Reagan Reconsidered

A new book argues that Ronald Reagan reshaped America and the world through his doctrine of 'peace through strength'

Back in 2008, then candidate Barack Obama declared “I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times. I do think that, for example, the 1980 election was different. I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.”

While Obama wasn’t by any means endorsing Reagan styled conservatism, he was casting himself, perhaps too grandiosely, as the embodiment of the sunny, emotional adrenaline rush for which his supporters clamored. This comment, however, stuck in the craw of several of Obama’s primary opponents who used his Reagan analogy to paint the Illinois senator as tone deaf, but to no avail. Obama had already favorably invoked Reagan in an early primary debate, as it happens, when he contrasted the 41st president’s policy of ‘peace through strength’ to President George W. Bush’s more bellicose approach. Obama reminded voters how “Ronald Reagan called Russia an evil empire, but also spoke to the Soviet Union.” Obama’s assessment, with more than 16 years of hindsight, and more than three decades since Reagan left office in 1989, now seems well founded.

Historian and Professor William Inboden recently joined me on Dirty Moderate (the episode is available now) to discuss his recent book, “The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan in the White House and the World On the Brink.” Inboden’s masterly history provides a definitive account of  Reagan’s strategic approach to diplomacy, his nuanced statecraft, and the impact of his decisions on the global stage. This compelling work examines how Reagan’s military buildup and tough rhetoric towards the Soviet Union are not only central to Reagan’s legacy, but are towering achievements in history. Inboden details how Reagan the “cowboy” became Reagan the diplomat, and thus emerged as a transformative figure. As Inboden argues:

“Along with Franklin Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan was one of the two most consequential presidents of the twentieth century. He was reviled and ridiculed by many experts and pundits at the time, but history’s unfolding offers a new window to reassess him, particularly his foreign policy. His critics, who were legion, feared that his presidency would lead to disastrous outcomes such as nuclear apocalypse, “another Vietnam,” and America’s terminal decline. Instead, with the peaceful end of the Cold War, collapse of the Soviet Union, renewal of the United States, and global expansion of freedom and prosperity, Reagan’s grand strategy succeeded beyond even his imagining.”

I was a child of the Cold War, and while I didn’t live through the height of the Red Scare, I was in elementary and junior high school during Reagan’s two terms. Reagan loomed large. His widespread popularity seemed to unify the nation. I was raised in a Democratic family, but there was no denying that “The Gipper” projected strength and leadership, and that he was a salve for a country which was still nursing wounds from the social unrest of the 60’s and 70’s, and the humiliation that was the Vietnam War.

But my political coming of age coincided with a disdain for Reagan and his controversial legacy among even mainstream Democrats. If had a quarter for the number of times I heard “Reagan ruined everything,” among my Democratic friends, I’d be wealthier than corporate America became under Reagan’s tax cuts.

Such simplistic history and political reductivism has sadly become less a bug than a feature of our political discourse, which makes Inboden’s book so refreshing and something of an antidote to much of the historiography of Reagan, much of which has been dismissive if not outright scathing. After all, the threat of Communism was more formidable than Reagan’s detractors allowed, even as swaths of Latin America, Africa and Asia fell to Marxist-Leninist governments in the years prior to Reagan’s election. Yet Reagan was singular among postwar presidents in seeing the ideological battle between the USSR and the West less as something to be contained than something to be vigorously contested. This was fundamentally a battle of ideas, and as Inboden explains, Reagan led America and its allies in “vanquishing a totalitarian empire.”

But as the book’s title makes clear, Reagan’s adept blend of power and diplomacy, may be his greatest legacy. For a man who once asserted that the Soviet Union should end up on “the ash heap of history,” Reagan set out, as Inboden assesses, “to win the Cold War without firing a shot” and by “extending one hand in friendship to the Soviet Union while using the other hand to try to bring it down.”

To be sure, Inboden, who like me was raised a Democrat, isn’t offering up a hagiography of Reagan, akin to the historical hackwork which has emerged from right wing media outlets and thinks tanks over the years. And Inboden’s book is all the more credible for it. Indeed, Inboden concedes that 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.” Presidents are and always will be imperfect, and deifying them or any politician for that matter is foolhardy. In reappraising the historical record on Reagan, Inboden’s willingness to expose the pockmarks of Reagan’s legacy on the world stage takes nothing away from his successes as commander in chief. Big ideas, even when they went awry, were the coin of the realm which was Reaganism.

At a time when the Republican Party has undergone an odious moral and philosophical collapse in the age of Donald Trump, the fight against dangerous ideas has often felt exhausting, especially in the face of MAGA’s destructive nihilism. For better or worse, and “The Peacemaker” arguably makes a rousing case for the better, Reagan had a core vision which animated his time in public life. This country has had many a rupture in continuity and we have again arrived at a moment of truth. But in fighting for nationhood, we as Americans have always been fighting for an idea. Ideas are fragile and perishable, and none perhaps more so than this experiment called America. Still, long before he was president, Reagan believed in diplomacy but only by winning the war of ideas. Trust but verify, as Reagan used to say. His own words in 1963 would turn out to be a cornerstone of his legacy:

“If we truly believe that our way of life is best, aren’t the Russians more likely to recognize that fact and modify their stand if we let their economy come unhinged so that the contrast is apparent? …In an all-out race our system is stronger, and eventually the enemy gives up the race as a hopeless cause. Then a noble nation believing in peace extends the hand of friendship and says there is room in the world for both of us.”