Shame you didn’t read the rest of it:

*“Here even studies acknowledging that U.S. policymakers in February 1990 briefly discussed limits on NATO’s future presence risk understating the significance of U.S.-Soviet bargaining in 1990 by missing the importance of informal deals to politics, in general, and to Cold War diplomacy, in particular. In U.S. domestic politics, for example, an informal offer can constitute a binding agreement provided one party gives up something of value in consideration of payment in goods or services. A similar principle applies to inter- national politics: not only are formal agreements often the codiacation of arrangements that states would make regardless of a formal offer, but if private and unwritten discussions are meaningless, then diplomacy itself would be an unnecessary and fruitless exercise.

Moreover, informal agreements and understandings were especially important during the Cold War. The 1962 Cuban missile crisis, for example, was re- solved in part through an informal agreement whereby the United States and the Soviet Union each removed missiles near the other’s territory. In the 1970s and 1980s, an unofficial alliance developed between the United States and China, as each turned to the other to balance Soviet ambitions in Europe and Asia. And as Marc Trachtenberg shows, Europe’s Cold War or- der emerged from tacit U.S. and Soviet initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s that helped the two sides and ways to coexist within a divided Europe. Ultimately, informal arrangements abounded during the Cold War as the United States and the Soviet Union competed for power, influence, and security.”(Shifrinson, Deal or No Deal?: The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion, p. 18)*