a nice thing about 20th anniversary of the fall of the berlin wall are all the articles about what was going on behind the scenes at that time. they are particularly interesting to me because i remember that period in broad strokes but not so much of the day-by-day news that added up to the end of the cold war.
which is why i found mary elise sarotte's piece in today's NYT to be so fascinating. it looks like the reunification of germany really was based on a misunderstanding. the USSR agreed to pull out of east germany on the condition that NATO would not expand to include former warsaw pact members. the US unofficially made that offer, but later backed away from it. because there was no comprehensive written agreement outlining the terms, each side went away thinking they got what they wanted. later when NATO expanded and russia cried foul, the US didn't know what it was talking about. russia really did get screwed in the deal, but i don't think the US intended to screw them. the story also explains one of the reasons why to this day russia is upset about NATO expansion.
which raises one of my pet issues about why NATO survived the end of the cold war. it was formed as an anti-soviet alliance and should have ended with the end of the soviet threat.it seems to me that NATO survived due to the inability of the political and military leaders of the time to break out of the cold war mentality that they had grown up with. Over the past 20 years as NATO has survived beyond its original purpose there have been periodic attempts to attribute some new point to the alliance, like stopping genocide in eastern europe or fighting terrorism. both are fine goals, but it's really not clear why an alliance to accomplish those things has to exclude russia. any claims that it is no longer an anti-russian alliance are undermined by the fact that russia is the only eastern european country that has never been invited to join.
