A leading expert on foreign policy reveals how tensions between America, NATO, and Russia transformed geopolitics A Foreign Affairs Best Book of 2021 and winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize "Sarotte has the receipts, as it were: her authoritative tale draws on thousands of memos, letters, briefs, and other once secret documents-including many that have never been published before-which both fill in and complicate settled narratives on both sides."-Joshua Yaffa, New Yorker "The most engaging and carefully documented account of this period in East-West diplomacy currently available."-Andrew Moravcsik, Foreign Affairs Not one inch. With these words, Secretary of State James Baker proposed a hypothetical bargain to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev after the fall of the Berlin Wall: if you let your part of Germany go, we will move NATO not one inch eastward. Controversy erupted almost immediately over this 1990 exchange-but more important was the decade to come, when the words took on new meaning. Gorbachev let his Germany go, but Washington rethought the bargain, not least after the Soviet Union's own collapse in December 1991. Washington realized it could not just win big but win bigger. Not one inch of territory needed to be off limits to NATO. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet collapse, this book uses new evidence and interviews to show how, in the decade that culminated in Vladimir Putin's rise to power, the United States and Russia undermined a potentially lasting partnership. Prize-winning historian M. E. Sarotte shows what went wrong.

Using new archival sources--including previously secret documents of the East German secret police and Communist Party--M. E. Sarotte goes behind the scenes of Cold War Germany during the era of dA(c)tente, as East and West tried negotiation instead of confrontation to settle their differences. In "Dealing with the Devil," she explores the motives of the German Democratic Republic and its Soviet backers in responding to both the dA(c)tente initiatives, or Ostpolitik, of West Germany and the foreign policy of the United States under President Nixon.

Sarotte focuses on both public and secret contacts between the two halves of the German nation during Brandt's chancellorship, exposing the cynical artifices constructed by negotiators on both sides. Her analysis also details much of the superpower maneuvering in the era of dA(c)tente, since German concerns were ever present in the minds of leaders in Washington and Moscow, and reveals the startling degree to which concern over China shaped European politics during this time. More generally, "Dealing with the Devil" presents an illuminating case study of how the relationship between center and periphery functioned in the Cold War Soviet empire.