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Charts the changes that occurred in American–Western European relations during the years of the Reagan and Bush administrations of 1984–1993, which marked a change in the Cold War (largely as a result of Gorbachev's policy changes in the Soviet Union), and its eventual end, which could be marked as the year 1989 (the year of the American–Soviet summit in Malta and of the collapse of Eastern European communist regimes). The first section of the chapter examines the Reagan and Gorbachev ‘Lovefest’: the change of Ronald Reagan's hardline anti‐Soviet policies to a policy of American–Soviet cooperation under the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev, and discusses Reagan's other foreign policies and Western European attitudes toward these. The second section, ‘The Liberation of Eastern Europe, the Unification of Germany, and the New World Order’, looks at the foreign policies of George Bush (who became President in January 1989) during this time of immense change in Europe, and at the increasing East–West cooperation that he presided over; the Gulf War strengthened American–European relations considerably during this period. The third section of the chapter shows that American–EU relations improved markedly under Bush, although the attitudes of the various European countries to a role for America in Europe varied, with the French being notably anti‐American. The last section of the chapter briefly considers the survival of the American–European relationship through this period and the changes that occurred in it.

This chapter details the establishment of International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) to demonstrate the crucial role of East-West cooperation in shaping global governance. IIASA as a diplomatic initiative was the result of actions by top governmental officials: US president Lyndon Johnson proposed creating an East-West think tank and Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei Kosygin accepted his proposal, both sides considering this step as part of cultural diplomacy or an exercise of “soft power” in the presumably less ideological areas of science and technology. The chapter then suggests that the establishment of IIASA can be interpreted as precisely such a forward-oriented arrangement to enable a certain form of cooperation between the opposing great powers: mutual predictability was enhanced by bringing together leading policy scientists from East and West, whereas shared goals were articulated through applied systems research.

This chapter explains how new concepts and strategies had to be devised to face the new North–South divide that seemed to be replacing the classic Cold War conflict. By the 1970s, the United States and the Soviet Union were conservative status quo powers that had more in common with each other than with the Global South. The Cold War was embedded in the international system and worked at much lower levels of tension than in earlier years. Would an East–West cooperation to deal with the Global South be viable? The Soviet Bloc did not appear to be keen on discussing a joint path out of the global economic turmoil, which it interpreted as the long-awaited crisis of capitalism. It was the European Economic Community (EEC), instead, that stood up as a distinctive actor, claiming to be distant from its members' imperial past and to offer a third way for the Third World, with goals that were not those of the Cold War superpowers.

This chapter focuses on computer-based global modeling, a new technology of knowledge production that emerged in the early 1970s and played an important, transformative role in Soviet governance by opening it up to East-West cooperation. Global modelers conceptualized the planet as a complex, interconnected system, the understanding of which required transnational scientific cooperation, enabling both scientists and data to cross national boundaries and Cold War divides. Moreover, Soviet scientists forged and used models of possible long-term futures of the world to reveal and criticize problems being experienced, but not always acknowledged, in the Soviet Union. Therefore, a history of computer-based global modeling is a history of East-West transfer, the transformation of the late state socialism and globalization.

This chapter examines Sarah's Chinese self-education. During her journey, Sarah met three extraordinary women who embodied her ideals for East-West co-operation: Methodist missionary Gertrude Howe and her Chinese “daughters,” Dr. Mary Stone and Dr. Ida Kahn. These women had given Sarah the key, through their services as interpreters and sources of insider knowledge, to unlock the doors she needed to get behind so that she could meet the real women of China.