Twenty years ago, the Berlin Wall fell. And all was good throughout the land (not really).
That it happened was a great human story—a pinnacle event of freedom (in its most sincere sense) that has brought millions of Europeans into a prosperous, liberal democratic order. The conventional wisdom, in this country at least, is that Ronald Reagan’s toughness and bellicose rhetoric (“Mr. Gorbachev, Tear down this wall!”) brought down the Soviet Union and its satellite states. This is, of course, a myth of the media’s creation and has very little basis in reality.
In fact, Reagan’s greatest contribution to ending the Cold War was not his toughness, but his willingness to negotiate with Gorbachev. American media narratives, however, don’t like to focus on complexity, and instead zoom in on any possible surface-level solution. Maybe that’s why our political system is so anachronistic and undemocratic. And if we had a media that actually attempted to explained complex issues in ways to illuminate, perhaps we could have adequate debates that measure our impact on the places we’re at war, and not just the partisan political posturing that is killing American foreign policy.
