ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a sampling of some of the most interesting recently released evidence on US foreign policy. It cites new sources from the George H. W. Bush Presidential Library and from the former West German foreign ministry archive, which opened new materials in 2015. The chapter considers the evidence to revisit the narrative of US policymaking in 1989. The picture of the first Bush administration stands in contrast to the earliest writings on US foreign policy at the end of the Cold War, which depicted the onset of a "new world order". Bush handled policy toward the People's Republic of China (PRC) after the Tiananmen massacre personally. Robert M. Gates's understanding of Bush's foreign policy as essentially conservative, rather than radical, has increasingly come to dominate writing on US strategy at the end of the Cold War. Bush felt that the development of a new kind of European security was an unjustifiably risky move.
