POSTSCRIPT 497ment to self-reform and ceased to quarantine its politics and media
from the rest of the world. Certainly the two leaderships continued to
have sharp disputes.
The American bargaining position strengthened as the USSR’s
internal disintegration quickened. Where there were sticking points,
Gorbachëv eventually had to give ground for fear of losing the oppor-
tunity of sealing a deal. He and Reagan genuinely aimed to reduce the
danger of thermonuclear war, and together their achievement was
magnificent. But Gorbachëv’s other objective of renovating the Soviet
economy turned into a nightmare as his own policies made a bad sit-
uation worse in industrial output and food supplies. Neither Reagan
nor Bush was minded to bail him out – their priority was to secure
international stability and America’s global primacy and they could
see no benefit in subsidizing Moscow’s doomed economic reform.
Behind the friendly facade at the summits the Americans insisted on
tough terms for conciliation.
No Western or Soviet politician had expected the Cold War to end
in their working lifetimes. Everything took place as if in a dream that
unfolded with unexpected twists in the plot before people woke up to
what had occurred. The military rivalry between Moscow and Wash-
ington, as everyone knew, was capable of producing a clash that would
have exterminated human existence on earth. The peacemakers had
diverse reasons to bring it to a close, but their cause was a noble one.
Though the superpowers’ allies endorsed the need for peace, their
influence, as I have had to conclude, was confined to the margins of
grand policy. Gorbachëv warned the East European communist
leaders that they would get no help from the Kremlin to repress their
peoples – and Ceauşescu eventually paid a fatal penalty for his policies
of violence and austerity. On entering the White House, Bush had
appeared sceptical about the rationale for rapprochement with the
USSR; but he was impressed by Gorbachëv’s refusal to crush the East
European revolutions of 1989 and reverted to the foreign-policy line
marked out by Reagan and Shultz. It was a time of disorienting trans-
formation, and the complexities of geopolitical management increased
as the Baltic national movements rolled boulders in the path of agree-
ments between America and the Soviet Union. In Western Europe,
most leaders feared for their national security when Reagan set out
to abolish nuclear weapons and advance his Strategic Defense Initia-
tive. But though Thatcher, Mitterrand and Andreotti restrained him
on some important matters, he never yielded to them on his broad