Episode 36: Season II, Episode VII: The Berlin Wall & The Soviet Fall

This week's crisis could have ended with the world in a giant blaze of nuclear flame, but it didn't. In fact, it's an example of how a crisis can be handled so effectively, that most people don't even remember it as a crisis. This week, we are talking about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. 

It's November, 1989. Reagan famously delivered his "tear down this wall" speech in 1987, but West and East Berlin are as divided as ever. In the summer of 1989, Chinese military forces mowed down peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square. Horrified by the images of violence, American leaders, and George H.W. Bush in particular, were eager to avoid provoking a similar crackdown in Eastern Europe. 

The stakes couldn't have been higher. Both sides were armed with enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world many times over, and they had itchy trigger fingers.

Then, unexpectedly, at a press conference, a mid-level bureaucrat ordered an enormous change in policy. He accidentally announced that residents would be allowed to leave East Germany. Word spread like wildfire. Within hours, thousands of residents were lined up at the gates to cross into West Berlin.

Why didn't this moment turn into one of violence and bloodshed? 
What were the repercussions of the collapse of a global superpower and its economic system? 
How might things have gone differently? 

To answer these questions, we have two dynamite guests. First, we have a voice that you will probably recognize. Our podcast host, Dr. Jeffrey Engle. When he’s not hosting The Past, The Promise, The Presidency, Jeffrey Engel works as the founding director of the SMU Center for Presidential History. He has also written or edited twelve books on US foreign policy, including The China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global and The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989.

We then spoke to Dr. Mary Elise Sarotte, who is the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is also the expert on the expansion of NATO in Germany at the end of the Cold War and the author of Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall, and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe.

Guests:

Dr. Jeffrey A. Engel is the founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University and one of the hosts of this podcast.

Dr. Jeffrey A. Engel is founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University. A Senior Fellow of the John Goodwin Tower Center for Political Studies, and graduate of Cornell University, he additionally studied at St. Catherine's College, Oxford University, and received his M.A. and Ph.D. in American history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, before serving as a John M. Olin Postdoctoral Fellow in International Security Studies at Yale University.

Having taught American history, international relations, and grand strategy at the University of Wisconsin, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Haverford College, he served until 2012 at Texas A&M University’s Bush School of Government & Public Service as the Howard and Verlin Kruse ’52 Professor and Director of Programming for the Scowcroft Institute for International Affairs, receiving during that a Silver Star Award for Teaching and Mentorship, a Distinguished Teaching Award from A&M’s Association of Former Students, and a Texas A&M University System Chancellor’s Teaching Excellence Award.

Engel has authored or edited twelve books on American foreign policy, including Cold War at 30,000 Feet: The Anglo-American Fight for Aviation Supremacy (Harvard University Press, 2007), which received the Paul Birdsall Prize from the American Historical Association; Local Consequences of the Global Cold War (Stanford University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2008); The China Diary of George H.W. Bush: The Making of a Global President (Princeton University Press, 2008); The Fall of the Berlin Wall: The Revolutionary Legacy of 1989 (Oxford University Press, 2009); with Joseph R. Cerami, Rethinking Leadership and “Whole of Government” National Security Reform (Strategic Studies Institute, 2010); Into the Desert: Reflections on the Gulf War (Oxford University Press, 2012); with Andrew Preston and Mark Lawrence, America in the World: A History in Documents (Princeton University Press, 2014); The Four Freedoms: FDR’s Legacy of Liberty for the United States and the World (Oxford University Press, 2015); and with Thomas Knock, When Life Strikes the President: Scandal, Death, and Illness in the White House (Oxford University Press, 2017); Impeachment: An American History, with Peter Baker, Timothy Naftali, and Jon Meacham (Random House, 2018); and with Tim Sayle, Hal Brands, and William Inboden, The Last Card in the Deck: Inside George W. Bush’s Decision to Surge Troops in Iraq (Cornell University Press, expected 2019).

But most importantly, Jeff is a cost-host on this podcast, The Past, The Promise, The Presidency. 

Follow Jeff on Twitter @jeffreyaengel.

Dr. Mary Elise Sarotte is the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. Mary E. Sarotte is the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins University and a member of the Council of Foreign Relations. She is also the expert on the expansion of NATO in Germany at the end of the Cold War.

Dr. Sarotte also has a brand new book coming out about US-Russian Relations this month from Yale University Press! Check out Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate.

Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you give up your part of Germany, we will move NATO not one inch eastward. Controversy erupted almost immediately over this 1990 exchange—but more important was the decade to come, when the words took on new meaning. Gorbachev let his Germany go, but Washington rethought the bargain, not least after the Soviet Union’s own collapse in December 1991. Washington realized it could not just win big but win bigger. Their new approach: Not one inch of territory needed to be off limits to NATO.

On the 30-year anniversary of the Soviet Union’s collapse, this groundbreaking new book draws on over 100 interviews and thousands of secret records from White-House Kremlin contacts to show how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics from the Cold War to COVID.

Dr. Sarotte is also the author of several other books, including The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and more. 

 Follow her on Twitter @e_sarotte.