Sarah Paine

I don't know why the Russians think they're so special.

Another false assumption.

Gorbachev believed that if the Warsaw Pact disappeared, the military alliance of the Eastern Bloc, if that disappeared, then NATO would disappear.

And that if the Comic-Con, which is their trading organization, if that goes away, then it's the European community in those days.

It becomes the European Union later.

Anyway, that would disappear.

Not quite, because it turns out that organizations that are

coercive versus those that are voluntary, they dissolve for different reasons.

And then Gorbachev also assumed that the United States would share a continental outlook of not wanting strong powers and that the United States therefore would not want a unified Germany, let alone a strong unified Germany.

So when all the unrest is happening in Germany, Gorbachev is off taking a vacation.

Poor life choice, because at that moment, President George Bush Sr.

and Chancellor Kohl of Germany are working on fast-tracking German unification of a fully sovereign, unified Germany, both halves in NATO.

All right, so...

Many of Gorbachev's closest supporters at the end of it all blamed him.

They said, look, his foreign policy mistakes were a function of his domestic policy mistakes, and it destroyed the Soviet Union.

And back to this America expert, Vladimir Lukin, Gorbachev was no Deng Xiaoping.

Okay.

And Arbatov, who's their premier America expert, the stupidity of our leaders caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union.

So the big bozo was playing with plastic bags, stuck one on his head, committed suicide.

It was by mistake.