The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2021 47 posed to be for the purpose of preparing for a summit to be held later, in Washington, D.C. Gorbachev surprised his coun- terparts by coming prepared to talk, in effect, about the ques- tion that President Reagan had raised about nuclear weapons in his 1984 State of the Union message: Wouldn’t it be better to do away with them entirely? Encouraged by Secretary of State George Shultz, this issue became a major focus of the discus- sions, and it produced the most extraordinary meeting that leaders of the two nations ever held. The typical outcome of such discussions would have been to refer their bold exchanges with each other to their strategic arms negotiators in Geneva so that the issues could be sorted out and made ready for the planned summit. What happened instead was that the talks broke up in disarray over the issue of testing ballistic missile defenses. In a back room at Hofdi House, the veteran presidential adviser Paul Nitze and others had been having an exchange with Soviet counterparts, includ- ing the powerful Soviet Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev, on issues that had arisen in talks on intermediate-range ballistic missiles. They were at an impasse, but it was only a temporary setback in what proved to be a momentous process. In 1987, following up on the 1986 discussions in Reykjavík, Gorbachev agreed to zero out INF missiles and two types of short-range ballistic missiles. This move had been considered highly unlikely when Reagan first proposed the zero option, but Gorbachev saw it as part of his campaign to end the Cold War. Reagan and Gorbachev signed the INF Treaty in Washington in December 1987, and it was ratified and entered into force in June 1988. The two men met again in May-June 1988 in Moscow but failed to resolve differences over issues in the strategic arms treaty. It was too late in Reagan’s term to reach agreement on START, but a good beginning had been made under the leader- ship of Reagan and Shultz. A treaty would be concluded and signed on July 31, 1991, by Gorbachev and George H.W. Bush during the latter’s single term and what turned out to be the last year of Gorbachev’s tenure as president of the USSR. The START Treaty was succeeded by the New START Treaty in 2010 under President Barack Obama and Prime Minister of Russia Dmitry Medvedev, and that treaty was extended for five years by Presi- dent Joe Biden and President Vladimir Putin soon after Biden took office in 2021. While all that was going on in the nuclear arena, Gorbachev was trying to end the Cold War in Europe, believing that good relations with Western Europe would be a key element in improving Russia’s economic condition. He had told the members of the Warsaw Pact—known as the “satellites” in the West—that they were free to adopt their own policies without interference from anyone. The political climate in Europe had been ready for such a move because of the agreement in 1975 on the Helsinki Final Act, which amounted to a definition of the international order for the Euro-Atlantic community of nations, including the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. Gorbachev’s actions were consistent with the provisions of the Helsinki Final Act, which had been signed by Brezhnev. Soon, East and West Germans were discussing unification. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989. Germany was reunited in 1990. Gorbachev received assurances from the United States and its allies that even with a united Germany as a member of NATO, the alliance would not expand its military footprint eastward and these assurances were observed through Gorbachev’s tenure as leader of the Soviet Union and through the term of President George H.W. Bush. As the 1980s came to a close, the U.S. and USSR had achieved arms control successes that George Kennan would not have imagined possible. Kennan did, however, foresee what the USSR’s “end” would look like with striking accuracy: it hinged, Kennan said, on something that would “disrupt the unity and efficacy of the Communist Party as a political instrument.” The Gang of Eight: The 1991 Coup The proximate cause of such a disruption was the decision of eight top officials of the Communist Party to stage a coup against USSR President Mikhail Gorbachev in August 1991. A crisis had been brewing as Communist Party chiefs in several of the 15 republics declared independence from the central government. The trend had been encouraged by no less a personage than the ambitious, recently elected president of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin. Though Yeltsin saw USSR President Mikhail Gor- bachev as an obstacle to his consolidation of presidential power, staging a coup to reverse the trend toward the independence of the Soviet republics was the last thing that Yeltsin wanted, so his opposition to the coup was practically guaranteed. Gorbachev had thought a lot about how to revive the Soviet Union, and he took office with change in mind and policies to make change happen.