The irreducible antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union, which became known as the Cold War, was a “struggle for the soul of the Mankind,” argues Melvyn Leffler borrowing the phrase from former US President George H. W. Bush. It did not have to be that way, though. No one really wanted the Cold War. Both Washington and Moscow hoped to continue cooperating even after the defeat of Japan and Germany. The superpowers-to-be were not longing for competition, and certainly not for the absolute and global competition that soon ensued. But, deserved or not, a Cold War they got. Why was that? And, more importantly, why did the Cold War last so long? What was it about US and Soviet leaders that made it impossible to put an end to the expensive, highly militarized and immensely dangerous competition between the two superpowers? What was in the international system that stimulated competition and precluded collaboration?

In this book, Leffler tries to answer these general questions. He does it in a very unconventional way, by concentrating – once more after his monumental Preponderance of Power (1992) – on the origins of the Cold War and on four other crucial moments; three of which he presents as lost opportunities, if not for peace then at least for “avoiding or modulating the extreme tension and hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union” (7). These four moments were the year and a half following Stalin's death (1953–54), the post-Cuban Missile Crisis years (1962–65), the crisis of détente (1975–80), and, finally, the end of the Cold War (1985–90).

Only in the last moment, Leffler argues, did brave and visionary leaders – Reagan and Gorbachev – seize the opportunity, reopen a dialogue and courageously proceed to dismantle the post-World War II international structure. Why were the other pairings, symmetrically analysed by Leffler (Stalin and Truman, Malenkov and Eisenhower, Khrushchev and Kennedy, Brezhnev and Carter), not able to do what Reagan and Gorbachev did?

Leffler offers three general matrices of Soviet and US behaviour: human agency, the structure of the international system, and ideology and historical memory. Historical experience and ideological axioms, Leffler maintains, permeated the thinking and outlook of Soviet and American leaders, preventing them from fully understanding the motivations and reasons of the other side. The bipolar structure of the international system, although highly imperfect and asymmetrical (one of the two poles, the US, was clearly much stronger than the other) tended to catalyse tensions and exacerbate conflicts. Finally, US and Soviet leaders were as far too human in their defects as they were in their apprehension and, at the end, in their prudence. They could not resist the temptations offered by the possibility to extend their reach and influence; they could not entirely contain the anxieties and fears provoked by the simple existence of the mighty enemy. In the end, however, geopolitical lust and irrational fear could not really prevail over caution and good sense. Until the late 1980s, peace, or at least a real, permanent reduction of tensions, remained a chimera; but war, devastating as it would be, did not come.

“The Cold War,” Leffler claims, “came because conditions in the international system created risks that Truman and Stalin could not accept and opportunities they could not resist” (57–58). It lasted so long because “there could be no real détente or peace so long as ideological presuppositions shaped the two sides' perceptions of threat and opportunity in a dynamic international system” (149); to Washington and Moscow “the world seem too frightening; it also seemed too full of opportunity” (150). Fears were nevertheless controlled and opportunities exploited only up to a certain extent. This seems particularly true for Soviet leaders, whose security concerns Leffler tries hard to explain and understand, often empathizing with them. In Leffler's sober assessment, there are neither villains nor heroes, at least until Reagan and Gorbachev enter the final stage. Some leaders get a better evaluation than others, most notably (and rightly in my view) Jimmy Carter. But they are all treated in a serious and unstereotyped way, including the monstrous Stalin. The book would be valuable only for this, particularly in times when historical caricatures and interpretative unilateralism abound, even in the works of some famed historians.

A second element of strength of the book is Leffler's crystal clear and sometimes even brilliant prose. There is occasional pleonasm and redundancy, but Leffler writes with lucidity and wit, and does not disdain some over-the-top but lively and highly enjoyable sentences (“the men who made policy in Washington and Moscow viewed developments through ideological prisms and historical memories that made détente extremely difficult to sustain. They could not transcend their past, overcome their fears, modify their aspirations, escape the pressure of allies, or ignore domestic political adversaries. They felt peril and they glimpsed salvation. They had nowhere to go once they escaped from Armageddon but back to Cold War” (233), my emphasis).

That said, and with full acknowledgement that the book will appeal not only to scholars and students, but also to a more general audience, I must admit I found some parts of the book unconvincing or simply disappointing. For the sake of synthesis, I will concentrate on four basic themes:

1. (a) The structure and the overall economy of the book. For the Soul of the Mankind is quite uneven: some parts are overdetailed and repetitive (the second moment), others are hasty and incomplete (the fifth moment, despite its length and its record-breaking 417 notes). Most troubling, the division of the narrative in five discrete intervals makes Leffler's reconstruction somehow fragmentary and incoherent: how can you describe the crisis of détente, to mention perhaps the most obvious example, without fully discussing what détente was and had achieved? For the same reason, it is virtually impossible for Leffler to offer any sort of sub-periodization of the long Cold War of 1945/47–1989/91. The decisive turning point represented by 1962/63 and the progressive maturation of a full strategic interdependence (i.e. nuclear deterrence) between the two superpowers is thus overlooked. Very little is said on the crucial change that nuclear arms, and Soviet massive rearmament more generally, imposed on the bipolar antagonism in the 1960s, when a fundamental commonality – positive (to preserve power duopoly) and negative (to avoid war) – developed between Moscow and Washington.

2. (b) Human agency gets the lion's share among the three matrices of Soviet and US post-World War II behaviour (“The Cold War was not predetermined. Leaders made choices,” Leffler concludes on page 451). The brief biographical sketches that open each chapter are always very good, and on a few occasions (Stalin and Brezhnev) truly superb. Individual decisions, fears, flaws, and courage offer the most important explanation of how many crucial turning points discussed in the book occurred, and certainly of why and how the Cold War ended (“It took an exceptional man, Gorbachev, to reconceive the nature of the threat and to focus on domestic resurrection rather than external opportunity. It took an exceptional man, Reagan, to muster the inner conviction, personal charm, and domestic political strength to leverage his opponent's concessions into a framework that preserved and institutionalized his own nation's global hegemony,” 452). I must admit I have some difficulty in accepting the notion that history is made by exceptional men. But that is not the issue here and I will return to it in my fourth and last point. What I found troublesome in Leffler's analysis is that these men, exceptional or not, too often seem to operate in a bubble, whose contours are defined by ideology, the lessons of history, the international system, but never by domestic dynamics and pressures. “No leader, anywhere, acts in a domestic vacuum in which policy can be made with indifference to internal constituents, bureaucracies and interest groups,” Leffler states at the beginning of the book (6). However, far too often the ten protagonists of this story do indeed appear to operate in a vacuum. This is difficult to accept, particularly in the case of the US, where domestic politics and foreign policy are always strictly intermingled and interdependent. To state the obvious: how can you explain the crisis of détente and Carter's travails without discussing the domestic attack on détente, the rise of the New Right, and all that followed?

3. (c) According to Leffler, ideology and the highly ideological world views of the US and the Soviet Union shaped their perceptions of threats and opportunities. Ideology was thus one of the primary matrices of the Cold War and a major cause of the many missed chances described in the book. However, in Leffler's hands ideology is often a given: it is stated more than explained and analysed. What is ideology? What made US and Soviet policies highly ideological? What made their foreign policies more ideological than those of previous great powers? In contrast to what “reality” do we measure the degree of ideology informing the view and the choices of the ten leaders discussed in the book? Particularly striking and disturbing, from my perspective, is the lack of a clear discussion and definition of what the US and the USSR were offering to “mankind” in order to conquer “its soul.” Notably absent, for instance, is any reference to the great modernization projects promoted and broadcasted by Washington and Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s. This is frankly puzzling and incomprehensible, considering the many excellent works (by Latham, Gilman, Cullather and others) we now have on the topic and the importance that modernization – as ideology and theory – had in shaping US and Soviet views of the world, of its problems and of the possible responses to such problems.

4. (d) Finally, the last chapter: the fifth and final moment of Leffler's story. The moment when heroes (“exceptional men” who were “pragmatists as well as dreamers,” 388) suddenly appear and, unlike in the past, do not miss the chances offered to them. The chapter is long, too long. The notes never end. The documents are nevertheless scarce, and it could not be otherwise. Far too frequently scholarship slips into hagiography. Reagan is characterized as “no pushover ... calculating, competitive, tough-minded and disciplined. He instinctively grasped the rhythm of negotiations. His stubborn patience was a powerful weapon, as were his apt use of humor and anecdote, simple language and strong convictions” (362–63); Gorbachev was the “indispensable agent of change”: no one “was more responsible for ending the Cold War than the Soviet leader” (466). Quotes like these abound throughout the chapter. It might be so and there is certainly much to commend in the way Reagan and Gorbachev handled the last, crucial détente of the second half of the 1980s. But the picture offered by Leffler seems to me quite simplistic. Important subjects (Western Europe? Federal Republic of Germany?) are left almost entirely at the margins. Structure is clearly subordinated to human agency. The most important systemic transformations of the period – the definitive end of Bretton Woods embedded liberalism, the difficult transition to a postindustrial society, the debate on US decline, the fear of Japan, the rise of the Asian tigers, and so on – are not even mentioned. Ditto some of the least honourable US and Soviet actions in the period, from Afghanistan to Central America. Iran–Contra and the Nicaraguan imbroglio get just brief mentions here and there. The end of the book (and of the Cold War) deserved better.

Melvyn Leffler has offered us a thorough work that enriches the historiography of the Cold War. It is a book in which the reader will find some sparkling parts, many sound judgements, and a commendable effort to empathize with Cold War leaders and the difficult, almost impossible, tasks they faced. Is this enough to make For the Soul of the Mankind a work up to the standards set by Leffler with his two previous monographs (the abovementioned Preponderance of Power and the superb The Elusive Quest, 1979)? In all honesty, my answer is no; although one must never forget how high those standards are.

The publication of a book by Melvyn Leffler has become a kind of event since the award-winning A Preponderance of Power in 1992: H-Diplo has held a round table on the Soul and here CUP has arranged an extended response to this new work. Such virtual events are indeed important given the impact of the previous work, which largely redefined the interpretation of the origins of the Cold War, the Truman administration and concepts of national security (the latter having a significant impact), and forced a breakaway from the antagonism of the earlier interpretations. Here again it is important to discuss the work given that this time the text is also aimed at a wider audience; the publishers, the engaging narrative style and the portraits that develop the human element of the protagonists suggest that this book is not solely intended for academic and student audiences. Its impact will again likely be wide.

Leffler's Soul of Mankind provides five incisions into periods of the Cold War during which there might have been an opportunity to build on certain conditions that might have led to a resolution of the antagonism. The origins of the Cold War are revisited but this time – in a pattern followed throughout the work – alongside a considered examination of the Soviet part of the bargain. The work provides well-developed yet succinct biographical portraits of the major protagonists, which assist in one of the key objectives of the book: to consider and highlight the role of agency, ideas and ideology as well as the contexts of the international system. The book is therefore “about men and their ideas and their fears and their hopes.” (8) It is also about the balance between those fears and opportunities.

The other four incisions examine the years immediately after Stalin's death, the post-Missile Crisis context, the latter part of the 1970s from President Ford to President Carter and then, finally, the end of the Cold War centred on Reagan and Gorbachev. Thankfully the book does not provide another survey of the Cold War, which at this point would really need to put forward a new methodology or new interpretation to advance our understanding. Leffler's strength is that in these chapters or “moments” we are provided with a real sense of the interaction of the protagonists and detailed explanations of why resolution and accommodation could not be reached. The history of the interactions is brought to life with the analysis of the simultaneously expansive and myopic world views of the US and Soviet leaderships. It is a tale of extended frustration that demonstrates that while opportunities for accommodation might have existed on one side, the fears and ambitions of the other goaded leaders into positions of intransigence.

Given the structure and the opportunity to develop depth rather than breadth there are a few points of concern: first, the use of ideology, and second, the scope or breadth or range of protagonists both within and outside the United States.

The concepts and uses of ideology might have been developed further. There is a considerable literature on the topic but some of the seminal work has not been directly engaged, including, but not limited to, that of Michael Hunt's 1987 Ideology and US Foreign Policy. Leffler does a superb job in addressing his particular objectives, and in analysing and explaining the various human agencies he provides great depth and detail on the set of questions he outlined at the outset of the work: “what did they want to do? What were their goals? Their motives? To what extent were they trapped by circumstance, pressured by allies or clients, buffeted by domestic constituencies, or imprisoned by ideas and historical memories?” (7) Through these questions and objectives we are provided with intimate portraits and detailed explanations of how the combinations of fear, power and opportunity never really aligned to alleviate the tensions that ran till the late 1980s. What concerns me here is that perhaps the emphasis on agency and contingency within the contexts of the various and numerous internal and external pressures does not lend itself to a systematic methodological development of ideology. Why did such beliefs and world views hold such sway, bridging the gap between the way things were and the way leaders thought they “ought” to be when there was considerable internal US analysis on alternative explanations and identification of alternative aspirations? The book is intriguing on the development of agency and contingency. The first chapter ends with the argument that Stalin had become “locked in a worldview struggle, yet the shape of the struggle was not predetermined.” Both Truman and Stalin were in a position in which they “could not control their fears and instincts, their passions and aspirations” and the combination of the “structure of the international system and their ideological mind-sets” (79) outweighed the desire to collaborate. During other episodes in the book those desires did not coincide and diplomatic opportunities were missed, a topic Logevall addressed in the 2004 Bernath Lecture. Leffler argues that fear and opportunity were considerable factors and ideology no doubt contributed to both, to the point that Stalin and Truman set the compass through their “visions and the ambitions” that drove their nations for the next few decades. “They could not do otherwise in an international order that engendered so much fear and so much opportunity.” (83) And yet these characters existed at the top of extraordinarily elaborate bureaucracies filled with a diverse array of individuals and personalities that might have contained or ameliorated these fears but perhaps did not.

Of course, policy on both sides was being made and decisions were being taken across a period in which three phenomena were taking shape: the process of decolonization and self-determination, a vast acceleration in global population and an unprecedented growth in global wealth generation. The aspirations of “local leaders and indigenous elites” were for independence, self-determination and modernization, and to “extinguish the misery that came with poverty.” (80) In the 1980s, when Robert Pastor reflected on his period as director for Latin American affairs on the National Security Council, he made the argument in his book Condemned to Repetition that President Carter's human rights policies were not simply idealistic, but contained a very considered sense of realism. Because, without US reform in its foreign policy and with the continued identification of the United States with a range of national security states (partly born out of either fear or opportunity) or authoritarian regimes, Washington ran the risk of losing the respect (soul?) of future generations amongst populations that were rapidly increasing. In this respect, although Leffler's Soul does address the rise of nationalism in Third World areas, it seems subordinated to the dualistic clash of the central protagonists, which creates problems in so far as the Cold War represented a struggle for that soul of mankind. For instance, while fear, ideology and misunderstanding do contribute to certain episodes, I think these are less useful as explanatory tools when examining such cases, for instance, as Guatemala under Arbenz or Nicaragua during the encounter between Reagan and the Sandinistas.

In that respect the book does not develop sufficiently the cynicism amongst some policymakers, though their opportunism is apparent. And given the author's interest in agency and contingency, it would have been interesting to combine this analysis with a mining into the lower levels of bureaucracy in Washington. The shear cynicism of US Ambassador John Peurifoy's quip that President Arbenz would do as a communist until one came along, or the extensive reporting by Ambassadors Pezzullo, White and Smith in Nicaragua, El Salvador and Cuba in the early Reagan years that local conditions did not accord with Reagan's rhetoric, do not get sufficient attention (and one could extend the discussion to a range of other locations from Tibet to Chile, Iraq's Kurdish area, East Timor, Angola and others). It is no doubt impossible to escape ideology, but its excesses need to be subjected to examination. The point is that these discussions were taking place. Leffler aptly quotes Louis Halle on Guatemala, but Halle was also quite critical, pointing out to his superior “that the widespread impression abroad is: (a) that the U.S. has become hysterical about the communist menace so that it is losing its head in dealing with it; and (b) that this is leading the U.S. to commit acts of international lawlessness.” Ultimately, domestic opportunity might also have been important. Odd Arne Westad argues that for many right-wing radicals, Latin America “became the preferred battleground for imposing a new and more offensive approach to the Cold War.” To overcome the impact of Kissinger's realism, the radicals, as Westad cites Robert Kagan, “sought to win ‘the domestic battle for the American soul as well as the strategic battle against the Soviet Union.’” With these two constituencies in view, the strategy ran great risks of losing the soul of the wider international community possessed of the range of ambitions and aspirations identified by Leffler.

In that context it might have been possible to develop explanations of why the US and Soviet leaderships did not squarely address the aspirations and concerns of the emerging nationalists and Third World leaders, let alone some broad conceptual aspirations of “the peoples” of various areas and countries that were at times perceptively commented on by US policymakers. Hence one questions whether the place of “third” actors, be it various Third World nationalists, revolutionaries, or leaders of the authoritarian national security states, or indeed the leadership and popular aspirations of Europe, Japan, and China, for instance, have been developed enough. Perhaps the structure of Soul based on incisions might have facilitated further examination of these actors, and questioned the binary view of US and Soviet protagonists.

About halfway through The Soul of Mankind, it struck me, retrospectively, that all of Mel Leffler's work (at least since his A Preponderance of Power) is constitutively grounded in the notion of “reasonableness.” It is a clumsy word for an agreeable quality. Leffler himself is a reasonable person, eminently liberal and humane, and so he looks for the ways in which people measure up to this standard in often difficult circumstances. Thus his histories are about people placed somewhere on a scale of reasonableness and facing demands which are intrinsically taxing or undermining of that quality. The narrative power of the proceedings is then produced by the confrontation between what might reasonably be expected or considered possible in situations that are often not conducive to that reasonableness.

Initially, one recognizes this problematic in its contours from Max Weber's classic delineation in “Politics as a Vocation/Profession (Beruf),” with its famous distinction between the ethics of responsibility and an ethics of ultimate ends, and more generally from a myriad of works in the genre of “politics as tragic predicament.” Leffler's version is more precise, however: what interests him is the degree to which reasonable (or, as the case may be, unreasonable) people act in specific, externally given circumstances. As Marx would have it, people make history but not in circumstances of their own doing. Though The Soul is explicitly about individuals at the highest echelons of US and Soviet decision-making (presidents and general secretaries in fact) and Preponderance is about US policies, “reasonableness” is the vantage point of both.

Preponderance, after elaborating the circumstances and the details of the policies, asks ultimately the question of how reasonable these decisions were in the given context. Reasonableness is judged, then, according to the standards of an imaginary “good” policymaker, competence here being determined by the historically situated norms and particularities Leffler has uncovered. The Soul extends “reasonableness” beyond the subject position of the situated policymaker pure and simple by posing the additional issue of how reasonable the actual personalities themselves were: how willing were they to compromise, discuss, concede, empathize? And above all, how willing and capable were they in understanding the predicament of the other, to give him (for they are all men) the benefit of the doubt and to seek common ground?

A certain unwanted objectivity of conflict was thus created around 1946–47 which we know as the Cold War (Leffler, as most historians, is not very interested in its conceptual aspects; the Cold War is what it is, so to speak). Truman and Stalin, coming from radically different backgrounds, end up following a certain trajectory that neither of them really wants. They create a reality from which, in various ways and to various degrees, all ensuing personages on both sides try to escape, until Mikhail Gorbachev along with Ronald Reagan and George Bush the Elder manage to do so, chiefly because of the dramatic moves of the last Soviet leader, a person who is in fact the very incarnation of reasonableness and the one individual here capable of transcending his predicament of historical circumstances. Hence, predicaments notwithstanding, the narrative is not a tragedy. There are, to be sure, mini-tragedies within. There is the political destruction of the crude but essentially well-meaning Lyndon B. Johnson along with a good deal of his Great Society, courtesy of his ideological blinders on Vietnam. There is the honourable failure of the equally crude and well-meaning Nikita Khrushchev. Overall, however, the history of “the Cold War” comes to an end in transcendence, if not salvation. Things turn out for the best. Reasonableness wins the day.

How persuasive is this? Put differently, on what grounds can Leffler's narrative and analysis be challenged? First, let it be said that looking for reasonableness has indubitable virtues in the context of Cold War history. It reduces the temptation to take an overly ideological view of something whose chief symptom seems indeed to be that it is itself overly ideological. Leffler is commendably able to put his deep dislike of unreasonable people into suspension and to see their viewpoints without a priori condemnation. Even Stalin gets a fair hearing, however evil, monstrous and paranoid Leffler, mostly with good reason, thinks he was. Perhaps the only figure Leffler cannot quite bring himself to “see” in reasonable terms is Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose constant harping at and hectoring of Jimmy Carter in the name of some nigh-on preternatural devotion to Cold War orthodoxy shines through in Leffler's account as starkly disagreeable. How well Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger would have fared is open to conjecture, for their moment is structurally excluded from the book. Altogether, then, Leffler lets everyone (to the point of excess) speak his mind in his own way and, more important, he tries to grapple respectfully with what is being said. Leffler is never dismissive. This is good, especially good when it comes to giving the Soviet view, which is rarely given its ideological due in US historiography.

In giving the Soviet view, however, Leffler also inadvertently reveals a certain problem with his account. For it turns out that the Soviet view is often more “reasonable,” at least on the surface, than the US counterpart. This is partly to do, of course, with the fact that the Soviet Union is throughout the entire epoch far less powerful than the United States: having constantly to play catch-up, Soviet leaders have more reason to contemplate ways of eliminating the Cold War predicament. So it is Moscow which comes up with radical proposals to lessen tensions.

What is abundantly obvious from Leffler's own account is that, when all is said and done, the United States remains far more committed to the basic proposition of the Cold War, namely that the very existence of the Soviet Union is the real cause of the Cold War and so the war can only end when the Soviet Union ceases to be the Soviet Union. Leffler does not pursue this systematically because his fundamental premise is mutuality and equivalence, two sides in a similar situation struggling not only with the adversary but also with their own twin desire to escape the given while seeking advantages to be explored. It is an existential problematic which requires for its operation a certain identity: in this case “the Cold War” and the struggle for something which Leffler, courtesy of Bush the Elder, calls “the soul of mankind.”

In Leffler's own terms, this equivalence gets tricky when it turns out that history presumably demonstrates that, reasonableness notwithstanding, the US position was right all along. The end comes only with the demise of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's transcendence, ably facilitated by Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, is ultimately not about coming to agreement in reasonable ways and doing away with the Cold War. It is about Soviet capitulation and self-destruction. The order of events is notable: capitulation first, destruction second. Gorbachev does not intend this, of course, but his abnegations of power, however honourable in spirit, serve first to give away all essential Soviet assets and then to destroy the Soviet Union itself (see Vladislav Zubok's biting account of the pathetic coda in A Failed Empire). The mutual predicament ceases to be because the mutual ceases to be. One might ask whether this is not the point at which the whole notion of the reasonable becomes null and void.

Reasonableness is, however, not Leffler's own problematic but a product of my symptomatic reading, and so he should not be taken to task for having failed properly to pursue it. Instead judgement rests on his statement that what is at stake is how and why the Cold War ended, hence too the issue of what it might have been. None of these related questions is elucidated satisfactorily by his account. The end of “the Cold War” is really not a problem at all. The Cold War ends because at a certain moment, for contingent reasons, Gorbachev comes along and he happens to do so when Ronald Reagan is on the other side. The Soviet Union is finished off. End of story. It is all blindingly obvious. The event, more importantly, is only tenuously part of the structure of the Cold War as such (in Leffler's terms, not mine). As a contingent event, it is first of all not the result of any logical unfolding.

This is fair enough: one might well take the position (as I think Leffler actually does) that the Cold War is not some Hegelian substance marching through time and space but a certain predicament, a response to an objectively given situation and an unresolvable dilemma: a predicament of incomprehension, fears and opportunities coupled with the inability to transcend. Leffler's “moments,” the confrontations he stages, might then be seen as instantiations, each discrete but drawing on an accumulating repertoire of ideology and memory. The Gorbachev–Reagan play, on that reading, will just be the final instance, the moment of resolution by means of destruction.

Such an account is still internally coherent. The problems begin when the predicament is concretized. If the Cold War was about the struggle for the “soul of mankind,” one might then put the irony that, in winning the battle for the soul of mankind, Gorbachev loses his horse, his country and the war itself. However, Leffler's history uncovers no obvious struggle for the soul of mankind in the sense of an overdetermining structure. What he does reveal is that US and Soviet leaders try continuously to overcome the pressures and problems of a certain power constellation not of their own making.

This is not surprising, but it is not enough to sustain the narrative. A good way to gauge why this is so is to consider the minor problem of Leffler's notion of “fear,” on which he places recurring emphasis. Fear is a constitutive part of the predicament, but it is not conceptually specified, perhaps because it seems self-evident. Yet fear is a strong word. It not the same as “worry.” Any normal security operation involves worry. Security is about worries. “Fear,” by contrast, implies existential extremity. If Leffler had demonstrated the continuous, organizing function of fear in that strong sense, then there would have been striking novelty here. Leffler, however, does not demonstrate such a determinative function but a fluctuating series of concerns and worries that sometimes approximate fear. The Cuban Missile Crisis involves real fear. Is Vietnam about fear in that sense? I think not. Lyndon Johnson may lie awake at night thinking about Vietnam but that is not necessarily a condition of “fear.”

What is at stake here is not some matter of mere semantic nuance but the assumption that there is a constant Cold War setup that marks all these leaders and creates their predicament. To see the implications, one can ponder the related and more troublesome issue of détente along with its side aspect of triangulation. Does the Cold War predicament suddenly disappear with Nixon, Kissinger and Brezhnev? Leffler says nothing substantial about the genesis and nature of détente, indeed about the period between Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford. He only introduces détente as decline in the epoch of Ford and Carter, i.e. as the return of the predicament. Is détente then perhaps a structural impossibility, a momentary lapse? Arguably, but Leffler does not make that argument.

I myself would say that, on the contrary, détente is a logical if not inevitable product of nuclear arsenals and an indication that the material foundations of the Cold War had already been undermined, but then my overall assertion is that the whole project of the Cold War as cold war was a US invention, that the Cold War as extreme tension and lack of classic diplomacy was the answer in 1946–47 to the question of how, in peacetime and aside from exigencies of asymmetric power, one was to put the United States into the world on a massive scale. I shall not elaborate on that alternative view here. I note only how difficult it is to imagine Henry Kissinger and Andrei Gromyko busying themselves with the soul of mankind, and even if we manage that feat, it is impossible to see how mankind might have fathomed in such utopian terms the geopolitical machinations that led the United States into a de facto alliance with the People's Republic of China, then the most radical communist regime in the world (with the possible exception of Albania). Moscow and Beijing might have pitched their mutual struggle as one whose ultimate object was the “soul of mankind,” but even that is a bit of a stretch.

In a deeper sense, then, my complaint has to do with Leffler's conventional view of the Cold War. It is at once a homogenized, seamless, blurry and ahistorical notion. It does not lend itself to explanation. Or, more accurately, it lends itself only to one kind of explanation. If the Cold War is simply an antagonism between the United States and the Soviet Union for the soul of mankind that begins after the Second World War and ends in 1989–91, then the end coincides with the end of the Soviet Union which in turn is thus what needs to be explained. The Cold War ends in victory for one side and defeat for the other: it makes perfect sense. Moreover, the victory/defeat is total. So it has to be because the very soul of mankind is at stake and the soul is inscribed in the very nature of the two antagonists. There can be no compromise or annulment which leaves the character of the two essentially intact. Hence Nixon and Brezhnev were mistaken in 1972. The Cold War was not over and it could not be over.

Structural reasonableness, as it happens, is finally only possible in the advent of total victory/defeat, the moment when the soul of mankind turns out to belong on one side rather than the other. Leffler is a little coy here because, temperamentally, he is generous and likes to see the validity of both sides. Perhaps he thinks that the two antagonists could have come to an agreement that the whole idea of struggling for the soul of mankind was a silly mistake or an illusion, that they might have declared it null and void, that they could have gone on jointly to focus on saving the environment or whatever. If so, his setup undermines him. His is a struggle to the death.

My complaint duly registered, however, I must immediately add that Leffler's episodic predicaments are a historical delight. For the immense strength of the book, beyond outstanding archival work, is the rich analyses of particular situations, sequences and confrontations. It is an extraordinarily revealing account. And any work that gives Georgy Malenkov his moment in the sun is irresistible.

Melvyn Leffler's new monograph considerably expands the post-revisionist interpretation of the Cold War and helps clarify the prevalent factors in the origins and development of the confrontation between the USA and the USSR and their allies over the four decades after World War II. Specifically he focusses our attention on the question of whether ideology or power politics, with all the components intrinsic to these categories, was at the heart of the conflict.

Developing this monograph since the mid-1990s, Leffler has thoroughly examined the American and Russian archives opened during that period. In addition to the holdings of the National Archives and Presidential Libraries, he has carefully investigated the collections of the National Security Archive, the Cold War International History Project of the Woodrow Wilson Center, oral histories, unpublished manuscripts, and Soviet sources such as the so-called V. N. Malin's notes from the Kremlin Archives.

Leffler refers often to his A Preponderance of Power,Footnote ¹ but in the present book he gives much more attention to the role of ideology in the shaping of US and Soviet foreign policies, critiquing the influence of ideology on national security and Cold War dynamics. In historiographic discussions about the Cold War “new history,” Leffler had quite clearly outlined the direction in which he was going to revise several postulates in his previous interpretation,Footnote ² but this is no less than a consideration of the essence of the Cold War.

Leffler's analysis is set out through an introductory quote from former president George H. W. Bush, who regarded the Cold War as “a struggle for the very soul of mankind” (3) and “for a way of life” (9). He pursues this view through a traditional study of relations between the two protagonists in the Cold War, but the novelty of Leffler's approach is manifest in the focus he places on the role of personalities as he tries to comprehend the behaviour of Soviet and US political leaders, assessing their contribution to the beginning, development and ending of the Cold War. Far from being reductionist, this approach opens up analysis of ideas, perceptions, historical memory, the influence of domestic political groupings, the pressure of bloc-associated allies and, no less important, the effects of “the international system.” Ideological and psychological factors, affecting the political leaders' perceptions of the outside world, are thus identified and interrogated.

This conceptual approach enables Leffler to argue why the Cold War was not inevitable in the early postwar years but also why it could not be ended before the late 1980s. He critiques the notion of the Cold War as the product “of Western horror at Stalin's cruelty,” pointing out that this aspect of Stalin's politics hardly worried US officials and that other considerations prompted the launching of the Cold War (44). Leffler concludes that, in the Soviet leader's mentality, “security considerations trumped revolutionary ambitions” (27). These national security interests, among them the prevention of revived German and Japanese military power and the procurement of loans and reparations for reconstruction of the national economy, dictated to Stalin the necessity to maintain cooperation with the Western allies in the postwar years.Footnote ³

Professor Leffler also critically appraises the view that Truman immediately started the Cold War under the pressure of his anti-Soviet advisers. He points out that Truman perceived the world in black-and-white terms and believed in the projection of US power, for example through possession of the atomic bomb. However, in spite of his lack of competence in foreign-policy affairs, the newly elected president thought fit to conduct negotiations with Stalin to uphold US interests. Truman also was not inclined to destroy the wartime coalition in view of the current difficulties in the internal political situation in the USA and the incomplete postwar settlement. In other words, the author underlines that neither Truman nor Stalin was initially bent on confrontation (56–57).

Building on this platform, Leffler scrutinizes the evolution of the postwar international system, with risks and opportunities that neither the US president nor the Soviet dictator could ignore in shaping their foreign policies. Importantly, he has expanded the traditional “realistic” interpretation of changes in the system of international relations after World War II, one which emphasized the filling of the vacuums of power by the Soviet Union and the US counteraction to it. Close attention is given to the socioeconomic situation in Europe, the strengthening of communist and socialist parties, and the upsurge of revolutionary nationalism in China and the countries of the emerging Third World. Without an analysis of the new alignment of forces on the international scene and its effect on the emergence of two centres of power, it would be hard to explain why a Cold War based on the confrontation of two antagonistic systems started not in 1917 but in 1947–48.

Still, for Leffler, the main driving force towards confrontation lay in ideological precepts, suspicions, and exaggerated fears that took priority over rational calculations. His subsequent chapters are unified by the searches made on both sides for the relaxation of this confrontation and by the identification of causes for the lost opportunities, from the first “thaw” in 1953–54 to the erosion of détente in 1975–80.

Analysing the “chance for peace” that arose from Stalin's death and Eisenhower's presidency, Leffler concludes that the priority of the collective Soviet leadership was to reduce the severity of confrontation, but the ideological mandate among the reasons (“to focus on domestic priorities, redefine their goals, and buttress their values,” 89) for improving the international atmosphere impeded this goal. The Soviet leaders believed in the final victory of communism, still seeing an enemy in the imperialistic West, and they were not going to make one-sided concessions, as the US administration expected. Conversely, Leffler's detailed assessment of the dilemma facing President Eisenhower – how not to miss the chance for détente while stepping up efforts to enhance national and West European security – allows a reader to see that by and large “U.S. actions reinforced this axiomatic Soviet thinking” (148). Eisenhower's choice between the risk of negotiations with an ideological enemy and the pursuit of efforts to “win” the Cold War led to the “new look” strategy, based on the doctrines of brinkmanship and massive retaliation.

The author concludes his study of the first attempts at the relaxation of international tension with the assessment that “there could be no real détente or peace so long as ideological presuppositions shaped the two sides' perceptions of threat and opportunity in a dynamic international system” (149–50). This is sensible, if détente is understood not just as a relaxation of international tension but as a comparatively long period of peaceful coexistence or even as a replacement of the “confrontation” model of the Cold War with the “cooperation” model of relations between two antagonistic systems. The analysis, however, overlooks that a relaxation of tension did occur in the mid-1950s and early 1960s, despite the factors identified by Leffler which affected the decision-making of the US and Soviet leaders. Unfortunately, Leffler fails to take his exposition up to the Geneva summit of 1955. While “the spirit of Geneva” was not sustained for long, the summit had clearly demonstrated the potential of negotiations and personal diplomacy to ease the Cold War, illustrated by Leffler's material on the settlement of the Cuban crisis of October 1962 and the preparations for signing the Moscow test-ban treaty in 1963.

In his analysis of the ideological and military–political reasons for Khrushchev's decision to deploy Soviet missiles in Cuba and to assist national liberation movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Leffler points out that the growing awareness of a nuclear threat became a serious deterrent to the USSR's competition “for the soul of mankind.” Khrushchev's intrinsic pragmatism and common sense, along with his unshakable belief in the superiority of the socialist system, helped him overcome differences with the USA in the negotiations to ban nuclear weapon tests. Kennedy's path to these negotiations is more striking, given Leffler's assertion that the president initially “placed a higher priority on thwarting communist advances in the third world than on responding to Moscow's overtures for détente” (176).

Tracing Kennedy's progress towards the improvement of relations with the USSR, including his address at American University in June 1963, the signing of the test-ban treaty two months later, and his proposals on Soviet–American cooperation in space and the nondeployment of nuclear weapons in outer space, Leffler notes Kennedy's repeated references to the existing essential ideological differences between the USA and the USSR and their contrary approaches to the so-called wars of national liberation. Posing the significant question “What then was the meaning of détente in a world of ideological rivalry?” (191), Leffler focusses on the interpretations of this concept by Kennedy's advisers and influential officials in the State Department. For them, détente was a plausible “strategy,” though it remained unclear whether it was aimed at the relaxation of tension and an advance towards peaceful coexistence or at triumph in the Cold War.

The author himself abstains from assessing the progress in Soviet–American relations, stating that, at the time of the tragic events in Dallas on 22 November 1963, “the future of détente was unclear” (191). Instead, in his detailed analysis of the policy pursued by Lyndon Johnson, Leffler shows that the idea of détente not only ceased to be a priority in the US–Soviet relations but also was disavowed because of the US administration's decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. Leffler claims that the new Soviet leadership, notably Leonid Brezhnev and Alexei Kosygin, wanted to continue joint efforts aimed at détente, in spite of the harder line taken by other Politburo members and the criticism of the Chinese communists. However, Leffler concludes once more that the ideological prejudices of Moscow and Washington, historical memory, and fears, combined with internal and external political factors, “made détente extremely difficult to sustain” (233).

Leffler's interest in the erosion of détente between 1975 and 1980 follows his attention to the preceding diplomatic achievements, seen mainly through the prism of Brezhnev's policy. The signing of SALT I, an anti-ballistic missile treaty, and numerous nonmilitary agreements between Brezhnev and Nixon, as well as Brezhnev's negotiations with Ford on SALT II, were regarded by Soviet leaders as “part of their strategy of détente, only a milestone on the way to an all-European security conference” (248). In Leffler's view, the Soviet leaders considered the Final Act, signed in July 1975 at Helsinki, as the outcome of this strategy because it legalized postwar frontiers in Europe (including the USSR's territorial expansion), recognized the German Democratic Republic, and accepted the Soviet way of life in Eastern Europe.

In contrast, for the US political establishment, Helsinki was a signal to assume the offensive. Noting that the pressure of critics prompted Ford to declare in March 1976 that he would not speak about détente any longer and that he was going to pursue the policy of “peace through strength” (253), Leffler explains the causes of the aggravation of US–Soviet relations and the end of détente during the subsequent Carter administration. He singles out the Soviet policy of military aid extended to Angola, Ethiopia, and Somalia, which worried the USA in view of the superpowers' continued rivalry for priority of their values and geopolitical interests in the turbulent Third World. However, the most ruinous factor for détente is seen in the commitment of Soviet troops in Afghanistan, through which “Leonid Brezhnev killed détente with the United States” (334).

Leffler also considers the aggravation of superpower relations by Soviet attempts to build up their military force, under the pretext of attaining real parity, and the new types of weapons such as MX missiles that appeared in the USA. The difficulties involved from the preparation of the SALT II treaty to its signing in Vienna in the spring of 1979 highlighted these tensions in the military sphere, including the notorious “double-track decision” taken by NATO in response to the deployment of Soviet SS-20 missiles.

Still, Leffler's overriding analysis is that the still-surviving apprehensions of the USA and the USSR about each other stemmed from deep-rooted ideological axioms. Dynamic changes in the world and the criticisms of the opponents of détente undermined this policy, seen by the author as “a respite to lessen the burdens of the arms race while Soviet and American leaders tackled domestic priorities and insured their countries against the dangers of nuclear war” (337). And it is a pity that beyond Leffler's deliberation remains his very interesting remark that détente gave the leaders the opportunity to envisage a picture of a more rational world wherein two nations could carry out their competition and economic development by peaceful means.

Like many other scholars, Professor Leffler associates the end of the Cold War with the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush. While giving a higher priority to the Gorbachev approach, he emphasizes that confrontation could be hardly ended without the contribution made by President Reagan. However, in contrast to the triumphalists who extol Reagan for his rejection of the idea of détente and his transition to a policy of rigidity, he sees Reagan's chief merit not in the desire “to squeeze” the enemy in the arms race or to conduct proxy wars against the Soviet Union in the Third World but in Reagan's enlisting of support from the conservative wing in the US establishment for a policy of negotiation. He concludes, “Reagan's greatness was not his buildup of force but his inspiring of trust” (462).

The author's assessment that “it was Gorbachev who ended the Cold War” (448) is based on his comprehensive analysis of the changes in Gorbachev's ideological precepts as well as his foreign-policy initiatives and actions, such as the signing of the intermediate-range nuclear forces treaty in 1987, the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the non-interference in revolutionary developments in Eastern Europe, and the reunification of Germany. In this synthesis, utmost importance is attached to “the new political thinking” of Gorbachev. The Soviet leader, striving to provide the most favorable external political conditions for perestroika and for democratizing socialism, transcended the Marxist–Leninist ideological postulates about the outside threat, placed the focus on humanistic values, and proclaimed the deideologization of international relations.

Without diminishing my high regard for this book and noting that I share the author's conceptual approach to the study of Cold War history, I think that Leffler attributes too great an importance to the inflexible Marxist–Leninist formulas – concerning American imperialism, West German revanchism and the NATO threats – as they were voiced in Soviet leaders' official statements. At the level of practical politics, more realistic estimations and recommendations were often taken into consideration, even if these assessments were not completely free of the influence of the state ideology. My criticism, however, only points to the possibilities in this work, which considerably enriches present-day knowledge on the Cold War, highlights theoretical and historical aspects which are still understudied, and puts new questions to scholars.

I am very grateful to the editor for selecting my book for the first round table and to the commentators for their thoughtful praise and stimulating criticism.

Collectively, my critics do a fine job highlighting the scope and breadth of my book. My purpose was to address three central questions: why did the Cold War begin, why did it continue for as long as it did, why did it end when it did. My aim was not to write a narrative history of the Cold War, but to illuminate its underlying dynamics. And I wanted to focus equal attention on policymaking in Moscow as well as in Washington.

As my commentators note, I focus a lot on human agency, but the purpose of my book was to explore how leaders operate in a larger context. When I began research on my book I did so with the explicit intent to assess the roles of ideology, domestic politics and institutions (broadly defined), and allies and clients. But to do these things, I knew I needed to carefully examine how the evolving configuration of power in the international system shaped perceptions of threat and of opportunity in the United States and the Soviet Union. Against this larger backdrop, I could try to analyze how much leaders mattered. If in the course of writing the book not all these factors received equal attention, it was because my research suggested that some were more important than others. But the larger thrust of my book was designed to illuminate the complex ways in which all these factors interacted.

Professor Yegorova does a very nice job outlining the various points I make in each of my five chapters. Her major objection is that I place too much emphasis on “inflexible Marxist–Leninist formulas.” Actually, in my interpretation of Soviet behavior I probably put as much stress on memory and experience as on ideology. One of the central themes of my book revolves around the importance of Germany; its anticipated revival and its power trajectory engendered perceptions of threat and opportunity. These fears and anxieties about Germany were woven into the life experience of all Soviet leaders during the Cold War. Ideology, of course, reified some of these worries. But the fear of Germany was not a manufactured artifact, as some Westerners liked to claim; it was a genuine worry seared into the memory of Soviet leaders. “I was fourteen when the war ended,” wrote Gorbachev in his memoir. “Our generation is the generation of wartime children. It has burned us, leaving its mark both on our characters and our view of the world.”Footnote ¹ No Soviet leader during the Cold War could escape memories of the hardship and devastation of war. In my account, I try to elucidate vividly how such matters affected Soviet polices, and they receive as much attention as does Marxist–Leninist ideology.

Anders Stephanson provides an imaginative but elusive critique of my book. He sometimes conflates my views with his views, and it is tantalizingly difficult (in his commentary) to separate his own interpretation of the Cold War from my own. His discussion of “reasonableness” is fascinating, but hardly captures what I seek to do. As he acknowledges, this focus on “reasonableness” is the product of his own “symptomatic reading.” In fact, I was not looking for “reasonableness.” I was seeking to understand how policymakers defined their interests, hopes, fears, and worries. What surprised me, as I read the evidence, was that officials themselves often saw forms of cooperation, or détente, or relaxation of tensions as integral to their definition of interest and compatible with their ideological aspirations. Yet as much as they sometimes wanted to cooperate, they failed to sustain that cooperation. In other words, by their own definition of interests and goals, they failed to achieve what they (not me) deemed reasonable. The point of my analysis is to explain why they failed, at least until the late 1980s.

I am not always certain what Stephanson is trying to say about my treatment of the end of the Cold War, but it is clear that he is not altogether happy with it. Perhaps the discord emanates from differences in defining when the Cold War ended. On this point, Stephanson seems clear: the Cold War (in his view) ended with the demise of the Soviet Union. But it is important for readers to realize that that is not my view. I show that the Cold War ended when Gorbachev accepted the unification of Germany in NATO; by that time, he had also withdrawn troops from Afghanistan, curtailed most of the struggles in the Third World that the Kremlin had previously supported, allowed self-government and elections to take place throughout most of Eastern Europe, and renounced an ideological approach to international relations. I seek to illuminate why Gorbachev took these steps.

My analysis of Gorbachev's initiatives is not without structural context, as I think Stephanson is suggesting. He seems to elide the emphasis I place on structural developments in the international arena and the evolution of national economies within an expanding, if sometimes sputtering, world capitalist system. The fears (and hopes) that I emphasize are (in part) products of the evolution of German power, the rise of revolutionary nationalist movements, and the socioeconomic trends that unfold especially in postwar Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union. These developments in the international system and the world political economy establish the framework for policy decisions in Washington and Moscow; they engender perceptions of fear and opportunity.

Stephanson accurately says that I do not look carefully at the rise of détente in the early 1970s. This is not an accident or an oversight; it is because I am interested in explaining why repeated efforts to relax tensions failed. “Is détente then perhaps a structural impossibility,” Stephanson incisively asks. Although he suggests that I do not answer this question, I would contend that my analysis sheds light precisely on this important query. I show how dynamics in the international system (especially the breakup of the Portuguese empire in the 1970s) and the Islamic Revolution in Iran combined with problems afflicting economies – both communist and capitalist – to make it very difficult to sustain détente, especially given the ideological assumptions shaping the cognitive processes of leaders in Washington and Moscow.

David Ryan nicely summarizes my efforts to show how ideology and the configuration of power in the international system interact and shape human agency. He cogently highlights my stress on fears and hopes, on threats and opportunities. But he feels that my treatment “does not lend itself to a systematic methodological development of ideology.” He is right in saying that my book does not do this, but I make no such attempt. My goals are more limited and more expansive at the same time. Rather than engage in a theoretical or methodological examination of ideology, I explain how beliefs and memories influenced policymakers' understanding of what was going on in the world, how they shaped perceptions of threat and opportunity, and how they inspired dreams and visions about what might be accomplished at home and abroad. By showing how beliefs and memories, for example, shaped Brezhnev's approach to détente and Reagan's attitude toward negotiations, I hope to illustrate in personal and vivid ways how ideology and memory shape the actions of leaders. I think this is more illuminating to most readers than a methodological or theoretical exegesis.

Ryan also believes that I do not pay enough attention to local situations in the Third World. He would like to see more analysis of developments in Central America and elsewhere, including Tibet, Chile, East Timor, Iraq, Angola, and other places. Space and time, of course, made analyses of such disparate events impossible. There are important sections of my book, however, that focus on Indochina, the Horn of Africa, Iran, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan. Perhaps I should have used some other cases as well, as Ryan suggests, but I am entirely cognizant of how North/South issues interacted with East/West relations. In fact, I write in my introduction that nobody can understand the Cold War “without grasping the aspirations of Asian, African, and Latin American peoples for autonomy, modernization, and material advancement” (9). The Cold War lasted through the 1960s and 1970s, I sum up in my conclusion, because “revolutionary nationalist upheavals and regional turbulences engendered exaggerated hopes in Moscow and aroused exaggerated fears in Washington” (456). My aim (in the appropriate chapters) is not to explain these developments for their own sake, but to show how they shaped Soviet–American relations. This seemed fitting for a book that seeks to explain the Cold War.

I am pleased that Professor del Pero likes my “sparkling” writing and “many sound judgements,” but regret that he does not like For the Soul of Mankind quite as much as he admires my other books. An analysis of the dynamics of the Cold War entailed challenges that did not inhere in my other projects. First, in this book I needed to explain decision-making over forty-five years, not eight years as in Preponderance of Power, or fifteen year as in The Elusive Quest. Second, in this book I sought to explain Soviet policymaking as well as US decision-making. Given these challenges, my own estimation of how this book stacks up in comparison with my other works is different to del Pero's.

However, he raises a number of points that are worthy of comment. With regard to the structure of the book I chose a format that would enable me to illuminate what I wanted to do; that is, explain why the Cold War persisted for almost forty years, and then suddenly ended. I had no interest in creating a structure that would allow for sub-periodization. Nor did I presume to touch on all the important issues of the Cold War, let alone international politics more broadly, between 1945 and 1990. My aim was to establish a framework that would allow me to explain the dynamics of the Cold War: why it began, why it continued, why it ended. I think the structure serves admirably well to accomplish those goals.

Professor del Pero would like to see more on domestic politics. I explicitly embraced domestic politics as a causal variable to investigate. I underscore this point in chapter 1 (dealing with the origins of the Cold War, 1945–48) with a subsection on “Politics at Home.” In researching subsequent episodes, I always looked for evidence that would help illuminate the salience and relative importance of this matter. If I do not highlight it in certain chapters, it is because I did not think it was as important as other considerations. Usually, I found it to be a secondary, but not inconsequential, variable. In the third part of my book dealing with Khrushchev, Kennedy, and Johnson, for example, I make it very clear that concerns with electoral outcomes were of critical importance to LBJ. In the chapter on Brezhnev and Carter, I do not ignore the domestic attacks on détente and I vividly describe how some of the president's advisers warned him of his plummeting popularity (see, for example, 313–14). Yet however important was the rise of neoconservatism and however consequential was the surging evangelical movement, Carter kept his (limited) version of détente on track until Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan. In other words, factors other than domestic politics were more responsible for the collapse of détente in the late 1970s, though domestic politics (in the USSR as well as well as the USA) intersected with these other factors.

Although I focus considerable attention on ideology, Professor del Pero thinks I fail to elucidate precisely what ideology involved or how it mattered. Although he seems to want me to discuss particular modernization projects, I thought it more useful throughout to illuminate how ideas and beliefs shaped (and sometimes warped) officials' perceptions of one another and of developments in the international system. And far from avoiding the issue of what officials in Moscow and Washington thought they were offering mankind, I explicitly recapitulate their conflicting visions of humankind's future on pages 452–53.

Grappling with the role of human agency is always daunting. Throughout my book there is a tension: were or were not leaders decisive? How important were Stalin and Truman or Brezhnev and Carter compared to the larger ideological and structural crosscurrents and domestic and international trends that I portray? Readers will have different views after they read my book. In the last chapter, I do make a case for the role of human agency; I do argue the importance of Reagan and, even more so, of Gorbachev. In presenting evidence to support the claims I make, I do not ignore the larger context in which these leaders operated: repeatedly, I emphasize the importance of the breakup of the Portuguese colonial empire in the 1970s and the end of the cycles of revolutionary nationalism; repeatedly, I discuss the impact of economic stagnation on Gorbachev's policies and how important it was that Western Europe and the United States gradually overcome the stagflation of the 1970s and the crisis of capitalism that accompanied it. Far from ignoring developments in places like Afghanistan and Germany, I have entire sections on these matters (403–14, 439–48) as well as on Eastern Europe (427–38). And although I think it would have been desirable to spend more time writing about the role of China and of Western Europe in the Cold War endgame, I do think Reagan and Gorbachev were more important to ending the Cold War than was the debate on US decline or the fear of Japan. Professor del Pero rightly points out the many matters that could be discussed, but the task of the historian is to make decisions – based on the evidence – of what really mattered most to policymakers.

Scholars often write books and wonder if it matters at all. Is anyone reading what we have to say? I don't know how future readers will assess my book's strengths and weaknesses, but for the moment I feel lucky to have been the beneficiary of such wise commentary.