IN OCTOBER 1986, IN A CLAPBOARD, possibly haunted, house on the windswept Icelandic coast, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev came agonisingly close to promising the elimination of all nuclear weapons. The leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union dared each other to take the precipitous step and make the pledge, but ultimately neither party was willing to budge on their respective commitment and opposition to the American Strategic Defence Initiative, which Reagan had commissioned to counter incoming Soviet missiles.
The Reykjavik Summit represented an important moment in the peaceful conclusion of the Cold War. Yet Reagan and Gorbachev’s impassioned colloquy did not take place in the same Cold War as their predecessors’ summits had over the previous decades. By the 1980s, new spectres were haunting Europe as the forces of global politics superseded the contours of the US-Soviet confrontation set down in the post-war period.
The global economic order was
