Germany and the U.S.: The end of an era

Since 1945, a chief foreign policy objective of the Soviet Union, and then Russia, has been to divide Germany and the United States. Initially, the Soviets pursued this strategy in a literal sense, by unilaterally creating a communist puppet state in East Germany. Then, Moscow attempted to prevent the Western allies access to Berlin. In 1961, the Soviets built a wall dividing the city. Moscow undertook all these gambits to pressure America into conceding that preserving a free and independent Federal Republic of Germany, strongly anchored in the West, was not worth the effort. Yet Soviet attempts to drive a wedge between the United States and Germany had the opposite effect. From the heroic Berlin Airlift (which kept the Western half of the city alive throughout an 11 month-long Soviet blockade) to landmark speeches by John F. Kennedy (“Ich bin ein Berliner”) and Ronald Reagan (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”), Soviet aggression only hardened American resolve.