Thirty years after Germans tore down the Berlin Wall, and the Cold War came crashing to an end, the Western order of alliances, disarmament treaties and robust transatlantic relationships is facing new strains.
The fall of the wall in 1989, and the end of the Cold War two years later when the Soviet Union collapsed, opened a remarkable period of relative peace, international cooperation in the West and hope that the emerging Russia and the former Soviet republics on its borders would become stable democracies.
He will “retrace his own steps” as a young Army officer stationed at the Iron Curtain, a senior State Department official said Tuesday, and visit a synagogue in Halle that was attacked last month on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur by a man linked to far-right groups. German prosecutors called the shooting an anti-Semitic crime.
The remaining arms control agreement with Moscow, the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty may also be scrapped. Trump has said he would prefer a disarmament agreement that includes China, but he has not moved to draft one. “We misread 1989,” said Constanze Stelzenmueller, a German scholar at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution in Washington. “We thought we had won and progress was here to stay.... The U.S. and U.K., especially, trusted in their cultures to keep [society] safe and that years of constitutional democracy was a guarantee against the temptation of authoritarianism.The post-Cold War order showed strains before Trump was elected.
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