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Forging a New Relationship this chapter presents the first session of the Princeton conference. It begins with opening remarks by James Baker and Anatoly Chernyaev that frame the debate over the causes of the end of the Cold War that recurs throughout the conference and is addressed by the scholarly chapters in Part III of this volume. The conferees then discussed the forging of the new administration ’s relationship with Moscow, ending with the December 1989 Malta summit. Following the inauguration of President George Bush in January 1989, the Bush administration cautiously took up the task of dealing with the Soviet Union. After a lengthy and much-criticized policy review, Secretary of State James Baker flew to Moscow in May 1989 to meet President Mikhail Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, who were frustrated by U.S. passivity. Baker returned counseling a renewal of U.S. activism. The effort saw its first breakthrough in September in the meeting of Baker and Shevardnadze at the Jackson Hole, Wyoming, ministerial meeting. Shevardnadze displayed astonishing frankness about the situation at home and modified Soviet arms control positions. The Malta “seasick” summit on December 2–3, which had been under discussion in secret channels since midsummer, marked the first meeting of minds between Bush and Gorbachev. For some participants , this meeting marked the symbolic end of the Cold War. It was at Malta that Gorbachev told Bush, “We don’t consider you an enemy anymore”; and he emphatically stressed the right of the peoples of Eastern and Central Europe to choose their own governments. Bush, in turn, assured the Soviet leader that the United States would not exploit the turmoil in ways that would harm the interests of a reforming Soviet Union. Fred I. Greenstein: Welcome. We are going to get rather quickly into a panel discussion in which Don Oberdorfer will be doing the principal questioning. But first we are going to have opening remarks by Mr. Baker and by Mr. Chernyaev, and I thought that just to start things off I would steal a passage from one of the several volumes by participants: Jack Matlock’s Autopsy on an Empire. “To understand why the Cold War ended in 1989 rather than 2089 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 rather than 2091, and why the latter 1 Wolhforth Chapter 1 12/26/02 11:39 PM Page 15 occurred with little violence in the empire’s heartland, we must think about the decisions actual people made. Impersonal social and economic trends may have molded the environment in which decisions were made, but it was decisions made by political leaders that determined the timing and character of events.”1 Stay tuned for the next two days and you will learn a great deal about them. Jim? James A. Baker III: Fred, thank you very much. Let me begin by saying how pleased I am to be here today at an event which is cosponsored by two institutions which are very dear to my heart: Princeton University and the Baker Institute at Rice University. I am truly honored that we have such distinguished participants, both scholars and practitioners, with us. I hope that our reflections here today will serve to bridge the gap between the world of scholars and the world of practitioners, which is a key tenet of the Baker Institute for Public Policy, because these worlds have a great deal to offer each other. Now I do not claim that what I am going to outline here in the next ten to twelve minutes will be either complete or unanimously accepted. Indeed, I encourage all of you to take issue with my impressions and my conclusions when you differ with them. After all, a vigorous debate is a necessary antecedent to an informed approach to public policy. And, of course, an informed approach to public policy is the ultimate goal of a conference such as this. In any event, I hope that my comments will offer us a starting point from which we can proceed —a road map, if you will, for further discussion. We meet today to discuss perhaps the most important event of this century : the peaceful end of a half-century of confrontation that had the very real potential of annihilating mankind. Let me start with a very simple premise: that there is, in my view at least, no single explanation for the peaceful end of the Cold War. All of the people that you see at both tables...

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