen Square. Anyone that tried to block their way were fired upon or crushed. By the next morning the area had been cleared of protesters. The death toll has never been officially confirmed, but it seems likely to have been in the high hundreds. In the weeks that followed, thousands of people associated with the movement were arrested and imprisoned. In the aftermath, China was widely condemned internationally, though many Asian countries remained silent throughout the protests to maintain good relations; the government of India ordered the state television to pare down coverage to the barest minimum. It remains one of the most sensitive and most widely censored political topics in China. Yet Deng also made a significant choice in grooming Jiang Zemin as his successor, the mayor of Shanghai who had peacefully dissolved demonstrations in the city, by appointing him as general secretary of the Party in 1989.

### AIDS Epidemic

The AIDS epidemic officially began on 5 June 1981, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported unusual clusters of pneumonia caused by an immune dysfunction in five homosexual men in Los Angeles, likely was acquired through sexual contact. Over the next 18 months, more clusters were discovered among otherwise healthy men in cities throughout the world. By August 1982, the CDC were referring to the disease as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). By 1984, two virologist teams led by Luc Montagnier and Robert Gallo isolated the cause as a new type of human retrovirus (HIV); Montagnier was awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize for his discovery. It is believed to have originated in west-central Africa during early 20th century, when an infection prevalent in chimpanzees crossed species to humans.

Throughout much of the 1980s, politicians and the media commonly referred to AIDS as the “gay plague”, though victims included heterosexual men and women, as well as intravenous drug users by sharing contaminated hypodermic needles. That was if they referred to it at all. It was only when actor Rock Hudson announced in July 1985 that he was dying of AIDS that the epidemic was brought fully into the popular consciousness. Yet the stigma of AIDS remained, prompting discrimination and many misconceptions, as did the perception that governments were not doing enough. Protest groups lobbied for more funding for education, research, and treatment, such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt unveiled on the National Mall in Washington in 1987, with 48,000 panels for each of those who had died in the United States. In 1987, AZT (zidovudine) came available as a treatment of AIDS/HIV, but it had to be taken with a cocktail of other antiretrovirals and had severe side effects. It was only when HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) was introduced in 1995 that AIDS related death rates plummeted, at least in the developed world. Third world nations often lacked the means for new drug therapies, while a host of social challenges have seen infection continue to spread rapidly; today, HIV has infected at least 10 percent of the population in Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.