Book Review: The INF Treaty of 1987: A Reappraisal by Philipp Gassert, Tim Geiger and Hermann Wentker (eds)

Abstract

escape this milieu; he had to work within it. His embrace of human rights, what Søndergaard calls Reagan’s ‘turnaround’ (chapter 2), set his administration up for a series of confrontations with Congress on a shared moral playing field. Human rights, of course, were defined according to ideological position. The Democrats opposed rightist regimes in Latin America; Republicans condemned Communist ones in the East. However, both used the language of human rights to agitate for their respective positions. Intriguingly, both sides, as Søndergaard notes, were essentially silent on China. The PRC had, over the preceding three decades, caused more human misery than all the bad governments American leader set themselves against in the same period, but received no censure. Given China’s contemporary relevance in debates about human rights, this might have been given more attention by the author. In consistently clear prose, devoid of unnecessary jargon and theorizing, Søndergaard lays out his case studies. In each, Reagan’s conservative vision of human rights – construed as essentially civil and political rights – met the more expansive emphasis of Democrats – who saw human rights as fundamentally economic and social. Reagan Republicans had begun the 1980s convinced the Democrat position was weak handwringing, an excuse for endless governmental tinkering; they left it with a vision of human rights that had enormously expanded the scope of US power, and which arguably led directly to the demise of the USSR, 1989–91. The book will make a lasting contribution to our understanding of the foreign policy continuity across the final decades of the Cold War. Carter and Reagan inhabited a national and international terrain that was more similar than different, and each deployed a set of moral tenets to aid their navigation of it. Søndergaard has written a sequel to Barbara Keys’ Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (2014). Like her, he has obliged us to rethink easy caricatures of US power. Søndergaard reminds us that American politics is sometimes compromised but often advantaged by its endemic contestation over moral questions.