Foreign Affairs At The End

We begin in 1985 with Mikhail Gorbachev's rise to General Secretary of the Soviet Union. Under this new leadership, Reagan and Gorbachev orchestrated a major breakthrough in the long-running Cold War by agreeing to a series of Soviet-American summits. Following success at the first summit in Geneva, SDI became a major stumbling block at the second summit in Reykjavik. But change was clearly underway as the Soviet Union initiated Gorbachev's domestic policies of Perestroika and Glasnost within the Soviet system.