The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2021 45 “strongest,” “weakest” and “pitiable,” but the general sense of his prediction was spot on. In his “X” article, Kennan did not venture to discuss the possi- bility that the leaders of the two bitter Cold War protagonists, the Soviet Union and the United States, could ever become partners in the global political arena. In fact, he ruled that out for what he called “the foreseeable future.” With no evidence to suggest that a Reagan and a Gorbachev would emerge simultaneously at the tops of their respective governments, he could not have antici- pated what took place during the 1980s. Selling containment as the preferable alternative to a war that then seemed all too likely was uppermost in his mind. And yet, they did become partners, and from the late 1970s through the 1980s, just before the collapse of the USSR, took dramatic cooperative security steps that ended the Cold War. It is the most surprising and unpredicted part of the story, and well worth remembering today. In the following we explore how that came to be and where it led. The INF Fulcrum: 1979-1984 With the Soviet Union’s achievement of strategic nuclear parity with the United States in the early 1970s, arms control had become a central policy concern. Negotiations on intermediate- range nuclear forces (INF) started under the aegis of President Jimmy Carter and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev following Soviet deployment of SS-20s, multiwarhead ballistic missiles tar- geted on Western Europe, in 1976. At a combined NATO Foreign Ministers–Defense Ministers meeting in December 1979—in which I participated as State’s European Bureau representative— NATO had agreed on a two-track policy: The Alliance would offer negotiations with the Soviet Union to limit deployments of intermediate-range missiles but would also prepare to deploy Mikhail Gorbachev (at left) and Ronald Reagan talk during a walk in Washington, D.C., where they signed the INF Treaty on Dec. 8, 1987. SPUTNIK/ALAMY. BACKGROUND: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/EKAPANOVA