History Corner: Did Reagan and Gorbachev "Win" the Cold War?

Our partner, The Journal of American Studies, has posted a challenging roundtable on Melvyn Leffler's recent book, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War. International scholars Mario del Pero (Italy), David Ryan (Ireland), Anders Stephanson (US), and Natalia Yegerova (Russia) critique Leffler's focus, through pairings such as Truman-Stalin, Eisenhower-Malenkov, Kennedy-Khrushchev, and Carter-Brezhnev, on why the conflict did not end until the interaction of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s.

Leffler concludes the roundtable with this provocative question: "Throughout my book there is a tension: were or were not leaders decisive?"

Read roundtable....