Though Germans might give more credit to Gorbachev and détente diplomacy, and Americans more to Reagan and Star Wars, the Atlantic alliance was united in victory. No one benefited more from the end of the cold war than a newly reunified Germany, and it was German-American cooperation that secured the win. In 1990 French president François Mitterrand favored a conciliatory vision of embracing the former Soviet bloc in a common European security policy that would supersede NATO as well as the Warsaw pact.1 But neither Helmut Kohl nor George Bush wanted anything to do with that. The West had won.
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