CHAPTER 5

The Designs for a New Europe

Back in January 1990, Charles Powell, Thatcher’s private secretary for defense and foreign policy matters, was assembling participants and papers for a secret seminar Thatcher was convening at Chequers, the prime minister’s country retreat. Powell was the forty-eight-year-old son of a senior Royal Air Force officer. He had received an elite education, majoring in modern history, before joining the diplomatic service right out of college. After twenty years of well-regarded diplomatic work, he had started working directly for Thatcher.

In January 1990, Powell had been in that job for nearly seven years. There was no one whose advice on foreign affairs Thatcher trusted more. So one of the papers Powell added to the compilation for the seminar was his own.

Powell’s jumping-off point was a provocative, widely discussed essay by an American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama had wondered, in print, if the world had arrived at “The End of History.”

Fukuyama did not really mean that history was over. He was referring to a philosophical theory of history, associated with Friedrich Hegel (and, following Hegel, Karl Marx), as a dialectic. The dialectic was that every system produced an antithesis which, after a struggle, evolved into the new synthesis, at which point the historical cycle would repeat again. Perhaps the world, Fukuyama thought, was arriving at a new synthesis, modern liberalism, that would end the cycle.

Writing to Thatcher on January 21, Powell offered a different prospect. “Far from being the end of history the next decade will mark the return of history. The period since 1945, with Communism reaching its high water mark of political and military influence and then beginning to ebb, will seem in retrospect a diversion from the norm.”

What, then, was this “norm” to which the world was about to return? Powell went on, “As Communism retreats, we shall find ourselves once again confronting nationalism and the conflicts to which it gives rise. Far from eliminating nationalism, Communist suppression of it has only ensured that it will now re-emerge in greater strength than ever. And the greatest risk will be that we and others will get drawn into conflicts between nationalities (in some cases fuelled by Islam).

“We shall have won the Cold War,” Powell granted. “But instead of being the dawn of a new, peaceful era, we shall find the next decade altogether more complex, with a multiplicity of dangers and threats rather than the monolithic enemy represented by Communism.”

If that was right, what then should be the design of a new Europe? Powell envisioned that Soviet military power would be out of Eastern Europe. All-European institutions should help the former communist countries keep their independence, dependencies of neither Germany nor the Soviet Union.

Powell hoped that German unification could be delayed. If it could not, he hoped means could be found to contain German power.

Powell hoped NATO would remain essential. But he worried about the Americans. He thought the U.S. commitment to Europe, including its nuclear commitment, was likely to erode and the Americans might leave. All the more important, then, to keep British and French forces strong, including their own national nuclear forces.¹

By the end of March 1990, two months after Powell wrote this paper, the East German elections had decided that a unification of Germany was plainly going to happen, soon, as a kind of West German annexation of the East. The “internal” unification process was being settled. But all the “external” aspects were still open, as were the wider issues of what Europe would become. Many Americans and Europeans shared Powell’s concerns about “the return of history.”

Mitterrand, Thatcher, and Delors were conceptual, deductive thinkers. They thought hard about grand designs and tried to make policy conform with an elaborate worldview, preconceived theories, and a grand strategy. Gorbachev quite consciously enjoyed considering the world in theoretical terms too, often in a more abstract way.

Bush and Baker, like Kohl and Genscher, had a different style. They were practical problem-solvers, focused on concrete results, attentive to all the available instruments of national power. They had principles. Baker sometimes called his approach “principled pragmatism.” But they did not enter the pivot and design years of 1989 and 1990 with a formal grand strategy.

These leaders focused on choices in front of them, choices that we have outlined in each chapter. Some of their underlings would then knit those choices into conceptual frameworks.

In the spring of 1990 the driving fact was the acceleration toward a German unification that now seemed irresistible. Alone, that fact did not necessarily favor either American or Soviet preferences.

The Soviets had more physical capabilities to interfere. German politicians might pay a high price in domestic support if they seemed to be alienating either side—and the West German elections would be held before the end of the year. Everyone had reasons to prefer an agreed international solution, if one could be found.

To sketch out some of the choices coming into view, we again offer one of our issue maps.

Issue Map

Building a Better World (April 1990)

Future of Eastern Europe

• Now in transition

Future of European Integration

• Atlantic vision (with North America) or European vision (continentalist, Mitterrand’s confederation proposal)?

• European monetary union going forward, but…

Move to single currency?

With a European Central Bank replacing national central banks?

With what other conditions? Fiscal convergence? European bank regulation?

• Add push for political union?

If so, what model? European federation? Confederation? Hybrid?

• How to include Eastern Europe? Role for CSCE?

Future of Germany

• If internal unification going fast, should external aspects be decoupled and handled later?

• Future Germany’s borders, settled how and when?

• How to manage future German military power?

Special regulation of German forces and behavior?

No unique regulation of German forces, use other institutions and CFE?

Security in Europe

• If Soviet forces are leaving foreign soil, should U.S. forces, including nuclear forces, stay or go home? Related to…

• Alliance status of united Germany

All in NATO?

Out of NATO with other international controls?

• Future of the two alliances

Both stay?

Both disappear?

NATO stays and Warsaw Pact goes?

• New pan-European security structures?

Get CFE treaty in 1990? Open Skies? Role of CSCE?

Collective security: All defending all?

Future of Soviet Union

• Soviet Union versus Lithuania

Support Lithuania, retaliate against Soviet efforts to crush its independence?

Support Gorbachev even if he cracks down to hold union together?

• Large-scale economic assistance for Gorbachev

Yes, large-scale government-guaranteed loans. What bargain or conditions?

No, Soviet Union not yet creditworthy or deserving.

Limited help, conditions, IMF starts working with Soviets.

• What to do about the secret Soviet biological weapons program?

A New European Union

As agreed in December 1989, the members of the EC had started to draft a treaty to create an economic and monetary union (EMU). This plan would at least consider creating a single currency for all the participating countries, along with a European Central Bank that might take the place of national central banks like the mighty Bundesbank.

Early in 1990, Kohl and his team, working with Delors, developed another major move. They pushed for an expansive vision of European political union to be adopted too.

Again, Delors played a catalytic role. The French European Commission president was quite worried. Without vigorous action, the upheavals in Europe might put all the European Community work on the “garbage heap of history.” The ideas of Europe had to adapt. Delors wanted Europe to have a conception of expansion to the east, even if at first this happened in “concentric circles” of integration.²

Kohl was sympathetic. From his point of view, Germany was already going down the path toward more integration. The EMU would embed German economic policymaking in European institutions. NATO would embed German security policymaking in Atlantic institutions.

Kohl believed deeply in such transnational integration. He frequently looked back on the history of the twentieth century, and he felt this was one of the absolute core lessons from it.³

But Kohl felt, as many other Germans did, that if Germany was going to commit itself so deeply to the European construction, others should step up too. Such a European structure also had to be political. France and others should join Germany in a more integrated, federal, and democratic Europe. The intergovernmental conference to build an economic and monetary union should, he and others concluded, be accompanied by another intergovernmental conference, one to build up Europe’s political union as well, and this union should give more power to its European Parliament.

Such a political union, moving toward the ideal of a European federation, appealed to some of the medium-and smaller-sized member governments in Europe, such as Italy, Ireland, and Belgium. The idea was anathema to Thatcher. It was not especially popular in France either. Much of France’s political class was proudly nationalistic (like the Gaullists) and prized France’s political independence.

In February 1990, Delors worked up an idea for a special European summit with the Irish prime minister, Charles Haughey (in the first half of 1990 it was Ireland’s turn to chair the European Council). This special summit would be in April, right after the East German elections.

The job of the special summit was to explain how Europe would adapt to German developments. The planned agenda had two parts: (1) a move to develop a political union, alongside the economic and monetary union; and (2) efforts to reach out, welcome the East German people, and help address their needs.

As German unification gathered steam, Delors had helped Kohl with constructive advice and support. A host of issues had arisen in figuring how to cope with the possible absorption of East Germany into the EC. Delors used his considerable ingenuity to find solutions in what he proposed to treat as a “special case.”

When Delors proposed his plan to Kohl, the chancellor embraced it. He brought it to Mitterrand.

At first, the French reactions were guarded. More than most French leaders, Mitterrand supported European integration. But he also saw the nationalist argument against a “political” union. He knew what kind of criticism he would get from socialist and Gaullist politicians at home.

Mitterrand’s main aide for European issues, Élisabeth Guigou, helped persuade the president. Guigou argued for making this a joint Franco-German initiative: France and Germany together would propose that, at the end of 1992, as the single European market came into being, the European Community would become a European Union.

Making this a Franco-German joint initiative was not just an appeal to Mitterrand’s ego. With such an initiative, France could help make sure that the Union avoided “federalist excesses.” Guigou argued that the Union might contain the powers of Delors’s Commission and build up the powers of the national governments working through the European Council. The Commission might take on more “management powers.” But it would do so under the Council’s authority, and with an improved European Parliament giving legislators more powers too.

Mitterrand signed up. One more time, the triumvirate of Kohl-Mitterrand-Delors and their staffs swung into action, working with Irish prime minister Haughey.

Kohl and Mitterrand announced their joint initiative at the end of March. In April they sent out a joint plan to other EC leaders. The special Dublin EC summit at the end of April went beautifully.

The new Union’s creation would now run on two tracks: EMU and European political union. Negotiations on both would begin at the end of 1990. The new union would build up European institutions, including the creation of a common European foreign and security policy.

The April Dublin summit was a pleasant meeting, the tone convivial. Everyone had noticed the results from the East German elections in March. Thatcher’s negativity could not dissipate the warmth with which EC members, especially from the smaller states, welcomed this inclusive initiative. It was quite a contrast from the last European summit, the one in Strasbourg in December 1989. Then the atmosphere had been icy, inside and out. Now it was springtime, inside and out.

It now seemed perfectly plain that when Kohl said that German and European development were “two sides of the same coin,” he meant it. Genscher liked Thomas Mann’s 1952 pronouncement: “We do not want a German Europe, but a European Germany.”⁴

At this point, in 1990, the political union proposal had already accomplished its most important objective—to signal a common (not just German) subordination to the European ideal.

The national governments did limit the political scope of this new European Union. The Maastricht Treaty, signed early in 1992, created a Union that was a balance, more than a confederation of independent states, but not a federation, not a United States of Europe.

The Union did set the goal of having a “common foreign and security policy”—if member governments could agree. Little new power was delegated to the Commission or the Parliament.

There was some similar movement toward common policies in “justice and home affairs.” But although EC borders opened, national governments still maintained most powers to set migration and asylum policies.

There was a Union “social policy” too. But it had little new content, because the EC already addressed discrimination and work safety issues. Business opposed European regulation of wages or pensions. Britain opted out of what little was agreed on “social policy.”⁵

As planned, the economic and monetary union was also part of the Maastricht Treaty. It was far more significant. In phases of implementation this EMU eliminated national currencies in favor of a new, common euro, to be used by the countries that joined the “Eurozone” within the Union. A new, independent European Central Bank managed this money. Germany gave up its D-Mark and its Bundesbank. In exchange, it gained a euro and an ECB, both set up largely on lines Germany preferred, free of political influence from national governments so it could stick to a low-inflation hard-money line.

In the EMU, the “M” (monetary) ended up being more unified than the “E” (economic). True, to enter the Eurozone a country had to meet strict criteria, with a promise that there would be no bailouts for governments. National governments were supposed to control their spending, but the national capitals still controlled their budgets. Under extreme circumstances the EU could impose sanctions on a profligate spender, but in practice this was hard to do.

Also, since the political union was relatively weak, neither the Commission nor the ECB were given strong powers to regulate private European banks. Banking regulation was left to the control of individual states. This was more like the system used in America before the United States overhauled its banking regulation system during the Great Depression.

In February 1992, when the Maastricht Treaty was signed, these potential problems in the design of the Union were in the background. In the foreground, everyone could see a sustained will to accomplish European integration, especially among the Germans, the French, and Delors. Everyone could see that leaders had set deadlines and worked very hard to stick to them.

As the best historians of the process put it, “Given the difficulties of history, ideology, and political interests involved, what was achieved at Maastricht represented an extraordinary political achievement. It was an image of a Europe far removed from the images of blocage and sclerosis that had been so prevalent in the early 1980s.”⁶

It was a good thing that the summit of EC leaders in Dublin, in April 1990, had been so harmonious. The Soviet reaction to the East German election results had not been so warm. As we mentioned at the end of the last chapter, the Soviet government seemed to be digging in for a fight. Not only was its position hardening on Germany, progress on the various arms control issues seemed to have stopped, or was even going backward. And then, on top of all those existing issues, there were new crises to consider.

Lithuania, Biological Weapons: Walking a Tightrope

One of the new challenges was a crisis everyone knew about and that forced both Gorbachev and Bush to walk a tightrope. The other new issue was a crisis almost no one knew about.

The crisis everyone knew about was the most serious challenge to the future of the Soviet Union that had arisen so far. Lithuania had declared its independence from the Union in March 1990.

Gorbachev authorized military maneuvers in the republic. He deployed additional troops there, confiscated private weapons and disarmed the local national guard, and seized printing presses and Communist Party property. Most important, the Soviet government imposed economic sanctions—including a cutoff of oil and natural gas.

Privately, Gorbachev was feeling overwhelmed. In February, in a down moment, he had mused to Chernyaev about being ready to leave office. In April, grappling with Lithuania, he had the impulse to cancel all his upcoming meetings with foreigners, even an upcoming summit with Bush (though he soon changed his mind).

Chernyaev could not tell whether Gorbachev was thinking about going back to the old line and maintaining the empire, or whether he would decisively break with the party once and for all. If he broke with the old guard, perhaps he would follow through on his talk about being ready to “go so far that you [Yakovlev and Chernyaev] cannot imagine.”

He was under pressure to get much tougher, to crush the Lithuanians with force and set an example. Analysts can argue about whether a “Chinese solution” was still truly feasible in the Soviet Union. In the spring of 1990, we think it still was, maybe for the last time.

Such a move would not have been able to stop with Lithuania. It would, in essence, have been the point where Moscow said: Enough! A full crackdown would probably have extended to other emergency measures, defiance in the diplomacy, a financial confrontation with Western creditors, and the reestablishment of a “socialism in one country” kind of philosophy.

Gorbachev might have been tempted to lead such a counterrevolution. But then, he would say to Chernyaev, a full crackdown on the republics might mean putting a hundred thousand people on trial. “We would be going back to 1937,” he said, alluding to the peak of Stalin’s great terror.

So far, Gorbachev had tried an economic blockade of Lithuania. He had expected a popular revolt against its breakaway leaders. That did not happen. To his diary, Chernyaev worried that, “[Gorbachev] does not have a Lithuania policy, just pure ideology of power not to allow the breakup of the empire.”⁷

Meeting in Bermuda on April 16, Bush and Thatcher compared notes on what Bush called Gorbachev’s “dilemma.” Both agreed the situation was getting worse. Thatcher judged that “the military is no longer on Gorbachev’s side.”

Bush said that “if Gorbachev doesn’t get out of the Baltic dilemma, I can’t do business with him.… We have come so far, but there is a danger we could slide back into the dark ages.”

Gorbachev’s partial crackdown in Lithuania in April and May filled the American press with calls for a strong reaction from the United States. Bush noted to his diary that he was in “almost a no-win situation, and I keep hoping that Gorbachev will recognize the disaster this will bring him internationally.” He asked visiting senators what they suggested he should do; they had no answers to offer.

Seeing Mitterrand only three days after his meeting with Thatcher, Bush sought the French leader’s advice. Mitterrand urged patience and negotiations. “Gorbachev has inherited an empire. It is now in revolt. If the Ukraine starts to move, Gorbachev is gone; a military dictatorship would result.”

After an internal debate among his advisers, Bush decided to freeze plans to normalize trade relations with the Soviet Union until the Soviets lifted their economic blockade of Lithuania and resumed dialogue. He personally drafted a letter to Gorbachev on this. The Senate voted its own resolution with the same conclusion.

Meanwhile, Bush indirectly put pressure on the Lithuanians to soften their stance and come to the table. He encouraged an initiative from Kohl and Mitterrand. The French and German leaders wrote to the Lithuanians and urged them to “suspend” their independence declaration and resume negotiations.

The Franco-German work was backed by a similar message delivered to the Vilnius leadership by a senior Republican senator, Richard Lugar, acting with Baker’s secret help. Bush and European leaders met with the Lithuanian prime minister in early May. Negotiations resumed; tensions calmed—for a while. Gorbachev (and Bush) stayed on their tightropes. Bush said privately at the time, “I don’t want people to look back 20 or 40 years from now and say, ‘That’s where everything went off track. That’s where progress stopped.’”⁸

Lithuania was the public crisis. The secret crisis was at least as serious. In October 1989 a Soviet defector had contacted the British government. In the spring of 1990, Thatcher, Bush, and a few of their advisers had to make some very difficult choices.

Back in 1969 the American government had decided to shut down its biological weapons (BW) program; the British had done so ten years earlier. Both governments had concluded that such horrifying weapons were not militarily useful. The Soviet government also said it did not need them. So the superpowers led the way in signing (in 1972) a Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), which entered into force in 1975, to ban the development, production, or stockpiling of any such weapons. It was a historic agreement, eventually signed by more than a hundred countries.

During the 1980s the United States had raised concerns about some possible Soviet BW research, because of a suspicious 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the city of Sverdlovsk. The Soviets heatedly denied the allegations. By the end of the 1980s, most opinion among people who followed the issue tended to believe the Soviet story that there had just been a public health problem from contaminated meat.⁹

Very few U.S. or British analysts still followed BW issues. The U.S. national security community still regarded BW as militarily useless. So the Americans and British worried a little, but not too much, about a Soviet BW program.

The Soviet official who defected to the British in October 1989 had been the head of a key lab in what, he secretly revealed, was a very advanced and active BW program—extensive, extremely secret, and entirely illegal (prohibited by the BWC that the USSR had signed). The program was not only manufacturing large quantities of BW for battlefield use; it was producing about a dozen different kinds of biological weapons, some at scale: quantities of anthrax, smallpox (a disease the world health community had just congratulated itself on eradicating at long last), pneumonic plague, and more. Sophisticated methods for weaponizing the viruses had been developed for possible strategic use in missiles to kill large numbers in a faraway enemy population. Active work was under way to develop viruses resistant to antibiotics (and also to immunize Soviet soldiers).

As these details were digested in early 1990 in the British and American intelligence agencies, at first the analysts could not quite believe what they were hearing. The Soviet BW program was worse than anything they had imagined.

The agencies then did extensive work to verify as many details of the defector’s account as they could from other intelligence sources. Verifiable details of the account checked out. But the agencies could not get into the sites to be sure or learn more. (It turned out that the defector had been truthful. In fact, the program was more elaborate than even he knew. The head of the whole BW program defected to the United States in 1992.)¹⁰

In April and early May 1990, at the very same time they were dealing with the Lithuanian crisis, Bush and Thatcher and their top aides were deliberating what they should do about this startling information concerning the clandestine Soviet biological weapons program. They could not even be sure that Gorbachev and Shevardnadze actually knew all these details.

It is rather astonishing, but true, that Bush and Thatcher seriously wondered whether the top leaders of the Soviet Union were aware of such a large and incredibly dangerous program in the Soviet scientific and military establishment. This is a question no one would have ever asked when Leonid Brezhnev or Yuri Andropov were running the Soviet Union. (In fact, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze did know something about this program. The defection of the lab director had been promptly reported straight to the ruling Politburo.)

If what the U.S. and British leaders now knew was made public, it would be a shock and a sensation. To ordinary citizens, the revelation of such a hitherto secret Soviet arsenal would have been much scarier than anything going on in places like Lithuania. It is hard to imagine what would have happened to all the diplomatic work about Germany, arms control agreements, and everything else that at that moment was still so up in the air.

Thatcher and Bush and their top aides considered this. They assumed that, if confronted in a public and embarrassing way, the Soviet government would instantly go into full defensive mode and deny everything. Evidence about later Soviet behavior reinforces their supposition that denial would have been the order of the day. In such a public confrontation, the American and British leaders could not see how they would be able to get the program shut down—which was their most important objective—while also preserving a relationship with Gorbachev.

On the other hand, if they did not make what they knew public, the leaders might later be faulted for not having called public attention to the danger. And there was also a risk that the information might leak.

Thatcher and Bush together decided to keep the information about the Soviet BW program as secret as they possibly could. Bush authorized a briefing for a small number of members of Congress. There were no leaks.¹¹

But Bush and Thatcher decided they would present the concerns to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze, in the hope that the Soviet leadership would secretly solve the problem, and do so in a way that U.S. and British experts could verify. On May 14 and 15, the U.S. and British ambassadors in Moscow made carefully prepared and coordinated presentations about their concerns to Chernyaev and the deputy foreign minister, Alexander Bessmertnykh. The two Soviets did not appear to know anything about the program.

According to Bessmertnykh’s record of the meeting, the American ambassador (Jack Matlock) emphasized that the two governments wanted to solve this problem “without additional fuss.” They “do not intend to raise the given question in a confrontational context and do not intend to make it public.… We [the U.S. and Britain] are absolutely not interested in burdening our relations with a new problem on the eve of the most important negotiations at the highest levels.”

In Moscow a couple of days later, Baker delivered the BW message personally, to stress its significance. He made time for a substantial private discussion about the BW program with Shevardnadze.

When Gorbachev came to Washington a couple of weeks later for his summit meeting with Bush, the American president also raised the BW problem personally. He waited until they were at Camp David and then pulled Gorbachev aside for a private discussion about it. He would raise it again at later summit meetings. Thatcher also raised the issue with Gorbachev during her trip to Moscow in June 1990 (her last as prime minister).

The immediate reactions from Gorbachev and Shevardnadze were defensive. They displayed little knowledge (this was only partially truthful) and promised to check into it. Gorbachev pushed back, saying that his government thought that the U.S. also had a secret BW program. He offered to set up mutual inspections and site visits.

The U.S. pursued that, a process that continued into 1991 with more top secret, high-level exchanges. The Soviets discovered that the U.S. was telling the truth. The U.S. inspectors, by contrast, discovered more Soviet cover-ups. Gorbachev himself encountered prolonged difficulties in trying to completely shut down this program, obstacles he never fully overcame. The issue would pass to his successor in 1992.¹²

At the time Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, Gates, and Thatcher wrote their memoirs, the details of what they and their intelligence agencies had known were still secret. Therefore, none of those memoirs discuss the BW issue, the many high-level discussions about it with the Soviets, or the choices the U.S. and British leaders had to make. We have not seen evidence that the BW program details were shared at this time with either the West Germans or the French. The historical literature therefore has so far not touched on this topic and the way it intersected with everything else that was going on.

While this secret crisis was unfolding, the leaders might compartmentalize the concern, putting it in a sort of mental safe, just as the secret information itself was compartmentalized and so closely held. But the leaders did not forget about the Soviet BW program. Even if left unstated, it was the kind of concern that might come to mind in a discussion about whether or not to give the Soviet government large-scale economic assistance, especially since the U.S. leaders knew that some key figures in Congress—who would have to act on any such request—also had this knowledge.

A Plan to Manage German Power

The united Germany would have about eighty million people. For those with historic memories, this was still a reduced Germany. In territory, it was 50 percent smaller than the Germany that fought the First World War, 30 percent smaller than the Germany that Hitler had taken over in 1933. Instead of a population that in 1937 was nearly double that of France, this united Germany would only have about 40 percent more people than France.

Yet the two Germanys were still a well-armed country, both the part that served with NATO and the part that served with the Warsaw Pact. West Germany was an economic and engineering powerhouse. Europeans wanted more reassurance.

During February and March 1990, a complex diplomatic minuet, in which Bush helped play a mediating role, produced suitable West German promises to Poland that there would be no change in the existing Polish-German border.¹³

More difficult than the problem of borders was the question of whether—or how—to put special limits on the German armed forces and German behavior. The new Germany’s armed forces would be large and capable. No one was especially worried about the intentions of the country’s political leaders in 1990. The question was whether or how to set some special limits on the Germans that were meant to last through the decades.

The stock approach, pressed by some Soviet officials and tempting to some West German diplomats, was to set and agree on unique German limits. The Soviets took a very tough stance on these issues throughout the spring of 1990, what one German participant remembered as a “cold shower” to Western hopes.

The Soviets said that if the Germans wanted to unify, very well then. But the Four Power occupation rights would remain in order to regulate that new Germany. The process of internal unity and external settlement could be decoupled.

Either in a Two Plus Four agreement or in a full-blown peace treaty including a number of other former combatants in the Second World War, Germany would be placed under a set of controls. There would be no extension of alliances. The treaty would place severe restrictions on the size of German forces, both in quantity and quality.

To help enforce these restrictions, the troops of the Four Powers, including Soviet troops, would remain in the united Germany for a transition period of at least five years. Germany would not only be forbidden from having nuclear weapons, it would not be able to participate in decision making about such weapons (thus restricting its NATO activities). Its politics would be monitored to prevent any resurgence of Nazi-like political movements. At the same time, the Soviet government stalled progress toward conclusion of the CFE treaty.¹⁴

The unhappy precedent for such controls on Germany was the 1919 Treaty of Versailles.¹⁵ That treaty had imposed a ceiling of one hundred thousand soldiers, along with other limits on the quality and placement of German forces. It had also envisioned using foreign occupation forces to enforce those controls, at least for a transition period, and with future rights of intervention.

Hitler had exploited German resentment of the controls in his rise to power, and on seizing power had ostentatiously torn up those restraints. After the Second World War, the Americans had developed an even more draconian, rigorously verified disarmament approach for the planned German peace treaty. But that disarmament plan was put aside, as negotiations over a German settlement broke down early in 1947.¹⁶

The Americans took seriously the Soviet threat to decouple internal unification from the external issues. Moscow was threatening to maintain occupation powers and leave hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops in Germany, to be maintained at German expense (per East German–Soviet agreements that the Soviets insisted would remain in force).

The Americans quietly discussed contingency plans, in which the United States, Britain, and France would give up their occupation rights when Germany unified, even if the Soviets did not. In early May 1990, the authors of this book wrote that the Soviets “must know that, after a given date, the West will declare the game over, devolve their own Four Power rights, and deploy legal arguments to the effect that all Four Power rights—including the Soviets’—have now lapsed.” Moscow and Gorbachev would then have the unpopular task of insisting to the German people that they alone retained the right to supervise a newly united and democratic German state.¹⁷

Kohl had come to a similar conclusion. Unification had to go ahead. Foreign policy, he told the visiting British foreign secretary, was like mowing grass for hay: You had to gather what you had cut in case of a thunderstorm.¹⁸

Yet the Americans and West Germans sought more creative ways to address Soviet concerns without such a blunt, dangerous confrontation. Their ideas would use the institutions of the new Europe.

First, they stressed NATO and NATO’s integrated military command. The stock, cutesy quote, constantly repeated, and attributed to Lord Ismay, is that the purpose of NATO was to “keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” This is clever. It is not really right.

The basic genius of the European constructions was to temper all the old national conflicts in a wider political community. The old European Coal and Steel Community, a precursor of the European Community, included the vital industrial resources of France as well as Germany. NATO, then, was similar to the European Community, later the European Union, in that it was not just a control mechanism—it was a different kind of political and economic and even military community. The political community worked because its members were free and democratic.

Like other NATO members, West Germany did not have truly independent armed forces. All of them were assigned to NATO’s command structures, so that the higher command and staff echelons were international. By retaining full German membership in NATO, the German military remained enmeshed in this international military structure.

NATO was also a key factor on the question of German nuclear weapons. Before Germany agreed to join the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1969, governments had been arguing for ten years about whether the Germans needed nuclear defenses. West Germans had their share of national pride and felt very threatened by Soviet military power. The renunciation of nuclear weapons finally made sense to them because of the NATO alliance. They could point to the assurance of British, French, and, above all, American nuclear defense. For the systems in Europe, American nuclear defense was coordinated through NATO.

The other big constraint on the Germans would be the planned CFE treaty. The Germans were willing to be constrained, but only in ways that did not single them out for special, discriminatory limits. The American mantra on this, publicly announced by the White House (on the occasion of the April meeting with Thatcher) and repeated often, was, “A united Germany should have full control over all of its territory without any new discriminatory constraints on German sovereignty.”¹⁹ The West Germans and Americans were happy to limit a future German army, but only if and when other national armies in Europe were limited too.

After the first CFE treaty was concluded in 1990, it would limit alliance totals of military equipment and U.S. and Soviet stationed manpower. These would not necessarily limit German force size. The plan was that in the next round of CFE talks all countries would accept national manpower ceilings too. The Germans would then have national limits along with everybody else.

The Soviets did not want to wait for the “next” CFE treaty after this one. The governments worked out a compromise solution, with some particular help from the American side. The plan would still be that all the CFE countries would accept such limits. Rather than be silent and noncommittal until that future agreement was signed, the West Germans would lean forward and simply make a unilateral political statement about the ceiling they planned to adopt in that future negotiation.

Thus Germany would have committed itself to a future ceiling. But it would still stick to the plan that such a ceiling would only be binding when all the other CFE parties went along and joined in accepting limits too. The solution had another key virtue: It kept the pressure on the Soviets to come to agreement on the current CFE treaty and get that done in 1990, a very difficult task.²⁰

This plan worked. The Germans made their commitment. They picked a total ceiling of 370,000 on the active-duty strength of their armed forces. This was a meaningful reduction. In 1988 the West German armed forces alone were about 490,000 strong; the East German forces numbered about another 170,000. So, in theory, on unity the combined German armed forces would have been about 660,000 strong, but the Germans were pledging to cut them back to no more than 370,000, along with all the other CFE limits on military equipment.

The Germans complied with these limits, at great expense. They ended up destroying nearly 11,000 items of major military equipment at a cost of about $5 billion.²¹

As planned, the CFE treaty was signed at the Paris CSCE summit in 1990. Also, as planned, the follow-on agreement (CFE 1A) was concluded alongside another CSCE summit, in Helsinki in 1992. It added the binding national ceilings on troop strength for all of the other twenty-nine countries that then were parties to the agreement (as by then the Soviet Union had broken up).²²

German forces remained in NATO’s integrated military command. This, plus the use of “annexation/takeover” as the vehicle for unification, helped settle Germany’s nuclear weapons status as well.

The old FRG’s acceptance of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1969 remained binding on the enlarged FRG. The Two Plus Four treaty (the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany) reaffirmed Germany’s nonnuclear weapons commitment. Further, since the Western approach would not allow American forces to be stationed in the former territory of East Germany (the “special military status”), that area thus also became a nuclear-weapons-free zone.

All these agreements have long been taken for granted. Yet it is worth remembering how much these understandings are intertwined with other structures, like CFE and NATO. If the wider structures disintegrate, long-entombed questions about German security, and that of others, will return to Europe.

During Kohl’s visit to Washington on May 17, Bush and Kohl had a private talk, practically alone.

Quietly sitting in the Oval Office, Bush asked Kohl for his honest opinion about the core question: Did the German public want the American troops to stay, if Soviet troops left, as Bush thought they should?

Bush acknowledged the “isolationist” tendencies on both sides of the Atlantic. “It would be understandable,” he said, “if [the German people] didn’t want U.S. troops.”

Kohl’s answer was twofold. “The U.S. troop presence is related to NATO. What sort of NATO would it be, leaving U.S. troops aside? If the U.S. left, NATO would vanish and there might be only CSCE.” Where would be the security, including for countries like Norway or the smaller states?

Second, Kohl added, even if the Soviet Union withdraws, “it is still in Europe. If the U.S. withdraws, it is 6,000 kilometers away. That is a big difference.”

Looking at the future of Europe even beyond the year 2000, Kohl foresaw the Americans staying in Europe. If the Europeans allowed the Americans to leave, it would be “the greatest defeat for us all. Remember Wilson in 1918,” he said, referring to the failure to keep the United States engaged in Europe after World War I.

Kohl became emotional. Trained in history, he felt deeply about issues and places of national memory. Looking ahead to his next visit to the United States, in a few weeks, he and Scowcroft had already made plans to tour Arlington Cemetery, where many American soldiers, sailors, and Marines rest.

“George,” he said, “don’t worry about those who draw parallels between U.S. and Soviet forces. We will push this through. We’ll put our political existence at stake for NATO and the political commitment of the United States in Europe.”²³

Germany was not alone in such beliefs. Almost all the NATO member governments positively liked the alliance. Led by some ministers with especially good experiences, like Norway or the Netherlands, the smaller governments felt enlarged and empowered by being part of a greater whole.

Therefore, it is a bit disorienting for us to read contemporary scholarly arguments about these years, accounts perhaps a bit colored by knowledge of what happened after 1990 and 1991, that see in this diplomacy an offensive American master plan to attain “preeminence” or “hegemony” in Europe (or some other imperious-sounding term currently in academic fashion). It should be apparent by now just how complex transatlantic and European power relationships were, and still are even now.

In 1989 and 1990, Bush was in fact planning a gradual but large downsizing of the American military and U.S. defense spending, a plan he announced in August 1990 (a historic announcement that coincided, by astonishing happenstance, with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait). With the world changing and the tide of American presence in Europe going out, the Bush administration was trying to anchor a diminished but still reassuring military presence and ensure that America remained a European power. In that sense the administration felt defensive, not expansive.

In 1989–90 the United States was coming off a large national debate about U.S. decline and the powerful surge of economic nationalism so remarked upon by American and foreign observers. A core issue—as Bush opened up about so candidly to Kohl—was whether, and how, the United States would maintain a major presence in Europe at all. On this point, American leaders were extremely attentive to European views and the currents of European opinion, none more important than those in West Germany.

In this context, the true consensus position emerging during the spring and summer of 1990 was that the East Europeans, watching what the Soviets were doing to Lithuania, were losing interest in retaining any defense alliance with Moscow. The West Europeans wanted to keep the alliance they had. Dangers did seem to have diminished for the moment, so there was no pressing need to create any new alliances.

What was pressing in the spring of 1990 was a widely shared sense of uncertainty about the future. On May 4, 1990, Bush used a commencement address in Oklahoma to discuss the need for a new kind of NATO, with a new strategy. He apologized to the graduating college students for dwelling on such a seemingly faraway topic.

The new mission, Bush explained, would be much more political. As for the military side, as he put it, “our enemy today is uncertainty and instability.”²⁴ That phrase seemed like a vague hedge. It was. It also turned out to be an accurate prediction.

Few, if anyone, predicted in May 1990 that the NATO allies would face two wars just in the next year. One would arise in the Middle East: Iraq’s August 1990 invasion and conquest of neighboring Kuwait. The other, for which the storm clouds were already gathering, was a set of wars that arose in the Balkans, as the disintegration of Yugoslavia led to conflicts that began in 1991.

The Soviet threat seemed to be receding. But new sorts of conflicts and dangers were already on the edge of bursting into flame. In April 1990 the Soviet government was placing an embargo on breakaway Lithuania, and the threat of violence was obvious.

Leaders liked and generally trusted Gorbachev. But they were already looking beyond him. For instance, by 1990, Kohl and Mitterrand were as close as cousins, or even brothers, including the occasional flareups. In a meeting at Mitterrand’s country home in Latche near the southwestern coast of France on a chilly, windy January day, the two men had mused about what might come next in Moscow.

“The Gorbachev experiment will still go on for a certain time,” Mitterrand predicted. “What will come after, if he fails?

“Ultras!” Mitterrand said, answering his own question. “Not Communists, but a tough military dictator.” If the military won, Mitterrand thought they would stick with liberalization of the economy. “But the nationalist elements would stand strong in the foreground. Blood would flow in Georgia and other parts of the Soviet Union.”²⁵

Conjectures like these were common in 1990. They were one reason why the existing allies valued their defense link to America.

Worries like these were also a reason to try to help Gorbachev stay in power. It was why Bush, Kohl, Mitterrand, Thatcher, and others all worked hard to find a way to help Gorbachev with the issue of Germany staying in NATO.

How to Help Gorbachev?

By May 1990 there was no doubt that Gorbachev was interested in getting significant economic assistance for the Soviet Union. The Soviet desire for economic assistance surfaced at last when Shevardnadze spoke with Kohl in Bonn on May 4. It was becoming difficult for the Soviet government to borrow money to import goods, especially food. Their existing creditors (in Western Europe and Japan) would not make new loans.

Shevardnadze asked the West German government for help. Kohl was determined to assist as much as he could.

Without informing his cabinet (but telling Genscher), Kohl contacted the leaders of two major West German banks. He sent Teltschik and the bankers to Moscow, in secret, to explore the Soviets’ needs and possible responses.²⁶ The Soviets asked for a credit line of DM 20 billion (about $12 billion) guaranteed by the West German government. The West German government could not back up that kind of loan.

Teltschik met directly with Gorbachev, who again linked the credit issue to the continuation of his overall program of economic reform and perestroika. But Gorbachev was not interested in compromising on the security issues involving Germany. They at least agreed that Kohl would come back to the Soviet Union in the summer and visit Gorbachev in his home region, the Caucasus.

When Kohl met with Bush in Washington a few days later, the Soviet request for money was at the top of his agenda.²⁷ Kohl said his government could guarantee about $3 billion in loans. He hoped the United States would guarantee some more.

Bush would not do it. He was still walking his tightrope. He had tried not to be too tough about Lithuania. But with that crisis not yet settled, adding more Soviet debt without real economic reform did not make sense to him.

Kohl urged Bush to change his mind. But Bush stood firm. He did not think the Soviets could repay big new loans under their current circumstances.

Kohl disagreed. He urged Bush to help Gorbachev, not wait for him to be overthrown.

Did Kohl think that there would be a military takeover? Bush asked.

Yes, said Kohl, by a civilian group backed by the military. He urged Bush again to think about the upcoming summit. Gorbachev needed to be able to stand beside the American president as an equal.

Bush promised to treat Gorbachev as an equal, moving forward on political relations and arms control. But the United States would not give Gorbachev money, not unless the Soviets changed their policy toward Lithuania.

The issue of economic assistance was left there for Bush to ponder as the U.S.-Soviet summit approached. Meanwhile, Baker was meeting with Shevardnadze, then Gorbachev, in Moscow.

The meetings did not go well. With Gorbachev, Baker made little headway, but he did deploy a set of nine assurances, about managing Germany and changing NATO, that Zoellick had drafted and tried out earlier in the day.

For weeks, Chernyaev had privately urged Gorbachev to stop what he called this “nonsense,” this “false patriotism of the masses,” and adjust his position on NATO and not “again miss the train.” Gorbachev, however, still seemed adamant.²⁸

Gorbachev moved the conversation with Baker to his agenda. He challenged the Americans’ real intentions toward the Soviet Union, given the clashes over issues such as Lithuania and Germany.

Then, just as Kohl had expected, he made the same kind of request for money that he had made to the West Germans. Gorbachev said he needed $20 billion in loans and credits to overcome a significant funding gap over the next few years. The United States had to be involved, at least symbolically, in the loan effort. The next few years would be critical in easing the transition to a market economy.

Baker could offer Gorbachev little encouragement. It was hard to justify spending U.S. taxpayers’ money if the Soviets were subsidizing the Cubans and blockading the Lithuanians. Baker was essentially making the same points Bush had made to Kohl in Washington the day before.

Reflecting on this meeting in a message back to Bush, Baker’s leading impression was that Gorbachev was clearly feeling squeezed and would probably react strongly to any action that compounded his political difficulties at home. “Germany definitely overloads his circuits right now.”

It was one thing for the United States and the Soviet Union to no longer be enemies. It was still another long road for the United States to actually consider giving the Soviet Union large sums of money.

Consider: First, the United States at this point did not even have normal trade relations with the Soviet Union, something that Bush could not do alone. Any such deal would require support from the U.S. Congress, which was controlled by the opposing Democratic Party. U.S.-Soviet trade relations were not yet even on the level the United States had with China (normal status, but temporary, up for renewal each year).

Then, someone would have to make a case about what the money was for—how it would actually be spent. And after that, Bush would have to persuade Congress, which was then embroiled in a taut battle with Bush over his determined efforts to move back toward balancing the budget, that the United States should appropriate large sums of money to a Soviet government that, on the surface, still seemed to be in pretty good shape and was devoting an enormous part of its economy to its military-industrial complex and massively subsidizing governments like those in Cuba and North Korea.

After Baker returned, Scowcroft laid out what he thought was the “strategic choice” for Bush. This was the first time the Soviet Union had asked for help in this way from Western governments. “The decision,” Scowcroft wrote, “is not in essence about aid to Soviet economic reform—the chance that we can turn the Soviet economy around is a slim one indeed.

“This is—and you should view it as such—a strategic choice about whether economic assistance is a direct and expeditious means by which to secure the victory of the West in the Cold War by obtaining the unification of Germany in NATO and the withdrawal of the Soviet military from Central and Eastern Europe.”

On that question, Scowcroft thought that a big investment, even $20 billion, was worth considering. “Some will say that we would be paying for what the Soviets will have to do anyway—leave Eastern Europe and Germany.” But he explained how difficult things could get. The Soviets “could make Central Europe a tense place for the next few years—years that are critical to the solidification of the Western gains of the recent period.”

It was true that the money to the Soviets might be wasted. It “would probably be spent on a quick infusion of consumer goods to blunt the impact of half-hearted economic reform measures.”

Nor would Congress support help “while the Soviet Union spends $15 billion a year to arm its client states—$5 billion in Cuba alone—and continues to strangle the Lithuanian independence movement.” But the United States had to concentrate on the most important problems, even if such an understanding about assistance would be a gamble on both sides.²⁹

Free to Choose

Mitterrand did not like to lean on Gorbachev. When he journeyed to Moscow to meet again with the Soviet leader in late May, about a week after Baker left, the French president’s tone was more philosophical. He threw in his weight on the German freedom to make the choice of alliances for themselves. “I do not see,” Mitterrand told Gorbachev, “how to forbid united Germany from choosing its alliances as agreed in Helsinki.”³⁰

The notion of Germans debating about NATO was not idle theory. In election campaign after election campaign, anyone who had followed German politics that year, West or East, could see that their political leaders—West or East—were offering a full menu of options, in or out of NATO.

Free to choose: The Soviet government had said it agreed with that principle when it was codified in the Helsinki CSCE Final Act of 1975. This had always been an argument that had stuck with Gorbachev, resonating as it did so strongly with his other political principles.³¹

By the end of May, as Gorbachev contemplated his trip to the United States, he faced a turning point in the course of East-West relations and perestroika. The stakes in continued cooperation with the West were enormous. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had stated both publicly and privately that their first priority was domestic reform. That meant cutting military expenditures and avoiding the distraction of a major international crisis.

In the spring of 1990 the Soviet Union appeared to be resigned to the failure of its policy in Eastern Europe. A long document prepared by the Central Committee staff spoke matter-of-factly about the changed political and ideological face of Eastern Europe. The analysis warned Soviet leaders that they currently had no policy to respond to this situation. There was a vacuum, and the West was filling it.

The USSR was withdrawing with “no rational explanation, with no regard for the immense material and spiritual investment that we made there.” The policy guidance grasped at straws. There was still a chance to strengthen the Soviet cultural presence, interest in the Russian language, and so forth. Ties needed to be developed with youth, trade unions, feminists, and religious groups. The Central Committee staff even suggested to a leadership desperately short of hard currency that a new policy in Eastern Europe might require a certain financial investment. “We should not economize,” the staff told their impoverished leaders, “because this is a matter of capital for the future.”³²

Soviet policy in Eastern Europe—premised on the potential for reformed communism—might be dead. Germany and Lithuania, however, were a different matter. The division of Germany and Soviet dominance of its eastern half could be considered the most important achievements of half a century of Soviet foreign policy. This Soviet emplacement in the heart of Europe was the highest and last remaining measure of meaning from the vast sacrifices endured during the Great Patriotic War. Now the West and NATO were threatening to take over this bastion of Soviet power. It seemed inconceivable that the USSR could submit supinely to such a reverse. Gorbachev’s own political survival could be jeopardized by such a concession, and Gorbachev would face a full congress of the Soviet Communist Party in July.

Gorbachev tried new economic reforms. On May 24, Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov announced a major new economic reform program, including liberalizing prices. The cost of bread would triple. A wave of panic buying and public unrest followed. Gorbachev addressed the nation on television on May 27, pleading for calm.

The economic reform measures were eventually rejected by the Supreme Soviet before they could take effect. And, as if to underscore Gorbachev’s beleaguered political situation, on May 29 the Russian legislature chose Boris Yeltsin as its president despite Gorbachev’s opposition.

Kohl called Bush just before Gorbachev arrived in Washington. Again, he pressed Bush to commit a lot of money for the Soviets. But Bush had decided against the kind of $20 billion “strategic choice” that Scowcroft had invited him to consider.

There was just too much against it. There were the problems with how the money would be used.

Also, though this would be time-consuming to explain in top-level meetings, under its laws the West German government had much more scope to offer government-guaranteed loans to support its country’s exports than was (or is) the case in the U.S. government.³³ Bush and Baker had trouble seeing how to get the federal government to guarantee loans on this sort of scale, and certainly not while Lithuania (and the BW program) were still unresolved.

It would be hard enough just to try and normalize trade relations. As Gorbachev was arriving, Bush had been going through a very hard battle with the Congress over his decision to renew normal trade with China for another year.

So Bush did not expect any breakthroughs with Gorbachev. He hoped to at least maintain forward progress.³⁴

On the morning of May 31, Gorbachev was formally welcomed in a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House. Guns boomed; a fife and drum corps dressed in the eighteenth-century uniforms of the Continental Army paraded for the leaders.

After the opening ceremony, Bush and Gorbachev walked from the South Lawn into the Oval Office for a private meeting, joined only by Scowcroft, Chernyaev, and their interpreters. Gorbachev promptly turned to the issue of American economic help for perestroika. A U.S.-Soviet trade agreement was essential. It was the one matter under discussion that might make a favorable impact at home.

Gorbachev knew that Lithuania was still a problem for the Americans. He pledged to avoid a violent solution by pursuing a peaceful dialogue with the republic’s leaders. Bush was noncommittal. In another room Baker and Shevardnadze were replaying the same discussion. Shevardnadze was particularly emotional, admitting that he had rarely spoken like this before, but a U.S.-Soviet trade agreement was “extremely important” for Gorbachev’s standing at home, to defend the Soviet leader’s policy of cooperation with the West.³⁵

Gorbachev returned to the Soviet embassy for a luncheon with American intellectuals and celebrities and then came back to the White House for an additional meeting. The main subject was Germany and the future of Europe.³⁶

Bush wanted to tackle this difficult subject right from the start. Naturally he knew that the open question of the trade agreement still lurked in the background. He began the Cabinet Room discussion by delivering a carefully prepared presentation on Germany. He used the “nine assurances” that Baker had just previewed with Gorbachev in Moscow.³⁷

Gorbachev presented his alternative. A united Germany could be a member of both military alliances, or it could be a member of neither. Moscow could live with either possibility. In a rambling presentation, Gorbachev said that letting a united Germany join only NATO would “unbalance” Europe. He repeatedly referred to the need for a long transition period. Perhaps by the end of this period Germany could be anchored in both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. As part of the transition both alliances would be transformed into political organizations. “You are a sailor,” he told Bush. “You will understand that if one anchor is good, two anchors are better.” He felt that if the United States and the USSR could decide on how to proceed, the Germans would surely agree.

Bush argued that a unified Germany in NATO was the most stable solution for Europe’s security.

Gorbachev agreed that the U.S. presence was stabilizing. This presence was linked to NATO. Fine; new structures could come later. But first NATO must change.

After back-and-forth arguments among Bush, Gorbachev, Baker, and Shevardnadze, Bush went back to the “free to choose” argument. Under the CSCE principles in the Helsinki Final Act, all nations had the right to choose their own alliances. So Germany should have the right to decide for itself which alliance it would join. Was this not so?

Gorbachev nodded. He agreed matter-of-factly that it was true.

The Americans were startled. They could see members of Gorbachev’s team shifting in their seats. Blackwill whispered to Zoellick, sitting next to him, that he would pass a note to the president. Zoellick agreed. Blackwill jotted down a quick note pointing out to President Bush that, surprisingly, Gorbachev had just supported the U.S. position that nations have the right to choose their own alliances. Could the president get Gorbachev to say it again?

Bush could. “I’m gratified that you and I seem to agree that nations can choose their own alliances,” he said.

“Do you and I agree that a united Germany has the right to be non-aligned, or a member of NATO, in a final document?” Gorbachev asked in reply.

“I agree with that,” Bush said. “But the German public wants to be in NATO. But if they want out of NATO, we will respect that. They are a democracy.”

“I agree to say so publicly,” Gorbachev then said, “that the United States and the USSR are in favor of seeing a united Germany, with a final settlement leaving it up to where a united Germany can choose.”

Bush then suggested an alternative formula: “We support a united Germany in NATO. If they don’t want in, we will respect that.”

“I agree,” Gorbachev answered.

“With the second part?” Bush queried.

“With both parts.”

Meanwhile, many of Gorbachev’s aides could not conceal their distress, whispering and gesturing at each other. “It was an unbelievable scene,” Bush recalled, “the likes of which none of us had ever seen before—virtually open rebellion against a Soviet leader.” Zoellick recalled the scene as “one of the most extraordinary” he’d ever witnessed.

Then Gorbachev appeared to return to the familiar Soviet stance, describing the notion of a prolonged transition period during which Europe would change in order to accommodate a unified Germany. Gorbachev slipped an adviser, Valentin Falin, a note asking him to explain why the Soviets considered a pro-NATO solution unacceptable. Falin scribbled, “I am ready,” and sent it back. Gorbachev nodded, and as Falin launched into his presentation, Gorbachev conferred with Shevardnadze.

When Gorbachev reentered the discussion, he proposed that Shevardnadze work with Baker on the German issue. Oddly, Shevardnadze at first openly refused, right in front of the Americans, saying that the matter had to be decided by heads of government. Gorbachev asked him again. Shevardnadze relented and agreed to explore the matter with Baker.

As the meeting ended, Bush and his advisers were in accord. There had been no misunderstanding: Gorbachev had indeed agreed that a united Germany could choose to be a full member of NATO. Back at the Soviet residence in Washington, Falin later recalled, Gorbachev complained about Shevardnadze’s passivity, and expressed unhappiness that the foreign minister had done nothing to explore what kinds of variations the Americans might be prepared to accept on the NATO issue.

Perhaps Shevardnadze, having been rebuffed by Gorbachev and others in the Politburo when discussing Germany earlier in the month, was reluctant to stick his neck out. If Gorbachev, who had overruled Shevardnadze then, wanted to make concessions now, let him take the responsibility.

But now Gorbachev had made a concession, and the entire Soviet delegation knew it. Immediately after the meeting, on the lawn of the White House, Akhromeyev practically assaulted Chernyaev, interrogating him about Gorbachev’s comments. Had they been written down as part of his briefing papers? Why had Gorbachev said what he’d said? Chernyaev replied that the comments were spontaneous; he did not know why the Soviet leader had chosen to make them on the spot.³⁸

Gorbachev’s and Shevardnadze’s behavior at the meeting seemed, and still seems, quite unusual. It is actually very rare in diplomacy to change one’s mind right at the table. The best interpretation consistent with the available evidence is that Gorbachev’s resolve had been weakening little by little, even before he arrived in Washington. Nothing that the Soviet Union suggested about Germany seemed to be working. The Soviet leader had made all the old arguments again and again.

Finally, as he faced Bush in Washington, something snapped. Bush’s invocation of the right to choose one’s alliance system (the same argument Mitterrand had made a week earlier) may have caught Gorbachev off guard. Chernyaev recalled later that it would not have been logical to reject this idea since Gorbachev had already granted that a united Germany would be fully sovereign. Indeed, Gorbachev had often adopted the rhetoric of free choice and national self-determination. So when Bush struck the wall of resistance from this new angle, it suddenly cracked.

Gorbachev went on with his schedule: a formal dinner at the White House in the evening, breakfast with congressional leaders the next morning, June 1. He explained his economic difficulties and asked the congressmen to back a trade agreement. The agreement would not bring quick results, he said, since “the trade relationship between us now is so primitive,” but “I think it is very important that you make this gesture mostly from a political standpoint.”³⁹

Gorbachev returned to the White House later that morning, and he and Bush talked further about the trade agreement. Bush had checked views around his administration and on Capitol Hill. Opinions were divided, but Baker recommended going ahead with the deal. The administration should try to negotiate some links to Soviet behavior in Lithuania, but the United States had to deliver this visible support to reform. Shevardnadze had been persuasive on this issue.

Bush agreed. It is probable that Gorbachev’s apparent move on Germany contributed to the president’s decision to help the beleaguered Soviet leader.

The White House had scheduled a ceremony at the end of the day on June 1 to announce the agreements that had been concluded. Gorbachev arrived. A few top officials on both sides huddled privately outside the East Room, where the ceremony was to take place. “Are we going to sign the trade agreement?” Gorbachev asked.

Yes, Bush replied. Shevardnadze and Baker had worked out a plan under which the deal would be signed, to take effect as progress was made on liberalizing Soviet emigration and talking to Lithuania. And the leaders signed.

Later that night Bush’s aides thought of a way to capitalize on Gorbachev’s concession on Germany. The NSC staff drafted a statement for the president to deliver at the joint press conference that would close the summit on Sunday morning, June 3. The statement repeated that “we are in full agreement that the matter of alliance membership is, in accordance with the Helsinki Final Act, a matter for the Germans to decide.” To make sure that Gorbachev was “in full agreement” with this statement, Rice passed the draft to the deputy foreign minister, who later confirmed that there was no objection.

At Camp David for more relaxed and private discussions, Gorbachev, as Bush had expected, raised the question of U.S.-government-guaranteed loans.

Bush said that he wanted to help but needed to see more economic reforms, movement on Lithuania, and a reduction of subsidies to Cuba. Progress on Germany would also create the right political climate for Bush to seek money from Congress.

Bush did pledge that the G-7 would consider a broad multilateral assistance program, including substantial credits, at the Houston summit in July, to be held right after the NATO summit in London.⁴⁰

At dinner Gorbachev looked untroubled, serene. With the trade agreement signed, the atmosphere was warm and friendly.

None of the reporters at the press conference appeared to notice the significance of Bush’s press statement. Nor did American officials call attention to it. They sensed that Gorbachev had finally turned a corner in his approach to the German question, but the situation was tentative and shaky. Indeed, later in June, Shevardnadze continued to present a doctrinaire line in the discussions about Germany.

Bush carefully reported on his press statement in phone calls to Kohl, Thatcher, and Mitterrand. He did not dramatize the concession. He instead emphasized the need to follow up with a successful NATO summit in July.

None of the other leaders appeared, at least at first, to grasp the significance of the Soviet move; none even inquired about it. (Teltschik, however, noted that this was “a sensation.”) Mitterrand did remark shrewdly that Gorbachev would be counting on achieving his security objectives through West Germany’s domestic politics.

Bush then followed up with written messages. Again, his tone was cautious: “We, of course, will have to see whether this reflects real flexibility in the Soviet position.”⁴¹

But, as Chernyaev recalled, the Americans were correct to take the exchange on Germany’s right to choose very seriously. When asked later when the Soviet Union agreed to membership of a united Germany in NATO, Chernyaev “unhesitatingly” answered, “On May 30 [sic], at the Soviet-American summit in Washington.”⁴²

A New Atlantic Alliance

In the spring of 1990, the Soviets put forward their ideas for pan-European security structures, designed mainly to handle the German problem. At first these seemed, to the Soviet diplomat charged with deploying them, like a “surrealistic jumble of ideas.”

The most polished set of Soviet suggestions, deployed in May–June 1990, looked about like this:

• NATO and the Warsaw Pact would remain. They would evolve into friendlier, cooperative structures.

• The united Germany would be in both alliances, or neither. But it would be under control measures for some transitional period, overseen by the Four Powers, perhaps involving the CSCE.

• The CSCE would develop into a pan-European organization that could help manage disputes with a conflict prevention center. To illustrate, in one conversation Shevardnadze mentioned disputes like those between Hungarians and Romanians, or between Czechs and Slovaks, or among the contenders in Yugoslavia. The CSCE’s conflict prevention center might be similar to the European Security Commission suggested by the new Czech foreign minister.⁴³

There was another possibility. Neither CFE nor CSCE offered an all-European alliance, a promise to come to another member’s defense in case of attack. In theory, then, a country could have proposed a thirty-five-nation alliance in which every member promised to come to the aid of the others. In such an alliance, the United States and the Soviet Union and Germany would promise to defend each other, or Yugoslavia, or any other member. Some of the Warsaw Pact member state leaders, like Czech president Vaclav Havel, were—in these early days—naturally taken with just such a concept.

This particular all-European idea was never seriously developed. It is not at all clear that the Soviet government actually wanted such a collective security alliance across all of Europe.

Also, in the spring of 1990, the Soviet Union was on the verge of possible internal wars, including a real danger of imminent conflict with breakaway Lithuania. It would have been hard to muster much enthusiasm around Europe to figure out how to handle all the possible scenarios that could arise from signing mutual defense pacts with Moscow.

What the Soviets instead began floating, as we mention above, were the ideas about a CSCE center for risk reduction and arms control verification. This might be attached to a pan-European peacekeeping force to help with resolution of civil conflicts. The risk reduction center idea was very close to ideas that, quite independently, the United States was also developing at that time, ideas that eventually all would agree to adopt as a complement to the CFE system.⁴⁴

Instead of some new alliance, perhaps old-style defense might no longer be necessary at all. Those alliances had been created in the 1940s and 1950s for Cold War dangers.

In this argument, alliances would go away altogether. The CFE/CSCE system would be there, regulating arms. Eastern European countries no longer seemed quite so interested in wanting a defense guarantee from Moscow.

The Soviet government was coming close to this position. Yet neither Moscow nor Genscher were willing at this point to go all the way to explain and defend this argument either.

In the spring of 1990, the Warsaw Pact members had not yet firmly decided to dissolve their alliance. Some, including Poland, were still musing about whether they needed some sort of Soviet defense relationship, maybe even a bilateral one, to hedge against a German threat. But they were all trending away from wanting a Soviet alliance.

The situation was quite different among the fourteen NATO member countries on the European side of the Atlantic or bordering the Mediterranean Sea. During 1990 or 1991 it would have been hard to find a single one of those governments that even wanted to talk about severing its defense guarantee and relations with the United States.

Gorbachev’s main problem with Germany staying in NATO, and the United States staying in Europe, was not rooted in solid arguments about the military balance or strategic necessity. NATO would help manage German power. The Germans should be free to choose. The CFE system would address the military balance of power.

The reduced Soviet military forces would still be enormous, relative to the others. The Soviet Union would not be vulnerable to a Western attack.

Gorbachev and Shevardnadze’s main problem was political. It was the imagery of Germany joining the enemy side. Their generation had been taught and reminded that NATO was an implacable foe, a dangerous bloc.

After four hours of talks with Shevardnadze early in May, Baker wrote back to Bush that the Soviet leaders “don’t know how to square the circle. They’re wrestling with it.” The core problem was that “I suspect that Gorbachev doesn’t want to take on this kind of an emotionally charged political issue now, and almost certainly not before the [July 1990] Party Congress.” Genscher, also deeply engaged in working the issue, saw it the same way. Shevardnadze was trying to change NATO’s “demonic” image at home.⁴⁵

To help him, the Americans promised real progress at a special NATO summit to be held in London early in July, before the Party Congress. Bush’s May 4 speech had set high expectations for this NATO summit. Since February, for five months Bush and his team had led the way to put meat on the bones of their promise to make NATO more political and change its military approach.

Back in February the White House had created an ad hoc “European Strategy Steering Group” to work the whole set of issues. It was chaired by Gates, Zelikow was the executive secretary, and it included Zoellick and Ross from State in addition to the usual line officials. An unusual set of interagency debates within the U.S. government was followed by extraordinary, rushed, and intense arguments in the alliance.

With Wörner’s support at NATO headquarters, the United States bypassed the usual working-level process. Bush took his ideas directly to his counterparts, to be negotiated on-site by Baker and ministers, or directly by the leaders. This risky strategy produced a turning point for the alliance at its London summit of July 5–6, 1990.⁴⁶

The leaders publicly agreed, in their declaration on a “transformed” alliance, that they were no longer adversaries of the Warsaw Pact states. That military purpose was gone.

The CFE system and related confidence-building measures would reset and regulate defenses. It would be followed by new conventional arms reductions that would go even further with “far-reaching measures” during the 1990s to “prevent any nation from maintaining disproportionate military power on the continent.”

The reduced national forces (including U.S. forces) would be integrated more into multinational commands. “Forward defense” would become a “reduced forward presence.”

The old NATO nuclear strategy of “flexible response” would also become history. In the new strategy, nuclear forces would be turned “truly into weapons of last resort.” All nuclear artillery and most other U.S. nuclear forces would be removed.

The summit planned for new arms control talks on these forces. In September 1991, the United States and Soviet Union jumped over that process. To get the work done faster, they proceeded with reciprocal unilateral reductions of almost all of their nuclear forces in Europe (outside those in the Soviet Union itself).

The U.S. approach thus followed through on Baker’s December 1989 promise that NATO would return mainly to its political mission. It was already evolving into a place where all NATO members could discuss political and security concerns.

Another major initiative from London was to welcome the Soviet Union and all the other former Warsaw Pact states to NATO. They were invited to establish permanent diplomatic liaison missions in NATO, with ambassadors accredited to the alliance.

This particular U.S. initiative, which the two of us developed in March and April 1990, anticipated the decay of the Warsaw Pact, which was formally abolished in 1991. We, and the leaders who then adopted this initiative, sought a way to welcome these countries to NATO, without having to get into issues of formal membership or alliance status.

We did not see any need to prejudge or get tangled up in those issues in 1990 or 1991. We just thought it was more important and useful to turn NATO into a community where representatives from the former enemies could start working directly with other representatives and staff at alliance headquarters on issues of common concern. As time passed, and everyone got to know each other and work together, they could make decisions about any further steps.⁴⁷

This move proceeded about as planned. A year later, at another special NATO summit held in Rome in November 1991, NATO created a more formal structure to include Soviet and East European ministers, a North Atlantic Cooperation Council (NACC).

As we will discuss below, NACC was not just empty symbolism. Using it as a key forum, governments from across Europe did vital work during the early 1990s to adapt the CFE system and the European military balance after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The NACC, in turn, evolved by 1994 into a “Partnership for Peace,” bringing the former adversaries even closer to NATO’s security deliberations.

The London NATO summit helped Soviet leaders with their NATO image problem. In his memoirs, Shevardnadze described how “in the extremely inflamed atmosphere of the [July Party] Congress it was difficult to breathe.” So, “when the news came out about the NATO session in London, I knew there had been a response.” Gorbachev and Shevardnadze quickly found ways to laud the move in the Soviet press. NATO’s move paved the way, they said, “for a safe future for the entire European continent.”⁴⁸

A Final Settlement for Germany

Between April and late July 1990, diplomatic attention centered on the allied effort to persuade Gorbachev and his government to accept the Western approach for settling the German question. At the time, we believed that this would probably work out somehow. Just the same, we were very anxious about it.

Gorbachev had indicated a degree of acceptance—the “free to choose” point—at the end of May. It took more effort, including the indication of the “transformed” NATO that came out of the London summit, and Gorbachev getting through his Party Congress, until the main deal was closed by Kohl and Genscher after many hours of meetings in Moscow and in the Caucasus on July 14–16.

Relaxing with his team on the evening of July 15 at the lodge where they were staying, Kohl sighed delightedly and said, “Never in my life have I had to work so hard. But never in my life have I also been so happy.” The treaty for a final settlement of the German question was negotiated rapidly in the following two months among the six countries in the Two Plus Four (with a July visit from Poland’s foreign minister).⁴⁹

We have often reflected on this historic agreement, focusing especially on the turning points in the spring and summer of 1990. Five observations, taken together, help explain that final outcome.

First, the West Germans and Americans did put together a serious and adequate package of assurances about how to address future German military power. These reassurances were probably more important to Moscow than the NATO membership issue itself. Germany’s NATO membership was essential to this control concept. It, along with the planned CFE arms control system, allowed such controls to make lasting sense for the Germans.

As we mentioned, in Moscow in May, Baker and Zoellick had started using and sharing a set of “nine points” to summarize all the ways that the West was already addressing, or moving to address, Soviet concerns. These points, frequently reiterated, had real substance. And the United States, the West Germans, and their allies followed through on every one of these points.⁵⁰

Second, therefore neither Gorbachev nor Shevardnadze could really come up with a truly persuasive, plausible alternative to the West German and American approach on the question of German NATO membership.

Gorbachev and Shevardnadze would later be attacked for having done a poor job in the diplomacy. It is true that they could have orchestrated a more powerful counterattack, especially in the early phases. They could have done much more to disrupt and delay the unification process, decouple the external aspects, create a major crisis, and polarize West German politics.

As tacticians, at the time we were keenly aware of, and still see, their lost tactical opportunities. One can then argue, as many have, that Gorbachev and Shevardnadze struck a poor deal for their country.

We do not agree. Is this just a product of our American bias? This was not a game. Those who levy the criticism bear the burden of making an argument about alternative Soviet strategic objectives and posture in the new Europe. Those making that argument must then link it to their proposed alternative conception of the future of the Soviet Union itself.

Gorbachev and Shevardnadze could have chosen an alternative grand strategy, one of forceful dictatorship and empire. Such a strategy might have required different leaders of the Soviet Union. But would such alternative leaders, such an alternative strategy, really have made the Soviet Union better off? Or Europe?

Third, by the spring of 1990 the quality of coordination among U.S., West German, French, and British diplomats was very strong. They did not agree on everything. Yet the net orchestration was detailed and effective.

Thus Gorbachev encountered a reasonably united front. Whether it was the American-Soviet summit in May, or the West German–Soviet summit in the Caucasus in July, in both cases the allies worked from a common script.

The Americans were pleasantly surprised by the July breakthrough. The press commented in predictable ways about whether Kohl deserved the credit, not Bush.

Bristling about such commentary, Blackwill, as he was about to leave the NSC staff at the end of July 1990, gave a talk at a Washington think tank in which he described the Soviet-German result as the product of a U.S.-directed policy. It had been, he said, “the most intensive application of US diplomacy of all time. Anyone who thought that the Administration had been upstaged by [the Caucasus breakthrough] must have been living on the planet Zarkon.”⁵¹

We understood our colleague’s irritation. But in fact, we all knew that the West Germans had a vital and difficult role to play in all this too. We also knew that the West German diplomacy with the Soviets had its own special character.

As our account makes clear, the allied partners were not robots, marching in perfect sync. There were plenty of strains and suspicions and sotto voce comments. They persisted right up to the very last hours of talks in Moscow in September 1990.⁵²

These were all proud, powerful governments of great countries whose leaders and officials very much had minds of their own. What was remarkable was not that there was disharmony and tension. That is the norm. It is mitigated—at best—only with constant effort and well-understood common policy designs.

What was remarkable was the extent to which the partners actually did function effectively as a team. A close examination of the diplomacy that culminated in the German-Soviet talks shows the constant interaction, coordination… and teamwork. Bush and Baker were not too troubled. They knew and they acknowledged, as did Kohl and Genscher, what a team effort it was.⁵³

Fourth, in the spring and summer of 1990, Gorbachev was terribly preoccupied and beset by his internal problems. We have noted how the “NATO” issue had already become more about image, and the struggle he was facing at home.

Fifth, Gorbachev pushed hard to get Western money, leaning especially on Kohl and on Bush.

We mentioned that Bush was not yet convinced. The G-7 countries agreed that an IMF-led team of international agencies would do a crash study of Soviet needs (which it did). The United States and other G-7 governments, including Delors, did not see how massive transfers would do much good, even if the money could be found or appropriated by legislatures, without much more far-reaching reforms in the Soviet Union itself.

Germany did transfer a lot of money to the Soviet Union. In May, Kohl had agreed that his government would guarantee further private bank loans to the USSR. In September, he agreed to a large cash transfer to offset the costs of withdrawing Soviet forces from Germany. Some refer to this as a successful “bribe” to seal the deal.⁵⁴

The money was important. But the “bribe” label is not fair to anyone involved. Even before Kohl arrived in Moscow in July for the historic meetings that would conclude in the Caucasus, Chernyaev and Gorbachev had already planned to confirm Soviet consent to full German membership in NATO.

Chernyaev was therefore worried about the appearance that German assistance had caused the Soviets to give way on NATO because, as he noted to his diary, “After all, the world does not know about the agreement made with Bush in Washington, so it could appear that Bush was not able to convince Gorbachev, but the German quickly won him over with loans.” To Chernyaev, writing the day after Gorbachev confirmed the agreement on NATO, “it is not the bait (loans) but the fact that it is pointless to resist here, it would go against the current of events, it would be contrary to the very realities that [Gorbachev] likes to refer to so much.”⁵⁵

The largest later Soviet claim on the Germans, in their tough negotiations in September 1990, was for help offsetting the costs of maintaining and rapidly relocating the hundreds of thousands of troops, families, and stocks of equipment from installations that had been in East Germany for generations, and effectively subsidized there.

These relocation costs were real and they were large. It was quite reasonable for Moscow to ask for West German help in offsetting those costs, since West Germany wanted the troops to leave the unified Germany as rapidly as possible. There was plenty of room to haggle over the right numbers, since there were no good ways to calculate them objectively.

In September, Gorbachev drove a hard bargain about German compensation for the troop withdrawals, probably amounting to the equivalent of about $9 billion in grants. In these talks, the Soviets had a bargaining advantage, and they used it.

Kohl’s offer of the D-Mark to East Germany, plus the rapid dissolution of the East German economy, meant that every day the West Germans were effectively losing more money, until they could get full political control over all the institutions. If the Soviets chose to delay political unification, the West Germans would lose much more money. By that time, a quick resolution, even at a relatively high price, was actually in West Germany’s economic interest, as Moscow knew.⁵⁶

The other big source of German aid to Moscow was huge sums of credit guarantees, private loans guaranteed by the German government. By the spring of 1991 the German government had extended credit guarantees and other credits for a total of about $25 billion (which Moscow was supposed to pay back).⁵⁷

In theory, the Soviet Union had enough export income to manage its debt.⁵⁸ The big issues were internal: State entities had borrowed the foreign money, but as the Soviet economy was starting to fall apart amid a mismanaged “reform” process, those entities no longer ran the firms or earned the money to repay the debts.

A year later Gorbachev admitted to Baker, “Things disappear around here. We got a lot of money for German unification, and when I called our people, I was told they didn’t know where it was.” Baker was a bit staggered by this. He checked later with Yakovlev, who told him, “It’s just gone.”⁵⁹

First Tests for a Transformed NATO

The United States and NATO followed through on the commitments to transform the alliance into something else. Like any protected historic landmark structure, NATO kept the same reassuring shell. The interior was gutted and completely renovated.

During the next few years, as all Soviet troops returned home and the Soviet Union itself broke apart, most U.S. troops also left Europe. A core remained. This numbered about 100,000 by 1993, less than one-third of the 1989 strength. By 1999 that number—down to about 69,000—had been reorganized for entirely different missions.

What was left was a core commitment to a continued guarantee of U.S. nuclear defense with a small remaining force of American bombs that could be delivered by allied and American aircraft kept in Western Europe. The old wide deployments to resist territorial aggression from the East were gone. Diplomats from all those countries now went to regular meetings at NATO.

The London Declaration promised that the new alliance would replace older force structures with “smaller and restructured” forces, “highly mobile and versatile so that Allied leaders will have maximum flexibility in deciding how to respond to a crisis,” and relying “increasingly on multinational corps made up of national units.” And this is what happened.

These restructured forces would be designed to be able to use European bases for two kinds of purposes:

• Agreed joint military actions outside Europe; or

• Agreed crisis management/peacekeeping efforts inside Europe.

Sooner than anyone had expected, both of these contingencies moved from the world of theoretical communiqués to problems of real action.

Agreed joint military actions outside Europe

That contingency arose in August 1990, with Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait. People at the time argued about whether the United States and other countries should confront Iraq and go to war in 1990–91. Both of us entirely agreed with the policies of the Bush administration in which we then served.

But, whatever one thinks about the policies, governments might at least want to have the option of being able to organize a decisive international response. NATO—as an institution—showed how valuable it could be in such a crisis, even one that originated outside of Europe.

British and French combat forces joined the military coalition, based in Saudi Arabia, assembled for the main campaign against Iraq (along with Arab forces from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, and the UAE). Beyond those national choices, though, the NATO alliance structures turned out to be highly useful.

First, early in August 1990, the United States asked Turkey, an alliance member, to risk an Iraqi attack by cutting Iraq’s oil lifeline as part of the global sanctions to persuade Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. To help the Turks, the United States sought and obtained an unprecedented NATO commitment that the alliance would defend Turkey from Iraqi attack, if Turkey took the risk.

Second, in late 1990 and early 1991, NATO structures, well rehearsed and operating 24/7 on a large scale, provided the essential planning and logistical capability for the very challenging redeployment of an entire U.S. corps, with its equipment, from Germany to Saudi Arabia. This corps became the principal attack force for the “left hook” part of the war plan against Iraq. Also, as U.S. naval forces redeployed to the Middle East, allied naval forces helped pick up the slack in the Mediterranean.⁶⁰

Third, early in 1991, NATO deployed a multinational mobile force (made up of German, Belgian, and Italian aircraft, along with Dutch air defense units) to defend Turkey as it also became a base in the imminent war against Iraq.

Fourth, NATO was involved in the deployment of a Dutch Patriot air defense unit to Israel in 1991, along with U.S. forces, to help defend Israel from Iraq’s missile attacks on it. This military aid in Israel’s defense was part of the effort to keep Israel itself from joining the war against Iraq (which Iraq was trying to provoke). This was only the second time in Israel’s history that foreign troops had been deployed on Israeli territory to aid in that country’s defense.⁶¹

Crisis management and peacekeeping inside Europe

This other main contingency for NATO’s future role also surfaced soon after the NATO leaders issued their July 1990 London Declaration. The country of Yugoslavia began disintegrating during the second half of 1990.

By late 1990, the U.S. government judged that the breakup was inevitable. The intelligence community accurately forecasted that the breakup would probably lead to widespread violence, including possible wars among the contending nationalities. Scowcroft and Baker’s deputy secretary, Lawrence Eagleburger, had served in Yugoslavia earlier in their careers and had some feel for the situation there. The lead NSC staffer for Europe at the time (who had replaced Blackwill) recalled concisely that “the Bush administration was well aware of the potential of a violent dissolution of Yugoslavia.” The problem was that “it simply knew of no way to prevent this from occurring.”⁶²

The crises and wars in the former Yugoslavia revealed how institutional choices for the new Europe could matter a lot, or not matter much at all. Some people thought the United States or European countries should have done much more to contain or pacify the Croatian, Bosnian, or Kosovo wars. Some thought they should have done less. Whatever one’s view, the failings were not because of institutions.

Governments or publics might use institutions as an excuse for failure, blaming NATO or the EU. But they were not the cause. The main problem, from 1990 to 1995, was that no sufficiently powerful group of outside countries could agree on what to do.

They could not agree to ignore or just contain the conflict. They could not agree to intervene decisively to help settle it. In Europe, as in the United States, there was loud disagreement within the governments, as well as with each other.

From the start, the United States was ready to let Europeans guide the way. The United States preferred to support European leadership in sorting out a coordinated policy. But the major European powers were themselves divided. This was not a case where some small European government blocked consensus. At the very core, France and Germany could not agree on what to do.

At this time, the Germans felt they were blocked from doing anything at all militarily, for legal and historical reasons. The French were reluctant to organize and dominate a European military intervention. They were also reluctant, at least in the early years, to forcibly confront the Serbs. The British did not want to act outside of NATO. But, really, they were reluctant to act at all. Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd told French foreign minister Roland Dumas, “No British soldier will ever fight in Yugoslavia.”⁶³

European and American forces found themselves, then, supporting ineffectual United Nations efforts. Finally, after years of agony, in 1995, once the atrocities mounted to newly horrifying magnitudes and the humiliation of the UN was complete, the United States decided to take a more forceful lead.

At that point, decisive coalition action was possible, and NATO was used to help organize it. After NATO had organized an initial peacekeeping force in Bosnia, the European Union took the lead in organizing a follow-on force.

In other words, depending on the political commitments, there were several institutional possibilities. Whether a UN-organized force or a NATO-organized force or an EU-organized force, or some mix in which the United States supported an EU force, all might have been effective.

The Balkan crises and wars revealed something else. All the alternative all-European “security architectures” would have been no more effective. They could very well have made matters worse.

At the pivotal London NATO summit of July 1990, the most outspoken dissents against the reinvention of NATO had come from Thatcher and from Mitterrand. Thatcher’s opposition was relatively predictable. Her approach to NATO was more conservative. Like some in Washington, she thought and argued that Bush’s proposed changes in defense posture were too radical, too soon.

Both Mitterrand and Thatcher were unhappy that the U.S. was downplaying its nuclear weapons and nuclear deterrence. They feared that such moves might go too far. Then British and French nuclear forces would be on the spot, either to make up the gap or join in the cutbacks. But their fears turned out to be overdrawn. The United States had rightly judged that adaptation could become an anchor, not a slide down a slippery slope.

Mitterrand, though, had a bigger, more fundamental objection to the American plans for NATO. The French were conservative in another way. As Scowcroft put it, the French leader “wanted to keep NATO confined to its traditional role—defense against a massive Soviet attack on Western Europe.” This “traditional role,” Scowcroft stressed, “was precisely what we did not want.”⁶⁴

To Mitterrand, all the talk of giving NATO this new political role, giving it a new military role, was all going in the wrong direction. He and his team believed the Americans would probably be leaving Europe. The French did not push for this, but they expected it. So the Europeans should build up new institutions of their own.

Grudgingly, Mitterrand went along with the London outcome. He could abide the goal of trying to make NATO less threatening to the Soviets. But he showed his pique by announcing that French troops stationed in Germany as part of alliance defense would soon return to France.⁶⁵ More than a year later, when NATO leaders in Rome ratified their new Strategic Concept in November 1991, Mitterrand pronounced, “The Alliance is good, but it is not the Holy Alliance.”

Through the rest of 1990 and 1991, France posed a choice: In addition to having the transformed NATO, which allies were moving rapidly to put in place, did Europe really want a multinational defense structure of its own, answering to the European Council, one that could act autonomously without the United States?

In principle, the argument for this was strong. It was a good idea to empower Europeans to act on matters the Americans did not wish to address. For example, as civil wars began in the former Yugoslavia during 1991, the American government did not want to get militarily involved. Perhaps a “European security and defense identity” might be good. Baker said so, even though some of his officials tended to want to stick with NATO.

It was in practice where the French argument ran into trouble. As European countries cut back their military forces in a new Europe, there was not a lot of surplus to be able to stand up two effective command systems and sets of multinational units.

The Germans wanted to please both the Americans and the French. Most other European governments—and certainly the British—did not think a standalone European entity would be militarily viable. Pushing it too hard might just spur the Americans to leave the Europeans on their own, which most European governments did not want.

Finally, in practice, the French theory was embarrassed by the two formative crises of the early 1990s. In the Gulf crisis in the Middle East, NATO had been quite valuable and no hindrance to selective European involvement. In the Yugoslav crisis, the leading European powers were themselves split about what to do—including a deep split right at the center, between France and Germany. Rather than empowering Europe to act, the European Union’s leaders exemplified its paralysis.

One of the best historians of the argument, himself French, concluded that by the end of 1991, the United States was far from being just a “last resort against an otherwise diminishing threat, as the French had anticipated.” Instead, “under the leadership of a United States resolved to remain a ‘European power,’ NATO was emerging in the immediate post–Cold War period as the pivot of European security.” He notes, “The net result” was “a re-Atlanticization of European security to a degree unprecedented since the origins of the Cold War.”⁶⁶

Americans should take no great satisfaction in this result. It was not the ideal outcome. The ideal solution was, in fact, for groups of concerned European governments to be able to act either with or without the United States, depending on the circumstances and the level of American interest (or insight).

Mitterrand stressed this point during a particularly unnecessary argument in July 1991, at a time when the United States was devoted to the transformation of both the CSCE and NATO. Mitterrand still believed, as he told Bush, that “in the years ahead, your country will pull away from Europe.” So, as Mitterrand explained to Kohl, he did not want to “enclose Europe in a structure that is totally dependent on Washington and stifle any desire for European defense.”⁶⁷

Bush and Baker were defensive because, as they told Mitterrand, they feared his stance would be a self-fulfilling prophecy, one that would trigger the American withdrawal from Europe. But the French president was also right. Indeed, in the Balkan case, the American government would have very much preferred to play a supporting role, not a leading one.

Fortunately, the institutions eventually evolved in just this more flexible direction. In 1990 the French and Germans created a multinational “Eurocorps” that also attracted troops from other countries, like Spain and Belgium. This new Eurocorps was a focal point of the 1991 quarrel. Years later, the Eurocorps became active once the French agreed, on German insistence, that the unit could operate under NATO command if there was a fight.

After a new French president took office in 1995, after NATO—that same year—became the instrument for firm coalition action in Bosnia, the French also began a process of slowly rejoining all of NATO’s organizations. By the end of the 2000s, France had rejoined NATO’s integrated military command.

By the end of the 1990s, the European Union was well launched. The authority of its governments, in the European Council, was enhanced. All the institutional structures were put in place for EU interventions, with EU-organized multinational battle groups beginning to take the field during the 2000s.⁶⁸

The 1990–91 visions for the transformation of the European Union and the Atlantic alliance turned out to be reasonably sound and durable. The problems were more eternal and immutable: to decide what was important, what capabilities to have, and how to solve the problems.

The largest of these problems also emerged right away: What to do about the rest of Europe, post-communist Europe? And how would all those countries fit into these emerging political, economic, and security visions?

Creating a Better League of Nations

The great and tragic precedent was in 1919. In that year, the established governments from Berlin to Vladivostok, from Riga to Belgrade, were all up for grabs. Their futures were sorted out in awful civil wars and revolutions that wracked practically every country. Millions lost their lives.

With borders patched together by treaties signed between 1919 and 1923, the nations remained bitterly divided among revolutionary communists, ruthless anticommunists, and armed nationalists. Within about ten years democracy had disappeared in every state from Germany to the Soviet Union, except for Czechoslovakia.

In 1990 and 1991, established governments from Berlin to Vladivostok, from Riga to Belgrade, were back on the operating table. This time the settlements were remarkably peaceful and remarkably durable.

Despite terribly painful economic and social upheavals, only Yugoslavia descended to full-scale civil war. That awful example helped encourage others not to follow it. In general, the futures were sorted out peacefully. Although Czechoslovakia itself broke in two, the Czech and Slovak republics chose a peaceful divorce. Ten years, even twenty years later, democratic norms still governed in almost all of Europe.

We opened this chapter with Charles Powell’s ominous prediction to Thatcher, in January 1990, about a return to cycles of national struggle and violence. Powell’s predictions seem prescient—from the perspective of the 2010s. But in the 1990s, most Europeans in fact did not follow that downward cycle.

Even in Russia, when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 and Gorbachev finally lost power, it was not the “ultras,” not a steely military dictatorship, that took his place. The “ultras” tried and failed.

The “ultras” were defeated by a democratic revolutionary. This revolutionary leader claimed legitimacy from the ballot box, and he—Boris Yeltsin—and his followers, his Russian allies, promised freedom.

Some of this, including in Russia, would later go wrong. Yet it is also worth noticing what went right.

In 1919, the main institution for Europe had been a new creation, a League of Nations, headquartered in Geneva. The League of Nations had not included the United States (by America’s choice). It had not included the Soviet Union (that center of world revolution). In its first years it also did not include the recently defeated countries either, like Germany, Austria, or Hungary.

The League had been a Eurocentric institution, dominated by Britain and France. Those two powers used the League (if they could agree) to tackle a number of lesser problems with “arbitration, mediation, and conciliation,” sorting out some border issues, organizing plebiscites.

In its first ten years the League intervened in seventeen such disputes. It successfully sorted out about half of them without military force or economic sanctions. In this early phase it handled the “‘small change’ of world affairs. It dealt with minor disputes and limited issues and not with the fundamental problems of reconstruction.”⁶⁹

In 1990 and 1991 the structures put into play for the new Europe were much more enveloping and ambitious. This time both the United States and Germany would play very large roles. The Soviet Union was there at the founding too, but its implosion would soon test the new structures.

As 1990 began, Mitterrand was still focused on his idea of a European confederation. He did not see how all the other countries in Europe could be absorbed into the European Community. Talking with Kohl, Mitterrand emphasized that the EC had to integrate further. This deepening ruled out adding new members anytime soon.

What then should be done with the countries that had just been “freed” from the Soviet bloc? “What will they do?”

They might form new groupings of their own, Mitterrand speculated, like a federation of Italy with Yugoslavia, Austria, and Hungary. “Others with other states. It would be a dangerous path.”

One had to find, the French president argued, “a status and structures for the European countries that one cannot leave outside.” There had to be political agreements with them, eventually also with the Soviet Union, so that it would not be isolated. “Then there will be a new situation by the end of the century.”

Thus Mitterrand thought a European confederation of democratic states might be a plausible alternative. The CSCE was there, but it included the United States and Canada.

He wanted a confederation that would include Europeans, to build up a common legal area with the countries on an equal basis, the large and the small. It would be a loose structure, with few mandates, but the countries would all be there.

Kohl agreed that the EC could not play this all-European role. He stressed that there had to be preconditions. Any member countries had to be free (freiheitlich), respecting the rule of law.⁷⁰

What Mitterrand was talking about, however, was really a substitute for the CSCE, a substitute that would exclude the United States (and Canada). Kohl never really believed in this. The Germans preferred to focus their efforts on the CSCE. But they cordially let the French try to persuade others.

The French tried to recruit East European governments to support their confederation plan. As those governments came to understand that Mitterrand’s idea would include the Soviets and exclude the Americans, they lost interest. During 1991 the French government made a high-profile launch effort. It crashed.⁷¹

The Soviet government also had pan-European ideas, dating back to Gorbachev’s concept of a “common European home.” These were consciously similar to Mitterrand’s idea, and drew a similarly pallid degree of European support.

As the French and Soviet visions faltered, the Americans and West Germans, with support from the British and several other European governments, clarified an emerging consensus. As we mentioned, NATO would be transformed. This started with an anodyne joint statement of cooperation with the Warsaw Pact. More important was the invitation to the Soviets and other Warsaw Pact states to send ambassadors to NATO.

The Americans and West Germans planned to build up CSCE too. The formative work occurred mainly during the first half of 1990.⁷² The Americans included a draft set of CSCE institutional proposals among the initiatives they sent to allied leaders for endorsement at the NATO London summit. Baker previewed them in detail with Shevardnadze even before NATO allies saw the full plan. Some Soviet ideas for the CSCE, like the idea for a conflict prevention role, converged with the ideas coming out of Washington, Bonn, and London.⁷³

With the final German settlement signed in Moscow in September 1990, the all-European part of the design was signed in Paris in November 1990 with two main pan-European pillars, the CFE treaty and the Charter of Paris.

The completion of the CFE treaty in November 1990 was an arduous diplomatic achievement. The Soviets did help clear away the last obstacles in the final months, especially since the treaty had been firmly linked to Soviet goals both on Germany and for a CSCE summit.

The treaty reduced and limited the conventional armed forces of at least twenty-three countries in Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals (every then-member of the NATO and Warsaw Pact alliances). Not only were there real limits on key items of military equipment (tanks, other armored fighting vehicles, artillery, aircraft, and helicopters), but there were also regional limits in specified zones to prevent threatening buildups of forces. The treaty created a thorough regime of intrusive transparency and inspections. Despite the stress and adjustments caused by the Soviet military’s large-scale effort to circumvent the CFE treaty reductions, the treaty attained its objectives.⁷⁴

The Soviet military deeply resented the CFE treaty. The required reductions were large (about fifteen thousand items of equipment just in Russia) and costly to implement. Nonetheless, the Soviet government, and later the Russians too, took the treaty very seriously.

After the Soviet Union broke up at the end of 1991, the CFE treaty had to be significantly revised and updated to take account of the new situation. There were now eight countries in formerly Soviet territory covered by the treaty, some very suspicious of each other. New kinds of national and regional limits were needed to adjust to all the new kinds of security concerns.

Using the new North Atlantic Cooperation Council (which included all these countries, the evolution from their having set up diplomatic missions at NATO) and a NATO working group, the new national limits were successfully hammered out in 1992 in another difficult but successful negotiation, sometimes called CFE 1A.⁷⁵

The other states in the CSCE joined the CFE system. It thus became a truly all-European security structure. The CSCE became a permanent OSCE (“O” for Organization) with a secretary-general and a permanent secretariat (in Vienna), the “world’s largest regional security organization” (now with fifty-seven member states).

Using both NATO and OSCE structures, revised CFE limits in regional zones (sometimes called the “flanks”) then had to be worked out. Russia now saw its main concerns lying more to its south, not the west.

Rather than the whole treaty being torn up and renegotiated, which might have been impossible, Russia’s concerns were effectively addressed and the necessary revisions in the existing treaty were agreed upon in 1996. Because the massive CFE system functioned reasonably well, few noticed what “proved to be a highly adaptable and flexible instrument of European security.”⁷⁶

The OSCE has a conflict prevention center, picking up on the original ideas from the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union. The center does not conduct military operations. It monitors conflict situations, offering information and a site for diplomacy and mediation. The center has played a useful role in a number of European disputes. It still runs significant field operations around Europe, including near the current battlefields in Ukraine.

Beginning in Paris in 1990, the OSCE members added further transparency measures to build confidence. On top of all this, all the OSCE members joined the new Open Skies system. That system of aerial surveillance has offered significant further transparency and reassurance. Amid various stresses and challenges, it also continues to operate to this day.

In the Charter of Paris, the CSCE members (transitioning into the OSCE) agreed that they would be democratic republics with the rule of law. They even agreed on a set of governing norms. To help put them into practice, they institutionalized the American-British initiative to create an office to offer advice and monitor the conduct of free elections in all the member states.

Based in Warsaw, this institution is now called the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights. It has effectively monitored scores of elections. At the follow-on Helsinki summit in 1992, the leaders added a small but active office for a High Commissioner on National Minorities.

The OSCE members also agreed on common principles of greater economic freedom. The Paris process included specific commitments to respect property rights, allow private businesses, share economic data, and help small and medium-sized enterprises grow. It followed through on hopes to establish “a set of basic principles to guide the conversion of socialist systems into market economies.”⁷⁷

The Charter of Paris also called for the creation of an all-European parliament, which was then established. The OSCE still has such a parliamentary assembly. It overlaps with the better-known parliamentary assembly of the Council of Europe. The CoE’s parliament has forty-seven member countries but does not include the United States, Canada, or the former Soviet states of Central Asia that are part of the fifty-seven-member OSCE’s parliamentary assembly. The European Parliament of the EU only includes EU members (so not Russia, Ukraine, Turkey).

Put in historical perspective, the OSCE/CFE/Open Skies system had most of the positive attributes of the old League of Nations, but turned out to be much broader in scope. It also proved to be more impactful, more inclusive, and more lasting. Looking back, Gorbachev was rightly satisfied that, as he put it, “The Paris conference [in November 1990] heralded a new, post-confrontational era in European history.”⁷⁸

But these designs for a new Europe were not braced for the upheavals of post-communist economic transition, the breakup of the Soviet Union, or the most brazen act of international aggression in a generation. The works of creation were not nearly complete.