William Michael Schmidli, Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and US Interventionism in the Late Cold War (Cornell University Press, 2022).

In Freedom on the Offensive, William Michael Schmidli illuminates how the Reagan administration's embrace of democracy promotion was a defining development in US foreign relations in the late twentieth century. Reagan used democracy promotion to refashion the bipartisan Cold War consensus that had collapsed in the late 1960s amid opposition to the Vietnam War. Over the course of the 1980s, the initiative led to a greater institutionalization of human rights—narrowly defined to include political rights and civil liberties and to exclude social and economic rights—as a US foreign policy priority.

Democracy promotion thus served to legitimize a distinctive form of US interventionism and to underpin the Reagan administration's aggressive Cold War foreign policies. Drawing on newly available archival materials, and featuring a range of perspectives from top-level policymakers and politicians to grassroots activists and militants, this study makes a defining contribution to our understanding of human rights ideas and the projection of American power during the final decade of the Cold War. 

Using Reagan's undeclared war on Nicaragua as a case study in US interventionism, Freedom on the Offensive explores how democracy promotion emerged as the centerpiece of an increasingly robust US human rights agenda. Yet, this initiative also became intertwined with deeply undemocratic practices that misled the American people, violated US law, and contributed to immense human and material destruction. Pursued through civil society or low-cost military interventions and rooted in the neoliberal imperatives of US-led globalization, Reagan's democracy promotion initiative had major implications for post–Cold War US foreign policy.  

Winner of the William M. LeoGrande Prize

for the best book on US-Latin American relations

“A groundbreaking book on Latin American human rights during the Reagan era. William Michael Schmidli mobilizes his deep knowledge of the literature and his compelling writing chops to deliver a devastating critique of the Reagan government's stance toward human rights and democracy promotion.”

—Alan McPherson, Temple University

“Schmidli’s thought-provoking account is a welcome contribution to the growing literature on Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy, particularly concerning his approach to human rights.”

—Cold War History

“Written with stylistic flourish, Freedom on the Offensive successfully draws on the history of US-Nicaragua relations to illuminate the rise of attention to human rights and democracy promotion in US foreign policy.”

—Sarah B. Snyder, American University

“Schmidli shows that Washington’s imperial toolbox evolved over the course of the 1980s. If at first advocacy of democracy was portrayed by the Right as a manifestation of American weakness during the post-Vietnam and Carter years, Reagan’s circle came to deploy democracy promotion as a weapon to advance its interests in Latin America and legitimize its broader agenda in the international system. … A crucial contribution of Schmidli’s study is to illuminate how the evolution of U.S. human rights narratives regarding Latin America came to influence Washington’s discourse and strategies toward the Soviet Union, as that empire gave way to American triumphalism occasioned by the conclusion of the Cold War.”  

—Prize Committee, William M. LeoGrande Book Award