WTH Should I Read This Summer? The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink by Will Inboden
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 16 August 2023
⏱️ 42 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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Summary
The What the Hell crew continues our summer reading series! Our next pick is The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink. The Peacemaker’s focus is Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, adding to previous research with recently declassified national security documents. But just as importantly, the history presented reminds us why the challenges we face today – socialism rebranded, struggles for sovereignty in Ukraine and Taiwan – are not novel. In fact, it is pretty simple to guess where Reagan might have stood in 2023. Inboden underscores as well that, contrary to popular opinion, the fall of the Soviet Union under Reagan was never inevitable, but required a real US policy shift. It is worth the read (or, if you are like Marc, the audiobook listen) to remember the Cold War muscles the US built not too long ago, or even just to remember what decorum and strength in leadership looks like in government.
Bonus: Reagan’s legacy lives on at the Reagan Institute; listen to our podcast on their summer survey here.
William Inboden is the Professor and Director of the Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida. He previously served as William Powers, Jr. Chair and Executive Director of the Clements Center for National Security, Associate Professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, and Distinguished Scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, all at the University of Texas-Austin. He also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Texas National Security Review. Inboden’s other current roles include Associate with the National Intelligence Council, member of the CIA Historical Advisory Panel, member of the State Department’s Historical Advisory Council, and Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.2 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. Thanks for listening. Here's our show. What the hell's going on? What the hell is going on? What the hell is going on? I don't know what the hell is talking about. You don't have to know what the hell is on it. What hell's the matter with these guys? We don't know what's going on. What hell's going on? |
| 0:01.1 | Who in God's name |
| 0:21.8 | knows what it's all about. |
| 0:36.9 | Welcome to our podcast. |
| 0:38.3 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:40.3 | Mark, what the hell is going on this summer? |
| 0:42.3 | So we're still in August, Danny, and this summer is going on, and we're continuing our summer |
| 0:47.0 | book series, What the Hell Should I Read this summer? |
| 0:50.0 | And today, we've invited Will In Bowden, who's a very good friend of ours, who's written an amazing book on Ronald Reagan called The Peacemaker. |
| 0:57.6 | Ronald Reagan, the Cold War and the World on the Brink. |
| 1:00.2 | And we're having Amman to talk about the Reagan legacy and what it means to us today. |
| 1:03.6 | The bottom line is, especially now given what we are seeing going on with Russia, with Russia and China, with Ukraine, all of these |
| 1:13.0 | questions about the end of the Cold War are vitally important. And one other little footnote |
| 1:18.7 | that I bring up in the interview as well, now that socialism has gone through a complete and |
| 1:24.8 | total rebrand, all the more reason for you to read this book. |
| 1:29.8 | So you can understand through the eyes of one of our greatest presidents how absolutely |
| 1:35.1 | bloody awful it really was. |
| 1:38.5 | And the other thing, the other reason to look forward is I've just been dismayed looking |
| 1:43.2 | at some people on the right |
| 1:44.7 | who seem to be on the wrong side of the war in Ukraine, who seem to think that Putin is some |
| 1:49.3 | sort of good guy or at least somebody we shouldn't care about and how the Ukrainians are the |
... |
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