Investigative Historian

How do the behind-the-scenes correspondence among politicians such as Mikhail Gorbachev, former leader of the Soviet Union, and former United States President George H.W. Bush relate to Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine? And why have Cold War politics seemingly come full circle?

In her Dean’s Special Lecture titled “A Broken Promise? The 1990 Origins of NATO’s Post-Cold War Expansion,” Mary Elise Sarotte, Dean’s Professor of History, described how negotiations among world leaders following the fall of the Berlin Wall contributed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ongoing resentment about the way in which the Cold War ended.

“Putin is very bitter about how the Soviet Union lost its position in Europe in 1989,” she said. “And he has on many occasions referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the greatest tragedy of the 20th century. This rancor, I believe is fueling many of his military actions today.”

Through funding from USC, Sarotte conducted her research in Europe using what she called “wedge strategy.”

“I started in Germany because former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl — in a move that horrified many German archivists — released correspondence among political leaders decades before they came out in other countries,” Sarotte said.

This was the opening that she needed. 

She next contacted the archives of former policymakers such as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom and François Mitterrand of France. When she informed those archives that she had already seen copies of their communications in German archives, it helped to ease the way for a release of the matching documents.

At the lecture, USC Dornsife Dean Steve Kay lauded Sarotte’s bold scholarship.

“I believe that by connecting past to present, Mary embodies USC Dornsife’s commitment to scholarship of consequence,” Kay said, “By engaging in a better understanding of history, her work can help us to build a more promising future.”

Sarotte is a historian of international relations. In 2009, she published her third book, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton University Press). Her fourth and most recent book, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (Basic Books, 2014) shows how the wall’s demise resulted from an unexpected series of accidents. She is a former White House fellow and Humboldt Research fellow, and she is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a nonpartisan think tank.

Setting up the theme of her lecture, Sarotte described a spectrum of possibilities regarding whether the U.S. promised that the North American Treaty Organization (NATO) — a political and military treaty signed in 1949, now comprising 28 states across North America and Europe — would ever spread east of West Germany.

“On one end, there are American analysts who said that NATO never came up in negotiations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union over the reunification of Germany,” she said. “But there are Russian analysts who say it certainly did and that the U.S. promised never to move one inch past that line.”

On her research trips in the U.S. and Europe for her two most recent books, Sarotte conducted more than 100 interviews with people who witnessed the events leading up to and following the fall of the Berlin Wall — such as revolutionaries, border guards, Communist party officials, smugglers and journalists.

Through these conversations and meticulous analysis of correspondence among Bush, Kohl, Baker, Gorbachev, former West German foreign minister Hans-Diedrich Genscher, and British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, Sarotte concluded that the issue of NATO’s expansion fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum.

“The evidence shows that neither the U.S. nor the Russian position is tenable,” Sarotte said. “NATO certainly came up in negotiations, and the more sensible Russian commentators will certainly admit that no promise was ever made in writing.”

She continued, “So this is something that becomes more tractable by psychology, not history. You have to get into what people thought happened, what they understood.”

As a result of the negotiations, in 1990 Gorbachev agreed to allow Germany to unite in NATO in exchange for various forms of compensation. He received no formal guarantees that NATO would not expand eastward.

Sarotte concluded her talk by reinforcing the link between past and present.

“Today, I think that to understand all of the heated rhetoric and tensions surrounding Vladimir Putin it is important to have a solid basis of historical and empirical research,” Sarotte said. “I hope that commentators on both the U.S. and Russian sides are paying attention to these factors, in order to help ratchet back the current violent approach and bring matters back to a place where they can be handled with diplomacy.”