The Importance of Cold War Leaders

The West lost the Soviet system and all of those countries that were allied with it to a great extent, particularly in a European context. So arguably, that's the very easy answer. But I suppose the simple answer is the different leaders had different approaches. Some of them were old and paranoid; some of them had very different views. You know, Reagan spoke about Russians being the evil empire which hadn't been around for decades. And so I think there's an element of this on both sides, but fundamentally in history, what we tend to ignore are personalities.