Reviewed by CKR
The photo on the dust jacket says something about this book. Glance at it once, and you see Ronald Reagan telling a joke to Mikhail Gorbachev, who seems to be anticipating the punch line with pleasure. Look a little longer, and you see two shadowy presences: the whisper-interpreters who make the conversation possible. Look again, though, and it’s clear that it is Reagan and Gorbachev who are carrying on the conversation; even the postures of the faceless interpreters mimic those of the principals: both feet flat on the floor for the Soviets, the left hand on the knee for the Americans.
The author, Jack Matlock, is a career diplomat, which means that he served both Democratic and Republican administrations with an ethos of allegiance to his country rather than to a party. He tells the story of the principals and the people who worked behind the scenes on, but he gives the credit for ending the Cold War to Reagan and Gorbachev.
Reagan and Gorbachev both possessed strong visions of a future. That future was one in which the arms race of the Cold War and the constant threat of world destruction were no more. Reagan and Gorbachev accomplished those goals to give us the world we now live in.
But other threats have arisen, and the goal that both men wanted, nuclear weapons abolished by the year 2000, is nowhere close. In order to make this a safer world, we need to consider how Reagan and Gorbachev defused the crises of their day.
It’s tempting to attribute large historical events to the individuals involved. We are fortunate to have had men like Reagan and Gorbachev in office when they were, but Matlock shows that it was not simply force of personality nor rhetoric nor the more memorable incidents—“Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” or the apparent failure of the summit at Reykjavik—that propelled the history of the 1980s.
Matlock begins the story in 1981 and considers the Cold War to have ended when the Soviet Union gave up applying the idea of class warfare (expressed in the phrase “peaceful coexistence”) to foreign policy, a point he also made in his previous book, Autopsy on an Empire. He sketches events through the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union, but these were consequences of the ending of the Cold War.
The contrasts with recent events are many. Reagan showed great patience and focus on his goals as events in the Soviet Union initially foiled his desire for a substantive dialog. He and Gorbachev needed time to understand each other, and there were many difficulties along the way. Movement toward disarmament was fitful and foiled by the bureaucracies on both sides. Both men had to pull their subordinates back to the paths toward their visions.
In his epilogue, Matlock makes some of these contrasts clear.
If there is a lesson in the outcome of the Cold War other than the fallacy of Marxist ideology and the bankruptcy of the Communist system of rule, it is that a country cannot for long guarantee its own safety by the military domination of others. Security in today’s world, as Mikhail Gorbachev came to understand, can be found only if countries cooperate to achieve it.
This is an outstanding book and a gripping read. I recommend it to those who believe that George Bush is following in Reagan’s footsteps, to those who believe Reagan was a dangerous fool, and to anyone who is interested in learning how to avoid war and move the world toward peace.