Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War

By Simon Miles

In a narrative-redefining approach, Engaging the Evil Empire dramatically alters how we look at the beginning of the end of the Cold War. Tracking key events in US-Soviet relations across the years between 1980 and 1985, Simon Miles shows that covert engagement gave way to overt conversation as both superpowers determined that open diplomacy was the best means of furthering their own, primarily competitive, goals. Miles narrates the history of these dramatic years, as President Ronald Reagan consistently applied a disciplined carrot-and-stick approach, reaching out to Moscow while at the same time excoriating the Soviet system and building up US military capabilities.

The received wisdom in diplomatic circles is that the beginning of the end of the Cold War came from changing policy preferences and that President Reagan in particular opted for a more conciliatory and less bellicose diplomatic approach. In reality, Miles clearly demonstrates, Reagan and ranking officials in the National Security Council had determined that the United States enjoyed a strategic margin of error that permitted it to engage Moscow overtly.

As US grand strategy developed, so did that of the Soviet Union. Engaging the Evil Empire covers five critical years of Cold War history when Soviet leaders tried to reduce tensions between the two nations in order to gain economic breathing room and, to ensure domestic political stability, prioritize expenditures on butter over those on guns. Miles's bold narrative shifts the focus of Cold War historians away from exclusive attention on Washington by focusing on the years of back-channel communiqués and internal strategy debates in Moscow as well as Prague and East Berlin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781501751714

Book preview

ENGAGING THE EVIL EMPIRE

WASHINGTON, MOSCOW, AND THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE COLD WAR

SIMON MILES

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For my parents

I’m a believer in quiet diplomacy and so far we’ve had several quite triumphant experiences by using that method. The problem is, you can’t talk about it afterward or then you can’t do it again.

—Ronald Reagan to John Koehler, July 9, 1981

We have more contact with the Soviets than anyone is aware of and whether to have a meeting or not is on the agenda at both ends of the line.

—Ronald Reagan to Paul Trousdale, May 23, 1983

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Introduction

1. Red Star Rising

2. Arm to Parley

3. Talking about Talking

4. Trial Balloons

5. New Departures

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In completing this project, I have accumulated a host of debts. Any attempt to acknowledge them must begin, as it did, in the archives: the archivists and declassification specialists in the Australian, British, Canadian, Czech, French, German, Russian, Ukrainian, and US archives facilitated my research there and made it extremely fruitful. Without their professionalism—and patience—this book would not have been possible.

Several institutions supported my research. A three-year fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada gave me the freedom to conduct much of the international archival research on which this book is based. Without this support from the government of Canada, the end product would undoubtedly have suffered. Two successive World Politics and Statecraft Fellowships from the Smith Richardson Foundation also gave me the freedom to make the story I tell as international as possible. I also received valuable financial support from the American Grand Strategy Program and the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Endowment Fund at Duke University; the Eisenhower Institute at Gettysburg College; the Gerald R. Ford and George H. W. Bush presidential libraries; and the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Robert Strauss Center for International Security and Law, the William P. Clements Jr. Center for National Security, and the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin.

The research for this book began at the University of Texas at Austin. While there, I benefited from the guidance and insights of a group of outstanding historians in the History Department and the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs: Frank Gavin, Will Inboden, Mark Lawrence, Charters Wynn, and Jeremi Suri, my adviser, who each made this a better work of history and me a better historian. For that, I am in their debt. I had the good fortune to spend three years as a visiting fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs. I am very grateful to John English and Jack Cunningham for giving me an intellectual home there. Toronto is where my journey as a historian began as an undergraduate thanks above all to Bob Bothwell and Lynne Viola, scholars who remain role models and whose influence shaped this project throughout. And I still draw on what I learned during my year at the London School of Economics and Political Science, especially working with Arne Hofmann.

I had the great personal and professional good fortune to finish this project at the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. An interdisciplinary community of colleagues and students, especially those in my grand strategy and Cold War seminars, made me reexamine important issues. I am particularly grateful to Roman Glitminov, Max Labaton, Masha Stoertz, and Elise van den Hoek for their research assistance, Linda Simpson for her kindness and patience, and to Jack Matlock for his generosity and insight. Peter Feaver and Bruce Jentleson have been wonderful mentors and friends; a new faculty member could not ask for better, and I am indebted to them both. I am also grateful to the school’s leadership, Kelly Brownell, Judith Kelly, and Billy Pizer, for their support throughout my time in Durham, and especially for making it possible to host an invaluable workshop on the book manuscript.

I presented portions of this research at meetings of the American Historical Association, the Canadian Historical Association, the International Studies Association, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and the Society for Military History, as well as at conferences and workshops at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Columbia University, George Washington University, the Institut de Hautes Études Internationales et du Développement, the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris, the London School of Economics and Political Science, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the Triangle Institute for Security Studies, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Toronto, and Yale University. The feedback I received at these presentations improved the work and encouraged me to pursue new avenues of research; I am grateful to all the organizers and participants. Elizabeth Charles, Jeff Engel, Kristin Goss, Jim Hershberg, David Holloway, Mark Kramer, Jon Lindsay, Chester Pach, Gunther Peck, Mike Poznansky, Don Raleigh, Tim Sayle, Doug Selvage, Josh Shifrinson, Mary Sarotte, Bill Taubman, Joseph Torigian, Jane Vaynman, James Wilson, and Gail Yoshitani all generously read portions of the manuscript in various forms and gave valuable feedback. Jim Goldgeier, Mel Leffler, Nancy Mitchell, Mike Morgan, and Arne Westad were all generous enough to make the trip to Durham to participate in a workshop on the book, hosted by Peter Feaver and Bruce Jentleson. Having these seven distinguished scholars take the time to read my entire manuscript was an honor, and their suggestions have improved the final product immeasurably. I am grateful to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press for permission to reproduce portions of my article The War Scare That Wasn’t: Able Archer 83 and the Myths of the Second Cold War, published in the Journal of Cold War Studies. At Cornell University Press, I am grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions, to Mary Gendron for shepherding the book through the production process, and especially to Michael McGandy, whose editorial guidance and friendly support made completing this project such a pleasure. Any remaining shortcomings are mine alone.

Friends and family like Violet Syrotiuk and Charlie Colbourn, Karen Colbourn, Sarah Colbourn, Elaine and Marvin Givertz, Katie and Derek Joslin, Maralyn and Michael Novack, Charles Pierson, and Catherine White made writing this book a pleasure. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Caryl and Dennis McManus for their support and generosity. And I could not imagine having completed this project without my wife, Susie Colbourn, who has shaped it from beginning to end. As a partner, her love and encouragement helped me see it through to completion. As a scholar, her expertise and input throughout made it immeasurably better.

I lack the words to adequately thank my parents, Murray and Silvia Miles, for everything they have done for me. They have always supported me and, equally important, have always pushed me to better myself and held me to the highest standards. I hope this book is a fitting testament to that; I dedicate it to them with my profound gratitude.

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION AND TRANSLATION

In romanization from Russian and Ukrainian Cyrillic script, I have used the American Language Association–Library of Congress standard throughout, albeit without two-letter tie symbols. I have deviated from this only when doing so would cause confusion in the case of names and terms that have another commonly accepted spelling in English, such as politburo (as opposed to politbiuro) and Yeltsin (as opposed to Elʹtsin). All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

Introduction

Grand Strategy and the End of the Cold War

A Soviet worker is to be given the honor of carrying General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko’s portrait in the 1984 May Day parade. Don’t ask me to do that, he demurs. I carried Lenin’s portrait and he died. I carried Stalin’s portrait and he died. I carried Khrushchev’s portrait and he disappeared. I carried Brezhnev’s portrait and he died. Not long ago I carried Andropov’s portrait and he died too. His boss insists, You have golden hands! You must carry Comrade Chernenko’s portrait. A fellow worker then chimes in, Let him carry the red flag [of the Soviet Union]!¹

Jokes (anekdoty in Russian) like this abounded in the Soviet Union during the early 1980s, and with good reason. A string of politburo members died in rapid succession: one every six months, on average, between 1980 and 1985.² In the United States, leaders also made light of the seemingly constant flow of obituaries out of the Kremlin. Vice President George H. W. Bush, as the White House chief of staff James Baker joked, should have adopted you die, I fly as his unofficial motto on account of his regular attendance at funerals in Moscow.³ It seemed that there was no one Ronald Reagan could do business with in the Kremlin. And even if there were, there was little evidence to suggest that the president was willing to do so in the first place. Reagan appeared to miss no opportunity to attack the Soviet Union. In his view, its leaders could not be trusted.⁴ Its ideology was a bizarre chapter in human history and certain to fail.⁵ The march of freedom and democracy, Reagan insisted, will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history.⁶ The Soviet Union was the focus of evil in the modern world and, most famously of all, an evil empire.⁷ The Soviets gave as good as they got. According to General Secretary Iuriĭ Andropov, Reagan had nothing to say but profanities alternated with hypocritical preaching.⁸ An article in Pravda summed up his administration’s foreign policy as little more than nuclear insanity.⁹ The Soviet press even went so far as to liken the fortieth president to Adolf Hitler.¹⁰

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The end of the Cold War presents a puzzle to this day. Wars, hot or cold, do not normally end with the abrupt but peaceful collapse of a major antagonist, the historian John Lewis Gaddis observed a decade after the conflict’s end. Such an event had to have deep roots, and yet neither our histories nor our theories came anywhere close to detecting these.… The Cold War went on for a very long time, and then all of a sudden it went away.¹¹ So profound a transformation of the international system had theretofore only been brought about by great-power war.¹² The end of the Cold War, by comparison, was remarkably—albeit not completely—peaceful.¹³

In the years since the Cold War’s improbable and unpredictable end, the conventional scholarly and policy wisdom has coalesced around four explanations. To some, the Cold War ended because Ronald Reagan rejected the failed foreign policy doctrines of containment and détente and crafted a new grand strategy that ended it.¹⁴ Rejecting this triumphalism, others credit Mikhail Gorbachev, whose new thinking transformed the Soviet Union and transcended the East-West confrontation.¹⁵ Alternative explanations look beyond the superpowers entirely, focusing on the power of people: human rights activists, anti-nuclear campaigners, concerned scientists, and citizens who reshaped their world.¹⁶ And for all these explanations centered on the agency of individuals, there are those who point instead to structural forces, the broader trends and systemic weaknesses that shaped their choices.¹⁷

None of these explanations accounts fully for the remarkable pace of the transformation—especially given what came before. After all, the Cold War’s denouement between 1985 and 1991 is regularly cited as a textbook case of long-standing adversaries setting aside prior disagreements and beginning to cooperate.¹⁸ And the conventional wisdom maintains that this transformation was sudden, emerging out of the deep freeze of the so-called Second Cold War from 1979 to 1985.¹⁹ Détente, many argue, was dead—and with it, any meaningful dialogue between the superpowers during the first half of the decade. Then, suddenly, everything seemed to change for the better.

This rapid rate of change, too, presents a puzzle. One school of thought posits an abrupt reversal in Reagan’s approach. Nearing the end of his first term, the president shifted his strategy from one of confrontation to one of cooperation, motivated in large part by fears that the Cold War might turn hot.²⁰ Another rejects the idea of Reagan as grand strategist; rapid change should come as no surprise when there was no consistency in US policy. Reagan’s approach to the Soviet Union instead struggled to reconcile two irreconcilable impulses: seeking peace for a world that included the Soviet Union (which required working with the Kremlin) and eradicating communism worldwide (which necessitated ousting its occupants).²¹ Alternatively, many seize on the fact that Gorbachev’s accession to power and the beginning of Cold War’s apparent shift from confrontation to cooperation both occurred in 1985. The new general secretary was the missing piece, the indispensable factor who remade not only his country but also the world.²² And some challenge the notion that there was a rapid change at all, arguing that policy makers in Europe kept détente alive and the lines of communication open throughout the early 1980s.²³

In seeking to understand both why the Cold War ended as it did and the deep roots of that transformation, archival evidence from both sides of the Iron Curtain led me to three conclusions. First and foremost, the key to understanding the puzzle of the Cold War’s rapid and unexpected denouement at the end of the 1980s lies in the beginning of the decade. In the span of just five years, between 1980 and 1985, the Cold War transformed in two fundamental ways: from a balance of power perceived to favor the Soviet Union to the more realistic perception of one tilted in favor of the United States, and, as a result, from a war of words coupled with back-channel discussions to overt superpower dialogue and summitry. Those twin shifts constituted the beginning of the end of the Cold War.

Second, US grand strategy shaped both of these processes. From 1981 on, Reagan implemented a grand strategy with parallel and complementary tracks. The first, what the president referred to as quiet diplomacy, was the proverbial carrot. Reagan had long seen dialogue with the Soviet Union as important not only to keep Cold War tensions under control, but also—and arguably more importantly—to cement US advantage through diplomatic agreements which would constrain the rival superpower.²⁴ The second, dubbed peace through strength, was the corresponding stick. Reagan was convinced that the United States needed to rebuild its military strength in order to secure these advantageous agreements.²⁵ A more secure United States would create a more secure world, he believed, deterring Soviet adventurism. Reagan’s grand strategy was, in the words of his second secretary of state, George P. Shultz, the parallel pursuit of strength and negotiation.²⁶

Third, successive Soviet leaders had grand strategies of their own. Gorbachev did not inherit a blank slate on coming to power in March 1985, even if he himself dismissed the preceding years as nothing but an era of stagnation (zastoĭ in Russian).²⁷ Many agree with the final general secretary, dismissing his geriatric predecessors out of hand. The end of Leonid Brezhnev’s rule, along with Iuriĭ Andropov’s and Konstantin Chernenko’s short tenures, was no more than an interregnum. History was waiting for Gorbachev.²⁸ In fact, Soviet grand strategy under all four sought, in varying ways, to reduce Cold War tensions in the hopes of creating breathing space to address the myriad economic, social, and political problems multiplying at home. For policy makers in the Kremlin, this never entailed abandoning the Cold War rivalry. They tried to strike a balance between cooperation and confrontation in order to redress the power imbalance between the two superpowers and compete more effectively.

These three interventions—situating the roots of the Cold War’s end in the early 1980s, identifying the Reagan administration’s dual-track grand strategy, and mapping the evolution of the Soviet grand strategy—are only possible thanks to international archival evidence. These sources illuminate how and why policy makers crafted strategy, but also how others perceived those choices and the global context in which they unfolded. Here, documents from Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Ukraine combine with extensive research in Russian archives to produce a more complete Eastern perspective; and US materials join with Australian, British, Canadian, French, and West German records to do the same for the Western side of the story. This pericentric approach sheds new light not only on both superpowers, but also on the roles of their allies as actors in their own right.²⁹

Such an outlook also addresses the challenges inherent in contemporary history, not least those of access and classification. Tapping into alliance networks—triangulation—can overcome these obstacles. Take, for example, the Soviet Union. Moscow sought to shape its allies’ foreign policies, but exerting such control was not automatic; it required meetings, briefings, and the flow of information—all of which left a paper trail, accessible in repositories across Eastern Europe where states have made transitions to democratic governments that prioritize transparency and access to information pertaining to their communist pasts.³⁰ But what Stephen Kotkin terms speaking Bolshevik presents historians working with such intra-bloc documents with an added challenge: they must separate pro forma pablum from meaningful commentary on the activities of the Eastern Bloc or perceptions of the West.³¹

Iosef Stalin once famously dismissed historians as mere archive rats, so focused on hunting down individual documents that they miss the big picture—unable to see the forest for the trees or, rather, the products thereof.³² But those documents can illuminate aspects of a past unknown even to participants and eyewitnesses. In this case, new evidence from both the superpowers and their allies, in both the Eastern and Western blocs, brings to light the pivotal importance of the first half of the 1980s and the grand strategies employed by Washington and Moscow to begin to end the Cold War.

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At its core, the Cold War was a struggle of global proportions between two competing systems, rival definitions of legitimacy and modernity driven either by the market or the state. Since its outbreak in the aftermath of World War II, the conflict had been defined by a mix of cooperation and competition between the superpowers. Indeed, the former was often a key means of doing the latter. Like their predecessors, leaders in Washington and Moscow during the early 1980s debated how best to engage their Cold War rival in order to come out on top.

The storied dialogue between Reagan and Gorbachev of the late 1980s did not appear out of the blue; the preceding half decade of East-West engagement, much of which has remained in the shadows, made it possible. Engagement here does not mean cooperation. Knowing the intentions with which both US and Soviet negotiators came to the bargaining table, it is hard to sustain the argument that they wanted only to cooperate with their Cold War adversary; rather, both superpowers saw engagement as a means of furthering their own, primarily competitive goals.³³ Engagement describes diplomacy in a value- and intention-neutral way: a contest, constrained in time and scope, that is a step toward the attainment of a greater objective.³⁴ For both superpowers, what that objective was changed during the years between 1980 and 1985, but it remained competitive in nature.

How US and Soviet policy makers approached engagement depended as much on perception as reality. Indeed, so much of the story of the Cold War is one of perception, reality, and the varying (and often vast) distance between the two. The first half of the 1980s was no different. On the campaign trail in 1980, Reagan and his advisers lamented the United States’ weak position and feared the consequences thereof. Washington would have to wait if it was to engage the Soviet Union on terms favorable to the United States. Upon taking office, the Reagan administration’s priority was rebuilding. Over the next five years, its outlook brightened considerably. The US economy recovered, while the Soviet economy continued its decline. Reagan’s defense buildup underwrote a new confidence in US foreign-policy making. So, too, did major structural trends emerging around the world. Markets and politics were becoming freer, something that could scarcely benefit a superpower built on quasi-autarky and single-party rule like the Soviet Union. All these developments redounded to Washington’s benefit, emboldening the Reagan administration to overtly engage the Soviet leadership. The transition was the opposite in Moscow. In 1980, Soviet policy makers believed themselves to be in a better position than the United States. Such optimism was short lived. Soviet economic and military power steadily declined, plagued by problems from Kabul to Warsaw—many of them of the Kremlin’s own making. Whereas the Reagan administration took license from rising US power to begin overtly engaging the Soviet Union, the Kremlin concluded that Soviet decline, which showed no signs of abating, necessitated a return to the bargaining table.

In Washington and Moscow alike, policy makers often misjudged their own position in the world, especially vis-à-vis that of the other superpower. In reality, the balance of power between the two shifted far less between 1980 and 1985 than did their perceptions thereof. But throughout, both superpowers sought to engage from a position of strength, and both focused disproportionately on the other’s pursuit of strength—mostly militarily—as compared to their professed desire to negotiate. These military measures seemed to those behind them to be defensive in nature, redressing an unfavorable imbalance; but to the other superpower, these ostensibly defensive measures appeared both offensive and threatening.³⁵ That same perception runs through observers’ accounts, be they allies or the general public, or those of historians writing after the fact.

The central role of perception in the events and evolutions of the first half of the 1980s is an important reminder: those years may have constituted the beginning of the end of the Cold War, but that process remained highly contingent. Leaders in both Washington and Moscow responded to one another and to the changing world in which they operated, but the choices they made were far from preordained.³⁶ Time and again, they could have made different ones that would have set the Cold War on a more confrontational course and made the world a less safe place. A declining Soviet Union could have reacted by lashing out. A rising United States could have pressed its advantage too far. Instead, both superpowers successfully managed the potentially dangerous power shift that played out between 1980 and 1985.³⁷

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Gorbachev is hard to understand, the last general secretary told his biographer William Taubman, referring, as he often does, to himself in the third person.³⁸ By contrast, he maintained that it was easy to make sense of what had come before him: stagnation, and nothing more. But the process of reevaluating this period of Soviet history has already begun, in part catalyzed by the ongoing opening of the Russian archives and those of former members of the Warsaw Pact. New studies of Brezhnev’s tenure as general secretary move past the stagnation-centric narrative in foreign and domestic policy alike.³⁹ Andropov, too, has enjoyed a resurgence in historical prominence, in part because of an effort in contemporary Russia to boost the prestige of the security services, of which both he and current president Vladimir Putin served as chief.⁴⁰ Chernenko’s historiographical day has yet to come. Understanding the evolution of superpower relations over the course of the first half of the 1980s requires a deeper understanding of each of these Soviet leaders. Struggles within the Kremlin over succession in all three instances—contrary to conspiracy theories that the four final general secretaries had made a secret pact to establish the order of succession in late 1978—are especially instructive for the light they shed on internal policy disputes.⁴¹

In Brezhnev’s case, the Soviet leader from 1964 to 1982 concluded that the Soviet Union needed peace and a reduction in tensions … [to] create better conditions for internal development and buy [the Soviet Union] time to win the struggle against imperialism.⁴² Unwilling to do anything that might jeopardize the tenuous economic situation at home, Brezhnev looked abroad.⁴³ Reducing tensions internationally was the only way he could see to enable the Soviet Union to compete with the United States more effectively. He was not wrong: during Brezhnev’s tenure, the Soviet Union eliminated the US superiority in strategic weapons, and Moscow came to be seen worldwide as Washington’s equal. Andropov inherited many of the same problems, especially in the domestic economy, but he was less risk-averse, hoping to fix them through a crackdown on inefficiency using the tool he knew best: the KGB. An economically healthier Soviet Union, he believed, would be better able to compete with the United States; however, the unhealthy general secretary had little time to see his grand strategy through. His successor, Chernenko—a Brezhnev protégé—looked to his mentor for inspiration. Under his tenure, corruption skyrocketed and the economic situation worsened, and Chernenko’s poor health meant he could not indulge in what he found most attractive about Brezhnev’s approach: high-profile summitry with his Western counterparts—above all, Reagan.

By 1985, with Gorbachev at the helm, the politburo understood that it would have to engage with the West and accept less advantageous agreements than it might have pressed for even in the recent past. Gorbachev inherited a shambolic economy, whose collapse, according to one prominent Soviet economist, was inevitable—it was just a question of when and how.⁴⁴ He inherited a military and, through the Warsaw Pact, an alliance undoubtedly and self-consciously weaker than those it faced in the United States and NATO. Though not entirely on his own terms, Gorbachev made different choices than those of his predecessors in important areas of foreign and domestic policy. To be sure, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko all appreciated that the Soviet Union’s position relative to the United States was in decline. Gorbachev saw no choice but to take their efforts further, as the situation grew increasingly dire at home. The last general secretary changed the nature of the Cold War competition, but he did not abandon it.⁴⁵

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As a historical figure, Reagan poses a host of challenges. To some, his Hollywood background served him all too well after he entered politics. When Reagan said something unexpectedly welcome, Allan Gotlieb, Canada’s ambassador to Washington, instinctively doubted the president’s sincerity: This is Reagan speaking? Or is this Reagan, the actor, reading his lines?⁴⁶ Gorbachev himself later responded fiercely to such assertions: the president was a man of real insight, sound political judgment, and courage.⁴⁷ To others, Reagan was a simpleton, on whom the nuances of statecraft were lost.⁴⁸ And historians have not just Reagan the man to contend with but also Reagan the myth. The fortieth president has become the avatar of American exceptionalism to many, for better or for worse.⁴⁹

Often credited with changing the Cold War game, Reagan’s Soviet counterparts were skeptical that he had in fact ushered in so significant a foreign-policy departure. Few in the administration would care to admit it, but Reagan’s policies bore a striking similarity to those of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. The Carter administration had increased defense spending and Carter’s willingness to speak out on human rights in the Soviet Union vexed the Kremlin. These continuities were so clear that even in 1985, analysts in Moscow concluded that US policy toward the Soviet Union would have been the same in the case of a second Carter term as it had been during Reagan’s first.⁵⁰

Reagan could articulate a deceptively simple vision for the Cold War’s outcome: We win, they lose.⁵¹ But an end to the Cold War was a long way off. Certainly the United States should work toward the peaceful, eventual devolution of the Soviet Empire into free states, but that process, Reagan’s advisers estimated at the beginning of the 1980s, would take at least sixty years.⁵² In the mean time, Reagan wanted to reduce East-West tensions—albeit on the West’s terms. Identifying a singular US foreign policy during this period nevertheless poses a serious challenge. Reagan’s White House staff consisted of advisers regularly at odds with one another, and not infrequently with the president himself.⁵³ Reagan’s strong personal aversion to discord in the policy-making process, which dated back to his time as the governor of California, meant that this factionalism all too often produced policies that did not fully reflect the president’s own views.⁵⁴ He was also, in his wife’s words, a loner, who did not share his private thoughts willingly.⁵⁵ From the Oval Office, the president kept his eye on the ‘big picture,’ namely US-Soviet relations, and tended to scant issues he believed were of little importance.⁵⁶ The challenge for the historian of Reagan’s foreign policy is precisely that his grand strategy was not spelled out in the grand-strategic venues to which historians often turn, such as at meetings of the National Security Council, at which Reagan regularly said little of substance and which often ended with everyone feeling that they had won the president over to their—diametrically opposed—positions.

People, not just process, make policy. In the case of Reagan, that meant a president with a keen emotional intelligence and an ability to engender trust. Not