Ronald Reagan on U.S. Global Leadership, with Max Boot

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Ronald Reagan and U.S. global leadership.

With me to discuss Ronald Reagan's life and especially his impact on U.S. foreign policy is Max Boot. Max is the Jean J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies here at CFR and a columnist at the Washington Post. Max has written numerous bestselling books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and The American Tragedy in Vietnam. Today, Max's newest book hits bookstore shelves. It is Reagan, His Life, and Legend. Max, thank you for coming on the President's Inbox. Congratulations on the publication of Reagan: His Life and Legend. It's getting rave reviews. I note that the New York Times has hailed it as one of twenty-two non-fiction books to read this fall.

BOOT:
Thank you very much, Jim. A pleasure to be here.

LINDSAY:
Max, before we begin discussing Ronald Reagan, I want to let listeners know how they can win a free copy of Reagan: His Life and Legend. To do so, they should go to cfr.org/giveaway. Let me repeat that, cfr.org/giveaway. There they can read the terms and conditions for the giveaway and register their entry. The registration for the giveaway will remain open until September 24. After that, we will select ten names at random to receive a free copy of Reagan: His Life and Legend. If you are still searching for a pen to write down this information, don't worry. We have posted the link to the giveaway in the show notes for the President's Inbox on cfr.org.

With those logistics out of the way, Max, let's talk about Ronald Reagan. And I want to begin with the question of why you decided to write a biography of Reagan. I will note that others have taken a crack at it, most notably Edmund Morris, who was writing an authorized biography and grew so frustrated with his subject, he ended up writing a fictionalized biography of Reagan.

BOOT:
Well, Edmund Morris's failure created my opportunity because if Edmund had done what everybody expected him to do, this definitive biography of Ronald Reagan, I would be writing about something else. But instead, as you noted, he produced this weird fictionalized book. And there have been a lot of other books, of course, about Ronald Reagan, but there really has not been a definitive biography that presents a balanced and objective account of him. And that's something that I set out to do. And I think there's a unique opportunity to do that now because we have some advantage of historical distance from the events that I'm writing about. We can move beyond the political passions of the day and take a more dispassionate balance than objective look at Ronald Reagan. And what I really set out to do was to write neither a hagiography nor a hit job, but to really write something that revealed Reagan with all his successes and failures, all his strengths and flaws, the way he really was, not the legend, but the true life of Ronald Reagan.

LINDSAY:
So, Max, help me understand that headline. Where did you net out on Ronald Reagan?

BOOT:
My net is there was a lot of good, a lot of bad. I mean, it's like anybody, nobody is perfect. I would say that on balance, Reagan has been rated as one of the top ten presidents in polls of presidential historians, around eight or nine, something like that. And I think that's a pretty fair assessment because of his giant achievements, helping the nation to recover from the traumas of the 1970s. Helping to revive national morale, presiding over an economic revival and a military revival. And most importantly of all, working with Mikhail Gorbachev to peacefully end the Cold War. So, those are monumental achievements. But there are also massive failures, including his failure to do very much about the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. He didn't speak about it until 1987, even as tens of thousands of Americans were dying. There were also a lot of scandals and managerial failures of which the most notorious was, of course, the Iran-Contra affair.

And you can also point to other things that Reagan did that had arguably harmful impacts. For example, if you look at trend lines of economic inequality in America, the trend lines really begin to diverge in the early 1980s, and you see this massive gain of wealth for the upper 1 percent while everybody else was stagnating or going down. And that's something that has contributed, I think, to a lot of turmoil and ultimately to the populist backlash that we've seen over the last ten plus years. So, he was certainly a complicated figure. He got a lot done. He had some real failures as well. But I think on balance, I would agree with the majority of historians who rate him pretty high.

LINDSAY:
Max, now that you've laid out the headline, let's dive into some of the details. Help me understand why it was that Ronald Reagan turned from an acting career to politics.

BOOT:
Well, he turned from an acting career because it wasn't going very well. I mean, if he was a headliner in Hollywood in the 1950s, he probably would've never gone into politics. But by the late 1940s, his acting career was largely kaput. And so, he was looking for something else to do. And he got a job hosting a program called General Electric Theater, which was very highly rated, and he became a spokesman for General Electric. And that period in the 1950s and early '60s really became his transition from a movie career to a political career. Because in those days, GE was a very political company. And they actively proselytized their employees with right-wing propaganda because they thought this would be the way to prevent strikes that would cripple the company.

And so, Ronald Reagan imbibed a lot of this right-wing propaganda and this long cross-country train rides because he hated to fly in those days. He moved from his earlier New Deal liberalism to this new conservative ethos. And at the same time, he learned how to be a politician by giving a lot of speeches on factory floors, and offices, and other places on behalf of GE. That was his graduate school in politics, such that he was ready to burst onto the political scene in 1964 when he gave his famous "Time for Choosing" speech on behalf of Barry Goldwater. And then two years later, he ran for and won the governorship of California.

LINDSAY:
Reagan had a reputation even before he became president of being a staunch anti-communist. What drove that, Max? Was it a strategic calculation that he thought that that would make him more appealing to Republican voters and mainstream voters? Or was it driven by a real ideological commitment?

BOOT:
Oh, it was no question, a real ideological commitment. And the transition really happened in the late 1940s when he was a union leader in Hollywood when he was the president of the Screen Actors Guild. And that was the heyday of the red hunts of the Red Scare of the blacklist in Hollywood. And he was caught up in the middle of all of that. And he was convinced by the FBI and by a lot of right-wing figures in Hollywood, like the very influential gossip columnist, Louella Parsons, he was convinced that there was this made-in-the-Kremlin plot to take over Hollywood.

Now, when I actually examined the evidence, I found that there really wasn't much evidence of that plot. It was largely a figment of the imagination of all these very fervent red hunters in the late 1940s. But Reagan ardently believed it, and he thought he was on the front lines of preventing a communist takeover of Hollywood. And so, opposition to communism became very central to his identity and reinforced by a lot of his reading, volumes by Whittaker Chambers and many others that made him a very staunch, very ideological anti-communist.

LINDSAY:
Max, Reagan clearly was anti-communist, but he was also a fervent believer in the power of U.S. global leadership. Those two, while they're often aligned, don't have to go together. One can be a staunch anti-communist and believe that the solution is, in essence, to pull back from the world. Why is it that Reagan came to this belief in the importance of America being a global leader shaping world politics?

BOOT:
Well, he was never an isolationist. Then in the late '30s, early '40s when isolationism was at its strongest when the original America First movement was roiling American politics. Reagan was an ardent backer of FDR. He was a new dealer, so he was very much in sync with FDR's desire to help embattled democracies like Great Britain resisting the Nazi onslaught. And then after World War II, while his political convictions changed, he maintained his belief in America as a force for good in the world. He was, in part, powerfully influenced by seeing films of liberated concentration camps, which he saw in his role as an officer in an Air Force film unit. He saw some of the first pictures taken by combat cameramen from liberated concentration camps showing the evils that could occur when America was remote from the world.

And so, he naturally, like most Americans, transitioned from believing that the United States had to be at the forefront of the fight against German and Japanese imperialism, to believing that the U.S. had to be at the forefront of the fight against the Soviet Union and communist imperialism in the post-World war II period. So, there were certainly a lot of conservative isolationists in those days led by Robert Taft and other figures, but that was never Reagan. He was always an internationalist, always somebody who believed that America needed to play a leading role in the world.

LINDSAY:
So, help locate Reagan for me, Max, in the 1970s. This is a time in which the Vietnam war has come to an end as Gerald Ford put it, "Our national nightmare is over." Lots of economic problems. Reagan decides to run for the presidency against Gerald Ford in 1976. He obviously doesn't win. Ford does not win election. Help me understand the way Reagan thought about Vietnam and how he spoke about it to Americans.

BOOT:
Well, generally, Reagan was a big booster of Richard Nixon, which was a major change for him because in the late '40s, early '50s when he was still a Democrat, he thought that Nixon was this untrustworthy charlatan. But by the early '60s, he was an ardent Nixon booster. As we now know from the White House tapes, Nixon himself had a fairly dim view of Reagan and his intellect. But Reagan was a huge Nixon fan. He supported all of Nixon's efforts to try to end the war in Vietnam. And he certainly supported the war in Vietnam and would say that we just took the gloves off, we could turn North Vietnam into a parking lot. And was very hawkish, not very thoughtful type of rhetoric, but it resonated with a huge part of the Republican and even a large part of the Democratic base.

He supported Nixon and he was governor of California at the time. He saw himself as Nixon's natural heir. So, he expected that Nixon would step down in '76, ending his second term, and Reagan would then seek and win the Republican nomination. So, Reagan was shocked when Nixon had to resign because Reagan had been an ardent defender of Nixon throughout Watergate. And then all of a sudden in '74, Nixon has to resign. Ford becomes president. And so, then Reagan is faced with this conundrum of does he fall in behind the new president, Gerald Ford? Or does he challenge him? And most Republicans were falling in behind Ford, but Reagan decided to challenge him because he thought that if he didn't do that, he would never get a chance to go for the brass ring himself.

And then the interesting thing is that campaign had a very heavy foreign policy focus with Reagan attacking Ford over negotiating the Panama Canal treaties to give the Panama Canal back to Panama, and also attacking Ford over détente trying to improve relations of the Soviet Union. And so, people assumed naturally that Reagan was critical of those policies all along. But in fact, what I found in my research was, Reagan only started criticizing those policies after he started running against Ford. When Richard Nixon was doing the exact same things, Reagan was completely supportive. So, there was certainly an element of political calculation in what Reagan was doing.

LINDSAY:
So, let's talk about the Reagan presidency before we talk about specific policies. I'd like to get your assessment of how involved Ronald Reagan was in his own administration in making policy choices. You're well aware, Max, of that famous SNL skit, which featured Phil Hartman playing Ronald Reagan in which Reagan is seen as this genial, not necessarily in command figure in public. But then the moments behind closed doors, he is a mastermind who is ordering all of his subordinates around. How much of Reagan really drove his own administration versus his being driven by his own staff?

BOOT:
That's a great question. I mean, the irony is that today there are a lot of conservatives who actually subscribe to that Saturday Night Live view of Reagan that he was actually this closet mastermind pulling the levers of power. So, that's like one extreme. And then there was the other extreme where Clark Clifford, the Democratic elder statesman, said that Reagan was an amiable dunce. So, I think the reality lies somewhere in the middle. He was not a dunce, he was a reasonably intelligent person. But he certainly was not on top of policy to the extent that a lot of presidents are, and he was certainly not on top of management.

I think the distinction I draw with Reagan is I think he was a great leader. He was a great communicator. He was very good at setting priorities and getting his message out. But while being a great leader, he was a very poor manager. He was very hands-off in management and had very little idea of what his aides were up to, which, of course, got him into big trouble during the Iran-Contra affair. But also got him out of trouble because the potentially impeachable defense in the Iran-Contra affair was funneling money from arms sales to Iran, to the Nicaraguan Contras in violation of a law passed by Congress. So, if Reagan had been found to have done this knowingly, he could have been impeached. But his defense was, "I had no idea what my subordinates were doing." And people actually tended to believe that. I mean, if this had been Nixon, nobody would've believed that Nixon didn't know what his aides were doing. But with Reagan, you believed it.

So, he was very disengaged and very remote from the actual task of running the government. And so, he was very dependent on his aides. And when he had good aides, he did very well. And so, for example, the first term had a lot of successes because Jim Baker was one of the all-time, great White House chiefs of staff. In the second term he had a lot of problems because Don Regan was a terrible White House chief of staff. And so, Reagan more than most presidents, I think, was really at the mercy of the people who worked for him.

LINDSAY:
What explains that, Max? Why was Reagan so detached from the management of his own government when his political stakes depended upon that government functioning well? You and I both lived through the 1980s, and the stories of infighting in the Reagan administration, particularly between Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and Secretary of State George Shultz, were infamous.

BOOT:
Those disputes between Weinberger and Shultz were really paralyzing for foreign policy and led to disasters like the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 in which 241 Americans died. Why wasn't Reagan more engaged? Well, it was very interesting because I actually found some insight in the memoirs of Richard Pipes, who was this eminent Harvard professor who spent a couple of years working on the Reagan NSC. And he was an ardent conservative, so he wasn't like some liberal mole. He was very conservative.

But he basically observed Reagan closely at National Security Council meetings. And Pipes's observation was that on most issues, Reagan did not have enough knowledge to really sort out the competing advice. And he also shied away from resolving disputes among his aides. And I would argue that that comes from his lifelong aversion to personality conflict, because he grew up in a very troubled household: alcoholic father, mother and father often arguing. So, he hated to get involved in personality conflicts, so he didn't want to sort out competing views in his administration. So, some of his aides said, "Mr. President, you can't have both Cap Weinberger and George Shultz on the cabinet. They're constantly at each other's throats. We're not getting anything done." And his reply was, "Well, they're both friends of mine. I really can't choose between them." And so, that was certainly problematic.

LINDSAY:
So, Max, help me understand the evolution of Reagan's foreign policy. He comes in, in January, 1981. I think it's safe to say that national morale is fairly low. Much of it has to do with the hangover from Vietnam and also has to do with what looked to be deteriorating economic conditions. Inflation was at record levels. Reagan during the campaign has talked about how the United States has to meet the Soviet challenge. A lot of people believe the Soviet Union is on the verge of overtaking the United States. How did Reagan handle the Soviet Union? Are our memories of his being an unflinching person confronting the Soviet Union correct? Or were there more nuance in the way Reagan approached the Soviet Union?

BOOT:
Well, the myth is that from the start of his administration, Reagan had some kind of secret plan to bring down the Soviet Union, and that's what led to the collapse of the USSR in 1991. And I actually asked this question to George Shultz, his long serving secretary of state. I said, "Did you have the secret plan?" And he said, "Well, I wish we did, but we didn't. We just had a general attitude of peace through strength, and that was about it." And so, there's no question that in his first term, Reagan did a lot of things that were tough on the Soviet Union, including this massive defense buildup, including calling the Soviet Union the evil empire, the focus of evil in the world. Very hawkish rhetoric. And people now tend to focus more on that and say that's what led to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But they forget there was also this other track of Reagan foreign policy where he was reaching out to Soviet leaders. He wanted to arrange a summit. Actually, one of his first actions in office was to lift the grain embargo that Jimmy Carter had imposed after the invasion of Afghanistan. And then at the end of 1981, when martial law was imposed in Poland, Reagan briefly imposed pipeline sanctions in the Soviet Union, and then lifted those without getting any concessions in return. So, his policy was actually more nuanced or more confusing than people would like to think. And it didn't really achieve that much in the first term, I would argue. Instead, by 1983, we were at such a state of tension with the Soviet Union that we were actually running the greatest risk of nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I call my chapter on 1983, "The Year of Living Dangerously," because we went through one crisis after another. And then after having seen that Reagan started to pull back. And in early 1984 gave a much more conciliatory speech talking about everything that Americans and Soviets have in common. But at the bottom line is he did not get a lot done with regard to the Soviet Union. And in his first term, the Cold War was running at a very high pitch. Things only began to turn around in 1985 when a very different communist leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, rose to the top of the Soviet system. That was the true turning point of the Cold War. It wasn't Reagan's defense buildup or anything that the U.S. did.

LINDSAY:
Max, I want to come back to the issue of how Reagan handled Gorbachev. But before we do, I want to talk a little bit more about Reagan's first term. And one of the episodes that you've already alluded to, which was the horrific bombing of the Marine battalion headquarters in Beirut in October of 1983. Reagan eventually ended up within several months withdrawing U.S. forces from Lebanon without exercising peace through strength in many ways, but he didn't seem to suffer political price for doing so. Help me understand both how the United States ended up having Marines based in Beirut and why it was that when Reagan in essence said, "We're going to withdraw," everyone said, "Okay."

BOOT:
Well, it was a disastrous miscalculation from start to finish. It was really an outgrowth of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. And the Reagan administration negotiated the withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon. And then they came in with Italian and French peacekeepers. They sent Marine peacekeeping forces to try to bolster the government, the pro-Western government in Beirut, which was under attack from various factions. But then what happened was that the Civil War in Lebanon picked up an intensity, and the Marines and the other peacekeepers were caught in the middle, and they were just basically sitting ducks. They weren't allowed to really go out and do very much. They were just bunkered down at the Beirut Airport.

And so, in 1983, you had this horrific suicide bomber attack by the organization that would later become known as Hezbollah, essentially an Iranian proxy group that was also kidnapping Americans in Beirut. And this was all part of the Iranian desire to drive the United States out Lebanon so that Iran could essentially, and its proxies, could dominate Lebanon, which is actually the same thing that's going on right now. And so, you had this terrible bombing of the Marine barracks. And there was a debate in the administration about what to do, and Reagan vowed to retaliate, but never did. And this caused a huge debate because Bud McFarlane, who was the national security adviser, later claimed that Reagan had ordered the retaliation. And Cap Weinberger, the defense secretary, had refused to carry out the presidential directive.

And looking into it closely, what I found was that didn't really happen. What happened eventually was that Reagan gave both McFarlane and Weinberger the impression that he agreed with both of them, but he never really made a decision. And so, Weinberger had the freedom not to do anything. And so, Reagan vowed not to be driven out of Lebanon, but by early 1984, his advisors convinced him that this was not a good place to be in as he was running for reelection. And so, in early 1984, he basically just pulled U.S troops out. And he didn't suffer a price for that because nobody really wanted long-term U.S. presence in Lebanon. Democrats were critical of the mission in the first place, so he got away with it. Although there was a long-term cost to be paid as Bud McFarlane told me years later. He thought that U.S. withdrawal under fire encouraged Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda to think that they could attack us with impunity.

LINDSAY:
Max, your point that Reagan didn't pay a political price for the catastrophe in Lebanon reminds me that during his presidency, Reagan was often referred to as the Teflon president; bad things didn't stick to him. Why do you think that was?

BOOT:
I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that he had this bond with the American people that took him through bad times and good. He had such a pleasing personality, and that was a lot of the secret of his success. In 1964 when he was campaigning for Barry Goldwater, a lot of people remarked Reagan and Goldwater had the same message, but Reagan delivered it in a much more winning fashion. Goldwater was this hard-edged, unlikable guy. As journalists wrote at the time in the 1960s, Reagan's personality was like soothing, warm bath water. He went over easy. And so, he had this connection with the American people and this ability to communicate, which I think armored him to a large extent against the tax, except during the Iran-Contra affair in 1986 and 1987. And that's the Iran-Contra affair was so traumatic for him because that was the one time he lost the faith with the American people. And polls showed that most people didn't believe what he was saying. And so, that was devastating to him.

LINDSAY:
And I will note that Reagan was remarkable as an orator, as a communicator in moments of national crisis. I can still remember the speech he gave after the suppression of Solidarity in Poland in 1981. The speech he gave after the explosion of the Challenger vehicle in 1986. I mean, he was a master of speaking to people at times of great emotion.

BOOT:
Yes, he was. And it's interesting, there are a lot of parallels with his boyhood hero, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He really learned and emulated FDR. But he also had, of course, a career going back to his early 1920s when he was a sportscaster in the Midwest. He had been communicating with a large audience for his whole life. So, he really knew how to talk to people in a way that connected with them.

LINDSAY:
Max, I want to come back to Reagan's second term and his outreach to the Soviet Union. He now has a new leader in the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. You've already said that you think Gorbachev deserves much more of the credit for the collapse of the Soviet Union than Reagan does. Walk me through that.

BOOT:
Well, Gorbachev was a transformational leader. Truly a black swan. Somebody who rose to the top of a dictatorial system, yet lost faith in that system. And there's a lot of mythology, especially on the right to suggest, "Oh, Gorbachev was implementing his reforms because he knew the Soviet Union was falling behind the United States and the arms race, and he wanted to keep up. It was really the Reagan defense buildup or Reagan's support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan or whatever that forced Gorbachev's hand." Not really accurate. In fact, Gorbachev had no desire to keep up with the arms race. He wanted to end the arms race because he thought all this defense spending was wasteful. He actually wanted to spend money to improve the lives of ordinary Soviet citizens. And his biggest challenge was not the Reagan arms buildup. His biggest challenge was how ineffective Soviet central planning was, and also the fall in oil prices in the 1980s, both of which severely handicapped the Soviet economy.

But Gorbachev was basically an idealist who wanted to create communism with a human face, something that turned out to be impossible, but he wanted to really humanize the system and democratize the system. And that was his primary impulse. Reagan's role I think was important, but it wasn't what people imagined it to be. It wasn't that he forced the collapse of the Soviet Union. Reagan's role was really that he recognized that Gorbachev was a different kind of communist leader, somebody he could actually do business with. They established a relationship with their first summit in Geneva in 1986.

A lot of conservatives, including Cap Weinberger, the defense secretary, were highly skeptical of Gorbachev. They thought he was snookering in the U.S. and that he was just the same old kind of communist. But Reagan talked to him and understood, no, he was actually somebody who was a genuine reformer. And so, Reagan was willing to work with Gorbachev to try to open up the Soviet Union in the Cold War. And that was important in helping Gorbachev to enact his reforms. He wasn't enacting those reforms because the Soviet Union was going bankrupt. I mean, under any other leader, the Soviet Union could have continued to exist just as China, and North Korea, and Cuba, Vietnam, and other communist regimes have continued to exist.

LINDSAY:
Max, talk to me a little bit about the meeting in Reykjavik between Gorbachev and Reagan. It's been a lot of commentary about it. Bold effort to try to get rid of nuclear weapons, an issue that had resonated with Reagan for quite some time. After all, he wanted to render nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete with what became known as the Strategic Defense Initiative. So, help me understand what happened or didn't happen in Reykjavik.

BOOT:
Well, the Reykjavik Summit in Iceland in 1986 was a summit done on short notice. And it became potentially more consequential than anybody expected because while Gorbachev and Reagan were talking, they basically agreed in principle to abolish their entire nuclear arsenals. Within ten years, this would've been a strategic revolution. And of course, both the Soviet military and the U.S. military were horrified at this prospect as were U.S. allies. But ultimately, the deal did not get done because of Reagan's ardent faith in SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, his ballistic missile idea, which is...because he dreamed of a giant space shield that would protect the United States from all nuclear missiles. And this was clearly not a realistic dream as Reagan's advisors told him. I mean, still hasn't been achieved all these decades later, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in spending. But he was very devoted to that.

And Gorbachev wanted to put SDI on hold in order to achieve this nuclear disarmament. Reagan refused to put SDI on hold because he was so devoted to it. And so, the meeting broke up in failure, and both sides were very bitter about the lack of achievement at Reykjavik. And yet, in hindsight, it turned out to be only a minor hiccup in the march toward ending the Cold War because the next year in 1987, Gorbachev and Reagan got together in Washington and signed the INF Treaty abolishing an entire class of intermediate-range nuclear missiles. So, that was a landmark agreement, and therefore, the failure at Reykjavik was only transitory.

LINDSAY:
Max. We've been looking backward. I'd like to for a moment, look forward. As you look at the Reagan presidency and particularly Reagan's approach, the Soviet Union. Are there lessons for us today in how the United States should deal with China?

BOOT:
A lot of people on the right in particular want to draw a straight line from what Reagan supposedly did with the Soviet Union to what we should do today with China. There's a lot of people, conservatives arguing, "Reagan defeated the Soviet Union. He brought down the evil empire. We should follow the same policies with China today." And as I argue in Foreign Affairs, I think that's a very dangerous and misguided description because as we've been discussing, it wasn't really Reagan who brought down the Soviet Union. It was Mikhail Gorbachev. And so, we should be very wary of policy prescriptions for China that call for just ratcheting up pressure on China, because it's more likely to result in a war that nobody wants than in the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party.

The only way you're going to have true change in China is if Xi Jinping, who is a hardliner, of course, if Xi Jinping is succeeded by a communist leader who is more in the Gorbachev mode, and who wants to actually transform China into a freer, more humane and democratic country. If that were to happen, then yes, you could imagine a future U.S. president working the future Chinese leader to radically decrease tensions and hostility between our two countries. But right now, that's very unlikely because Xi Jinping is more like Brezhnev than Gorbachev. He's a hardliner. And so, just ratcheting up the pressure willy-nilly against China and saying like, "Oh, we're going to bring down China the way that Reagan supposedly brought down the Soviet Union," that's very unrealistic and very dangerous policy advice.

LINDSAY:
Max, what about the future of U.S. global leadership? Reagan came to the presidency in 1981 where I think a lot of Americans at that point had been turning inward, did not want the burdens of global leadership. Reagan did not follow the public. He led the public in a different direction. Now, as we flash forward some forty years, once again, we see a rise of argument that the United States needs to do less abroad. How do you think Reagan would respond to the current moment?

BOOT:
Well, you could read some of his responses in some of his features, including his famous speech in 1984 on the fortieth anniversary of D-Day, where he not only paid tribute to the boys of Pointe du Hoc, the Army Rangers, who took those close to Normandy, but he also paid tribute to the Transatlantic Alliance and vowed that America would continue to stand by Europe in the future. And of course, Reagan was part of that greatest generation who saw for themselves what happened when America walked away from the world. The result was World War II. He never wanted to see a repeat of that again. And unfortunately today, a lot of people, especially on the right, I think, have forgotten those lessons and have reverted to that America First isolationism of the pre-World War II period. And I think anybody who reads Ronald Reagan's speeches will see very eloquent warnings about the dangers of isolationism and the need for American leadership.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's inbox for this week. My guest has been Max Boot, the Jean J. Kirkpatrick senior fellow for national security studies here at CFR, and the author of the riveting new book, Reagan: His Life, and Legend. Max, as always, thank you for joining me.

BOOT:
It was a pleasure. Great conversation, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you listen. And leave us a review. We love the feedback. You can email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on cfr.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox or solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions or matters of policy.

Today's episode was produced by Ester Fang and Kenadee Mangus with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.