George Pratt Shultz As Secretary of State, he helped Reagan end the Cold War by winning it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/george-pratt-shultz-11612725575?mod=opinion_lead_pos2
President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, called his memoir “Present at the Creation,” an account of rebuilding the postwar world and the realities of a Cold War with the Soviet Union. Former Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who died Saturday at age 100, titled his memoir “Turmoil and Triumph,” an apt description of the historic role Shultz played in ending the Cold War some 40 years later.
Shultz served as Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State for almost the length of Reagan’s Presidency, from 1982 until 1989. The “turmoil” of his memoir’s title described the world as he took control of foreign policy for Reagan.
The Soviet Union, possessing a huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, was led by Yuri Andropov, a determined communist opponent of the West. Hard to believe now, but Europe then was still divided by what Winston Churchill called an “iron curtain,” which separated the free democratic nations of Western Europe from the closed, Soviet-dominated countries to the east. Millions were imprisoned inside these countries, unable to emigrate. Those who tried to flee could be imprisoned or shot.
The competition between the U.S. and Soviet Union was global, extending into Central America, the Middle East, East, East and Southeast Asia and Africa. Shultz, like Reagan, was determined to end the Cold War.
It was in some ways an unlikely role for Shultz, who earned his Ph.D. in industrial economics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after serving in the Marine Corps during World War II. His thinking on economics later came to be associated with such free-market economists as Milton Friedman and Ronald Coase at the University of Chicago, where Shultz served as dean of the business school in the 1960s.
He left Chicago in 1969 to accept President Richard Nixon’s offer to become Secretary of Labor. A few years later, after a stint running the Office of Management and Budget, he moved over to run the Treasury. In 1982 President Reagan asked Shultz to return to government as Secretary of State.
Within a year Shultz was at the center of a massive global effort to force the U.S. to back down from its intention to deploy Pershing-II intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe to balance the Soviet Union’s INF missiles already deployed and aimed at Western Europe.
Some 30 years after the Cold War ended with the West’s victory, we tend to forget how contingent and difficult the struggle was. Millions of anti-American marchers demonstrated in European capitals. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops lent its moral weight to the anti-Reagan opposition. Despite this pressure, Reagan—with the support of allied leadership in Britain, West Germany and France—went ahead with placing the Pershing-II missiles in West Germany.
“Allied unity and resolve were demonstrated,” Shultz wrote in his memoir, adding what came to be known as a keystone of his approach to foreign policy: “Strength was recognized as crucial to diplomacy.”
Four years later, Shultz shepherded the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 signed by Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, amid some Republican and conservative opposition, including from these columns. The U.S. has since withdrawn from the INF treaty after years of Kremlin violations, but at the time it reduced East-West tensions. Shultz often wrote for these pages in his later decades (see nearby), including as recently as last August with “China Has Troubles Too.”
By 1989 communist regimes were collapsing across eastern Europe. The symbolic end of the Cold War came with the fall of the Berlin Wall. An enormous cast of public figures and government officials, in the U.S. and Europe, contributed to the elimination of Soviet communism. George Shultz will be remembered as a leading force in shaping and executing a U.S. strategy that liberated millions from the ideology of totalitarianism.
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