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1. William C. Wohlforth, “Scholars, Policy Makers, and the End of the Cold War,” in Wohlforth, ed., Witnesses to the End of the Cold War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 263. Scholarly debates over the end of the Cold War have focused to an unusual extent on the role of individuals, particularly Gorbachev, and the issue of trust. On Gorbachev, see, in addition to Vladislav Zubok’s chapter, Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Janice Gross Stein, “Political Learning by Doing: Gorbachev as Uncommitted Thinker and Motivated Learner,” International Organization 48, no. 2 (spring 1994): 155–84. On the issue of trust, see Deborah Larson, Anatomy of Mistrust: U.S.-Soviet Relations During the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). Trust Bursting Out All Over: The Soviet Side of German Unification Andrew O. Bennett There is something paradoxical in the fact that we evolved trust faster than our American counterparts. —Anatoly Chernyaev the transcripts of the Cold War Endgame conference throw into sharp relief many of the theoretical and historical puzzles of the end of the Cold War. Why did the Soviet Union fail to use force in 1989 to keep together the Warsaw Pact, as it had in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? Why did the Soviet bureaucracy fail even to come up with a coherent option for using force in 1989? Why did Gorbachev fail to exact a higher price for German unification in 1990? Why did his acceptance of a unified Germany within NATO survive opposition from his foreign and defense ministries, which in this case did propose and push for alternatives? These central puzzles have rightly been the focus of considerable research and theorizing, as they are here, but underlying them is the central paradox pointed out by Gorbachev’s foreign policy adviser Anatoly Chernyaev. As William Wohlforth has noted, “What is striking about the whole story is how many unprecedented signals and gestures were needed to reduce American uncertainty about Soviet intentions (and how few such signals the Americans had to send to reduce Gorbachev’s uncertainty concerning their intentions).”1 The preceding chapter by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier addresses the first half of this puzzle; the present chapter addresses the second. In doing so, it builds on Vladislav Zubok’s account of Gorbachev’s personal trust of the West and Robert English’s account of the “new ideas” that Gorbachev and others introduced on foreign policy, and it integrates the material factors, 6 Wolhforth Chapter 6 12/27/02 12:17 AM Page 175 political conditions, and shared ideas that allowed Gorbachev’s initiatives to prevail in Soviet foreign policy in 1989–90. The resulting mix of explanatory variables leans more on ideas and less on material incentives than Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth’s account does (Chapter 9 herein). Our two accounts agree that ideas and material constraints were both important, however , and we are not far apart on key counterfactual questions regarding when changes in the material balance of power would have allowed Soviet foreign policy change and when they would have compelled it, and regarding the range of alternative policies that the material balance might have accommodated. This chapter outlines four of the principal theoretical approaches to the puzzles of 1989 and 1990 and the underlying paradox of Soviet trustfulness, and it uses each approach to illuminate not only the Endgame transcripts but also the substantial documentary and interview material that has become available in recent years. First, the “realist” approach, exemplified by Brooks and Wohlforth, emphasizes the material balance of power and argues that Soviet leaders refrained from using force and made most of the concessions in 1989 and 1990 because Soviet economic decline and Eastern European indebtedness left them little choice. Trust and personal interactions, in this view, played a very small role: only repeated “costly signaling” by the Soviet Union convinced the United States that the Soviet Union had indeed scaled back its ambitions to fit its resources. A second view, based on Jürgen Habermas’s theory of “communicative action,” maintains that U.S. and Soviet leaders engaged in a deliberative process in which leaders on each side allowed their interests, ideas, and even identities to be influenced by persuasive communications from the other side. This approach suggests that personal interactions and the trust they developed are central to explaining the Cold War’s end. A third school of thought, drawing on theories of cognitive and...

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