Critics among America's allies had already judged the President as one who saw the world in terms of the American Wild West. They did not see the cool realism in his policy. Mr. Reagan put pressure on the Soviet Union, while extending the hand of cooperation the solve tensions. The U.S.S.R. faced up to the fact that its Achilles' hell was economic. It could not keep up an arms race with a superpower that seemed to have almost unlimited borrowing power.
It was March 8, 1983, in Orlando, Florida, that U.S. President Ronald Reagan bluntly defined the world that then existed. The Free World, he announced, was in mortal battle with an evil empire - the U.S.S.R. "They preach the supremacy of the state, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples of the earth - they are the focus of evil in the modern world," declared Mr. Reagan.
There followed four Reagan - Gorbachev summits: Geneva, November 1985; Reykjavik, October 1986; Washington, D.C., December 1987; and Moscow, May - June 1988. The unthinkable had happened; glasnost within the Soviet Union expanded to relationships outside the U.S.S.R. And the consequent economic realisties within the Soviet Union demanded a major restructuring of the communist system if the ultimate goal of a new communist world were to be achieved.
The result is an astoundingly different world. Whereas once the leaders of the two superpowers flew to neutral nations or, occasionally, to each other's capitals, they now journey into each other's spheres of influence.
The Iron Curtain has been not just literally but politically sundered between Hungary and the West. European Community leaders have opened the door to Hungarian participation in EC affairs. All this just three short years before Europe becomes the world's largest agricultural and economic market without frontiers.