The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

44 DECEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL COVER STORY James E. Goodby joined the Foreign Service in 1952 and rose to the rank of Career Minister. During his career, he was engaged in international security negotiations with the USSR and later with the Russian Federation, including tours as head of the U.S. delegation to the Conference on Confidence- and Security-Building Measures and Disarmament in Europe, part of the Helsinki Process, and as chief negotiator for Cooperative Threat Reduction (the Nunn-Lugar program). After service in U.S. Missions to the European Community and to NATO, he was appointed deputy assistant secretary of State for European affairs and then ambassador to Finland. He worked with George Shultz at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 2007 until Secretary Shultz passed away in February 2021. He is currently Annenberg Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Acknowledgment: The author thanks Tom Blanton and Bill Burr of the National Security Archive for their invaluable advice during the research and writing of this essay. Thirty years ago, an improbable U.S.-Soviet partnership took dramatic cooperative security steps to end the Cold War. BY JAMES E . GOODBY G eorge Kennan made public his ideas about what became the American Cold War strategy of containment in 1947 in an essay published by Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym “X”. The article was based on the “Long Telegram, ” a strategic analysis of the sources of Soviet conduct he had written and sent as a cable while posted in Moscow in 1946. One question that he obviously thought he had to address was: How does it all end? Kennan’s answer was strikingly close to what actually hap- pened to the Soviet Union more than four decades later, in December 1991: “If … anything were ever to occur to disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Party as a political instrument, Soviet Russia might be changed overnight from one of the strongest to one of the weakest and most pitiable of national societies.” His rhetoric got a bit out of hand with adjectives like “overnight,” The Odd Couple and the End of an Era WHEN THE SOVIET UNION COLLAPSED