In March, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham suggested to Sean Hannity that Reagan would have happily risked World War III in response to a collision between a Russian jet and a U.S. drone over the Black Sea: “He would start shooting Russian planes down.” Anyone with even a passing knowledge of the Reagan administration will recognize this as, at best, a cartoonish depiction of its approach to foreign affairs. Yet it relies on a widely made argument: that Reagan’s tough defense policies, his insistence on “peace through strength,” brought an end to the Cold War, “winning” the long, twilight struggle against the Soviet Union for the United States.
It is this argument that William Inboden makes in his book The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink, an analysis of Reagan’s role in the final decade of the Cold War. Infinitely more sophisticated than Graham’s grandstanding, Inboden’s book is also far more likely to influence serious discussions of foreign policy behind closed doors. Former Senator Ben Sasse suggests in a blurb that “as Americans stare down the possibility of a Beijing-led twenty first century,” they “would do well to learn from” Inboden’s Ronald Reagan. Many no doubt will, as The Peacemaker is the standout example of its genre.
The only problem is that, in doing so, they will learn many of the wrong lessons. Reagan’s significant and salutary role in ending the Cold War cannot be denied, but he was a far different sort of “peacemaker” than Inboden suggests.
Though the memory has faded with time, the peaceful end of the Cold War was experienced by those who lived through it as nothing short of a miracle. Somewhere between Ronald Reagan’s presidential visit to Moscow in 1988 and the final dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, the two “superpowers” began to release each other from the death grips they had held for decades. Since at least the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles and thermonuclear weapons in the 1950s, the two powers had plausibly threatened the annihilation of humanity. The dread of a dark, nuclear-scarred future hovered just out of mind for all, whether in the “East” or the “West.” Thus the largely nonviolent collapse of the Soviet empire was a startling transformation, made all the more so by the fact that in the late 1970s, the Soviet Union had been widely perceived as winning the Cold War against a declining United States (“The world”, as one Soviet official later put it, “was going our way”).