How Reagan’s friendship with Gorbachev helped end the Cold War

(NewsNation) — Although initially hesitant to build a relationship, President Ronald Reagan formed a professional bond with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that led to the end of the Cold War and continues to be a touchstone for geopolitical relations.

In the last days of Reagan’s life, Gorbachev called the former president “a statesman who, despite all the differences that existed between our countries at the time, demonstrated vision and determination to fulfill our proposals and change our relations for the better.”

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“I consider Ronald Reagan a great president, with whom the Soviet leadership was able to launch a very difficult but important dialogue,” Gorbachev said, according to the Interfax news agency, on Ekho Moskvy radio.

But their relationship took time to build, as the two had opposing political views and preconceived opinions of each other.

Reagan, who died 20 years ago this week, was an anti-communist capitalist who promised to stop the Soviet Union’s “evil empire” upon taking office, according to the history channel.

Gorbachev was a staunch communist who rose through the political ranks to lead the Soviet Union.

But as the Cold War progressed, the two realized they needed to communicate. They wrote letters to each other to suppress a rapidly evolving nuclear arms race.

According to the History Channel, more than 40 letters, many of them handwritten, and four summits in just over three years were instrumental in building that trust.

“As I look back now, I realize that those first letters marked the cautious beginning on both sides of what would become the basis not only of a better relationship between our countries, but of a friendship between two men,” Reagan wrote in his autobiography . , An American Life.

This willingness to negotiate was praised for helping to end the Cold War. Together, they negotiated a historic agreement in 1987 to dismantle intermediate-range nuclear missiles.

Historian Jason Saltoun-Ebin has closely studied the relationship between the two and credits their ability to overcome mutual reluctance as crucial to stopping the war.

“Perhaps then the real story of the end of the Cold War is just a simple story of how an old hard-line anti-communist president of the United States and a young Soviet reformer discovered that, despite their vast differences, all they needed to do was find a common common area of ​​agreement to change the world,” he wrote in his book, “Dear Mr. President…: Reagan/Gorbachev and the Correspondence that Ended the Cold War.”

“Both Reagan and Gorbachev recognized that change was on the way and both wanted to be on the right side of history,” he wrote. “But they needed to find a way to overcome forty years of Cold War ideology. They needed to find a way to trust each other.”

It’s a trust that seems almost impossible in today’s politics.

“I think, frankly, that President Gorbachev and I discovered a kind of bond, a friendship between us, that we thought could become a great bond between all people,” Reagan told journalists in Moscow during a visit in 1990.

When Reagan’s son Michael attended his father’s funeral, Gorbachev was sitting right behind him, reported The Guardian.

“What I remember most is him telling me that every time my father and he met, my father would always end each meeting with, ‘If it is God’s will,’ and Mikhail Gorbachev would say to me, ‘I would look around the room to see if God was there’.”