The Triumph of Improvisation.

• Author: Abrahamson, James L.
• Position: Book review

The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev's Adaptability, Reagan's Engagement, and the End of the Cold War by James Graham Wilson, Cornell University Press: Ithaca and London, 2014, ISBN 978-0-8014-5229-1, xvi, 264 pp. $29.95 (hardcover)

Between 1978 and 1991, the United States revived its economy and strengthened its armed forces, boosting both international capitalism and Western self-confidence. Meanwhile the Soviet empire continued to stagnate and lose cohesion. The hardliners within the incoming Reagan administration consequently believed they could overawe a relatively weakened Soviet Union and end the Cold War on American terms by devising and implementing a confrontational grand strategy built on the growth of American power relative to the Soviet Union and on President Reagan's conservatism and hostility to communism.

Despite two Reagan-era National Security Decision Directives prepared by the administration's hardliners, the president never truly tried to implement their master plans. Despite his many harshly negative public statements about communism and the Soviet Union, the president never consistently embraced the hardline view of the USSR or its eventual leader. Reagan's policy toward the Soviet Union and the Cold War most often derived, instead, from reliance on a flexible four-part negotiating framework focused on "bilateral relations, regional matters, arms control, and human rights." (p. 75) Devised by two administration moderates, Jack Matlock and George Shultz, the framework did not bind the president and permitted diplomacy to move forward on some points even when stuck on others.

Shultz also satisfied Reagan's desire to meet and learn about the USSR from more open and cosmopolitan Soviets, beginning in 1983 with ambassador to the U.S. Anatoly Dobrynin. The president soon built on that experience and on face-to-face summit meetings with his Soviet counterpart in Geneva (1985), Reykjavik (1986), Washington (1987), and Moscow (1988). The many personal exchanges convinced Reagan that he could not make progress, as the hardliners argued, by stressing the Soviet system, but instead by creating feelings of personal trust and seeking to build on what the two leaders shared in common.

Nor did strategic planning by hardliners constrain the thinking and behavior of Mikhail Gorbachev, who became the Soviet Union's General Secretary in November 1984. Though attracted by the...