Romesh Ratnesar
is Deputy Editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and a Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. A former Time deputy managing editor and foreign editor, he has reported from many countries around the world, including Iraq, Afghanistan and Israel and the Palestinian territories.
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Mar 2010
“A President’s Relentless Optimism”
I was just interviewed by Kathryn Jean Lopez for the National Review. Here's an excerpt:
LOPEZ: Your subtitle is “A City, a President, and the Speech that Ended the Cold War.” Why is it not an overstatement that this one speech was the turning point or catalyst for the end?
RATNESAR: Reagan’s speech was delivered in the context of his evolving relationship with Mikhail Gorbachev — which, as I argue in the book, ultimately defused the superpower rivalry that had dominated world politics for the previous half-century. What Reagan’s speech accomplished was to identify Berlin as the litmus test of Gorbachev’s intentions to seek a better relationship with the West. In Reagan’s view, arms-control agreements were a necessary but not sufficient condition for ending the Cold War; if the Soviets were truly serious about making peace, they would have to let the Berlin Wall come down. It took another two years, but in the end that’s what Gorbachev did.
Read the interview at the National Review
