Trump v. Zelenskyy: Reagan v. Gorbachev Again?

The lesson of peace through strength.

The date: October 11-12, 1986. As a young staffer in the Reagan White House Political Affairs Office, I, along with other colleagues, was frustrated. The 1986 congressional elections were in full swing, and it was our responsibility to arrange for President Reagan’s trips around the country to campaign for Republican candidates. And suddenly, everything had stopped in its tracks. Out of the blue, Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, wanted an immediate summit with Reagan to discuss, amazingly, a treaty banning ballistic missiles. A summit not in Moscow or Washington but out in the nowhere land of the capital of Iceland — Reykjavík. Reagan, whose creation of what was called the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) had presumably pushed a suddenly interested Gorbachev to this point, was interested. The instant result, to the chagrin of the White House Political Office, was for Reagan to be pulled off the campaign trail. With Air Force One now jetting off the campaign trail to Reykjavík, Iceland, for this sudden summit with Gorbachev. Why Reykjavík? In historian and diplomat William Inboden’s Reagan book The Peacemaker: Ronald Reagan, the Cold War, and the World on the Brink, Gorbachev is quoted as saying: “It’s a good idea. Halfway between us and them, and none of the big powers will be offended.” The whole thing that seemed even more incredulous was that the summit was being held in a decidedly plain if large wooden building that had previously served as a French consulate and British Embassy. But on the books, Reykjavík it was. When Reagan landed, the UPI described the setting for this unique superpower confab as “one of the strangest places on Earth — a windblown, volcanic moonscape populated by sheep, ponies, elves, pagan gods and 241,000 bookish descendants of the Vikings.” Gathered on each side of a conference table, the Reagan–Gorbachev negotiations began. And made progress with potential agreement on cuts in offens...