Ronald Reagan and the End of the Cold War

William Inboden, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink. New York: Penguin Random House, 2022. 608 pp. $40.00.

Editor's Introduction: Ronald Reagan began his presidency in January 1981 during one of the tensest phases of the Cold War. By the time he left office eight years later, the Cold War was rapidly coming to a peaceful end. Reagan's contribution to the remarkable changes in the 1980s that overcame the division of Europe and the longstanding East-West conflict has been a topic of debate among scholars and the wider public ever since.

In 2022, William Inboden, a professor and senior administrator at the University of Texas at Austin, published a laudatory analysis of Reagan's role in the Cold War. The book explores Reagan's views of the Cold War in great detail, and it also traces the larger international context of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in the 1980s. The many other challenges Reagan faced during this time included attacks by international terrorist groups against U.S. and allied interests, the growing prominence of large East Asian countries in the global economy, the increasing impact of high technology on world affairs, and armed conflicts in the Middle East, Central America, and Africa.

We asked two distinguished scholars to offer commentaries on Inboden's book. Their assessments and Inboden's reply are published here seriatim.Ronald Reagan was once the patron saint of the Republican Party in the United States. That was before the emergence of Donald Trump, for whom fealty is unmatched.

Both men promised to “make America great again,” but the policies espoused by Reagan in the 1980s and Trump in his two administrations (especially the second) diverge markedly on key issues such as immigration, the value of alliances, and the importance of morality and human rights in U.S. foreign policy. The two presidents differed most in their view of the U.S. role in the world. Reagan believed the United States should lead a global crusade for freedom and democracy and that sacrifices made in pursuit of that goal were investments in a better future and evidence of the country's divinely mandated special purpose.

Trump, by contrast, has argued that the United States should forcefully impose its will on the Western Hemisphere and other regions; he has embraced a transactional approach to U.S. foreign policy; and he has tilted in favor of anti-Western militarists in the Kremlin against longstanding U.S. allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).Beginning any essay in presidential history with a comparison to Trump is, by now, tiresome. Yet it is also revealing, especially when considering the divide between 1980 and today, after failed diplomacy and military occupations in Southwest Asia, wars that dragged on without results, economic uncertainty, declining faith in democratic principles, and disillusionment with the prospect of achieving the American Dream. Many of these woes were present in both 1980 and the 2020s, yet Republicans produced vastly different champions in response.

The party is far more under Trump's control today than it ever was under Reagan's in the 1980s, though the latter still has adherents. “Ronald Reagan shook us from our malaise,” the party's last presidential nominee before Trump recently proclaimed.1 Mitt Romney's running mate in that failed bid for the White House in 2012 subsequently went a step further. Paul Ryan called Reagan “a statesman, an iconic leader, and a true inspiration. He stirred the aspirations of a generation of conservative leaders.” To those, like Ryan, who proudly call themselves “Reagan conservatives,” the 40th president remains worthy of a spot on Mt.

Rushmore. In their pantheon of heroes, George Washington won Americans their freedom. Abraham Lincoln saved the union, and Dwight Eisenhower the free world.

But it was Reagan that made modern America. “Just think how different the world would look today,” Ryan argued in 2021, “without this one man whose arrival in American politics still seems providential.”2Reagan retains acolytes even to this day, and one need not have agreed with Reagan to recognize him as a man of principle who could inspire many. In Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, The Cold War, and the World on the Brink, William Inboden has given us the best account yet of the ideas that formed Reagan's principled foreign policy. [Full disclosure: I have co-authored and co-edited works with Inboden and consider him a personal and professional friend.] The comparison between Reagan and Trump appears only briefly in this book, but is nonetheless useful for appreciating what Inboden has done across 609 deeply researched and well-reasoned pages of history. This is a book about Reagan, in every sense of the word.

The book follows the full arc of the president's foreign policy across eight years in office, but its pages reveal more about the man than about his moment at the apex of U.S. politics. This is not a slight. Inboden has provided the most comprehensive analysis available of what Reagan thought and believed.

The book is not a comprehensive chronicle of global affairs in the 1980s, nor is it an international history dedicated to giving equal weight (or pages) to the insights of other leaders, be they foreign or merely inside Reagan's own byzantine and backbiting administration. Nor does it intend to be. It is a book about the man on the cover, Ronald Wilson Reagan.Reagan, Inboden argues, had convictions, and he also had a blueprint for a future that would no longer be plagued by the daily tension and nuclear risks of the Cold War.

More to the point, Reagan had a plan for winning the multigenerational superpower conflict. Not just enduring or surviving, but actually triumphing in a confrontation widely perceived by 1980 as an indelible part of the post-1945 international system. More nuanced than simply its most trite rendition of “we win, they lose,” Inboden's Reagan had a prophetic vision. “To those with ears to hear,” he writes of Reagan's famous June 1982 address to Britain's Parliament, the president distilled “what the next six and a half years of his foreign policy will entail” (p.

2). Communism would fall. The Soviet Union would crumble from within.

The “arc of history,” in Inboden's words, “guiding the present moment. And the triumph of freedom and peace.”No mere speech, Reagan's Westminster prophecy was “an oration,” praised by Inboden with near-religious fervor, an urtext for the faithful offering “a comprehensive Cold War strategy that sought to rebuild America's strengths and pose them against the Soviet Union across virtually every dimension. An alliance system built on choice versus the coerced colonies of the Warsaw Pact.

Weapons systems that outmatched their Soviet counterparts. An open society against a closed one. Self-government versus dictatorship.

Religious faith against atheism. Prosperity versus penury. Freedom over tyranny” (p.

5).It is fair to say that Inboden is a fan. Writing in the present tense in order to place the reader squarely within the scene and the moment, Inboden argues Reagan's “Westminster oration unveils a new offensive that in seven short years will bring the Cold War to a peaceful end.”But did it? The Cold War did end peacefully a year or so after Reagan left office, but the question permeating The Peacemaker is whether Reagan's strategy is what brought it to its conclusion.

Note the particular language Inboden deploys: Reagan's offensive “will bring the Cold War to a peaceful end.” His policies were, in this depiction, decisive, causal, and indispensable. That is a large statement indeed. No matter one's thoughts on Reagan as a causal actor in the Cold War's end, this book should be required reading for anyone interested in understanding Reagan.

It is comprehensive, chock full of new research both textual and oral, and very well-written. Yet it contributes only to our understanding of why the Cold War indeed came to a close. The case remains to be made that it was Reagan's policies that brought about the USSR's defeat.

There is no doubt Reagan was prophetic, his words producing acolytes then and now. Yet is not the man who commands the sun to rise each morning an equal prophet? He gets the outcome right.

But should he be praised for it?Prediction and causation are two separate things, each part of the fundamental question of why a seemingly permanent fixture of the international system abruptly disappeared. This is the question all students of the Cold War's end must confront. My own view is that internal Soviet politics, failed policies, and Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to find remedy and reform explains more about why and when the Cold War ended as it did than anything Reagan authorized on the far-side of the Atlantic Ocean.

A case for credit can be made for Pope John Paul II, the Polish Solidarity trade union, computer designers in Silicon in or human rights in the who peacefully against Soviet In every of this must that no actor the Cold War's just as no one can for a true and Inboden is a indeed. The Mikhail George and many more his Yet Reagan is The and also its his and thoughts as no other or the thoughts and within his White Reagan's Cold War Inboden only seven to the Middle East, but Reagan's view was more I will Inboden at not only to but so can his better of Reagan's one will not yet it is considering how many of those eight were actually under Reagan's in more did he and the to each a the eight or Reagan the of history his or its of Reagan was the of can he be given credit for the Cold War. Inboden's a for his Reagan a a president who has He also debate whether the of the more to the of than to Reagan's economic policies still be among acolytes Paul Ryan “Reagan a given to many of Reagan's most policies in 1982 after the year of produced one of the in Prosperity began to two years later, just in time for Reagan's The from a his in Yet who the sun to Reagan the or the of a like Paul the from the called Reagan's economic impact the of this I will be as a of and in of Reagan's in the by him about his goal of Soviet Inboden the Reagan's approach from what the president his policies of the permanent of a Soviet and by the Cold War.

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This book should be a on any Cold War understanding Reagan's I can understanding why the Cold War I must also look end of the Cold War will present scholars with to debate the between and in The many that brought about the were of great and whose were or by William Inboden's book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink, is the this research in U.S. and Inboden the of the Reagan to and in so argues that Ronald Reagan's Cold War the peaceful end of the Cold War (p. of is not a new but Inboden it with from the U.S. and than anyone has The book not those who have been of the “Reagan that they should their but it does the most and comprehensive of that to the in its and even The of international affairs will be by the that scholars can in key of the of the and of most the of how the future will Inboden has this with great than the book or he as they came across Reagan's trade with of Middle East and the of and all across The on the to the reader an sense of of (p. such a it can It is a great credit to Inboden's as a and that he the and the of the book the Many of the of military and diplomacy to his understanding of the Cold War as an of ideas in would and his of to detail, and to scholars of the Cold War. But they in Inboden's account with particular and of his Reagan's on as the most U.S. and the of in every of his a in The Peacemaker that has of the Reagan than the one that Reagan's strategy won the Cold War. Inboden in this are those like Wilson who have argued that Reagan's pursuit of whether to with the Soviet Union as an equal in pursuit of world or to to the Soviet Union in pursuit of Cold War that he did not have a are those like who have that the U.S. to in the Cold War and the at the of the was as a of in the of the world and politics as it was the of any are the of scholars who for the Cold War not to the of the White House, but to the last Soviet who the Mikhail Reagan had to with Gorbachev's rise to these scholars and any that Reagan's strategy ended the Cold War but the has an for each of these He that Reagan's were even at in but he argues that they were the goal of achieving the of the Soviet Union in the Cold War (p.

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