American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War

Even with the passage of a decade, the events of 1989 have lost none of their capacity to astonish. At the beginning of that portentous year, communist regimes were in power throughout the region. By year's end, all were gone, swept away by revolutionary developments scarcely imaginable a few years before.

United States policy clearly did not cause those developments they grew out of very deep historic roots but our efforts did play a role, sometimes a decisive one. Let me begin by recalling a conversation with Bronislaw Geremek, currently Poland's Foreign Minister but then an advisor to Lech Walesa, in May 1989 at Ambassador John Davis' residence. Our previous meeting, a year before, and also in the ambassador's residence, had been at the time of the so-called anti-crisis pact between Solidarity and the communist government.

In May 1989, these difficult negotiations had produced the historic Roundtable Agreement. I was in Warsaw to prepare the impending visit of President Bush and to see how the United States might support Poland's hopeful steps toward democratizing reform. Let me highlight five ways in which the United States lent indispensable assistance during this critical period.

First, we threw US support fully behind Poland and Hungary in early 1989, when those countries were on the threshold of revolutionary change. We elevated East Central Europe to first place on the international agenda and held United States-Soviet relations hostage to Soviet acceptance of self-determination in this region. This stance may look obvious now, but it was not at all obvious in early 1989.

There were three choices for United States policy: wait and see, support Gorbachev, or support Poland and Hungary. It is worth recalling that the relevant pressure on President Bush was to support Gorbachev and to help him survive politically and help him manage potentially destabilizing developments in Poland and Hungary. To his credit, Bush resisted this pressure.

He saw an opportunity that he knew could be fleeting, seized it, and mobilized American foreign policy with a single-mindedness seldom seen in peacetime. It was, in my view, the most important thing the United States did in helping bring about the end of the Cold War. Within the United States administration, our judgment was that if the Polish Roundtable Agreement was implemented fully and faithfully, this was the beginning of the end of communist rule in Poland.

And if communism was finished in Poland, it was finished everywhere in Eastern Europe including East Germany, which meant that German unification would leap onto the international agenda. Of course, those were very large ifs; our appreciation of the potential for such sweeping changes was by no means a prediction that they would occur, much less that they could occur within a