The WW2 military analogy is misleading: the Cold War was not a war but a prolonged mutual effort to avoid one. Each time a possibility of armed confrontation in Europe presented itself (1953 Berlin, 56 Budapest, 68 Prague), the West opted for non-intervention. Which was probably the only sane thing to do, but it nonetheless means that the logic of the confrontation and its outcome cannot be framed in military terms. Precisely because, as you point out, economically bankrupt regimes can survive indefinitely, the bankrupcy into which the armament race ratcheted up by Reagan drove the USSR did not in itself spell the end of the regime. Rhetorical gambits, as Reagan's 1987 "tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev", would have been so much hot air, had it not been for the fact that the person in power in the USSR was Gorbachev. For the implosion to begin, Gorbachev's genuinely well-meaning but naive faith in reform was needed--which was naive because he mistakenly believed that reform on the scale he envisioned could still be kept within the confines of communism. 1989 was the unintended outcome of Gorbachev's perestroika+glasnost. As far as I know, the restraint shown by the West was partly a reflection of panicked cluelessness and partly a matter of pragmatic calculation, i.e. the wish not to undermine Gorbachev. But it is not as though NATO could have sent tanks rolling in the direction of Warsaw, Prague and Budapest, to be greeted as liberators. Of course I don't mean to imply that Gorbachev is the only person who deserves credit. Although in purely causal terms no other person's decisions had comparable impact on the processes of 1989, the eventual outcome was not what he intended. Credit should go to members of the opposition movements in Eastern European countries, as well as to all those who had shown in 53, 56, 68 and 79 how far people can go to stand up for their freedom (without any Western help!) and thereby indirectly contributed to the gradual moral bankrupcy of Soviet communism. As for Thatcher, he was not just a "reluctant midwife" to unified Germany, she was desperately scheming to prevent it.
The Cause of the Fall
Three new books argue over how the impossible—the fall of the Berlin Wall—came to pass.
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No matter how clear we try to make it, looking back at 1989 is always a bit like peering into a kaleidoscope. Everything happened so quickly that the participants, from policymakers in Washington to Germans in the streets and Soviet apparatchiks, could barely keep up as the world they knew came crashing down. The end of communism in Europe, on some level at least, makes sense: the Soviets had bankrupted themselves, and their client states throughout Eastern Europe predicted a better future with the West. But if Moscow had wanted, it might have been able to thwart that path of history; instead, it simply allowed the march of freedom that everybody rushed to call inexorable. In fact, the West didn't win the Cold War so much as the East lost it.
Without the benefit of hindsight, though, events unfolded so rapidly that it was almost impossible to keep tabs on the blur. Take just one day, June 4. Solidarity, the political opposition movement in Poland that had been gathering steam for years, made a run at nationwide elections. (The communists had foolishly let them do so.) Though Solidarity toppled the old regime's three-legged throne, Washington was simultaneously blindsided with more earth-shattering news. On the very same day, another communist regime flexed its muscle, slaughtering pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square. And as if China's crackdown weren't enough to crowd Washington's bandwidth, news also broke that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian revolution and archenemy of the U.S., had died. In the first half of 1989, Poland became a blip.
A raft of new books on the fall of the Berlin Wall venture back to the most tumultuous year in world politics since the end of the Second World War, trying to reconstruct exactly what happened and why. Reading them together is like twisting that kaleidoscope and doing everything to avoid vertigo. But important patterns emerge: for one thing, American statesmanship had little, if anything, to do with the actual fall of the wall. If any single person deserves the credit, it was Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, not President Reagan. For another, things happened so fast that the United States couldn't have pulled the strings even if it had wanted to. The fall of the Soviet Union was like other great revolutions in history—first a hairline fracture in the glass, and then a deafening break as it shattered.
One thing we know now is that Washington should have paid better attention to Poland. And Romania. And the German Democratic Republic. If they had done so, Americans wouldn't have been caught so badly off guard. In a must-have accounting, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (Pantheon Books), the British historian and newspaperman Victor Sebestyen sets the scene, reporting that the CIA, with the help of the Vatican, funneled more than $50 million to Solidarity over the years. Sebestyen's brilliantly written narrative unfolds in brief, gripping episodes and, in a welcome move, reaches back to the election of the Pole Karol Wojtyla as Pope John Paul II. (Somewhat more dubiously, Sebestyen sees the church's role in events as second only to Moscow's.) Populations of the people's democracies hated communism, Sebestyen says. And more, so did their leaders. After all, Moscow planted nukes on Czech soil without even informing the country's elites. In the late 1980s the problem wasn't so much the ideological legacy of Vladimir Lenin as much as it was the impoverished and discredited regime in Moscow.
Even as Langley fed Polish liberals, though, Washington remained largely unaware of the imminent dissipation in Eastern Europe. The CIA's own National Intelligence Estimates continually missed the mark. In The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall (Simon & Schuster), Michael Meyer recounts the insight of a national-security aide at the time: "We in Washington often found ourselves in the role of thrilled, if not to say astonished, onlookers." Unlike Sebestyen and his long, historical arc, Meyer—who witnessed events while covering Germany and Eastern Europe for NEWSWEEK—brings the latter months of 1989 to life by living up to the book's subtitle and weaving his firsthand reporting into a high-drama, vividly told, five-act narrative. Reinforcing the point that Americans were happy beneficiaries but not prime movers, Meyer even skewers Ronald Reagan's now famous challenge, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" The truth, Meyer argues, was that at the time, the speech was something of a dud, hyped only in retrospect. American flags waving that day had been planted by the U.S. Embassy, and "a large majority [of Germans] actively disliked [Reagan]." Instead, change actually originated within the empire.
For Meyer, the "untold story" revolves around Miklós Neméth, the reform-minded and diplomatically brilliant prime minister of Hungary. By 1989, like most of the Warsaw Pact countries, Hungary faced dismal financial straits, and Neméth looked West for answers. Upon taking power, Neméth took his time making the ceremonial visit to Moscow. When he finally arrived, he privately broached the possibility of Hungarian elections with Gorbachev. The Soviet leader was furious. Neméth pushed him, asking point blank: if communists in Budapest were voted from power, would Russia retaliate? "Nyet," Gorbachev finally said. "At least, not while I am sitting in this chair." It was a startling admission of restraint. For Meyer, what came next was legendary. After ultrasecret negotiations with the West Germans, Neméth opened the country's border with Austria, striking a blow at the heart of Moscow's grip. The empire could no longer control the borders of the Warsaw Pact. Meyer calls the choreography "one of the great subterfuges in the annals of diplomatic history," one that would set in motion the breakaways of other states to the West, culminating in the Nov. 9 opening of the Berlin Wall.
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