Mary Sarotte
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies, The Johns Hopkins University

Axel Springer Fellow and Bosch Fellow in Public Policy - Class of Fall 2009 and Class of Fall 2022

Mary Elise Sarotte is the inaugural Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Distinguished Professor of Historical Studies at The Johns Hopkins University and a research associate at Harvard University’s Center for European Studies. She earned her AB at Harvard University and her PhD in History at Yale University, and has also taught at the University of Cambridge and University of Southern California. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations and former member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Sarotte is the author or editor of seven books, including The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (Basic Books, 2014) and 1989: The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe (Princeton, 2019), both of which were selected as Financial Times Books of the Year, among other distinctions. In her most recent book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate (Yale, 2021), Sarotte examined how the fight over NATO expansion has impacted Western relations with Russia.

Project Description

Grace and Gift: The Elusive Goal of European Partnership with Russia

Project from 2022: In her Academy project, “Grace and Gift: The Elusive Goal of European Partnership with Russia”(under contract with C.H. Beck), Sarotte asks what went wrong between the West and Moscow in the decade following 1989, when a better shared future between the two countries seemed not only possible but likely. Today, their combined atomic arsenals stockpiled during the Cold War—a full 90 percent of the world’s nuclear warheads—have the ability to kill nearly every living creature on earth. To Sarotte, “that ability makes understanding the decay in their relationship an essential story of our time. Cold wars are not short-lived affairs, so thaws are precious.” She cites French president François Mitterrand’s 1995 observation that the world was living in an era of “grace and gift” during the post-1989 thaw. But neither the US nor Russia made the best possible use of that time. “After unexpectedly being delivered from the threat of a nuclear confrontation with each other, they let deliverance slip away,” she writes. Recently, Sarotte completed a book on US foreign policy toward Russia in the 1990s, a crucial decade that culminated with Vladimir Putin’s rise to the top. In Berlin, she will delve into archival sources and meet with fellow scholars and government officials to examine the role of Germany and other European countries over that fateful decade—and to trace its legacy for European relations with Russia today. Project from 2009: Helmut Kohl and the Era of New Unpredictability: At the Academy, Sarotte used the privilege of early access to the records of former Chancellor Helmut Kohl to investigate how he, together with the leadership of the United States, succeeded in transplanting Western political institutions to the East – most notably NATO – during the upheaval at the end of the Cold War.

Academy Activities

07 Nov 23
Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate International Relations

American Academy Lecture

Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate

How tensions in the 1990s between Americans, Europeans, and Russians over NATO enlargement set the stage for today’s conflict in Ukraine.

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21 Sep 22
The Elusive Goal of Western Partnership with Russia Foreign Policy

Axel Springer Lecture

The Elusive Goal of Western Partnership with Russia

Mary Sarotte will draw from her most recent book, "Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate," to investigate what went wrong.

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21 Sep 22

The Elusive Goal of Western Partnership with Russia

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989, a less strained, more peaceful future between the West and Moscow seemed not only possible but likely. What happened? To understand where we are today, it is essential—as the Greek dramatist Sophocles advised—to judge the new times by the past. The un ...

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