Ronald Reagan entered the presidency in 1981 with convictions about the Soviet Union and nuclear weapons that alarmed much of the foreign policy establishment: he believed the Cold War could be won rather than merely managed, and he pursued both a massive military buildup and diplomatic engagement with a consistency that confounded critics who saw contradiction in the combination. William Inboden, a historian and former National Security Council staff member, reconstructs Reagan's national security strategy from archival sources, showing how the president and his team navigated the final decade of the Cold War. The book traces Reagan's approach across multiple fronts: the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe over fierce public opposition, the Strategic Defense Initiative that was dismissed as fantasy but shifted the strategic calculus, covert support for anti-communist movements from Afghanistan to Central America, and the intensive personal diplomacy with Mikhail Gorbachev that produced landmark arms reduction agreements. Inboden argues that Reagan held together what others saw as incompatible impulses — military strength and a genuine desire for nuclear abolition — through a strategic vision that was more coherent than contemporaries recognized. The book does not shy from Reagan's failures and blind spots, including the Iran-Contra scandal and the administration's slow response to the AIDS crisis, but its primary argument is that Reagan's combination of pressure and engagement created conditions that allowed the Cold War to end with remarkably little bloodshed. Inboden draws on newly declassified documents and interviews with surviving participants to provide the most detailed account yet of how Reagan's national security apparatus actually functioned.