ABSTRACT
The final phase of the cold war presents a distinct challenge to the historian. Intensification of cold war antagonism in the early 1980s was succeeded at the end of the decade by the disintegration of the cold war system itself. Moreover, it occurred in the very way which policy-makers such as George Kennan had hoped for when they contemplated the clouded future in the late 1940s – as a result of the collapse of Soviet power. Was this to be regarded as a vindication of containment in general and of President Reagan’s hardline cold war policies in particular? Or was the Soviet collapse a result of internal decay, developments in Eastern Europe, the specific policies of Mikhail Gorbachev, or perhaps a combination of all these?
