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]
