Foreign Policy Initiatives - the 80's and 90's

An agreement providing for Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan was reached in April 1988. Official figures issued in May indicated that 13,310 Soviet soldiers had been killed and 35,478 injured in the fighting. The withdrawal was completed by February 1989; in October, Soviet leaders acknowledged that the intervention in Afghanistan had "violated the norms of proper behaviour".

Between 1985 and 1991, Gorbachev held a series of summit conferences with US Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush. At a meeting with Reagan in Reykjavík, Iceland, in October 1986, the two leaders exchanged bold new arms reduction proposals, but negotiations broke down over the Soviet demand for limitations on research and testing of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The two presidents signed an agreement in December 1987 to eliminate medium-range and certain shorter-range missiles. In May 1990, Gorbachev and Bush signed a treaty to end production and reduce stockpiles of chemical weapons, and in July 1991 the two men signed an accord requiring substantial cuts in strategic nuclear weapons.

Gorbachev's initiatives in other foreign policy areas were equally striking. In December 1988, at the UN General Assembly, he announced unilateral reductions in conventional forces, notably in Eastern Europe and along the Sino-Soviet border. During Gorbachev's visit to Beijing in May 1989, China and the USSR agreed to resume normal relations after a 30-year rift. At a meeting with Pope John Paul II in Rome in December, Gorbachev promised that the Soviet Union would allow full religious freedom, and the USSR and the Vatican agreed to establish diplomatic ties. Relations with Israel also improved dramatically, as the USSR relaxed emigration restrictions on Soviet Jews. After August 1990, with tensions rising in the Persian Gulf, the USSR generally supported the US-led effort to use economic and military pressure to force Iraq to give up Kuwait.