power- military, economic, and political- has been the bulwark of human freedom" (Roche 27). Furthermore, it was Carter who began rebuilding the U.S. military, responded to the Soviet deployment of SS-20 nuclear missiles with a plan to put American missiles in Europe, began supporting the mujeheddin who drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan, improved American relations with China, and started pressing Moscow to respect the human rights of its people.
Carter's contributions, however, have been interpreted differently: "When Jimmy Carter was elected, the doves got their chance, and their policies resulted in utter failure. This led to the triumph in 1980 of Ronald Reagan, whose opposite policies were crowned with success (Muravchik 45). Other western experts insist that the West prevailed not because of tough-minded American policies and military strength brought communism to its knees but because the Soviet system collapsed from within. The Reagan-Bush argument may have overlooked another critical insight: : "In the final analysis, because the Cold War rested on Marxist-Leninist assumptions of inevitable world conflict, only a Soviet leader could have ended it. And Gorbachev set out deliberately to do just that" (Garthoff 12).
Mikhail Gorbachev, who abandoned superpower confrontation in favor of a new-thinking Soviet foreign policy of cooperation, deserves much of the credit for ending the Cold War. Despite important differences among them, all Soviet leaders before Gorbachev had shared a belief in an ineluctable conflict between socialism and capitalism. Although Gorbachev remained a socialist, and in his own terms even a communist, he renounced the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist idea of inevitable world conflict. His avowed acceptance of the interdependence of the world, of the priority of human values, and of the indivisibility of common security marked a revolutionary ideological change.
This change, which Gorbachev publicly dec...