CHAPTER 3
Hopes and Fears
“Dream Big Dreams”
In September 1988, Henry Kissinger wrote a long and public “memo to the next president.” Back then there were not many Americans who could ask a national newsmagazine (Newsweek) to clear the space for a nearly five-thousand-word “memo” about the fate of the world. Kissinger could.
“The postwar era in international relations is coming to an end,” Kissinger began.
This was much bigger than Gorbachev. “A new era cannot be based on ephemeral personalities,” he explained. It would not be the first time that “the West deluded itself by basing its policies on favorable assessments of Soviet leaders.” Moreover, Gorbachev “seems intent on weakening the Western Alliance” because the Soviet policy was “to diminish American influence, if not to expel us from Europe altogether.”
The big issue was that Europe was about to be transformed. “The political structure of Europe—East and West—will thus emerge as the central issue of the ’90s.”1
Eastern Europe might again become a battleground, a “re-emergence of the competition between Teuton and Slav that produced two world wars.” In some crisis Moscow might use force. If it did, “even as an act of desperation—Western euphoria will switch to hysteria.”
Kissinger was dubious about more arms control. What Kissinger emphasized instead was the need “to create a political framework” to manage change, with a real political strategy behind it. He speculated about U.S.-Soviet arrangements that would give the Soviets “security guarantees (widely defined).”
Kissinger suggested, for example, “a drastic reduction of all outside forces in Europe—including those of the U.S.—might revolutionize present concepts of security.” As these “outside forces” left, there could be “rapid progress toward West European integration.”
“The time has come,” Kissinger concluded, “for the first comprehensive discussion about the political future of Europe since the outbreak of World War I.” And not just Europe. He foresaw the development across the world of “a new international order.”
Weeks later, Reagan’s vice president, George H. W. Bush, was elected as the new American president. Kissinger pressed his argument again.
“Empires do not disintegrate without convulsions,” he warned. Without a full political understanding, “the two sides are working themselves—in the name of peace and arms control—into a classical European crisis of the kind that produced World War I.” Any sustainable solution for Europe “must either include both the Soviet Union and the United States or exclude both.” Again he suggested, as just one idea, that, at most, only small outside forces should remain in Europe.2
The “postwar” era was coming to an end. The whole political structure of Europe, West as well as East, was now back on the table, as it had not been for generations.
In Moscow, sitting with his Politburo colleagues as the year 1988 came to an end, Gorbachev wondered what the Americans would do next. Shevardnadze spoke up. He alluded to Kissinger’s warning about Gorbachev. “Look what remained of [Kissinger’s] theory after your [UN] speech,” he said.
“Nothing remained,” Gorbachev replied.3
Gorbachev expected conservatives in America and Europe to try to keep the Cold War going. They would either do nothing or take new steps that would “contribute to the arms race.”
More “liberal circles,” he said, welcomed the Soviet efforts to rescue socialism. He analogized what he was doing as comparable to the way the American president Franklin Roosevelt had rescued capitalism with his New Deal program in the 1930s.
Gorbachev expected the incoming Bush administration to be “centrist.” It would probably not make matters worse. Nor would it do much to make them better. To Gorbachev, the new Bush group looked like “traditionalists” who “still do not have any foreign policy alternative to the traditional post-war course.” They were still worried “that they might be on the losing side.”
What, exactly, did the Soviets want the Americans to do? In his UN speech Gorbachev had stated three hopes. All had to do with arms control. He wanted the United States to move forward in the talks on strategic nuclear arms (START), chemical weapons, and conventional forces (CFE).
The arms control situation was not encouraging. Nothing had happened on either side that seemed likely to close the difficult gaps in the START talks. The discussions on banning chemical weapons were in an early stage and would depend on quite complex verification issues.
The CFE negotiations were just about to get under way and were on an enormous scale, with all twenty-three NATO and Warsaw Pact states participating in talks that covered Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals. Meanwhile NATO was planning to open up a whole new set of issues, with its plans to modernize short-range nuclear missile forces (SNF).
None of this, though, really spoke to the broader vision for the future of Europe, and the world.
At the end of 1988, as Gorbachev was comparing notes with his Politburo colleagues, Bush and his newly designated secretary of state, James Baker, were musing about Kissinger’s big ideas. Baker asked for comments on Kissinger’s arguments from the State Department’s European bureau and the aide who would be his new policy planning director, Dennis Ross.
The bureau counseled that the United States should just stay on course. Ross, though, had a different view.
Ross had already worked with Bush, during the Reagan administration and in the election campaign. He had heard Bush say that it was time to “dream big dreams.”
Ross agreed. “We’re entering a period that is really unlike any we’ve seen throughout the whole post-war era,” Ross wrote to Baker in December 1988, “and this is not the time to put our thinking in a strait-jacket.”
He scorned the European bureau’s advice as “more of the same.” That would just “be content with the current trends, fostering them but not having to do much to fuel them.”
Ross argued instead that the full potential for change could be more radical, as radical as Kissinger imagined. It really was a crossroads in world history.
But Ross did not like Kissinger’s recommendations. First, he thought Kissinger was too negative about Gorbachev, that he “probably exaggerates the dangers.”
Nor did Ross like the idea of seeking a U.S.-Soviet understanding about how to handle change in Europe. “We certainly don’t want to create a new Yalta.” Here he was referring to the argument that at the Yalta conference, in February 1945, Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt had disposed of the fate of Eastern Europe over the heads of its inhabitants.
The United States should have its own agenda for Europe’s future, Ross argued. In the American agenda, the future of Eastern Europe and the rest of Europe should be front and center.
“The division of Europe symbolizes the continuation of the cold war. If we are entering a new era and if there is a great new potential, we ought to be willing to deal with that key symbol—and we ought to tell Gorbachev this.”
Just because “we aren’t prepared to accept or promote the ‘Grand Design’ in Europe as Kissinger has defined it, we ought not to be too constrained in our thinking and not simply reject new ideas. That’s not the way to dream big dreams.”4
Just before Bush took office, Kissinger offered to help set up the sensitive U.S.-Soviet political dialogue that he thought was now so vital. He suggested to Bush that, while in Moscow for another reason, he might meet with Gorbachev and explore a channel for secret discussions. Bush, Baker, and Bush’s newly designated national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, went along with this.
In his Moscow meetings, Kissinger repeated his argument for a political understanding about the future of Europe, “conditions in which a political evolution could be possible but a political explosion would not be allowed.” He did not repeat his idea of a mutual U.S. and Soviet withdrawal from Europe. To Yakovlev, he said the U.S. presence in Europe was vital, if just as “a guarantee against the adventurism of Europeans themselves.”
Gorbachev told Kissinger, “My view is that we should both keep an eye on Germany and by that I mean both Germanies. We must not do anything to unsettle Europe into a crisis.”
On Eastern Europe, Gorbachev was philosophical. Life brings certain changes that no one can stop. But both sides should be careful not to threaten the other’s security.
Kissinger proposed a secret U.S.-Soviet channel. In this channel, Scowcroft (also a former Kissinger aide) would represent Bush. On his side, Gorbachev designated former Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. The plan was that the “political dialogue” in the channel could get going as early as March 1989.
It would be like old times, when Kissinger was President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and Kissinger-Dobrynin was his prime, secret connection to the Soviets, usually cutting out the secretary of state. Now it would be Scowcroft-Dobrynin.
Gorbachev pledged secrecy. Only he, Yakovlev, Dobrynin, and Shevardnadze would know about the channel. Dobrynin mentioned the Soviet desire to talk about China. “In 30 years they will be a nightmare.”
As the meeting was wrapping up, Gorbachev became “pensive.” He took a moment to reflect on what was happening at this moment in history. “I lead a strange country. I am trying to take my people in a direction they do not understand and many do not want to go.… But one thing is sure—whatever happens to perestroika this country will never be the same again.”
Kissinger replied that if he were a historian, he would wonder why Gorbachev, a product of the old system, was so determined to change it.
Gorbachev answered, “wistfully,” that “it was easy to see what was wrong. What is harder is to find out what works. But I need a long period of peace.”
Kissinger’s comment on this was that Gorbachev “was treading water with perestroika. He is looking to foreign policy as a way out. He will pay a reasonable price to that end.”5
Two days after Bush received Kissinger’s written report, Gorbachev phoned Bush to congratulate him on his inauguration. Bush promised to hear Kissinger’s report in person. He added that we “would not necessarily believe everything [Kissinger said] because this was, after all, Henry Kissinger.”
Bush then brought up the proposal of a secret U.S.-Soviet channel. There would indeed be a channel, but his spokesman in it would be James Baker.
Bush said that he hoped Baker, after he finished his consultations in Europe with all of America’s allies, would establish the kind of tight relationship with Shevardnadze that Shultz had forged. He stressed that “Jim Baker was very close to him.”
That ended any notion of a special Scowcroft-Dobrynin channel. It also effectively concluded Kissinger’s role as a facilitator. The Baker-Shevardnadze discussions got under way on about the intended schedule; their first meeting was on March 7.
Baker apparently took care to be sure that Bush established that he, Baker, would be the point person in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. The point was not just about reaffirming Baker’s primacy. Baker and his team also wanted to stay in the lead because they regarded Scowcroft and Scowcroft’s new deputy, Robert Gates, as too cautious and conservative. For Baker, as for Bush, it was time to “dream big dreams.”6
The Vectors of Change
During the next few months, between February and May 1989, the new American leaders conferred intensively with their counterparts in Western Europe, Canada, and Japan. Among them, an agenda emerged for a new Europe and a different world. An operating partnership also began to emerge between the U.S. leaders and key counterparts in Western Europe who actively planned together.
What leaders did was to catalog their key problems and, reasonably systematically, start making choices about how to try and solve them. These choices would set vectors of change, providing a sense of direction and magnitude.
Just after taking office, before Baker set off on a flurry of trips to Europe and Asia and back to Europe, Bush met privately with Baker to go over their thinking about U.S.-Soviet relations.
To Baker, what was essential was that the changes in the Soviet Union were real. Gorbachev really was different. The jury was still out about how it would turn out.
Bush had noticed the public prediction from the Soviet dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov that Gorbachev might soon be overthrown.
Baker did not think the Soviet outcome depended on U.S. actions. But, he noted, even if the United States could only affect Gorbachev’s prospects “on the margins,” it did not want him to fail.
The U.S. could help frame the hard choices Gorbachev would have to make. It could do this with negative incentives, making it clear that military competition would not work. It could also use positive incentives, by “offering him the hand of partnership and by challenging him to give his slogans real content.”
The United States, Baker thought, would soon have to muster its own initiatives, for instance on conventional arms control or on chemical weapons. “Let’s honestly probe, and let’s challenge him to be bold in actions, not only words.”7
On this point, as on almost all others in foreign policy, Bush’s and Baker’s instincts were about the same. Although the media at the time and historians later would make much of a so-called pause early in the Bush administration, these commentaries misunderstand what was really going on. While there were a couple of doubting voices about Gorbachev in the new Bush administration, Bush and Baker were not among them. They agreed that they wished to find a way to help Gorbachev in a constructive way.
What they wanted to do was put their own stamp on U.S. policies. Bush and Baker did not think the policy positions they had inherited from the Reagan administration on next steps with the Soviet Union or on Europe were very interesting or promising. They had not inherited any pending breakthroughs or novel ideas in arms control, for example.
One of Baker’s earliest priorities was in fact to distance the new administration from the Reagan administration’s stance in Central America. He tried to achieve an early win by persuading Congress (done with great difficulty) to fund nonlethal assistance to the resistance in Nicaragua, then use the emerging peace process there to press the Nicaraguan government toward a solution.
Less than three weeks in office, Bush offered a revealing outline of his thinking in a relaxed meeting held in Ottawa with his friend, the Canadian prime minister, Brian Mulroney. Baker and Scowcroft were there too.
Bush underscored to Mulroney that this was an important phase for all of Europe. His plan, he said, was to think, consult with allies, and then “take the offensive, to save the Alliance, not just be seen as reacting to yet another [Gorbachev] move.” Baker was about to visit with every NATO ally.
Maybe, Bush added, Eastern Europe was the key, to “get in there in his end zone! Not stir up revolution.” The United States was right on human rights, on democracy, and on freedom. “There is a big opportunity for us in dealing with Eastern Europe,” Bush explained, “if we can get our act together. There is a potential for economic cooperation, but there is also the danger,” he added, “of pushing too far in Eastern Europe and causing the situation to get out of control, at which point the tanks might come in.”
In addition to Eastern Europe, what, Mulroney asked, were Bush’s priorities for the Western alliance?
Bush ticked off three. First, there was “Alliance solidarity,” with particular concern about Germany. The urgent issue there was a hot emerging one about whether or how to go through with the 1988 NATO decision to modernize U.S. short-range nuclear forces in Europe, which above all meant in Germany.
Next was “moving ahead with the USSR.” Baker had already flagged the need to come up with initiatives, at least in arms control.
Third, the United States needed a policy to deal with West European integration. The single European market was to take full effect in 1992.
Mulroney knew very well how strong protectionism had become in the United States, amid the general erosion of the Cold War trading system. Mulroney had just gone through the near-failure of the new U.S.-Canada trade agreement. Called in to save the deal by the Reagan White House, Baker (then the treasury secretary) had rescued it in the waning months of the administration. It had been a very close call.
Now the Europeans seemed, with the Single European Act, to be creating what could become a “Fortress Europe,” the largest integrated market in the world. This could redouble protectionist pressures on both sides of the Atlantic. Bush said he wanted to find a way to sustain an open economic system.
Baker brought the discussion back to Gorbachev. He stressed that the administration did not want Gorbachev to fail. This was the Bush administration’s position, even if there were some people in the United States who might disagree.
Perhaps feeling called out, Scowcroft added that he too wanted to “move forward” with the Soviet Union. But he wanted to think of ways to do it that could be reversed quickly if something happened to Gorbachev. He wondered what could be done to preempt Gorbachev strategically.
“That’s the big issue,” Baker chimed in, “and what we’re seeking but don’t yet have.” The Americans would work on this. But, echoing the point he had made to Bush, “we do think that it’s what happens in the USSR that will determine his success or not—not what the U.S. or the alliance does.”
Mulroney had some advice that resonated with Bush and Baker. “Some smart politics by the President of the United States is in order—a trip, a statement, and an initiative in the near-term, at least by May or June.”8
Bush and Baker started off at the run, as Baker visited all the NATO allies, then joined Bush in East Asia. Bush, the former World War II pilot who had flown missions against Japan, was going to the funeral of the emperor who had led that nation in wartime, Hirohito. Then Bush and Baker would head on to South Korea and China (a return to a country where Bush had been America’s envoy in 1974–75).
Bush is often portrayed as a cautious, prudent “realist.” A less schematic but more accurate assessment would find something different.
Bush was an intelligent and almost peripatetically restless man, a competitive college baseball player in his younger days now reduced to tennis, golf, fishing, horseshoes, or competing at anything else that came to hand. Unlike Reagan, a self-taught intellectual who loved thinking and writing about political ideas, Bush was more action-oriented than reflective.
Bush was never comfortable with prepared, public speeches. Here again he was unlike Reagan. He came across better in person than he did on television.
Though he was conversant on the issues, Bush’s judgments about basic direction were often intuitive. His conversation and his correspondence (he was a frequent and faithful note and letter writer) are full of expressions like—later explaining how he and Gorbachev came to be able to “go around the world on issues”—“I thought I had a feel for his heartbeat.”9
Bush’s characteristic way of operating was to read, listen, and try to get to the essence of the tone or position he thought he should adopt. Once he thought he had the essence of it, he would then reach out to counterparts and talk it through with them in his own way.
When it came to hammering out the details, Bush would often turn that over to “Jimmy.”
Few but George Bush would refer to James Baker that way. But, except for the pairing of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, no president in American history had ever been this close to his secretary of state.
At the end of 1988, Bush and Baker had been almost brotherly friends for more than thirty years. They had gone through a lot together, from personal tragedies to political campaigns.
During the eight years of the Reagan administration, when Baker had been White House chief of staff and treasury secretary while Bush was vice president, Baker’s political power on a given day had often been greater than Bush’s. At one level they regarded each other as peers, with an undercurrent of rivalry that was part of their makeup. Yet Baker carefully separated two George Bushes in his mind, one the longtime friend and the other the person Baker would address even in small meetings as “Mr. President.”
Like Bush, Baker was oriented toward action. Where Bush would look for an essential theme or stance, Baker would try to convert it into a practical strategy, mapping out and negotiating the details.
In history books, Baker often comes across mainly as a kind of political lawyer, acknowledged as tactically gifted, expert at negotiations, but not regarded as a policy strategist in the way outsiders perceive someone like Kissinger. Such an appraisal of Baker might be close to the mark when he was Reagan’s chief of staff during Reagan’s first term. But by the end of that term, and certainly by the time he had finished another term as a very active treasury secretary, Baker was accustomed to mapping international strategy on a large scale.
If strategy consists of charting just how to connect means and ends to get something done, including on a grand scale, Baker was the Bush administration’s principal strategist. Most comfortable when focused on action, Baker, aware of some of his own strengths and weaknesses, constantly interacted with a small team mapping out ideas and sizing up practical ways to apply them in upcoming trips, meetings, or phone calls.
Integral to that small team were two veterans of the 1988 election campaign, which Baker had managed for Bush: Robert Zoellick, who had been the campaign’s overall issues director, and Dennis Ross, the foreign policy lead.
Zoellick had worked for Baker at Treasury. Ross, who in the mid-1980s had been at UC Berkeley running a center on Soviet international behavior, was also a specialist on the Middle East. He had already served in government at State and Defense. In the Reagan White House, on the NSC staff, since 1986, he had worked closely with Bush. He knew Bush much better than he did Baker.
After Bush chose Baker as his secretary of state and Scowcroft as his national security adviser, Bush invited the forty-year-old Ross to take his choice of jobs. He could be the deputy either to Scowcroft or to Baker.
Ross chose to work with Baker. He knew he liked Baker’s operating style and wanted to be closer to the fieldwork of diplomacy. Zoellick also turned down a top position on the White House staff in order to work on Baker’s team. But the point is that Baker’s team, like Baker, had good personal relationships with Bush.10
Zoellick and Ross then became Baker’s two chief strategists at the State Department, Ross focusing on the Soviet Union and the Middle East and Zoellick on Europe and practically everything else. Zoellick was thirty-five, raised in the Midwest, near Chicago, and had earned joint degrees from Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government before going into full-time government work.
Baker relied heavily on Zoellick and Ross. Until he brought in a new team during the second half of 1989, he had little confidence in the leadership of State’s European bureau, believing that they had no new ideas about future strategies.11
The Bush-Baker relationship was practically symbiotic. To one former governor who later joined Bush’s cabinet, Bush and Baker “seemed connected telepathically; each man appeared perennially aware of what the other was thinking and doing.” Each was conscious of the other’s strengths. Even when they had played tennis doubles together as winning club players, Baker remembered that Bush was “great at the net and I was great at ground strokes. We were both weak as servers.”
When it came to foreign policy, Baker recalled simply that “there was no daylight between us. We really saw everything pretty much the same way.”12
Baker would frequently see Bush alone, discussing what they would do next. Scowcroft would often be invited to sit in. When Baker later made a move, he could count on Bush to back his play.
Because Baker, Zoellick, and Ross had already worked so much and so recently with Bush, unlike Scowcroft or his staff, Scowcroft was, at first, a bit of an outlier. Bush and Baker had first worked with Scowcroft (and soon-to-be defense secretary Dick Cheney) nearly fifteen years earlier in the Ford administration.
Scowcroft was hardworking, discreet, and cautious. He had served most recently as a member of the Tower Commission, which investigated the Iran-Contra mess in the Reagan administration. The investigation had left Scowcroft deeply uneasy about the way Reagan ran his White House. Scowcroft looked for top-quality staff work, another deficiency he had observed in the Reagan White House.
After Ross turned down the job as Scowcroft’s deputy, that concern about the quality of the staff work was a factor that drew Scowcroft to choose Bob Gates, a CIA career officer who had spent considerable time on the NSC staff. Gates was the CIA’s deputy director during Reagan’s second term. Well organized, disciplined, and extremely skilled at the day-to-day operations of government, he ran the deputies committee of top subcabinet officials so efficiently that full meetings of the National Security Council were rarely needed to clarify issues before they were presented to President Bush.13
Gates had been relatively outspoken in voicing skepticism about Gorbachev. In October 1988 he had given a speech that had so infuriated Secretary of State Shultz that Shultz directly confronted him about it and then tried to get him fired. Knowing this, during those early months in 1989, Baker and his staff kept a wary eye on Gates, to make sure the administration spoke with one voice.
The NSC staff office for Europe and the Soviet Union was led by Robert Blackwill. A career diplomat who had worked on Kissinger’s staff in the 1970s (but did not share Kissinger’s policy prescriptions for Europe), he was probably hired because Bob Gates remembered him well from their common service on the Carter administration’s NSC staff. Scowcroft recalled Blackwill’s “reputation for brilliance, laced with irascibility,” a “forward-looking original thinker who reveled in finding ways to take advantage of the rapidly changing European scene.” Some of the office’s ideas turned out to appeal more to Bush (and Baker) than they did to Scowcroft.
Joining Blackwill were the authors of this book. Condi Rice, then a young (thirty-four-year-old) Stanford professor, was an expert on Soviet affairs. Scowcroft and Gates were both acquainted with Rice. She also knew and got along with Ross; they had both been part of the Berkeley-Stanford center on Soviet international behavior. To help on Western Europe and European security, Blackwill brought in Philip Zelikow, a thirty-four-year-old former trial lawyer who was then a career diplomat and a veteran of the conventional arms control talks.14
On March 7, Baker and Shevardnadze opened their channel with direct talks in Vienna on the margins of a conference of foreign ministers of all thirty-five European nations participating in the “Helsinki process,” the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) that had been founded in 1973. They agreed on an agenda and exchanged their positions on the range of issues.
Shevardnadze stressed Soviet readiness to move on conventional arms control. The Soviets had shown their readiness to do something about armored forces. They pressed the United States to put aircraft, helicopters, and troop numbers on the table too.15
On strategic nuclear arms control, the START talks, one of Bush’s first acts had been to replace the Reagan administration’s START negotiator (Edward Rowny) with Richard Burt, who was transferred from his post as Reagan’s ambassador to West Germany. The Burt pick was a loud signal, to those who remembered the battles over arms control in the Reagan era, that Bush was siding with those who wanted rapid progress in the START talks.
The issues holding up progress were difficult and technically complex, mainly about whether to ban strategic defense systems and how to handle cruise missiles. The important moves to break these logjams began later in 1989.
The new national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, had launched a series of formal policy reviews that might develop a distinctive Bush administration approach. Historians have given these too much attention. Baker had gone along with Scowcroft’s wish to have these reviews, but they made no difference for what Baker and his team were doing. “We treated that exercise as something to monitor and manage so it wouldn’t bind us,” Zoellick recalled, “but not to treat it in a serious way.”16
Just before Baker’s March 7 meeting with Shevardnadze, Scowcroft sent Bush a memo on “Getting Ahead of Gorbachev.” Scowcroft’s tone was wary. He warned against “early and dramatic proposals.” He instead argued for “a sound strategy,” laying out a set of sensible, conservative principles. The American ambassador in Moscow also had just sent back a set of similarly conservative policy suggestions.17
Meanwhile, Scowcroft’s staff, like Baker’s team, had already given up on the formal reviews. Both of us joined in a memo to Scowcroft telling him that the reviews “were not proceeding well.”
We thought the analysis part of the Soviet work was fine, but “the policy half… is largely a restatement of last year’s agenda, vague and unfocused.” It “lacks any clear guide as to how the future may differ from the past and what we can or should do to shape it.”
While the European bureau’s work on Eastern Europe was more constructive, we thought the Western European work was even worse than the Soviet effort. We pointed out that, over at State, Ross and his aides “fully shared our negative assessment.”18
Returning from his March 7 meeting with Shevardnadze, Baker also had a quite different sort of approach in mind. Baker sat down with Bush on March 8. He argued in favor of just the sort of early and dramatic proposals on Europe and the Soviet Union that, a week earlier, Scowcroft had warned against.
To Baker, all the debates about whether Gorbachev would succeed or fail seemed like “academic theology.” Each side had their case. “What mattered to me were what actions we could take in the face of these two different possibilities.”
The Soviet “new thinking” was not well defined. The United States should suggest some of the “content.”
On the plan to modernize U.S. short-range nuclear forces (SNF), Baker had listened to the Europeans. He wanted to reconsider the U.S. position.
The worries about nuclear deterrence were linked to the conventional force position in Europe. On that key subject, “I’m less convinced we have ideas, much less the analysis to support them.” Baker wanted Bush to ready a major conventional arms control move for the historic NATO summit meeting, celebrating the alliance’s fortieth anniversary, scheduled for the end of May.
Baker thought a “small, reliable group” had to come up with really big ideas about the future of U.S. forces in Europe. He warned Bush that the bureaucracy would probably hinder or leak about any such bold effort. He stressed that the pace of change in Eastern Europe seemed to be picking up, “both political and economic,” and the United States also needed to step up the pace in thinking about how to encourage those developments.19
Bush liked Baker’s activist approach. Scowcroft too had to admit that his formal policy reviews did not seem to be producing any interesting ideas. In the second week of March, the word came down to us that it was time to disregard the formal reviews. We should go all out to develop a menu of ideas on all fronts concerning the future of Europe. This was not just about the Soviet Union. The wider future of Europe was in play.
In the flurry of policy development that followed, it is hard to follow all the moves without a map. So we offer an issue map.
With each issue there was a basic choice to make. These were not theoretical choices. They were actual, plausible ones debated at the time. Like switches that control the course of an aircraft, they would set the vectors of change.
This list roughly corresponds to the chronological sequence in which these issues were tackled during the spring of 1989, but that does not mean that one was necessarily more important than another. As policies evolved, new issues and new choices would emerge.
To force the pace of new policy moves, Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft decided to create a series of action-forcing events. The White House and State teams mapped out a plan for two major European trips by the president in 1989. First, in the late spring, Bush would go to Western Europe, and there would be a NATO summit. Second, in the summer, Bush would concentrate on Eastern Europe, and this would culminate in the G-7 economic summit, to be held that year in Paris. The White House also planned a series of speeches in the spring in order to set the new vectors.
Because it would be months before Baker had a new team in place to run State’s European bureau, in this early period Blackwill’s NSC staff office became a critical engine room for churning out ideas. Along with Zoellick and Ross on Baker’s team, they would become the “small, reliable group” that Baker had wanted.
Over in Western Europe, the prevailing mood was similar to that in Washington. Officials speculated about Gorbachev’s future. French president Mitterrand had followed Kohl’s October 1988 visit to Moscow with one of his own in November. He, foreign minister Roland Dumas, and their advisers regarded Gorbachev’s nuclear arms control ideas as “romantic.” They emphasized conventional arms control instead. They said they “were not subject to the ‘Gorby-mania’ they observed in Germany.”20
Western leaders waited to see what would happen in the Roundtable talks in Hungary and Poland. They debated about the emerging single European market and emerging proposals to intensify an economic and monetary union. They worried about what it all meant for the Atlantic alliance. West European leaders joined in setting the vectors for change, driving much of the agenda. They did this through development of a different kind of direct operating partnership with the Americans.
In the early 1970s, bargaining between the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Western Europe sometimes seemed like a triangle in which each of the three sides would play off the others. Baker never tried to run a triangular game. He and Bush preferred an orchestrated, coordinated partnership.
Rather than operating that partnership mainly through a British-American transatlantic bridge, Bush and Baker consulted broadly and deeply with West European counterparts, especially with the West Germans. A Washington-Bonn nexus began to supplant the traditional Washington-London one. This came naturally to Baker, from his experience in working with economic issues and the Bonn-centered European Monetary System.
Though it is now practically forgotten, the NATO modernization debate about SNF (short-range nuclear forces, usually referring to missiles with ranges of zero to five hundred miles) was the great security issue in Europe in the first months of 1989. As part of the bargains surrounding the INF treaty of 1987, NATO had formally agreed that it would plod ahead with freshening these short-range forces, which would be the only U.S. nuclear missiles that would remain in Europe (in addition to the nuclear bombs that could be carried on aircraft). This commitment to modernize SNF had become one more token that, as tensions relaxed, America would not “decouple” its nuclear deterrent from European defense.
British prime minister Thatcher had no doubts. She devoted her first call to Bush after his inauguration to the “urgent” need to modernize SNF.
But, especially in West Germany, the prospect of another huge debate about putting in new American nuclear missiles was disheartening, especially with West German elections coming in 1990. These proposed new missiles would have so short a range that the most likely targets would be in places inhabited by Germans. Such a push seemed more and more bizarre in the age of Gorbachev.
To Gorbachev, getting reports on the allied debates, it seemed that “Baker traveled around Europe and he is in a panic: Europe is breaking away from their [American] control. Their society is reacting powerfully to our work.”21
The Future of Eastern Europe
Early in February 1989, Gorbachev retreated from Moscow’s snows to a well-earned vacation at Pitsunda, on the Black Sea coast, a longtime resort spot for Soviet leaders. He was in that pensive mood that Kissinger had sensed in mid-January, that perestroika was “treading water.” The same day that he had met with Kissinger and wondered aloud about his “strange country,” Gorbachev had confided to his aides, “We’re walking on the razor’s edge.”
It is hard to avoid the impression that at some level, Gorbachev felt he had shot his bolt and now the future was starting to move out of his hands. He went to work on a new book, dictating main ideas and turning over the drafting to a team of writers led by Chernyaev. In early March the resulting four-hundred-page manuscript was ready for Gorbachev’s review. It was to be entitled 1988: The Turning Point Year. The book was never finished.22
During March, in Moscow the party leadership was getting ready for the democratic reforms that we described in chapter 2, the election of a reconstituted Supreme Soviet. The leaders had to select the “Red Hundred,” the party members who would be guaranteed seats.
During March, in Warsaw and Budapest, Poles and Hungarians were hammering out their first moves toward some more inclusive and democratic government. Those agreements were to be implemented during the early summer.
Watching Poland and Hungary, the Soviet government ran a very secret policy review about how to get ready for possible changes in Eastern Europe. Remembering the Polish crisis in 1980–81, the Soviet government and the military were not at all eager to send in the tanks, shoot civilians, and crush new revolts, as they had crushed them in the old days.
The threat of Soviet tanks might help local communists who wanted to scare the dissidents. But Moscow did not actually want to send in the tanks. It did not want to assume the burden of having to fix or subsidize states that would not fix or finance themselves.23
As we mentioned in chapter 2, since October 1988 a few of Gorbachev’s key advisers on this subject, like Georgi Shakhnazarov, had been urging leaders to get ready for upheaval. But to Shakhnazarov, this meant Moscow should get ready for restraint, to not send in the tanks.24 In late January 1989, another senior aide on the CC Staff and America watcher, Vadim Zagladin, asked Gorbachev to authorize a “painstaking review” of Soviet policy on military assistance to foreign states in “extreme circumstances.” Gorbachev had agreed.
On March 25 the review’s conclusions were presented to Gorbachev in a ten-page report from Shevardnadze, Defense Minister Dmitry Yazov, and the head of the state foreign economic commission. They recommended that the Soviet Union assist its East European allies militarily only if there was an external, foreign attack. Gorbachev had already come to the same conclusion.
Zagladin suggested that the Soviet Union might wish to let the United States know about these important decisions. Moscow could reassure the United States, confidentially, that it did not plan to send in the tanks if there was a crisis.
On this point, the ministers disagreed with Zagladin. Such assurances to Washington would be leaked. Then “we would appear in the eyes of our allies to be conspiring behind their backs with the Americans regarding our obligations.”25
Gorbachev had another policy review under way, also in secret, to review Soviet policy toward Western Europe. The new policy should develop Soviet ideas about a “common European home,” turn them more toward a European focus, what he and Chernyaev thought of as “Mitterrand’s approach.” The goal was to have that new policy ready for a trip and speeches in Western Europe in July 1989.26
In late March the Washington press had been diverted by talk about Kissinger’s supposed “Yalta II” plan for U.S.-Soviet management of change in Eastern Europe. That idea had been quashed secretly months earlier and was now dismissed publicly. Baker warned that no one should see some “signal that somehow we are getting together with the Soviet Union and carving up Eastern Europe.”27
Like the secret group in Moscow, Bush and his team were getting ready for some new democratic process in Hungary and in Poland. The Bush team did not know about the policy review in Moscow. They did know that the Roundtable agreements would test Soviet tolerance.
In April, Bush delivered the first in the planned series of policy statements, this one on Eastern Europe. When Bush went to Poland and Hungary that summer, after the Poles held their first free elections, it would be the first visit by an American president to Poland since 1977 and the first such visit ever to Hungary.
The occasion of the speech was memorable for Bush, partly because it was his first foreign policy speech since his inauguration, and partly because he later learned that an assassin had been in the crowd hoping to kill him. Deterred that time by metal detectors, the would-be assassin tried to intercept Bush at two other locations before he was eventually arrested and jailed.
Speaking to a Polish American community in Hamtramck, Michigan, Bush quoted his inaugural address: “The day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient leafless tree.” The West, he said, “can now be bold in proposing a vision of the European future.”
As Ross had argued back in December 1988, Bush looked beyond more arms control. Arms, he added in a conscious echo of Czech dissident Václav Havel, “are a symptom, not a source of tension. The true source of tension is the imposed and unnatural division of Europe.”28
Should the U.S. offer aid? Internally, the Bush administration was divided about what aid the United States might offer. His administration felt constrained, dealing with the hangover of unsustainable public and private debt incurred during the Reagan years. Bush started with some moves on export credits and again rescheduling and writing down Polish public debt. No president had ever offered major economic assistance to a Warsaw Pact state and Soviet military ally.
But, in his speech, Bush held out the hope that America and international financial institutions, like the IMF, could do much more. As he had told the Poles in his vice-presidential visit, aid would be conditional. “Help from the West will come in concert with liberalization,” he declared. “We’re not going to offer aid without requiring sound economic practices in return.”
Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady had already started arguing about the size of possible aid to Eastern Europe. Brady stressed, accurately, that Poland had already gotten itself in deep trouble by borrowing and squandering money.
“Baker and I argued that the policy this time was different.… The dispute was emotional and irreconcilable,” Scowcroft remembered.
Bush finally “directed that [he] wanted to see aid proposals—[and] hoped that, in a pinch, [the budget director] could find money.” Since that budget director, Richard Darman, had been Baker’s longtime deputy, there was a good chance that Baker could find the money he wanted. What eventually emerged was a substantial American aid program that was developed with Congress, turned into legislation, and passed into law during the next seven months.29
The truth was that in the summer of 1989 neither Bush nor any other Western leader was ready to tell the changing governments what exactly they should do. None of the Western governments had developed substantial plans that presumed to tell them how to go about transforming the whole economy of a communist country.
The United States looked to Western Europe for help in developing a wider agenda for assistance to Eastern Europe. They jumped into that common planning during the late summer of 1989, as the election results in Poland and Hungary electrified the world.
The Future of the Soviet Union
Since Scowcroft had agreed with his staff (and Baker) that the formal policy review on U.S.-Soviet policy was “going nowhere,” late one March evening he told Blackwill and Rice, “See if you can write something that has more bite.” Rice took the better part of a weekend to rough out a notional policy statement and then went over it with Blackwill and with Ross.
The essence of the paper was to throw the switch away from the grand strategy of “containment” that had guided policy toward the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. “For forty years” that was how the United States “had committed its power and will,” but “a new era may now be upon us.”
In the new strategy, “We may be able to move beyond containment to a U.S. policy that actively promotes the integration of the Soviet Union into the existing international system.”
The paper then listed military and political conditions “that will support a cooperative relationship between Moscow and the West.” These included a “smaller and much less threatening” force posture, renunciation of the principle of permanent international class conflict, permission for self-determination in Eastern Europe, a more pluralist and humane domestic political life, and at least a willingness to cooperate on other issues.
That document became the centerpiece of the president’s first speech on policy toward the Soviet Union, an address at Texas A&M on May 17. “Beyond containment” became a catchphrase for Bush.30
The American concept was that the Soviet leadership was clearly moving toward or considering such fundamental changes. So the American stance was to spotlight the hope and spell out a set of goals, or tests, that could set clear, reasonable benchmarks for a Soviet shift to a cooperative world system.
Some Soviets disliked Bush’s tone, with its Cold War concerns about Soviet behavior and posture. Others liked the basic thrust, which lined up with their new thinking, to end the Soviet Union’s isolation from the international system.
Bush also made it clear, both in the speech and through Baker (who had just returned from Moscow, where he met with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze on May 10 and 11), that he hoped for Gorbachev’s success. Bush’s defense secretary, Dick Cheney, sought to offer a more skeptical and hawkish view.
The White House censored portions of a speech Cheney had prepared. Then Cheney gave a press interview indicating that Gorbachev could well fail. Baker felt great regard for Cheney from their work together in the Ford administration. But as he later recalled, “I picked up the phone. I called the President, and said, ‘You can’t have this.’”
Bush and Baker decided that the White House would put out a statement disavowing Cheney’s comment. “And they [the White House press office] went out there and they cut the ground out from under Dick quicker than you could imagine.”
Later in the year, in October, when he thought Gates was trying to voice a distinct view about Gorbachev, Baker would step hard on that too, and make a point of having done so. Bush and Scowcroft backed Baker up.31
In his speech, Bush proposed a specific test of Gorbachev’s commitment to openness, to “glasnost.” He revived an idea called “Open Skies.” He proposed that the United States, the Soviet Union, and their allies should be willing to open their skies to multinational teams that could fly over and surveil military sites. Dwight Eisenhower had first tried out this idea in 1955, to head off an era of thermonuclear fear. Bush thought it was time to try again, and the new idea would include all the NATO and Warsaw Pact states.
Even though it had been developed by Blackwill and Zelikow on his own staff, Scowcroft thought the idea was old and “smacked of gimmickry.” This dismissive view was echoed by Bush’s political opponents and the press.
Bush did not agree with Scowcroft or the critics. “I thought we had a lot to gain” from Open Skies, he said. Although it was commonly believed that satellites already provided abundant information, there were many advantages to aerial imagery compared to satellite imagery, especially in that era.
Also, Bush’s proposal would open up such access and transparency to at least twenty-three states, not just the superpowers. The initiative later led to a treaty. As this book goes to press, Open Skies flights continue in the United States and across Europe.32
Bush did agree with Scowcroft that it was best to delay a summit with Gorbachev until there was something “concrete” to do or announce. The press would place high expectations on what such a meeting might produce. But in July, Bush decided the time was right for the summit with Gorbachev, as soon as possible.33
The Future of European Integration
While the Americans were working on their policy ideas, the leading West European governments were busy too. On the subject of Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union, their views were similar to those in the United States.
What occupied a lot of their attention, though, was the future of the European project. Their issue, in the spring of 1989, was whether to take European integration to another stage, beyond the single European market, and develop a plan for European monetary union. The key initiative again emerged from the triumvirate of Kohl/Genscher, Mitterrand, and Delors.
Drawing on his life experience, especially out of the Second World War, Mitterrand was committed “to a peace-enabling rebirth of Europe in the process of its unification.” This “was the great political passion of his life.”
It was to preserve this cause of Europe that Mitterrand had made one of the most difficult decisions of his public life, in 1983, when (as is detailed in chapter 1) he had reversed his whole economic program in order to preserve the partnership with Germany and Europe. It had been his crucial “act of faith.” He would remember it, and remind other Europeans of it, later in 1989.34
As for Delors, in Brussels, still the president of the European Commission, he had already achieved a stunning accomplishment in the Single European Act that had been signed in 1986. He had not rested on these laurels.
With the particular help of an Italian adviser, Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, Delors pushed for another stage. They believed that a unified European commercial system had to be accompanied by allowing easy movement of capital across borders too. Thus, Delors and Padoa-Schioppa argued, a single European market had to deepen into some kind of economic and monetary union (EMU). The logic was strong that if countries had free capital movement and fixed or tightly coordinated exchange rates, they should move away from independent national monetary policies.
The West Germans liked the idea of free capital movement; the plan was less appealing to French finance officials and banks. Once more, the triumvirate guided change. Mitterrand’s broad vision was shared to an exceptional degree by the West German coalition leaders, Helmut Kohl and Hans-Dietrich Genscher. They decided to join the EMU cause.
Pressed hard by his French counterpart, Roland Dumas, in February 1988 Genscher produced a memo that outlined the “Creation of a European Currency Area and a European Central Bank.” He proposed that a committee of wise men develop the idea. A few months later, in June 1988, Mitterrand and Kohl came to an unwritten understanding that they would go ahead with a plan for free capital movement within Europe, in a wider plan for economic and monetary union. They persuaded other European leaders to at least let the work begin on the idea.
Delors would be in charge of working up the plan. Kohl insisted on the key role for Delors.
This plan for monetary union, surrendering West German control over their currency, was a huge step for Germans to consider. The stability of their D-Mark was a symbol for their pride in their whole economic success story since the war.
Kohl decided to help Delors confront the Bundesbank, the West German central bank. In July 1988 Kohl personally appeared before the bank’s governing council.
He offered the central bankers a broad historical perspective. The EC might enlarge further, he predicted. There was also “great interest” in the EC in Eastern Europe (a remarkable statement to make at the time). Kohl also stressed how important it was to preserve the Franco-German partnership, which “went beyond the economic.”
Mitterrand understood the German concerns. To his cabinet, in August 1988, he explained that “Germany is divided even though it remains a great country, a great people. It is deprived of the attributes of sovereignty. It insists on its power. Yet its power is the economy; the deutsch mark is its atomic force.” Mitterrand did not know if he could integrate this power into a European union, “but I hope so.”35
Many of the French did not share Mitterrand’s pro-European vision. “It represented a cultural image that, within the Socialist Party, was particular to Mitterrand. In no sense did it embody the characteristic image and rationale of Franco-German relations and European unification to be found in the Foreign Ministry, the Finance Ministry, or even the Elysée.” But, thanks to Mitterrand, the EMU project went forward.36
The British finance minister regarded this Delors-led planning process as a “disaster.” He and Thatcher hoped that, since the West German Bundesbank’s president and the head of the Bank of England were both on Delors’s committee, they would torpedo the idea.
By the spring of 1989, this “Delors report” was being finished. Delors had eased the fears of his opponents by promising that the new European Central Bank would be “a Bundesbank-type” central bank: independent, an inflation fighter. The Bank of England head decided to be constructive and he did not sabotage the enterprise.
The plan very much envisioned that “a monetary union also requires some measure of fiscal union” of common budget policies. It did not necessarily require a single currency. But the plan would at least set up tight coordination among the national currencies.
Details leaked to the press in April 1989. The political debate went public. Dissenting, the Bundesbank’s leader claimed the proposal was “completely unrealistic.” The head of the Bank of England worried that others in his government were “going to clamp down on me because of all this independence stuff.”37
The French finance minister was unhappy too. He attacked the plan as “too Germanic.” France’s central banker, who was helping Delors, stubbornly explained that he was doing his work directly for Mitterrand.
Though Delors kept him informed, Mitterrand was not interested in the details. What he wanted was enough political momentum to keep the process moving forward. His staff coordinated the maneuvers among the triumvirate (Paris, Bonn, and Brussels) and with Madrid, since the Spanish were chairs of the EC process during the first half of 1989.38
In the spring of 1989 there were two basic choices for what the West Europeans would do next about EMU. Either the governments would adopt the report or they would “shelve it and make it material for doctoral theses.”39 The first choice, adoption, meant that a new committee would get to work on writing a treaty.
Kohl was now uneasy and wanted to delay the work, at least until after his 1990 reelection effort was done. Mitterrand was against delay.
The triumvirate came up with a middle option. At their June 1989 summit in Madrid, European leaders adopted the report as a “sound basis for future work.” They set up an intergovernmental conference to write the treaty, but then put off deciding when this conference would start or finish its work.40
Thatcher felt powerless to veto this result. It had not fixed an outcome. Having chosen to still stay outside of the existing European Monetary System, Britain had less leverage to tell others inside that system what they should do to improve it.
At this interesting time in the development of the European project, in the spring of 1989, Bush invited Mitterrand to come to his family’s retreat on the Maine coast, in Kennebunkport. He also offered to speak about Europe’s future, together with Mitterrand, on the same dais at Boston University.
The American administration had played practically no part in the advancing European argument about economic and monetary union. The Bush administration was awakening to the full significance of the way Europe was changing. Bush made a conscious effort to improve relations with Mitterrand and with France. Blackwill had pressed him to reach out to Mitterrand, and Bush had helped persuade a reluctant Scowcroft to go along.
It worked. Bush and Mitterrand renewed their acquaintance. They had known each other since 1981. The atmosphere in Bush’s home was warm.
But their friendliness could only go so far. Bush asked Mitterrand to go out with him for a ride on Bush’s cigarette boat, a racing-style motorboat.
“Mitterrand took one look at the boat and firmly said, ‘Non.’”
Bush then asked Blackwill to go. A loyal civil servant, Blackwill did not feel quite able to decline. The ride, he recalled, “scared the bejabbers out of landlubber me, as the President drove like a maniac.”41
Safe on dry land, Bush and Mitterrand reassured each other about their support for European integration. The two leaders found that their strategic outlook converged on other European issues too. The American vision for Europe’s future as a whole was that the Cold War might end as all of Europe converged on shared fundamental principles. The European Community had become a magnet and precedent for this approach.42
Looking to institutions that embraced all of Europe, the Bush administration soon proposed that the pan-European political organization, the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE), could do more too. It could promote pluralism by setting guidelines for how to hold free elections in Eastern Europe, as the Hungarian and Polish Roundtable talks were agreeing on their own tentative democratic experiments.43
In his policy address with Mitterrand, on May 21, Bush called attention to the coming single European market. This fed protectionist fears in the United States, as the world trade system seemed to be falling apart and Europe was now forming into an economic superpower.
From the start of the administration, Baker had warned the rest of the cabinet that European integration was “a major challenge; we need to make sure the result is outward-looking, not inward.” This would require a “well-coordinated, consistent, active effort” by the U.S. government.
The Boston speech became the occasion for Bush “to make the strategic case for not letting our economic agencies declare war on the [European Community] at this point in history.” Another part of that strategic case was that European integration was a powerful magnetic force “drawing Eastern Europe closer toward the commonwealth of free nations.”
So, Bush told his Boston audience that “the postwar order that began in 1945 is transforming into something very different.” In language that was heard loud and clear on the other side of the Atlantic, the American president declared that, whatever others may say, “this administration is of one mind. We believe a strong, united Europe means a strong America.”44
Later that month, Bush had a chance to reiterate this message directly with Delors in Brussels. Two weeks later, in Washington, Delors returned the visit. Delors told the Americans that the monetary union could follow the huge work associated with the single European market (“EC 92”). The Americans expressed no concern about the “Delors report.”
Instead, what Bush and Baker wanted was an understanding about where all this would go. They wanted to head off the danger of an integrated European economy becoming an economic Fortress Europe. That meant they wanted a hard linkage to link completion of EC 92 to a new agreement on global trade.
The negotiations to create this global trading system were called the “Uruguay Round” in the framework of the old GATT system. This round of global trade talks, ultimately involving more than 120 country signatories, was the most ambitious ever launched since the original framework was created in 1947.
It was called the Uruguay Round because, after four years of exploratory work, the round had been launched in 1986 at a meeting at Punta del Este, Uruguay. It had the most ambitious negotiating mandate ever attempted. The new global trade agreement was, in theory, supposed to conclude at the end of 1990.
Delors agreed. A single European market and a conclusion of the Uruguay Round had to run together. He agreed that Europe should not have one without agreement on the other.45
Security in Europe
On March 30, sitting around the Oval Office with an informal group of his top advisers, President Bush chaired a meeting to brainstorm about the whole future of Europe—the list on our earlier issue map. This meeting set a pattern of informal sessions among just a small group of principals.46
Scowcroft kicked off the meeting with an initial presentation. One of the big questions they took up was the vision for the future of U.S. and Soviet forces in Europe. Associated with that was the concept for what conventional arms control in Europe might achieve.
Scowcroft had been intrigued by Kissinger’s original idea of a mutual withdrawal, perhaps of all foreign forces at least in Central Europe. He asked Blackwill about it, who was appalled. Scowcroft liked the idea as a way of getting Soviet forces out of Eastern Europe. His staff had warned that such Soviet forces would still be in the European USSR, while U.S. forces would be going back over the Atlantic Ocean.
Undeterred, Scowcroft broached the idea in the Oval Office session on March 30. He recalled that “Dick Cheney looked stunned, and replied that it was too early to consider such a fundamental move.”
Baker tried a different tack. He wondered about just withdrawing all tanks, since they were so essential to an offensive military posture.47
After that first skirmish, there was a burst of further work. The United States and its allies kept going back and forth during April about how to address the European security issues, both SNF and conventional forces. West German, British, and U.S. envoys crisscrossed the Atlantic searching for common ground. The Dutch foreign minister also played a helpful role.
Back to Moscow in early May, where he met with Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, Baker encountered more Soviet offers about what they were prepared to do about their short-range nuclear forces. Baker came back to Washington feeling fed up. He was now determined to find some way to pull back from the controversial 1988 NATO decision to modernize SNF.48
Baker’s impatience was matched at the White House. Gorbachev would be making a triumphant visit to West Germany and France in June. Bush’s staff had the sense that here he was, the toast of Europe, and they were fighting over whether to deploy more nuclear missiles there.
Blackwill and Zelikow had developed a plan for a major move on conventional forces. Armed with these ideas, Scowcroft and Baker talked about how to move forward. Together, they arrived at a key insight.
They agreed to fuse two problems—SNF and conventional forces in Europe—into one solution. A breakthrough on conventional arms control would help Gorbachev. It would enlarge and accelerate the withdrawal of Soviet tanks and troops out of Eastern and Central Europe. It could also defuse the quarrel over the short-range nuclear forces.49
The SNF part of the idea was to put off both modernizing and negotiating about the shorter-range nuclear forces. U.S. nuclear forces were supposed to offset the Soviet advantage in conventional forces. Very well. Then, first complete the CFE treaty. That would reduce and equalize conventional forces in all of Europe. Then the specifics of the nuclear deterrent would not be quite so vital.
That strategy required a plan to finish the CFE treaty very soon. To make that credible, the NSC staff proposal was that the United States would move toward the Soviet position in the talks.
The Soviets and their allies had offered to go along with reductions to common ceilings in tanks, artillery, and armored fighting vehicles. These were potentially huge reductions, involving the elimination of tens of thousands of weapon systems.
In return, what Moscow insisted on was that the NATO side reciprocate and put its strengths on the table too. If the Soviets would reduce these key ground force weapons, they insisted on Western agreement to similar reductions in two categories of weaponry where the West had at least a qualitative edge: combat aircraft and helicopters.
This Soviet proposal was quite controversial in Western capitals. Bush went along with his staff’s proposal. He decided he would agree to include the proposed ceilings on aircraft and helicopters, as the Soviets had proposed. He would lead the NATO alliance to agree to offer such a deal.
Bush approved another U.S. move. The United States would offer to set a common ceiling on American and Soviet troop numbers on foreign soil in Europe. Bush personally pushed the Pentagon to come up with a manpower number that would represent a significant cut by the United States. The final number they came up was 275,000. This ceiling was about 15 percent below the existing U.S. troops deployed in Europe, then about 320,000.50
Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft were not trying to implement Kissinger’s idea of a withdrawal of both U.S. and Soviet forces out of Europe. They thought their proposal would greatly reduce the Soviet forward presence while retaining a strong anchor for the United States to stay coupled to Europe’s defense. They were not trying to abandon forward defense. By offering ways to adapt, they could preserve the essence of it.
Since the Soviets had so many more forward-deployed troops, this common ceiling would require a much larger drawdown of the Soviet troop presence in Eastern Europe than anything Gorbachev had proposed so far. Gorbachev’s well-known proposal of December 1988 announced a unilateral plan to withdraw about 20 percent of Soviet divisions from Eastern Europe. The American (and NATO) proposal would require withdrawal of more than half of the Soviet forces stationed in their forward, foreign bases in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Hungary.
The Defense Department opposed these CFE moves. Cheney argued that the proposal would “unhinge the Alliance” and that the “British and French would go crazy.” The Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Admiral William J. Crowe, joined the opposition. He called the proposal “PR” moves that would put “forward defense” at risk.
Bush overruled the objections. He sided with Baker and Scowcroft. Those in the meetings remembered that Bush “was the most forward leaning of all.” “I want this done,” he said. “Don’t keep telling me why it can’t be done. Tell me how it can be done.”
Baker’s deputy, Lawrence Eagleburger, and Scowcroft’s deputy, Bob Gates, were secretly dispatched to Europe to tell allies what the United States had in mind. Their trip was bracketed by presidential phone calls and more envoys exchanged with the Germans.
Thatcher did not care for the plan. Gates recalled, “We both felt like schoolchildren called before the principal for committing some unspoken dastardly act.”
Kohl, on the other hand, was “ecstatic.” All the allied leaders ultimately went along.51
Baker and Zoellick hammered out an agreed document at the NATO summit codifying the deal among the sixteen allied presidents and prime ministers. SNF decisions would be deferred to later negotiations with the Soviets, with a “zero” solution ruled out. The CFE proposal would be advanced. As Bush privately explained at the time, “Some say we’re cold warriors, that we don’t want Gorbachev to succeed. I’ve made clear that’s not the case.”52
Gorbachev and Shevardnadze welcomed the NATO moves. Such a CFE treaty would drastically change the whole defense posture of the Soviet Union, in the context of a mutual agreement. If achieved, CFE would be the most ambitious arms control treaty ever concluded. The CFE talks did in fact take off and made rapid progress.53
Bush’s conventional arms control/SNF joint initiative came as a complete surprise to the gathered journalists. The episode, along with the way the huge SNF shadow had suddenly dissipated, lifted the way Bush was perceived in Europe and also boosted the new Bush team’s self-confidence.
Bush and his team tended to rely thereafter on the improvised and secretive policymaking processes they had used in the spring of 1989. A bit bemused by the acclaim that greeted the summit outcome, Bush reminded reporters three days later, “I’m the same guy I was four days ago.”54
The Future of Germany
In mid-March 1989, Blackwill and Zelikow drafted a deliberately provocative memo that declared, “Today, the top priority for American foreign policy in Europe should be the fate of the Federal Republic of Germany.”
The Kohl government was expected to go to the polls the next year, in December 1990. It was expected to be a very close election.
Bush’s advisers urged him bluntly to do what he appropriately could to “help keep Kohl in power.” Kohl’s “government is now lagging in the polls behind an opposition that, as currently constituted, has too little regard either for nuclear deterrence or for conventional defense.”
The NSC staff argued that the broad goal of U.S. policy in Europe “should be to overcome the division of the continent through acceptance of common democratic values.” Gorbachev was proposing a “common European home” divided into different rooms by social systems, alliance structures, and historical realities. Instead of that, the United States would propose a vision for a “commonwealth of free nations.”
In the same memo to Bush, Scowcroft signed off on a principle, though he was uneasy about it, that the United States should be willing to put German unification back on the table. The United States should “send a clear signal to the Germans that we are ready to do more if the political climate allows it.”
The State Department’s European bureau, headed by a former ambassador to East Germany, had been scornful about ideas to jeopardize the hard-won Cold War status quo. Zoellick later recalled that when, in early 1989, he had asked a visiting West German colonel about German attitudes toward unification, the bureau chief sharply observed that unification was “the subject that all Americans are interested in and no German cares about.”55 Scowcroft too shared some of these doubts. But Blackwill and Zelikow pushed the point.
Bush marked up the memo and noted to Scowcroft that he had “read this with interest!” He liked the forward-looking tone. He regarded himself (in his words) as “less of a Europeanist, not dominated by [that] history.”56 He noticed when Scowcroft flagged the issue of German unification at their March 30 brainstorming session. Baker too, urged on by Zoellick, was open about possible German futures.
Bush began saying publicly, as he put it in a May interview, that he would “love to see” Germany reunified. He added, “Anybody who looks back over his shoulder and then looks at the present and sees a country ripped asunder by division, a people ripped asunder by political division, should say: ‘If you can get reunification on a proper basis, fine.’”
When then–Vice President Bush had visited the German city of Krefeld in June 1983, at the height of the mass demonstrations against Euromissile deployment, the new Federal Republic chancellor, Helmut Kohl, had taken time to get to know the American. Bush recalled demonstrators slinging rocks at his car without any security counteraction (“Our Secret Service would have shot them!”) and sitting in a garage with Kohl waiting for a route to clear.
West Germany, Bush remembered, was a society willing to pay the price for free speech. Though the first to admit he was not clairvoyant and “can’t claim to have understood everything that would happen in Europe from Day One,” he had concluded that West Germany was a solid democracy. It had done penance for its sins, and “at some point you should let a guy up.”57
The NSC staff advice helped encourage Bush to feel that it was okay for him to support possible German unification. Scowcroft was slower to come around to this view.58
With Bush already thinking and talking about German unification, when Bush met with Mitterrand in May, he asked the French president what he thought about the prospect of German unification.
“As long as the Soviet Union is strong, it will never happen,” Mitterrand replied. Perhaps such a thing might be possible “after ten years” and a “disruption [dislocation, in French] of the Soviet empire.” But at this time the Soviets would oppose this “with force.” They have other problems and “won’t take a chance on reunification.”
Bush pressed. What was Mitterrand’s own view?
“If the German people wished it, I would not oppose it,” he answered. “But not enough has changed since World War II to permit it.”
In any case, he said, he could not see how it would happen. The Soviets would not permit it and “Gorbachev is very happy that East Germany is the most reactionary [government in the East bloc].”59
This quizzing of Mitterrand about German unification set a pattern. In his meetings at the end of the month in Europe, Bush kept asking European leaders what they thought of the idea of German unification. None were quite as forthcoming about German wishes as Mitterrand had been. All were at least as cautious about any immediate moves.60
Talking with the press after the NATO summit, Bush reaffirmed that he would define the end of the Cold War as an end of the division of Europe. “Our overall aim is to overcome the division of Europe and to forge a unity based on Western values.”61
Reporters talking to Bush on the final stop of his trip in London were struck by his emphasis on the potential for change in Eastern Europe. Although the region was relatively quiet at the moment—a week before the Polish parliamentary election and shortly before other states in the region would experience serious unrest—Bush called Eastern Europe “the most exciting area for change in the world.” According to one journalist, he “came back to [Eastern Europe] time and again in response to questions on other subjects.”
What did “beyond containment” mean? the reporters asked. Bush answered, “It means a united Europe. It means a Europe without as many artificial boundaries.”62
In a follow-on visit to West Germany, Bush gave a major speech at the Rheingoldhalle in Mainz, the capital of Rheinland-Pfalz, where Kohl had risen to political prominence. The West’s goal now, Bush proclaimed, was to “let Europe be whole and free.”
“To the founders of the Alliance, this aspiration was a distant dream,” Bush added, “and now it’s the new mission of NATO. The Cold War began with the division of Europe. It can only end when Europe is whole. Today it is this very concept of a divided Europe that is under siege.”
Alluding to Gorbachev, Bush observed that “there cannot be a common European home until all within it are free to move from room to room.” He called for the Iron Curtain to come down: “Let Berlin be next.”63
Having introduced the volatile language of unity to his German audience, Bush then used carefully phrased language. “We seek self-determination for all of Germany and all of Eastern Europe,” he declared.64 Bush’s remarks delighted many Germans, who were quick to infer that he hoped the seemingly frozen German question might thaw.65
West German officials hoped that the GDR might begin a process of internal reform, like that in Poland or Hungary. They also believed that such reform might be “easier if the GDR was not challenged by the question of territorial unification.” Once the East Germans had democratic rights, anything might be possible. But for the time being they preferred not to talk about unification. Instead they wanted to emphasize human rights for East Germans.66
For the moment, the West German government was not ready to take on Bush’s May hints of support for unification. In July 1989, Horst Teltschik, Kohl’s foreign policy adviser, repeated the point West German president Richard von Weizsäcker had made years earlier, namely, that “for us, the German question is not primarily a matter of seeking a territorial solution.”67
Bush’s rhetoric was duly noted by diplomats and commentators in West Germany, but one reporter quoted the prominent West German professor Karl Kaiser’s comment: “You Americans have taken our reunification debate far more seriously than we have.” The Soviets, Kaiser said, simply would not allow a political reunification of Germany.68
Teltschik recalled later that the United States “was far ahead of the Germans at this time” on the issue of unification. He did not necessarily mean far ahead in wisdom or in desire for unification. It was just that some Americans were readier to raise a subject that West German leaders, for reasons that varied from person to person, judged they still needed to handle with reticent care.
This reticence masked real differences among West Germans. Some no longer even wished for unification, regarding it as a dangerous illusion that might inflame older German pathologies. Others felt strongly about holding on to the possibility of unification, but did not think the time was right to press the point. Latent German attitudes about unification therefore remained beneath the surface, unexpressed, unexamined, and uncertain, until circumstances changed dramatically during the second half of 1989.69
In his Mainz speech, Bush had also described the West Germans as “partners in leadership.” This was not an empty expression. The spring 1989 diplomacy cemented a true core partnership between the U.S. and West German governments, in the sense of joint planning and coordination of policy moves.
Since the United States first began learning the habits of true coalition planning, in 1941–42 and beyond, the usual habits of core partnership were Anglo-American. Washington and London also shared intelligence to an unusual degree, routines that were extended to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as well.
The Anglo-American core had been the default pattern of the Reagan administration. Reagan and Shultz got along well enough with Mitterrand and his ministers, or with Kohl and Genscher, but the relationships were not close enough to become policymaking partnerships.
In the first half of 1989, Bush and Baker had changed this pattern. There is no evidence that they deliberately set out to do so. It evolved that way as they worked to orchestrate common views about Europe’s future. The American-German partnership became central and remained so for years.70
The routines of interaction with London remained strong, especially at the working level. But British diplomats assigned to Washington and to Bonn quickly sensed “a shifting balance of power in the alliance as between US/UK/FRG.” They reported that “we are no longer regarded as necessarily the best interpreter between the US and Europe.”71
Later in 1989, as the great issues of Germany’s and Europe’s future became acute, Blackwill delicately shared his concern, with a senior British diplomat and friend, that Thatcher’s estrangement from other European leaders undermined the White House’s ability to work with Britain. Thatcher’s hostility to the French and dismissiveness about the Germans made Bush uncomfortable. Blackwill’s friend, who had worked for her, doubted that anything could be done to “change her basic views and reactions.”
The friend thought the United States might help manage German issues “by strengthening the European structures within which this might be done.” Blackwill confirmed Bush’s personal commitment to “the development of ‘Europe’” and added that he thought the “White House was ahead of the State Department in this regard.”72
Bush’s good relationship with Mitterrand complemented the strong relationships with the West Germans. The Americans were therefore now linked firmly with the Kohl-Mitterrand-Delors triumvirate shaping broader policies within Europe and in the EC. By the middle of 1989 all these governments were therefore unusually well positioned to pull together as they entered the rapids.
Gorbachev and Bush were both soon back in Western Europe. Breaking away from his consuming domestic troubles, Gorbachev had a triumphal visit to West Germany in June and another to France early in July.
During Kohl’s visit to Moscow in October 1988, the chancellor had spoken publicly, as he always did, about his hopes for the ultimate unity of the German nation. Publicly Gorbachev had repeated that history had divided Germany and that any attempt to change the situation with “unrealistic policies” would be “unpredictable and even dangerous.”73
Kohl and Genscher each debriefed Bush on the meetings with Gorbachev. Bush asked Genscher specifically about whether unification had come up. Genscher replied that “Gorbachev had asked the West Germans not to talk too loudly about reunification but rather to let events take their course—toward a more cooperative and integrated Europe, not a reestablishment of the German Empire.”74
The elderly East German party boss, Erich Honecker, traveled to Moscow two weeks after Gorbachev left Bonn. Gorbachev reassured him that he had adhered to traditional principles. Gorbachev did not want to destroy the East German state; he hoped it would reform. He believed that socialism had put down deep roots in East Germany and could weather its own version of perestroika.75
Gorbachev had insisted to Kohl that outsiders should not meddle in what was going on in Eastern Europe. “If anyone tried to exert influence from the outside, this would lead to destabilization and a loss of confidence and would endanger the understanding between East and West.”76 He complained that some of Bush’s statements amounted to such meddling, though he declined to identify which ones. When Kohl debriefed Bush, he did not mention Gorbachev’s complaint.
Gorbachev’s visit to Paris a few weeks later (July 4–6) was another kind of victory tour. Mitterrand treated him as a great statesman. Even more flattering, he treated Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev as kindred spirits, fellow intellectuals. Mitterrand even confided to Gorbachev that he did not think Bush was a very “original thinker.” Gorbachev came away feeling that Mitterrand proved that “at last Western leaders believed in perestroika.”77
Gorbachev gave his long-planned speech to the European Parliament, in Strasbourg. He elaborated on his concept of a “common European home” as a place that would “replace the balance of forces with a balance of interests.”
But what would this mean? Gorbachev envisioned an all-European system of collective security, the emergence of a vast economic space from the Atlantic to the Urals, concern for the common environment, and respect for human rights.
He called for another CSCE summit of all thirty-five European member states, the first such meeting since the summit in Helsinki in 1975. The United States agreed with this initiative. The CSCE summit was scheduled for November 1990, in Paris.78
The Chinese Solution
On May 15, 1989, as the Bush administration was completing its internal debates on the SNF-CFE policy move in Europe, Gorbachev descended into the noisy epicenter of a vast and public debate about the future of the socialist world. His airplane landed in Beijing.
The Chinese leadership had to conduct the welcoming ceremony at the airport, instead of the more traditional location outside the Great Hall of the People, because they feared that demonstrations would disrupt the ceremony. China’s people were in the midst of a massive confrontation with their government. Mass protests had been getting larger and larger for a whole month. Hundreds of thousands of mostly young demonstrators had come out into the streets, many of them students, centered in Beijing but also gathering in cities all over China. Their demands, their challenge, was for a freer press, more rule of law, and more democracy.
Obviously, Gorbachev could understand such demands. His visit was inspirational for many of the protesters. He had led the way with introducing such ideas about openness, accountability, and democracy into hitherto closed communist systems.
The new Polish elections would be held in June. Also in June, the Hungarian government would begin negotiations about the political future with a Roundtable of other representatives from Hungarian unions and civil society.
The initial Soviet elections, the ones Gorbachev and his team had set in motion during 1988, had just concluded at the end of March. The thousands of newly elected delegates to the Congress of People’s Deputies would soon meet for the first time, a week after Gorbachev returned from China.
For Gorbachev, the new Soviet experiment had certainly complicated his politics. In 1988 it had seemed that there were two main camps. There were the reformers (aligned with Gorbachev) and there were the conservatives, the party apparatchiks who resisted change and openness.
Now, in the first half of 1989, Gorbachev’s reform faction watched opposition come at them from three directions. There were still the conservatives, who had used the way the election had been structured to retain a majority in the new Congress of People’s Deputies. But now the critics who thought the reform movement was much too slow, who called themselves “democrats,” had gained much more strength. They were led by the aging dissident scientist Andrei Sakharov, and Boris Yeltsin, who had won an at-large district in Moscow and returned to the national stage.
Finally the national groups, seeking to detach themselves from Moscow’s rule, were walking on stage. Representatives of the three Soviet Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) were leading the way.
Just a few days before he arrived in China, Gorbachev had assured his Politburo colleagues, “We shouldn’t identify the popular fronts [in the Baltics], which are supported by 90% of the population, with extremists.” We have to “think, think, think how in practice to transform our federation. Otherwise everything will really collapse.” But of course, he said, “the use of force is out of the question.”
As Gorbachev knew well, the use of force had already come back on the table. In early April nationalist protests had been held day after day in the southern USSR, in Tbilisi, the capital of the Soviet republic of Georgia (and Shevardnadze’s home). On April 9, Interior Ministry troops, joined by regular army soldiers, attacked the demonstrators. Hundreds of civilians were injured and about twenty of them were killed. Finger-pointing had already begun about who was to blame, with some even saying that Gorbachev had acquiesced.79
Gorbachev had not come to China to offer advice about reform. He had come to turn a page in Sino-Soviet relations. The two communist powers had definitively split apart since 1960 and, as Deng told Gorbachev, China had regarded the Soviet Union as its most dangerous enemy for much of the 1960s and 1970s. That era had now passed. Now it was time to “normalize” relations. That was the main purpose of the visit.
Yet in the Chinese city of Taiyuan, on the day of Gorbachev’s arrival, more than ten thousand students had gathered from around their province of Shanxi. One of their slogans was, “Where is China’s Gorbachev?”80
China did have its own “Gorbachev” among its leaders, at least two of them in fact. Its current party general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, and his predecessor, Hu Yaobang, held views about their countries and socialism that were very similar to Gorbachev’s.
Imagine that when Gorbachev came to power in 1985, his mentor from the “old guard,” Yuri Andropov, had still been alive. Suppose Andropov, regarded by all as the senior statesman, had just chosen to step back from day-to-day authority in order to let the younger reformer, Gorbachev, take over the day-to-day work. Imagine too that Andropov had supported Gorbachev but also kept key conservatives in their places on the Politburo as the debates over reform heated up during 1988 and on into 1989.
Such was the scenario in China. Deng had stayed in the background, yet was regarded by all the leaders as the paramount authority.
Deng was eighty-five years old in 1989. He had empowered the reform leadership of Hu Yaobang. Zhao Ziyang, working for Hu as an economic reformer, recalled him as a “generous and tolerant man” who wanted to open up China to intellectual argument and believed, as Hu put it in a draft doctrine, that “the most important [negative] lessons learned during the development of socialism were: first, neglecting development of the economy, and second, failing to build real democratic politics.”81
Amid an initial wave of protests and controversies from China’s reforms, Hu had been forced to resign in 1987, accused of “bourgeois liberalization.” He had stayed on the Politburo and Zhao Ziyang took his place. When Hu died in April 1989, it was public sorrow about his passing that had set off the first wave of protests that had now grown to such an enormous scale by the time of Gorbachev’s visit.
At first, Zhao had been happy to put issues of political reform to one side. But by the time Gorbachev visited, amid the enormous and growing protests, Zhao had come to believe that some sort of structural program of political reform was a necessary companion to the economic liberalization.
As he and Gorbachev sat down to talk, the discussion quickly turned to the student protests (a topic Deng had ignored). They quickly saw eye to eye.
Zhao said the students often looked at things “naively, simplistically,” but clearly should be heard and understood.
Gorbachev commented that “we, too, have hotheads.” Both attacked the forces that refused to consider change.
Zhao opened up. “Here we speak the same language with you. I think that at the present time the socialist movement has really entered a decisive stage.” He continued, “Many young people are asking: who has the advantage now, socialism or capitalism. The youth has a hard time imagining the degree of backwardness of pre-revolutionary China or of old Russia. Besides, even under the socialist regime, mistakes of subjective nature were made,” including in China. “The advantages of socialism can manifest themselves only through reforms; only they can increase its attractive force.”
The two men again agreed. They discussed the difficulties they had encountered with enacting price reforms that would introduce market incentives (Zhao called them “the law of value”). They exchanged views on how to secure the rule of law and sustain an independent judiciary.82
It might have been the start of a beautiful friendship.
The next day, Deng chaired a Politburo meeting and told his colleagues that the situation in the streets had become intolerable. “Especially in Beijing, the anarchy gets worse every day.… If we don’t turn things around, if we let them go on like this, all our gains will evaporate, and China will take a historic step backward.… If things continue like this, we could even end up under house arrest.” The Chinese had been tracking developments in Europe and wanted to contain the virus.
The Politburo decided to bring in the army and declare martial law. “The aim of martial law,” Deng declared, “will be to suppress the turmoil once and for all and to return things quickly to normal.” Zhao objected to the plan. He was overruled, Deng told him. “The minority yields to the majority.” Zhao accepted party discipline, but the next day drafted his letter of resignation, complaining of ill health.83
By May 17, the day after Deng and Zhao met with Gorbachev, security authorities estimated that 1.2 million people in Beijing had joined the demonstrations, coming from all walks of life, calling for a change of leadership. Students on hunger strikes were collapsing one after another.
The government declared a state of martial law on May 19. Troops moved in. The protesters did not disperse. Zhao and his supporters were purged from their posts. The fighting began on June 3 and escalated on June 4.
There were protests and confrontations in cities throughout China. In their initial internal exchanges as the fighting subsided, party leaders referred to about seven thousand people being wounded and about four hundred dead or missing.84 No reliable final statistics about the losses are available.
By June 6 the party leaders congratulated themselves that they had “put down the counterrevolutionary riots” and defended party power everywhere. Deng hoped that China would stick with economic reform and its opening to the West, but political reform had to be strictly controlled to avoid any more instability.
Zhao Ziyang remained opposed to the violent crackdown. He was eventually placed under house arrest, where he remained for the rest of his life.
The Chinese crackdown left Bush frustrated and disheartened. He had served in China and had been hopeful about the developments there. He saw how the promising wave of changes could go all wrong, very quickly.
In the United States, Bush’s domestic opponents attacked him for preserving relations with such a brutal Chinese government. Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft believed that it was best to limit but hold on to the relationship and ride out the political attacks. They were making a long-term bet that China would still evolve in a positive direction.
Gorbachev’s reactions to the Tiananmen Square crisis were different. Soviet relations with China continued to improve. Gorbachev “clinically separated his personal aversion to the use of force and his sympathy for the students’ cause from the exigencies of power politics.” Talking to the Indian prime minister, he even appears to have imagined a possible future alignment cementing ties between the Soviet Union, China, and India.85
The Chinese crackdown did not alter Gorbachev’s still-secret wish to avoid Soviet intervention in Eastern Europe. There, he still thought those communist governments had good options for internal reform, and he still did not want Moscow to have to shoulder the burden of fixing them.
Gorbachev was also fully preoccupied with his political problems at home. The new Congress of People’s Deputies was incredibly fractious, with riveting and publicized spectacles from one day to the next.
Later in October 1989, told that the death toll in China might be as many as three thousand, Gorbachev commented to the Politburo, “We must be realists. They, like us, have to hold on. Three thousand… so what?”86
The Chinese solution was on Bush’s mind as he visited Poland and Hungary and then came to Paris for the G-7 economic summit. Poland’s elections produced a stunning vote against the government and for Solidarity in the seats that were up for grabs. It seemed clear that a new government would probably have to be formed soon.
In his July visits to both countries, Bush welcomed the changes in Poland and Hungary. He was exhilarated by the crowds at his speeches and by the exciting changes under way.
At the G-7 summit Scowcroft noticed something interesting. The press was “grousing” that Bush had not dominated the G-7 work, as he had the NATO summit. He “had accepted ideas from his colleagues. It was beginning to appear to me that the press definitely was not receptive to his collegial style.
“The reporters seemed to thrive on flamboyance and fireworks,” Scowcroft reflected, “rather than on friendly persuasion—and results.” He was frustrated. He and Bush believed that allies “appreciated a cooperative rather than an imperious approach.”87
The G-7 coordinated a common approach on China. Bush, with Japanese support, successfully held out for a balance that maintained all relations but restricted new World Bank loans and offered asylum to Chinese student-refugees.
On a late summer afternoon, Bush and Mitterrand sat together in Mitterrand’s ceremonial office in the Elysée Palace. No one else was present but one aide for each man (Scowcroft and Jacques Attali) and interpreters.
Bush shared his impressions from Hungary and Poland. On Poland, he mentioned that the “labor demands will make it difficult to introduce reforms.” But “another state crackdown would lead to chaos and possible [Soviet] intervention.”
Bush had also tried hard not to create more problems for Gorbachev. He acknowledged that “the Poles cannot move away from their alliances.” He was happy to work, at least for the time being, with Wojciech Jaruzelski, whom much of the world regarded as the face of Poland’s brutal former martial-law regime but whom Bush saw as “battered but experienced.”
Bush wanted to hear Mitterrand’s impressions of Gorbachev.
“Gorbachev is very disturbed about his domestic problems and a little disturbed about his external problems,” Mitterrand told him. “He dreads having to stop the political liberalization. He does not want to do something like what the Chinese have done with Tiananmen. But he fears he will be dragged into it.” Gorbachev had said, “It’s hard. I do not sleep.”
Mitterrand sympathized. Gorbachev seemed “tired, harassed, but he still pursued his policies in the same direction. We need to encourage him.”
Bush said it might now be time for him to talk with Gorbachev. Mitterrand agreed. He urged Bush to schedule a summit meeting.
Bush had been considering this for months. He wondered aloud to Mitterrand: Would the meeting be useful even if none of the arms control agreements were ready? He was concerned that there was not yet anything “concrete to do” at such a high-profile meeting.
Mitterrand said the important thing now was to talk. Gorbachev was “nervous.” A “policy of letting things get worse” (politique du pire) could mean “the failure of perestroika.” Gorbachev wanted a personal relationship with Bush.
As for Poland and Hungary, Mitterrand argued that “the USSR will accept a lot of things.” Western economic action might be fine.
In other matters “there are limits, or it will be Budapest in 1956” (when the Soviets and their allies intervened massively to destroy a dissident Hungarian government). For the time being, Mitterrand urged that “we have to give [Gorbachev] the impression that we will not cross those limits.” As an example, Mitterrand said that the Soviet-led military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, “might have to exist to the end of the century for stability.”88
Still in Paris, Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft sat together on a terrace in the American embassy’s garden. Bush reflected on Mitterrand’s advice. He told the other two men that it was time to meet with the Soviet leader.
Baker had not been against it. Scowcroft no longer was. Anyway, as Scowcroft recalled, Bush “put it in that way he has when his mind is made up.”89
Bush sent a secret message to Gorbachev to begin work on the arrangements. “Up until now,” he wrote, “I have felt that a meeting would have to produce major agreements so as not to disappoint the watching world. Now my thinking is changing.” He was open to any suggestions about where to get together, ready to open his home in Maine to Gorbachev or meet anywhere else they and a few advisers could be comfortable.90
Later Bush remembered how “moved” he was at this point “by the hope I saw in Eastern Europe.” He saw dangers ahead. “I would have to respond with even greater care as Eastern Europeans pushed their own way to the future. We could not let the people down—there could still be more Tiananmens.”91
American Decline? Soviet Decline?
Early in September 1989, the well-informed British embassy in Washington, led by Antony Acland, prepared a careful, cold-blooded analysis of the new Bush administration and the situation in America. The British diplomats granted that Bush and Baker were “non-ideological” and very politically minded practical men.92
Yes, their foreign policy team was unusually cohesive. The “inter-agency warfare which was the hallmark of foreign policy-making in the [Reagan] Administration (and others) has been conspicuous by its absence.”
Yes, Baker’s deputy had said back in March that they would put alliance togetherness first, that “West/West is the key to East/West.” The British had duly noted all the “general pointers” in the speeches. They grudgingly granted credit for the CFE initiative that had, for the moment, quieted some of the critics.
But the British still felt bruised by the way some of the moves had been handled. The secretive administration was like Bush: “His style is rather easier to identify than his beliefs.” Acland wrote that he thought “there is more to it—and to him—than that. But it is on his policies that he will have to be judged, and the jury is still out.” So far, the British saw “little sign of a coherent overall approach to policy.”
The basic problem, the British embassy thought, was American decline. The prevailing response in Washington was “economic nationalism.” The Bush administration had not yet shown that it had a policy answer for either.
The British diplomats observed “a widespread feeling in the United States that American dominance of the industrialized world is eroding, perhaps irrevocably.” Americans had helped foster the emergence of a successful Europe and Japan, yet were now ambivalent about both. “And, within the Alliance, the Americans (but not only the Americans) have yet to assess the implications of a restive and more assertive Germany.”
“This sense of decline in their country’s place in the world is the more painful” because it was such a blow to Americans’ image of themselves. The British had been following “the national debate” about American “over-stretch” and decline, amid unchecked federal budget deficits and high trade deficits. Any American policies had to assume an “economy of resources.”
American concerns about decline, the British stressed, “have resulted in a new mood of economic nationalism.” Many of the congressional Democrats represented this movement. Bush was the first president in more than a hundred years to start his presidency without his party holding a majority in either of the houses of Congress.
Bush, they said, “is well aware of the problem.” In his May speech in Boston about Western Europe he had said, “What a tragedy, what an absurdity it would be if future historians attributed the demise of the Western Alliance to disputes over beef hormones and wars over pasta.”
Yet the British saw “no clear sense of direction in the Administration’s trade policy,” raising doubt about the U.S. will to uphold free trade and an open world economy, especially against “a protectionist Congress.”
In sum, the British argued, “the mood of economic nationalism, lurking just beneath the surface [in America], and waiting to be exploited by any unscrupulous politician (or Presidential candidate), is stronger and deeper than at any time in recent years.” Meanwhile, the changes in the world were “calling into question many of the assumptions on which [the Americans]—and we—have based key aspects of our foreign and security policies since the end of World War Two.”
The Bush administration faced problems that were “dauntingly complex,” and its policies were still at a “formative” stage. Still, Acland hedged, we “should not underestimate a man who is competitive as well as cautious.”
In the summer of 1989 the British argument about American decline very much reflected the common wisdom. A year earlier a former U.S. official had announced that “the American Century is over. The big development in the latter part of the century is the emergence of Japan as a major superpower.”93
A prominent political scientist tried to buck this trendy view. Harvard’s Samuel Huntington observed, “In 1988 the United States reached the zenith of its fifth wave of declinism since the 1950s.” Huntington argued that the coming period could actually turn into an era of American renewal. But his seemed like a contrarian voice.94
Within the U.S. government, a few important officials also were focused on the danger of decline. But they were not as concerned about American decline. They were watching the Soviet Union.
Gates warned Bush about rising unrest, as more foods were being rationed, and violent outbreaks (as had just happened in Soviet Armenia) could become more common, with cycles of upheaval and repression. A senior Soviet analyst at the CIA who had worked closely with Gates, Grey Hodnett, developed a provocative assessment. He did not necessarily want Gorbachev to fail. But he believed he probably would.
Hodnett’s argument was that Gorbachev had undertaken a set of “gambles” about nationality issues, postponing marketization and deep economic reform, and his partial democracy experiment. But these gambles were “based on questionable premises and wishful thinking.”
Hodnett’s main point was about what might happen next. One possibility was general repression, like the Chinese solution. If this happened, Hodnett forecasted that Gorbachev would lose his natural constituency and “his entire political program.”
If Gorbachev did stay in power, he could try more democratization, loosen the Soviet Union, and accept the short-term pain of financial stabilization and market reform in exchange for long-term gain. If he did not make the needed and painful financial and market reforms, he might ease his way for a while. But fairly soon, “in the near and medium-term,” unrest would rise. Hodnett warned of “likely movement of the Soviet system toward revolution, a hard-right takeover, or ‘Ottomanization’—growing relative backwardness of the USSR and a piecemeal breakoff of the national republics.”
Gorbachev thus needed a foreign policy that reduced external dangers. But, Hodnett warned, Western actions that appeared to “‘take advantage’ of Soviet instability could hurt Gorbachev.”
In August 1989, Rice added her own analysis, for Scowcroft. She tended to share Hodnett’s very worrying assessment (although his was not the majority view in the U.S. intelligence community).
Her particular take was that Gorbachev and his few key advisers were stirring up the people to confront local officials, making them the “goats.” It was a populist approach (Rice called it “Peronist,” referring to Argentina’s former dictator), to make Gorbachev and Moscow the source of solutions.
Rice believed this approach might work for a little while. Soon Moscow would run out of solutions.
Then the crunch would come. After that, “whether Gorbachev survives personally or not, the system has already been weakened enough that, short of an all-out crackdown, unrest will continue whoever occupies the Kremlin.”95
Rice agreed that the Soviet leadership would become increasingly preoccupied with their internal problems. Since so few people were handling so much, the leaders would have difficulty engaging constructively on foreign policy issues. Signs of this were already becoming evident in Baker’s work with Shevardnadze. “‘New thinking’ in foreign policy—to the extent that it exists—does not have deep roots in the Soviet bureaucracy.”
What did this mean for policy? Rice doubted that the United States could do much to help the Soviets solve their internal problems. The United States should “be clearer and more focused in pushing a few core issues.” She went on, “We need to decide what we really can and must achieve during this window of opportunity—a window whose duration is increasingly uncertain.”