The United States’ strategy of democracy promotion most notably came to attention in the period following the 9/11 attacks in September 2001. In the wake of US interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, President George W. Bush resolved to spread democracy in both countries.

Prior to 9/11, Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton both embraced to varying degrees the post-Cold War role of the US in promoting and extending democracy abroad.

Historiographically, the post-Cold war period is well covered,Footnote ¹ yet, as, the editors of this book note, democracy promotion in the Cold War has been understudied. The Reagan Administration, the Cold War, and the Transition to Democracy Promotion, edited by Robert Pee and William Michael Schmidli, attempts to fill this gap by arguing that US democracy-promotion efforts after the Cold War had strong and enduring roots in the Cold War administration of Ronald Reagan, and were in fact a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

To date, however, studies of the Reagan presidency tend to focus to a greater extent on his nuclear abolitionism as the driving force in ultimately helping to end the Cold War, or the heightened militaristic and covert nature of his presidency, and the use of the CIA to aggressively roll back communism in Central America. The issue of democracy promotion that filters through other strands of his presidency is often missed, but in his chapter, titled “Recreating the Cold War Consensus: Democracy Promotion and the Crisis of American Hegemony,” Schmidli argues, for example, that the clandestine Iran–Contra operation was in fact part of Reagan's democracy-promotion strategy (78). This fact was largely missed at the time, due to the illegalities of the affair, which became the focus of the ensuing Congressional investigation, but Schmidli refers to the fact that Oliver North himself referred to Iran–Contra as “Project Democracy” (78).

The book is divided into four main sections; the first details Reagan's shift away from Jimmy Carter's “failed” approach to human rights and towards a renewed emphasis on democracy promotion, and the ideological and strategic “institutional change” that facilitated this move.

The second focusses on US democracy-promotion efforts in the Soviet Union, and Reagan's “dynamic détente” approach in pressuring the Soviets to implement internal reforms based around human rights. This section also includes the rise and significant role of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), in supporting and funding government opposition groups in Poland between 1984 and 1989.

Part Three covers democracy promotion in the Third World, in places such as Central and South America and Asia. The last section of the book sums up the legacy of the Reagan administration, detailing the impact of its democracy-promotion strategies on successive post-Cold War governments. This approach works well and helps to delineate the nuances of the administration's region-specific approach to democracy promotion.

Of particular interest are two chapters on Uruguay and the Philippines, areas usually overlooked in the historiographical scholarship in favour of Reagan's anticommunist struggles in Central America. The book argues that both countries were of immense strategic importance to the US, and showcase Reagan's attitude to fostering democracy in specific Third World regions. In the case of Uruguay, author Debbie Sharnak contends that it provides an illuminating and unique example of the administration's stance on human rights and democracy promotion. From the outset of his presidency, the country was a priority for Reagan, who was interested in Uruguayan efforts to “rebuild democratic institutions and return to its democratic traditions” (189).

As regards the Philippines, Sharnak contends that this is where the roots of the neoconservative post-Cold War agenda, which found its fullest expression during the presidency of George W. Bush, lay. As a case study, the Philippines is cited as a prime example of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine and, as such, the Reagan administration believed it could be liberalized by supporting “authoritarian allies” such as Ferdinand Marcos.

The editors argue that ultimately the Reagan administration's transition to an active strategy of democracy promotion (which became more marked in Reagan's second term) was Reagan's attempt to reforge the political consensus of the early Cold War which had collapsed in the 1970s after Vietnam. The mechanism by which Reagan pursued this was via a combination of quiet diplomacy and funding of civil-society/democratic groups by the NED.

Using new archival evidence and building on the work of Nicholas Bouchet and Henry R. Nau,Footnote ² this book adds a valuable new dimension to the study of the Reagan administration, which moves beyond the usual narratives of his aggressive Cold War presidency to portray Reagan as a President who made democracy promotion a key aspect of his foreign policy, and who used it as a shrewd means of achieving his anticommunist ends.