Prize-winning historian M. E. Sarotte pulls back the curtain on the crucial decade between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Vladimir Putin, when Americans and Russians?in the fighting over NATO expansion and Europe's future?sowed the seeds of the tensions that shape today's world.

M. E. Sarotte is the Kravis Professor of Historical Studies at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and the author of The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.