Washington Summit (1987)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Washington Summit of 1987 brought Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev together for three days in December at the White House. On the first morning, they sat across from each other in the Oval Office and talked about human rights, emigration, and the state of their two countries' relationship. By the time those three days were done, they had signed one of the most consequential arms control agreements of the Cold War. But the summit almost never happened. The months leading up to it were among the most turbulent either leader had faced. What pressures were bearing down on Reagan in late 1987? What crisis inside the Soviet leadership nearly derailed Gorbachev's position before he even boarded the plane to Washington? And why, despite all of that turbulence, did Gorbachev's foreign minister fly to Washington within two days of a tense October meeting in Moscow just to lock in the final details?

• 2. Reagan Under Pressure

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  The Iran-Contra scandal was still raking through Washington as Reagan prepared for the summit. Trouble with the stock market and the Senate's rejection of his Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork added to a sense that the administration was losing its footing. The political atmosphere around the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty was not much calmer. Criticism came not just from opponents but from an unusually large number of prominent conservatives. Former President Richard Nixon weighed in. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger did as well. Commentator William Buckley joined them. Members of Reagan's own administration were also skeptical. It was a striking alignment of voices against a deal that Reagan himself was committed to pursuing. The Reykjavik Summit the previous year had come close to a major breakthrough, and many supporters of both leaders were unsettled by where the two men seemed willing to go. Reagan pressed forward anyway, channeling resources into INF Treaty negotiations even as the criticism mounted around him.

• 3. Gorbachev's Fractures

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  Gorbachev arrived in Washington carrying his own political damage. His Perestroika reform program was generating resistance inside the Soviet system. He had already replaced more than 150 senior defense ministers and officers in the wake of the Mathias Rust incident, a security embarrassment that had exposed vulnerabilities in Soviet air defenses. Then, just two months before the summit, a far more direct blow landed. Boris Yeltsin, at that point a candidate member of the Politburo and a Gorbachev supporter, stood up and publicly denounced the General Secretary before resigning from his post. The move was described as unprecedented and highly controversial. It was the kind of rupture that could signal weakness at the top. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who met with Gorbachev in Moscow in late October to nail down the INF Treaty terms, observed that the Soviet leader was unusually contentious during that session. Yet within days of Shultz returning to Washington, word arrived from Moscow that Gorbachev wanted the summit scheduled quickly. Foreign Minister Shevardnadze was dispatched to Washington within two days to handle the final details.

• 4. Three Days in Washington

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  The summit opened on the morning of December 8th with a meeting in the Oval Office that ran from 10:45 in the morning until 12:30 in the afternoon. Reagan and Gorbachev covered human rights, emigration, and the overall direction of Soviet-American relations. That afternoon, they moved to the Cabinet Room for a session focused on arms control for conventional and chemical weapons. The second day included a session running from 10:55 in the morning until 12:35 in the afternoon on the Strategic Defense Initiative, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the status of START negotiations, and the situation in Afghanistan and the Iran-Iraq War. Tucked between the two formal sessions that morning was a ten-minute informal meeting in a small office next to the Oval Office, during which Reagan and Gorbachev autographed a baseball for Joe DiMaggio. The third day began with a short Oval Office meeting on regional issues, followed by a working luncheon in the Family Dining Room that began at 12:40 in the afternoon. That final session covered how to describe progress on regional issues in a joint statement, including Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia, the Geneva Agreements, and North Korea. By its final minutes, the luncheon had turned to self-congratulatory remarks and an exchange of jokes between the two leaders.

• 5. The INF Treaty

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  At least a week before the summit opened, The New York Times reported that Reagan and Gorbachev were scheduled to sign a treaty on December 8th eliminating their nations' shorter-range and medium-range missiles. The treaty did get signed on that date. The INF Treaty was the summit's defining accomplishment, the moment that gave the gathering its historical weight. It addressed an entire category of nuclear weapons rather than capping or limiting them, which set it apart from previous arms control agreements. The same New York Times report noted that discussions about reducing long-range strategic nuclear weapons were running into obstacles, which meant START remained unresolved. Afghanistan was on the agenda across multiple sessions. So were Central America, Southern Africa, and other regional conflicts where the two superpowers were engaged on opposing sides. Chemical and conventional weapons also received dedicated discussion time. The scope of the agenda reflected how much had been left unresolved at Reykjavik the previous year, and how much both sides still needed to negotiate even as the INF agreement moved toward signature.

• 6. Significance and Aftermath

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  The path to the Washington Summit ran through Reykjavik, where a near-breakthrough had unnerved allies and hard-liners on both sides. The INF Treaty that emerged from Washington was the product of negotiations that had survived domestic opposition in both countries, a Soviet leadership crisis, and a period of sustained American political turbulence. George Shultz's role in shuttling between capitals in the weeks before the summit helped hold the process together through the contentiousness of that late-October Moscow session. The joint statement issued at the end of the summit had to account for regional conflicts across three continents, reflecting just how entangled superpower competition had become in the 1980s. The summit schedule itself, preserved in the historical record, shows a final luncheon that ended with jokes between two men who had spent the previous year trading accusations and surviving political storms at home. Boris Yeltsin, whose dramatic resignation two months earlier had rattled Gorbachev's standing, would go on to play a far larger role in the Soviet Union's future than anyone in that December luncheon room could have anticipated.