Ronald Reagan

Ronald Reagan appears as the president whose administration made the fight against international terrorism a defining public claim while, in the book’s account, sponsoring or supporting extensive violence abroad. Nicaragua provides the clearest example: Reagan invoked emergency powers and an embargo against a government resisting U.S. attack, while his administration rejected legal condemnation of its own use of force. The book connects that record to a broader argument that “counterterrorism” can function as political language that condemns violence by adversaries while obscuring violence by powerful states.

The declared war on terrorism

The Reagan administration came to power proclaiming that international terrorism, allegedly financed around the world by the Soviet Union, was the greatest threat to the United States and its allies. It described the danger as a cancer or plague against civilization and promised a relentless campaign to eradicate it. The book sets this rhetoric against the administration’s record: it says the United States organized large-scale international terrorist campaigns, leading to condemnation by the International Court of Justice, and supported destructive operations elsewhere.

The contrast is not merely between a stated aim and an imperfect outcome. The book argues that the official definition of terrorism—coercive violence directed at civilians for political ends—could also describe state policy. It identifies low-intensity warfare as official doctrine and says its usual definitions closely resemble the U.S. government’s definitions of terrorism. In that framing, the category does not belong only to non-state groups or to the adversary: it can describe actions carried out by governments themselves.

Nicaragua and the politics of emergency

The confrontation with Nicaragua exposes this contradiction in legal and political terms. Reagan declared a national emergency on May 1, 1985, and renewed it annually, asserting that the Nicaraguan government’s policies and actions posed an extraordinary and unusual threat to U.S. national security and foreign policy. His administration also imposed an embargo, presenting it as a response to Nicaraguan aggression in Central America. The book reverses that description: Nicaragua was resisting an American attack, and the International Court of Justice rejected Washington’s allegations about Nicaraguan aggression as unfounded.

The dispute also concerned Nicaragua’s ability to defend itself. The book describes U.S. pressure on allies to stop supplying arms, with the hope that Russia would step in. When rumors circulated that Nicaragua had received Russian fighter aircraft to defend its airspace, the claims were false; nevertheless, some U.S. commentators suggested that, if true, the United States should bomb Nicaragua because the aircraft would threaten American security. The discussion emphasizes how little attention was paid to Nicaragua’s asserted right of self-defense, even as the country faced attacks on civilian targets, including farming cooperatives and clinics.

Law, rhetoric, and the double standard

The book juxtaposes Reagan’s observance of Law Day with his treatment of international law. In 1984, he celebrated May 1 as Law Day and praised the historic alliance between law and liberty, warning that without law there would be chaos and disorder. The day before, however, he had announced that the United States would disregard the forthcoming International Court judgment against his administration for unlawful force and treaty violations in Nicaragua. After the Court ordered the United States to end its crimes of international terrorism, the book says, the administration immediately made matters worse.

The date carries an additional contrast: outside the United States, May 1 is a day of solidarity with workers’ struggles. The book uses this juxtaposition to underscore the distance between Reagan’s public invocation of law and the administration’s refusal to accept legal judgment when it constrained U.S. action. Nicaragua’s resort to legal means rather than bombing Washington is presented as a model of how a targeted country attempted to answer force through law, despite the limited effect of that effort.

From Reagan’s campaign to later policy

The book treats the Reagan-era campaign not as an isolated episode but as an earlier version of the later “war on terror.” It argues that the rhetoric of a global threat, and the practice of applying the label of terrorism selectively, persisted across administrations. The attacks of September 11 did not, in this account, create the underlying political objectives; they gave governments an opportunity to intensify existing policies, including repression at home and abroad.

The author also connects the Reagan record to the broader structure of U.S. military power. The later expansion of American bases in Central Asia is interpreted as helping secure access to regional resources and complementing a network oriented toward the Persian Gulf. This is the author’s strategic reading of the consequences of the later war in Afghanistan, not a claim about Reagan personally. Reagan’s relevance lies instead in the precedent the book identifies: a public war against terrorism could coexist with state violence and could help normalize a vocabulary that treated powerful states’ coercion differently from comparable acts by their enemies.