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Not so long ago, preventing Armageddon was the only objective U.S. and Soviet leaders had in common. That is why the issue of arms control so dominated earlier summits. Yet there was always an underlying paradox about the enterprise: the arms to be controlled were the consequence, not the cause, of the hostility that infused U.S.-Soviet relations. The cause was a combination of ideology and geopolitics. The two leaderships differed profoundly over the treatment of the individual citizen by the state, and they had conflicting interests in every region of the world.
When the U.S. tried to raise its concern over the Soviet Union's abuses of human rights, Moscow would indignantly reject "interference in our internal affairs." American protests against the U.S.S.R.'s expansionist behavior evoked a similar combination of stonewalling and self-righteousness: the Soviet Union, its representatives insisted, had rights equal to those of the U.S., including the right to throw its weight around in every corner of the globe. In practice, that meant a license to invade other countries, underwrite leftist insurgencies and provide political and military support to Marxist regimes.
American and Soviet officials could, and did, argue about their ideological and geopolitical differences, but they were able to agree only on how to regulate the military competition. On almost every other subject, the millions of words that flowed between the White House and the Kremlin could be summarized simply:
The U.S.: Cut it out!
The U.S.S.R.: Shut up! Or, for variety: Mind your own business!
The negotiators were hardly ever that succinct, and their exchanges were described in communiques as full, frank, businesslike and useful. But in fact they often weren't terribly useful. So the two sides would go back to the one subject where they could accomplish something -- arms control -- and the exercise became increasingly esoteric and rarefied. Like medieval theologians debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, the statesmen would % dicker over how many warheads would be allowed on a Soviet ICBM and how many cruise missiles would be allowed on an American bomber. Nuclear diplomacy also became more controversial because it involved cooperation and compromise with a feared and hated enemy. For example, the political opposition to SALT II, completed in 1979 but never ratified by the U.S. Senate, was based more on fury over Brezhnev's expansionism and doubts about Jimmy Carter's ability to stand up to the Soviet challenge than on any substantive objections to the pact itself.
Gorbachev changed all that. Not only did he put the basic issues of contention on the agenda, but he also made massive concessions. In every significant area where the U.S. and the West had grievances against the Soviet Union, Gorbachev yielded. He pulled Soviet troops out of Afghanistan, used his influence on Hanoi to bring about a withdrawal of Vietnamese forces from Cambodia, cooperated with the U.S. in achieving negotiated settlements to civil wars in Central America and Africa and pulled the plug on leftist dictatorships in Nicaragua and Ethiopia.