Engaging the Evil Empire: Washington, Moscow, and the Beginning of the End of the Cold War

Adding to the growing literature about why the Cold War ended the way it did, Simon Miles's book focuses on the five years that preceded the endgame years under Mikhail Gorbachev. Miles is not the first to highlight the importance of the period. The collections of essays edited by Olav Njølstad in 2005 and Leopoldo Nuti in 2009 still provide the most comprehensive analyses and interpretation of the transitional decade from 1975 to 1985. The new book by Miles, covering only the latter half of that decade and only the relationship between the two superpowers, takes a narrower view. Despite acknowledging “the central role of perceptions in the events and evolutions” in a “process [that] remained highly contingent” and in which the leaders’ “choices were far from preordained” (p. 6), Miles attributes the outcome to the deliberate management of the “power shift” that occurred between the United States and the...