From the Berlin Wall to American withdrawal

Hardly had the dust from the fall of the Berlin Wall settled, but Václav Havel was already trying to sell two TV channels to the Americans. According to declassified minutes of his White House meeting with George H.W. Bush on Feb. 20, 1990, Havel said that his government would like to do this for reasons of political stability. Four years later, a friend of Bush's from the Reagan administration, Ronald Lauder (who served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense for European and Nato policy and ambassador to Austria), launched TV Nova. Among all the many anniversaries being celebrated, this one is easy to overlook. Yet after 30 years of helping to provide "political stability" in the CR, the U.S. is pulling out of the TV market. The station that Havel so wanted to sell to the Americans is being bought by Petr Kellner, whose business existence depends more or less on a Chinese Communist Party with other views on political stability. Those are paradoxes, as Havel would say.