If anyone ever doubted that America was God’s chosen country, the events of the 1980s should have been reassuring. Electing Ronald Reagan, a onetime movie star, to lead them, to determine their future in a world of extraordinary complexity, with nuclear holocaust a hair’s breadth away, was the ultimate act of faith by the American people. Their faith did not go unrewarded.

Reagan was a man of unusual charm, with an appealing self-deprecating sense of humor. He was a likeable man, who shared the nostalgia many Americans felt for the days of American hegemony. He offered himself as their leader at a time when their economy was a shambles, when they were still heartsick from defeat in Vietnam and from the humiliation of the Iranian hostage crisis. Once in the White House, he restored the nation’s confidence in itself and its future. He was the charismatic leader his people wanted. His impact was reminiscent of that of his early idol, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had assured hungry Americans, frightened by the grinding misery of the Great Depression, that they had “nothing to fear, but fear itself,” that they had “a rendezvous with destiny.”

Unlike Roosevelt, Reagan knew little about the world in which the United States had long been the dominant power. He was uninformed – and not terribly interested. Details, such as the political orientation of various governments, bored and eluded him. Efforts by foreign policy specialists to explain were often futile. He ignored briefing books and dozed while the intricacies of military strategy were presented to him.