The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

46 DECEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL By 1983, no agreement on INF had been reached with the Soviet Union, and deployments of ground- launched cruise missiles had begun that year in a few NATO countries. such missiles in the territories of European alliance members if agreement could not be reached with Moscow. This was the same formula NATO had been prepared to use in a negotiation with Moscow over NATO’s proposed deployment of the “neutron bomb,” until President Carter decided the weapon was not needed and was politically divisive. No progress was made in the remaining year of President Carter’s term, and Ronald Reagan became president in January 1981. By that time, a suggestion that all INF missiles on both sides should be banned had gained traction among defense experts in West Germany, and Richard Perle, then a top aide to Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, had advocated that this become the U.S. position. The idea appealed to Reagan, and the zero option became the position presented to Moscow by the Reagan admin- istration in November 1981, contrary to the advice of Reagan’s first Secretary of State, Alexander Haig. (As a former Supreme Commander of NATO, Haig favored some NATO INF deployment in Europe to fill what some Europeans saw as a deterrence gap in NATO’s posture.) By 1983, however, no agreement on INF had been reached with the Soviet Union, and deployments of ground-launched cruise missiles had begun that year in a few NATO countries. West Germany had agreed to deploy Pershing II intermediate-range ballistic missiles in its territory, and these deployments also had begun in 1983 despite a major Soviet effort to persuade the Ger- man government and people not to do so. The Soviet delegation in the Geneva INF talks was ordered to walk out when its campaign to block Pershing II failed, and that act meant the suspension of any negotiations on INF. George Shultz long maintained that the German decision to proceed with Pershing II deployments in 1983 over strong Soviet objections was the turning point in the Cold War, because it proved to Moscow that the Western allies would stick together in standing up to Soviet threats. This display of NATO solidarity must have added to the feeling in Moscow that their government lacked the clout their people expected it to have. In themeantime, circumstances arose in America and Russia that solidified that turning point.This is themost unexpected part of the unlikely partnership that ended the ColdWar. It comes down to a story of “the odd couple”—two leaders steeped in the values of their respective systems but whose thoughts turned to an imagined better future, and who gained the power to act on those visions. Converging Interests: 1985-1988 After Mikhail Gorbachev’s ascent to the top positions in the Soviet hierarchy in 1985, he vigorously pursued conditions he perceived as necessary for the economic health of the Soviet Union—or, as he put it, to achieve the full potential of socialism. Gorbachev thought it was possible to end the military confronta- tion between the Soviet Union and the United States that had been the driver of defense expenditures in both countries. He believed, in fact, that the Cold War had to be ended if he was to achieve his ambitions for the Soviet Union. His actions quickly led to a changed outlook for agreements with the West, both in U.S.-USSR cooperative security negotiations and in political rela- tions between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. Gorbachev had probably read or perhaps listened to the State of the Union message that Ronald Reagan delivered in January 1984. Gorbachev certainly paid attention to this part of the American president’s speech: “People of the Soviet Union, there is only one sane policy, for your country and mine, to preserve our civilization in this modern age: A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. The only value in our two nations possessing nuclear weapons is to make sure they will never be used. But then, would it not be better to do away with them entirely?” To a man looking for a way to end the Cold War, Reagan’s words must have seemed like manna from heaven. A year later, in January 1985, George Shultz and Andrei Gromyko achieved an agreement that was aimed at expediting nuclear negotiations between the two sides, another signal that Reagan and Shultz were serious. They restructured the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) and Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations, and Reagan appointed new heads of the negotiating teams for strategic and space arms. The table was set for progress. After becoming General Secretary in 1985, Gorbachev lost no time in joining President Reagan for what became known as the “Fireside Summit” in Geneva, Switzerland, on Nov. 19-20, 1985. The joint statement released by the two leaders included these words from President Reagan’s State of the Union message: “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” In October 1986, Reagan and Gorbachev met again, this time in Reykjavík at the Hofdi House. That meeting was sup-