Gorbachev believed his reforms would lead Eastern European nations to adopt "socialism with a human face" and view him as a liberator. He completely failed to grasp the depth of animosity after decades of occupation, ensuring these countries would reject Russia at the first opportunity.
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Russia portrays NATO's growth as an aggressive act of encirclement. This narrative, however, ignores that Eastern European nations eagerly joined NATO for protection, driven by Russia's long and brutal history of posing an existential threat to its neighbors. The expansion was defensive, not offensive.
President Bush intentionally refrained from celebrating America's Cold War victory to avoid humiliating Gorbachev and empowering Russian hardliners. This strategic humility bought newly freed Eastern European nations two decades to integrate with the West, securing peace at the direct cost of Bush's domestic popularity and re-election.
The 1990s belief that economic liberalization would inevitably make China democratic provided ideological cover for policies that fueled its growth. This hubris, combined with corporate greed, allowed the US to facilitate the rise of its greatest geopolitical rival without achieving the expected political reforms.
The West's Cold War fear was that countries would fall to communism one by one. Ironically, the domino effect occurred in reverse. Once democratic reforms began in Poland, the movement spread rapidly, causing the entire Soviet empire in Eastern Europe to crumble.
To predict a leader's actions, disregard their words and even individual actions. Instead, focus on their consistent, long-term pattern of behavior. For Putin, the pattern is using negotiations as a stalling tactic to advance a fixed agenda, making him an unreliable partner for peace deals based on stated intentions.
The US stopped its ground offensive in Iraq after 100 hours, short of toppling Saddam Hussein. This was because the Soviet Union drew a red line: no regime change. Preserving Gorbachev's cooperation to finalize the end of the Cold War was the primary strategic goal, superseding objectives in Iraq.
To control Eastern Europe after WWII, the Soviets used a replicable playbook. They seized control of defense, interior, and justice ministries to monopolize coercion and information, while using land reform to eliminate old elites and create dependency, all under the fiction of democracy.
While Reagan's military buildup is credited with ending the Cold War, post-war data revealed the USSR was spending 40-70% of its GNP on defense—not the 20% the CIA estimated. This miscalculated overspending made economic collapse inevitable.
The West reluctantly included human rights provisions in the Helsinki Accords, believing them unenforceable. However, dissidents across the Eastern Bloc weaponized these clauses to hold communist regimes accountable, undermining their legitimacy from within and contributing to their collapse.
To facilitate German unification, Chancellor Kohl paid East Germany and Hungary hundreds of millions of Deutschmarks. In exchange, they eased travel restrictions, allowing East Germans to leave. This brain drain and display of preference for the West created a crisis that made the fall of the Berlin Wall inevitable.