A leading expert on foreign policy reveals how tensions between
America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics
● A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2021 and winner of the Pushkin
House Book Prize
"Sarotte has the receipts, as it were: her authoritative tale draws on
thousands of memos, letters, briefs, and other once secret
documents--including many that have never been published before--which
both fill in and complicate settled narratives on both sides."--Joshua
Yaffa, New Yorker
"The most engaging and carefully documented account of this period in
East-West diplomacy currently available."--Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign
Affairs
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 let your part of Germany go, 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. Not one inch of territory needed to be off limits to NATO.
On the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, this book uses new
evidence and interviews to show how, in the decade that culminated in
Vladimir Putin's rise to power, the United States and Russia undermined
a potentially lasting partnership. Prize-winning historian M. E. Sarotte
shows what went wrong.
