U.S. foreign policy and the end of the Cold War (ePub)

Essay from the year 2005 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: USA, grade: 1,7, Central European University Budapest, 19 entries in the bibliography, language: English, abstract: The Cold War was the defining conflict in the international system for more than four decades. When the Soviet Union eventually broke up in December 1991, the Cold War had come to an end. This, however, was not simply the result of the disappearance of the Soviet Union. Substantial improvements in U.S.-Soviet relations had been made since 1985. While the initiative to end the Cold War certainly lay more with Gorbachev and the Soviet side, the assessment of the Reagan Administration’s contribution to the end of the Cold War has tended to polarize scholars. Richard Pipes, for instance, claims that “U.S. policies played an important role in compelling reforms and … [these] reforms once launched, unraveled the system.” In contrast, Raymond Garthoff assesses the American role as “necessary but not primary.” Against the triumphalist argument proposed by Pipes, he argues that not the West’s geopolitical containment, military deterrence and even less the Reagan military build up, but the emergence of a new reform-minded Soviet leadership was the crucial causal condition. Lebow and Stein agree with Garthoff in pointing out that the end of the Cold War began when Gorbachev launched his reforms. But unlike Garthoff, they evaluate the policies of the Reagan Administration towards the Soviet Union not as less relevant, but as rather counterproductive, arguing that “[i]f American policy did have an impact when Soviet leaders were committed to reform, then the strategy of deterrence likely prolonged the Cold War.”
While all these arguments draw attention to important aspects, they seem to be slightly too much colored with U.S. partisan attitudes and, for that reason, do not capture the whole picture of the impact of U.S. policy on Soviet conduct and the end of the Cold War. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to review U.S. policy towards the Soviet Union in the 1980s and to present a less politically biased assessment of the U.S. role in the end of the Cold War. I argue that while the U.S. military build-up may to a certain extent have figured in the Soviet leadership’s perception of the systemic crisis, it was only one among other factors urging for fundamental reforms. Yet, once Gorbachev took the helm, U.S. foreign policy played an indispensable role in bringing the Cold War to an end.