Tortuous Path to the Summit

• Share

For Ronald Reagan, the road to his first meeting with a Soviet leader has been bumpy and twisting. Driven by a lifelong visceral anti-Communism, he campaigned for the White House in 1980 by charging that détente was "an illusion" and that the arms-limitation treaty (SALT II) with the Soviet Union was "fatally flawed." At his first presidential press conference on Jan. 29, 1981, Reagan set a chilly tone. The Soviets, he said, "reserve unto themselves the right to commit any crime, to lie, to cheat" in pursuit of world domination. Only three months later, the President adopted a pragmatic course that belied his hostile words: he lifted the ineffective grain embargo that Jimmy Carter had imposed on Soviet trade after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. Ever since, the Administration's policy toward the Soviet Union has had a typically Reaganesque twist: harsh ideological rhetoric tempered by moves rooted in an emerging realism. The inconsistency has caused relations between the two superpowers to blow hot and cold. Mostly, they have blown cold.

The Reagan Administration was eight months old before the White House and the Kremlin could even agree to hold a high-level get-acquainted meeting; Secretary of State Alexander Haig received Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in New York in September 1981. Despite earlier reservations, Reagan took a first step toward arms control in November, unveiling his zero-option proposal to cancel the planned U.S. deployment of Pershing and cruise missiles in Europe if the Soviet Union would dismantle its existing SS-20 missiles aimed at European targets. The offer was rejected, but talks on limiting such intermediate nuclear forces (INF) began the same month in Geneva. That December the Soviet-dominated government of Poland cracked down forcefully on growing unrest. Reagan reacted as impractically as Carter had, ordering U.S. companies to stop helping the Soviets build a natural-gas pipeline to Western Europe and later asking European allies to join the boycott by renouncing a raft of potentially profitable deals. They refused.

Hope for better relations grew in November 1982, when Yuri Andropov succeeded the deceased Leonid Brezhnev and the U.S. lifted the pipeline sanctions. But on March 8, 1983, Reagan reverted to his earlier themes, castigating the Soviet Union as "an evil empire." Soviet diplomats still refer bitterly to the speech. That same month the President proposed his Star Wars missile defense scheme, which has developed into a major element in U.S. strategic planning and a persistent obstacle to any new arms agreement.

When Soviet jet fighters shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 over the Sea of Japan in September 1983, the justifiable U.S. outrage sent relations into a deep freeze. Two months later the first Pershing missiles were deployed in England and the Soviets walked out of the arms talks. Relations dropped to their lowest level since cold war days.