The Big Three who ended the Cold War

Historians argue endlessly and pointlessly about the extent to which the human factor rather than brute circumstance determines the course of events. History, geography and economic reality always constrain personal freedom of action. But within these limitations the individual can make a decisive difference. Britain’s war would have taken a different turn if Halifax rather than Churchill had become prime minister in May 1940. Archie Brown’s thesis is that the Cold War could have ended quite differently— much later and perhaps much more bloodily — had it not been for the fortuitous combination of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.

In 1997 Brown published The Gorbachev Factor, a pioneering work criticised by some for giving too much credit to the man with whom Thatcher could do business. His new book, lucidly written and scholarly, carries the argument further. Always interested in big ideas (he has written on the history of world communism and the myth of the strong leader), he is fascinated by the evolving interplay between three remarkable but very different people who presided over the ending of the Cold War.

All came from modest backgrounds. The son of a small-time salesman who drank too much, Reagan graduated from an undistinguished university with a mediocre degree in economics and sociology. He worked in sports journalism and films, and honed his political skills as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Dismissed in Europe as a screen cowboy, he nevertheless showed his political mettle by becoming a two-term governor of California.

He moved steadily to the right on a platform of anti-communism and lively suspicion of the Soviet Union, which he publicly denounced as an ‘evil empire’. But observers initially failed to noticed that he also had a vivid awareness of the dangers of nuclear confrontation, and that one of his goals was to get away from what he thought of as the ‘crazy’ policy of mutually assured destruction.