Content area
Full Text
William C. Wohlforth (ed.), Witnesses to the End of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, xvi + 344 pp., $39.95.
THE END OF THE COLD WAR has occasioned tremendous debate among international relations theorists: can Realism explain the end of the Cold War or are `second level' factors most significant? Underlying the theoretical debate are other questions: did the policies pursued by US President Ronald Reagan force Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev to seek accommodation, or was the dramatic change in Soviet policies the result of the precipitous decline in the Soviet economy? Witnesses to the End of the Cold War offers unusual insights into these questions-both on the theoretical and the policy levels. The very fact that the book combines first-hand observations with theory makes it unique.
The first part of the volume consists of a transcript of a conference convened at Princeton University in February 1993 which brought together Soviet and US policy makers who played significant roles in the days leading up to the collapse of the Soviet Union. These discussions centred around two crucial questions: the role of military power in bringing about the shift in US-Soviet relations and the role of personality and personal relationships in bringing the Cold War to a close. As the transcript reveals, military issues-most specifically, evaluations of Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI)-played a central role in factional in-fighting around both Reagan and Gorbachev. According to all of the American participants, Reagan was genuinely committed to SDI, and equally important, he was honest in his offer to share the relevant technology with the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, Rozanne Ridgeway,...