The twilight struggle: what the Cold War teaches us about Great Power rivalry today

Abstract

Cold War security order that included Russia could have decreased tensions between the world’s two nuclear superpowersthereby decreasing tensions for all of Europe’ (p. 195). Alternatively, Mark Trachtenberg in his curiously under-cited commentary on NATO enlargement makes an ostensibly controversial remark: ‘historical analysis in itself cannot really answer the fundamental question of how the policy of NATO expansion is to be assessed, and it is not the historian’s business in any event to sit in judgment on the past’. Sarotte’s historiographical judgment furthers debate on the perpetual question of a contemporary historians’ moral and political responsibilities when bringing the past into the present. Not One Inch is a substantial addition in Sarotte’s unofficial trilogy (1989; The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall) and fortifies her legacy as a pathbreaking historian of the end of the Cold War and the post-Cold War period. The historiography of the 1990s is indebted to the groundwork she has laid. As knowledge production on post-Cold War European security plays an increasing role in contemporary political debates, it is important that historians of the 1990s ruminate on the imprint politics and morality may leave on the emerging historiography.