At the outset of the 1980s, Brezhnev boasted that a third of the world's
people now lived under Marxist-Leninist socialism. American President
Jimmy Carter's humiliation over the Iranian hostage crisis only underscored
the Europeans' fears that weakened and erratic American leadership against
an expansionist Soviet Union was faltering badly, just when it was most
needed.

This chapter moves backward in time to recount a strange story: how in
the 1980s Western leaders reacted to the image of a triumphant Soviet
Union by joining to take a hard line against it. The Cold War took on a new
life just as Soviet economic weakness began to manifest itself. In the United
States, President Ronald Reagan initiated the greatest military buildup in
peacetime history and launched his startling and enormously expensive
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), a program of defense against interconti-
nental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Yet, as we have seen in the last chapter,
the Soviet Union was overextended. Only the devices of propaganda cov-
ered the inherent weaknesses of its economy, weaknesses that could be
glimpsed on a smaller scale in an Eastern Europe still under Soviet domina-
tion. It is still a matter of contention as to how much the Reagan buildup
may have helped force the Soviet Union into bankruptcy.

In his first year Gorbachev reinforced Western views when he tried to
maintain the impetus of Brezhnev's global thrust. But his rapid retrench-
ment caught Western leadership by surprise. In the latter half of the 1980s,
Western leaders struggled to adjust to the downward spiral of Soviet power
and to deal with a world in which the Soviet Union no longer supported
radicals and revolutionaries who could offer them strategic advantage. The
arch hard-liner, Ronald Reagan, surprised everyone by taking Gorbachev at
his word, not only signing the first genuine disarmament agreement since
1922, but seeming to agree with the Russian that all nuclear missiles should
be done away with.

-248-