The Reagan Administration and the Real End of the North–South Dialogue, 1981–84

Interest in the Third World’s campaign for a New International Economic Order in the 1970s has exploded, but historians have paid little attention to the global “North-South dialogue” negotiations that followed and lasted into the early 1980s. Against current interpretations, this paper argues that the Reagan Administration took the North-South dialogue seriously and that it struggled to agree on a coherent policy. Using exclusive interviews with the NSC and State Department officials involved, it shows how pressure from Western allies and the international community forced the Administration to moderate its initial stance of firm opposition and agree in 1981 to a new round of global negotiations. It concludes that external events—namely, the 1982 debt crisis—were ultimately more decisive than Reagan’s economic ideology in the NIEO’s final chapter.