1989 saw two major events with global consequences: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in which the Beijing government shot several hundred protesters and injured many others. The author examines the context and assesses the long-term global consequences, arguing that the world of Bush, Gorbachev, Kohl and Deng, with Thatcher and Mitterrand on the sidelines, led ultimately to our world of Trump, Putin and Xi. The book starts with a striking scenario based on the 1989 nuclear war simulation by NATO troops, where the German politician playing commander-in-chief could not bring himself to launch the decisive nuclear strike, even in a simulation. The prospect of a global nuclear holocaust was very real, and although the Marxist-Leninist ideology of Soviet communism was haemorrhaging, nothing had prepared international leaders for the speed of change as demonstrators demanding democracy broke through the Iron Curtain. At the same time, the People's Republic of China under Deng Xiaoping was entering the global capitalist economy without relinquishing the grip of Communism, crushing any hopes harboured by western democracies that the world was entering an era of peace and stability, even as the US pressed for a global US-led free-trading system. In 1991 Yugoslavia became engulfed in a genocidal war, with mass movement of refugees, while Moscow struggled in its relations with Ukraine and Crimea. This book was written before the current war in Ukraine and is prescient in much of its analysis. The collapse of Soviet power allowed former clients to assert themselves, with North Korea attempting to embark on a nuclear programme while the invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein was to have far-reaching consequences. The author's discussion of negotiations between Bush and Gorbachev over Iraq provide a fascinating insight into the east-west diplomacy of the era. Bush mobilised troops without consulting Gorbachev, a fact omitted from the minutes of their discussion and only later revealed by researchers. 768pp, over 100 pages of notes, black and white reproductions.
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