https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/06/12/when_reagan_went_to_the_wall_a_berlin-singapore_nexus_137259.html
The unlikely meeting between President Donald J. Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un has ended amid handshakes, expressions of goodwill, and hopes — but no proof — that something good has begun.
Thirty-one years ago today, a momentous speech in another part of the world lit another flame of possibility. The setting was Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, the very symbol of Europe’s Cold War division between the West and the Soviet-controlled “satellite” states.
As is true regarding Trump’s Korean gambit, those in the U.S. foreign policy establishment were skeptical of President Reagan’s intentions on his 1987 trip to Germany. At a delicate point in the long dance between the two superpowers, they didn’t want Reagan antagonizing Soviet leaders with bellicose language. Infighting broke out among White House aides. But the boss wasn’t dissuaded by the experts. “The boys at State are going to kill me for this,” Reagan told deputy White House chief of staff Kenneth Duberstein, “but it’s the right thing to do.”
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When Ronald Reagan arrived in Berlin on June 12, 1987, relations between Washington and Moscow had progressed far past the “evil empire” rhetoric of Reagan’s first term. Although he received little credit for it either in the U.S. or abroad, Reagan had long been fixated on reducing the world’s nuclear arsenals. Kremlin leaders were receptive to this idea, but the sticking point had always been their aversion to allowing inspectors inside the Soviet Union to verify implementation of arms reduction agreements.
