With the exception of Donald Trump, no president in my lifetime had a more shallow knowledge of history and foreign policy than Ronald Reagan. Reagan entered the White House in 1981 with an extremely negative and ideological view of the Soviet Union, and it was no surprise that Soviet-American bilateral relations deteriorated to their worst level in twenty years. In Reagan’s first press conference, he noted that Soviet leaders “reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat.” More