Instead, Soviet communism simply collapsed. With the rise to power of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985, the regime launched a painful process of retrenchment and reform. That process is still underway, its outcome greatly in doubt. But the larger East-West confrontation is history, and parties on both sides are scrambling to take credit. Did the Reagan-Bush policy of “peace through strength”-later modulated to what the White House would call “tough love”-win the cold war? Did Gorbachev do it? Or did the Soviet Union crumble under the weight of its own inner contradictions, as Marx might have said? These are more than academic questions. They go to the core of all foreign-policy thinking, and as such will be debated for years to come.
Any attempt to provide answers will have to reckon with At the Highest Levels (498 pages. Little, Brown. $24.95), an account of the diplomatic pas de deux pairing Gorbachev with George Bush from late 1988 through the Soviet leader’s resignation in December 1991. This book, by CNN commentator Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, the foreign-affairs columnist for Time magazine who has just been named special ambassador for policy on Russia and the other former Soviet republics, does not frame an explicit argument. Its aim is ostensibly more modest: a carefully reported cold-war chronicle from the inside. The authors rely on “a large number” of U.S., Soviet and European officials, with whom they spoke, not for attribution, “on a regular basis.” Some of the officials occupied the most senior positions (former secretary of state and leakmeister James Baker appears to suspiciously good advantage throughout). From these interviews they re-created hundreds of the negotiations, briefings and phone calls that allowed U.S.-Soviet relations to evolve from frosty arms-control talks to something like a real, if limited, alliance by the time of the Persian Gulf War.
The themes are for the most part familiar: Bush’s early skepticism about Gorbachev, reinforced by his awareness of his vulnerability to the right wing of the Republican Party; Gorbachev’s growing problems with his own Communist hard-liners; the mounting concern within the administration that American caution might also prove fatal to Soviet reform. But Beschloss and Talbott produce a wealth of valuable detail. They have Bush telling Gorbachev even before taking office that the party of Ronald Reagan was led by “marginal intellectual thugs” who would capitalize on any chance to accuse the incoming president of softness on communism. They cite unusually candid warnings from former Soviet foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze (another of the authors’ favorites) about the rise of anti-Western sentiment in high Moscow circles. There are revealing anecdotes: after the bloody crackdown in Lithuania in January 1991, Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a hasty “mutual-support pact” with all three Baltic states, throwing Gorbachev into a rage. “That son of a bitch!” he shouted. “What’s to be done about him?” It was, said an unnamed informant inside the Kremlin, like Henry II’s plea about Thomas a Becket: “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
The overall picture is of a dialectical process resembling that of a Victorian novel of manners, in which the hero and heroine only narrowly escape a series of misunderstandings and false starts to achieve true bliss. After more than two years of delicacy, Bush and Gorbachev did consummate the relationship begun under Reagan. And as Beschloss and Talbott point out in a brief summary passage, it was an ironic denouement: Gorbachev “was responsible for much of what had happened … yet he had neither foreseen nor intended the outcome.”
This seems a fair, if preliminary, judgment. Bush did not “win” the cold war, even though he took the credit in his 1992 State of the Union address. Neither did Gorbachev. The fall of Soviet communism was probably inevitable. Still, nothing says it had to happen when it did. In the end, history and personality entwine: events flow at their own rate, but people channel them. “At the Highest Levels” is most illuminating on the personalities-Gorbachev and Reagan and Bush all somehow overcoming a lifetime’s habits of thought. Still to come are the books on the historical forces at work. No doubt they are already in train. Meanwhile, this is the place to start.
