To the Editors: Since the 2016 election, urban liberals and Democrats have newly discovered “rural America,” which is to say our country itself beyond the cities and the suburbs and a few scenic vacation spots. To its new discoverers, this is an unknown land inhabited by “white blue-collar workers” whom the discoverers fear but know nothing about. And so they are turning to experts, who actually have visited rural America or who previously have heard of it, to lift the mystery from it. One such expert is Nathaniel Rich…

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To the Editors: Archie Brown’s review of Robert Service’s excellent The End of the Cold War, 1985–1991 falsely diminishes Eduard Shevardnadze’s contribution to improved Soviet–American relations and the cold war’s sudden end. Shevardnadze not only revamped Andrei Gromyko’s Foreign Ministry, but he orchestrated the purge of the Defense Ministry, and persuaded hard-liners in the Kremlin that the time had come for rapprochement with the United States. In forging close relations with secretaries of state George Shultz and James Baker, Shevardnadze broke down the anti-Soviet cast of the Reagan administration.

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