After the Summit: Reykjavik and Beyond

Michael Mandelbaum and Strobe Talbott

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1986/87

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Summary:  Charts the ups and downs of Soviet-US relations in the run-up to the Reykjavik summit (including the Daniloff affair), the arms control proposals discussed there, and the political fall-out. SDI is seen as central to President Reagan's policy, contrary to the views of his officials. The events of the latter half of 1986 prove that the strategic relationship between the superpowers is a tenuous one, but that it is not founded on the classic principles of international relations because of the nuclear question. Common security must be the target for the future. Sets out the limits for US-Soviet relationship -- limits to how good, and how bad, it can be.

Michael Mandelbaum is a senior fellow and director of the East-West relations project at the Council on Foreign Relations. Strobe Talbott is Washington bureau chief of Time magazine. They are the co-authors of Reagan and Gorbachev, a book to be published for the Council on Foreign Relations in January 1987 by Vintage Books/Random House, from which this article is adapted.

The late summer and autumn of 1986 were a busy, confusing and dramatic period in Soviet-American relations. Within four months, the tone and substance of communications between Washington and Moscow oscillated sharply between conciliation and acrimony. At issue was whether there would be a second meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. If summitry futures had been traded like commodities, fortunes would have been made and lost. The two leaders themselves engaged in a kind of arbitrage, trying to make quick political profits from the swings of the market.

In July and August Reagan and Gorbachev exchanged letters, and each dispatched delegations of arms control experts to the other?s capital. Momentum seemed to be building toward a summit in Washington at the end of the year. Then an American journalist was arrested in Moscow. Suddenly the mood soured, and the momentum slowed. But in the midst of what turned out to be a minor crisis, Reagan and Gorbachev made clear first to each other and then to the world that they were determined to proceed with the business between them. They agreed to hold a meeting, which quickly became one of the most extraordinary encounters in the history of relations between their countries, perhaps in the annals of high-level diplomacy.

The two-day meeting in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 11-12, 1986, broke with virtually all the precedents of U.S.-Soviet relations. There were scarcely any preparations. The meeting that took place was entirely different from the one the Americans had expected. They had anticipated not a full-fledged summit but, in President Reagan?s words, "the last base camp" on the way to a Washington summit. Yet the agenda turned out to be much broader, and the issues discussed far more consequential, than even those the Americans had envisioned for the anticipated full summit itself.

In some obvious ways the Reykjavik meeting was a failure. At least in the short term, it derailed the summit process and dramatized the fragility of the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Not since Khrushchev had refused to meet with President Eisenhower in Paris in 1960 and argued with President Kennedy in Vienna the following year had an encounter between the American and Soviet leaders ended so badly. In Iceland, when Reagan emerged from his final session with Gorbachev, his usual jaunty manner was missing; his mood was grim.

In reporting to the press immediately afterward, Secretary of State George Shultz appeared exhausted, dejected and defeated. He had to fight to control his emotions. He repeatedly used the word "disappointment" to describe the weekend. White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan, at an impromptu press conference at Keflavik Airport, lashed out at the Soviets, saying that "they finally showed their hand; it showed them up for what they are." He said that "there will not be another summit in the near future as far as I can see."

Despite the spectacular collapse of the meeting and the ensuing acrimony, there was also significant, if tentative, progress on arms control. In his ...

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