The West’s Missed Opportunity
1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe
by Mary Elise Sarotte
–Reviewed by Adam Fleisher
It’s been more than 20 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we still can’t agree on how it happened. One general approach is to give some credit to American policy, and in particular Ronald Reagan’s famous “tear down this wall” speech, for creating conditions that weakened the East German regime and thereby empowered the East German people.
Mary Elise Sarotte’s 1989, however, takes a much more specific approach to the end of the Cold …
