Turning Points in Ending the Cold War

by Skinner, Kiron K.

• ISBN13: 9780817946319
• ISBN10: 0817946314
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-01
• Publisher: Hoover Press

Summary

"In 1983, U.S.-Soviet relations appeared to be in an uncontrollable free fall. It was the year Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an "evil empire," announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, and obtained permission from Western European governments to deploy intermediate nuclear forces (INF) on their soil. The Soviet government retaliated by walking out of the INF and Strategic Arms Reductions Talks. Yet, just two years later, Reagan and new Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev held their first summit and jointly declared that "a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought." Between 1988 and 1991, peaceful revolutions spread throughout Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact nations embraced democracy. These historic events defied widespread expectations, as many experts expected the cold war to end with a nuclear war. Why were they proved wrong?" "The essays in this collection offer illuminating insights into the key players - Ronald Reagan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin, and others - and the monumental events that led to the collapse of communism. The expert contributors examine the end of detente and the beginning of the new phase of the cold war in the early 1980s, Reagan's radical new strategies aimed at changing Soviet behavior, the peaceful democratic revolutions in Poland and Hungary, the events that brought about the reunification of Germany, the role of events in Third World countries, the critical contributions of Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and more."--BOOK JACKET.

Author Biography

Kiron K. Skinner is the W. Glenn Campbell Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. She also is an associate professor of history and political science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Table of Contents

A Perspective from Moscow
A Perspective from Washington
Introductory Essay: Talking Across the Cold War Divide	p. 1
The End of Detente and the Reformulation of American Strategy: 1980-1983	p. 11
What Lessons Learned?	p. 40
The Crisis that Didn't Erupt: The Soviet-American Relationship, 1980-1983	p. 63
An Alternative Conception of Mutual Cooperation	p. 93
Gorbachev's Foreign Policy: The Concept	p. 111
Moving to Globalization	p. 141
Soviet-American Relations in the Third World	p. 149
Reversal of Fortune?	p. 182
Europe Between the Superpowers	p. 191
Europe Between the Superpowers: A Soviet Perspective	p. 218
German Unification	p. 229
German Unification from the Soviet (Russian) Perspective	p. 255
Boris Yeltsin: Catalyst for the Cold War's End	p. 273
Boris Yeltsin: Catalyst for the Cold War's End?	p. 306
Contributors	p. 327
Acknowledgments	p. 333
Index	p. 335
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