German President Thanks Gorbachev!

This morning, Germany's president Frank-Walter Steinmeier thanked former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for his role in enabling his country's reunification.

In a letter to Gorbachev released by his office Tuesday, ahead of the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, President Steinmeier wrote that Germany's peaceful reunification and the end of Europe's pision "would not have been possible without the courageous and humane decisions that you personally made back then."

On another hand, Steinmeier acknowledged that not all the hopes of three decades ago have been fulfilled.

"What pains me the most is the state of German-Russian and European-Russian relations," and added that it's important "not to resign ourselves to the alienation that has grown over recent years."

On the evening of November 9, 1989, Berliners from the east poured through the wall that had pided them from West Germans for 28 years. Within a year, the two Germanies got unified, and the cold war in Europe ended peacefully. Thirty years later, the US and the rest of the world can draw useful lessons from the diplomacy of 1989-90.

Robert Zoellick, lead US negotiator in the two-plus-four process, wrote at Financial Times that the German people drove those historic events, and West German leaders guided unification masterfully. The US president George H W Bush and secretary of state James Baker orchestrated a supportive international policy, working with Soviets, British, French, Poles, Nato and the European Community.

He added: "Germans, east and west, had created momentum for unification and could trigger a crisis if negotiations stalled. Americans and West Germans used that pressure to force the other countries to face decisions they preferred to avoid."