following re-election, Reagan began his rapprochement with Mikhail Gorbachev; in September , the President began nudging his closest ally, Margaret Thatcher, towards a rapprochment with the Irish Republic. The relationship between these overlapping frames underlines the article's claims that "cold wars" are a useful category of international relations, in which small nations can be significant factors. Tensions over Ronald Reagan in Ireland remind us that the global Cold War was always much more complex than superpower rivalries.As each year passes, the Cold War -as an immediate fact, a structure of possibilities and dangers, of contingency -recedes into memory, devolving into stock images and simple polarities for popular usage, while evolving, at its best, into the kind of complex, many-sided history captured in Arne Westad's The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, or Piero Gleijeses's Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, -. In this context, Ronald Reagan's stop-over in the Republic of Ireland in early June is one of those bits of historical detritus that older people might remember if prompted but which has no import for their students. It came on the eve of larger events, including an economic summit with the European Economic Community leaders, a stirring address to the House of Commons, and the "boys of Pointe du Hoc" speech in Normandy. Yet, properly unpacked, this brief span of days offers a prism into a set of important issues in Cold War studies. It highlights how the "second" Cold
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