Mattia Toaldo's monograph is a meticulous reconstruction of the path toward the War on Terror many years before September 2001 and an examination of U.S. counter-terrorism policy under Ronald Reagan in the early and mid-1980s. Offering two case studies of U.S. counterterrorism strategies—the crisis in Lebanon and the confrontation with Muammar Gaddafi of Libya—Toaldo traces the evolution of a policy that focused on military action in response to terrorist acts. The Origins of the U.S. War on Terror underscores the impact of the Cold War framework on Reagan's strategy against state-sponsored terrorism and demonstrates the administration's failure to understand that the events in the Middle East were being influenced by regional dynamics and the rise of political Islam rather than by Moscow-based puppet masters.
In the introduction, Toaldo describes the first War on Terror as a consequence of two crucial events in 1979: the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which led...