The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. William Inboden. New York, NY: Dutton, 2022.

William Inboden’s recent book The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink takes up the banner of attributing the end of the Cold War to the foreign policy acumen and foresight of Ronald Reagan. Indeed, it suggests Reagan possessed a remarkable perspicacity that allowed him to perceive the world's historic changes on the horizon well before others did, and that this, plus his innate optimism, helped him lead the United States toward a better future. This is an argument that invites scrutiny, of course. The book also offers readers a deeply researched, detailed, and comprehensive account of foreign policy making within the Reagan administration, and this is where it makes its most useful contribution to our understanding of this period. Before delving into a more critical assessment, however, a holistic overview of the book is in order.

The Peacemaker proceeds chronologically, beginning a couple of years before the 1980 election campaign and ending with Ronald Reagan’s last day in office. Inboden breaks each chapter up into many short sections, allowing him to weave together multiple stories and to chronicle all of the events, challenges, and conflicts that emerged simultaneously at every given moment of the Reagan presidency. For example, chapter 6, which covers the first part of 1983, moves breathlessly from the issuance of National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 75, to a speech Reagan made to the National Religious Broadcasters, to diplomacy with Japanese Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone, to talks with the Soviets, and then moves on to discussions about the Strategic Defense Initiative, defense exercises in the Kurils, meetings with Afghan rebels, challenges in Suriname, South Africa, and Beirut, and more. Throughout these sections, Inboden does not shy away from covering the conflicts that divided Reagan’s advisors, whether they were petty interpersonal or interagency clashes or more serious philosophical and strategic disagreements. This was a purposeful stylistic approach on Inboden’s part, one that imparts a visceral sense of “the chaos of policymaking as it felt to Reagan and his team,” with the constant churn and crush of events meaning that “no issue could be considered on its own, no decision deferred in the fullness of time, because the world does not wait on the White House Situation Room calendar.”[1] It also makes clear how much personality and contingency can shape policy. While this messy reality is true for any presidential administration, it is an aspect that other narrative approaches might have masked. Embedding this sense of chaos within the structure of the book is very effective at illuminating the challenges of executive leadership and foreign policy decision making. 

Inboden’s granularity does not come at the expense of a bigger picture analysis or thematic thread. Despite the wide range of events, large and small, that Inboden surveys in each chapter, he still fleshes out the core themes that he outlines in his introduction: the fundamental importance of alliances and personal relationships to Reagan’s foreign policy strategy, the role of historical memory in shaping Reagan’s sense of personal and national mission, the paradoxical relationship between force and diplomacy in his “peace through strength” concept, and the set of beliefs about religious faith, freedom, ideology, and tragedy that undergirded his reading of the Cold War conflict and the possibilities for a post-Cold War world.[2] He is especially effective at integrating a discussion of the significant and still understudied role that religion and religious belief played in shaping U.S. foreign relations.

Despite its intellectual and literal heft (it comes in at nearly 600 pages with notes), the book reads quickly due to Inboden’s compelling writing style. A section on the 1985 hijacking of the ship the Achille Lauro is a great example. Even a well-known event in Inboden’s retelling reads like a suspenseful thriller. He moves through the key events—the hijacking, the murder of ship passenger Leon Klinghoffer, the docking of the ship in Egypt, the coordinated escape of the hijackers on EgyptAir 737, the U.S. F-14 Tomcats intercepting the flight and forcing it to land in Italy, and then the U.S. Navy Seals and hundreds of Italian soldiers surrounding the plane on the tarmac—interspersing these action-packed moments with details about the negotiations, discussions, and decisions happening simultaneously within the Reagan White House. He then neatly links the resolution of the incident with one of his core themes. Because the plane had landed in Italy, the Italian government prosecuted the hijackers. Although three of the men were sentenced to lengthy prison terms, Yasser Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, successfully pressured Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi to set the mastermind of the operation free. Inboden notes that this outcome left Reagan “angry for a few days,” yet the president forgave Craxi quickly because he “did not want to risk a rift with a friend on the eve of” the planned summit with the Soviet Union in Geneva.[3] Per Inboden’s argument, alliances and personal relations were paramount to Reagan.

Indeed, there are numerous moments in each chapter where Inboden’s identified themes shine through. This lends considerable coherence despite the “fog of war” narrative approach and on the whole these themes are analytically useful and compelling.

Yet the essential characterization of Reagan that Inboden seeks to present through the book is one that will inspire much debate among historians. Throughout The Peacemaker, Inboden implies that Reagan had a strategy from the outset of his presidency “to win the Cold War without firing a shot” by “extend[ing] one hand in friendship to the Soviet Union while using the other hand to try to bring it down.”[4] Although Inboden does note that the administration did not define a comprehensive grand strategy at the start of Reagan’s first term, he suggests throughout that Reagan had an almost instinctual grand strategy, one that he pursued with dogged focus until he succeeded in triumphing over the Soviet adversary. In one chapter, Inboden argues that while in 1982 “most elite opinion saw the Soviet Union as stable and resilient,” Reagan had a (gut-based) insight that Soviet military spending was unsustainable.[5] Reagan formalized his instincts and ideology through NSDD-32—a policy document that laid out a strategy of “pressuring the Soviet system on every front…not only to exploit its weaknesses, but to produce a reformist leader.”[6] Inboden contends that Reagan then spent “the rest of his first term looking for such a Soviet reformer. In his second term, he would find one.”[7] This suggests much of the agency rested with Reagan. Yet finding that reformist leader in Gorbachev does not mean that Reagan, his advisors, or the strategy of NSDD-32, engineered this outcome. Hope and instinct did not produce this outcome. Historical contingency (including the contingency of the relationship that developed between Reagan and Gorbachev) as well as factors internal to the Soviet Union did, as historians such as Melvyn Leffler, David Priestland, James Wilson, and Vladislav Zubok have demonstrated powerfully in their work.[8]

Inboden’s own evidence makes this reality clear, too. He allows that “Gorbachev’s accession stemmed primarily from larger dynamics within the Soviet system” in concert with “Reagan’s rigid position,” as well as from Gorbachev’s own “vision and shrewd maneuvering.”[9] He describes throughout the internal economic rot and external economic shocks that rocked the Soviet Union, not to mention the Chernobyl disaster and the war in Afghanistan. Inboden also highlights the moments when “Gorbachev seized the initiative,” such as when he released dissident Anatoly Shcharansky or when he called for the elimination of nuclear weapons and announced a unilateral plan to reduce Soviet stockpiles, a move that “caught the Reagan administration off guard.”[10] In discussing U.S.-Soviet arms reduction talks, he acknowledges that Gorbachev was the one that “made a big concession,” that, at a crucial moment, “Gorbachev changed his mind” about leaving a summit after their scheduled time was over and agreed to continue to meet, and that, at a later meeting, Gorbachev backed down from his earlier demands.[11] Internal Soviet politics and Gorbachev’s decision making also played key roles in hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union. Inboden’s assertion that Reagan, “like Franklin Roosevelt…led his nation and its allies in vanquishing a totalitarian empire” oversimplifies the historical record and exaggerates Reagan’s role.[12] Reagan certainly mattered, but his strategy was not the only factor that led to the demise of the Soviet Union; historical works that consider non-U.S. sources tend to offer more balance (and less mythmaking) on this score.

There are other instances in the book where Inboden ascribes more clarity and power to Reagan’s strategy than is perhaps warranted. He suggests nuclear freeze activists did not appreciate that Reagan was actually “the nuclear abolitionist-in-chief” and not the saber-rattling warmonger they saw him as because they did not realize Reagan “detested Soviet communism even more” than nuclear weapons “and remained determined to build up America’s nuclear arsenal in order to bring down both the Soviet Union and the world’s most destructive weapons.”[13] He also asserts Reagan recognized that right-wing dictators “were wasting assets” whose “authoritarianism came at the expense of destabilizing discontent from their citizens and erosion of America’s moral capital.”[14] The Reagan administration, of course, did not eliminate nuclear weapons and it continued to support right wing dictators in Latin America and beyond. Inboden does make the reality clear; he is not uncritical of the administration’s missteps. Yet his framing of Reagan’s strategy tends to downplay most of the unsavory aspects of the Reagan presidency. For example, when he suggests the Reagan Doctrine “helped free Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, and Cambodia from communist misrule but left behind divided, impoverished countries awash in armed factions, instability, and corruption,” he acknowledges but still underplays the culpability for the devastation wrought and the abuses tolerated through U.S. policies.[15]

The Peacemaker is thus an exciting but provocative read. It gives readers what often feels like a front row seat to the inner workings of the Reagan White House as it grappled with an enormous range of foreign policy challenges. The depth and breadth of this coverage is very welcome, as there are few books that provide such a comprehensive study of Reagan’s foreign policymaking process. Inboden is a skilled historian and a captivating storyteller. Yet the book also tends to downplay the significance of the wide range of factors that led to the end of the Cold War and to mythologize Ronald Reagan. It will surely spark much debate among historians for this reason, as it leaves the core question of why and how the Cold War ended as open to historical interpretation as ever.

Lauren Turek is an associate professor of history and the director of the Diplomacy, Security, War, and Peace Studies concentration in the International Studies department at Trinity University in San Antonio, TX, where she teaches courses on modern United States history, U.S. foreign relations, and public history. Her first book, To Bring the Good News to All Nations: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations, was published in 2020 as part of the Cornell University Press U.S. in the World Series. Her articles on religion in American politics and foreign relations have appeared in Diplomatic History, the Journal of American Studies, and Religions and she has contributed chapters to a number of edited volumes.

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Header Image: President Ronald Reagan at his desk in the Oval Office, Washington, D.C. 1986 (Carol Highsmith).

Notes:

[1] William Inboden, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink (New York: Dutton, 2022), 7.

[2] Ibid, 7-12.

[3] Ibid, 370.

[4] Ibid, 65, 84.

[5] Inboden, The Peacemaker, 135.

[6] Ibid, 139.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); David Priestland, The Red Flag : A History of Communism (New York: Grove Press, 2009); James Graham Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Vladislav Zubok, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 2007); Vladislav Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021).

[9] Inboden, The Peacemaker, 329.

[10] Ibid, 382.

[11] Ibid, 412, 414, 431.

[12] Ibid, 478.

[13] Inboden, The Peacemaker, 175.

[14] Ibid, 304-305.

[15] Ibid, 461.