For many readers, “summitry” will bring to mind only meetings between leaders of military superpowers, especially those of U.S. presidents with Soviet and Russian leaders. It is reasonable, however, to apply the term, as James Cooper does in this book, to meetings of heads of government, especially when they are leaders of consequence.There is no doubting the significance of the relationship between Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Reagan himself on several occasions described her as a “soulmate,” and those who served in senior positions in his administration noted that she was the foreign leader with whom he felt the closest affinity. Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush, believed that Thatcher had gained excessive influence over Reagan. Interviewed for the authorized biography of Thatcher, he said that Reagan “was just smitten by her.” Thatcher was aware that the discrepancy in power between the United States and Great Britain meant that she was the junior partner, but she was far from being Reagan's “poodle,” a term, as Cooper notes (p. 150), her British political opponents applied to her.It is a pity that Cooper covers only Reagan's first term, but he has made a careful study of much of the archival material on the Reagan-Thatcher meetings and uses it to support his main thesis: “Summits that were often ostensibly about international relations and security concerns frequently masked attempts by Reagan and Thatcher to bolster their respective domestic positions” (p. 10).Cooper shows how domestic priorities in numerous cases led to sharp differences between the U.S. and British positions, and it is not difficult to discern the pressures that caused Reagan and Thatcher to emphasize particular subjects. Thus, Thatcher was frequently reminded of U.S. concern about the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland and had to reassure Reagan that she was committed to a peaceful resolution and that she enjoyed good relations with her Irish counterpart, Garret FitzGerald.Thatcher did not hesitate to criticize U.S. deficit spending and high interest rates, which, she argued, harmed Britain and other European countries. In September 1983, she put her points bluntly to U.S. industrialists and politicians the evening before she met Reagan. Her economic policy, she said, was “based on the principle that expenditure had to be paid for.” Because her government had not been able to reduce expenditures as much as she would have liked, she had “reluctantly increased taxation” and believed it was vital not “to mislead people into thinking that they could have something for nothing” (p. 114). Implied criticism of the Reagan administration's economic management was, however, a step too far into U.S. domestic politics for her complaints to make any headway.On some other issues, however, Thatcher did partly or even wholly get her way. Cooper notes her “fury at the prioritization of American agriculture over British manufacturing” (p. 101) at a time when the U.S. government wanted to respond to the imposition of martial law in Poland and the Soviet Union's ongoing war in Afghanistan by stopping the Scottish company John Brown from fulfilling a pipeline order from the Soviet Union. The disjuncture between this demand and the Reagan administration's resumption of U.S. wheat exports to the Soviet Union (abandoning the Carter administration's grain embargo against the USSR) could not help but rankle British leaders. The two sides ultimately reached a compromise on the pipeline issue.Thatcher and the British government were staunchly opposed to the U.S. Department of Justice's decision to indict British airlines for alleged violations of U.S. antitrust laws (pp. 132–134). Reagan, to the annoyance of his domestic opponents, ultimately put a stop to the case, writing (p. 134) in his diary that “I came down on the side of foreign relations.” Although that concession was made in response to Thatcher's electoral concerns, it is an example of how international considerations could trump U.S. domestic interests.On the Falklands War, Reagan was initially torn and his administration divided. Aware that the British military response to the Argentinian invasion would be viewed in much of Latin America as neocolonialism, Reagan and the State Department were worried that overt support for Britain would reduce U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere. Although Reagan continued to hope for a settlement that would not “humiliate” Argentina, Thatcher was in no mood to compromise. The decisive British military victory precipitated the downfall of the Argentine junta and a restoration of democracy in Argentina. With the conflict still raging, Reagan came out in strong support of the “young men fighting for Britain” in the South Atlantic when he spoke to a joint session of the two houses of the British Parliament on 8 June 1982. They were fighting, said the president, “for the belief that armed aggression must not be allowed to succeed” and that “the people must participate in the decisions of government … under the rule of law” (p. 94).Cooper is right to note the importance of domestic considerations in the determination of foreign policy in both the United States and the United Kingdom. This may be particularly true of the United States. Answering questions from Moscow University students in 1988, Reagan explained that his interest in the treatment of particular groups in the Soviet Union stemmed in part from the salience of immigrants in U.S. history. U.S. citizens, he said, were apt to take a special interest in what was happening in the country from which their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents emigrated. Moreover, the frequency of national elections in the United States (congressional as well as presidential) is highly conducive to domestic lobbies' exercise of influence over foreign policy.Cooper, however, goes too far in downplaying Reagan's and Thatcher's substantial interest in foreign and security policy—especially their preoccupation with Communism in general and the Soviet Union in particular. Cooper's strength is in his coverage of declassified archival materials on the Reagan-Thatcher relationship. A weakness is his apparent unfamiliarity with major recent research by others. That applies especially to the authorized three-volume biography of Thatcher by Charles Moore. Every door was opened to Moore, and his access to people and papers was greater than that accorded to any other researcher. His first two volumes, published in 2013 and 2015, are highly relevant to Cooper's subject.Soviet-Western relations were immensely significant for both Thatcher and Reagan. Thatcher flew to Washington via Beijing and Hong Kong for a key meeting at Camp David on Saturday, 22 December 1984. In characteristic workaholic mode, she spent the whole of the 24-hour flight from Hong Kong to Washington studying the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger's various statements on the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). The two most important items on the agenda of the Camp David meeting were SDI, about which Thatcher was extremely skeptical, and the recent visit to Britain (in mid-December) by Mikhail Gorbachev.Gorbachev appeared likely to become the next Soviet leader, and, judging by the appearance, and non-appearances, of the incumbent, Konstantin Chernenko, there was not long to wait. Thatcher was keen to share with Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz her impressions of Gorbachev from her five hours of discussion with him during his week in Britain. Her U.S. interlocutors were no less eager to hear what she had to say. The book mentions some of what Thatcher said to Reagan about Gorbachev (at least as positive in private as it had been in public), but because Cooper is so focused on domestic issues, he fails to highlight the significance of Thatcher's comments regarding Gorbachev.Cooper also misses the other key result of the December 1984 Camp David meeting: an agreement on SDI drafted by National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane and Thatcher's closest adviser, Charles Powell. The crucial point is that both Reagan and Thatcher signed off on a declaration that would allow research on SDI to move ahead, but stipulated that deployment would, “in view of treaty obligations, have to be a matter for negotiation.” Shultz was delighted with the statement. Weinberger, who had been left off the invitation list for Camp David, was not. As Moore put it, the agreement “upset the Pentagon and pleased the State Department as it geared up for negotiations.”Cooper's book is a useful contribution to study of Reagan-Thatcher diplomacy, but one limited by his desire to downplay the reality, and often centrality, of international relations in those discussions and by his ignoring the fullest published source on Thatcher, that of her authorized biographer, in which illuminating attention is paid to the U.S.-British relationship.