What a Cold War summit can teach us about disagreeing well
Forty years before anyone coined the term “enlightened disagreement,” two world leaders sat down in a small house on the edge of Reykjavik, Iceland, and tried to talk their way out of a nuclear standoff. They didn’t reach a deal. By the scoreboard everyone was watching that weekend in 1986, the summit was a failure.
But scoreboards, says Kellogg Professor Eli Finkel, don’t always measure what matters.
Finkel recently joined the writer-director and producer of the new film “The Brink of War” for a panel discussion following the movie’s screening at the Wayfarer Theater in Highland Park, Illinois. The film dramatizes the Reykjavik Summit between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, drawing on since-declassified transcripts of their negotiations. Moderated by Angel Studios’ David Fisher, the conversation also featured director Michael Russell Gunn and producer John Logan Pierson and gave the audience an opportunity to hear a Kellogg scholar of conflict and relationships unpack a pivotal moment in Cold War diplomacy in real time.
"Before Reykjavik, the realistic debate was about slowing the growth of nuclear arsenals. Reykjavik shifted that window enough to make outright reduction, and eventually elimination, part of the conversation."
Finkel, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg and psychology at Northwestern, is the founding co-director of the school’s Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement. The center takes a research-backed approach to a challenge that spans “the political arena to the business world to higher education” growing polarization has made it harder to engage productively across difference, even as that engagement remains one of the best sources of innovation and progress. That focus made him a natural voice for a film built entirely around two adversaries trying to do just that.
Finkel has spent three decades studying how people navigate conflict — first in romantic relationships and increasingly in the realm of political polarization. Watching the film, he said, he couldn’t help but notice how much the two settings have in common.
“There is a future here,” Finkel told the audience. “When you’re in a situation like that, you don’t just look at the scoreboard.” Whether the parties are a married couple or two nuclear superpowers, he explained, they are bound together for the long haul — which means the metrics that matter go well beyond who “won” any single meeting.
By that standard, Finkel argued, Reykjavik was far more successful than its contemporaneous headlines suggested. He pointed to three outcomes that didn’t show up in the “no deal” reporting:
- Interpersonal trust: Reagan and Gorbachev left the summit knowing each other better as individuals
- Information gathering: The leaders mapped out, for the first time, where agreement might actually be possible
- The Overton window: The range of ideas a society is willing to seriously entertain at a given moment
The last of these, Finkel suggested, may have been the most important. Before Reykjavik, the realistic debate was about slowing the growth of nuclear arsenals. Reykjavik shifted that window enough to make outright reduction, and eventually elimination, part of the conversation. A year later, that groundwork helped produce a landmark arms-reduction agreement.
A tool for understanding the other side
Much of Finkel’s research focuses on a technique he uses to study — and improve — political polarization: the “ideological Turing test,” in which someone tries to argue the other side’s position convincingly enough that a member of that group can’t tell they’re an impostor. For example, a Democrat passes the test if they can make an argument for an immigration policy in a manner that convinces Republicans they are one of them (regardless of whether they actually advocate for that policy). Once the Democrat has done so, they know they’re arguing for or against what Republicans actually believe rather than adopting the all-too-common tactic of caricaturing the other side’s argument and then arguing against that caricature.
Applied to the film, Finkel offered a thought experiment: What if Reagan and Gorbachev had been asked to make each other’s case — Reagan explaining, in Gorbachev’s voice, why space-based missile defense felt like a betrayal of mutual vulnerability; Gorbachev explaining, in Reagan’s voice, why keeping a “gas mask” (nuclear defense) in reserve made sense even after agreeing to get rid of the “mustard gas” (nuclear weapons). Even then, he suggested, the two men might still have disagreed — but they’d have understood they were arguing over genuinely different theories of how peace is built, not over flawed understanding of each other’s views.That distinction, between disagreement rooted in understanding and disagreement rooted in misperception, sits at the heart of the work Finkel now co-leads at the Litowitz Center. Through research, curriculum, outreach and convening, the center works to give students, leaders and organizations the tools to navigate disagreement rather than avoid it.
Asked whether the lessons of Reykjavik translate to today’s conflicts, Finkel was candid about the limits of the analogy. But he pointed to one factor that seemed present in 1986 and harder to find in several of today’s standoffs: both sides had come to genuinely fear the alternative to talking. Without that shared incentive to find common ground, he noted, it’s difficult for adversaries to even get in the same room, let alone find common ground.
The dynamics Finkel described that were at play in Reykjavik — separating outcome from process, testing whether you actually understand the other side’s position, watching for where the realm of the possible might shift — aren't unique to nuclear diplomacy. They're the same dynamics at play any time two parties with a long-term relationship need to work through a disagreement. That's a major throughline of the Litowitz Center's work: the skills that helped two Cold War leaders find a narrow path forward are largely the same skills Kellogg trains leaders to bring to their work.
Lessons from historical moments like this are the foundation of what the Litowitz Center is building: intellectual and analytical tools to help people navigate disagreement and harness the power of difference.