Henry A. Kissinger Former U.S. National Security Advisor and U.S. Secretary of State In my 1994 book Diplomacy, I included a chapter on the end of the Cold War that described in cold analytical fashion Mikhail Gorbachev's doomed effort to save, and reform, the Soviet system. But the forces that doomed his effort were the contradictions and fatal flaws of the system he inherited. On the occasion of his seventieth birthday, the historic figure of Mikhail Gorbachev deserves a more sympathetic treatment of the vision that inspired him and the world-transforming contribution that he made. As an American I am obliged to note that many decades of U.S. and Western policy also contributed to the outcome. It was the firm Western resistance to Soviet expansionism that ultimately persuaded a new generation of Soviet leaders of the futility of the Leninist course, and of the imperative of Russia's rejoining the world community instead of assaulting it. But at the same time Ronald Reagan himself, that apostle of anti-Communism, detected in Mikhail Gorbachev a moral quality unlike any of his predecessors - a determination to bring the Soviet campaign against the West, and thereby the Cold War, to a peaceful end. During one of my meetings with him, in early 1989, Gorbachev told me how he and his close colleague Eduard Shevardnadze had concluded sometime in the 1970s that the Communist system needed to be changed from top to bottom. I asked him how, as a Communist, he had reached this conclusion. "Knowing what was wrong was easy," he replied. "Knowing what was right was the hard part." The answer remained elusive. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Archimedes had said: "Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth." Revolutions consume their children because revolutionaries rarely understand that, after a certain point of social disintegration, there are no longer any fixed Archimedean points from which to exert leverage. Gorbachev started with the conviction that a reformed Communist Party could propel Soviet society into the modern world. But Communism itself was the problem, not the solution. For two generations, the CPSU had suppressed independent thought and stifled individual initiative. By 1990, central planning had ossified, and the various organizations designed to keep a check on every aspect of life were instead concluding nonaggression treaties with the very groups they were supposedly supervising. Bureaucracy turned self-perpetuation into the primary goal. Gorbachev's attempt to liberate initiative disrupted and then unraveled the system. In foreign policy, too, he had inherited a truly difficult, perhaps insurmountable set of problems. When he assumed power in 1985, the scale of the Soviets' international failure was just becoming apparent. Forty years of Cold War had forged a loose coalition of nearly all the world's other industrial powers against the Soviet Union. Its erstwhile ally, China, had for all practical purposes joined the opposing camp. Moscow's only remaining allies were the East European satellites, which were held together by the threat of Soviet force implicit in the Brezhnev Doctrine, and which represented a drain, not an augmentation, of Soviet strength and resources. Soviet adventures in the Third World were turning out to be both expensive and inconclusive, most painfully in Afghanistan. From Angola to Nicaragua, resistance forces backed by the United States were turning Soviet expansionism into costly stalemates or discredited failures, while the U.S. strategic buildup, especially the Strategic Defense Initiative, posed a technological challenge, which the stagnant and overburdened Soviet economy could not begin to meet. At a moment when the supercomputer microchip information technology revolution was beginning in the West, the new Soviet leader watched his country slipping into technological underdevelopment. Gorbachev deserves credit for seeing this clearly and attempting to face it squarely. He understood that he needed a period of international calm in which to address the domestic challenges. To gain this breathing space, he initiated a major reassessment of Soviet foreign policy. At the XXVII Party Congress in 1986, Marxist-Leninist ideology was nearly completely jettisoned. Previous periods of peaceful coexistence had been justified by Soviet leaders as temporary respites in which to rearrange the balance of forces while the class struggle continued. Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader to repudiate the class struggle altogether, and to proclaim peaceful coexistence as an end in itself. Though continuing to affirm the ideological differences between East and West, Gorbachev insisted that they were superseded by the need for international cooperation. Coexistence was justified not as a necessary stage on the road to an eventual Communist victory, but as contributing to the well being of humanity. During a news conference at the end of his first summit meeting with President Reagan, in Geneva in November 1985, Gorbachev said: The international situation today is distinguished by a very important feature, which we and the United States of America must take into account in our foreign policy. What I mean is this: In the present situation we are talking not only about confrontation between the two social systems, but about a choice between survival and mutual annihilation. To be sure, Gorbachev hoped by a less repressive and more progressive policy in Eastern Europe to give new life to the Soviet role there. By pursuing arms control vigorously with the United States, he hoped both to ease Soviet military burdens and to complicate America's relations with its allies. But these gains did not materialize. On the contrary, his seminal speech at the United Nations on December 7, 1988, announcing deep unilateral reductions of Soviet forces in Eastern Europe, contributed to the unraveling of the satellite regimes. When unrest escalated, the Kremlin, according to the dictates of the Brezhnev Doctrine, should have quelled the incipient revolutions by force. But Gorbachev was unsuited by temperament for such a bloody course. And he knew it would undermine his entire foreign policy. For suppression of Eastern Europe would have solidified NATO and the Sino-American entente, and intensified the arms race. By his proclamation of "new thinking" in foreign policy, just as in domestic policy, he had given hostages to fortune. To his everlasting credit, Gorbachev let the consequences unfold. He had reached far, and striven for a goal beyond his, or anyone else's, capabilities. His place in history, as the man who undid the Soviet tyranny, is secure. While post-Communist Russia today still struggles through its difficult but necessary- transition, few Russians wish to return to the Communist past. Their liberation from that past is Mikhail Gorbachev's legacy.