In 1980, both the United States and the Soviet Union possessed the means and the will to bring about the end of the world. The world’s only superpowers were locked in an arms race fueled by an immoral and ignoble strategy to preserve a tenuous, often tumultuous peace by threatening the annihilation of the citizens of each nation—the madness of Mutual Assured Destruction. The year marked the beginning of the fourth decade of the Cold War.
The flawed diplomacy of détente had done little more than maintain a stand-off between the United States and the Soviet Union, even as Moscow increased its nuclear warfare capabilities to some 40,000 warheads, fielded the largest conventional military in Europe, continued to hold Eastern Europe captive, and offered ongoing support to armed rebels and communist insurgencies on three continents. Foreign policy experts and senior government officials in Washington saw the Cold War as a permanent fixture of the geopolitical landscape.
The newly elected President of the United States did not.
William Inboden’s new book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink is a masterful account of the most significant American foreign policy success of the 20th century—the orchestrated demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. In this crisply written appraisal of Reagan’s singular role in crafting and implementing grand strategy, Inboden details Reagan’s determination to address both the scourge of Soviet communism and the apocalyptic threat of nuclear war.
