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H-Diplo FRUS Review No. 34 H20-Diplo FRUS1 9Reviews H-Diplo Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse Web and Production Editor: George Fujii @HDiplo FRUS Review No. 35 Published 28 June 2019 H-Diplo FRUS Review of James Graham Wilson ed. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981-1988, Volume VI, Soviet Union, October 1986-1989. Washington, D.C.: United States Government Publishing Office (GPO), 2016. https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1981-88v06. URL: https://hdiplo.org/to/FRUS35 Review by Christian Peterson, Ferris State University he sixth volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series on the Reagan administration deserves a wide audience. Editor James Graham Wilson has compiled a T stimulating collection of documents that elucidate the evolution and complexities of U.S.-Soviet relations from the immediate aftermath of the Reykjavik Summit (11-12 October 1986) to the end of Ronald Reagan’s Presidency. Even if these documents confirm much of what scholars already know about the behavior of key U.S. and Soviet policymakers, they deserve attention for a number of reasons. They highlight the pivotal role that Secretary of State George Shultz played in shaping the engagement policies that the administration employed to promote internal reform in the USSR and reach agreements with Soviet leaders.1 They provide fascinating details about the substance of superpower negotiations, especially the exchanges between Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. These documents testify to how policymakers tried—and sometimes failed--to build trust with each other. They also raise important questions about existing interpretations or point to developments that need more scholarly attention. 1 James Graham Wilson elucidates the important role that George Shultz played in shaping the Reagan administration’s strategy of engagement with the Soviet Union. See James Graham Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2014). Whereas Wilson emphasizes the “improvised” nature of Reagan’s policies towards the USSR, Beth A. Fischer focuses on how Reagan abandoned a hardline approach for one of active engagement long before Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet General Secretary. See Fischer, The Reagan Reversal: Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000). For other works that reveal Reagan’s pragmatism and efforts to engage the Soviets in productive negotiations, see Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 298-301, 307, 312, 316, 752-753, 783-784; Melvyn P. Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 347-348, 360-364, 381, 383, 401, 418-420. James Mann, The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan: A History of the End of the Cold War (New York: Penguin, 2010). 1 | Page H-Diplo FRUS Reviews This FRUS volume will interest scholars for other reasons. Its contents reinforce the limitations of the argument that Reagan “won” the Cold War by carrying out an integrated strategy of political, economic, military, and ideological competition that forced the Soviet Union to crumble (i.e. The Reagan Victory School).2 Along with revealing weaknesses in the Reagan Victory School thesis, these documents also show the limitations of three competing lines of thought on the Reagan administration’s role in ending the Cold War. The first argues that Reagan’s hardline policies impeded Gorbachev’s efforts to reform the USSR and improve relations with Western countries (impediment school); the second contends that Reagan’s hardline policies proved “irrelevant to the ending of the Cold War” given Gorbachev’s behavior (irrelevancy school); and the third emphasizes that a conscious shift away from a policy of confrontation to one of engagement near the end of his first term played an important role in ending the Cold War (engagement school).3 As demonstrated in this volume, the engagement school has obvious limitations in light of how even pragmatists like Shultz refused to negotiate issues or reach agreements with the Soviets that they felt undermined U.S. military power and compromised important Cold War interests.4 The fact that the Reagan administration might have signed more far-reaching agreements with the Soviets does not fully vindicate the “irrelevancy” or “impediment” schools, however. Instead, it points to how engagement scholars could strengthen their arguments by explaining how the Reagan administration used the Helsinki Accords (Final Act) and other cooperative agreements to link the tasks of improving Soviet human rights performance, building liberal democratic institutions in the USSR, and reducing military armaments in Europe.5 Overall, the documents in this volume confirm much of what scholars already know about the behavior of key U.S. and Soviet policymakers. In particular, they reinforce that George Shultz played the most important role in shaping the Reagan administration’s negotiations with the Soviets. It was Shultz who overcame the resistance of hardliners like National Security Adviser William Clark and helped the 2 For a sample of works that on the whole favor the Reagan Victory School thesis, see Douglas E. Streusand, Norman A. Bailey, and Francis H. Marlo, eds., The Grand Strategy that Won the Cold War: Architecture of Triumph (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2016); Francis H. Marlo, Reagan’s War: Conservative Strategists and America’s Cold War Victory (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2012); Peter Schweitzer, Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism (New York: Doubleday, 2002); Norman A. Bailey, The Strategic Plan that Won the Cold War: National Directive 75 (MacLean: Potomac Foundation, 1999); and Paul Kengor, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). 3 This historiographical framework draws on the insights of Beth A. Fischer. See Fischer, “US Foreign Policy under Reagan and Bush,” in Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, Volume III: Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 267-288. 4 For a similar view that focuses on how Gorbachev reformed the Soviet Union in spite of the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations’ “tough bargaining,” see Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American- Soviet Relations and the END of the Cold War (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1994), 768-778. 5 Most authors gloss over how the Reagan administration exploited the provisions of the Final Act to promote pluralism and internal reform in the Soviet Union. For notable exceptions to this oversight, see Christian Philip Peterson, Globalizing Human Rights: Private Citizens, the Soviet Union, and the West (New York: Routledge, 2012); and Sarah B. Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War: A Transnational History of the Helsinki Network (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 2 | Page H-Diplo FRUS Reviews president act on his preference of engaging in productive negotiations with the Soviet Union. As many authors have pointed out, Shultz helped convince Reagan to settle on pursuing a “four part” negotiating framework with the USSR that addressed the issues of human rights, bilateral relations, regional conflicts, and arms control. In effect, Reagan and Shultz favored this framework because it gave the United States the flexibility to engage in the most productive negotiations with the Soviets that were possible without sacrificing U.S. interests and values—an approach consistent with the wording of the hardline National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 75, which was issued in January 1983.6 As Shultz wrote in a “non- paper” that he distributed during a 18 November 1987 White House meeting, pursuing the “four part” framework would put the administration in the best possible position to use a “balance of toughness and inducement” to manage the evolution of Superpower relations in positive ways. After all, Shultz recounted, the Soviet Union had no choice but to reform itself in an emerging “information age” that would punish nations that cut themselves off from global production and denied citizens the freedom to innovate—trends that the growing prosperity of market oriented, export-led nations like China portended. Therefore, by remaining the “psychologically superior party” in negotiations, the United States could afford to let Gorbachev take credit “for moves that come in our direction and follow our agenda.” He even went so far as to muse that if the General Secretary’s reform campaign continued, and the U.S. kept negotiating from a “position of strength” and with confidence, the USSR “is going to be seen by history as Ronald Reagan’s ‘China’” (530-31). Shultz’s influence mattered because hardline officials like Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and National Security Council staffers repeatedly tried to convince Reagan to be wary of negotiating agreements with the Soviets because they might weaken the strength and resolve of the United States. For example, about three weeks before the 1987 Washington Summit took place (8-10 December 1987), U.S. National Security Advisor (soon to be Secretary of Defense) Frank Carlucci wrote a memorandum to Reagan warning him that Gorbachev had no real interest in improving superpower relations consistent with U.S. interests and values. Instead, the General
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