Reagan and the World

Reagan and the World represents the first substantive attempt by historians to evaluate the foreign relations of the Reagan administration. The contributors place U.S. interaction with the Soviet Union, Western Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and the Far East into historical context. The book contains not only an overview of Reagan's foreign policy by the editor and a thoughtful analysis of each region by a distinguished scholar, but a lively and wide-ranging roundtable discussion involving all the contributors. With the falling of the final curtain on the administration of the first actor president, historians are now faced with the formidable task of assessing the foreign relations of the Reagan presidency and placing them into a larger historical context. The task of appraising Ronald Reagan as foreign policymaker is difficult because it involves making sense of his many paradoxes and apparent contradictions. This collection of essays represents the attempts at such an assessment by six distinguished historians of international stature. The contributors address U.S. relations with the Soviet Union, East Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Western Europe and Africa. They differ markedly in their appraisals. John Lewis Gaddis asserts that Reagan's Soviet policy was not only successful, but was rationally determined and pursued from the outset of his administration. Akira Iriye finds much to admire in the Reagan administration's relations with East Asia, particularly with respect to economic diplomacy. In contrast, Gier Lundestad is far less complimentary about Reagan's relations with Western Europe, and the three scholars who deal with the less-developed areas of the globe offer generally negative appraisals of Reagan's record. Philip S. Khoury argues that the administration further inflamed the volatile Middle East; Susanne Jonas finds Reagan's Central America policy ultimately destructive of U.S. interests in the region