From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (146 page)

With different personalities, the changes might have been delayed or never taken place, but what journalist Martin Walker has called an "extraordinary coincidence of two extraordinary men" played a vital role.
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Personality was always more important to Reagan than the substance of policy. Encouraged by his friend British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, he concluded after their first meeting in late 1985 that Gorbachev was a man he could work with.
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He in turn worked his famous charm on his Soviet counterpart. Each leader "served the other's purpose," Cannon has noted. They initiated a private correspondence addressing
a variety of issues. Despite strong differences between them and missteps along the way, they developed, in Reagan's words, a "kind of chemistry."
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By the time Reagan left office, they were at ease with each other. The only discordant note was the frosty relationship between Nancy Reagan and Raisa Gorbachev, who seem to have taken an instant dislike to each other and never had second thoughts.

Events reinforced the two leaders' willingness to indulge in what Gorbachev called "new thinking." When Reagan learned of the Soviet reaction to NATO's Able Archer exercises during those extremely tense months in late 1983, he drew the obvious—but for Cold War adversaries often elusive—conclusion that the Soviets feared the United States as much as Americans feared them. This epiphany enabled him to put himself in their place and thus conclude that negotiations might be both feasible and productive.
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The nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl near Kiev in the summer of 1985 had a profound impact on both men. After a typically clumsy cover-up gave the Kremlin an international black eye, a chastened Gorbachev determined that
glasnost
was the route to take abroad as well as at home. Chernobyl reinforced Reagan's already emotional fears of a nuclear Armageddon and his determination to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
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Even with the commitment of the two heads of state, the path was littered with obstacles. Gorbachev faced stern opposition from his military advisers and hard-line civilians who attacked his "Capitulationist Line" toward the West. It took time for him to replace old-timers like Gromyko with his own people like Eduard Shevardnadze. He was never able to build a firm consensus around his "new thinking" and repeatedly had to outmaneuver his foes.
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The deep divisions within the Reagan administration, especially on nuclear issues, enormously complicated the formulation of agreed-upon positions. Hard-liners like Weinberger, Casey, and arms control negotiator Kenneth Adelman fought bitterly with Shultz and the pragmatists. Differences between the two nations remained sharp even if no longer generally beyond resolution. On Afghanistan, for example, where they agreed in principle, they could still get tangled up in details. And on issues like SDI, which Gorbachev was determined to eliminate and Reagan to implement, the differences proved insurmountable.
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Moving in fits and starts through four summits in four years, the two leaders eventually registered signal achievements. At their first meeting in Geneva in November 1985, they agreed vaguely to seek 50 percent reductions in nuclear weapons—but on little else. At a hastily called October 1986 summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, only SDI seemed to stand in the way of truly astounding achievements. Before the meeting, Reagan had revived the "zero option" proposal to eliminate all intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF) in Europe. Gorbachev, who held the initiative throughout the period, countered with bold proposals for huge across-the-board cuts and the elimination of all nuclear weapons by the year 2000. During a "bizarre weekend" in a seaside house said to be haunted, he advanced the deadline by five years. The idea appealed to Reagan's anti-nuclearism. Their apparent accord "shocked" the negotiations into a "whole new dimension." After an extended late-night session, the initially stunned technical experts appeared to agree on terms. But Reagan flatly rejected Gorbachev's condition that SDI be confined to the laboratory. The Reykjavik summit broke up amidst great disappointment and without any agreement.
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Desperate for success and persuaded by physicist Andrei Sakharov that SDI would not work and in any event might be a bluff, Gorbachev subsequently isolated the INF issue and the two sides carved out a major agreement.
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For the first time, they agreed on reducing the number of nuclear weapons in their arsenals, the Soviets giving up 1,836 missiles, the United States 859. Ironically, given earlier adamant Kremlin opposition to any kind of inspection, Gorbachev's verification proposals were so intrusive that the CIA and NSA balked, resulting in an agreement for on-site inspection. The INF treaty was signed with great fanfare in Washington at 1:45
P.M
. on December 8, 1987, a time deemed especially propitious, it was later learned, by Nancy Reagan's astrologer. Reagan called it "a grand historical moment." It was also a godsend for a president beleaguered by Iran-Contra. It provoked noisy protests from hard-liners such as Perle, journalist William Buckley, and North Carolina senator Jesse Helms. Howard Phillips of the Conservative Caucus branded Reagan a "useful idiot for Soviet propaganda."
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Advances in superpower relations were not limited to nuclear weapons. The two nations opened bilateral discussions to defuse regional conflicts such as Nicaragua and Afghanistan. The hotline was upgraded and an agreement concluded on joint exploration of space. Jewish emigration
remained a thorny problem, but Moscow and Washington discussed human rights issues openly and without the rancor of an earlier era. More emigrants left Russia for the United States and Israel. The two nations conspicuously cooperated in the UN Security Council in calling for a cease-fire in the Iran-Iraq war and jointly warned Libya against sending arms to Iran. Cultural interchange expanded well beyond the heyday of detente in the 1970s. Student exchanges reached down to the high school level and extended into new academic disciplines. Scholarly visits achieved new highs, and in the atmosphere of
glasnost
attained a new level of frankness, even in politically loaded subjects like the humanities.

In the last year of Reagan's presidency, there was growing talk of an end to the Cold War. The old rhetoric occasionally resurfaced, as when the president thundered at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate in June 1987, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"—a ringing statement designed to palliate his conservative critics and challenge the Soviet leader to take even more dramatic steps.
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Human rights issues continued to vex superpower relations. But the other signs were more dramatic. "Gorby fever" infected Washington during the December 1987 summit, the ebullient Soviet premier drawing huge and enthusiastic crowds and on one occasion leaving his limousine like an American politician to press the flesh with curious onlookers. It was "as if he came from another planet," novelist Joyce Carol Oates exclaimed.
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At the May 1988 Moscow summit, Reagan attracted large throngs. Insisting that the Soviet Union had changed rather than he, he still backed away from his 1983 "evil empire" speech. It was an "intensely symbolic moment," U.S. Kremlinologist Stephen Cohen observed, the most right-wing of postwar presidents going to Moscow and speaking in the most soothing tones.
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The Moscow summit represented for all practical purposes the normalization of U.S.-Soviet relations. In a radical speech at the UN on December 7, 1988, another truly dramatic turning point, Gorbachev went much further. He conceded that Moscow had no monopoly on the truth. He appeared to foreswear the use of force as an instrument of diplomacy, setting forth instead a concept of "reasonable sufficiency for defense" and underscoring it by announcing the reduction of Soviet conventional forces by half a million troops and ten thousand tanks within the next year. Most shocking and significant, he opened the way for self-determination in Eastern Europe by proclaiming that "the principle of freedom of choice is mandatory." This scrapping of the Brezhnev
Doctrine for what one Soviet official dubbed the Sinatra Doctrine (so named for crooner Frank Sinatra's song "My Way") effectively removed the central issue around which the Cold War had begun.
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Growing Soviet-American concord provided a foundation for resolving other conflicts. Reagan administration claims that aid to insurgent groups had made war more costly for Communist governments had some merit. But other factors were equally important. Giving higher priority to domestic matters, Gorbachev began to push Soviet client states to liquidate their wars. Soviet-American cooperation contributed to ending numerous conflicts and helped the UN to work as its founders had intended. War-weariness among the combatants themselves produced strong pressures for peace. The inability to play the superpowers off against each other denied them the means to fight. Thus in the summer and fall of 1988—what the
New York Times
labeled a "season of peace"—numerous belligerents moved to resolve seemingly interminable conflicts. Iran and Iraq agreed to a cease-fire. South Africa and Angola moved to end their fifteen-year-old conflict in Southwest Africa. Isolated in the international community and under pressure from Moscow, Vietnam set out to liquidate its ten-year occupation of Cambodia. The
intifada
ground on in the West Bank and Gaza, but at the UN in early December PLO leader Arafat appeared to meet long-standing U.S. terms, explicitly renouncing terrorism and implicitly recognizing Israel's right to exist. The "year of the dove" left many problems unattended; the initiatives undertaken did not always produce immediate results. Still, the peace moves were many and dramatic. Reagan left office in a strikingly different world than the one he had inherited from Carter.

Easily victorious over Democrat Michael Dukakis in a campaign in which foreign policy was suddenly peripheral, George Bush presided over the culmination of the revolution in world affairs set off by Gorbachev and Reagan. Sensing with the peaceful revolution that swept Eastern Europe in 1989 that events were moving in the right direction, he wisely allowed them to take their course, refusing to interfere or to gloat at the outcome. He struggled to find the right balance between liberation and the order he preferred, however, and at times seemed curiously out of touch with the spirit of human freedom that swept the world during his first years in office.

George Herbert Walker Bush brought to the White House a sometimes uneasy amalgam of eastern, moderate Republicanism and the new,
more conservative Sun Belt variety.
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Scion of a wealthy and prominent Connecticut family, a much decorated navy pilot in World War II, educated at Andover and Yale, he imbibed the Stimsonian ethos of hard work, modesty, competition, and public service. After graduation from college, he broke the mold by setting out for Texas to enter the oil business. Like many of his generation and class, he gravitated naturally to politics. Following two terms in Congress and a failed effort to win a Senate seat, he held a series of important positions that would earn him the title "résumé president": Nixon's ambassador to the UN; chairman of the Republican National Committee; de facto ambassador to China before normalization was completed; director of Central Intelligence. After losing the nomination to Reagan in 1980, in the interest of party unity he joined the ticket as vice presidential candidate. By his own admission lacking in "the vision thing," Bush was a doer rather than thinker. His views were thoroughly establishmentarian, although in his political campaigns he pandered to the increasingly potent right wing of his party by resigning from the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Like many of his generation, he found foreign policy "more fun." Certain that personal connections were what made diplomacy work, he traveled 1.3 million miles and visited sixty-five countries as vice president, cultivating ties with foreign leaders and also laying claim to the title "Rolodex President."
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More interested in the processes of government than in ideas and especially mindful of the destructive consequences of Reagan's chaotic managerial style, Bush put together a foreign policy team of generally like-minded men, many of them close friends. Like his boss, Secretary of State James A. Baker III came from wealth. A Texan educated at Princeton and an ex-marine, Baker met Bush through his Houston law practice. As Bush's campaign manager and Reagan's White House chief of staff and secretary of the treasury, he established a reputation as a shrewd political operative and master deal-maker. His close personal relationship to the president assured his position in the foreign policy inner circle. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was a last-minute replacement for Texas senator John Tower, who failed to gain congressional approval. Deeply conservative and almost pathologically secretive, the Wyoming native had been Gerald Ford's chief of staff and had served in Congress. The
Bush foreign policy apparatus was held together by national security adviser and Kissinger protégé Gen. Brent Scowcroft, who had held the same position in Ford's last years. A workaholic, Scowcroft was notorious for taking catnaps in meetings. Slight of build, happy with anonymity, the former air force general became the president's alter ego, in journalist Bob Woodward's words, the "model of the trustworthy, self-effacing staffer."
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The Bush team was not monolithic. The 1991 war in the Persian Gulf would expose major differences among them. But they shared an innate caution and conservatism—"prudence" was the word the president preferred—a commitment to team play, and a passion for order. They worked together more harmoniously than any group going back to the Johnson administration. Especially in foreign policy, Bush adopted a hands-on style, a marked contrast to his predecessor.

In its first months in office, the Bush administration was shaken by an unexpected crisis in China, the country the president should have known best. Ironically, despite Reagan's long-standing and vocal support for Taiwan, U.S. relations with China during his presidency were remarkably harmonious. Reagan's early crusade against the "evil empire" easily trumped his traditional sympathy for Taiwan, and the administration significantly expanded the ties created by Carter in 1979. The United States provided the arms and technology eagerly sought by Beijing. The two nations actively collaborated in Cambodia and Afghanistan to undermine pro-Soviet regimes. In the latter, to conceal its hand, the United States purchased Chinese weapons that were shipped directly through Pakistan to the rebels. It also subsidized breeding of the Chinese mules that became the backbone of mujahideen logistics. During the Reagan years, China experienced its most intense period of Westernization, welcoming U.S. influence and sending thousands of students to America to study. In 1987, opposite the Mao Zedong mausoleum in Beijing, Kentucky Fried Chicken opened a two-story restaurant in the shape of a bucket bearing a larger-than-life image of Colonel Sanders. One "reformist" Chinese official even proposed substituting knives and forks for chopsticks! After an official visit in April 1984, Reagan referred to China as that "so-called Communist country," a widely publicized off-the-cuff statement that reflected broader American delusions about the extent to which Westernization and reform had really taken hold there.
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