The End of the Cold War

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how Reagan's defense buildup, the Strategic Defense Initiative announced in 1983, and the renewed confrontational rhetoric of the early 1980s reset the terms of late-Cold War superpower competition.
• Describe the Gorbachev reforms of glasnost and perestroika introduced after 1985, and explain why measures intended to revive the Soviet system instead accelerated its collapse.
• Trace the four Reagan-Gorbachev summits from Geneva in 1985 through Moscow in 1988, and explain the significance of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed at the Washington summit in 1987.
• Account for the chain of revolutions across Eastern Europe in 1989, including Solidarity in Poland, the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, and the execution of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania.
• Explain why the Soviet Union dissolved on December 26, 1991, and identify the major successor states that emerged, including Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, the Central Asian republics, and the Baltic states.
• Use Skill 1 (Identification and Explanation of Historical Concepts and Causation) to account for the Persian Gulf War of 1990 to 1991 as the first major test of post-Cold War American military power and the political setting for George H. W. Bush's New World Order rhetoric.

When Ronald Reagan took the oath of office in January 1981, the Cold War had been the organizing fact of American foreign policy for thirty-five years. The detente of the 1970s had produced the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Helsinki Accords, but it had also produced what conservatives saw as Soviet advances in Africa, Central America, and Afghanistan. Reagan rejected detente in favor of confrontation. His first-term defense budgets rose by roughly seven percent a year in real terms, the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. He named the Soviet Union an "evil empire" in a March 1983 speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, and two weeks later announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a research program nicknamed Star Wars that promised a space-based shield against Soviet ballistic missiles. SDI did not produce a working system in the 1980s, and many physicists doubted it ever could, but the program forced Soviet planners to consider whether their nuclear deterrent might be neutralized and whether their economy could match a renewed American technological push (KC-9.3.I.A).

The Soviet system that received those pressures was not the system of 1945 or even of 1968. The command economy had stagnated through the late Brezhnev years, hard-currency revenue depended on oil prices that began falling in 1985, and the war in Afghanistan that had begun in 1979 was draining manpower and prestige. Three Soviet leaders died in close succession between 1982 and 1985, and in March 1985 the Politburo selected Mikhail Gorbachev, the youngest member of the leadership, as the new general secretary. Gorbachev introduced two reforms intended to revive the system. Glasnost, meaning openness, allowed open discussion of Soviet failures, eased press censorship, and exposed the abuses and inefficiencies that earlier leaders had concealed. Perestroika, meaning restructuring, attempted to inject limited market mechanisms into the centrally planned economy and to decentralize decision making across enterprises and republics. Gorbachev did not intend to dismantle the Soviet Union or its socialist system. He intended to save them. The reforms he introduced instead surfaced grievances that the system could not contain, weakened the central authority that had held the union together, and emboldened nationalist movements in the Baltic and other constituent republics (KC-9.3.I.A).

The new Soviet leader and the American president met four times. The first summit, in Geneva in November 1985, produced no agreement but established a working relationship that surprised both sides. The second, in Reykjavik in October 1986, came close to an agreement to eliminate all strategic nuclear weapons before stalling over Reagan's refusal to limit the Strategic Defense Initiative. The third, in Washington in December 1987, produced the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, the first arms-control agreement to eliminate an entire class of nuclear weapons. The treaty removed Soviet SS-20 missiles and American Pershing II missiles from Europe and established intrusive on-site verification procedures that became the template for later arms-control work. The fourth summit, in Moscow in May and June 1988, produced no major new treaty but allowed Reagan to walk through Red Square and to declare in answer to a reporter's question that he no longer considered the Soviet Union an evil empire. The arms-control track ran on after Reagan left office: George H. W. Bush and Gorbachev signed the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in July 1991, deeply cutting both sides' strategic arsenals (KC-9.3.I.A).

While Soviet leaders were rethinking the relationship with the United States, the satellite communist regimes of Eastern Europe were collapsing one after another. Poland went first. The independent trade union Solidarity, founded in 1980 and driven underground after the imposition of martial law in 1981, returned to legal status in 1989 and won the partly free June elections in a landslide. By August, Tadeusz Mazowiecki had become the first non-communist prime minister in the bloc since 1948. Hungary opened its border with Austria in May, allowing East Germans on summer vacation to flee to the West. East Germany followed. After weeks of demonstrations in Leipzig and Dresden, an East German government spokesman announced on the evening of November 9, 1989 that travel restrictions would be eased; crowds at the Berlin checkpoints interpreted the announcement as the immediate opening of the border, and by midnight the Berlin Wall was no longer a barrier. Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution brought down the communist government in November and December and elected the playwright Vaclav Havel president. In Romania, the longtime dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were arrested, tried, and executed on Christmas Day. Within six months the Iron Curtain that had divided Europe for forty years was gone, and Gorbachev had refused to send Soviet troops to prop up the failing regimes (KC-9.3.I.B).

The Soviet Union itself dissolved across 1990 and 1991. The Baltic republics of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia declared independence in March 1990. Other constituent republics followed across the next year. In August 1991, hardline Soviet officials launched a coup against Gorbachev and held him under house arrest at his vacation home in Crimea. Boris Yeltsin, the newly elected president of the Russian republic, climbed onto a tank outside the Russian parliament building in Moscow and rallied resistance; the coup collapsed within three days, but so did the Soviet center. Republic after republic declared independence across the autumn. On December 8, the leaders of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus met in a forest in Belarus and signed an agreement creating the Commonwealth of Independent States and declaring the Soviet Union dissolved. Gorbachev resigned on December 25, and the Soviet flag came down over the Kremlin on December 26, 1991. Fifteen independent states emerged: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, the three Baltic republics, the South Caucasus republics of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia, and the Central Asian Stans of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. The bipolar superpower competition that had organized international relations since 1945 ended without a direct military confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union (KC-9.3.I.B).

The end of the Cold War immediately raised the question of what would replace it. George H. W. Bush, who had succeeded Reagan in January 1989, used the phrase New World Order in a series of speeches across 1990 and 1991 to describe a more cooperative international system led by the United States and supported by United Nations institutions and the existing Atlantic alliance. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1949 to deter a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, did not dissolve with the threat that had created it. Instead it began the long process of post-Soviet expansion, eventually adding the former Warsaw Pact states of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999 and the Baltic states and other Eastern European countries in 2004 and after. The expansion was a direct legacy of the 1989 to 1991 settlement, and it would shape later debates about the eastern boundary of the post-Cold War order (KC-9.3.I.C).

The first major test of post-Cold War American military power came almost immediately. On August 2, 1990, Iraqi forces under Saddam Hussein invaded the neighboring emirate of Kuwait, seizing its oil fields and threatening Saudi Arabia. The Bush administration assembled a coalition of more than thirty nations under United Nations authorization, an arrangement that would have been unthinkable during the bipolar competition. Soviet diplomats in their last months as a superpower supported the coalition rather than opposing it. The air campaign against Iraqi forces opened on January 16, 1991, and the ground campaign on February 24. Operation Desert Storm liberated Kuwait in roughly one hundred hours of ground combat, on the strength of precision-guided weapons, satellite reconnaissance, stealth aircraft, and overwhelming air power. The Persian Gulf War ended with American casualties in the low hundreds and Iraqi casualties estimated at tens of thousands. Bush chose not to march on Baghdad, calculating that occupation would shatter the coalition and produce a wider regional crisis. The war showcased post-Cold War American military hegemony and gave Bush the rhetorical opening to declare that a New World Order had begun, even as the long-term political settlement of the post-Soviet space and of the Middle East remained unresolved (KC-9.3.I.C, Theme WOR).

The five sources below are drawn from the Unit 9 canonical primary-source library for Topic 9.3. Each is in the public domain and hosted by a federally affiliated repository or a major university archive. The first three sources mark the diplomatic arc of the Reagan-Gorbachev years; the last two open the post-Cold War order.

1. (Causation) Account for the relative weight of the Reagan defense buildup, the internal stagnation of the Soviet command economy, and the Gorbachev reforms in producing the end of the Cold War. Which of the three was the most decisive cause, and on what evidence do you base your answer?
2. (Continuity and Change) Compare the Reagan rhetoric of the 1983 evil empire speech with the Reagan rhetoric of the 1988 Moscow summit. Identify one continuity and one significant shift, and account for what produced the shift.
3. (Causation) Trace the causal chain from the Hungarian decision to open its border with Austria in May 1989 to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9. At which step in the chain do you think a different decision could have produced a different outcome, and why?
4. (Comparison) Compare the August 1991 coup against Gorbachev with the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia in November and December 1989. What does the comparison reveal about the relative role of leadership, popular mobilization, and military restraint in the end of the communist order?
5. (Causation) Account for why the United States and its coalition partners stopped at the liberation of Kuwait in February 1991 rather than continuing the Persian Gulf War to Baghdad. What does that decision reveal about the post-Cold War limits of American military power?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.