The End of the Cold War in two minutes
- Reagan rejected détente. He called the Soviet Union an evil empire in 1983, raised defense spending, and proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed Star Wars, to shoot down nuclear missiles.
- The Reagan Doctrine backed anti-communist forces, mostly with money and weapons, in Afghanistan and Nicaragua. Iran-Contra broke in 1986 after aides secretly sold missiles to Iran and sent profits to the Contras.
- Mikhail Gorbachev took over a stagnant Soviet economy in 1985, and oil prices fell in 1986. He began glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) and needed weapons cuts, which meant deals with Reagan.
- Summits at Geneva in 1985 and Reykjavík in 1986 led to the INF Treaty of December 1987, which destroyed a class of nuclear missiles and allowed on-site inspections.
- In 1989 Gorbachev declined to use force to prop up Communist allies. Solidarity won in Poland, Hungary opened its border, the Berlin Wall opened on November 9, and Germany reunified in 1990.
- A failed hard-line coup in August 1991 hastened the Soviet collapse that December. The United States, already victorious in the Gulf War, debated its role in Somalia, Rwanda and the Balkans.
- On the exam: Causation questions ask you to weigh Reagan's pressure, Soviet economic failure, Gorbachev's choices and Eastern European protest, and to connect them to containment after 1945 and 1970s détente.
Topic 9.3 key terms
- East Germany (GDR)
The Communist German state, 1949–1990, allied with the Soviet Union. Its ruling party built the Berlin Wall and controlled travel out of the country. West Germany was a separate democracy.
- Berlin Wall
East Germany's guarded barrier through Berlin, begun August 13, 1961, to stop its people leaving. It stood 28 years and was opened on the night of November 9, 1989.
- Cold War
The rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, from the late 1940s until 1991. They fought it through alliances, nuclear weapons, and proxy wars. The two superpowers never fought each other directly.
- Causation
Explaining why something happened. The end of the Cold War had several causes at once: American pressure, American diplomacy, Gorbachev, and the people of Eastern Europe. On the exam, show how they worked together.
- Détente
The easing of U.S.-Soviet tension in the 1970s, through arms talks, trade, and summits. At his first news conference, Reagan called it a one-way street the Soviets had used for their own aims.
- Evil empire
Reagan's name for the Soviet Union, in a speech to evangelical ministers in Orlando on March 8, 1983. The words he used were an evil empire. The phrase treated the Cold War as a moral contest and broke with détente.
- Nuclear freeze
A campaign to halt the testing, building, and deployment of nuclear weapons by both the United States and the Soviet Union. Reagan opposed a freeze at the numbers then in place. He wanted cuts, after a buildup.
- Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
Reagan's plan, announced March 23, 1983, to research a defense that could shoot nuclear missiles down in flight. He wanted those weapons made impotent and obsolete. Critics called it Star Wars. In the 1987 SDIO report, lasers and particle beams are a later phase. The first design was interceptor rockets.
- Reagan Doctrine
U.S. money and weapons for rebels fighting governments the Soviet Union backed. Reagan called the rebels freedom fighters. The main cases were Afghanistan and Nicaragua. El Salvador was different: aid went to the government, against leftist guerrillas.
- Sandinistas
The leftist movement that took power in Nicaragua in 1979 and governed through the 1980s. The Reagan administration tried to bring that government down.
- Contras
Rebels fighting Nicaragua's Sandinista government. The United States armed and funded them, much of the time from bases in Honduras.
- Boland Amendment
A law of October 12, 1984, Public Law 98-473, section 8066. During fiscal 1985, no funds available to the CIA, the Defense Department, or any other U.S. intelligence agency could be spent, directly or indirectly, to support military or paramilitary operations in Nicaragua.
- Iran-Contra affair
A secret White House operation, 1985–86. Aides sold missiles to Iran to free American hostages in Lebanon, and diverted profits to the Nicaraguan Contras, which the Boland Amendment had forbidden.
- Mikhail Gorbachev
General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party from March 1985. At 54 he was the youngest member of the Politburo. He answered a stalled economy with glasnost and perestroika, and he came to Reagan looking for a cut in weapons.
- glasnost
Openness. Gorbachev's policy of letting Soviet citizens say, in print and in public, what was wrong: empty shelves, bad officials, the failures of the system.
- perestroika
Restructuring. Gorbachev's attempt to loosen the state-planned economy and allow some market practices. The reforms cost money, so he needed to spend less on weapons.
- Reykjavík summit
October 11–12, 1986, in Iceland. Reagan and Gorbachev talked through eliminating nuclear weapons. It broke down over SDI, the missile shield critics called Star Wars: Gorbachev wanted the research kept in the laboratory, and Reagan refused.
- INF Treaty (1987)
Signed December 8, 1987. It eliminated U.S. and Soviet ground-launched missiles with ranges from 500 to 5,500 kilometers, and let each side inspect the other. The first treaty to destroy a class of nuclear weapons.
- trust, but verify
A Russian proverb Reagan kept quoting to Gorbachev. Make the deal, then check that the other side does it. The INF Treaty's inspectors were the check.
- on-site inspection
Under the INF Treaty, each side sent inspectors onto the other's ground. Soviet teams watched missile motors burn in Texas. Americans stood at the gates of the Votkinsk missile factory from 1988 to 2001.
- satellites
The Communist states of Eastern Europe, aligned with Moscow. At the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev said every nation was free to choose its own system.
- Solidarity
An independent trade union founded in the Gdańsk shipyards in 1980. Poland's Communist government banned it under martial law in December 1981. It survived underground and, once legal again, won the June 1989 elections.
- Lech Wałęsa
The electrician who led Solidarity. He became the face of Poland's challenge to Communist rule, from the 1980 strike through the 1989 elections.
- Tiananmen Square
The Beijing square where students and workers camped in the spring of 1989, asking for political reform. On the night of June 3–4, China's army crushed the protests. Hundreds were killed. Some estimates run above a thousand.
- Sinatra Doctrine
Moscow's 1989 name for letting Warsaw Pact countries choose their own governments. It replaced the Brezhnev Doctrine, the claim that Moscow could send troops to keep a Communist government in power.
- START I (1991)
The first treaty to cut U.S. and Soviet long-range nuclear weapons. Signed in Moscow on July 31, 1991, it limited each side to 1,600 delivery vehicles and 6,000 accountable warheads.
- Russian Republic
The largest of the fifteen Soviet republics. By 1991 it had its own elected president and parliament, separate from the Soviet government Gorbachev led.
- Boris Yeltsin
President of the Russian Republic. On August 19, 1991, he climbed onto a tank outside the Russian parliament and called for resistance to the coup against Gorbachev. The coup collapsed two days later.
- Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
A loose confederation of former Soviet republics, formed as the Soviet Union ended. Russia, Belarus and Ukraine agreed to it at Belavezha on December 8, 1991. Eleven former republics joined on December 21.
- New world order
George H. W. Bush's name, in a speech to Congress on September 11, 1990, for a world after the Cold War in which countries would act together against aggression, through the United Nations.
- Persian Gulf War (1991)
A U.S.-led war, authorized by the UN Security Council, that drove Iraq out of Kuwait. The air war began January 17, 1991. The ground war lasted about 100 hours. Iraq's dictator, Saddam Hussein, stayed in power. The U.S. name for the fighting was Operation Desert Storm.
- Ethnic cleansing
The forced removal or killing of an ethnic or religious group, to take its land. The term spread with the wars in the former Yugoslavia. At Srebrenica in July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces murdered about 8,000 Muslim men and boys.
- APEC
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, a forum of Pacific economies founded in 1989. At Bogor in 1994 its leaders pledged free and open trade in the region, by 2010 for industrialized economies and by 2020 for developing ones.
- Powell Doctrine
Questions others drew from Colin Powell before sending troops: a real national interest, a clear goal, overwhelming force, public support, and a way out. Powell wrote that there is no fixed set of rules for the use of military force.
Transcript
Quotes are from the historical record and name their source. Lines marked Dramatized are reconstructions.
Immediately, Without Delay
November 9, 1989
Key terms: East Germany (GDR), Berlin Wall, Cold War, Causation
November 9, 1989 Thursday · 6:53 p.m.
For nearly an hour, a Communist Party spokesman, Günter Schabowski, had been reading announcements to the world's press. Near the end, he picked up a note he'd been handed on his way in. He hadn't read it through.
It said East Germans could apply to travel abroad. A reporter asked when the new rule started.
He leafed through his papers and answered.
That comes into effect, according to my information, immediately, without delay.
Most East Germans watched West German TV. On the late news, the gates in the Wall stood wide open. They didn't. So people went to look.
At the Bornholmer Strasse crossing, thousands of people chanted, 'Open the gate!' The officer was told to let the loudest out and stamp their ID cards, so they could never return.
At about 11:30, with the crowd still growing, Lieutenant Colonel Harald Jäger opened the gate. The Wall had stood for twenty-eight years. It opened because of a note nobody had read carefully.
Six years earlier, the American president had called the Soviet Union an evil empire. So who ended the Cold War? Reagan's pressure? Reagan's diplomacy? Mikhail Gorbachev? Or the people on this wall?
1981
Evil Empire
1981–1983
Key terms: Détente, Evil empire, Nuclear freeze, Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
Ronald Reagan called détente a one-way street the Soviets had used for their own aims. His plan, as Richard Allen recalled it later: We win and they lose.
In London in 1982, he said Marx was right: a great economic crisis was coming.
It was coming to the Soviet Union. He would leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history.
In 1983, speaking to evangelical ministers in Florida, he went further.
Ronald Reagan
the aggressive impulses of an evil empire
Then he paid for the words. In five years, military spending rose by more than a third after inflation. New bombers, new missiles, more ships.
In June 1982, hundreds of thousands of people rallied in New York's Central Park against the arms race.
In March 1983, Reagan asked scientists to make nuclear missiles impotent and obsolete by shooting them down in flight. Critics named that plan Star Wars.
That November, NATO rehearsed a nuclear war. Some Soviet officials feared the exercise was cover for a real attack. A secret American review later warned that relations had been on a hair trigger.
The scientists moved their clock to three minutes to midnight.
"Freedom Fighters"
1981–1987
Key terms: Reagan Doctrine, Sandinistas, Contras, Boland Amendment, Iran-Contra affair
Reagan rarely sent American troops. He sent money and weapons to rebels fighting Soviet-backed governments, and called them freedom fighters.
In Afghanistan, the CIA armed rebels against the Soviet army. In Nicaragua, from Honduras, it armed the Contras against the leftist Sandinistas.
In El Salvador, an American-trained battalion killed nearly a thousand people in and around El Mozote. More than half were children. Reagan's officials dismissed the reports. A UN commission confirmed them in 1993.
On October 23, 1983, a truck bomb killed 241 American servicemen at their barracks in Beirut. They had been sent as peacekeepers. Within months, Reagan pulled the Marines out.
Two days later, U.S. troops invaded Grenada, where hard-liners had just murdered Prime Minister Maurice Bishop. Reagan gave two reasons: about 600 American medical students, and a new airport runway.
Ronald Reagan
Grenada, we were told, was a friendly island paradise for tourism. Well, it wasn't. It was a Soviet-Cuban colony.
Was he right?
Most Americans cheered, and so did many Grenadians. The UN condemned the invasion.
Ronald Reagan
And, you know, it didn't upset my breakfast at all.
In 1984, Congress banned military aid to the Contras.
So White House aides secretly sold missiles to Iran, for American hostages in Lebanon. They sent the profits, through Swiss accounts, to the Contras.
Ronald Reagan
We did not—repeat—did not trade weapons or anything else for hostages, nor will we.
Ronald Reagan
My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.
Trust the second one. It cost him something to say.
Enter Gorbachev
1982–1986
Key terms: Mikhail Gorbachev, glasnost, perestroika, Reykjavík summit
Meanwhile, Soviet leaders kept dying: Leonid Brezhnev in 1982, Yuri Andropov in 1984, Konstantin Chernenko in 1985. Vice President George Bush flew to all three funerals.
The next leader was 54, the youngest man on the Politburo: Mikhail Gorbachev.
He took over an economy that had nearly stopped growing.
Then, in 1986, the price of oil, its biggest export, fell by more than half. Oil and gas were about 60 percent of Soviet hard-currency earnings.
Glasnost let people say what was wrong. Perestroika loosened the planned economy. He needed to spend less on weapons. That meant a deal with Reagan.
They first met in Geneva in November 1985.
At dinner, Reagan explained that if aliens attacked the Earth from Halley's Comet, the whole world would unite. The American note-taker wrote it down.
They agreed on one sentence.
A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.
At Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, they talked about getting rid of nuclear weapons altogether.
It broke down over one word. Gorbachev wanted Star Wars kept in the laboratory. Reagan refused.
Trust, but Verify
1987–1989
Key terms: INF Treaty (1987), trust, but verify, on-site inspection, satellites
In June 1987, Reagan spoke at the Brandenburg Gate.
Ronald Reagan
Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
His own State Department and National Security Council had tried to cut that line.
That December, Gorbachev came to Washington to sign the INF Treaty. It destroyed a whole class of nuclear missiles, American and Soviet. Reagan couldn't resist his favorite Russian proverb.
Ronald Reagan
Dovorey no provorey — trust, but verify.
Mikhail Gorbachev and his interpreter
You repeat that at every meeting.
Ronald Reagan
I like it.
Now each side could check the other. Soviet inspectors watched American rocket motors burn in Texas. Americans watched a Soviet missile factory's gates for thirteen years.
In May 1988, inside the Kremlin, a reporter asked if this was still an evil empire. 'No,' he said. 'You are talking about another time, another era.'
At the UN in December 1988, Gorbachev promised to cut half a million troops.
Freedom of choice is a universal principle to which there should be no exceptions.
Eastern Europe was listening.
In February 1989, the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan. About fifteen thousand Soviet soldiers and around a million Afghans had died.
Open the Gate
1989
Key terms: Solidarity, Lech Wałęsa, Tiananmen Square, Sinatra Doctrine
Eastern Europeans had been pushing for years.
In Poland, a shipyard electrician named Lech Wałęsa led a union called Solidarity. Martial law crushed it in 1981, but it survived underground.
In June 1989, Solidarity won almost every seat it was allowed to contest. The next morning, the prime minister told his party, "We had a false assessment of the situation."
The same day, China's army crushed the protests in and around Tiananmen Square. Hundreds were killed. Some estimates run above a thousand.
Everyone in Eastern Europe knew it could happen to them. Instead, Hungary cut its fence with Austria, and East Germans poured through.
In Leipzig in October, 70,000 people marched with candles, chanting, "We are the people." Nobody gave the order to shoot.
Moscow wasn't coming. A Soviet spokesman called it the Sinatra Doctrine.
Hungary and Poland are doing it their way.
Then came Schabowski's note.
Four causes met on this wall tonight.
Pressure raised the cost of the arms race. A failing economy pushed Gorbachev to reform, and to make deals. Reagan's diplomacy gave him a partner. When he refused to send tanks, Eastern Europeans took their chance. Historians still argue about which mattered most. The exam asks you to explain how they worked together.
In Washington, a reporter told President Bush he didn't seem elated.
George H. W. Bush
I am not an emotional kind of guy.
He didn't want to provoke the Soviet military.
The Last Flag
1989–1991
Key terms: START I (1991), Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS)
After the Wall, Communist governments fell fast. Only in Romania did it turn violent. More than a thousand people died.
In October 1990, Germany became one country again, inside NATO, with Gorbachev's consent.
In August 1991, hard-liners arrested Gorbachev and sent tanks into Moscow.
Boris Yeltsin, Russia's elected president, climbed onto a tank and called for resistance. Three young men were killed. The coup collapsed.
The coup was meant to save the Soviet Union. It finished it.
On Christmas night, Gorbachev resigned on live television. His pen ran dry, so he borrowed one from the president of CNN.
The atomic scientists moved their clock to seventeen minutes to midnight. It has never been farther.
One Superpower
1989–1999
Key terms: New world order, Persian Gulf War (1991), Ethnic cleansing, APEC, Powell Doctrine
The Cold War had told American foreign policy what it was for. Now the United States was the only superpower.
What was all that power for?
In December 1989, Bush sent troops into Panama to seize its dictator. Manuel Noriega had been a CIA informant. Indictments charged him with drug trafficking.
Hundreds of Panamanians died.
George H. W. Bush
This will not stand, this aggression against Kuwait.
In August 1990, Saddam Hussein seized Kuwait.
Bush built a coalition of thirty-four countries. The Security Council approved the use of force. The Senate agreed by five votes.
The ground war took a hundred hours.
George H. W. Bush
By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Saddam Hussein stayed in power. American troops stayed in Saudi Arabia.
In Somalia, American troops were guarding famine relief. In October 1993, a battle in Mogadishu killed eighteen Americans and hundreds of Somalis. Clinton pulled out.
In 1994, extremists who controlled Rwanda's government murdered some eight hundred thousand people. Most of them were Tutsi. It took about a hundred days.
The United States stayed out. Its officials avoided the word genocide.
…who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror.
At Srebrenica, Bosnian Serb forces murdered about eight thousand Muslim men and boys. NATO bombed. The peace was settled at Dayton, Ohio. In 1999, NATO bombed Serbia over Kosovo.
There were new partners, too, from the White House lawn to the Pacific.
In 1999, three former Warsaw Pact countries joined NATO. George Kennan, the father of containment, called it the beginning of a new cold war.
Policeman, partner, or bystander? Americans argued about it all through the 1990s. Bush had laid out his new world order to Congress on September 11, 1990.