There were several factors that led to Reagan’s change of policy that occurred during his second term and they enabled relations between the two superpowers to improve significantly. The 1984 presidential election was one factor because it became clear that there was a growing fear among at least one third of the American public that Reagan was leading them into a nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union and consequently he, ‘cooled his rhetoric.’ Furthermore, Reagan’s tough stance of his first term may have been an attempt to intimidate the Soviet Union in order to bring them to the negotiating table. The growth in the size of the American armed forces was not done in order to wage a future war but to put pressure on the already inefficient Soviet economy and force the Soviet leadership to make sizeable cuts to their armed forces. The S.D.I. was also proposed to pressure the Soviets into arms reduction talks by theoretically making nuclear weapons obsolete altogether. Reagan was also noted to have believed that nuclear weapons threatened not just the United States but the whole of mankind, and he stated that, ‘it was a great danger to have a world so heavily armed that one misstep could trigger a great war.’ Hence Reagan was aware that there needed to be arms reductions and he did not want nuclear conflict but he had to appear to be taking a firm approach towards the U.S.S.R. The fact that Reagan ratified the SALT II treaty in 1981 is clear evidence of his belief in arms reductions and he would continue this once Gorbachev came to power. Therefore Reagan was not as ‘hawkish’ as he may have appeared, and when asked to comment on when talks about arms reductions with the Soviets would resume he said that, ‘when we can…we should start negotiations,’ and that opportunity presented itself when Gorbachev came to power in 1985.
After Brezhnev’s death in1982 Soviet diplomacy had, ‘drifted into a state of paralysis,’ since Andropov and Chernenko were ineffective leaders, and so any sort of constructive dialogue between Washington and Moscow was practically impossible until Gorbachev came to power. Hence one could argue that Reagan could not have pursued a successful policy of arms reduction until there was a like-minded leader in the Kremlin. However, once Gorbachev was in office Reagan wasted no time in establishing personal links with him and, ‘just four days after Gorbachev came to power Reagan was making positive overtures.’ Both leaders were also aware that, ‘an indefinite continuation of life under nuclear threat was not a tolerable condition for either of their countries,’ and so they would both make determined efforts to remedy that situation. However reducing the nuclear threat to his country was not the only factor behind Gorbachev’s enthusiasm to engage in arms reduction talks and one must also consider the part Gorbachev played in bringing about the end of the Cold War.
It has been argued that the Cold War situation for America would have improved no matter who won the 1980 presidential election since the Soviet Union was, ‘at a peak in its fortunes,’ and the United States at a trough in its fortunes. In the early 1980s the Soviet Union was in decline with a stalemate in Afghanistan, internal problems in Poland with the emergence of Solidarity and such like, ineffectiveness when dealing with the Middle East, stagnation in the economy, and it had become too entangled in the problems of the Third World. Along with these problems the Soviet leadership was very weak with the consecutive deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko all in relatively short period while at the same time strong western leaders were in place in the form of Reagan, Thatcher, Mitterand and Kohl. Consequently attempts at diplomacy and talks on arms reductions did not get very far, and it was not until 1985 that the right combination of, ‘a politically strong United States’ president and a physically strong Soviet general secretary,’ were in office simultaneously to enable the Cold War to move forward. Therefore conditions were right for a move towards greater arms control and an improvement in American – Soviet relations. It was Gorbachev who took the initiative because he had to do something in order to get the Soviet Union out of the downward spiral that it was in.
On becoming general secretary Gorbachev’s main aim was to stabilise and expand the ailing Soviet economy in order to try to maintain the Soviet Union’s status as a superpower, and he announced his policy Perestroika, which was meant to restructure the economy. To this objective of economic reform all his other policies and actions were linked. He also felt that if the economy was to move forward then the public would have to be allowed greater freedom and there would be more political openness and this was known as his Glasnost policy. In order to carry out his internal reforms Gorbachev needed to change the external environment that was the main cause for the economic problems. Therefore he worked tirelessly to end the futile arms race that had been one of the overriding characteristics of the Cold War. This arms race had for too long drained the Soviet budget and swallowed up resources which could have been used much more productively in other sectors of the economy. Hence Gorbachev actively sought arms reduction talks with Reagan in order to be able to reduce his defence budget, and Reagan was also keen to do this in the United States too. The two leaders established a very productive relationship very quickly and it was this relationship that drove the Cold War towards its conclusion, and so Reagan played an important part in this too.
Between 1985 and the end of 1988 Reagan and Gorbachev met on several occasions to discuss arms control and reduction and each time relations between the two leaders and their corresponding states improved, moving the world further towards an end to the Cold War. Their first meeting was at Geneva in November 1985, and this was the first time in six years that the leaders of the superpowers had met. The following year they met at the Reykjavik summit where Gorbachev called for the elimination of all nuclear weapons by the end of the twentieth century, and Reagan agreed that there should be substantial reductions. In 1987 Gorbachev visited the United States and there the first real movement on arms reduction was made when he and Reagan agreed to destroy all intermediate range missiles. In 1988 Reagan visited Moscow and this visit was not just about arms talks but to prove to the world that American-Soviet relations really had improved. The two leaders were seen, ‘strolling amiably through Red Square, greeting tourists, and bouncing babies in font of Lenin’s tomb.’ Furthermore, when questioned in Moscow about his ‘evil empire’ speech Reagan replied that those comments belonged to, ‘another time, another era,’ and so it was clear from this that Reagan was willing to accept that the Cold War was nearing the end and he would not prevent that from occurring.
If one is to assess the part that Reagan played in bringing about the end of the Cold War from the evidence given thus far then one would probably conclude that he did have an important role to play. However Reagan has been described as incompetent with little knowledge or experience of foreign policy before he came to office, and as, ‘an actor reading a script without understanding the words.’ The real driving force behind Reagan’s foreign policy was his Secretary of State George Shultz, who was a skilful negotiator and a person of integrity and vision. Shultz was indispensable to Reagan because Reagan knew that he wanted to improve American-Soviet relations but he did not know the method with which to achieve this. It was here that Shultz provided, ‘a persistent and practical drive toward the goal of improved relations through the accomplishment of tangible objectives.’ Therefore Reagan’s part was to establish the aims he wanted to achieve and it was Shultz who then went about trying to achieve these aims. Gorbachev’s personal part in bringing the Cold War to an end away from the summit meetings now seems more important than the part that Reagan played. This is due to the fact that Gorbachev personally decided to withdraw Soviet forces from such places as Afghanistan and cut aid to Cuba. He also had come to see the Warsaw Pact states as liabilities rather than assets, and so he had no problem in allowing free elections in Eastern Europe in 1989 and recognising the new non-communist governments that emerged. Gorbachev also renounced the Marxist-Leninist concept of the ‘class struggle’ and in February 1990 the Soviet Union finally became a multi-political-party state again after Gorbachev ended the monopoly of power that the Communist Party had held for the previous seventy-three years. Gorbachev was, ‘opening windows that had been sealed shut for seventy years,’ and by doing so he was reducing Western fears about Soviet expansionism. Garthoff argues that it could only have been a Soviet leader that ended the Cold War, and the above actions that Gorbachev carried out could only have been done by a Soviet leader, and so Reagan’s part in bringing the Cold War to an end could never have been as big as Gorbachev’s.
Finally one must also consider the structural factors that contributed towards bringing an end to the Cold War. The military pressures on both superpowers were rising to a level never seen before in the Cold War during the 1980s, with the huge expensive military build-ups threatening their economies and the improvement in the speed, accuracy and range of nuclear missiles, ‘put the survival of both nations at risk as never before.’ Hence it was in both their interests to move towards arms reductions. There were also more global forces acting on the superpowers such as the globalisation of Western economies and the corresponding explosion in digital and mass communications. The backward and stagnated economies of the Eastern Bloc were not able to compete with these emerging market economies of the West and consequently a yearning for economic and political reforms emerged in the East. The world was also moving in a direction that would lead to greater human rights and less toleration of repressive regimes. Gorbachev was aware of this and he did not resist the cries for independence and freedom that were echoing from Eastern Europe partly in the hope that the world would see the Soviet Union as becoming more tolerant and democratic. However these changes in global structures were underlying trends and the Soviet Foreign Minister Bessmertnykh said that the improvement in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union was, ‘a rare case in history when a major change did not just develop – it was willed to happen.’ It was Reagan and Gorbachev that acknowledged the change in global trends and structures and then went about trying to use those changes to bring the Cold War to an end.
By the time George Bush Snr. was sworn in as president in January 1989 it appeared that the prospect of an actual nuclear holocaust was more remote than at any other time since the beginning of the Cold War rivalry of the superpowers. Later that same year the Berlin Wall was torn down and just two years after that the whole of the Soviet Union collapsed. Ronald Reagan played a key role in contributing to these events with his early military expansion putting further pressure on an already strained Soviet economy. Then, when the time was right, Reagan made great progress, along with Gorbachev, on arms reductions and improving American-Soviet relations to enable them to bring about an end to a confrontation that was no longer benefiting either side in an ever increasing globalised world. Therefore the issue that George Bush had to deal with in 1989 was not how he should fight the Cold War but instead decide whether the Cold War was over.
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