In the Soviet Union, the impact of Reagan’s second-term policies was less direct, but arguably even more significant. Reagan’s policies gave Gorbachev enough time, latitude, and prestige to proceed with his reforms, to the point where they could no longer be undone. Gorbachev was hardly radical in his domestic policies; he was opening up the Soviet system, but always with the goal of maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party. Yet Gorbachev’s foreign policy was, in fact, a break with the past. During this period, he progressively reduced the role of the Soviet military—bringing troops home, forswearing the use of force, allowing the Soviet Union’s Eastern European allies to go their own way. These foreign and domestic policies were interconnected: his glowing reviews overseas helped Gorbachev to fend off domestic opposition for several critical years. Reagan and Shultz grasped Gorbachev’s importance and these underlying dynamics in a way that Reagan’s critics in Washington did not. They helped give the Soviet leader the breathing room he required. They also offered Gorbachev the underlying economic rationalization he needed for his changing approach to the world—that the Soviet Union had to accommodate to the inevitable trends of globalization.
The triumphal interpretation of Reagan says that he “won” the Cold War through the confrontational policies of his first term—above all, by increasing spending for the military in a big way and by launching the Strategic Defense Initiative. But no matter how one judges the impact of the American defense buildup, it did not bring the Cold War to an end. By itself, it could at best have led to a prolonged stalemate during which the Soviet leadership, while unable to match American military spending, clung to power. There was nothing in Reagan’s first-term policies that could induce Mikhail Gorbachev to abandon the Brezhnev doctrine’s assertion of the Soviet Union’s right to intervene with force in Eastern Europe. The “Star Wars” program did not persuade Gorbachev to sit passively by in 1989 while the Berlin Wall was torn down.
It was Reagan’s second-term policies, his decision to do business with Gorbachev, that set the course for the end of the Cold War. If Reagan had not been responsive, then events might have taken a different course during the crucial period from 1985 to 1989. Gorbachev’s critics at home could have succeeded in resisting change by warning that American policy remained a continuing danger and that Gorbachev was failing to obtain any alteration of the Soviet Union’s relationship with the United States.
Gorbachev himself might have tried to freeze the degree of change in the Soviet political system. Or alternatively, traditionalists in the Soviet leadership might have attempted to overthrow Gorbachev—as, indeed, they tried to do in the abortive coup d’etat of August 1991. Instead, Gorbachev proceeded to open up the Soviet system, and by the time the old guard in the Soviet leadership finally mobilized against him, it was too late. The changes of the previous six years turned out to be irreversible.
Gorbachev occasionally joked that through his actions, he was depriving the United States of an enemy. The reverse was also true: Reagan, through his policies, deprived the Soviet Union of the intensely adversarial relationship with the United States that had, over the decades, repeatedly served as Moscow’s justification for preserving its enormous military and security apparatus. In order to proceed at home, Gorbachev had to show that he was moving toward a different role in the world. As Gorbachev later acknowledged, he needed American and international recognition of his foreign policy to shore up his position in Moscow and overcome resistance within the Soviet leadership. By treating Gorbachev as fundamentally different from his predecessors, Reagan’s policies gave the Soviet leader what he required.
In the end, the Cold War sputtered out without any large-scale violent upheavals or explosions. It was not inevitable that the climax should have been so anticlimactic. Unquestionably, Gorbachev played the leading role in bringing the four-decade-old conflict to a close. Yet Reagan, overcoming considerable opposition of his own at home, played a crucial role by buttressing Gorbachev’s political position. It was in this sense that Ronald Reagan helped ensure the Cold War ended in the tranquil fashion that it did. Reagan didn’t win the Cold War; Gorbachev abandoned it. By recognizing Gorbachev’s significance, when many others in the United States did not, Reagan helped create the climate in which the Cold War could end.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
By far the most significant institution for me in writing this book was the Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. SAIS, as it is commonly known, provided a home for me from the time I started this book in 2004. Its dean, Jessica Einhorn, has been supportive of my work and, in general, of books about America’s relations with the world. I am also grateful to other SAIS administrators, including Thomas Keaney and Ted Baker of the Foreign Policy Institute. I am thankful to the SAIS Library, particularly Linda Carlson, for handling so professionally my many requests for materials and information. A talented and knowledgeable SAIS graduate student, David A. Beffert, provided important assistance with research and translation.
There were two other institutions that provided invaluable help to me as an author. The first was the American Academy in Berlin, where I lived for four months in the fall of 2005. It was through the help of the American Academy that I was able to conduct book interviews in Germany. I am grateful to Gary Smith, the executive director, and to several others who helped so much in the research and the interviews in Berlin, including Ingrid Mueller, Thomas Rid, Marie Unger, Maria Lueck, and Tessa Fanelsa.
The second institution was the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, which enabled me to spend four weeks reading, thinking about, and organizing the book just as I was getting started on the project.
The professional archivists at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley tolerated my visits and many requests for material; I am particularly grateful to Shelly Williams for her help there. The Richard Nixon Library was responsive and helpful to my queries; John H. Taylor and Greg Cumming deserve special mention. The National Security Archive in Washington proved, as always, to be the principal and most accessible source of declassified materials, providing information that extends well beyond the collections of the presidential libraries; Thomas Blanton and William Burr provided special help and insight. Several collections of oral interviews were invaluable for the Reagan years: above all, those of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs and the oral interviews that were conducted jointly by the Hoover Institution and by the Gorbachev Foundation.
The research also included approximately one hundred of my own interviews with participants in the events of the final years of the Cold War. I am always astonished to discover how interviews produce more information, more details, and more insight than is on the historical record. Among those who were kind enough to be interviewed, at least once and sometimes more than once: Morton Abramowitz, Anatoly Adamishin, Richard Allen, Martin Anderson, Richard Armitage, Egon Bahr, Dennis Blair, Thomas Blanton, Hildegard Boucsein, Hans-Otto Bräutigam, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Richard Burt, Frank Carlucci, William Cohen, Lothar de Maizière, Eberhard Diepgen, Anthony Dolan, Kenneth Duberstein, Dieter and Ingeborg Elz, Fritz Ermarth, Francis Fukuyama, Thomas Griscom, Helga Haftendorn, Jörg Halthöfer, Frank Herold, Fred Ikle, Walter Ischinger, Richard Kauzlarich, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Helmut Kohl, John Kornblum, Egon Krenz, Nelson Ledsky, Jon Lellenberg, Barry Lowenkron, Robert McFarlane, John McLaughlin, Andrew Marshall, Suzanne Massie, Jack Matlock, Edwin Meese, Don Oberdorfer, William Odom, Rudolf Perina, Michael Pillsbury, Colin Powell, Nancy Reagan, Rozanne Ridgway, Peter Robinson, Peter Rodman, Dana Rohrabacher, Brent Scowcroft, George Shultz, Thomas Simons, Richard Solomon, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, John Taylor, Horst Teltschik, Maritta Tkalec, Bettina Urbanski, Karsten Voigt, Richard von Weizsäcker, George Will, and Vladimir Zubok.