How Reagan built strength first and then sat down with Gorbachev

Picture a small white wooden house on the edge of the sea in Reykjavik, Iceland, in the middle of October 1986. Inside, two men who command between them the most destructive arsenals in human history have been negotiating for two days without a break. They have come closer to a real deal on nuclear weapons than leaders of the two powers had ever come. They have talked about eliminating whole categories of missiles. They have talked, astonishingly, about eliminating all of them. And then it falls apart over one phrase, and Ronald Reagan stands up, gathers his papers and walks out of the room.

Conservatives of a certain age tell that story with a grin, because it shows the old man would not bend. Dealmakers tell it with a sigh, because it shows how close they came. I think both groups miss the point, which is that the walkout and the handshake are two halves of one strategy. A little over a year after Reykjavik, those same two men signed a treaty in Washington that eliminated an entire class of nuclear missiles. It happened because Reagan had spent the previous six years making sure the other side knew he meant what he said.

This post is about the sequence. Strength first, then talks. Not talks instead of strength, and not strength instead of talks. If you want to understand why the INF Treaty happened, and what it can teach the next generation of Republicans about dealing with a hostile power, start with the order of events.

Before the talks: the problem in Europe

To see why the treaty mattered, you need to know the problem it solved. In the late 1970s the Soviet Union began deploying a new generation of intermediate-range missiles called the SS-20, mobile and carrying several warheads, aimed at the capitals of Western Europe. America's NATO allies, particularly West Germany, were alarmed. The Soviets had a weapon that could reach Bonn and Paris in minutes, and NATO had no equivalent that could answer from European soil.

In December 1979, under President Carter, NATO adopted what became known as the dual-track decision. On one track, NATO would deploy American Pershing II ballistic missiles and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe, beginning at the end of 1983. On the other, it would offer to negotiate limits on such weapons with the Soviets. Deploy and talk. Notice that this was not a Reagan invention. It was a bipartisan alliance decision, and it laid the groundwork for everything that followed.

When Reagan took office in 1981, he added a proposal of his own. On November 18, 1981, in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington, he offered what became known as the zero option: if the Soviets would dismantle all their SS-20s and similar missiles, the United States would cancel its planned deployment. It sounded one-sided to many commentators, and a good number of them said it was a non-starter. The Soviets rejected it. Reagan kept it on the table.

The buildup and the hard line

Meanwhile the administration pursued the policy that critics at home called reckless and that the President called peace through strength. Defense spending rose substantially in the early 1980s. The administration pressed on with new weapons programs. And Reagan spoke plainly about the nature of the adversary. On March 8, 1983, speaking to the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, he called the Soviet Union an "evil empire." The reaction in much of the Western press was dismay.

Two weeks later, on March 23, 1983, he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, immediately nicknamed Star Wars. He asked the nation's scientists, who had given the country nuclear weapons, to turn their talents to giving it the means of rendering those weapons "impotent and obsolete." You can find the whole idea, and the jokes it prompted, in The Star Wars Joke That Helped Bring the Soviets to the Table. Whatever you think of the technical feasibility of missile defense, the political effect was to tell Moscow that the United States intended to compete in a field where the Soviets, with their struggling economy, could not easily keep up.

Then came the test. In November 1983 the first Pershing II missiles arrived in West Germany, after a vote in the Bundestag, and cruise missiles arrived in Britain. Huge protests filled the streets of Western Europe. The Soviets walked out of the Geneva talks on intermediate-range weapons on November 23, 1983, and declared they would not return as long as deployment went ahead. Alliance leaders, particularly Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, held firm. That mattered more than any speech. NATO had passed the first test of nerve.

If you have ever dealt with a stubborn counterparty, you know what that moment is. The other side has made a threat. The question is whether you blink. NATO did not blink.

The turn: a new leader in Moscow

In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. He was younger than his predecessors, and he faced a Soviet economy that was stagnating under the weight of its military commitments, an expensive war in Afghanistan and a rigid system. The Soviets had resumed negotiations earlier that year. Now there was a leader who wanted something different.

I want to be careful about the causation here, because it is the heart of the debate. Reagan did not cause Gorbachev to exist. The Soviet Union had deep internal problems that were not made in Washington. But the foreign pressure was real, and Gorbachev understood it. A buildup he could not match, a missile-defense program he feared and an American alliance that had refused to crack all shaped his choices. For more on how this debate plays out among historians, see Did Reagan Really Win the Cold War or Did the Soviets Just Collapse and Seven Myths About Reagan, Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War.

The summits

Geneva, November 1985. Reagan and Gorbachev met for the first time at a summit in Geneva, November 19 to 21. They did not agree on much. But they issued a joint statement that included a sentence conservatives and liberals could both live with: a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. It was a statement of principle, and it signaled a thaw.

Reykjavik, October 1986. The second meeting, on October 11 and 12 at the Hofdi House, was the dramatic one. The two leaders discussed deep cuts in strategic weapons, and in an extraordinary exchange the talk turned to eliminating all ballistic missiles and even all nuclear weapons. The sticking point was Reagan's missile defense program. Gorbachev demanded that research on it be confined to the laboratory. Reagan refused, because he was not prepared to give up the program, and the talks ended with no agreement. At the time many commentators called it a failure.

It was not. Reykjavik showed the Soviets that Reagan could not be pressured into surrendering a program he believed in. It also revealed how far both sides were prepared to go. The ideas discussed there did not vanish. Within months Gorbachev moved. In February 1987 he announced that he was prepared to separate an agreement on intermediate-range missiles from the dispute over missile defense. That was the concession that unlocked the deal.

Berlin, June 1987. In between, on June 12, 1987, Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin and said: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Notice what that is. It was a blunt public demand to the very man he would sign a treaty with six months later. Reagan saw no contradiction between demanding the wall come down and negotiating with the person who ran the country that built it. That is exactly the point of this post.

Washington, December 1987. On December 8, 1987, in the East Room of the White House, Reagan and Gorbachev signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. At the ceremony Reagan used a Russian proverb, "trust, but verify." He used it because the treaty was built around verification.

What the INF Treaty did

Here is what the treaty actually accomplished, in plain terms.

1. It eliminated a whole class of weapons. The treaty banned all U.S. and Soviet ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers, which is roughly 310 to 3,400 miles. Those were the missiles at the center of the European crisis.
2. It was lopsided in America's favor. The Soviets had to destroy more missiles than the United States. About 1,846 Soviet missiles and about 846 American ones were eliminated, a total of 2,692. Subtract: 1,846 minus 846 is 1,000 more Soviet than American missiles. The side with the larger arsenal in the category gave up more.
3. It had real inspections. The treaty allowed on-site inspections of missile bases and production facilities by each side. For the first time, Soviet inspectors were looking over American sites and Americans were looking over Soviet ones. The verification system was the part that satisfied the skeptics.
4. It used the same logic as the dual-track decision. The Soviets agreed to the zero option, the proposal Reagan had made in 1981, which they had called a non-starter. They accepted a deal that they had rejected six years earlier because the facts had changed.

The Senate ratified the treaty in 1988 by a very large bipartisan margin, and the treaty entered into force that June at the Moscow summit, where Reagan and Gorbachev strolled through Red Square. A reporter asked Reagan whether he still thought he was dealing with an evil empire. He answered that he had been talking about another time, another era.

The conservative objections

I owe you the other side, and it is a serious one. Many conservatives opposed the treaty, and some of them were Reagan's most loyal allies.

Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina fought it in the Senate. Prominent activists on the right accused the President of being taken in by Soviet charm, and a number of conservative commentators wrote that he was giving away the achievements of the buildup. The argument was that the Soviets cheat, that verification is never perfect, and that signing agreements with a regime that broke earlier ones would lull the West into complacency.

Those are sound concerns, and they should be put to every negotiation with a hostile power. Here is the answer to them.

1. The deal rested on verification, not trust. The inspection regime was far more intrusive than anything before it. The President's slogan was literally about checking.
2. The balance favored the United States and its allies. The missiles that went away were the ones aimed at Europe, and the Soviets had more of them.
3. The talks followed strength. If Reagan had come to the table in 1981 with nothing, he would have gotten nothing. He came in 1987 after the deployments, after the buildup, after SDI, and after Reykjavik. This is the whole point.

It is also worth noting that the treaty did not last forever. The United States formally withdrew in August 2019 after years of accusing Russia of violating it. The lesson there is not that the treaty was a mistake. It is that agreements need to be enforced, and that verification is a continuing job.

Four questions for any negotiation with a hostile power

You will hear the Reagan example invoked for years whenever the talk turns to Russia. Here is how to use it properly, without turning it into a slogan. Ask four questions of any proposed negotiation.

What leverage do we have? Reagan came with deployed missiles, a growing military, an allied front and a technology program the other side feared. If the answer is "none," the talks are a request, not a negotiation.

Who is at the table? The INF Treaty was negotiated with the allies' consent, and they stood firm when it was costly. A deal that sacrifices the interests of friends will not last. The story of how allies were consulted is part of the larger NATO history I recount in The One Time NATO's Article 5 Was Invoked, and Who Answered the Call.

How will we know? Verification is not an extra. It is the agreement.

What does the other side want, and why would it want it? Gorbachev had reasons to deal, and Reagan understood them. A negotiator who does not know the other side's motives is guessing.

Those four questions apply equally to hawks and to dealmakers. Hawks need to remember that Reagan did sit down with the Soviets, and that refusing to talk can leave you with nothing to show for your strength. Dealmakers need to remember that Reagan sat down only after he had built the leverage, and that talk without leverage buys little. The same lesson, from a different angle, is in Peace Through Strength Is Older Than Reagan and It Still Works, and for the broader tradition of Republicans who helped build the postwar alliances, see Vandenberg's Conversion and the Republicans Who Built the Postwar Order. A more recent chapter in how Americans think about promises made to a neighbor of Russia is in What America Promised Ukraine in 1994 and What It Did Not.

The bottom line

• The INF Treaty followed six years of buildup, a firm line in Europe, a missile-defense program and a walkout at Reykjavik. Strength came first and talks came second.
• The treaty eliminated a class of missiles, destroyed more Soviet than American ones (1,846 against 846), and included on-site inspections. "Trust, but verify" was the design, not the slogan.
• Conservative critics, including Senator Helms, raised real concerns about cheating and complacency. Those concerns are why verification mattered.
• When someone cites Reagan to justify a deal, ask four questions: what leverage, who is at the table, how will we verify, and what does the other side want?
• Read the treaty text and the ratification debate yourself. They are public, and they are more interesting than the slogans.