 Good afternoon and welcome to the fourth interview in our second year of our six week series of conversations with noted scholars and historians about the American presidency. The series is brought to you by the LBJ Presidential Library, the Osher U.T. Osher Lifelong Learning Institute and Humanities Texas. I'm Phil Barnes and it is my privilege to chair the U.T. Ollie Enrichment Committee. Dr. Mark Lawrence, the director of the LBJ Presidential Library and himself a widely respected historian is the host for each of these interviews. This year we are focusing on presidential decisions for war and peace. And from these conversations we are learning just how complex and difficult these decisions could be. As a participant in the webinar you may present questions throughout the program for our Q&A segment by using the Q&A function to write and submit them and I certainly encourage to do that. Our Q&A host today is Sarah McCracken, the director of public programs from the LBJ Presidential Library. William Emondon is executive director and William Powers Jr. Chair of the Clement Center for National Security at the University of Texas at Austin where he is associate professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs. He is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, a contributing editor of the Foreign Policy Magazine and his commentary has appeared in numerous outlets, most notably the Wall Street Journal and NPR among others. He is the author of Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, The Cold War and the World on the Break. As he documents in this important account of the Reagan years, Ronald Reagan came to the White House with an overriding faith in democracy and a belief that Soviet communism and the threat of nuclear war must end. Reagan's faith in democracy was granted and sustained by his personal belief in God and that religious freedom was fundamental to individual liberty and both were antithetical to Soviet communism or for that matter all totalitarian regimes. And thus President Reagan abhorred the treatment of Jews in the Soviet Union, the Soviets repression of political dissent and the attendant human rights abuses and he made that quite clear. Reagan also believed that the absence of individual freedoms protected by the rule of law would lead uneditably to the decline and failure of the Soviet system and the Soviet style command economy was inherently inflexible and rigid, suppressing the individual ethnicity and creativity essential to economic growth. These were the fundamental beliefs that Ronald Reagan brought to his series of meetings with Mikhail Gorbachev and Sunitz, pushing the Soviets within arms race and ideological contest toward economic and political collapse all the while extending an order branch of diplomacy. The Reagan presidency ended in January of 1989, less than three years later in December of 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed and 15 newly independent nations were born including a Russia with at that time a democratically elected anti-communist leader, a remarkable accomplishment. Now we have the opportunity to learn more about this defining period in presidential history from the author of this remarkable book. So I am delighted to welcome for today's interview William N. Button, author of The Peacemaker, Ronald Reagan, The Cold War and the World of the Black Brick. And now, the Mark Lawrence. Well, thank you, Phil, and welcome, everyone. Good afternoon. It's great to be back with you for, as Phil mentioned, this fourth interview in our series. I hope, by the way, that everyone is safe and warm if you're joining us from Texas. It's been a rough week and I hope that this event can bring you a little bit of distraction from what's going on around us. And welcome especially to our special guest, Will Inboden. Thank you so much, Will, for making time to be with us. Great to have you. Thanks, Martin. It's great to be here with you. You know, Will, when it comes to presidential leadership and decision making for war and peace, there are a few stories, it seems to me, so compelling as Ronald Reagan's management of the end of the Cold War, this eight-year saga that transformed the East-West confrontation into a new era in geopolitical history and how this process played out. The roles of these larger-than-life figures like Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan are, of course, truly fascinating historians that have drawn an awful lot of attention over the years, deservedly from biographers and journalists and historians. But no one, it seems to me, is better placed than you to help us think about these subjects, given the very recent publication of your fantastic new book, The Peacekeeper. Obviously, we want to dive into a lot of what you cover in this lengthy book in the time ahead of us here. But it seemed to me a good way to get started, to help us appreciate the enormity of what happened under Ronald Reagan's leadership, is to talk about the situation that he inherited. As he stepped into office in January of 1981, tell us what the world situation was like so that we can then move on and talk about everything that changed in the following eight years. Sure. Thanks, Mark. And for our viewers, and I hope at least a number of you will have a chance to pick up and read the book, you'll see that it is very much just focused on the eight years of Reagan's presidency and then foreign policy within those eight years. So it's not a full-length biography of him. But I say that by way of preface, because as Mark asked, I do spend the first chapter trying to set the scene, especially on the world situation in the 1970s and the challenges that Reagan inherits when he's elected in November of 1980 and then when he takes the oath of office in January of 1981. And in a word, the 70s were a terrible decade for the United States and for much of the world. Many of our viewers here will have firsthand memories of them. But just to rattle off a number of the challenges or difficulties that the United States found itself facing from the 1970s and that shaped a lot of the difficulties that Reagan then encountered. So we had lost the war in Vietnam. As I've often put it, when Reagan takes the oath of office in January of 1980, it is almost in January of 1981. It was almost eight years to the day when the last American combat troops had left Vietnam and the Paris Peace Accords had been signed. And so we can think back to just eight years ago, it was a 2015. That doesn't feel like distant history. That is almost yesterday, right? And so the traumas of Vietnam were still very fresh for the country. And of course, our host Mark Lawrence is one of the country's foremost scholars on this. But for the Cold War, the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, the Soviet bloc, Vietnam was the first in what becomes a cascade of successful communist revolutions and takeovers across the developing world throughout the 1970s. And so in addition to South Vietnam, Laos, Carlson, communism, Cambodia does, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Angola, Nicaragua, the Soviet Union invades Afghanistan, Grenada falls to communism. And now each of those stories has its own complexities. Each is in part a product of local factors, but the sponsorship or the support by the Soviet Union and some of its proxies like Cuba was also a factor in each of those. And so by November of 1980, if you are just keeping an entirely sheet in the Cold War, it appears like the United States is losing. It appears like the free world is losing and the communist bloc is advancing just in terms of the number of new communist governments. In addition, in the actual standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union, if you just want to look at the military balance there, it also looks like the United States is losing or at least has fallen way behind. The Soviet Union hits the apex of its military might sometime in 1981 or 82 probably, whereas the American military was still underfunded, demoralized from the loss in Vietnam and then subsequent budget cuts and undergoing a rocky transition from the draft to the all volunteer force. So the American military seems weakened in comparison with the Soviets. The United States has other internal problems. Our economy is not in good shape. We're experiencing several years of stagflation. You may remember that perverse combination of high unemployment and high inflation, excuse me and high inflation. And of course, then the Fed had to jack up interest rates and so it just seemed like the American economy could not get going again. And that in turn leads to further national division and despondency. Of course, the OPEC oil embargo had also damaged the American economy, but also even more seemed to damage America's own sense of confidence in itself. We couldn't even fuel our cars at the gas station, let alone fuel our economy and fuel our society. And then in 1979, the Iranian revolution and then the subsequent hostage crisis of 52 American diplomats and spies being held captive by the new Iranian regime for about a year and a half. And so all of those factors had contributed to the sense that the United States is just a demoralized weakened crippled giant, just as not as capable economically or militarily as it used to be. And even a sense that maybe democracy and free markets are the best days were behind them. Finally, one other challenge of particular interest, I think, to the series on the American presidency is when Reagan took office, a lot of people thought that the presidency itself, the office of the presidency was broken, or at least irresistibly, irredeemably weakened. One general rule of thumb that we can use for a successful presidency, it's overly simplistic, but general one is, does that president complete two terms in office? Does he complete a first term and get reelected and complete a second term? And the last time an American president had completed two terms was Eisenhower, when Reagan takes office 20 years earlier. And we had had five presidents since then who had not been able to complete two terms in office. Kennedy had been killed by an assassin's bullet. LBJ, again, you have obviously namesake for the institution hosting us today, had foregone re-election partly because of the country turning against him over Vietnam. Nixon, of course, had resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal. Ford had been defeated for re-election after just two years of trying to fill out Nixon's term. And then Carter had just been defeated after one term. And so those are Democrats, Republicans, different circumstances, but five different American presidents who hadn't been able to complete two terms, two terms. And so there was a sense among a lot of Americans that the country can't be restored until the office of the presidency itself can be restored. And maybe it can't be. Maybe it is just now a broken institution. So all that to say, it was a very difficult hand that Reagan had. Now we'll fast forward to 1989, the year Ronald Reagan left office. November of that year, a little after Reagan had handed the reins to George Bush, the Berlin Wall is breached. People are literally standing dancing on the Berlin Wall. The Cold War is clearly crumbling and it sure looks like the United States has prevailed in many ways. It would take a couple more years, of course, for the Soviet Union to collapse. But tremendously transformative things have happened in the world. A central point of your book, it seems to me, is to show the importance of Ronald Reagan to that story. And especially to the grand strategic vision that sat in Ronald Reagan's head as he navigated very difficult times across those eight years. Tell us about Ronald Reagan's strategic vision, a vision that you say succeeded beyond even his imagining on page three of the book. What was his strategic vision? Yeah, so to oversimplify, I think he comes into office with three big goals, all of which are interrelated. The first is to see the demise of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War. And he's pretty explicit about that. The second is to dramatically reduce the risk of nuclear war. And that is, of course, derivative from the first. But in some ways it's also a separate goal in its own right. And the third is to expand freedom in the world. And importantly, not just in terms of bringing down Soviet communism as inimical to freedom, but also to support the growth of economic freedom, of an open trading order of democracy, including with a lot of America's right wing military dictatorship allies, too. And so if we take those as his, those three strategic goals he's wanting to pursue by a year or two after he leaves office, even by the time he's leaving office, but especially by a year or two after he leaves office, there's been tremendous advances on all three. And so that's where he had a pretty transformative strategic vision. As I've said that before, almost every previous Cold War president had seen the Soviet Union as a geopolitical rival to be managed and contained. No other American president wanted the Soviet Union to advance, of course. They all share that in common with Reagan. But I don't think that any other American president had actually envisioned the Soviet Union being defeated, the Cold War itself ending. I mean, there's a sense that this is a pretty permanent part of the geopolitical landscape. When Reagan takes office, the Soviet Union been around for over six decades and prevailing assumptions that it's going to be around for several more decades, if not into the indefinite future. Similarly, there was a sense that democracy was in retreat by the end of the 1970s. The only democracies in the world were in at the time in Western Europe, North America, and then Japan was the only democracy in Asia. Now, as great scholars like our own Austin native Hal Brands and others have pointed out, we now, looking back, can see that there are a number of structural forces going on in the world throughout the beneath the service in the 1970s that Reagan benefits from, that he and his team take advantage of and try to accelerate. And so certainly my book is trying to emphasize the role of presidential leadership and vision on something like this. I do think Reagan's policies are really essential to understand this story, but he also benefits from some of those broader global trends and those feed into his strategy. Well, one of the really distinctive things about Ronald Reagan, at least to me, is the way in which he could simultaneously be the hawk who advocated a major military buildup and the dove who was always willing to negotiate with the Soviets. Talk if you would a little bit about the balance of carrots and sticks, if I can put it that way, or dove and hawk that seems to have driven Reagan's outlook toward the Soviet Union, really from the outside, if not in fact from the years before he became president. Yeah, this is a great question, Mark. It's a really important theme in the book that Reagan is this very enigmatic figure where he holds with equal tenacity to these two different impulses. And he's he's working a lot of his time as president to reconcile them, maybe if you will. But again, on the one hand, he is emphatically an anti-Soviet, anti-communist hardliner. He is and he wants to do an aggressive military buildup and he wants to confront them rhetorically. And it's clear he wants to put pressure on this system to weaken it and hopefully to crack it apart. And that's why it is famous, somewhat jingoistic, but I think in the same level, profound line that, you know, my theory of the Cold War is we win, they lose, right? And that's what, you know, the more hardliners like to gravitate to. At the same time, he also, from decades before he becomes president, was a nuclear abolitionist. He wanted to see all nuclear weapons abolished. He is terrified of nuclear weapons and nuclear war. He is very committed to keeping the Cold War cold in terms of, you know, he does not want it to turn into a nuclear exchange or a devastating conventional war in Europe. He's very reticent about actually using force. In eight years as president, he only deploys ground troops in combat once and that's in the Grenada, which is really over in a weekend. It's a pretty small operation. And he, from the outset of his presidency, is very committed to genuine outreach to Soviet leaders. He wants to find one who can be a negotiating partner. He wants to assure them the United States doesn't want to blow them up and blow the world up. He wants them to work with him, not just to slow the arms race or manage the arms race, but to end the arms race and even end all nuclear weapons. And that part of him is also confounding. And especially that part of him listed quite a bit of opposition and criticism from his own conservative Republican base. And so, you know, in hindsight, I think there's a esteem for Reagan has probably climbed, you know, the year since he left office. I think I hope my book is part of that since the very favorable assessment. But one thing I was really reminded of in researching and writing this is what a polarizing figure he was at the time. Certainly a lot of criticism from the left, but also especially in this second term as he's building this partnership with Gorbachev as he's eliminated all of their immediate and immediate range of nuclear missiles and talking about abolishing a lot of them fierce revolt from from the right, a lot of criticism from conservative Republicans in Congress and conservative pundits too. And so both of those sides of Reagan have to be, I think, appreciated and comprehended to understand the full story. And I know there used to be a very popular idea. I think I bought into it honestly for a long time that there was in the middle of Reagan's years in office, the Reagan reversal. This profound shift from the hawkish Ronald Reagan to the more dovish Ronald Reagan. And the big question was, okay, what happened? What changed? But you, I think very effectively in your book kind of reject the whole idea of the reversal. Could you unpack that a little bit and talk about why that's not a good way to understand Reagan? Sure, yes. And thanks for, thanks for bringing that. And that was one of the questions I'd had when I'd started the research in this book several years ago. You know, I was open to there being a Reagan reversal, but I just as you, as you laid out there, I think in this, it just wasn't the case. And I think, you know, the main principle is throughout his eight years as president, Reagan was committed to both strong pressure on the Soviet system and diplomatic outreach. And so the Reagan reversal thesis is more, well, he's a hard liner in the first term, and then he becomes more accommodated in outreach in the second term. And rather, I see quite a bit of that outreach in the first term, and also continued hawkishness and pressure in the second term. And I'll just mention a few examples of this. So in the first term, just, you know, three months into office after he's denounced the Soviets rhetorically a bunch of times and wants his military buildup, after he survives the assassination attempt, he also writes this very moving heartfelt personal letter to Brezhnev, the Soviet leader at the time, saying, Hey, listen, we hold the fate of the world in our hands. Can we be friends? Can we talk? I don't want to blow up the world. After surviving this assassin's bullet, I have even a more strong sense of the need to bring peace. It's really, really committed to peace. And even some of Reagan's more dovish advisors at the State Department think this letter is way too soft. We can't let him send this thing. I could give other examples like that from his first term of that real genuine outreach to the Soviets. But also in the second term, while he is negotiating with Gorbachev, building this really inspiring partnership for peace with Gorbachev, Reagan is keeping up the pressure. This is when he dramatically increases our covert support for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, who, to be rather gruesome about it, are sending hundreds of Soviet soldiers home in body bags every month, being killed by American weapons. And Reagan is authorizing this and accelerating it. So it's not just a rhetorical hardline. He continues the defense buildup. He continues economic pressure on the Soviet Union. He continues confronting them rhetorically as when he, you know, June of 1987, he says, tear down this wall at the Berlin Wall over the objections of all of his advisors who think that that is too provocative. He continues supporting human rights and political dissidents and religious dissidents inside the Soviet Union, even though that's driving Gorbachev crazy. He continues holding on to the strategic defense initiative that, you know, rather fantastical mission, shield vision he has to make, you know, the Soviet nuclear arsenal obsolete. So all these pressure prongs that he continues doing in the, in the second term, while doing the outreach and diplomacy with Gorbachev. And so that's why, you know, he'll occasionally recalibrate, maybe a little more pressure here, a little more outreach here. But those two prongs are there, are there throughout, I think. You mentioned a little while ago that your book is not a biography and yet there is a Ronald Reagan, the man, the personality that emerges in your book. And it strikes me that he's a very unusual peculiar. You used the word a few minutes ago, enigmatic person. Let's talk a little bit about Ronald Reagan, the, the person. I mean, here's an unusual person who is willing to buck the critics on both sides, as you pointed out, is willing to conceive a big vision that is not very popular or really widely held. As you point out, he was his own strategist. He really didn't get these big ideas, you know, from his staff in a way perhaps other presidents have tended to do. Talk a little bit about who he was and how he came to have such an unusual vision and the confidence to push it against a bureaucracy that wasn't always very happy to hear what he had in mind. Yeah. Yeah. Again, a terrific question. And here, I'll certainly share some of my own thoughts and findings from my research, but also I benefited very much from our fellow history faculty member, colleague, Bill Brands, who did a great biography of Reagan and gave me some of these insights too. So first Reagan as a person is a man of paradoxes. So on the one hand, everyone who worked for him or who interacted with them would describe him as this really warm, fun, affable personality, but at the same time, inscrutable and hard to get to know. And so they enjoyed working for him, but none of them really felt like they knew him. And he didn't really have any close friends. Certainly the closest friend he had was Nancy Reagan, you know, the first lady. Other than that, no real close friends. And he has tremendous self-confidence. He's a very inner directed person to use the old habits of the heart term. Some of this comes from his Christian faith. Some of this comes from being at the time the oldest selected president who had spent, you know, several decades before the presidency, thinking about what he believed and being pretty firm in it. Some of it comes from his own reading. Even though he's not an intellectual, he was more of an avid reader than I think people had appreciated and just a man of strong convictions. But at the same time, he is very, so even though he's resolute on what he wants and what his ideas are, he's very conflict averse and he's a terrible manager. And so this is why he, even though he's got his own clear vision of what he wants, he doesn't always communicate it really well to his staff or doesn't enforce it with them. And so this is why every White House has its feuds and divisions, but the Reagan White House much worse than most, right? And this is why you have deep acrimony and feuding and the backbiting and leaking among, among the staff throughout the eight years. And Reagan doesn't like that, but he doesn't really police it very much because he is so conflict averse and just wants everyone to be happy and be happy and get along. So that's, yeah, like he said, he's, I can't pretend to say that I feel like I cracked the code and then, you know, the first, you know, scholar to finally understand everything that was going on inside his head. There still are some puzzles there. We can know a little more now than we used to just as, you know, his diaries have now been, you know, declassified and published. And I read those very closely, quite a bit of his personal correspondence. And then now just in the last few years, a lot of the transcripts of his meetings with heads of states or national security council meetings have been declassified and made available. And so the, the, the private Reagan, the Reagan behind closed doors is more available now to scholars than it was before through these records. And so those, you know, give me some more insights, but again, there still are some, some mysteries. He seems to have at least to my reading of your book, really have booked the dominant views on at least two questions, right? He seems to have believed in contrast to the conventional wisdom that democracy really was gaining the upper hand. It may not have always been visible, but you know, the world was headed in the right direction in Reagan's view. He appears to have believed as well that the Soviet Union was much more fragile economically in particular than much of the conventional wisdom held. What was his experience like in pushing back against, you know, what were some pretty strongly held views, it seems to me, in the American national security bureaucracy throughout his, at least the early parts of his presidency. Yeah. Yeah. So he goes back to when I mentioned him being interdirected. He's also one I've described before as a conviction politician, meaning that he just, he arrives in office with some very deeply held convictions. And most of them, I think he's largely correct. So, you know, I'll tip my hand there, not necessarily all of them, but whether or not you agree or disagree, I think anyone looking at him has to conclude he really believed this stuff. And he held to it very tenaciously. And to mention a few of those, and this gets into how and why he was able or willing to challenge the conventional wisdom on the possibilities of the spread of freedom, of democracy, and also the vulnerabilities of the Soviet system. So first, he just believed as a matter of conviction that democracy is the, you know, the highest form of government, the one most conducive to human dignity and human liberty and human flourishing. He believes similarly that free markets and free enterprise are the best economic systems. He had developed that partly through his own growing up experiences, but also through a lot of his own reading in the 1950s and 60s. He believes that human beings are more innately religious and spiritual people that, you know, most of us throughout human history and around the world are hardwired to believe in some sort of higher power, some sort of transcendence. And so when he looked at Soviet Communism, he saw a system that stood, you know, as an affront to all three of those pillars, right? Rather than democratic self-government, it is a dictatorship, a totalitarian dictatorship, you know, not just saying that people can't vote for their own leaders, but almost trying to control what they think. Of course, instead of a free market economy, it is a command economy where the state owns all the means of production. And then it is officially atheistic and not just as a, you know, tentative belief, but that it actively persecuted religious believers, especially Christians, Christians and Jews. And so Reagan just had this conviction that a system like that is not sustainable because it goes so contrary to his beliefs about human nature, human dignity, the way that it well-functioning society can work. I mean, he knew that it can last for a time, but it required so much control and such an imposition of its own alien dogmas on otherwise unwilling populations. He thought that economy can't continue itself because it's just not going to work. It's not allowing people the freedom of creativity, of private property, of productivity, of prosperity. It's not allowing them a voice of their future, you know, all these different things. And it's not allowing them to believe in worship, believe in and worship God. But he also, throughout the 1970s, and then including early in his time in office, is very intrigued by the human factor and fascinated by what is life actually like behind the iron curtain? What is life like inside the Soviet Union? And so anytime he would have a chance to meet with a Soviet dissident or say an East German dissident or, you know, someone free, you know, because when it comes to the West, who's freed from one of those systems, he would just ask them, you know, what's life like there? And he'd be here overwhelmingly. We don't trust our government. We fear our government. We don't like our government. The bread lines are really long. We're all very despondent about our futures. And we all want to leave and escape to the West if we can. You know, we don't like the war in Afghanistan. We don't like the way our kids are being treated. And so that also made him suspicious here in these personal accounts of people who had a firsthand lived experience with the system, made him suspicious of official economic figures that the Kremlin is putting out or CIA analysis saying, well, we think that the Soviet economy will keep growing for another one to 2% a year and may not be the most productive in the world, but it'll keep going or the Soviet system is really stable. That just flew in the face of his own convictions and what he was hearing from people who had lived under it. Well, you have a lot to say in your book. In fact, just referencing this about Reagan's religious beliefs. And to my eye, this is something that you're really emphasizing in a way that, again, to my knowledge, no previous biographer or historian has really done. Is that something that you expected to find in your study of Reagan? And ultimately, how important was it? Maybe hard to quantify. But at least roughly, how important a factor was that in driving Reagan's decision making? Making him. Yeah. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, this is a big theme of the books you pointed out. I would say I didn't necessarily expect to find it when I started the research, but I was open to finding it. Of course, as you know, some of my previous academic work on the role of religious faith in the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, I guess attuned to looking for as an American president, bringing religious convictions to bear on something. And there are one or two other scholars, Paul Pengor at a liberal arts college in Ohio, who had done a book on Reagan's faith, which I had read, and he had uncovered some interesting stuff and thought, okay, I think there may be something here and I want to explore it more. But again, even with that, I was surprised at just how central it is to Reagan, especially because when I started the research, I knew, okay, he rarely attended church while he's president. And yes, he would use religious language in public, and he'd be appealed to the religious right as part of his court, the court of his political base in his two campaigns. And so I knew that there was what we scholars sometimes call and say, instrumentalist approach to religion there. But what he actually believed and how genuine it was, I was unsure, but was open to open finding. And so that's why, again, as you alluded, once I dove into the research, I found out, wow, there's a lot more here. And some of it comes out in his personal diaries, or letters that he's writing to friends and family, as well, this is someone who has a very genuine and deeply held faith, even if he's somewhat private about it. It's not just something to say reference in a campaign speech, you know, just a few examples. So when he's lying on the operating table in the emergency room at the hospital right after the assassination attempt, and we now know, you know, very comes very close to death there, right, if the bullet would have been just a millimeter more to one side, it probably would have probably killed him. And as he writes in this diary, once he recovers, he says, as I was laying on the operating table, I was praying that God would spare my life. But then I realized, how can I pray that God will save me if I have hatred in my heart towards that confused young man who shot me? And so I prayed that God would forgive that young man because aren't we all lost sheep? And don't we all need God's forgiveness? And again, this is a very intensely personal moment as he's almost dying, he only reports it in his diary, he never gives a speech on this, right? So that's where, you know, we've got to take that, got to take that seriously. And then he later writes that he thinks that God spared him from the assassination from death in part to help end the Cold War and to bring, he says, to end the Cold War and particularly to end the threat of nuclear war and nuclear destruction. And so from that personal faith, you get also that sense of resolve and core inner conviction, which I think is one of the key stuff and understand why he's able to withstand all the criticism and opposition to his policies. One of the, then yet I'll share in this, which brings together the Cold War policy and his personal faith is, as you know, he built a really genuine friendship with Gorbachev over their four years together being in their respective leadership roles. And, you know, they certainly have their very big differences in some ways, some different end goals for Gorbachev. They both want to, you know, bring peace to the Cold War, but Gorbachev wants to preserve Soviet communism and Reagan still wants to end it. But along the way, they build a very genuine friendship and Reagan is just very personally grieved that Gorbachev is an atheist. And it's not just that Reagan doesn't like that Soviet communism is atheistic and that it throws Christians and Jews in the gulag. He's very grieved that his now friend Gorbachev doesn't believe in God. And so their final summit meeting in Moscow in May of 1988, Cold War is already starting to thaw, you know, the tensions are winding down. It's still there, but, you know, they've they've signed and ratified the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty, eliminating, you know, all those, you know, dreadful intermediate-aged nuclear weapons. They're, you know, opening ties between the two countries and other fronts. But Reagan spends a good part of his time with Gorbachev in his final summit meeting, trying to get Gorbachev to believe in God. And it's his very personal thing. And Reagan speaks, you know, very candidly about his grief that his own son Ron is an atheist and says, I really wish I could persuade my own son to believe in God. And I wish I could persuade you to as well. And again, this is not about a Cold War policy or anything. This is just Reagan's own personal faith and personal spiritual convictions and his way of expressing care to Gorbachev. And it's touching to read the transcripts because Gorbachev, on the one hand, is pretty baffled by this. This is not usually what, you know, superpowers are talking about. But Gorbachev also takes it seriously and sees that this is coming from a place of genuine concern. And he doesn't seem to start believing in God, but he says he'll think about it. And he really appreciates this as a gesture of friendship and Reagan's part. So that that was another just very revealing moment for me about the genuineness and depth of his, his faith. Will, you mentioned the, the all important, I mean, to put it mildly, relationship between Reagan and Gorbachev take us into that part of your story. When Reagan first encounters Gorbachev, there's a feeling out process, some skepticism, certainly some vigorous clashes over human rights and, and STI and, and perhaps other issues as well. And yet it over time develops into the much warmer relationship that you just mentioned. Tell us about some perhaps of the key moments in that, in that developing relationship and generally how this developed over time. Sure, yes. And I'm going to rewind a little bit to actually start in 1981. It's because this is again, one of the, I thought, pretty interesting research findings from the book. And, you know, it will be a somewhat controversial one among our fellow scholars, but I think there's a credible argument to be made here. When Reagan first comes into office, as we were talking earlier, he has, he already has a strategy in mind of binding pressure and outreach to the Soviets. So he wants to pressure that system, deter their military, you know, accelerate the cracks and weaknesses in it, but also outreach to Soviet leaders and, and see if they can negotiate, you know, reduce risk of nuclear war. And his main Soviet advisor on the National Security Council staff is Richard Pipes, a Harvard professor, a very eminent scholar of Russian history who was also, you know, a real hardliner, a hawk, and had taken two-year leave from Harvard to work for Reagan. And Pipes and Reagan have this really interesting dialogue as Reagan tasked Pipes with putting together, you know, Reagan's anti-Soviet strategy or his Fulver strategy. And he and Pipes develop a very explicit prong in that strategy, which is that we are not just pressuring the Soviet system to weaken it and deter them from attacking us. We are pressuring it to strengthen its reformist impulses and to produce a reformist leader. And, and I, that was very interesting to me, because it again, it shows that Reagan from the beginning wants to find a reformist leader in the Soviet Union that he can negotiate with, that can be a partner for peace. And it takes, you know, three Soviet leaders and four and a half little over four years for that to actually come along, right? So Brezhnev and a drop-up in Terniko die in quick succession and are not the reformist leaders that Reagan is looking for. But in March of 1985, you know, four years and two months after Reagan takes office, the Politburo selects Gorbachev, who is committed from day one to being a reformist leader. Now I want to be very clear the main reason why Gorbachev is selected by the Politburo is internal Soviet forces and, and, and the internal Soviet system. I'm not saying that Reagan dictates the Soviet, you shall pick Gorbachev. But I do think it's very clear that part of, because of Reagan's strategy of pressure was to kind of back the Kremlin into a corner where they feel like, okay, we, other ways aren't working. We need to go the reformist path or at least to strengthen some of those reformers. That's at least got to be part of the story. Gorbachev come into power. And even if it's only a small part of the story, here's why it matters the most. My title, the chapter where Gorbachev comes to power waiting for Gorbachev. Reagan recognizes and embraces Gorbachev a lot sooner than most other, you know, members of his administration or, you know, Soviet experts, he, because he'd been looking for a reformer. And if you're looking for something, you're going to be more likely to find it. And so because he'd been looking for a Soviet reformer to come along, he thinks, okay, Gorbachev, I think this, this may be the one. Not convinced at first, right? There's a testing out. So again, to your, you know, question about, you know, some of these iconic moments, their first summit is in Geneva in November of 1985. And by the conventional standards of evaluating summits, it's a failure because they don't come out with any big new agreements, right? That's usually historically when American presidents would meet with a Soviet leader, you want to see some policy agreements, some treaties, arms control exchanges, economic liberalization and like that, they don't get any of that. But what happens in Gorbachev, in their two days together in Geneva is they spend a lot of time together one on one, and a lot of time together in groups, ends up being about 12, 14 hours total, they're negotiating sessions. And they're really testing each other out, they both come away from it thinking, this is the guy I can do business with. And they even say that they're closing, they're closing press conference, probably go out on stage, you know, Reagan turns to Gorbachev and says, you know, kind of laughs, he says, your hardliners back in Moscow and my hardliners back in America are not going to like us becoming friends, but but let's, you know, let's essentially torment all of them and let's really, let's really do something transformative here. And Gorbachev laughs and says, you know, absolutely, we can. The next big one of course is Reykjavik a year later, October of 1986. And again, by the conventional standards of summits, it also is a failure and it's even it's very much seen as long time because they don't come up with any tangible agreements or or new policies. But at Reykjavik, they both push each other as far as they can, and they both agree that they want to abolish all nuclear weapons. This is stunning, right? No American Soviet leader had ever come close to anything about this about this before. And again, reading the transcripts of those meetings, you can also see them racing out do each other. Okay, let's cut half our arsenal. No, let's cut half of our nuclear missiles. No, let's cut half of all of our nuclear weapons, our bombs, our missiles, all that. No, let's cut them all, right, limit all of them. It falls apart and, you know, we won't go into all the details that it falls apart over a disagreement over SDI over Reagan wanting to hold on to his vision of an anti-missile anti-missile system. And we can, you know, talk more about that, if you'd like. But the fact that they both realize, wow, this guy is willing to take tremendous political risks. This guy is willing to be incredibly visionary in moving out of that steel Cold War paradigm of mutual assured destruction and a balance of terror. And we've both got to hold on to the, you know, some amount of these nuclear arsenals. And that is why just a few months later, they turn that failed summit into the incredible success of abolishing all intermediate-range nuclear missiles, you know, withdrawing them from Europe, and then starting to cut conventional arsenals and moving towards that transformation in the Cold War. Nicely done. You covered on a lot of ground. Sorry, I know. I can speak across a very long period of time in a very complicated relationship. Will, just with an eye on the, let me actually take a moment here and remind everyone who's listening, please enter your questions into the Q&A button at the bottom of the Zoom screen. And I'll turn the floor over to Sarah McCracken in a few minutes here too, so that Will can respond to questions from all of you who are out there listening. Will, though just a couple more from me. First of all, your book is clearly very admiring of Reagan. No question about that. And yet, as you move through his administration, you do note some weaknesses and problems from time to time. What is the single most striking weakness, or if it's not too strong a word, failure on the part of the Reagan administration as it made foreign policy? Yeah, there's a few I could mention, but I'll mention two, which are related to each other. The first is I touched on earlier the management failures, just not releasing the feuding and backbiting and squabbling and divisions within his team. Because that over time wasn't just about people being upset with each other or slowing down policy implementation or leaking too much. That, in some real tangible ways, produced some terrible policy outcomes. I mean, that's part of the story of the Iran-Contra scandal, which would certainly be one of the big feelings. But it does bring me to the second one, which is overall Reagan's Middle East policy. It's hard to see it as a success, and there's some real failures within it. Now, the Middle East is difficult. I'll give him that. He inherits a difficult hand there. But the terrorist bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983 kills 241 Marines. That's a tragedy. I mean, the fault for it, of course, is on Hezbollah. But when you look at what leads up to that, it is partly that Reagan just has a very confused, uncertain, unclear, ambivalent policy, which combines the worst of all worlds, where the Defense Department, the Pentagon, didn't want the Marines there at all. The State Department wanted the Marines there in a much more forceful way to try to end the Lebanese Civil War and get Israel to withdraw to a complicated situation. And because Reagan wouldn't arbitrate between his squabbling Pentagon and State Department, he chooses the middling option, which is, well, let's put the Marines there, but they can't load their weapons. They can't guard themselves too well. They can't really fire back if they're fired upon. And so they're effectively sitting ducks, and they're not able to even accomplish the mission. And that is in part why they're so vulnerable to the suicide attack. Then related to that is out of that, then Hezbollah, sensing American weakness, decides that it can also engage in a spree of hostage-taking. And Reagan then reverses his own stated policy of we won't negotiate with terrorists and we won't sell arms to Iran by negotiating with terrorists and selling the arms to Iran and not even being able to get the hostages released and violating American law along the way. And so more things I could say there, but the core management leads pretty directly to a lot of the confusions and failures on his Middle East policy. Well, let me wrap up with just a question or two that perhaps unfairly takes you a bit beyond the chronology of your book and ask you to think about Ronald Reagan and how he is understood in more recent times. It seems to me Reagan is widely admired, especially clearly among Republicans, among conservatives. And yet it seems that a lot of his core ideas that you really do such a great job teasing out in your book have really vanished from a current day political debate and from the Republican Party. That sense of optimism, that sense of the attachment to free trade, the openness to the celebration of the diversity of the American public, even by partisanship in some ways. Why do you think that Reagan remains so popular, kind of the gold standard in some ways, when people have in many cases really rejected a lot of what he stood for? Yeah, no, I've also puzzled over that. And again, I, you know, as I hope readers will see, I wrote the book as a pure history. So it ends with the end of Reagan's presidency, you know, sketching things out in the epilogue. So I don't try to do a concluding chapter of what's this mean for American politics or the Republican Party of the 21st century. But since you asked, all right, I've given you some thoughts. I think part of it is by most standards, and I certainly call this time, his presidency is a success, right? It just even look at the outcomes, you know, peaceful end of the Cold War collapses, so the Union expansion of freedom, renewal of the American economy and American strength. And, you know, most Americans are, you know, Democrats and Republicans are pretty pragmatic and want things to work. And so when you just point to a presidency that on balance is pretty successful, and led by such a charismatic figure as well, and he's electorally successful, so you write the landslide reelection 1984, then a successor, you know, being elected in 1988, so it's almost like three Reagan terms. So that I think is a big part of why there is, you know, nostalgia for him among a lot of today's today's Republicans. But what I hope my book shows are people who care to read it and see what his policies were is Reagan's successful policies comes from I want to rattle off a number of things which I think will speak to themselves, strong commitment to allies, strong commitment to open trade, strong commitment to an optimistic and unifying vision of America, strong commitment especially after his first couple years to human rights and democracy. And again, you know, we'll talk more about that. That is where he does reverse himself somebody by 83, 84, he no longer wants to support military dictators or anti-communist. He wants, you know, democracy for everybody. He really sees America as a bastion of hope and opportunity for immigrants and those seeking political asylum, those who have, especially those who have suffered in other countries. And that's why he used, you know, very pro-immigration. And then this certainly a very strong commitment to military strength, but with that a commitment to diplomacy and negotiations too. So those are the ingredients of his successful policies. And, you know, I still call myself, I'm still Republican today, you know, so my message to my fellow Republicans is if you want to valorize Reagan, you want to understand why his policies were successful, well, look at those particular convictions that he held and I think and hope some of those should still have some purchase today. Well, I think you're hinting at an answer to my very next question, which is simply, what are the lessons of Ronald Reagan's management of foreign policy that we might do well to think about today? Yeah, again, this is one I've certainly given a lot of thought to and has come up in other settings, but which I don't get into explicitly in the book. So, you know, the first always have to, you know, you'll appreciate this march in my fellow historian, always have to be the good historian and say, well, you know, the 1980s were very different in a lot of ways than our moment today, but they're, you know, US-China and it's different from the US-Soviet Union and you know, any number of differences. That said, you know, a few general principles that I do think still are worth revisiting are this concept of integrating force and diplomacy. So, too often in our prevailing debates these days, we'll talk about, well, we want a diplomatic solution rather than the use of force like that and when we look at some of Reagan's biggest policy successes, it is often when he is engaged in diplomacy but backed up by the incredible threat of force or at least backed up by a strong military, which he's very reluctant to actually use and, you know, he wants to negotiate successfully without having to fire shots, but there's that threat of it. And this is where George Schultz's secretary of state is such an indispensable partner, I should have mentioned him sooner. Another is doing a careful assessment of what America's traditional strengths really are, our alliances, you know, our allies, Reagan is so committed to them, our open society, our values, not in a chauvinistic way, but values especially in so far as they can be inspiring to others. This real sense of the free world actually meaning something. And then getting the theory of the case right with how we understand our main adversaries are challenges. And so, you know, one way I've summarized Reagan's strategic vision or strategic revolution with the Soviet Union in this whole, I will apply this to China today, is his here, the case was that the Cold War is fundamentally a battle of ideas that happens to be a great power competition between two rival superpowers. And most of his previous Cold War predecessors had seen the Cold War is primarily a, you know, superpower competition or super standoff great power competition that happens to have an ideological component. And so, when Reagan reverses that theory of the case and puts the battle of ideas first, that enables him to see some of the Soviet systems vulnerabilities and ways that others hadn't necessarily fully appreciated. And so, I do think there's something to be said to putting that theory of the case a little more on the forefront of what we're dealing with Russia or China today of there is a battle of ideas going on, you know, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have a very fundamentally different set of convictions about not just how they want their countries run, but how they want the world to work. And even if the particulars may be different, I think that general Reaganist sense of taking that competition of ideas seriously and engaging in it more directly is also something worth with emulating. Well, Professor will in Bowdoin, I want to say a huge word of thanks for this really fascinating conversation and an even bigger word of congratulations on the publication of the peacemaker Ronald Reagan, the Cold War and the world on the brink a really fantastic book and a seminal contribution on any number of controversial and tremendously important subjects. Great to be with you will. Thanks again. Thank you so much, Mark. I enjoyed it. And now we questions from the audience. Yes, please. Now, let me turn it over to my colleague, Sarah McCracken, who will offer some questions. Thank you. Well, that was terrific listening. The first question is from Jeff. And he says you mentioned Schultz and I think Piper, he said among Reagan's staff, who was the most influential in the path he took with the Soviet Union, especially in understanding their economy left them vulnerable? Yeah, it's all mentioned two advisors there. Certainly George Schultz is one and he plays a very prominent role in the book. I try to make a case for him being the greatest secretary of state since since Dean Atchison at least and maybe even further back than that. And, you know, many attributes of Schultz I could highlight, but a couple on this particular question about dealing with Soviets is Schultz was a trained economist. He had a PhD in economics from MIT. He had been OMB director and then secretary of the Treasury in the Nixon administration. Schultz is the the father of the G seven, as we now know, like he really creates that back in the 1970s. And so he's the most economically literate secretary of state in history. And he also, you know, shared Reagan's sense of the Soviet economy's vulnerability in ways that others others haven't seen. But Schultz was also very committed to diplomacy, and yet diplomacy backed by that threat of force. And so and so he is a very effective alter ego and partner for Reagan. The other advisor I'll mention who is a less known one. But one why I try to resurrect in the book as very important is Bill Clark. And Clark was Reagan's second national security advisor. He serves in the job for just two years. But he had he was probably Reagan's closest, the closest to Reagan personally of all of his advisors, you know, the caveat that Reagan didn't have very many close friends. Clark had been his chief of staff when he was governor in California back in the 60s and 70s. He's a fellow rancher and cowboy so they'd like to go horseback riding together. And Clark really saw his role as taking some of Reagan's ideas and strategic convictions about the Cold War, and putting them into much more operational strategies. And so Clark, you know, spends his two years as national security advisor, pulling together some pretty sophisticated strategic blueprints channeling Reagan's ideas but making sure that the rest of the American government actually follows and implements them. So he's also very important advisor. Thanks. This next question says your book clearly documents that the Soviets genuinely genuinely believed that SDI the strategic defense initiative would render their ballistic missiles ineffective against the US. And this fact was important in Reagan's success and the subsequent arms reduction talks. The Soviet Union fell in 1991. SDI was abandoned by 1993. Are we back to mad as the cornerstone of our nuclear arms policy? Oh, okay. Good question for the other contemporary moment. But I first want to elaborate and I appreciate the questioner because they do get a lot of the history correct there. That, you know, SDI never becomes operational during Reagan's time as president. You know, he announces the plan to develop it in March of 1983. You know, he gets Congress to appropriate some money for it. But it's just really this idea. And a lot of scientists were very skeptical that it could ever work. A lot of arms control experts actually worried it could work, but they didn't like it. They thought it was really destabilizing. But it's very key to Reagan's vision of transcending the balance of terror, transcending mutual assured destruction and rendering what was a Soviet advantage. They had a lot more ICBMs than the United States did rendering that a liability or at least, at least impotence. And even though most expert opinion didn't think it could work, Gorbachev really thought it could work. And he was terrified of it. And he was, you know, enamored of American technological prowess and innovation and our leading economy. And he thought like those essentially, you know, those Americans can invent anything that they put their mind to. So, yeah, so it's the question rightly notes, you know, the border end and the SDI program is wound down. But some of the technologies the SDI was working on are employed today, you know, on a smaller scale. So the Patriot missile defense system that we're sharing with the Ukrainians right now, some of Israel's missile defense systems, some of the other systems the Ukrainians are using are at least derived from that original research program that Reagan launched. And now as we are looking at, you know, the renewed threat of the Russian nuclear arsenal and frankly, a growing threat from China's small but growing nuclear arsenal, as well as, you know, North Korea's existing and growing nuclear arsenal and missile program. Yes, I'm not a scientist. I can't talk about the technical feasibility of, you know, in a more elaborate missile defense. But I'm glad that our government is at least doing plenty of some research and development on that. And I very much hope that it can be accelerated and brought to some sort of some sort of successful opera operaization. This is a question from Mark says obviously times are different now, but did Reagan have a perspective during his presidency about China, including what might be the future prospects for that country and how the US should engage with them. Same for North Korea. Thanks, Mark. Great question. And I'm actually working on a spinoff article on this, but I haven't finished it yet. So this is a good, good prop. I'll give you a little bit of a preview. Yes, Reagan thought a lot about China. And it was one of the other themes in my book is just how important Asia is overall to Reagan's global strategy. So again, that's, if you do get a chance to read the book, something you'll see, but a few of the highlights of his approach to China. When he takes office, he inherits the opening to China that Nixon had started, and then Carter had accelerated. And so Reagan inherits this paradigm of China is now America's most important partner in Asia for countering the Soviet Union. And because China was anti-Soviet at the time, and that is I think a overall a admirable and successful strategic innovation that Nixon and Carter had developed. However, Reagan comes in office thinking that that has been taken too far. And his initial priorities in Asia while he when he becomes president are first deepening America's partnership with Japan. So even though Japan is technically a treaty ally of democracy, they're mostly seen as a trade rival, an economic rival. And so Reagan wants to prioritize Japan as the most important American partner in Asia over China. This is why he first visits Japan in 1983 and doesn't go to China until a year later. The other thing that he wanted to do was to rebalance America's commitment to Taiwan. He worried that Nixon and Carter had in embracing China had jettisoned Taiwan too much, left Taiwan too vulnerable. And so also Reagan's first couple of years in office, he goes back, he sends a message to Chinese, we're going to keep supporting Taiwan, we're going to support Taiwan, we're going to provide arms to them, and we don't want there being any risk of you invading them. And so after Reagan feels like he gets things solidified with Japan as our main partner, and with Taiwan as another important partner who is a little more protected or emboldened against Chinese aggression, then he really does some outreach to Beijing. And he wants to deepen our trade ties with Beijing. He wants to keep the anti-Soviet partnership going. China becomes one of our most important partners for supplying the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, the covert action there. We do a lot of intelligence share with China. And so he actually is able to manage the China relationship on the shared interest of countering the Soviets. But he also really starts pressing China on human rights and democracy. He's appealing to them to release imprisoned Catholic priests and host church pastors. He gives a couple of speeches over there, encouraging them to embrace democratic values and principles. He knows it's an uphill battle. And so even though he wants to see their economy grow and them to be an important strategic partner, he also is very wary of the Chinese Communist Party and does not want to see it continue. But the pragmatist in him knows you only do one core board at a time. At the time, the main adversary was the Soviet Union. And so he forges that kind of partnership and convenience with China while putting it in the context of their not our main priority in Asia compared to Japan and Taiwan. So it's a very interesting story. So there's another question that relates to China. So I'll go ahead and pose it now. This is from Steve. And he says, would you agree with the following that today, Biden's strategy in relation to China is influenced or heavily influenced and informed by Reagan's convictions during the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War? Good question, Steve. I've not met President Biden or asked him this directly. So I will only speculate here. I don't know how much he has influenced Reagan on this. But of course, he was a much younger senator during the Reagan era. He certainly knew Ronald Reagan and observed his Cold War strategy up close. And so he'll be very familiar with it. I can certainly see some seeds of some Reagan principles. And so the way that Biden is trying to repair or deepen ties with America's allies in Asia, especially Japan and South Korea and Australia and now bringing India in as a new partner to help counter China. That's a very Reaganist principle. The way that Biden is trying to redeploy American military assets in Asia to protect our allies, especially a partner like Taiwan from potential Chinese invasion, but to deter any other Chinese military adventurism. I think that's certainly a Reaganist principle. I would like to see Biden do more on human rights and religious freedom inside China. I'd like to see him. I'm glad that he's declared the genocide against the Uyghurs a genocide. But I'd like to see more there. I think it's the right thing to do. But also that would certainly be taken a page out of the Reagan playbook. And similarly, I'd like to see the Biden administration do more to provide new sources of information, radio broadcasts, internet access to the Chinese people who otherwise are dealing with the Chinese Communist Party propaganda and not much exposure to outside ideas. That was very key to Reagan's strategy towards the Soviets of trying to put in literature and broadcasting in that information warfare, if you will. I'd like to see us do more of that with China. Question about NATO. He says, do you write about Reagan's sense of Russian history and the Russian fear of being encircled by potential enemies seeking its destruction? Did Reagan have a view about the possible and subsequent admission to NATO of the former Soviet states bordering Russia? Yeah, it's a really good question. I don't know. Now, I'll give a little bit more of an answer there, but I just want to say I can't point you to any, I'm not aware of any statements from Reagan after he left office on my support, you know, these former Soviet satellites, you know, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, being admitted to NATO or not. He may have made one of those statements, but I'm not aware of it. But while you rightly note from the book, he was certainly very mindful of Russian history and Russia's fear of, you know, invasions coming from the West, whether it's Napoleon in the 19th century or Nazi Germany in the 20th century. Reagan was also very committed to self-determination. It's very important to him that each individual country be able to choose its own path forward, including choosing which organizations it will be it will be a part of. While in office, he was pretty supportive of more autonomy for Soviet republics like Ukraine, the Baltics, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia. And so I would think that he would have overall been supportive of these former Warsaw Pact satellites who really wanted to join NATO in the 1990s and asked to. And of course, the Clinton administration was supportive of that as well. That was that was an American policy, but, you know, no one was coerced into joining NATO. This was really what a lot of those those countries countries wanted. And that's pretty that that welcoming of their own self-determination is a pretty consistent Reagan principle. And even though he was mindful of Russian Russian fears there, he also thought that Russians were way too paranoid. And he spent a lot of time trying to reassure the Soviets, we're not trying to do a preemptive strike on you. You know, we're not out to to invade you. Knock off with the paranoia. I'll get to maybe one or two more questions. This one says at an LBJ library program in 2011 Gorbachev said that Reagan's tear down this wall speech and Reagan's hard line against the USSR was not the primary in the downfall of Soviet Union, that it was more of the disenchantment with old communist regime by a new Russian generation. What's your reaction? And did Reagan use that to kind of play as part of his greater his hand, I guess? Yeah, no, this is a really good question because it is something that, you know, scholars continue to debate and puzzle over, you know, what are the factors? What are the main causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Iron Curtain? And, you know, I first want to say it is a whole combination of things. It's the structural factors, it's Gorbachev's reforms, it's the internal drive that the peoples of the Warsaw Pact countries, the peoples of the Soviet Union itself had, especially the younger generation for a better life, all of those are playing in. But I do think that American policy, both the outside pressures that the Reagan administration was applying on the Soviet system, as well as the support that the Reagan administration was providing for these dissidents and these other people who want a better life, that that's an important part of the story, right? The internal Soviet developments are not happening in vacuum, they are in part being shaped by these external factors and external forces. And even the support and embrace that Reagan is giving Gorbachev to encourage Gorbachev to continue on those reforms, right? I mean, that also is emboldening for Gorbachev to accelerate his reforms. And he'll often even say, look, we can't keep up in this arms race with the Americans anymore, they've lured us into, you know, we can't deal with the economic pressures that the arms race and our own and, you know, American sanctions and other things are putting on us. So he would often nod to American pressures himself. Again, tear down this wall versus the full line is Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall. So Reagan knew that the Soviet Union had put up the Berlin Wall and he wanted them to take it down. Of course, it is the people of Berlin who tear down the wall themselves. Yeah, Gorbachev makes the very, I think, visionary and courageous decision not to send in the troops, not to send in, you know, the Soviet army to protect the wall and to crush any of the demonstrators there. And so he certainly, like I said, is an essential part of the story too. But I will, as you probably can see from my book, give Reagan and American policy a little more credit than Gorbachev necessarily wants to give it or at least did when he was here in 2011. Thank you. And with that, I will turn it back over to Phil Barnes who will conclude us this evening. Thank you, Will and Martin, Mark Lawrence and Sarah McCrippen for another very special afternoon. As I know, at this time each week, many of us in the audience are members of UT Holley or friends of the LBJ Library or perhaps both. If not, please check us out. Both organizations offer a wide variety of outstanding in-person and virtual programs, much like the one that we shared today. And thank all of you for tuning in. We will be back next Thursday, February 9th at 4 p.m. for a conversation with Lynn Hong T. Nguyen on Richard Nixon and the end of the Vietnam War. Much has been written about America's war and the other side's leadership and its conflicts remain a mystery. In her book, Professor Nguyen unlocks the industry for us. Don't miss it. Goodbye for now.