25 for 25. Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik (1986)

Have you ever found yourself wrestling with a life problem you just couldn't solve? You try this, you try that, you turn the problem upside down, but you can't find a way out. And then, something happens offstage, as it were, something unrelated to the problem itself, that resets the context and allows a resolution.

Classical dramatists had a term for this. The outside force was called a deus ex machina—a god from the machine—because, in the archetypal version, a crane would lower an actor playing a god who would supply the timely intervention.

It's a handy concept. We should all have one. It's kind of like a get-out-of-jail-free card from the Monopoly board game.

Franklin Roosevelt had one. His name was Adolf Hitler. Roosevelt's second term was going badly. His Supreme Court-packing plan had blown up in his face. A recession undid most of the progress in the economy since 1933. It seemed that Roosevelt would leave office after his second term with his presidency considered mediocre at best. But then Hitler started a war in Europe, which gave Roosevelt an excuse to run for a third term, which led to his becoming one of the great world leaders of the twentieth century. In the process the American economy kicked into high gear, making Roosevelt appear a miracle worker on that front as well.

Something similar rescued Ronald Reagan's second term. Like Roosevelt, Reagan had been reelected in a landslide. But problems in the Middle East and Central America were mounting, leading Reagan's administration down the path that would produce the Iran-contra scandal. Policy toward the Soviet Union was in limbo following the serial deaths of Soviet top leaders. Reagan himself was running out of gas, showing first signs of the dementia that would claim him soon after he left office. White House aides wondered if the president would make it to the second-term finish line.

And then, out of the blue, came the solution to Reagan's problems. Mikhail Gorbachev was named Soviet general secretary. The Kremlin’s new boss was very different from the old bosses. He was younger and bolder. He recognized the need for fundamental change in the Soviet approach to the world. He instituted domestic reforms to revive the Soviet economy. And he looked to the United States for an easing of the arms race that was bankrupting the Soviet government.

Casual observers might have thought Reagan the last person to respond to such overtures. In his first term, Reagan had conspicuously built up American arms. He had campaigned on a platform of opposition to detente, the Nixonian policy of accommodation with Russia. After election he denounced the Soviet Union as an evil empire and gave every impression of trying to drive it to the wall.

In fact, though, Reagan had long had a profound aversion to the premise at the foundation of American arms policy. Called mutual assured destruction, or MAD, this approach based American security, and that of the Soviet Union, on the vulnerability of each country to the nuclear weapons of the other. Reagan thought MAD a mutual suicide pact and deeply immoral. In 1983 he announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, a program to build a defense against Soviet missiles. He envisioned sharing the technology with the Soviet Union at some point. But SDI was a long-term project. In the short term, Reagan hoped to reduce the danger by negotiating arms reductions.

Gorbachev was just the negotiating partner Reagan needed. Reagan's SDI threatened to launch the arms race into outer space. The Soviet budget couldn't stand the strain. Gorbachev hoped to talk Reagan out of SDI, saving both countries piles of money.

The two leaders initially met in Geneva in November 1985. Nothing of substance came out of the meeting, but something more important did. Each man concluded that he could work with the other. Reagan hoped to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Gorbachev had a more modest objective. He wanted to save the Soviet system.

A second meeting took place in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986. During a tense weekend, Reagan and Gorbachev came close to an agreement to eliminate nuclear weapons from their countries’ arsenals.

But they couldn't get past the sticking point of SDI. Gorbachev wanted Reagan to abandon the program, or at least confine it to the laboratory. Reagan had been warned by conservatives in the United States not to negotiate SDI away. He had said he would not, and now he decided he could not.

The two men emerged from the Reykjavik meeting frustrated. But their shared disappointment provided a bond that enabled them to negotiate the first serious arms reductions of the Cold War. By the time Reagan left office in early 1989, the president who had been an ardent arms builder became the greatest arms reducer in American history. And Gorbachev was the greatest in Soviet history.

As it turned out, Gorbachev dismantled more than the Soviet arsenal. The reforms he set in motion undercut the legitimacy of the Soviet system, leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the end of the Cold War.

Reagan's fans claimed credit for their hero in this happy result. Reagan was indeed a facilitator, but the heavy lifting was Gorbachev's. And so was the heavy responsibility. By no means did everyone in Russia appreciate the dismantling of the Soviet empire. Within a decade, Vladimir Putin came to power intending to restore what Gorbachev had dismantled.

Today, Russia and the United States are again at odds. More than a few commentators are speaking of a renewed Cold War. Yet the threat of nuclear armageddon that hung over the original Cold War has been much reduced. It's true that, as bumper stickers in the 1960s used to say, even a few nukes can ruin your day. But the massive arsenals that were on hair-trigger alert in that earlier time haven't been reproduced.

Reagan and Gorbachev didn’t get what they wanted at Reykjavik. Yet what they eventually got was a big deal, for them and for the world.