Reagan and Gorbachev

"Jack Matlock’s book, like Lévesque’s, is on the end of the Cold War, but is quite different because it is overwhelmingly concerned with US-Soviet relations. It differs in another respect from all four of the other books I’ve discussed, for it is written by an insider—a participant-observer in the policy process. Reagan and Gorbachev is one of three valuable books Matlock has written since he retired from the government service. Now aged 90, he was a career diplomat who played a significant and very constructive role in the process whereby the Cold War was ended. In 1983 he succeeded Richard Pipes as the top Soviet specialist on Reagan’s National Security Council. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter His policy preferences were very different from those of his predecessor. Pipes believed that no good could come of Reagan talking with Soviet leaders and was highly skeptical of the value of engagement. Matlock, in contrast, believed it was necessary to engage and he fully supported Reagan’s own desire to meet his Soviet counterparts. From Washington Matlock moved to Moscow, as American ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1987 to 1991. He was a rare example of a consequential Reagan Administration foreign policy appointee who kept his position after George H.W. Bush arrived in the White House. Matlock’s book is based on a great deal of first-hand knowledge, on the careful records he kept at the time, and on the research he has conducted since leaving government service. While aware of Ronald Reagan’s intellectual shortcomings and blind spots, Matlock takes a highly positive view of him and of the part he played in the Cold War’s ending. He deplores, as did George Shultz, the fact that the Bush administration took so long to carry on where Reagan left off, thus losing momentum in the US-Soviet relationship and weakening Gorbachev’s position. Matlock recognizes Gorbachev’s indispensability for the Cold War ending so peaceably and in such a short space of time. Margaret Thatcher had many faults. She tried to do too much herself, bullied her ministers, particularly Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe, and she became too sure she was always right. But her role in the ending of the Cold War was greater than has been recognized and greater than the disparity between British military power and that of the American and Soviet superpowers would lead a ‘realist’ to expect. One of Thatcher’s strengths was to do her homework. She held many seminars on different aspects of policy to which outside experts were invited. She took great pains to be well-informed. I was an active participant in three such seminars—two at the prime minister’s official country residence, Chequers (in 1983 and 1987), and the other a much more informal discussion in 10 Downing Street in December 1984, the evening before Mikhail Gorbachev arrived for his first visit to Britain, three months prior to his becoming Soviet leader. I had been invited to brief her specifically on Gorbachev, who had first been brought to her attention by a paper I wrote for the 8 September 1983 seminar. The most important of these seminars was that 1983 one. As the now declassified government papers clearly show, it led to a change of British foreign policy—to what the documents describe as ‘a new policy’ of engagement with Communist Europe (both USSR and Eastern Europe). “Margaret Thatcher had many faults . . . But her role in the ending of the Cold War was greater than has been recognized” Up to that point, the Prime Minister had been skeptical about the idea that any good could come from engaging with the ‘evil empire’. Her views on this subject had remained close to Reagan’s. The British Foreign Office (our equivalent of the State Department) was concerned about the Cold War getting dangerously colder. They were anxious to improve East-West relations, but Thatcher had a deep distrust of the Foreign Office as an institution, believing that they were much too ready to compromise. That the academic experts at the 1983 seminar were even more in favor of engagement with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe—at all levels, we urged, from dissidents to general secretaries—helped to swing the Prime Minister behind a policy that the Foreign Office had hitherto failed to get her to adopt. Thatcher prepared extraordinarily thoroughly for every meeting with Gorbachev who, for his part, was greatly impressed by how closely she had been following Soviet developments. They argued vigorously, but with a mutual respect, which developed into a surprising friendship. The fact that she was Reagan’s favorite foreign leader—he referred to her as a ‘soulmate’—made her all the more important in Gorbachev’s eyes, for she exercised real influence with Reagan personally and in his administration. The Prime Minister’s official foreign policy adviser in 10 Downing Street, Sir Percy Cradock, worried that, ‘Iron Lady’ image notwithstanding, Gorbachev had become ‘something of an icon’ for her and that ‘she acted as a conduit from Gorbachev to Reagan, selling him in Washington as a man to do business with, and acting as an agent of influence in both directions’. Cradock disapproved of that, but I take the opposite view. In contrast with much of her diplomacy in Western Europe and her hostility to German unification, she played a valuably constructive role in the changing relationship with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. It was to Thatcher’s credit that she worked so hard to become well-informed. She was able to assimilate knowledge to a much greater extent than Reagan could, although he also prepared assiduously for summit meetings. Gorbachev gradually came to respect Reagan and they shared a desire (not endorsed by Thatcher) to rid the world entirely of nuclear weapons, but he also found the President obtuse. Thatcher, in contrast, with her vigor in debate and relevant facts at her fingertips, kept the Soviet leader on his toes. Not only Reagan, but Gorbachev at times also, was influenced by her. My academic interests have always been much broader than Soviet, Russian and Communist politics and have included other countries and other subjects. A recurring theme of my research and writing has been political leadership. The first really substantial article I published in an academic journal (in the 1960s) was on the powers and leadership styles of British prime ministers. The book you mention, The Myth of the Strong Leader , is on political leadership worldwide, focusing mainly on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I stress the danger of heads of government concentrating too much power in their hands and believing that they alone have the right to take all the big decisions. While that applies especially to authoritarian regimes—where a more collective leadership is usually a lesser evil than personal dictatorship—it is applicable also to democracies. Dangerously foolish risks are taken when a president or prime minister surrounds himself by people who are afraid to disagree with him or her, and when groupthink takes the place of uninhibited discussion in which neither senior colleagues nor expert advisers are afraid to air views contrary to those of the top leader. Leaders who suffer from the illusion that they always know best and that their intuition is worth more than the professional knowledge or political understanding of lesser mortals are especially dangerous during a pandemic. Britain has not done well during the coronavirus health crisis. There are many reasons for that, but one is that Prime Minister Boris Johnson has never shared Margaret Thatcher’s concern with mastering policy detail and he was too ready to believe his own upbeat rhetoric. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But Johnson looks less bad in comparison with a President of the United States who is manifestly out of his depth in that role, but fails to realize it. Faced by fundamental global problems which cannot be fixed by building walls or populist invective—the coronavirus and, of even greater significance, climate change—a policy of ‘America First’ is as dangerous for the United States as it is for other countries. It also greatly damages the US’s reputation in the rest of the world. Even as early as 2017, in only two out of 37 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center was Donald Trump rated ahead of his far more highly esteemed predecessor Barack Obama. (The two exceptions were Russia and Israel.) Since the spread of the coronavirus has been especially rapid and severe in the United States, as compared with many Asian and European countries that from its onset adopted more stringent, consistent and rational policies, Trump’s reputation has plummeted further. He is, I regret to say, a prime example of ‘the myth of the strong leader’—a leader who likes to look tough, relishing the power to follow his own whims, regardless of the evidence. This appeals to a segment of the population who admire that kind of ‘strength’ in a leader, although there are other, and far more desirable, qualities we would wish a head of government to possess—among them, integrity, intelligence, empathy, collegiality, diligence and (if we are lucky) vision. Presenting himself, with bombast and bluster, as ‘strong’ may be of some utility for a president perpetually running for re-election, but it is no way to govern a great country."