William Michael Schmidli, a US foreign relations historian at Leiden University in the Netherlands, has made another major contribution to the study of the late Cold War period. His first book, The Fate of Freedom Elsewhere: Human Rights and US Cold War Policy toward Argentina (2013), is the best bilateral study we have of US policy toward a South American country during the Jimmy Carter administration. This new book primarily focuses on US relations with Nicaragua during the Ronald Reagan administration. Readers may at times misunderstand Schmidli's own perspective, even in his title. When he writes about Reagan's policies, he sounds like a Reaganite. And when he writes about Nicaragua, he sounds like a Sandinista. Some may find this unsettling. I take it to be one of his strengths as a historian.
Convinced that Carter's human rights policy had undermined valuable Cold War allies in the Western Hemisphere, Reagan came...
