Gorbachev’s call for perestroika in international relations remains more relevant today than ever.
The Western image of Mikhail Gorbachev as the victorious slayer of communism is not wrong but lacks nuance on three issues. First, his original goal was to reform and salvage, not destroy, both the Communist Party and the USSR. Second, the Cold War ended before, not because of, the dismantlement of the USSR in 1991. And third, the triumphalist interpretation of the Cold War’s end as a Western victory obscures the fact that Russia’s fundamental geopolitical and security interests have undergone territorial but not existential change. The current debacle in Ukraine is proof of that. The depth of Gorbachev’s commitment to domestic and international pluralism makes clear why he both criticized Vladimir Putin’s domestic practices and supported his overall foreign policy strategy.
Before Gorbachev came to power in the USSR, Ronald Reagan had already resurrected America’s messianism as a psychological antidote to the depression of the 1970s. During the presidential campaign of 1980, Reagan echoed Henry Luce in claiming that “America has been sleepwalking far too long.” It was time to “do a better job of exporting Americanism” whose “pre-ordained destiny [was] to show all mankind that they, too, can be free.” Reagan won the election with the promise to “make America great again” by resurrecting American exceptionalism and messianism. By 1982, Reagan was calling for “a crusade for freedom.” He crowned the re-moralization of the Cold War when he called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in 1983.
Self-confident and endlessly optimistic that the forces of history were good and reasonable, Gorbachev neither demanded written guarantees to prevent NATO expansion nor took constructive steps to create a new collective security agreement. Blinded by his own messianic message of delivering the world from bipolarity, he failed to recognize the effort it would take to midwife multipolarity into a world drifting towards a unipolar structure.
