Sarah Paine

François Mitterrand eventually found solace in expanding the European Union, European community to the European Union, when you're incorporating all these Eastern Bloc countries into it.

And he plays a really important role in concluding the Maastricht Treaty that forms the European Union.

But Margaret Thatcher just plain lost.

She was just upset about the whole thing.

She said, Germany will be the Japan of Europe and worse than Japan.

I guess she hadn't been to Japan lately.

She said, the Germans will get in peace what Hitler couldn't get in war.

And she wanted to leave Red Army troops.

in Germany for the duration.

Imagine if that had been the case and now dealing with Putin.

If he had troops in Germany, we would be in trouble.

But Bush and Cole worked around all of them.

And Bush said to Cole at the end of it, he said, look, I'm not going to beat my chest and dance on the Berlin Wall.

Both of them were very careful never to humiliate Gorbachev about the Soviet loss of the Cold War.

Why?

Because they knew that if they did that, he might fall from power sooner rather than later.

Also, they were afraid that if they did that, the hardliners would come to power much more rapidly than they actually did.

It was 20 years before Putin started consolidating his power.

And the new country...

Newly independent countries of Eastern Europe needed those 20 years to integrate militarily, politically, economically with the West so that the cement could set before you got the Russians trying to destabilize them.