Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate

March 30, 2022 ~ 7:00pm ET
M. E. Sarotte, Johns Hopkins University

Due to potential copyrights restrictions we were unable to record Professor Sarotte's webinar.

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. NCHE welcomes historian Mary E. Sarotte to discuss what went wrong over the 30 years since the Soviet collapse and how it led to our current situation.

M.E. Sarotte is the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins University, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author, among other books, of The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall. She has written for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and more.

Registered participants will receive a link to the introduction from Dr. Sarotte's newest publication, Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate.