Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall

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Reagan at Reykjavik: Forty-Eight Hours That Ended the Cold War by Ken Adelman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Haight Ashbury, It's morning again in America, Kitchen Debate, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative, summit fever, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

(Ronald Reagan Library) What Time called “the four most famous words of the Reagan presidency” were almost not spoken, owing to opposition from nearly all of Reagan’s aides. But he spoke them anyway, on June 12, 1987, at the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance from the Berlin Wall. Screens had been set up to protect him against any East German sniper. The president called out, “Mr. Gorbachev,” paused, and then repeated the name for emphasis—“Mr. Gorbachev—tear down this Wall!” It had an electrifying effect that day, and was evoked again when the Wall fell two years later. (Ronald Reagan Library) Raisa Gorbachev and Nancy Reagan were mostly just tolerating each other by the time of the welcoming ceremonies for the Gorbachevs’ arrival at the Washington Summit on December 7, 1987.

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He later called Reagan “a stroke of luck for the world, especially for Europe.” But some traditional diplomats, even gifted ones, never grasped the power of public diplomacy nor the role that Reagan’s campaign to delegitimize the Soviet system played in bending history. George Shultz, in his thousand-plus-page memoir, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State, makes no mention of Reagan’s speech that day. Nor does Jack Matlock in his book, Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended. Nor did Paul Nitze in his five-hundred-page memoir. Nonetheless, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall” became the hallmark, if not the highlight, of Reagan’s foreign policy, and, as Time declared twenty years later, the most famous words of his presidency.

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The president and the general secretary signed each copy in eight places, their sixteen signatures scrupulously guided by a hovering diplomat, who indicated just where they should sign. In the middle of this stilted procedure, Gorbachev turned to Reagan and, with an impish grin, asked if he might like to exchange pens. “Let’s keep these pens for memory’s sake,” he said. Reagan considered this a fine idea and smiled as they traded pens. LIKE MANY THINGS AFTER Reykjavik—including Reagan’s exhortation to “tear down this Wall” and the completion of the treaty itself—this East Room ceremony nearly didn’t happen. A glitch had suddenly arisen earlier that day. Under the treaty terms, each side had to furnish a photograph of its missile, so the other could know what to identify during its monitoring.

The Year That Changed the World: The Untold Story Behind the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Michael Meyer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, call centre, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, haute couture, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing

Boyd, the New York Times, June 13, 1987, as well as retrospectives on the twentieth anniversary of the speech: Bild, “The Great Speech That Changed the World”; Associated Press, “Reagan’s ‘Tear Down This Wall’ Speech Turns 20”; Time, “20 Years After ‘Tear Down This Wall’ ”; American Conservative, review of Rise of the Vulcans, by Georgie Anne Geyer, June 7, 2004. For George H. W. Bush’s reaction to the fall of the Wall, see Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War, 1993. Peter Robinson’s fascinating book, How Ronald Reagan Changed My Life, 2003, was a key source for the background on Reagan’s immortal speech. Additional references: Hoover Digest, “Tearing Down That Wall,” by Peter M.

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“We stood our ground” for America as a “leading light, a guiding star, the greatest nation on the face of the Earth”—language inspired directly by Reagan. Then he concluded with the ultimate exculpation, as if he were a latter-day Saint Sebastian: “Ronald Reagan, too, was called a ‘warmonger,’ an ‘amiable dunce,’ an actor detached from reality. Yet within a few years after President Reagan left office, the Berlin Wall came down, the Evil Empire collapsed, the Cold War was won.” Everyone hears the echo. Everyone knows the reference. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” A generation of speechwriters wish they had crafted that clarion call. A generation of statesmen wish they had uttered it, among them many who belittled it at the time.

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All this became magnified under the second Bush administration, particularly after September 11. Just as the new president took office modeling himself on Ronald Reagan, so did many senior officials around him, few more happily than those who had been marginalized during Reagan’s later years, or marginalized once more under the first Bush administration. Born-again, they resurrected the in-your-face rhetoric of early Reagan and amped it up. They made his myth—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”—into operational dictum. Traditional American idealism—the United States as a lamp unto nations, enjoying a special providence—morphed into a crude Manichaean dialectic: good versus evil, us versus them.

The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall by Mary Elise Sarotte

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, hindsight bias, Mikhail Gorbachev, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban decay, éminence grise

It is possible to research this speech in the original sources at the Reagan Library: see in particular RRPL, White House Staff Member and Office Files, Files of Peter M. Robinson, Files 1983–1988, Series I, Drafts, Box 9, Subject File, Notes from Berlin Pre-Advance. Also useful are the speechwriter’s own comments; see Peter Robinson, It’s My Party: A Republican’s Messy Love Affair with the GOP (New York: Warner Books, 2000), and Peter M. Robinson, “Four Words That Moved the World: ‘Tear Down This Wall,’” Wall Street Journal, June 9, 2012. See also Romesh Ratnesar, Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009), which includes the text of the speech; the quotation from Reagan’s speech is at 210. 16.

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Even decades later, the most famous call for an end to that division—delivered by Reagan himself on June 12, 1987—did not result in any opening of the barriers. Reagan made this call in a speech delivered at the same location in front of the Berlin Wall from which Brokaw would broadcast the actual, chaotic opening two and a half years later. In his address, Reagan challenged the Soviet leader personally: “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace . . . come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”15 Despite these dramatic lines—which some of Reagan’s own advisors had attempted to cut from the speech because they found them too confrontational—no opening of the gate, or even tentative agreement or provision for a future opening, resulted.

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To cite just two of the many examples: (1) Soviet expert Jonathan Haslam could still write that “Krenz . . . instructed that the barriers be raised” (Haslam, Russia’s Cold War [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011], 391); and (2) the volume on US foreign policy in the seemingly definitive Oxford University Press History of the United States series could state that, following the ouster of “the recalcitrant hard-liner Erich Honecker,” on “November 9, his successor opened the Berlin Wall to passage without visas” (Herring, From Colony to Superpower, 905). 35. The gist of this narrative is that when Reagan speaks, “even walls fall down,” as summarized in Ratnesar, Tear Down This Wall, 195. Ratnesar does acknowledge that factors other than Reagan’s speech played a role in the opening of the Wall and acknowledges the contributions of Germans themselves elsewhere in the book, so his book is not the most strident advocate of this view. 36. See, for example, Charles Maier, “What Have We Learned Since 1989?”

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

Then the final two sentences that flow inexorably on to their conclusion in the speech’s title. This is his finest hour. You are on fire, sir. RONALD REAGAN Tear Down This Wall The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin 12 June 1987 The most successful electoral politician of any era of American politics, Ronald Reagan was, to use a coinage of George W. Bush, the most mis-underestimated president of modern times. He was also, as much as Wilson and Eisenhower, a war leader. Reagan’s war was the Cold War and it ended in a decisive victory. The Cold War was a war of ideas, a war conducted through cultural imperialism and fine words.

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Kennedy: Ask Not What Your Country Can Do for You, Washington DC, 20 January 1961 Barack Obama: I Have Never Been More Hopeful about America, Grant Park, Chicago, 7 November 2012 Pericles: Funeral Oration, Athens, Winter, c. 431 BC David Lloyd George: The Great Pinnacle of Sacrifice, Queen’s Hall, London, 19 September 1914 Woodrow Wilson: Making the World Safe for Democracy, Joint Session of the Two Houses of Congress, 2 April 1917 Winston Churchill: Their Finest Hour, House of Commons, 18 June 1940 Ronald Reagan: Tear Down This Wall, The Brandenburg Gate, Berlin, 12 June 1987 Elizabeth I of England: I Have the Heart and Stomach of a King, Tilbury, 9 August 1588 Benjamin Franklin: I Agree to This Constitution with All Its Faults, The Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, 17 September 1787 Jawaharlal Nehru: A Tryst with Destiny, Constituent Assembly, Parliament House, New Delhi, 14 August 1947 Nelson Mandela: An Ideal for Which I Am Prepared to Die, Supreme Court of South Africa, Pretoria, 20 April 1964 Aung San Suu Kyi: Freedom from Fear, European Parliament, Strasbourg, 10 July 1991 William Wilberforce: Let Us Make Reparations to Africa, House of Commons, London, 12 May 1789 Emmeline Pankhurst: The Laws That Men Have Made, The Portman Rooms, 24 March 1908 Isidora Dolores Ibárruri Gómez (La Pasionaria): No Pasarán, Mestal Stadium, Valencia, 23 August 1936 Martin Luther King: I Have a Dream, The March on Washington, 28 August 1963 Neil Kinnock: Why Am I the First Kinnock in a Thousand Generations?

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General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall! The chief writer of this speech, Peter Robinson, struggled to formulate the best line. His first draft read: ‘Herr Gorbachev, bring down this wall.’ In the second draft he wrote ‘take down’ instead. Then he tried it in German: ‘Herr Gorbachev, machen Sie dieses Tor auf.’ Eventually, at a Berlin dinner party Robinson heard a lady called Ingeborg Elz almost supply the right phrase: take down that wall. That was when the trouble really started. Reagan had to contend with the opinions of so many advisers, not a problem Pericles ever had.

The End of the Cold War: 1985-1991 by Robert Service

Able Archer 83, active measures, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Chicago School, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

Pry, War Scare: Russia and America on the Nuclear Brink (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999) Qian Qichen, Ten Episodes in China’s Diplomacy (New York: HarperCollins, 2005) R. Ratnesar, Tear Down This Wall: A City, a President, and the Speech That Ended the Cold War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009) N. Reagan, My Turn (New York: Random House, 1989) R. Reagan, An American Life: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990) Reagan: A Life in Letters, ed. K. Skinner, A. Anderson and M. Anderson (New York: Free Press, 2003) The Reagan Diaries (London: HarperCollins, 2007) The Reagan Diaries Unabridged, vols 1–2 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009) The Reagan Files: The Untold Story of Reagan’s Top-Secret Efforts to Win the Cold War, ed.

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Like Gorbachëv, he wanted a clear policy on how to deal with the potential fallout from the American President’s visit to West Germany in the following month. Shevardnadze asked his officials to help him plan for the future: ‘Reagan can propose the idea of the unification of Germany. Sharp reaction of our friends [in East Germany] to this idea. Think up long-term programme of work in this direction.’29 Reagan’s speechwriter Peter Robinson was drafting a speech exactly along the lines that Soviet leaders feared. Robinson wanted the President to say: ‘Mr Gorbachëv, tear down this wall!’ Although the phrase was not a summons to rebellion, it implicitly personalized responsibility for the changes that America wished to see in Eastern Europe.

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Insisting that the source of the trouble lay in Moscow, he issued the following injunction: ‘General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ He gave a consummate performance. Every phrase, pause and repetition in the speech was managed for the greatest impact. He remarked that the Soviet leadership had entered serious talks because NATO had increased its military strength. He expressed the hope that one day the two halves of Berlin could jointly host the Olympic games.33 Pravda, in a break with precedent, avoided an expression of anger.34 Calm was the order of the day in Moscow, if not in East Berlin where Honecker went on TV to release his splenetic fury.

The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

Able Archer 83, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, European colonialism, full employment, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, land reform, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Potemkin village, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Strategic Defense Initiative

Gorbachev’s emergence raised the possibility of convincing a Kremlin leader himself that the “evil empire” was a lost cause, and over the next several years Reagan tried to do this. His methods included quiet persuasion, continued assistance to anti-Soviet resistance movements, and as always dramatic speeches: the most sensational one came at the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on June 12, 1987, when—against the advice of the State Department—the president demanded: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”97 For once, a Reagan performance fell flat: the reaction in Moscow was unexpectedly restrained. Despite this challenge to the most visible symbol of Soviet authority in Europe, planning went ahead for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Washington summit later that year.

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Robert Orwell, George Ostpolitik Pahlavi, Mohammad Reza Shah Paine, Thomas Pakistan Paul VI, pope “peaceful coexistence,” Pearl Harbor attack Peloponnesian War Pentagon Papers People’s Daily perestroika (restructuring) Perestroika (Gorbachev) Pershing II missiles Pervukhin, Mikhail Philby, Kim Philippines Pinochet, Augusto “Plastic People of the Universe,” Plumbers Poland John Paul II and 1989 election in rise of Solidarity in Soviet non-intervention in Politburo, Soviet Pol Pot Portugal Potsdam Conference of 1945 Powers, Francis Gary Prague spring Pravda Public Group to Promote Observance of the Helsinki Accords Quemoy and Matsu crises Radio Free Europe Rákosi, Mátyás Reagan, Ronald abolition of nuclear weapons proposed by attempted assassination of détente as target of “evil empire” speech of Gorbachev and at Reykjavik summit rise of SDI concept and Soviet Union visited by “tear down this wall” speech of U.S.-Soviet relations and Reagan Doctrine Red Guards Republican Party, U.S. Reykjavik summit of 1986 Rhee, Syngman Rice, Condoleezza Ridgway, Matthew B. Romania 1989 Revolution in Roosevelt, Franklin D.

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For the drafting of this speech, see Richard Pipes, Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 197–200. 66 Speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, Orlando, Florida, March 8, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, p. 364; Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), pp. 569–70. 67 The figures are in Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, pp. 393–94. 68 Lettow, Ronald Reagan, p. 23; Reagan, An American Life, p. 13. 69 Radio-television address, March 23, 1983, Reagan Public Papers, 1983, pp. 442—43. 70 Ibid., p. 364. Lettow, Ronald Reagan, provides the best discussion of Reagan’s nuclear abolitionism. 71 Dobrynin, In Confidence, p. 528. 72 Ibid., p. 523. 73 Christopher Andrew and Oleg Gordievsky, KGB: The Inside Story of Its Foreign Operations from Lenin to Gorbachev (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), pp. 583–99. 74 Raymond Garthoff, The Great Transition: American-Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1994), pp. 118–31. 75 Ibid., pp. 138—41; Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era: The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1991, updated edition (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 65—68. 76 Radio-television address, January 16, 1984, Reagan Public Papers, 1984, p. 45.

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

For journalists and politicians alike, the Wall itself had long served as a made-to-order prop. Cinder block, barbed wire, armed guards, and German shepherds straining at the leash all combined to constitute a perfect metaphor for the Cold War. For this very reason, from John F. Kennedy (“Ich bin ein Berliner.”) to Ronald Reagan (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”), a succession of U.S. presidents intent on scoring propaganda points had made good use of the barrier’s visual potency, denouncing it as an affront to freedom, democracy, and human decency (even as they tacitly accepted its existence). Now festooned with dancing, singing, Sekt-swilling, sledgehammer-wielding young Germans, the Wall was undergoing a radical reconceptualization before a worldwide audience in real time.

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Dick and Ron Put Things Right Nothing better illustrates the process by which postwar normalcy was restored than the presidencies of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. During the Cold War, only three presidents managed to win two terms. Nixon and Reagan were two of those three. Their electoral success was well deserved: Nixon and Reagan were, in fact, the nation’s two most consequential chief executives of the late twentieth century, even if more recent events have greatly diminished their legacies. Many Americans today revile Nixon; as many remember Reagan fondly. For our purposes, their personal reputations are irrelevant, as are their lapses while in office.

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Rubio ran as the self-appointed heir of Ronald Reagan. Cruz went Rubio one better. He ran as the self-designated heir of Jesus Christ. Present-day Republicans tend to remember Reagan’s actual record selectively. Much the same applies to their adherence to Christ’s teachings. In this regard, Rubio and Cruz did not disappoint. Depicting Reagan as the best president in recent memory and Obama as the worst, Rubio used the Gipper’s first successful presidential campaign as a prototype for his own effort in 2016. In effect, Rubio ran against Jimmy Carter—or against the image of Carter that Reagan had successfully contrived in 1980.

America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power, and the Neoconservative Legacy by Francis Fukuyama

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, European colonialism, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, information security, Internet Archive, John Perry Barlow, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, no-fly zone, oil-for-food scandal, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus

The latter position was shared by people on the left who had some sympathy for the socialist aims of communism and disagreed only with the means, and by realists on the right who accepted communism as another form of government to which Western democracies would have to accommodate themselves. Neoconservatives after Vietnam simply continued to bear the torch of the earlier Cold War view about communism as a unique evil. Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but to "tear down this wall." His as- The Neoconservative Legacy sistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; and his proposal for a double zero in the intermediate-range nuclear forces negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien pensant centrist foreign policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department.

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But it should be clear that the neoconservative heritage was a complex one that had multiple strands, and that the specific policy implications for how to deal with China, Iraq, or the Europeans that one could derive from the underlying principles were not necessarily those chosen by Kristol and Kagan. WAS RONALD REAGAN A NEOCONSERVATIVE? IS GEORGE W. BUSH? The intertwining of neoconservatives with the mainstream conservative movement in America from the 1980s on raises some The Neoconservative Legacy interesting questions about who qualifies as a neoconservative. Kristol and Kagan explicitly claimed the mantle of Reaganism and sought to derive their foreign policy from his. To what extent is the foreign policy of George W. Bush simply a continuation of the tradition of Reaganism, and, to that extent, does it qualify President Bush as a neoconservative?

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On one level, it seems somewhat odd to call either Reagan or Bush a neoconservative. Neoconservatives were in their origin (mostly) Jewish intellectuals who loved to read, write, argue, and debate; in a sense, it was their intellectual brilliance, their ability to reflect, and the nuance and flexibility associated with intellectual debate that was most notable about them, and what set them apart from the paleoconservatives. Of the two presidents in question, Ronald Reagan in my view more clearly qualifies as a neoconservative. Much as his enemies are loath to admit it, Ronald Reagan was an intellectual of sorts: in the first decade or so of his career, all he had to offer were ideas and arguments about communism and the free market, American values, and the defects of the reigning liberal orthodoxy.

America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

He had written personal letters to the three Soviet leaders who had preceded Gorbachev—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—although he had been disappointed by their stolid replies. He could not make progress, he used to joke, “if they keep dying on me.” The rise of Gorbachev in early 1985 changed the dynamic. Even as Reagan built his relationship with the younger Soviet president, the U.S. president’s rhetorical diplomacy continued to frame U.S. strategy. In June 1987, Reagan stood before the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The president’s secretary of state, national security adviser, and most senior White House staff argued vigorously to cut the line. They worried that the president would look foolish, embarrass West German chancellor Helmut Kohl, anger Gorbachev, and stir up false hope in East Germany.

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Link, “The Higher Realism of Woodrow Wilson,” Journal of Presbyterian History 41, no. 1 (March 1963), 1–13; Ernest May, The World War and American Isolation: 1914–1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 437; Francis Gavin, “The Wilsonian Legacy in the Twentieth Century,” Orbis 41, no. 4 (Autumn 1997), 632; David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest (New York: Random House, 1972), 56. More broadly, see Martin Walker, “Woodrow Wilson and the Cold War: ‘Tear Down This Wall, Mr. Gorbachev,’” in Cooper, Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, 279, 282. 77. See Throntveit, Power Without Victory, though WW did not consider himself to be a “pragmatist” (see 10). See also idem., “ ‘Common Counsel’: Woodrow Wilson’s Pragmatic Progressivism,” in Cooper, Reconsidering Woodrow Wilson, 25. 78.

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See George Shultz, foreword in Skinner, Reagan, in His Own Hand, x for MacFarlane; Brands, Reagan, 734. 29. Cannon, President Reagan, 26; Brands, Reagan, 734 (flattered); Rowland and Jones, Reagan at Westminster, 30 (themes). 30. Skinner, Reagan, in His Own Hand, especially 4–14. 31. Rowland and Jones, Reagan at Westminster, 38; see Skinner, Reagan, in His Own Hand, ix for Shultz. 32. Brands, Reagan, 734; see Skinner, Reagan, in His Own Hand, ix for Shultz. 33. Hayward, Age of Reagan, 3–4; Brands, Reagan, 157. 34. Hayward, Age of Reagan, 3; Brands, Reagan, 12, 725. 35. Brands, Reagan, 734; Cannon, President Reagan, 12. 36.

1983: Reagan, Andropov, and a World on the Brink by Taylor Downing

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, Herman Kahn, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear paranoia, nuclear winter, RAND corporation, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, Yom Kippur War

Then, reaching his climax, and to growing cheers from the Berlin crowd, Reagan, with his actor’s sense of timing, called out, ‘Mr Gorbachev, Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’23 The speech did much to revive his reputation as a Cold War warrior. And it forever linked Reagan with the fall of the Wall, even though this came two years later, in very different circumstances and well after he had left the White House. The result of the intense diplomacy between Shultz and Shevardnadze came in the Washington summit, held more than two years after the first in Geneva. Reagan had hoped to invite Gorbachev to a triumphant tour of the US, starting in Washington and culminating in a few days on his ranch in California.

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There are slightly different accounts of this meeting by those present but the gist is exactly the same, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff were keen to find a way around the MX impasse and eagerly put forward the defence initiative, that McFarlane took this up with enthusiasm, and that Watkins used the final phrase about ‘protecting’ rather than ‘avenging’ the American people. 16 Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, p.130. 17 Cannon, President Reagan, pp.330–1. 18 Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, p.139. 19 REAGAN: Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security, 23 March 1983. 20 Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, p.140. 21 Fitzgerald, Way Out There in the Blue, p.210ff; and Morgan, Reagan, p.218. 22 Dobrynin, In Confidence, p.528. 23 Pravda, 27 March 1983, quoted in Isaacs and Downing, Cold War, pp.390–1. 6 Lack of Intelligence 1 NSA: CIA Biographical Profile of Yuriy Vladimirovich Andropov, 11 January 1983. 2 Gates, From the Shadows, p.199. 3 Ibid., pp.203–7. 4 Ibid., p.238. 5 Reagan, An American Life, p.551. 6 FLASHBACK: Interview with Robert Gates. 7 Gates, From the Shadows, p.259. 8 George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, p.5. 9 Ibid., p.165. 10 Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp.484–5. 11 Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, p.131. 12 Dobrynin, In Confidence, pp.517–22. 13 Reagan, An American Life, p.551. 14 Gates, From the Shadows, p.264. 7 Double Agents 1 In line with most of the Soviet bloc intelligence organisations, officers in the KGB held military ranks.

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., p.244. 19 NSA: Reagan’s Nuclear War Briefing Declassified, Briefing Book no. 575: Documents 15, 16 & 17. 20 Reagan, An American Life, p.13. 21 Ibid., p.550. 22 Ibid., p.257. 23 REAGAN: Address at Commencement Exercises at Eureka College, Illinois, 9 May 1982. 24 Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence, p.502. 25 Reagan, The Reagan Diaries, p.75. 26 Nate Jones, Able Archer 83, p.9. 27 REAGAN: Address to Members of the British Parliament, 8 June 1982. 28 REAGAN: Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida, 8 March 1983. 29 Reagan, An American Life, p.570. 4 Operation RYaN 1 The story was later told by General Adrian Danilevich to American Defense officials after the Cold War; see NSA: John G.

On the Road: Adventures From Nixon to Trump by James Naughtie

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Julian Assange, Mikhail Gorbachev, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, plutocrats, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, white flight, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

He’d seen it all in the second half of the Cold War – exchanges of spies on the Glienicke Bridge, escapes across the wall, the to-and-fro exchanges between the occupying powers in West Berlin and the Soviets in the East. He was at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 when Reagan delivered his famous line, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ It pleased Kornblum, not least because he had written it. Looking back, he remembers it as a message not so much to Moscow, but to the West German government in Bonn. I thought up the Reagan speech and I organised it. We did it for one very specific reason, because at that time there was again a change of eras. It was the end of the Soviet Union, the one country that would profit the most from the end of the Soviet Union was trying to prop it up, and that was Germany.

…

Gary Sick, who had worked on the National Security Council, published an account a decade later in which he claimed that Reagan’s campaign manager William Casey, who had a background in intelligence and was appointed as CIA director after the election, brokered a deal with Tehran in the course of the campaign that promised arms deliveries via Israel if the hostages were kept safe and only released after Reagan had been elected, thereby avoiding an ‘October Surprise’ that could have handed Carter the election in a moment of national celebration at a prisoners’ homecoming. Barbara Honegger, who worked on Reagan’s campaign, supported the thrust of Sick’s theory. Two separate congressional investigations in the 1990s, however, failed to produce clinching evidence, leaving the case unproven.

…

When Americans decide to be formal, they go for broke: everyone at this union dinner appeared to be wearing patent leather shoes, and their tuxedos were sharp. Here was a gathering of political heavyweights on the Democratic side, but taking place in Michigan, a state that Reagan had won by a huge margin. The extent of Reagan’s blue-collar support in 1980 had shocked them, and they suspected, rightly, that there was much more of that to come. That explained the downbeat quality of the evening. Mondale’s speech was routine and flat. It lacked fire, surprisingly from someone who was purporting to be ready to take on Reagan, but it was obvious that in the UAW the Carter years were not seen as good ones for the men who built America’s cars, however much they might pay homage to Mondale’s support for organised labour throughout his time in public life.

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

But Shultz still had to battle with administration hawks and opponents on Capitol Hill and to convince the president’s alter ego that the Soviets were serious. Privately Reagan assured his old friend William Buckley, a noted anti-communist ideologue, in May: ‘I have not changed my belief that we are dealing with an “evil empire”.’ And he kept up the propaganda war with a rousing speech in front of the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate on 12 June. Challenging the Soviet leader to show that perestroika and glasnost were more than ‘token gestures’, the president called for one ‘unmistakable’ sign of his commitment to ‘freedom and peace’: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ He had made this demand many times before but repeated it in this headline-catching venue to show he was not a politically crippled president and to prove his continued toughness in dealing with Moscow.82 Shultz also had to secure the agreement of America’s NATO allies for the ‘double-zero’ deal on INFs and SRINFs in Europe.

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‘Letter, Ronald Reagan to Liuba Vaschenko, 11 October 1984’, in Kiron Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds, Reagan: A Life in Letters (New York, 2003), 380. 8. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Simi Valley CA (henceforth RRPL), Robert McFarlane files, Reorganized Archival Collection (henceforth RAC) Box 3, Memorandum, Shultz to Reagan: USG-Soviet relations, 3 March 1983. 9. Paul Lettow, Ronald Reagan and his Quest to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (New York, 2005), xi, 37–8. 10. John F. Burns, ‘Gromyko rejects Reagan arms plan’, New York Times, 3 April 1983, 10. 11. Reagan, Address to the Nation on the Soviet Attack on a Korean Civilian Airliner, 5 September 1983, The American Presidency Project (henceforth APP) website, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?

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Hoffman, The Dead Hand, 235, 237. 38. Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (New York, 2007), 383. 39. ‘Memorandum, Poindexter to Reagan, Gorbachev’s handwritten letter, 15 February 1986’, copy at http://endofcoldwarforum.org/sites/default/files/docs/reagan/STY-1986-02-15.pdf. 40. RRPL, Robert E. Linhard files, RAC Box 6, Memorandum, Paul Nitze: Transition to defense, 4 April 1985, 2–3. 41. RRPL, Robert E. Linhard files, RAC Box 6, Email, McFarlane to Linhard: SDI, 30 March 1985. 42. RRPL, Robert McFarlane files, RAC Box 1, Memorandum, William Clark to Reagan: The anti-nuclear movement, 22 April 1982, 4. 43.

The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

There, before a worldwide audience, he challenged the Soviet Union to make good on its proposals for world peace. ‘‘If you seek liberation: Come here to the gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’’56 The speech was the most impressive since John Kennedy confronted the Soviet Union at the same place, but this time the United States stood poised to vanquish its adversary. Reagan seemed to have the momentum in negotiations as well as rhetoric, but in the Washington summit that December, it was Gorbachev who was the media 100 THE AMERICA THAT REAGAN BUILT star. After meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, President John F. Kennedy described him as ‘‘rude and savage,’’ with a ‘‘vicious and sneering manner.’’57 That was the stereotype of Russian leaders until Gorbachev came to Washington.

…

After the attempted assassination of her husband, Nancy Reagan began regular consultations with an astrologer, Joan Quigley, whose charts helped set the president’s schedule.40 Ronald Reagan was casual in his superstitions, but Nancy Reagan became convinced that Quigley’s advice had protected her husband from repeated assassination attempts. Real and imagined dangers led the White House to defer final acceptance for any event until Mrs. Reagan had approved. Much of the Bitburg fiasco was attributable to Nancy Reagan’s superstitions, and the world will never know how much of the Iran-Contra mismanagement was a consequence of Nancy Reagan and her astrologer.

…

After rambling through several topics, Reagan looked into Gorbachev’s eyes and told him: ‘‘I do hope for the sake of our children that we can find some way to avert this terrible, escalating arms race.’’ Then he paused, and Gorbachev, thinking Reagan was finished, opened his mouth to speak, but the president was not through: ‘‘because if we can’t America will not lose it, I assure you.’’52 98 THE AMERICA THAT REAGAN BUILT President Reagan and Soviet General Gorbachev at the first Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, November 19, 1985. (Courtesy, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library) Reagan continued staring into Gorbachev’s eyes while the Russian interpreter translated his words.

The Abandonment of the West by Michael Kimmage

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, City Beautiful movement, classic study, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gunnar Myrdal, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

After November 1989 when the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War effectively evaporated, Reagan’s 1987 speech would be remembered not for the call to create a safer, freer world in cooperation with the Soviet East—and still less for its call to make Berlin the air transportation hub of Europe. It would be remembered for one simple phrase: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”21 REAGAN WAS NO hero to academics, and in the 1980s American academia and the White House were as out of sorts as they had been in the late 1960s and early 1970s. American academia was outgrowing the West. In November 1968, San Francisco State College students protested for a School of Ethnic and Area Studies.

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It was the unconditional surrender of the East (minus China) and the ideological victory of the West, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say civilizational victory, even if civilization was far less common a cultural and political category in 1989 than it had been in the 1940s and 1950s. A Reagan administration official would equate the end of the Cold War with the end of history itself. Reagan’s optimism obscured much history that was not triumphant. It obscured the political divisions over Vietnam, which by the 1970s were divisions about American politics, American culture, American society. Reagan was a polarizing president in the 1980s, just as he had been a polarizing governor of California in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At the Reagan-era universities, the culture wars signaled the discontents of many students and professors. They would not endorse Reagan or the Cold War as the United States had learned to fight it.

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Partially in response to a culture in flux, the conservative movement from which Reagan’s thinking and his campaign had emerged thrilled to Reagan’s presence in the White House while despairing about the direction of Reagan’s America, which was ever drifting away from the ideals and the hierarchies of the Columbian Republic. Unlike Kennedy’s or Truman’s, Reagan’s optimism about the West was conservative. It was not a bipartisan affiliation, and it was everywhere contested. Unifying a figure as he was for conservatives, Reagan was also anomalous as an American conservative, and to a degree he was anomalous in his attitude toward the West.

Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear by Dr. Frank Luntz

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bonfire of the Vanities, call centre, citizen journalism, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, glass ceiling, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, It's morning again in America, pension reform, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, school vouchers, Steve Jobs, upwardly mobile, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight

Restore hope (“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) . . . Inspire a generation (“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”) . . . Urge personal responsibility (“Be the change you wish to see in the world”) . . . End tyranny (“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”) . . . Dream dreams (“Some men see things as they are and ask why; I dream of things that never were and ask, why not”). If a face can launch a thousand ships, a few good words can change history. And what all those great phrases of the ages have in common is in their inspirational and aspirational tone: each is positive, uplifting, and delivers a call to action.

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If unemployment and inflation are up and confidence in the future is down, telling voters that life has gotten worse, while clearly factual, is less effective than asking voters “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan asked Jimmy Carter and the tens of millions of debate listeners this devastating political question in their only face-to-face campaign encounter in 1980. No litany of economic data or political accusation could carry the power of a simple rhetorical question that for most Americans had an equally simple answer. “Are you better off” framed not just the debate, held only five days before the election, but the entire campaign, and it propelled Reagan from dead even to a nine-point victory over the incumbent Carter. An even simpler question was posed hypothetically by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the months leading up to the 2006 midterm elections.

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When the pictures are powerful and emotional, they override if not completely drown out the sound. I mean it, Lesley. Nobody heard you.”12 The happy pictures of President Reagan—looking strong and amiable and, well, presidential—undermined the context for Stahl’s harsh critique. Providing proper context is rule number one of communication, but visual impact can obliterate rule number one. A visual context that supports and reinforces your language will provide a multiplier effect, making your message that much stronger. And, as the Stahl-Reagan anecdote illustrates, a striking visual context can overwhelm the intended verbal message entirely. It’s no accident that contemporary politicians have learned to array American flags in the background of their press conferences or speak in front of themed backdrops, pronouncing the subject and message just in case the speech doesn’t make it abundantly clear.

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

"General Secretary Gorbachev," Reagan declared, "if you seek peace--if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe--if you seek liberalization, come here, to this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" The speech was classic Reagan, infused with his powerful faith in freedom and prosperity and the link between the two. Reagan recalled in his memoir that when he saw the wall, he spoke with genuine anger in his voice. Gorbachev still did not entirely understand Reagan, nor his rhetoric, and called Chernyaev a few days later. "He is trying to provoke us, to make us snap, which would help them get the Soviet threat back. If, like Reagan, I was giving interviews every week, I would say that he hasn't forgotten his previous occupation over these eight years."35 Gorbachev's retreat from the arms race led to confusion not only in the military but in the prestigious defense institutes and design bureaus.

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.: Public Affairs Press, 1969), pp. 212, 219-221. 11 The author covered the Reagan campaign as a reporter for Knight-Ridder newspapers, and never picked up on Reagan's nuclear abolitionist views. Yet his thinking was expressed in earlier years. See Reagan's 1963 speech text, "Are Liberals Really Liberal?" in Reagan in His Own Hand, and Reagan's address to the 1976 Republican National Convention, Anderson, pp. 69-71. 12 Reagan, "Peace: Restoring the Margin of Safety," address to the Veterans of Foreign Wars Convention, Chicago, August 18, 1980. 13 David Hoffman, "Reagan's Lure Is His Optimism," Detroit Free Press, Summer 1980. 14 Reagan, An American Life, p. 267. 15 Anatoly Dobrynin, In Confidence: Moscow's Ambassador to America's Six Cold War Presidents (New York: Times Books, 1995), p. 484. 16 Lou Cannon, Ronald Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 299-301.

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Oberdorfer, who covered the trip for the Washington Post, reports that Gorbachev said he would be willing to reduce existing nuclear weapons to zero on condition the two sides stopped the "militarization of space," Don Oberdorfer, From the Cold War to a New Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), p. 137. 66 Reagan diary, Nov. 5, 1985. 67 Reagan diary, Nov. 6, 1985. 68 Reagan, An American Life, p. 632. 69 Sagdeev, pp. 268-269. 70 Gates, p. 358. 71 Matlock, pp. 134-135, 158. 72 Oberdorfer, p. 143. 73 Reagan, An American Life, p. 635. 74 This account of the summit meetings is based on the official U.S. minutes, unless otherwise specified. 75 Gorbachev, p. 406. 76 Reagan diary, Nov. 19, 1985. 77 Reagan, An American Life, p. 636. 78 Gorbachev, p. 408. 79 Dobrynin recalls that this agreement for reciprocal visits was precooked quietly by him, p. 589. Reagan had also envisioned meeting again.

Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America, 1970 to the Present by Jeff Madrick

Abraham Maslow, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bear Stearns, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carl Icahn, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, desegregation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, inflation targeting, inventory management, invisible hand, John Bogle, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kitchen Debate, laissez-faire capitalism, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, price stability, quantitative easing, Ralph Nader, rent control, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, tail risk, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, too big to fail, union organizing, V2 rocket, value at risk, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Also, Jeff Madrick, “Time for a New Deal,” New York Review of Books, September 25, 2008. 13 MANY CLAIMED, DESPITE THE LOW WAGES: See, for example, economist Jason Furman, http://www.slate.com/id/2144517. 14 SUCH AS COSTCO: See, for example, Christine Fey, “Costco’s Love of Labor,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 29, 2004, http://www.seattlepi.com/business/166680_costco29.html. 15 MCKINSEY, THE CONSULTING FIRM: James Hoopes, “Tear Down This Wall,” The American Prospect, June 4, 2004, Web only, http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?articleId=7812. 16 IT WAS NOT A MODEL: Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect, pp. 102–8. 17 SOON, KINNEY WAS GENERATING ENOUGH PROFIT: Connie Bruck, Master of the Game (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 48–58. 18 THEY IN TURN RESPONDED TO HIS CHARM: Ibid., p. 129. 19 “HE WAS A GUY”: Ibid., p. 363. 20 HE EVEN CLAIMED: Ibid., p. 84. 21 WITH SO MUCH MONEY COMING IN: Ibid., p. 104. 22 BY THE END OF THE 1970S, ROSS WAS AT THE TOP: The following information is based on press releases and media reports of the periods cited. 23 TURNER WAS BORN IN 1938: What follows is based on several books about Ted Turner, many of which corroborate the same facts.

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., p. 312. 15 “I, IN MY OWN MIND”: Commencement address, Williams Woods College, June 1952. 16 MARTIN ANDERSON, A PRINCIPAL ECONOMIC ADVISER: Martin Anderson, Revolution: The Reagan Legacy (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), p. 164. 17 BUT LOU CANNON WROTE: Cannon, President Reagan, p. 202. 18 “TODAY,” REAGAN SAID IN A SPEECH IN 1959: Ibid., p. 121. 19 “TO REAGAN … THERE ARE”: Dallek, Ronald Reagan, p. 132. 20 AS FOR COMMUNISM: Cannon, President Reagan, p. 292; John Patrick Diggins, Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom and the Making of History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), pp. 7–12. 21 REAGAN MENTIONED HIS FELLOW CONVERT: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 268. 22 “AT HEART,” WROTE CHAMBERS: Whittaker Chambers, Jr., Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), p. 4. 23 “WE ARE FACED WITH”: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?

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, p. 311. 24 IT SHOULD NOT HAVE COME AS A SURPRISE: Morris, Dutch, pp. 472–73. 25 THE STORY HE TOLD AMERICANS: In general, Wills, Reagan’s America, and in particular, p. 338. 26 “THE BASIS OF THE DRAMATIC FORM”: Reagan and Hubler, Where’s the Rest of Me?, p. 294. 27 “REAGAN’S CAPACITY FOR SELF-DENIAL”: Cannon, President Reagan, p. 190. 28 CANNON BELIEVED REAGAN SIMPLY THOUGHT: Cannon, Governor Reagan, pp. 116–17. 29 HE WROTE IN A LATER MEMOIR: Kiron K. Skinner, Annelise Anderson, and Martin Anderson, eds., Reagan in His Own Hand: The Writings of Ronald Reagan That Reveal His Revolutionary Vision for America (New York: Free Press, 2001), p. 67. 30 GARRY WILLS, HOWEVER: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 339. 31 CANNON LEANS TOWARD: Cannon, Governor Reagan, pp. 112–13. 32 “A TIME FOR CHOOSING”: For the speech actually made, with a different opening paragraph, see http://www.nationalcenter.org/ReaganChoosing1964.html. 33 “GOLDWATER HAD BECOME A CAUSE”: Morris, Dutch, p. 333. 34 IT WAS MORE LIKELY A STANCE: For example, Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 367. 35 THEIR ADVICE WAS PREDICTABLE: Cannon, Governor Reagan, pp. 136–40; Wills, Reagan’s America, pp. 346–54. 36 WHEN FOX WENT TO SELL IT SOON AFTER: Cannon, President Reagan, p. 354; Dan Moldea and Jeff Goldberg, “Film Company Paid the Candidate a Steep Price for Some Steep Land to Make Him a Millionaire,” Wall Street Journal, August 1, 1980. 37 WELFARE POLICIES WERE RESULTING: Cannon, Governor Reagan, p. 350. 38 “WE MUST RETURN”: Ibid., p. 216. 39 REAGAN HAD A PERFECT CAMPAIGN ISSUE: Ibid., pp. 338–39. 40 “WELFARE IS THE GREATEST DOMESTIC PROBLEM”: Ibid., p. 342. 41 LOU CANNON INSISTED REAGAN: Ibid., p. 122. 42 “WE NEVER THOUGHT”: Author interview with Walter Shorenstein, July 2004. 43 HE AND THE DEMOCRATS JOINTLY AGREED: Cannon, Governor Reagan, p. 359. 44 GOVERNMENT SPENDING KEPT RISING UNDER REAGAN: Wills, Reagan’s America, p. 373. 45 REAGAN FORMED THE TAX REDUCTION TASK FORCE: Author interviews with Lewis Uhler, January 12, 2004, and February and March 2004.

Burning Down the Haus: Punk Rock, Revolution, and the Fall of the Berlin Wall by Tim Mohr

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, cuban missile crisis, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentrification, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, off-the-grid, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sexual politics, side project

Gorbachev’s star had long since eclipsed Reagan’s in both Germanies, and there was little interest in, or West German media coverage of, the speech. The previous week, at nearly the same location as Reagan’s speech, David Bowie, the Eurythmics, and Genesis had headlined open-air shows on three successive nights as part of anniversary celebrations. Each night a couple thousand East Germans had tried to approach the Brandenburg Gate from the east in order to hear the music; for Reagan, they didn’t bother. “Mr. Gorbachev,” Reagan intoned, “tear down this wall,” And nobody on either side of the Berlin Wall gave a fuck. 51 Two days later, organizers of the Church Conference from Below met in Halle for the last major planning session prior to the event.

…

There was Anne Clark’s “Poem for a Nuclear Romance,” the Sisters of Mercy’s “Black Planet,” the Cure’s “A Strange Day”—the list goes on and on. This was the bleak reality of life while Reagan held the nuclear launch codes. On June 11, 1987, despite rain, tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets of West Berlin. Demonstrators torched cars and smashed store windows. Police fought back with tear gas and batons. “Reagan is a murderer and a fascist!” the demonstrators chanted. Feelings for Reagan were no warmer in the East. Kids in the East had also grown up with a genuine sense of fear that the world might actually come to an end during their lifetime.

…

For some, this fueled nihilistic feelings—one reason Toster from die Anderen, for instance, never got deeply political was because he stopped giving a shit. Forget changing the world, let’s have a party. To Toster, the posturing, especially from Reagan, was like a pissing contest—but one that affected the whole world. And while Gorbachev had raised hopes a little, the future still looked dim with the tough-talking Reagan in power in the U.S. On June 12, the day following the protests in West Berlin, Reagan delivered his speech at the Brandenburg Gate, with the Berlin Wall as a backdrop. Police sealed off the entire Western district of Kreuzberg in order to contain protesters they feared would overwhelm the modest audience assembled at the site of the speech.

The Cold War: A World History by Odd Arne Westad

Able Archer 83, Albert Einstein, American ideology, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, imperial preference, Internet Archive, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, out of africa, post-industrial society, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South China Sea, special economic zone, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez crisis 1956, union organizing, urban planning, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

The relationship between Gorbachev and Honecker soon soured. Gorbachev tired of the East German leader’s constant reminders of the need for the USSR to support the GDR. Honecker also complained about less-than-flattering treatment of the GDR in Soviet papers. When Reagan dared the Soviet leader to end the division of Germany in a 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate—“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall”—Gorbachev bristled. He told his advisers that he would not let the Americans set his European policy. But even so, Gorbachev’s closest foreign affairs aide, Anatolii Cherniaev, wrote in his diary, “He feels it in his heart that the problem cannot be removed and that someday the Germans will reunite.”21 What really galled Gorbachev was that East German intransigence prevented him from doing what he considered really important for the Soviet Union, not least economically: to draw closer to West Germany and, through the Germans, to western Europe.

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Reagan to Gorbachev, 11 March 195, NSA-DA, http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/dc.html?doc=2755702-Document-02. 10. Entry for 10 October 1983, Ronald Reagan, The Reagan Diaries (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), 186. 11. Reagan State of the Union address, 25 January 1984, PPP Reagan 1984, 1:93. 12. Record of conversation, Reagan–Gorbachev, 20 November 1985, Geneva, in Svetlana Savranskaya and Thomas Blanton, eds., The Last Superpower Summits. Gorbachev, Reagan, and Bush. Conversations That Ended the Cold War (Budapest: Central European Press, 2016), 112. 13. Mikhail Gorbachev, Political Report of the CPSU Central Committee to the 27th Party Congress (Moscow: Novosti, 1986), 5, 6. 14.

…

The threat of nuclear war was ever more immediate, especially as both sides were developing new, lighter, and more easily targetable weapons. And there was the rhetoric, which by 1982–83 had reached fever pitch. Reagan spoke of the USSR as “the focus of evil in the modern world.” The Soviets spoke of Reagan as the new Hitler. “Reagan’s vulgar speeches show the true face of the military-industrial complex. They have long sought such a figure. Now, they have finally found it in the form of Reagan,” said Iurii Andropov, who after Brezhnev’s death in 1982 replaced him as Soviet leader.1 The Cold War in the early 1980s was very perilous, probably more so than at any other time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Californian Ideology, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, computer age, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, global village, Google Earth, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, invention of radio, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, lolcat, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, pre–internet, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Sinatra Doctrine, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, Steve Jobs, Streisand effect, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Journalists, always keen to sacrifice nuance in the name of supposed clarity, are the worst abusers of Cold War history for the purpose of explaining the imperative to promote Internet freedom to their audience. Roger Cohen, a foreign affairs columnist for the International Herald Tribune, writes that while “Tear down this wall!” was a twentieth-century cry, the proper cry for the twenty-first century is “Tear down this firewall!” Foreign Affairs’ David Feith argues that “just as East Germans diminished Soviet legitimacy by escaping across Checkpoint Charlie, ‘hacktivists’ today do the same by breaching Internet cyber walls.”

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The person to blame for popularizing such views happens to be the same hero many conservatives widely believe to have won the Cold War itself: Ronald Reagan. Since he was the man in charge of all those Western radio broadcasts and spearheaded the undercover support to samizdat-printing dissidents, any account that links the fall of communism to the role of technology would invariably glorify Reagan’s own role in the process. Reagan, however, did not have to wait for future interpretations. Proclaiming that “breezes of electronic beams blow through the Iron Curtain as if it was lace,” he started the conversation that eventually degenerated into the dreamy world of “virtual curtains” and “cyber-walls.” Once Reagan announced that “information is the oxygen of the modern age” and that “it seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders,” pundits, politicians, and think-tankers knew they had a metaphorical treasure trove while Reagan’s numerous supporters saw this narrative as finally acknowledging their hero’s own gigantic contribution to ushering in democracy into Europe.

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Once Reagan announced that “information is the oxygen of the modern age” and that “it seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders,” pundits, politicians, and think-tankers knew they had a metaphorical treasure trove while Reagan’s numerous supporters saw this narrative as finally acknowledging their hero’s own gigantic contribution to ushering in democracy into Europe. (China’s microchip manufacturers must have been laughing all the way to the bank when Reagan predicted that “the Goliath of totalitarianism will be brought down by the David of the microchip.”) It just took a few months to add analytical luster to Reagan’s pronouncements and turn it into something of a coherent history. In 1990, the RAND Corporation, a California-based think tank that, perhaps by the sheer virtue of its propitious location, never passes up an opportunity to praise the powers of modern technology, reached a strikingly similar conclusion.

Gorbachev by William Taubman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Able Archer 83, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, card file, conceptual framework, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, haute couture, indoor plumbing, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade liberalization, young professional

CHAPTER 13 1989: TRIUMPH AND TROUBLE ABROAD IN THE LONG RUN, THE FALL of the Berlin Wall was inevitable. How could Germans remain forever separated when they were so attached (occasionally too attached) to their shared nationhood? But when and how the wall fell was not predictable. It did not fall because in the summer of 1987 President Reagan declared, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Nor because Gorbachev decided on his own to order the East Germans to do so. Rather, the actual fall resembled the theater of the absurd.1 Under pressure from massive opposition demonstrations in early November 1989, the East German Politburo opted for new, temporary travel rules permitting “permanent exit” from the German Democratic Republic.

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., Reagan and Gorbachev, 156. 158 Dobrynin, In Confidence, 591. 159 Regan, For the Record, 312–13. 160 Author’s interview with Gorbachev, May 2, 2007, Moscow. 161 Reagan, American Life, 12–15. 162 Regan, For the Record, 315. 163 Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum, “Address at Commencement Exercises at Eureka College, Eureka, Illinois, on May 9, 1982,” Public Papers of President Ronald W. Reagan, May 9, 1982, http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/­archives/speeches/1982/50982a.htm. 164 FitzGerald, Way Out There, 54. 165 Nancy Reagan, My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan (New York: Random House, 1989), 66. 166 Ibid., 336. 167 Ibid., 44–54, on astrology; Regan, For the Record, 300, on the château. 168 N. Reagan, My Turn, 336–40. 169 Regan, For the Record, 314. 170 R.

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“I don’t want to do anything dumb,” he told Scowcroft in late January.20 He also had a complicated relationship with Reagan and Reaganism that held him back. Bush wanted to emerge from Reagan’s shadow as his own man, “to put his own fingerprint on the country’s foreign policy,” as Baker later put it. But he also feared right-wing attacks for being more liberal than Reagan, which he could avoid by being tougher on the Russians than Reagan had been. Bush knew from the letter that Kissinger brought back from Moscow that Gorbachev was (in Bush’s words) “ready to pick up immediately from where the Reagan administration had left off,” but instead Bush decreed the “pause.”21 Gorbachev was puzzled, then “offended” (according to Grachev), that “his newly discovered ‘friend George’ was not ready to render him the support he so badly needed,” “afraid” (Chernyaev recalled) that “everything he had achieved with Reagan” might be “lost.”22 He could tolerate a short delay, but weeks and months?

The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America by George Packer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, citizen journalism, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, company town, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, DeepMind, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, East Village, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, Flash crash, food desert, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, intentional community, Jane Jacobs, Larry Ellison, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Kinnock, new economy, New Journalism, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, oil shock, PalmPilot, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, public intellectual, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, smart grid, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, too big to fail, union organizing, uptick rule, urban planning, vertical integration, We are the 99%, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, white flight, white picket fence, zero-sum game

Now young people were protesting on Wall Street because the whole thing was hog-tied, but Dean tried to make the occupiers see the change that was coming, right there in Greensboro. In Tampa, Matt Weidner started blogging about Occupy just a few days after the protesters took the park, and didn’t let up. He compared it to Shays’ Rebellion just after the Revolutionary War, called it “the Tea Party with brains,” and in a post titled “Mr. President—Tear Down This Wall (Street),” he wrote: The Occupy Wall Street movement is just the beginning. Admittedly small, but powerful and frankly quite dangerous. Both to the established order and to the way of life that this country is currently infected by. This current way of life is not sustainable. This country has become a lie.

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It took Dean six years of bartending to graduate—at one stage his education was interrupted by a five-month trip with his best friend, Chris, to California, where they lived in a VW bus and pursued girls and good times—but in 1989 he finally earned his degree, in political science. Dean was a registered Republican, and Reagan was his idol. To Dean, Reagan was like a soothing grandfather: he had that ability to communicate and inspire people, like when he spoke about “a city upon a hill.” It was something Dean thought he could do as well, since he was a good speaker and came from a family of preachers. When Reagan talked, you trusted him, and he gave you hope that America could be great again. He was the only politician who ever made Dean want to become one himself—an idea that ended the week he was busted for smoking pot on the steps of a campus building and arrested a few days later for driving under the influence.

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The only one his father would help pay for was Bob Jones University, a Bible school in South Carolina. Bob Jones barred interracial dating and marriage, and in early 1982, a few months after Dean enrolled, the school became national news when the Reagan administration challenged an IRS decision that had denied Bob Jones tax-exempt status. After a storm of criticism, Reagan reversed himself. According to Dean, Bob Jones was the only college in the world where the barbed wire around the campus was turned inward, not outward, like at a prison. The boys had to keep their hair above their ears, and the only way to communicate with the girls on the other side of campus was to write a note and put it in a box that a runner would take from dorm to dorm.

The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape by Brian Ladd

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, full employment, megaproject, New Urbanism, planned obsolescence, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, urban planning, urban renewal

Before long, however, West Germany and its allies began to exploit the propaganda value of the Wall as a symbol of Communism's failure. 11 By the time of Kennedy's triumphal visit in June of 1963, a pilgrimage to the safely fortified forward post had become a favorite photo opportunity. Every state visitor in Bonn was if possible brought to Berlin to view the infamous Wall. President Ronald Reagan's visit in 1987, for example, sounded the metaphor of mobility and connectedness. He stood before the walled-off Brandenburg Gate and demanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." The East could respond in kind: it declared the statements of Western politicians at the Wall to be a provocation showing the necessity and the efficacy of the border fortifications, which they, too, proudly displayed to guestsat least to carefully selected ones.

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Kohl's way of honoring victims had already created a furor eight years before, when he persuaded President Ronald Reagan to accompany him to a German military cemetery in the town of Bitburg. The graves he asked Reagan to honor were of soldiers who had fought against U.S. troops in World War II; a few were members of the Waffen-SS. The Bitburg visit became a publicrelations disaster for Reagan, since he refused to embarrass Kohl by canceling it, despite protests from American war veterans and from Jewish groups. Under American pressure, however, the day's itinerary for May 5, 1985, was expanded to include a visit to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Through their remembrance, Kohl and Reagan linked, and effectively equated, two groups of victims: concentration camp prisoners and German soldiers.

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A brochure prepared for the Fort Lee auction described the segments of Wall as the perfect way to "decorate the entrance hall of your corporate headquarters, museum, or estate." 4 Some pieces were re-erected as works of artor were they just souvenirs? Others stood as victory monuments or Cold War booty, such as the piece ("hated symbol of, yes, an evil empire") proudly unveiled by former president Ronald Reagan at the dedication of his presidential library.5 It was difficult enough to define the meaning of Wall fragments removed to sites where they stood alone. The idea of leaving pieces on their original site made no sense at all to most Berliners. Proposals to preserve parts of the Wall, and to create a Wall memorial in Berlin, faced organized and unorganized opposition.

Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk by Satyajit Das

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Swan, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, capital asset pricing model, carbon credits, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, Celtic Tiger, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deal flow, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discrete time, diversification, diversified portfolio, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Edward Thorp, Emanuel Derman, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, eurozone crisis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Goodhart's law, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, Jones Act, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, load shedding, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Nick Leeson, Nixon shock, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price stability, profit maximization, proprietary trading, public intellectual, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Satyajit Das, savings glut, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Slavoj Žižek, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, tail risk, Teledyne, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the market place, the medium is the message, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Turing test, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Yogi Berra, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Los Cee-Ca-Go Boys For a quarter of a century, the Berlin Wall symbolized the difference between the free markets of the West and the socialist economies of the East. On June 12, 1987, speaking at the Brandenburg Gate to commemorate the 750th anniversary of Berlin, U.S. President Ronald Reagan issued a challenge to Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “Tear down this wall!” On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall came down. At the fall of the Wall, when asked “Who won?”, Western political scientists cited the triumph of capitalism over socialism. The economists’ response was “Chicago.” The University of Chicago radically changed how the world thought about economics, politics, and business, with a system based on: “belief in the efficacy of the free market as a means for organizing resources...skepticism about government intervention into economic affairs and...emphasis on the quantity theory of money as a key factor in producing inflation.”1 In the early part of the twentieth century, work in theoretical physics was centered around the Cavendish Laboratory (Cambridge, England), Göttingen (Germany), and the Institute of Theoretical Physics (Copenhagen, Denmark).

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Facing a strike by federal air traffic controllers, Reagan, once president of the Screen Actors Guild, declared an emergency and ultimately fired over 11,000 striking controllers, effectively busting the union. In the UK Thatcher and her trusted enforcer Norman Tebbit defeated the National Union of Mineworkers in a bruising, no-holds-barred battle. Reagan and Thatcher took the advice of financier Jay Gould: “hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.” Reagan cut spending, but not sufficiently to offset the reduction in tax revenue. Reagan reduced nonmilitary spending such as food stamps, federal education, and environmental programs.

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There was the misery index—the sum of inflation and unemployment rates. In a presidential debate, Reagan delivered the killer blow: “Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls...and make a decision. ...when you make that decision...ask yourself, are you better off than you were four years ago?” Reagan defeated President Carter easily. In the UK, Margaret Hilda Thatcher defeated the ill-fated James Callaghan and a tired Labour government in 1979 to become the first woman prime minister of the UK. Ten years earlier Thatcher had said: “no woman in my time will be Prime Minister.” Thatcher became a close ally of Reagan. An aide observed that when together a crowbar was needed to pry them apart.

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, urban sprawl, working-age population

Only a week later US President Ronald Reagan visited West Berlin and delivered a challenge to the Soviet leader that would, more than two years later, seem like a prophetic demand: ‘General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ Reagan’s speech has since been hailed as a decisive factor, if only because Gorbachev’s actions – or rather inaction – were key to the events of 1989. At the time, it just seemed Reagan was trying to compete with the ghost of John F.

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He returned home to become head of the KGB and had been a leading light in advocating the brutal suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring. His promotion to the top job was greeted with despair in a Poland still labouring under martial law. Washington saw him as a fittingly sinister head for what President Ronald Reagan now termed the ‘evil empire’. A few months later, in September 1983, we reached one of those bleak moments when the awful reality of the superpower standoff came home. Soviet fighter pilots shot down a South Korean airliner which had – allegedly because of a navigational error – strayed into prohibited airspace over the Kamchatka peninsula, home to some of Moscow’s missiles sites.

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Lev had previously been foreign minister Andrei Gromyko’s personal snapper, he boasted. Which made me realise I was now also just ‘two handshakes’ away from Josef Stalin. As links to twentieth-century tyrants went, I had done the double! Back on the Cold War front, a memorable Time magazine cover named Reagan and Andropov jointly ‘Men of the Year’, showing them standing back to back, like adversaries about to take part in a deadly duel. The American television correspondents meanwhile were engaged in a battle of their own: trying to get their domestic anchors to pronounce the new Soviet leader’s relatively simple name properly.

The Centrist Manifesto by Charles Wheelan

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, demand response, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, invisible hand, obamacare, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Solyndra, stem cell, the scientific method, transcontinental railway, Walter Mischel

That is the beauty of a system with relatively powerful state and local governments. The Republicans have historically been strong on national defense, which is inarguably a core responsibility of the federal government. (It is hard to imagine Jimmy Carter, rather than Ronald Reagan, standing in West Berlin and declaring, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) More recently, the same logic has been applied to antiterrorism efforts. No individual can protect against a terrorist attack or prevent a North Korean missile launch. Government is the mechanism by which we collectively protect ourselves against these kinds of potentially devastating threats.

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Government cannot possibly protect us from ourselves in situations where we should know better. Government should not be responsible for supporting people who are capable of supporting themselves; people who can work should work. The notion of welfare queens driving Cadillacs has often been overstated and exploited. (Ronald Reagan’s original anecdote to this effect appears to have been woven from whole cloth.) Still, anyone looking to redistribute income in the United States should appreciate a core element of the American psyche: no hardworking person likes to pay taxes to support people whom they perceive to be taking advantage of the system.

Post Wall: Rebuilding the World After 1989 by Kristina Spohr

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, Japanese asset price bubble, Kickstarter, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, operational security, Prenzlauer Berg, price stability, public intellectual, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, software patent, South China Sea, special economic zone, Thomas L Friedman, Transnistria, uranium enrichment, zero-coupon bond

And our responsibility is to look ahead and grasp the promise of the future … For forty years, the seeds of democracy in Eastern Europe lay dormant, buried under the frozen tundra of the Cold War … But the passion for freedom cannot be denied forever. The world has waited long enough. The time is right. Let Europe be whole and free … Let Berlin be next – let Berlin be next!’[116] Two years before, Bush’s predecessor Ronald Reagan had stood before the Brandenburg Gate and called on the Soviet leader, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’[117] Now in June 1989 a new US president was throwing down the gauntlet once again, mounting a new propaganda offensive against the charismatic Soviet leader. ‘Let Berlin be next’ was in one way headline-grabbing rhetoric, but it revealed that the administration was already beginning to grapple with the issue of German unification.

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Geir Lundestad ‘“Imperial Overstretch”, Mikhail Gorbachev and the End of the Cold War’ CWH 1, 1 (2000) pp. 1–20; Arne Westad The Global Cold War p. 379 Back to text 10. Reagan’s Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando Florida 8.3.1983 The American Presidency Project website (hereafter APP); Reagan’s Address to Members of the UK Parliament 8.6.1982 APP Back to text 11. Reagan’s Address to the Nation on Defense and National Security 23.3.1983 APP Back to text 12. On the superpower summits, see for example Jack F. Matlock Jr Reagan and Gorbachev: How the Cold War Ended Random House 2004; James Graham Wilson The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagament, and the End of the Cold War Cornell UP 2014; Svetlana Savranskaya & Thomas Blanton (eds) The Last Superpower Summits: Gorbachev, Reagan and Bush – Conversations that Ended the Cold War CEU Press 2016 (hereafter TLSS); Jonathan Hunt & David Reynolds ‘Geneva, Reykjavik, Washington, and Moscow, 1985–1991’ in Kristina Spohr & David Reynolds (eds) Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 Oxford UP 2016 pp. 151–79.

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Gorbachev launched into a passionate speech in favour of nuclear abolition and ‘a nuclear-free Europe’ – which Thatcher totally rejected – and he vented his frustrations with Bush for not responding more positively to his disarmament initiatives. The prime minister, playing her preferred role as elder stateswoman, was at pains to reassure him: ‘Bush is a very different person from Reagan. Reagan was an idealist who firmly defended his convictions … Bush is a more balanced person, he gives more attention to detail than Reagan did. But as a whole, he will continue the Reagan line, including on Soviet–American relations. He will strive to achieve agreements that are in our common interest.’ Gorbachev jumped on those last words: ‘That is the question – in our common interests or in your Western interests?’

The World as It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House by Ben Rhodes

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, demand response, different worldview, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, illegal immigration, intangible asset, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Paris climate accords, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, trickle-down economics, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

I would be responsible for the words he spoke in public, and the Berlin speech was the center of my existence for a couple of weeks. As a thirty-year-old who had never written a speech delivered outside the United States, this was like being asked to ride your first race as a jockey on the favorite horse at the Kentucky Derby. It was, after all, Berlin. Kennedy: Ich bin ein Berliner! Reagan: Tear down this wall! The two most iconic speeches delivered by American presidents abroad both took place in Berlin. I read each of them dozens of times. I’d listen to recordings of them in my apartment late at night. I wanted, more than anything else, to help put Barack Obama in that continuum, to write words that someone like me might someday read.

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“I don’t know,” I said to Obama, “but they’re not going to be paying for your presidential library.” CHAPTER 10 LIBYA One of my earliest memories of American foreign policy is of Ronald Reagan sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office and explaining, in his grandfatherly way, that we were bombing Libya. I was eight years old. My father loved Reagan, so to me he could do no wrong. If Reagan said we had to teach Gaddafi a lesson for sponsoring terrorist attacks, then surely he was right. Gaddafi was a villain, and our president was a hero who rode horses with the queen of England. I never imagined that Gaddafi would be at the center of events that would shape the Obama presidency and my own role in it.

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The one person who didn’t seem enthusiastic about giving a speech in Berlin was Obama. When Favreau and I talked to him about it, he didn’t offer much beyond suggesting we use Berlin’s story to talk about what we were proposing in our own foreign policy. Chancellor Angela Merkel rejected a request from the campaign for the speech to take place at the Brandenburg Gate, where Reagan had called on Gorbachev to tear down the wall, saying that the venue should be reserved for an actual president. When he learned about this, Obama was embarrassed and annoyed. “I never said I wanted to give a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate,” he snapped. It spoke to a larger dynamic in the campaign: While Obama was often blamed for the cult of personality growing up around him—arty posters, celebrity anthems, and lavish settings for his events—he was rarely responsible for it, and worried that we were raising expectations too high in a world that has a way of resisting change.

The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency by Annie Jacobsen

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boston Dynamics, colonial rule, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dean Kamen, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, GPS: selective availability, Herman Kahn, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, license plate recognition, Livingstone, I presume, low earth orbit, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, operation paperclip, place-making, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, social intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, traumatic brain injury, zero-sum game

For decades scientists have been trying to create artificially intelligent machines, without success. AI scientists keep hitting the same wall. To date, computers can only obey commands, following rules set forth by software algorithms. I wondered if the transhumanism programs that Michael Goldblatt pioneered at DARPA would allow the agency to tear down this wall. Were DARPA’s brain-computer interface programs the missing link? Goldblatt chuckled. He’d left DARPA a decade ago, he said. He could discuss only unclassified programs. But he pointed me in a revelatory direction. This came up when we were discussing the Jason scientists and a report they published in 2008.

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And Jack Thorpe had more than a decade of work ahead of him. CHAPTER FIFTEEN Star Wars and Tank Wars On the evening of March 23, 1983, a long black limousine pulled up to the south gate of Ronald Reagan’s White House. In the back sat Edward Teller, now seventy-five years old. Teller was not exactly sure why he was here. He had just flown in from California, where he lived, because the aide who called him three days earlier said President Reagan thought it was important that he be at the White House on this night. Walking with a limp and a cane, Teller made his way through the White House foyer, up the stairs, and into the Blue Room.

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Townes, the principal inventor of the laser. At 8:00 p.m., in a nationally televised address, President Reagan announced to the world his decision to launch a major new research and development program to intercept Soviet ICBMs in various stages of flight. The program, the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), would require numerous advanced technology systems, the majority of which were still in the development stage. DARPA would be the lead agency in charge until SDI had its own organization. President Reagan said that the reason for this radical new initiative was simple. When he first became president, he was shocked to learn that in the event of a Soviet nuclear strike, his only option as commander in chief was to launch an all-out nuclear attack against the Soviets in response.

The Berlin Wall: A World Divided, 1961-1989 by Frederick Taylor

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, cuban missile crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, German hyperinflation, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, oil shock, open borders, plutocrats, RAND corporation, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, the market place, young professional, éminence grise

The only major political figure to challenge this increasingly relaxed attitude towards the Wall was the same man who, in 1978, had attracted 396 / THE BERLIN WALL the attention of the Stasi observers at Checkpoint Charlie: Ronald Reagan. Now more than half-way through his second term as president of the United States, the 76-year-old had lost none of his fierce and occasionally undiplomatic anti-Communist drive. In June 1987 he arrived in West Berlin to join the city’s 750th-anniversary celebrations. ‘General Secretary Gorbachev,’ Reagan thundered in front of the Brandenburg Gate, ‘if you seek peace-if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe-if you seek liberalisation, come here to this gate, Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ All the same, three months later, Erich Honecker was received with honours in West Germany.

…

However, about four hours later they returned in a black Plymouth sedan with US Mission licence plates. An army sergeant drove them through the checkpoint and into East Berlin. Only when they presented their passports were the couple in the back of the Plymouth identified as two Americans, a man of sixty-seven and a woman ten years younger. Their names were Ronald and Nancy Reagan. The Reagans took an hour’s drive around East Berlin, like any tourists, and then returned to the West. The East German authorities had for the ENDGAME / 381 first time laid eyes on the man who, many say, would prove to be the nemesis of their regime and all it represented. However, the Stasi observers do not, at that point, even seem to have realised who the man and his wife were.1 This would change very soon.

…

The Stasi could keep the dissident movement divided, and it could decapitate its leadership, but the exit-visa movement was something else, something close to a force of nature—a monster that the ENDGAME / 385 Helsinki agreement had summoned from the depths of the East German people’s unconsciousness. And just a little more than two years after the Stasi had spotted him and his wife posing for the cameras in front of Checkpoint Charlie, on 20 January 1981 Ronald Wilson Reagan was sworn in as fortieth president of the United States. President Reagan’s incoming Republican administration offered little direct threat to the East German regime as such. What it did represent was a kind of ruthless counter-revolutionary conviction that shocked and shook the Communist world. Backing the right-wing Contras against Marxist Sandanistas in Central America and the mujahidin against the Soviets and their client regime in Afghanistan, the Americans dared to mimic the kind of support for ‘national liberation’ movements that the Soviets had aggressively promoted since the 1950s.

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

The names of two respected newspaper journalists—Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—likewise became indelibly linked to the Watergate scandal. Network television footage of crowds at the Berlin Wall in the darkness of November 9, 1989, provided unforgettable, collective images of the end of the Cold War, echoing President Reagan’s powerful rhetoric a few years earlier: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And burned into the consciousness of many Americans following September 11, 2001, is the television footage of the airplanes plunging into the Twin Towers, not to mention the figure of Mayor Rudy Giuliani, standing at the podium answering questions at press conference after press conference with a mixture of calm, grief, and determination.

…

It’s a legitimate question, and a brief historical example from the Democratic side suggests why. As the 1984 presidential election season got under way, Democrats were in trouble. The front-runner for their party’s nomination, Walter Mondale, didn’t stir up much excitement, and he faced an enormously popular incumbent Republican president—Ronald Reagan—who was also an incredible communicator and former movie star. Mondale represented the consummate Democratic insider. A former U.S. senator and vice president under Jimmy Carter, he had spent much of his public life preparing to run for president, working his way up the Democratic Party food chain.

…

Conventional wisdom judged him unbeatable in the primaries because he had locked up the Democratic Party’s fund-raising machinery and most of the critical endorsements, leaving his competitors out in the cold. Still, he remained an uninspiring figure widely regarded as unable to mount a credible challenge to Reagan. Mondale easily won the Iowa caucus. But then, to everyone’s shock, he lost the New Hampshire primary to the charismatic and handsome Gary Hart, a young upstart U.S. senator from the American West. Now Democrats who had resigned themselves to Mondale as the nominee got excited. They began sending money to Hart in hopes he might defeat Mondale.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

The speech bothered Ari Fleischer, who worried it might sound unsophisticated. In the car back to the White House, Fleischer advised Bush to go easy on the word “evil,” suggesting it was too simple. “If this isn’t good versus evil, what is?” Bush countered. He reminded Fleischer that Ronald Reagan had not gone to Berlin to say “put a gate in this wall” or “take down a few bricks.” He said “tear down this wall,” all of it. Sometimes simple was best. Bush was getting second-guessed at every turn. Not much later, Hughes broached his use of the word “folks” to describe the attackers. “Mr. President, I’m not sure you ought to be calling the terrorists ‘folks.’

…

Cheney had friendships with reporters, although he disdained the conservative columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak, whom he dubbed “Errors and No Facts.” He oversaw the campaign, leaning on a crafty Texas operative named James A. Baker III to wage a delegate-by-delegate battle staving off Reagan. Cheney, more in tune politically with the challenger, made a secret trip to Camp David in August 1976 to convince Ford to put Reagan on the ticket. But the scars of their primary contest were too deep. The battle went all the way to the convention, where Reagan forces extracted one last concession, a “morality in foreign policy” plank in the platform denouncing agreements with the Soviet Union—in effect, denouncing Ford’s own policies.

…

Pete Williams, then a young reporter covering the campaign, thought, “This guy doesn’t give a speech; he briefs the audience.” Looming over both races was Ronald Reagan. Bush’s primary opponent had worked for Reagan, who in turn sent a letter supporting him for the Texas seat, a move that might have been rooted in loyalty but also reflected the chess match then under way for the 1980 presidential nomination with Bush’s father. Cheney, for his part, had to live down his work in the 1976 primaries against Reagan, who carried the Wyoming delegation at the convention. Reluctant to “run as Jerry Ford’s guy in Wyoming,” Cheney asked his former boss not to endorse him.

Roller-Coaster: Europe, 1950-2017 by Ian Kershaw

airport security, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, centre right, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, fixed income, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, labour market flexibility, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open borders, post-war consensus, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, trade liberalization, union organizing, upwardly mobile, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, young professional

Hope of lasting improvement in relations between the West and the Soviet Union had grown markedly by that time. Hardly any Western European leader, however, even then could anticipate the speed of developments over the coming year, or believe that by the end of 1989 the Berlin Wall – symbol of the Cold War – would have come down. When President Reagan, standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate in West Berlin on 12 June 1987, demanded ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’, the sentiment was applauded but the demand itself seemed no more than a rhetorical flourish. The Wall appeared destined to last into the indefinite future and indeed, ran some arguments, it remained a welcome source of stability, permanently putting the ‘German Question’ on hold.

…

Mrs Thatcher visibly relaxed at the joke and later, picking up the words of one of her advisers, remarked: ‘I like Mr Gorbachev. We can do business together.’ Gorbachev and Reagan also established a good personal rapport when they met in Geneva in November 1985. At a second summit, in Reykjavik in Iceland, on 11–12 October 1986, Gorbachev took Reagan completely by surprise in proposing a 50 per cent reduction in strategic nuclear arsenals on both sides, then, when the Americans hesitated, suggesting the complete elimination of intermediate-range missiles in Europe. The proposal foundered when Reagan refused to contemplate restrictions on testing for the Strategic Defence Initiative.

…

For the next five years superpower relations worsened. The new American President, Ronald Reagan, a former B-movie actor whose folksy manner combined with firm conservative principles proved a winning formula in the election of 1980 after the widely viewed failure of the Carter presidency, set the tone. He was avidly backed by his most assertive ally, Margaret Thatcher. Part of restoring prestige after the Vietnam debacle was to demonstrate American strength through a readiness to confront the Soviet Union, which by 1983 Reagan was describing as ‘an evil empire’. The nuclear arms race escalated that year. The first Pershing missiles were stationed in Western Europe in November.

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit by Aja Raden

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, intentional community, iterative process, low interest rates, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, sugar pill, survivorship bias, theory of mind, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa

To make matters worse, those same major American newspapers had been relentlessly demanding access to the Chinese market for years, insisting on the need to “tear down the wall of Chinese tariffs and protectionism.” (In fact, they still do; as recently as 2012 Forbes ran an article titled “Tear Down This Wall—The Chinese Tariff Wall.”17) The preexisting conditions for disaster were already boiling, but when the news reached China that the Great Wall was going to be torn down by Americans as an invitation to foreign trade, it certainly can’t have helped. It’s very possible that these two separate news stories—that the Great Wall would be torn down by Americans seeking trade with China and that Americans demanded the wall of Chinese tariffs and protectionism be torn down to facilitate trade—one literal and threatening, the other metaphoric and merely entitled, were conflated and confused by the time they reached the Chinese, who were already more than a little angry over numerous foreign encroachments and aggressions.

…

Brad Schwartz, “The Infamous ‘War of the Worlds’ Radio Broadcast Was a Magnificent Fluke,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 6, 2015.   7.  Ibid.   8.  Ibid.   9.  Sifakis, Hoaxes, 172. 10.  Ibid. 11.  Ibid., 173–74. 12.  Ibid., 174. 13.  Ibid. 14.  Ibid., 110. 15.  Ibid. 16.  Ibid. 17.  Baizhu Chen, “Tear Down This Wall—The Chinese Tariff Wall,” Forbes, July 12, 2012. 18.  Sifakis, Hoaxes, 110. 19.  Ibid. 20.  H. L. Mencken, “A Neglected Anniversary,” ETC: A Review of General Semantics 58, no. 4 (2001): 420–24. 21.  Ibid. 22.  Ibid. 23.  Mencken, Henry L., “Melancholy Reflections,” Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1926. 24.  

…

Public opinion in the United States was strongly against starting a war in Nicaragua, but the Sandinistas’ enemies, the counter-revolutionaries, or Contras for short, were happy to do the ground fighting. This is where covert war comes in handy. Because, for reasons that passeth understanding (mine anyway), the newly elected U.S. president, Ronald Reagan, had big heart-shaped eyes for the Contras, likening them to America’s founding fathers. So instead of sending troops to fight the Sandinistas in South America, we sent money. Lots of money. In 1980 the Reagan administration quietly authorized the CIA to “assist” the Contras with funds, weapons, and training. Where did they get this money? Certainly not from Congress—because the whole affair was super illegal.

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

CHAPTER 4 THE SIZZLER A riot of noise greeted Mark Spitznagel as he stepped into the visitors’ gallery of the Chicago Board of Trade’s cavernous Grain Room. It was the summer of 1987. The market was on a roll, and so was America. The Dow industrials closed above two thousand points for the first time. In Berlin, Ronald Reagan exhorted Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down this wall. Michael Jackson released Bad. Prozac was approved by the FDA. Inside the Board of Trade, the adrenaline-soaked machinery of naked capitalism was hard at work. Spitznagel’s teenage eyes widened at the sights before him. Shouting hordes of traders—sardined into the open-outcry floor, many outfitted in brightly colored jackets—made wild indecipherable gestures.

…

A walled-and-gated French-style villa, it was surrounded by a moat and had a guesthouse, swimming pool, stream, and a garden with an arbor. One room the size of a New York studio apartment had been dedicated solely to storing J. Lo’s shoes. The mansion stood a block away from a former home of Spitznagel’s boyhood idol Ronald Reagan. Nancy Reagan still lived there, and he fantasized about strolling up to her home and knocking on the door. Other fund managers, wanting their own J. Lo mansions and moats, did the math—and opened up copycat operations. “A growing number of money managers and financial firms are rolling out investment products designed to exploit big declines known as ‘black swan’ events,” an August 2010 Wall Street Journal article said.

…

The middleman who sold you the contract—the local—could benefit if prices fell below that twenty-buck bushel. He could also benefit just by trading around moving prices, trying to buy low and sell high. T-bond futures were essentially the same thing, for bonds. Trading in the contracts had surged in the 1980s as the Reagan administration funded an economic boom by issuing billions in Treasurys. Futures contracts helped big institutions buying the bonds to protect themselves against losses—a trade known as a “hedge.” In the exchange’s legendary pits, memorialized in the 1903 Frank Norris novel The Pit, Spitznagel suddenly found himself working side by side with some of the biggest traders in Chicago.

Divided: Why We're Living in an Age of Walls by Tim Marshall

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, cryptocurrency, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, end world poverty, facts on the ground, gentrification, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, open borders, openstreetmap, profit motive, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, the built environment, trade route, unpaid internship, urban planning

Thirty years ago a wall came down, ushering in what looked like a new era of openness and internationalism. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan went to the Brandenburg Gate in divided Berlin and called out to his opposite number in the Soviet Union, ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’ Two years later it fell. Berlin, Germany and then Europe were united once more. They were heady times in which some intellectuals predicted an end of history. However, history does not end. In recent years, the cry ‘Tear down this wall’ is losing the argument against ‘fortress mentality’. It is struggling to be heard, unable to compete with the frightening heights of mass migration, the backlash against globalization, the resurgence of nationalism, the collapse of Communism and the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath.

…

The issue was already in the national consciousness, but this incident helped to raise public awareness further – and it’s been rising ever since. The fence-building continued, albeit with less celebration of finger- and toe-severing, but levels of immigration did not noticeably decrease. In 1986 President Ronald Reagan did a deal: around 3 million unauthorized immigrants who had been living in the USA since before 1982 were given ‘amnesty’. In return, Congress approved more stringent regulations to prevent companies from hiring illegal immigrants, as well as tightened border security. Over the following years, additional barriers were built, but on a limited budget and on occasion using leftover materials from the Vietnam War, such as metal sheets known as perforated steel planking, which had been used as temporary aircraft landing strips.

…

R. 148 Nation of Islam 64–5 nation states in Africa, colonialist creation of 157, 159, 161–3, 166–7, 177 National Front, French 205, 207, 211 National Rifle Association (NRA), US 53 nationalism 6, 193, 196–7, 206–11 Native American tribes 44, 54 Ndadaye, Melchior 166 Nepal 140, 144 Netherlands 207, 211 New Scientist 160 Nigeria 161–2, 164–6, 167–8, 169, 171–2, 174 Nkrumah, Kwame 151, 169 Nordic Union 196 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) 50, 53–4 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 53 Northern Border Project, Saudi Arabia 107 Northern Ireland 226–9, 230, 237 Norway 200 Nowrasteh, Alex 51 Nusra Front 79 Nyerere, Julius 170 O Obama, Barack 48–9, 53, 65–6 Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) 227 Orbán, Viktor 199, 211 Orwell, George 240–1 Ottoman Empire 106 Outer Space Treaty 248–9 P Pakistan 125–7, 130, 132 Afghanistan border 143–4 Indian border 2, 140–3, 145 Iran border 144 Palestine border tunnels 89–90 Christian population 89 disillusionment with leadership 90–1 Egyptian border 89–90 Gaza 74, 87–90, 245–6 Hamas and Fatah 87–9, 91 Middle Eastern discrimination against 91–2 national identity 197 New Charter (2017) 88 West Bank 1, 6, 71–3, 74, 76–7, 90 see also Israel and Palestine Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) 72 Palestinian Authority (PA) 87, 91 Paraguay 248 Party for Freedom, Dutch 211 Pashtuns 143–4 Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamization of the West (PEGIDA) 209–10 Pearce, Fred 160 People’s Daily newspaper 23 perestroika 188 Persian Safavid dynasty 106 see also Iran Peru 174 Picts 220 Pinto, Lourenco 161 Poland 194, 205, 212, 235 Polisario Front (PF) 155, 156, 167 Portuguese explorers 160–1 Prohibition (1920–33) 46 Protestants and Catholics, Northern Irish 226–9 Provincial Houses of Traditional Leaders 168 Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) 227 Q Qin dynasty 16 Qin Shi Huang 16, 33 Quesada, Vicente Fox 55 Question Time 231 R Reagan, Ronald 1, 47 refugees 50–1 entering Europe 198–9, 202, 208 Syrian 106, 110 see also immigration religious persecution 6, 128, 131–2, 135, 136–7 see also Islam; Israel and Palestine Republic of Biafra 166 right-wing parties, extreme 64, 203, 206–7, 209, 250 Road to Somewhere (D. Goodhart) 232–3 Robert the Bruce 222 Robinson, Henry 227, 228 Robinson, Peter 228 Rohingya people 136–7 Roman Empire 217–20 Rozoff, James 213 Russia 2, 198, 200 Rwanda 166 S Sadat, Anwar 117 Safavid dynasty 106 Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic 155–6, 177 Salman, Crown Prince Mohammed bin 113–14 San Bernardino terrorist attacks 51 Saudi Arabia 6, 42, 104, 105, 115, 116 building barriers 42, 106, 107–8, 246 internal divisions 108–9 reforms initiated by royal family 113–14 Scandinavia 196 Schabowski, Günter 189 Scioli, Mike 48 Scotland 196–7, 219, 220 Gaelic language 223 independence referendum (2014) 223–4 relationship with England 222–4, 225–6, 229–30 Scottish parliament 223–4 Scotland Act (1998) 223 Scotland Act (2016) 224 Scottish National Party (SNP) 224 Second Intifada 74 Second Temple, Israel 82–3 Second World War 46, 250 Senegal 165 Sephardi Jews 80, 83 Serbia 2, 199 Shia Islam 4, 5, 6, 102–3, 104–6, 108, 109, 115, 116, 144 Shudras 146 Siachen Glacier 143 Silk Route 14 Singh, Maharaja Hari 141 Single European Act (1986) 194 Six-Day War 64 slavery 45, 59–60 Slovenia 2, 200 smartphones in China 30 Smith, Nathan 246–7 smuggling across borders 46, 51–2, 89–90 social media 4, 28, 29, 30, 51 Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission, UK 231 Socialist Unity Party, East Germany 184–5 South Africa 168, 171–2, 173 South Sudan 165 Soviet Union 1, 184, 194 space, ownership of outer 248–9 space race 185 Spain 43–4, 156, 167, 197, 198–9 Sri Lanka 126 Stasi 188 Strelczyk, Hans 186 Sungbo’s Eredo 162 Sunni Islam 4, 5, 6, 102, 103, 104–6, 107–8, 109, 113, 115, 116, 144 Sweden 2, 200, 204, 207, 235 Switzerland 202 Syria 42, 79, 92, 101, 105, 106–7, 110, 111, 116 Syrian–Israel border wall 78–9 T Taliban 143–4 Tanganyika 170 Tanzania 170 terrorism Bango Bhoomi theory 132–3 in Europe 200, 201, 205 in the Middle East 99–101, 103–4 radical Islam 18, 51, 79, 101, 104, 105, 107, 114, 115, 128, 137 Uighur people of China 18 United States of America 50–1 see also Hamas; Islamic State (IS) Texas 43–5, 52 Texas–Mexico Automotive SuperCluster Region 52 Tibet 17, 19, 29, 126 Tohono O’odham nation 54 ‘Tortilla Curtain’ 47 trade and industry China 18, 20–1, 30–1, 33 United States of America 52–3 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) 43, 45 tribalism, African 6, 157–8 Tripathi, Sanjeev 131 True Story of Ah Q (Lu Xun) 22 Trump, Donald 3, 6, 39–41, 43, 50, 51, 52–7, 61, 64, 93, 210 see also United States of America Tunisia 101, 106 Turkey 106, 110, 111, 199, 208, 244 Tutsis 166 2001: A Space Odyssey (film) 3 U Uighur people 17–18, 29 Ukrainian–Russian conflict 198 UNICEF 104 Unionists and Nationalists see Northern Ireland United Kingdom ‘Anywheres and Somewheres’ 232–3 Brexit 6, 196, 222, 226, 229, 231, 232 class division 231–3 colonialism and colonial guilt 161–2, 163, 240–1 Cornish nationalists 225 education 231 Hadrian’s Wall 217–18, 219, 220–1 immigration 234–6 multiculturalism and integration 238–40 Muslim population 204, 237–9 Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics 226–8 relations between England and Northern Ireland 226–7, 229, 231 relations between England and Scotland 222–4, 225–6, 229, 231 relations between England and Wales 224–5 religion 226–8, 236–9 Roman invasion 217–20 United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) 196 United Nations (UN) 109–10, 112, 114–15, 130, 136, 137, 167, 169, 172, 175–6, 248–9 United States of America 3, 6 black population 58–60 border protection agencies 40, 46, 47, 48 broadening political divide 62–3, 65 citizens rights and equality 41–2 Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) 107 education 58–9, 63–4 gated communities 173–4 Hispanic population 42–3, 56, 57 immigration 41, 46–51 Iraq War (2003–11) 100–1, 109 Marshall Plan 250 race relations/inequality 6, 56–61, 63–5 religious diversity 60 Republicans 6, 40, 50, 62 smuggling 46, 51–2 student extremism 63–4 terrorism 50–1 trade and industry 52–3 Trump’s border wall plan 39–41, 42, 43, 50, 53 US–Mexico border 43–52, 53–5 white supremacists and black separatists 64–5 Untouchables/Dalits, Indian 146–9 V Vaishyas 146 Vanguard newspaper 167–8 Varosha, Cyprus 244 virtual private networks (VPN) 28, 29 Visegard Group 196 W Wade, Field Marshal George 220–1 Wales 219, 224–5 ‘Wall Disease’ – Mauerkrankheit 186 ‘Wall of Shame’, Moroccan 155–6 ‘Walled Off Hotel’, West Bank 72–3 Washington Post 31 Weinstein, Bret 63–4 West Bank 71–3, 74, 76–7, 90, 91 see also Israel and Palestine West Germany 183, 184–5, 186, 188–9, 190–1 Western Sahara 155–7, 167 Western Wall, Israel 82–3 Wetzel, Gunter 186 Wilson, Harold 233 Women of the Wall (WOW) 82–3 World Bank 170–1 The World is Flat (T.

After the Berlin Wall by Christopher Hilton

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, urban planning, urban renewal, women in the workforce

TIMELINE 1945 7 May Germany surrenders 3 July Allied troops take over their four sectors in Berlin 16 July Potsdam Conference begins 2 August Potsdam Conference ends 1946 21 April Communist Party and Social Democrats form the SED (Socialist Unity Party) to rule East Germany 1947 5 June Marshall Plan launched 1948 21 June Deutsche Mark introduced in the West 24 June Berlin blockade and airlift begins 24 July East German Mark introduced 1949 4 April NATO formed 11 May Berlin blockade and airlift ends 24 May FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) founded in the West, merging the American, British and French Zones 7 October GDR (German Democratic Republic) founded in the East from the Soviet Zone, with East Berlin as its capital 1953 16 June GDR workers uprising over increasing work norms 1955 9 May FRG accepted into NATO 14 May Communist states, including the GDR, sign the Warsaw Pact 1958 27 October Walter Ulbricht, GDR leader, threatens West Berlin 10 November Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev says it is time to cancel Berlin’s four-power status 1961 4 June At a summit in Vienna, Khruschev tries to pressure US President John Kennedy to demilitarise Berlin 1–12 August 21,828 refugees arrive in West Berlin 13 August Berlin Wall built 1963 26 June Kennedy visits Berlin and makes his ‘Ich Bin Ein Berliner’ speech 1968 21 August Warsaw Pact countries crush Prague Spring 1970 19 March Willy Brandt visits GDR city Erfurt as part of his Ostpolitik policy 1971 3 May Ulbricht forced to resign, succeeded by Erich Honecker 1972 October Traffic Agreement signed, giving FRG citizens access to the GDR 21 December Basic Treaty signed, the FRG in effect recognising the GDR 1973 18 September The GDR and the FRG admitted to the United Nations 1985 11 March Mikhail Gorbachev elected General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party 1987 12 June Ronald Reagan speaks at the Brandenburg Gate: ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’ 7–11 September Honecker visits FRG 1989 2 May Hungary opens its border with Austria, allowing GDR holidaymakers to cross 7 May GDR elections with 98.85 per cent for the government and widespread allegations of fraud 4 September Leipzig demonstrations begin 30 September GDR citizens in FRG Prague Embassy told they can travel to the West 6 October GDR fortieth anniversary 18 October Honecker forced to resign, succeeded by Egon Krenz 4 November A million people demonstrate in East Berlin 9 November The Wall opens 29 November Chancellor Helmut Kohl issues plan for a ‘confederation leading to a federation in Germany’ 7 December Krenz resigns.

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It is so stark it does not require a caption and, like emerging from sunlight, your eyes need time to adjust. At first it seems to be a lunarscape with houses – the apartments – but as your eyes adjust it transforms itself into the Leuschnerdamm which was somewhere else altogether: depending on which side chance had placed you, a frontier community confronting Ronald Reagan’s evil empire or a frontier community confronting the imperialist-fascist-capitalist running dogs. The Wall ran where the dark tarmac holes are – they were supports for an earlier version of it – so the terraced houses and the unkempt pavement were in the West, the cobbled road in the East. The pavement became a gully; the 12ft Wall to one side of it, the apartments and their little gardens to the other.

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Hildebrandt became a propagandist for non-violent resistance all over the world and published extensively on that as well as The Wall. He loomed as a father figure, slightly eccentric, slightly innocent but right. 8. Interview in July 2008. 9. Lieutenant Oliver North, a U.S. marine, was involved in the Iran-Contra Affair when, during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, he sold weapons clandestinely to Iran. He subsequently became a right-wing commentator, appeared on Fox TV and wrote best-selling books. 10. Ulbricht’s words were used on tall posters on the Western side of The Wall pointing East so the population there could read them: NOBODY HAS ANY INTENTION OF BUILDING A WALL.

Beyond the Wall: East Germany, 1949-1990 by Katja Hoyer

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, land reform, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, open borders, Prenzlauer Berg, remote working, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, union organizing, work culture

It didn’t destroy your life.’3 When Peter and his family reached Berlin in the summer of 1987, they found things had changed a fair bit from the unpleasant atmosphere that his predecessors had been exposed to. President Ronald Reagan had delivered a speech in West Berlin in front of the Brandenburg Gate on 12 June 1987, in which he demanded, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’ But nobody could have foreseen that the fall of the Berlin Wall was just two years into the future. Reagan’s speech was initially just a publicity stunt. The event that did make a difference to the way Peter and his American colleagues were treated in East Germany was Honecker’s visit to Bonn in September.

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But on the shelves in the West – and that includes our Intershops – there were twenty models.’16 Focusing on microelectronics and rationalization wasn’t enough to heal the GDR’s festering economic wounds. Many Western countries responded to the severe problems caused by the oil crises of the 1970s by introducing cuts to their welfare systems in the 1980s – from Helmut Kohl in West Germany to Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US. Honecker had no such option. The GDR’s subsidies to essentials such as rent, food and childcare had become a fact of life. When prices for textiles rose briefly in 1977, it had immediately led to stockpiling by disconcerted citizens while rationing of everyday luxuries such as coffee and chocolate also caused consternation.

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The gathering was a sight to behold: British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, French President François Mitterrand, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Romanian President Nicolae Ceauşescu and the East German leader Erich Honecker were among the dozens of foreign dignitaries gathered in the heart of what US President Ronald Reagan had dubbed the ‘Evil Empire’ almost exactly two years earlier. Notably, the latter was absent, having ‘an awful lot on my plate right now that would have to be set aside’.36 But with the exception of the US, most of the leaders of major capitalist and communist countries had come to Moscow to bury Konstantin Chernenko, seventh General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

How the Other Half Banks: Exclusion, Exploitation, and the Threat to Democracy by Mehrsa Baradaran

access to a mobile phone, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, British Empire, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, credit crunch, David Graeber, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, diversification, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, housing crisis, income inequality, Internet Archive, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, M-Pesa, McMansion, Michael Milken, microcredit, mobile money, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, new economy, Own Your Own Home, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, subprime mortgage crisis, the built environment, the payments system, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, working poor

The Occupy Wall Street movement embodied this disdain for reckless moneylending with demands that bankers be sent to jail. Their signs could have been written by a modern-day Nehemiah or Andrew Jackson: “Tax Wall Street Leeches,” “Turn Wall Street into Tahrir Square,” “JP Morgan is a Kleptomaniac,” “Jail the Bankers,” “Tear Down this Wall Street,” “Jesus was the 99%,” and “Kick ‘M in the Junk Bonds.”29 (Timothy Geithner dismissed those who were uncomfortable with bailing out banks as demanding “Old Testament Justice,”30 which seems accurate given the admonitions against usury in the book, but the modern state is no longer persuaded by Nehemiah’s arguments.)

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Something had to change, but deregulation was by no means the only option. The era also coincided with a conservative political revival in America and Europe and a deregulatory philosophy in other sectors. Ronald Reagan wanted to get the government off the people’s backs, and the banking sector needed exactly that. But deregulation was not just about Ronald Reagan. A decade later, Bill Clinton finished what Reagan had started. Additionally, other changes occurred in the United States that explain the ideological transformations of the time, such as a historic rise of income and wealth disparity and an economic boom.

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An ideological capture of key policymakers—Larry Summers, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, and others—who had spent their careers marinating in the industry, working in “captured” regulatory agencies, or captivated by extreme laissez-faire ideology, also took place during this era. Agencies also went along with or even pushed deregulation. The OCC and the OTS, agencies funded by their regulated entities (their customers), courted them through lax regulations. The executive branch was also sold on the vision of finance free from state control. Each president, from Reagan to Obama, operated with a similar view about the dangers of overregulation. Each also received significant funds from Wall Street. Agency capture is perhaps one of the most significant aspects of this political story. Because of the increased power and size of these firms, government regulators have become impotent against them—that is, those who have continued to fight.

Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis

Apollo 11, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Carmen Reinhart, Celtic Tiger, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial thriller, full employment, German hyperinflation, government statistician, Irish property bubble, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, pension reform, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, South Sea Bubble, subprime mortgage crisis, the new new thing, Tragedy of the Commons, tulip mania, women in the workforce

The Commerzbank chairman, Klaus-Peter Müller, actually works in Berlin, inside another very German kind of place. His office is attached to the side of the Brandenburg Gate. The Berlin Wall once ran, roughly speaking, right through the middle of it. One side of his building was once a field of fire for East German border guards, the other a backdrop for Ronald Reagan’s famous speech. (“Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”) From looking at it you would never guess any of this. “After the wall came down we were offered the chance to buy it back,” says Müller. “This building had been ours before the war. But the condition was that we had to put everything back exactly the way it was.

Were You Born on the Wrong Continent? by Thomas Geoghegan

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, business logic, collective bargaining, corporate governance, cross-subsidies, dark matter, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, disinformation, Easter island, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, income inequality, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, McJob, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, pensions crisis, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, purchasing power parity, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce

“Okay,” I said, “but let’s go somewhere else.” “East or west?” “East!” I said. I knew it had advanced beyond a wannabe Mister Softee truck, and I felt the thrill of going into the “Communist” darkness, but we still ended up at a yuppie-type trattoria. The East was under construction. When Reagan said, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall,” he spoke on behalf of real-estate developers from all over Europe. I never saw so many construction sites: big cranes bobbing like Big Bird even at midnight in Berlin. They had overbuilt. Whereas once the East-was-Red, now the East was in the red, in a way unimaginable for Germans, and in the years to come, many people like my friend Father L. would say: “Berlin is broke.”

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Here was the chain of reasoning when Gerhard Schroeder became the German chancellor: (1) he’s really just like Tony Blair, (2) Blair is really just like Clinton, (3) Clinton is really just like Bush (the first one). And the first Bush was like Reagan. So when Schroeder was elected, it just showed Europe was going to the right, and they were all more or less like Reagan. “Wait: isn’t Schroeder a socialist?” Yes. They’re all socialists! That’s why Europe is collapsing! It’s collapsing. It’s collapsed. Everyone is unemployed. It’s becoming just like America anyway. I knew a bit more than that. As a union-side labor lawyer, I wanted social democracy to succeed.

Berlin by Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, indoor plumbing, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Skype, starchitect, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Walter Ulbricht, East German head of state; 15 June 1961 ‘Berlin is the testicle of the West. When I want the West to scream, I squeeze on Berlin.’ Nikita Khrushchev, Soviet communist party secretary (1953–64) ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ John F Kennedy, US president; 26 June 1963 ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!’ Ronald Reagan, US president; 12 June 1987 ‘Private travel into foreign countries can be requested without conditions…Permission will be granted instantly.’ Günter Schabowski, East German government official; 9 November 1989 * * * The fun came to an instant end when the US stock market crashed in 1929, plunging the world into economic depression.

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East and West Germany recognise each other’s sovereignty in the Basic Treaty. 1976 The Palace of the Republic, which houses the GDR parliament and an entertainment centre, opens on 23 April on the site where the royal Hohenzollern palace stood for 500 years. 1987 East and West Berlin celebrate the city’s 750th birthday separately. On 12 June Ronald Reagan visits the city, proclaiming ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!’ while standing in front of the Brandenburg Gate. 1989 Bye, bye Berlin Wall and hello Love Parade! What would grow into the world’s biggest street party begins modestly with one truck and 150 ravers. 1991 Members of the Bundestag (German parliament) vote to reinstate Berlin as Germany’s capital and to move the federal government here.

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It’s a simple, geometric space of lawns dappled with beech and oak trees. In summer, a rather commercial beach bar called Capital Beach sets up shop below the pedestrian-only bridge. Return to beginning of chapter BRANDENBURGER TOR & AROUND Here’s a trivia question for you: Who said ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’? Answer: former US president Ronald Reagan, during a speech in 1987, with the Brandenburger Tor trapped behind the Berlin Wall as a backdrop. Two years later, the Wall was history and the famous gate went from symbol of division to symbol of a reunited Germany. Since then, Pariser Platz, the former wasteland east of the gate, has resumed its historic role as the capital’s ‘reception room’ and is framed by embassies, banks and hotels.

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

I think back to how I ended up here in the supposed center of the financial universe at the mercy of the market gods. I started as an undergrad with an eye toward law school, expecting to be some sort of litigator. But this was 1990, and the world was changing. Only two and a half years after President Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate imploring Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall,” the wall had fallen, and with it, the Soviet Union’s credibility. The Evil Empire was teetering like a Jenga tower, and people were transfixed on what the world would look like once it finally imploded. Three hundred million people freed from the binds of communism, countries reasserting their autonomy, new frontiers, and new markets.

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It’s a timeline of the last forty years, showing who was the Fed chair at the time, and stock market returns over the entire period. There’s also a shaded section showing periods when the US economy was in recession. “I’ll start with Paul Volcker, who died yesterday and who is the first one I can remember from my childhood. He was chairman of the Fed under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan from ‘79 to ‘87, back when you could work for both a Democratic and Republican boss. It was a messy time. America was dealing with oil shocks, the fallout from the Vietnam War, the end of the Bretton Woods system, and then massive tax cuts. Inflation spiked when Nixon decided to leave Bretton Woods, the gold standard.

Berlin Now: The City After the Wall by Peter Schneider, Sophie Schlondorff

Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, young professional

EPILOGUE In early March 2013, a demonstration at the East Side Gallery brought about an unexpected turn of events. Unlikely slogans could be heard near the section by Mühlenstraße in the Friedrichshain district: “The wall must stay,” groups of demonstrators shouted, while others chanted, in English, “Mr. Wowereit, don’t tear down this wall!”—a play on Ronald Reagan’s famous call from 1987, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The reason for the demonstration was an investor’s attempt to cut out a sixty-two-foot-long section of the East Side Gallery to clear the way for the entrance to a new apartment tower. The plans called for the removed sections of the Hinterlandmauer to be set up again at another location.

The World in 2050: Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future by Laurence C. Smith

Boeing 747, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, clean water, climate change refugee, Climategate, colonial rule, data science, deglobalization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Easter island, electricity market, energy security, flex fuel, G4S, global supply chain, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, guest worker program, Hans Island, hydrogen economy, ice-free Arctic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, land tenure, Martin Wolf, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, standardized shipping container, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Y2K

Our fifth billion came in 1987, now just twelve years after the fourth. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed above 2,000 for the first time in history and the Irish rock band U2 released their fifth album, The Joshua Tree. Standing outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, U.S. president Ronald Reagan exhorted Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” The world’s last dusky seaside sparrow died of old age on a tiny island preserve in Florida’s Walt Disney World Resort. A self-absorbed college sophomore at the time, I only noticed The Joshua Tree. Our sixth billion arrived in 1999. This is now very recent history.

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Up until the demise of the Bretton Woods monetary regulatory system in the early 1970s, it presided for three decades over what some have called the “golden age of controlled capitalism.”29 But by the 1980s, “controlled capitalism” had fallen to a revolution of “neoliberalism”—the deregulation and elimination of tariffs and other controls on international trade and capital flows. The neoliberalism movement was championed by British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and U.S. president Ronald Reagan, but was rooted in the ideas of Adam Smith. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s the IMF, WTO, and World Bank aggressively pursued agendas of liberalizing (deregulating) trade markets around the world, vigorously urged on by the United States.30 A common tactic was to require developing countries to accept neoliberal reforms to qualify for IMF or World Bank loans.

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See demography; specific countries Portugal Powell, James Lawrence Primorsky Territory Prince Edward Island Pripyat, Ukraine protectionism Prudhoe Bay Putin, Vladimir Qatar Quantification Settlement Agreement Québec Queen Elizabeth Island radiation railroads rain forests rainfall Reagan, Ronald RechargeIt initiative regional corporations renewable energy resources. See also specific energy types Republic of Korea reserve-to-production ratios reservoirs resource demand. See also specific resource types: and aboriginal peoples; and the Arctic economy; connection to other global forces; and the economic slowdown; and electric vehicles; and Far East Russia; as global force; historical debate on; and human settlement patterns; and hydrocarbon cities; and inertia of global forces; mineral depletion rates; and prospects for NORCs; and proven resource levels; and renewable energy; and reserve levels; and the resource curse; and the Russian Far East; and traditional resources; and urbanization; and water consumption; and West Siberian Lowlands Resource Wars (Klare) Reykjavik, Iceland Ricardo, David ringed seals Río Negro Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (Klare) risk assessment rivers.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

They also legitimize the growing desire of autocratic and authoritarian regimes to subject cyberspace to territorialized controls, and the censorship and surveillance practices that go along with them. By our actions in the West, we contribute to this trend abroad. We preach about the need for closed autocratic societies to “open up,” or, as Ronald Reagan famously thundered, to “tear down this wall,” and yet vis-à-vis cyberspace we are contributing to state censorship and surveillance. Although states were once thought to be powerless in the face of the Internet, the giants have awoken from their slumber. Left unchecked, these trends will result in the gradual disintegration of what is in the long-term interest of all citizens: an open and secure commons of information on a planetary scale.

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If we can undertake acts of sabotage without killing or physically harming people, this does seem to represent progress, a new, gentler form of warfare. In this respect, the argument is the exact inverse of the neutron bomb debates of the 1970s and 1980s. The neutron bomb was an enhanced radiation weapon under development during the Carter and Reagan administrations that would kill people while leaving buildings and infrastructure intact, through a highly concentrated dispersal of radioactive material. (Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev memorably described it as a “capitalist bomb” because it would destroy people, but not property.) Stuxnet-type weapons, on the other hand, are more like something inspired by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski: they would target industrial-technological systems, but leave people alone.

Team Human by Douglas Rushkoff

1960s counterculture, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, clockwork universe, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, digital capitalism, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, gig economy, Google bus, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, invisible hand, iterative process, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, mirror neurons, multilevel marketing, new economy, patient HM, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, theory of mind, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

We are not advancing toward some new, totally inclusive global society, but retreating back to nativism Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). Even 9/11 was a simultaneously experienced, global event Jean-Marie Colombani, “Nous Sommes Tous Américains,” Le Monde, September 12, 2001. At the height of the television media era, an American president Ronald Reagan, “Tear Down This Wall!” speech, June 12, 1987. demand the construction of walls Donald Trump, speech, Phoenix, August 31, 2016. 41. In 1945, when Vannevar Bush imagined the “memex,” on which computers were based Vannevar Bush, “As We May Think,” The Atlantic, July 1945. Similar tensions are rising in India, Malaysia, and Sudan Kevin Roose, “Forget Washington.

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Instead of celebrating more racial intermingling, we find many yearning for a fictional past when—people like to think—our races were distinct, and all was well. At the height of the television media era, an American president could broadcast a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin and demand that Russia “tear down this wall.” No more. Politicians of the digital media environment pull out of global trade blocs, and demand the construction of walls to enforce their countries’ borders. This is very different from the television environment, which engendered a “big blue marble” melting pot, hands-across-the-world, International Space Station, cooperative internationalism that still characterizes our interpretations of geopolitics.

Lonely Planet Pocket Berlin by Lonely Planet, Andrea Schulte-Peevers

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, call centre, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, messenger bag, Peter Eisenman, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal

Outside the northern S-Bahn station entrance are a few Berlin Wall segments with panels pointing to other Wall memorial sites and future Wall-related projects. Brandenburg Gate The Brandenburg Gate (Click here) was where construction of the Wall began. Many statesmen gave speeches in front of it, perhaps most famously former US president Ronald Reagan who, in 1987, uttered the words: ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’. Two years later, the Wall was history. Art Installation On the riverwalk level of the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus, which houses the parliamentary library, an art installation by Ben Wagin features original Wall segments, each painted with a year and the number of people killed at the border in that year.

The End of Jobs: Money, Meaning and Freedom Without the 9-To-5 by Taylor Pearson

Airbnb, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Black Swan, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Google Hangouts, Hacker Conference 1984, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, means of production, Oculus Rift, passive income, passive investing, Peter Thiel, power law, remote working, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, telemarketer, the long tail, Thomas Malthus, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog

The moments which stand out in their lives are those of bold pronouncements and plans to realize them. In 1962, President Kennedy defined the future of space exploration and a country rallied behind him. “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”63 President Reagan defined the future of a unified Germany: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Martin Luther King had a dream and marched on the nation’s capital to make it a reality. We have abdicated this responsibility. Thiel sees this in the proliferation of “wealth re-arrangers” in today’s society. Massive industries, from law to finance, are dedicated not to creating more wealth but to simply moving money around in a circle.

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

He devised a simple trick for estimating how long the Berlin Wall would stand. He did the math in his head and announced his prediction to a friend, Chuck Allen. The wall would stand at least two and two-thirds more years but no more than twenty-four more years, he said. Gott went back to America. In 1987 President Ronald Reagan demanded, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” From 1990 to 1992 the wall was demolished. That was twenty-one to twenty-three years after Gott’s prediction and within the range he announced. Gott called his secret the “delta t argument.” “Delta t” means change in time. It’s also known as the Copernican method, after Nicolaus Copernicus, the great Polish astronomer of the Renaissance.

Central Europe Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Defenestration of Prague, Fall of the Berlin Wall, flag carrier, Frank Gehry, Gregor Mendel, Guggenheim Bilbao, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Prenzlauer Berg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Skype, trade route, urban renewal, white picket fence, young professional

Mitte (Berlin) Top Sights Altes MuseumE5 Brandenburg GateB6 FernsehturmG5 Hamburger BahnhofA2 PergamonmuseumE4 ReichstagA5 Sights 1Alte NationalgalerieE4 2BebelplatzD6 3Berliner DomF5 4BodemuseumE4 5Deutsches Historisches MuseumE5 6Hackesche HöfeF3 7Holocaust MemorialB6 8Humboldt UniversityD5 9Neue Synagogue & Centrum JudaicumE3 10Neues MuseumE5 11World Time ClockH4 Sleeping 12Arcotel VelvetC3 13Circus HostelF2 14Circus HotelF2 15EastsevenG1 16Garden Hotel HonigmondC1 17Hotel Adlon KempinskiB6 18Hotel HonigmondD2 19Lux 11G3 20Wombat's City HostelG3 Eating 21AsselD3 22La FoccaceriaF1 23Monsieur VuongG3 24Sankt OberholzF2 Drinking 25ReingoldC2 Entertainment 26Berliner EnsembleC4 27Kaffee BurgerG2 28Staatsoper Unter den LindenE6 29WeekendH4 Shopping 30Berlin Art & Nostalgia MarketE5 31Galeries LafayetteD6 Sights Brandenburg Gate LANDMARK (Brandenburger Tor; Click here ; Pariser Platz; S-Bahn Unter den Linden) Finished in 1791 as one of 18 city gates, the neoclassical Brandenburg Gate became an East-West crossing point after the Berlin Wall was built in 1961. A symbol of Berlin’s division, it was a place US presidents loved to grandstand. John F Kennedy passed by in 1963. Ronald Reagan appeared in 1987 to appeal to the Russian leader, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!’. In 1989 more than 100,000 Germans poured through it as the wall fell. Five years later, Bill Clinton somewhat belatedly noted: ‘Berlin is free’. The crowning Quadriga statue, a winged goddess in a horse-drawn chariot (once kidnapped by Napoleon and briefly taken to Paris), was cleaned in 2000 along with the rest of the structure.

Germany Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, bank run, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, call centre, capitalist realism, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, company town, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, haute cuisine, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, low cost airline, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Eisenman, post-work, Prenzlauer Berg, retail therapy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, sensible shoes, Skype, starchitect, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, V2 rocket, white picket fence

Outside the northern S-Bahn station entrance, several Berlin Wall segments provide information about other wall memorial sites and future wall-related projects. Continue north to the Brandenburger Tor where construction of the wall began in the wee hours of 13 August 1961. Many statesmen exhorted against communism in front of it, including Ronald Reagan who, in 1987, uttered the famous words: ‘Mr Gorbachev – tear down this wall!’. Two years later, the Berlin Wall was history. Tours Bus You’ll see them everywhere around town: colourful buses (in summer, often open-top double-deckers) that tick off all the key sights on two-hour loops with basic taped commentary in eight languages.