Here’s my interview with Will Inboden, Executive Director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin, on his new book The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink

Mark Tooley:

Hello! This is Mark Tooley, the President of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, and Editor of Providence, a Journal of Christianity and American Foreign Policy here in Washington, DC, with the pleasure today of talking to my old friend Will Inboden, Director of the Clements Center for National Security at the University of Texas, Austin, with a very momentous new book called, If I may get this correctly, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. For those of us old enough to remember the nineteen eighties, this should be a magical book. So, Will, thank you for writing this book, and look forward to learning more about it from you in the next twenty minutes.

William Inboden:

Mark, well, thanks so much, and great to be with you and the Providence audience. And for anyone looking, there is an advance copy of the book coming out on November 15, so I’m very excited about it.

Mark Tooley:

Now Will, of course, you worked on the National Security Council staff of the George W. Bush Administration.

William Inboden:

Yes, that’s right.

Mark Tooley:

You were too young to have actually served in the Reagan Administration. I know I’m older than you.

William Inboden:

Yes, I was in junior high in high school during the Reagan years. And, so I have, you know, vivid memories of watching him on the evening news and things like that but was quite far removed from any involvement in the Reagan administration, and to my everlasting regret, never got to meet him in person.

Mark Tooley:

But obviously the story of that administration was sufficiently captivating for you to write a book about it. So, tell us how you came to write it, why you wrote it, and what is the book about?

William Inboden:

Sure thing. Yeah. So, I first started thinking about doing a big project on the Reagan Presidency about a decade ago, but it took me a few years of exploring different angles and wrapping up some other projects to really dive into it. So, the actual more intensive work on the book started about six years ago, and there were a number of factors that came together. One is enough time had passed since he left office, you know, in January of 1989 that we could take, I thought, a more dispassionate, fresh look at his Presidency. You know, somewhat further removed from the partisan passions of the day. As you know, he’s a very notable president, but he certainly had some fierce critics during his time, and so one nice thing about the passage of time and the working of history is it gives us a little bit more critical distance. And, related, is, he was, I think, recent enough in the past that some of the same challenges he was facing on the foreign policy front, such as, say, a nuclear armed Communist superpower on the Eurasian landmass, a contest between an atheistic great power and the Judeo-Christian West still seems relevant for today. And as far as the scholarship goes. even though he left office a few decades ago, it’s only been in the last few years that a number of the key archival documents from his time in the White House had been declassified, and so I was one of the first scholars able to look at a number of these newly declassified National Security Council and Intelligence Community and State Department and Pentagon documents. So, to get, I think, a fresh look at some of the decision-making strategies of the administration. But finally, it was still recent enough, since he had left office, that, a number of people who had served with him were still alive, and I was able to interview quite a few Reagan hands. So, all those factors came together inspiring me to write this book.

Mark Tooley:

Well, obviously, enthusiasts and fans of Ronald Reagan celebrate him as the victor of the Cold War. Is that a fair descriptor?

William Inboden:

It is. Yes, and I started the project with a pretty favorable assessment of Reagan, but not terribly well informed. And one of the conclusions I came to over the many years of research and writing this book is my esteem for President Reagan and his team, you know, and a number of his key advisors are an important part of the story, just went up the more I learned about them. And, especially, I think the evidence is pretty strong that he deserves a very considerable share of the credit for what I would say is America’s peaceful victory in the Cold War, and both of those matter, right? Peaceful is a big part of it, that he was able to avoid nuclear war or avoid the Cold War turning hot, and yet was able to bring it to a conclusion very favorable to the forces of freedom. Obviously, with the collapse of the Iron Curtain, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself. So, you know some of the arguments in my book will be, some are provocative for scholars who want to downplay Reagan’s accomplishments, or think that he just got lucky, or that it was structural forces in play, or who think that Gorbachev gets the lion’s share of the credit. And all those are factors. Reagan did have a good sense of timing. There were structural factors. Gorbachev is an indispensable partner for him, but I think the weight of the evidence gives, I think, the preponderance of the credit to President Reagan.

Mark Tooley:

Now, early in his administration he was criticized by critics on the left for being too hardcore with the Soviet Union, almost a warmonger. Towards the end of the administration, as he was collaborating with Mikhail Gorbachev, they were some on the right, old allies, who thought he had gone squishy on the Soviet Union. Were they both wrong, in retrospect?

William Inboden:

They were both wrong. Yeah. And again, that’s another one of the themes of the book is Reagan’s consistent strategy, his consistent vision, developed before he became President, and then employed throughout his eight years as President, that combined pressure and outreach, that combined force and diplomacy. So, you know, one of the things I argue in the book is that he maintained a pretty hard line towards the Soviet Union throughout his eight years as President, including while he was working with Gorbachev to reduce the threat of nuclear war and bring it to a peaceful conclusion, but also that from the beginning of his presidency, and throughout, he was extending the hand of outreach to the Soviets, wanting to negotiate with Soviet leaders, as he, you know, famously said after Brezhnev, and then Andropov, and then Chernenko all died while in office, he said, “I want to negotiate with them, but they keep dying on me.” But finally, of course, Gorbachev comes to power and is a negotiating partner for Reagan. But you know this strategy was confounding to a lot of his critics, certainly to those on the left, who, you know, unfairly maligned him as a reckless warmonger, and to some of his, you know, more hardline conservative critics who objected to his outreach and peacemaking with Gorbachev. But I think in the end the historical record vindicates Reagan’s pretty sophisticated two-part strategy there of pressure and outreach.

Mark Tooley:

You’re a man of faith. So was President Reagan. Is it fair to say that as a Christian optimist, almost a Christian idealist, this gave him a sense of confidence about dealing with the Soviet Union, about the superiority of American democracy and the ability to end the Cold War peacefully without the ultimate conflict?

William Inboden:

Absolutely. And again, this is another theme that really comes out in the book is the importance of Reagan’s Christian faith, to his own conduct as President, to his overall Cold War strategy, and also the importance of religious freedom as one of the key pillars of his strategy towards weakening Soviet Communism. So, first on his own personal Christian faith, and again, I had some sense of this going into research in the book but was frankly surprised at just how strong it is. Just to give a few examples: after his assassination attempt in March of 1981. He’s just been president for two months and a deranged gunman shoots him, comes very close to killing Reagan when Reagan was leaving an event outside the Capital Hilton. As Reagan was on the operating table, losing consciousness, you know, fighting for his life there at T. W. Hospital, he prayed that God would forgive the young man who had tried to assassinate him. And then Reagan says: “Just as Christ has forgiven me, I felt like I have to forgive this man who has done this to me.” And we only later learned this because Reagan wrote about this in his diary, you know, this was not cheap posturing for the evangelical vote. This was a very sincere faith. Another aspect of it that comes out is Reagan is deeply grieved that Gorbachev is an atheist, and as he’s building this friendship, this partnership with Gorbachev through several of their summit meetings, increasingly, especially towards the end of their final big summit in Moscow in 1988, Reagan is just personally troubled that this Soviet leader he’s come to admire and care for does not believe in God, and you know, might face an eternity without God. And so, Reagan spends a lot of their final meetings, trying desperately to persuade Gorbachev to believe in God, to read the Bible, to turn to faith, as well as trying to persuade Gorbachev to respect religious freedom. And that’s the policy side of this. It’s very clear that Reagan saw Soviet Communism’s biggest vulnerability was not its inefficient economy, although he was very clear about that. It was not its runaway spending on its military. He thought its biggest vulnerability was its atheism, and its oppression of human freedom. And he would often speak very eloquently about this, both in private and public, that a system that denies belief in God, that tries to repress its Christian, Jewish, religious believers cannot sustain itself, and that is ultimately what will bring it down. And this is why he was so devoted to pressuring the Soviets to release Christian and Jewish prisoners of conscience, why he did so much to support the plight of the Jewish Refuseniks, who wanted to emigrate to Israel, why he focused so much on years of negotiations with the Soviets to get the Siberian Pentecostals released from the basement of the US Embassy. Complicated episode that hopefully readers of my book will be able to get in more detail. So, the religious dimension, both on the personal front and then also as a policy issue is a very, very big part of the story.

Mark Tooley:

And does your book focus exclusively on Reagan’s relations with the Soviet Union? Or is it more expansive about his foreign policy?

William Inboden:

Very much the latter. And again, this is where I think it’s a pretty unique book, the first of its kind to try to do a comprehensive assessment of Reagan’s foreign policies all over the world. So, of course, the Cold War and his relation to the Soviet Union are the central part of the story, as you know from the title. But the book does quite a bit on his Asian policies, Middle East policies, counterterrorism, and national economic policies. And I do that for a couple of reasons. One is putting on my hat as a former policymaker. I know that policymakers cannot only pick one issue they’re going to focus on and ignore everything else. So, to really appreciate what Reagan’s Presidency was about, the things he was dealing with, I write the book as a narrative, showing how all these different issues are crashing in on him. He’s having to manage all of them at once. So, trade tensions with Japan, challenges with managing arms sales to Taiwan while trying to keep tensions with China from flaring too much, encouraging the Philippines and South Korea and Chile to democratize (the democracy agenda is a very big part of the story), managing hostage-taking and a real upsurge in terrorism in the Middle East. So, Reagan and his team are managing all these different challenges while still trying to win a peaceful victory in the Cold War. And the Asia policies are, in particular, I think, quite relevant for today. So again, I hope readers will enjoy delving into that part of the book. It’s a too much forgotten part of the Reagan story, but a very important part of his legacy.

Mark Tooley:

What do you think were his worst mistakes in foreign policy and national security? I would think, putting US troops into Lebanon. But what are some other mistakes that are mentioned in your book?

William Inboden:

Yeah, I’m glad you asked this, Mark. I want to be clear that, and, readers will find this, that while the book is overall a very favorable treatment of Reagan and his record, it’s not a hagiography, and he made a number of mistakes. He certainly had considerable flaws. I won’t go into all of them, but just a few to mention. One – he was a pretty lousy manager. And, while every White House has its feuds and its differences, his had more of those than most, and because he was not very attentive to management, he let a lot of the divisiveness between the State Department and the Pentagon, or among his own White House staff, really get carried away, and it was rife with leaking, with acrimony, with back biting, and often that was a real impediment to implementing good policy. And so that’s not a single mistake. But that’s a theme that pervades the book. Then, thinking about policy mistakes, certainly, he mishandled Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent Lebanon Civil War, culminating, of course, in the dreadful massacre of two hundred and forty-one marines. There were peacekeepers who were killed by a Hezbollah terrorist attack. Again, a very complicated story. There were not any good policy options, but what Reagan unfortunately ended up with was the worst of all worlds of deploying our forces there, and yet doing it with such restrictive rules of engagement that they couldn’t make much of a difference. And so, the better options would have either been a more forceful deployment or not having been there at all. And again, we can debate which of those it might have been. But that’s why the marines were sitting ducks. Then, of course, as Reagan became very grieved by the plight of Americans taken hostage by Hezbollah terrorists again in Lebanon, he made the catastrophically bad decision to trade arms to Iran. You know this is revolutionary Iran, the same militant, anti-American, anti-Israel regime we’re dealing with today. He was selling arms to that regime trying, usually in vain, to persuade them to release hostages. And again, it really undercut America’s credibility in the region. It violated the law, and it didn’t really work. So that was another pretty significant mistake.

Mark Tooley:

Who were his main partners in his successful foreign policy and national security? He had two, or I guess, three, Secretaries of State…and a half-dozen national security advisers.

William Inboden:

Yes, yes, and there’s a couple of figures that I’ll mention that I really highlight in the book. The first is his second secretary of state, George Shultz, who succeeded Al Haig in the summer of 1982, and then served six and a half years as Secretary of State, and I try to make a case in the book that Shultz was an indispensable partner for Reagan, is one of the real keys to Reagan’s diplomatic successes as President, is, I think, the greatest Secretary of State of the modern era, one of the greatest in American history, and I know that puts him in stiff company with, the likes of Henry Kissinger or James Baker, or others. But I think Shultz is even above them. So, the book is overall a very favorable treatment of Shultz. Another, too much forgotten Reagan figure is his second National Security advisor, Bill Clark, and Clark only served in the role for two years, but I argue you in the book that, Clark is, I think, a forgotten secret to Reagan’s success. He’s the one who oversees the drafting of some of Reagan’s key, at the time, classified Cold War strategy documents, NSDD 32 and 75, for any specialists who are viewing this. Clarke was one of Reagan’s, closest friends, had been his chief of staff with him back in California, fiercely loyal to Reagan. But a great manager and is able to take Reagan’s strategic vision and really help implement it. And then one other figure who is very colorful and controversial, but I think it’s really important to bring up his successes, is CIA Director Bill Casey, and again, he sometimes colors outside the lines, but also shared Reagan’s convictions about the spiritual stakes of the Cold War, about re-energizing CIA to really be on the front lines of the fight against Communism.

Mark Tooley:

And Caspar Weinberger. How do you assess him as Defense Secretary?

William Inboden:

Yeah. So, Weinberger is another one who is absolutely essential to Reagan’s overall Cold War strategy. I think Weinberger gets a pretty favorable treatment in the book as well. He takes Reagan’s vision of modernizing and strengthening the Pentagon and really implements it. It’s a tremendous management challenge, and Weinberger is a very gifted manager. So, he oversees America’s defense buildup. And a very important theme in the book on the defense buildup is it was not just about outbuilding the Soviets. It was not just showing that our free-market economy can spend more on our military than the Soviet one can. It was about outsmarting the Soviets and using America’s technological edge to design a new generation of weapons, systems that were so much more advanced than anything the Soviets could marshal, that no matter how much the Soviets would spend on theirs and building theirs up, our more advanced systems would outclass them, and Weinberger is really key on that. Where Weinberger fell short was, he never understood or supported Reagan’s vision of pairing force with diplomacy. Weinberger got the force part right, but he was just very skeptical of Reagan’s efforts to negotiate with the Soviets. And so, by the second term Weinberger was increasingly at odds with Reagan on that, and Reagan was increasingly siding more and more with Shultz in some of those bureaucratic, interagency fights. So that’s what Weinberger’s ultimate failing was. But he was still indispensable to Reagan’s success and a very key part of the team.

Mark Tooley:

Did Jeane Kirkpatrick as UN Ambassador play any significant role?

William Inboden:

Yeah, very much, and again I should have mentioned her earlier. She looms large in the books. She’s kind of an intellectual alter ego for Reagan, especially when it comes to the importance of supporting our anti-Communist allies, and of having moral clarity against Soviet Communism. Reagan had read her famous commentary article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” in 1979. He read it on the campaign trail, and she was a die-hard Democrat at the time, but he invited her to meet with him, and between her disillusionment with Carter’s weakness, and her belief in Reagan’s strategic vision she signed on. And she was also very good about calling out the UN for its moral relativism, for the fact that it would spend more time criticizing Israel in the United States than it would criticizing the much worse barbarism and depredations of the Communist bloc. Where Kirkpatrick eventually became less aligned with Reagan’s Vision is, within a couple of years in office, Reagan becomes much more committed to supporting democracy and democratic transitions, even with some of those right-wing military dictatorships that the US had been supporting, and he and Shultz, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, are some other key figures in this. This is why they start putting pressure on the Taiwanese military government or the South Korean military government, or Pinochet in Chile, saying, “Listen, we appreciate your partnership with the United States. We appreciate your anti-Communism, but you cannot be massacring peaceful protesters in your own country. For the sake of human rights and moral consistency and legitimacy, you need to transition to a multi-party democracy.” And Kirkpatrick was not fully on board with that and that’s one of the reasons why she eventually was frustrated when she left the administration. But I do think that in hindsight this is an underappreciated and very important part of the Reagan record is supporting those democratic transitions among our right-wing authoritarian friends, as well as of course, supporting democracy in the Communist world.

Mark Tooley:

I know you need to go in several minutes Will. But Nancy Reagan obviously was a very decisive figure for President Reagan. Did you have a direct impact on foreign policy?

William Inboden:

Her main impact and influence are just being his closest friend. You know the Presidency is an incredibly lonely, isolating job, and she was fiercely loyal to him, fiercely protective of him. You see this in his diaries. Whenever she happened to be traveling away from the White House, and he’s alone there, he’s just painfully lonely and talking about how you can’t wait until the first lady returns, and she also was very supportive of his diplomatic outreach to the Soviets, and particularly to Gorbachev. But she was not getting involved in specific policy issues very much. Interestingly, three other women who are very important on the policy front. We mentioned Jeane Kirkpatrick already. Another, of course, is Margaret Thatcher, a very, very close friend of his, even when they would have their differences. And then one is less known, the author and Russia scholar, Suzanne Massie, and he had read one of her books about nineteenth century Russian history, and she was regularly traveling over to Moscow and meeting with ordinary Russians and Russian literary figures, and Reagan struck up a friendship with her, and she was his real window into the Russian soul, into the yearning for Christian faith, especially in the Orthodox Church there. So, he would meet with her regularly as his secret back channel to what the Russians were thinking. She’s the one who gave him the famous Russian proverb “Trust but verify.” He memorized that in Russian, and then would trot it out with, well, I can’t say the Russian, but he trotted it out with Gorbachev every time they met which drove Gorbachev crazy. But Reagan was right to do so. And again, he had gotten that from Suzanne Massie. So, she’s one of the handful of women who play really important roles in the book.

Mark Tooley:

And, finally, Will, Reagan’s lessons for today?

William Inboden:

Yeah, I don’t write explicitly on that in the book. The book is just a pure history, and it ends with the peaceful end of the Cold War. But I do hope that readers reading it will see, we rightly remember him as the last unambiguously successful two-term Republican President, two-term President period. And particularly as we’re facing this new era of great power competition of oppressive Communist government, oppressive Russian Government as well, that I think Reagan’s combination of economic and military power, and a strong commitment to American values, as his universal values, is a very potent combination. And I think we need to draw on all those traditions when we’re dealing with the threat from China and from Russia today.

Mark Tooley:

Will Inboden, author of the new book, The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. Thank you very much for an informative conversation.

William Inboden:

Well, thank you, Mark. I appreciate it.

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