Introduction

Abstract

The 1980s, the last decade of the Cold War, were marked by great ups and downs in US-Soviet relations which directly impacted on the US-West European Alliance. In the early 1980s, a more confrontational atmosphere reigned as a result of the December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; the harsher rhetoric toward the Soviet Union by President Ronald Reagan; the declaration of martial law in Poland in December 1981; the battle over the deployment of intermediaterange nuclear forces (INF) and an intensive Soviet ‘peace offensive’ to prevent this deployment; the US announcement of the Strategic Defence Initiative in March 1983; the Soviet shootdown of the Korean airliner in September 1983; and many other events. Characteristic of this confrontational environment, no US-Soviet Summit was held between June 1979 and November 1985, the longest period without such a meeting since the immediate postwar years. Between November 1982 and March 1985 three successive Soviet leaders died, and Soviet policy was marked by little or no innovation. During the first half of the 1980s, the USA and many West European countries did not always agree on how to deal with the Soviet Union, whether on the question of economic sanctions or on the tone of the rhetoric. In 1985, the key event which served as the catalyst to the vast changes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union occurred when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power. Indicative of the greatly changed world and the greatly improved US-Soviet relations, four Reagan-Gorbachev summits were held in the 1985–88 period, and several more took place in the first two years of the Bush Administration. In 1980 — or for that matter, in 1988 — no one predicted, or could have predicted, that German reunification would occur in 1990 or that there would be free elections across Eastern Europe in 1989 or 1990. The post-Cold War world is shaping a new form of US-Soviet relations. (See Appendix 1 for a chronology of the key events of the 1980s.)KeywordsPublic OpinionForeign PolicyEconomic SanctionMass PublicPublic DiplomacyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.