US-Soviet Relations: Beyond the Cold War?
Phil Williams1989, International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-)
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Abstract
President Reagan came to office in 1981 as an enthusiastic Cold Warrior determined to restore American power and pre-eminence and to show the Soviet Union that it could not embark upon expansionist policies without paying a very high price. He left office in 1989 as the co-architect of a new superpower detente. It was not called that, of course, as the idea of detente was still associated with America's period of malaise in the 1970s, when both foreign policy and domestic politics were in disarray after Watergate, Vietnam and the Iran hostage crisis. But the antipathy that had characterized Soviet-American exchanges in the early 1980s had been replaced by a relationship that was less acrimonious and much more cordial. A series of summit meetings between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev had culminated in the Washington summit of December 1987 at which the INF Treaty, removing all land-based medium-range nuclear missiles from Europe, was signed. In June 1988 President Reagan visited Moscow, and although little of substance emerged from this summit the symbolic importance of a visit to the centre of what Reagan, only a few years earlier, had called the 'evil empire' was immense. Although the superpowers found it impossible to reach an agreement on long-range arms reductions (START) before Reagan left office, it was clear that they had entered another period of relaxation in which they were increasingly willing to take steps to moderate and regulate their relationship and to cooperate on security issues. What had occurred was effectively detente by another name. What remains uncertain, of course, is whether the Reagan-Gorbachev detente is sustainable. Is it just another phase in the old cyclical pattern in which the superpowers pass from periods of Cold War to detente and back again? Or does it represent a more fundamental and long-term trend in the evolution of US-Soviet relations from confrontation to cooperation? In short, is the Cold War finally over? It may be tempting to dismiss such questions as premature and ill-conceived. There have been thaws in the Cold War before, but they have been succeeded by periods of renewed tension between the superpowers. The 'spirit of Camp David' of 1959, for example, when Khrushchev visited the United States for talks with Eisenhower, was followed by one of the most dangerous periods in the Cold War, with the superpowers confronting each other over Berlin and Cuba. Similarly, the detente of the 1970s gave way to a renewed period of tension in which the two sides abandoned cooperative ventures for a more confrontational approach. Although the rhetorical belligerence of Moscow and Washington was not matched by recklessness on either side, the superpower relationship in the first half of the 1980s was characterized by a degree of mutual paranoia and hostility that many found extremely disturbing.
