The Foreign Service Journal, December 2021

50 DECEMBER 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Confidence- and Security-Building Measures and Disarma- ment in Europe, also known as the Stockholm Conference, abruptly left a plenary meeting. We learned later that he had been summoned back to Moscow because his father lay near death. At the time, when asked about getting on with nuclear arms talks, President Reagan said that he would like to, “but they keep dying on me.” The stage was set for a younger, more dynamic leader to take the reins of power in Moscow. Gorbachev was 54 when selected in 1985 by the Politburo to succeed Andropov—indeed, to replace leaders who ever since the death of Stalin had resisted changes in the status quo. 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. He summarized his policy in two words: “perestroika” and “glasnost,” by which he meant that he wanted to restructure the old Soviet system while making it more open and transparent. Gorbachev helped usher in a new era, one in which coopera- tion with the U.S. on curbing the nuclear arms race was possible. Reykjavík’s Flame of Hope The world of 2021 is a far different place from the world of the 1980s. In 1984, Reagan was able to argue in a State of the Union message that the only purpose of nuclear weapons was to see that they were never used and that the logic of that suggested they should be done away with. Imagine a U.S. president saying such a thing now! On May 31, 1988, standing with Mikhail Gorbachev at the Kremlin in Moscow, Reagan was reminded by a reporter of his speech castigating the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” He replied simply: “No, that was another time, another era.” Today there is no counterpart either to Reagan in Washington or to Gorbachev in Moscow. There is no “nuclear freeze movement” in which Ameri- cans demonstrate in the streets to ask their government to slow down the nuclear arms race. President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the Reagan-Shultz-Gorbachev INF treaty effective Aug. 2, 2019, citing Soviet noncompliance and suggesting that China should be covered by any INF treaty. Russia today is in much the same situation economically as it was when Mikhail Gorbachev diagnosed its problems. Four distinguished statesmen of the Cold War wrote sev- eral articles between 2007 and 2013 that argued for the goal of a world without nuclear weapons, hoping to rekindle the flame of hope that had burned brightly in Reykjavík. George Shultz, Henry Kissinger, William Perry and Sam Nunn met with President Barack Obama, who supported their goal and gave a speech in Prague that laid out an ambitious arms control and disarmament program. Obama spoke later in Berlin to advocate deeper reductions in nuclear weapons after New START. He also spoke in Hiroshima about the need for moral advances to match technological advances. Leaders of other nations spoke in support of working toward the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. The U.N. Security Council in 2011 adopted a resolution asking for efforts to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons in line with the nuclear nonproliferation treaty. But today, late in the year 2021, little is heard of eliminating nuclear weapons as a national priority. Obviously, the pandemic has sucked all the oxygen out of the room available for debate about great public issues, but we should not forget the far greater global catastrophe that awaits us if a nuclear war should ever start. Russia today is in much the same situation economically as it was when Mikhail Gorbachev diagnosed its problems. Much like Leonid Brezhnev before him, President Vladimir Putin has opted for the status quo in the name of maintaining a stable society. Putin does not have a Communist Party nomenklatura, true; but he does have wealthy oligarchs eager to do his bidding. He has relied on Russia’s natural resources as the driver of gross domes- tic product rather than encouraging entrepreneurship, and has thus sacrificed the potential offered by science and technology for modernizing the economy. Despite evidence that Russia is a nation in decline, or maybe because the behavior of a weak Russia could be more dangerous than that of a strong and secure Russia, the United States should look for chances to work constructively with that nation. George Shultz’s last book before he passed away at age 100 in February 2021, was about the future. Titled A Hinge of His- tory , it was written with James Timbie, a leading figure for many years in nuclear negotiations with the Soviet Union. In that last testament of a great American patriot, Shultz and his co-author eloquently argue for renewed engagement with Russia. They write: “Russia is a major power, armed with the most danger- ous weapons on earth. It will always be important, so the United States must figure out how to work with Russia constructively. It has been done before, and it can be done today, even in a new and changing world.” n