Review of Simon Miles's Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War (original) (raw)

In 1989, Robert McFarlane, Ronald Reagan's former national security advisor, congratulated the exiting president on the "vindication of his seven year strategy" that resulted in Reagan's summits with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva and Reykjavik and signing of the INF treaty.[1] In the spirit of this statement, Simon Miles in his monograph, the name and some arguments of which he likely borrows from a William Pemberton chapter on the same period, presents the reader with the peculiarities of Reagan's grand strategy.[2] Contrary to the established stereotype, Miles presents Reagan as a master strategist, who, with the assistance of his team, skillfully applied the dual-track strategy toward the Soviet Union, which combined public hawkish rhetoric with engagement in "quiet diplomacy" long before Reagan and Gorbachev shook hands in Geneva in 1985. Miles thus challenges some of the notions that became deeply engrained in popular memory, such as the