Notes
Some abbreviated references to collections of documents recur frequently in the notes.
United States
Bush Library—George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, Texas A&M University. In addition to its documentary holdings on site, the Bush Library has placed all of the Bush records of conversations with foreigners (almost all of them now opened) in a well-designed, chronologically organized database accessible online.
Baker Papers—James A. Baker III Papers, Seeley Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton University.
Bush 41 OHP—Bush 41 Oral History Project, Miller Center of Public Affairs, University of Virginia. The Miller Center also has oral history records, in varying states of openness, for the Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush 43, and, soon, Obama presidencies.
Clinton Library—William J. Clinton Presidential Library, Little Rock, Arkansas.
Where U.S. documents are cited without indicating an archive location, Zelikow had access to them, in work on our 1995 book, before they were archived and cataloged. Many of these records may still be classified. We cite them because the citations themselves were unclassified. The earlier citations have facilitated the declassification process for many of these records. We discuss the circumstances of Zelikow’s original access to these materials briefly in the introduction to this book and further in the preface to the earlier book.
Soviet Union
Gorbachev papers donated to Stanford—In 1992, in turbulent and uncertain times, Mikhail Gorbachev worked with Rice to place some of his papers at Stanford University for safekeeping and research. Rice studied these papers (which are not translated) in their uncataloged form. They are now cataloged and open for research at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives, Stanford University. Hoover also has records and correspondence related to our earlier research work.
National Security Archive—This invaluable institution, located at George Washington University, collects documents released by the U.S. and other governments, often working with the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, in Washington, DC. The Wilson Center also has its own Digital Archive of opened international documents, usefully organized.
Chernyaev diary—Anatoly Chernyaev (often also transliterated as Chernyayev) donated his diaries to the National Security Archive. Translated by Anna Melyakova and edited by Svetlana Savranskaya, they were published online twenty years after they were created (1989 in 2009, etc.).
Federal Republic of Germany
DzD-Einheit—Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik: Deutsche Einheit Sonderedition aus den Akten des Bundeskanzleramtes 1989/90, research supervision from Klaus Hildebrand and Hans-Peter Schwarz with Friedrich Kahlenberg of the Bundesarchivs, edited by Hanns Jürgen Küsters and Daniel Hofmann (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998).
Diplomatie—Diplomatie für die deutsche Einheit: Dokumente des Auswärtigen Amts zu den deutsch-sowjetischen Beziehungen 1989/90, edited by Andreas Hilger (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011).
Einheit Dokumente—Die Einheit: Das Auswärtige Amt, das DDR-Außenministerium und der Zwei-plus-Vier-Prozess, Institut für Zeitgeschichte, by Horst Möller, Ilse Dorothee Pautsch, Gregor Schöllgen, Hermann Wentker, and Andreas Wirsching, and edited by Heike Amos and Tim Geiger (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015).
United Kingdom
TNA—The National Archives of the UK, Richmond. PREM is the acronym for the Prime Minister’s Office files.
DBPO/Unification—Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series III, vol. VII, German Unification 1989–1990, edited by Patrick Salmon, Keith Hamilton, and Stephen Twigge (London: Routledge, 2010).
France
AD—Centre des Archives diplomatiques du ministère des Affaires étrangères, La Courneuve.
The papers of François Mitterrand are not generally open, but portions of them have been made available to several scholars, whose work from them is cited in our notes.
To help distinguish government documents from published materials, we have cited such documents with abbreviated dates (e.g., 30 Nov 89). Telegrams to or from American missions are cited by what the State Department calls message reference numbers, usually with subject and date of transmission. “Secto” means a message sent to Washington by the secretary of state’s traveling party.
A “memcon” is a memorandum of a personal conversation; “telcon” is a memorandum of a telephone conversation.
Introduction: Catalytic Choices
1. David Childs, The GDR: Moscow’s German Ally, 2nd ed. (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), xii.
2. On Angela Merkel, the best overall biography so far is Gerd Langguth, Angela Merkel (Munich: DTB Verlag, 2007); and, for this period, see also Ralf Georg Reuth and Günther Lachmann, Das erste Leben der Angela M. (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2013). Merkel has not written a memoir, but a series of interviews with her given to Hugo Müller-Vogg were published as Angela Merkel, Mein Weg (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 2004). The best biographical studies of Merkel’s early life available in English are Matthew Qvortrup, Angela Merkel: Europe’s Most Influential Leader (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2016); Mark Thompson and Ludmilla Lennartz, “The Making of Chancellor Merkel,” German Politics 15 (2006): 99–110; and George Packer, “The Quiet German,” New Yorker, December 1, 2014.
For specific quotes in the text: “meticulous” is from Merkel quoted in Herlinde Koelbl, Spuren der Macht: Die Verwandlung des Menschen durch das Amt (Munich: Knesebeck, 1999), 48; “people cried” is from Merkel, Mein Weg, 43. The school play story is in Reuth and Lachmann, Das erste Leben, 69–70, and Qvortrup, Angela Merkel, 58–61. Merkel tells her “chatterbox” story in Wolfgang Stock, Angela Merkel: Eine politische Biographie (Munich: Olzog, 2000), 49. Her husband’s memory of how “she packed her bags” is from Qvortrup, Angela Merkel, 78. The department boss evaluation that “she is on to something” is from Langguth, Angela Merkel, 117.
On Vladimir Putin, the best biography so far for the early life is Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (New York: Knopf, 2015). On specific quotes, “two natures” is from Putin quoted by Roy Medvedev, in Allen Lynch, Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2011), 9. Putin’s memory of the movie and “one man’s effort,” along with his early experiences with intelligence work, are from Putin’s own de facto memoir published shortly after he became Russia’s president for the first time, a set of interviews interleaving interviews from his wife and a few close friends, in Vladimir Putin with Nataliya Gevorkyan, Natalya Timakova, and Andrei Kolesnilov, First Person, trans. Catherine Fitzpatrick (New York: PublicAffairs, 2000), 22, 41–42, 47, 49. A good overview of Putin’s work in Dresden is Myers, The New Tsar, 38–47. The specific quotes about his experiences there and his wife’s impressions are from Putin with Gevorkyan et al., First Person, 40, 68, 74, and 77. Putin’s quoted remarks to his officemate and friend are from Myers, The New Tsar, 47.
3. John Gunther, “Inside England 1964,” in Procession (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 491.
4. For a brief entrée to how decision makers size up a situation as an interactive compound of value, reality, and action judgments, see Philip Zelikow, “Introduction: Three Judgments,” in Zelikow, Ernest May, and the Harvard Suez Team, Suez Deconstructed: An Interactive Study of Crisis, War, and Peacemaking (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2018), 1–8.
Quentin Skinner and others in the “Cambridge school” of political philosophy have similarly emphasized how the writings of famous thinkers like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke must be understood in a very specific original historical context. See, e.g., Skinner’s collection of essays in Visions of Politics, vol. 1, Regarding Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). R. R. Palmer emphasized that same point in his classic history The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014 [orig. 1959 and 1964]), chapters 1–3.
5. Paraphrasing an expression Zelikow contributed to the 9/11 Commission, Report (New York: Norton, 2004), 339.
6. David Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1995 [reprinting the original 1942 book and its 1962 update]), 13 (“fallacy”); Potter, The South and the Sectional Crisis (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1968), 246 (“supreme task… imperfect eyes”). Edward L. Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863 (New York: Norton, 2003), 147. To describe such profound historical breakpoints, Ayers likes the term “deep contingency.”
In natural history, Stephen Jay Gould helped popularize a different but analogous term: “punctuated equilibrium.” Gould was more interested in the punctuations than in the equilibrium. “When we set our focus upon the level of detail that regulates most common questions about the history of life, contingency dominates and the predictability of general form recedes to an irrelevant background.” Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York: Norton, 1989), 289–90.
7. Genscher quoted in Richard Kiessler and Frank Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken: Der diplomatische Weg zur deutschen Einheit (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1993), 14–15; Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Random House, 1993), 343.
8. Karl Kaiser, Deutschlands Vereinigung: Die internationalen Aspekte (Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe, 1991), 16 (“greatest triumph”); Alexander Bessmertnykh quoted in a 1991 interview in Michael Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 240 (“most hated developments”).
9. See, e.g., the interview excerpts with Helmut Kohl, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Horst Teltschik, Eduard Shevardnadze, Vyacheslav Dashichev, Nikolai Portugalov, and Rainer Eppelmann in Ekkehard Kuhn, Gorbatschow und die deutsche Einheit: Aussagen der wichtigsten russischen und deutschen Beteiligten (Bonn: Bouvier, 1993), 8–11.
10. Many historians might agree that the most significant catalytic episodes in world history since 1775 have been: (1) the revolutions that convulsed the Atlantic world and beyond, culminating in the settlements of 1814–15; (2) a series of civil and international wars around the world that began in about 1854 and subsided with the defeat of the Commune and the European settlements of 1871; (3) the period of global breakdown and war between 1911 and 1923; (4) the huge global struggles, that included the Second World War, between 1937 and 1954; and (5) the end of the Cold War and related developments in China, India, and other countries between 1988 and 1992.
11. Post-2006 trendline and “democratic recession” from Larry Diamond, “Is There a Crisis of Liberal Democracy?” The American Interest, October 13, 2017.
12. “Do You Hear Me Now?” was the title Stephen Hayes used for his post-election commentary in the Weekly Standard, November 11, 2016. “What comes next?” is from Condoleezza Rice, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (New York: Twelve, 2017), 439 (emphasis in original).
13. Since at the time we wished to avoid calling attention to Gorbachev’s role in safeguarding his papers, in our 1995 book we referred to these papers that actually came from Gorbachev as coming from the young woman who delivered them to Stanford, Alexandra Bezymenskaya. We studied them in an uncataloged form. The papers were deposited with the Hoover Institution at Stanford, are cataloged, and have become available and useful to other researchers.
Chapter 1: The Renewal of the Free World
1. See John P. Diggins, Up from Communism: Conservative Odysseys in American Intellectual History (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 161.
2. See Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World (New York: John Day, 1941); and his less well-read but more mature reflections in The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom (New York: John Day, 1943), 269 (“belief in the myths”). The title The Machiavellians refers to the political thinkers whose ideas Burnham admired and dwells on. These were mainly Italians—Gaetano Mosca, Vilfredo Pareto, Robert Michels, and Georges Sorel (who was French)—in addition to Burnham’s admiration for the work of Machiavelli himself. The standard biography of Burnham is Daniel Kelly, James Burnham and the Struggle for the World (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2002), and Burnham’s is one of the four portraits in Diggins, Up from Communism. See also Samuel T. Francis, Power and History: The Political Thought of James Burnham (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984).
3. For a sense of the prevailing expectations and pessimism among other leading thinkers of the period, see, e.g., Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, either the 1st edition of 1942 or the 2nd edition of 1947); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1944); or Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).
4. Thomas Ricks, Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom (New York: Penguin, 2017), 44.
5. Orwell, “Inside the Whale” (1940), in Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 1, An Age Like This (Boston: Nonpareil, 2000), 516.
6. Orwell, “James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution” (1946) and “Burnham’s View of the Contemporary World Struggle” (1947), in Orwell and Angus, eds., The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 4, In Front of Your Nose (Boston: Nonpareil, 2000), 169, 170, 176, 325.
7. See Orwell, “James Burnham” and “Burnham’s View,” 173, 179–80, 324.
8. Intellectuals at the time recognized how much the novel was influenced and prompted by Burnham’s work. “Whoever investigates the background of 1984 must pay particular attention to the work of James Burnham.” William Steinhoff, George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), 43. Steinhoff spends a chapter to prove that point.
9. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, quoted tellingly by an author who spent most of his career covering contemporary wars, Ricks, in Churchill and Orwell, 255–56.
10. Orwell, “Toward European Unity” (1947), in Orwell and Angus, eds., Collected Essays, vol. 4, 371 (emphasis added).
11. James Burnham, Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (Chicago: Regnery, 1985 [orig. 1964]), 297. Burnham did not quite know what to do about ideals of liberty and freedom. In his older work he had expected elites to rule. Yet, for America, he also emphasized ways to divide and separate power, by strengthening state government at the expense of the national/federal level, or by strengthening Congress against the presidency. But this created problems for his larger theory of managerial dictatorship of the superstate. As early as 1943 a perceptive critic had noticed that Burnham “runs away to Renaissance Florence, but Thomas Jefferson is right behind him. He hides himself among French Syndicalists, but James Madison plucks him by the sleeve.” John Chamberlain, writing in the New York Times in 1943, quoted in Kelly, James Burnham, 111.
12. Placing “1968” in its global context, including the global conservative reactions, are Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); and Carole Fink, Philipp Gassert, and Detlef Junker, eds., 1968: The World Transformed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
13. See Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System (New York: Praeger, 1957). On the Cultural Revolution in China and its toll, Frank Dikötter, The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962–1976 (London: Bloomsbury, 2016).
14. In the 1960s and 1970s these elite theories were offered as an alternative to philosophies that emphasized a destabilizing “adversary culture.” The elitists argued that such divisive and revolutionary ideas contributed little that was constructive to the real world of governance. Intellectuals should not try to become the new “high priests,” one West German theorist argued. They should defer and let more competent “others do the work.” On trends in more conservative social theory, partly in reaction to the influential work either from Marxists or thinkers like Jürgen Habermas, see, e.g., Chris Thornhill, Political Theory in Modern Germany: An Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2000), and Michael King and Chris Thornhill, Niklas Luhmann’s Theory of Politics and Law (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). “High priests” (an idiomatic translation of Priestherrschaft) is from a book by one of Luhmann’s mentors, Helmut Schelsky, Die Arbeit tun die anderen: Klassenkampf und Priestherrschaft der Intellektuellen (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975).
15. Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: NYU Press, 1975), 2.
16. Francis, Power and History, 97. Another National Review editor would eventually publish another book of prophecy with the title Suicide of the West. But this argument, published in 2018, is very different. Jonah Goldberg, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (New York: Crown Forum, 2018); see also the reflections in Julius Krein, “James Burnham’s Managerial Elite,” American Affairs 1, no. 1 (Spring 2017).
17. On the application of civil rights laws, such as the laws against discrimination in private employment or voting rights, Zelikow participated in this directly as a civil rights lawyer during the late 1970s and early 1980s. On the ERA battle, the standard account is Jane Mansbridge, Why We Lost the ERA (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). The pivotal Supreme Court decision on the application of the Fourteenth Amendment to gender was Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190 (1976).
18. Mikael Rask Madsen, “The Challenging Authority of the European Court of Human Rights: From Cold War Legal Diplomacy to the Brighton Declaration and Backlash,” Law and Contemporary Problems 79 (2016): 141, 152; a useful survey of some of the European story is Patrick Pasture, “The Invention of European Human Rights,” History 103, no. 356 (2018): 485–504.
19. There is a substantial literature on the movements in support of international human rights. These works often center on the evolution of transnational elites discussing and publicizing issues of human rights, for instance tracking groups like Amnesty International, which was certainly important. See, e.g., Kenneth Cmiel, “The Emergence of Human Rights Politics in the United States,” Journal of American History 109, no. 1 (December 1999): 1231–50; or Michael Cotey Morgan, “The Seventies and the Rebirth of Human Rights,” in Niall Ferguson, Charles Maier, Erez Manela, and Daniel Sargent, eds., The Shock of the Global: The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 237–50. For a more general survey, which does take a broader view of the human rights discourse, see the essays in Akira Iriye, Petra Goedde, and William Hitchcock, The Human Rights Revolution: An International History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). These essays do not do quite enough to stress the wider domestic discourse about “rights” set off by decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, such as the giant domestic controversies over the rights of criminal suspects, abortion, or press freedom, or the struggles over laws banning private employment discrimination. Also often overlooked is that these wrenching domestic arguments were occurring in Western Europe as well as in the United States.
In the aftermath of the shame and regret about the Vietnam War, it was natural for many Americans to turn to their discourse about “rights” as a way to reassert themselves in foreign policy as well. This is the point so ably stressed in Barbara Keys, Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). What Keys seems to underplay is that the domestic debates about “rights,” debates that were also roiling politics in Western Europe, had a much larger cultural impact in these societies than the debates about or specific assertions of “international” human rights norms in more traditional foreign policy settings. It is worth emphasizing that this transnational “rights” revolution flowered on a mass scale during the 1970s, not the 1960s. This happened on both sides of the Atlantic and began to cross the Pacific, affecting debates about laws and norms in Japan and South Korea.
20. Correctly stressing the West European leadership on this point, see Daniel Thomas, The Helsinki Effect: International Norms, Human Rights, and the Demise of Communism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Angela Romano, From Détente in Europe to European Détente: How the West Shaped the Helsinki CSCE (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009); Mark Gilbert, Cold War Europe: The Politics of a Contested Continent (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 185–91.
21. Samuel Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993).
22. On the intellectual movement in Europe, see Michael Scott Christofferson, French Intellectuals Against the Left: France’s Antitotalitarian Moment (New York: Berghahn, 2004); Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles (New York: Free Press, 1991); and Jan-Werner Müller, “The Cold War and the Intellectual History of the Late Twentieth Century,” in Melvyn Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, eds., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, vol. 3, Endings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–22. For “a kind of historical fool,” W. L. Webb quoted in Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 559.
23. See generally Daniel Thomas, “Human Rights Ideas, the Demise of Communism, and the End of the Cold War,” Journal of Cold War Studies 7, no. 2 (2005): 110–41.
24. Charles Maier, “‘Malaise’: The Crisis of Capitalism in the 1970s,” in The Shock of the Global, 26–27.
25. Jeffry Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: Norton, 2006), 236 (“stabilize the business cycle”).
26. Herman Van der Wee, Prosperity and Upheaval: The World Economy 1945–1980, trans. Robin Hogg and Max Hall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 380.
27. John Jackson quoted in Douglas Irwin, Clashing over Commerce: A History of U.S. Trade Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 614.
28. Although many of the key ideas about relying on international monetary discipline in a freer global financial system originated in Europe, the American role was critical in the early 1970s as President Nixon’s treasury secretary, George Shultz, Shultz’s successor William Simon (who also served President Gerald Ford), and a financial official who worked with both of them, Paul Volcker, successfully blocked various options to use capital and exchange controls to manage the crises of the early 1970s. Then some of the initiative to press for open financial markets shifted back again to Western Europe, as European central bankers developed their own approaches to stabilizing their exchange rates. The American role became crucial once more after Volcker took over the leadership of the Federal Reserve Board in 1979. See Eric Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance: From Bretton Woods to the 1990s (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 65–67, 102–21, stressing the international financial aspects, and Greta Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis: The Political Origins of the Rise of Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), stressing domestic deregulation of credit markets and then the U.S. reliance on borrowing, including international borrowing, to sustain continued deficits and high levels of consumption through the 1980s. An important new work on this transition in global capitalism is Michael De Groot, “Disruption: Economic Globalization and the End of the Cold War Order in the 1970s” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2018).
Krippner also puts less emphasis on neoliberal ideas. She emphasizes a series of “ad hoc responses to crisis conditions” (p. 23). In the early 1980s these responses revealed, somewhat surprisingly, how readily the United States could borrow its way out of having to make the hard choices other countries faced. Krippner’s work also ties into the work of historians like Louis Hyman, who have discussed how the U.S. financial system shifted from business lending into consumer and household lending, including the development of internationally marketable mortgage-based securities. Hyman, “American Debt, Global Capital: The Policy Origins of Securitization,” in The Shock of the Global, 128–42.
29. See Kristina Spohr, The Global Chancellor: Helmut Schmidt and the Reshaping of the International Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 18–23; George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 352 (“mistress”).
30. Spohr, The Global Chancellor, 27–32.
31. Britain had already found itself forced to rely on outside finance, including bailout help from the International Monetary Fund, during a severe financial crisis in 1976. The resulting constraints on the Labour government then in power led to the strains and strikes that were the prelude to Margaret Thatcher’s landmark electoral victory leading the Conservative Party in March 1979. On the significance of Britain’s 1976 financial crisis, see Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance, 124–30.
32. On the EMS and U.S. shifts, including Volcker’s failed attempt in 1979–80 to try to regulate the Euromarket, see Daniel Gros and Niels Thygesen, European Monetary Integration, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1998), 35–64; Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance, 131–39; Peter Ludlow, The Making of the European Monetary System: A Case Study in the Politics of the European Community (Boston: Butterworth, 1982); and, emphasizing that the November 1978 improvisation was a key turning point in American policy, Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 108–30, 273–85; along with Krippner, Capitalizing on Crisis, 114–20. On November 1978 as a pivot point in the U.S. government, the best account of the whole episode, which calls out the work of a key deputy at Treasury, Anthony Solomon, is Stuart Eizenstat, President Carter: The White House Years (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018), 327–51.
33. The notion of an inherent “trilemma” between national monetary autonomy, exchange rate stability, and free movement of capital in which governments can only have two of the three is associated with Robert Mundell and Marcus Fleming’s work in the 1960s. For a reflective summary, see Maurice Obstfeld, Jay Shambaugh, and Alan Taylor, “The Trilemma in History: Tradeoffs Among Exchange Rates, Monetary Policies, and Capital Mobility,” Review of Economics and Statistics 87, no. 3 (2005): 423–38.
In effect, the “hard money” approach was returning global capitalism to the basic conceptual structure of the gold exchange standard system of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The new system, rather than base stability on the price of a mineral, based stability on the price of fiat money, its issuance controlled by the key issuers. As an approach to political economy the new system of regulated fiat money has many of the same virtues and problems that the gold exchange standard system once had—greater stability of prices and exchange rates, greater availability of global capital, and a heightened risk of severe financial crises.
34. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 151.
35. “I did not appoint you”: to Pierre Mauroy in the autumn of 1982, quoted in Philip Short, A Taste for Intrigue: The Multiple Lives of François Mitterrand (New York: Henry Holt, 2013), 374.
36. Rawi Abdelal, Capital Rules: The Construction of Global Finance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 57 (“turning point”), 62–63 (“no Right”), quoting Pascal Lamy, who became the chief of staff to Jacques Delors during the Delors presidency of the European Commission.
37. On the stages of the French U-turn from 1982 to the summer of 1984 (when Fabius became prime minister and the Communists left the parliamentary coalition), see Wayne Northcutt, Mitterrand: A Political Biography (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1992), 116–69, and, emphasizing the key decisions in the second austerity package of March 1983, Helleiner, States and the Reemergence of Global Finance, 140–44. Richard Kuisel, The French Way: How France Embraced and Rejected American Values and Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 25 (“that’s what’s chic”).
38. Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 2, At Her Zenith: In London, Washington and Moscow (New York: Vintage, 2015), 194.
39. See Vito Tanzi and Ludger Schuknecht, Public Spending in the 20th Century: A Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Ludger Schuknecht and Vito Tanzi, “Reforming Public Expenditure in Industrialized Countries: Are There Trade-offs?,” in Peter Wierts, Servaas Deroose, Elena Flores, and Alessandro Turrini, eds., Fiscal Policy Surveillance in Europe (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 247–73.
40. William Niskanen quoted in Irwin, Clashing over Commerce, 574 (“ten-foot wall”). This account relies on ibid.; Barry Eichengreen, Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 145–52; Yoichi Funabashi, Managing the Dollar: From the Plaza to the Louvre (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 1988); Paul Volcker with Christine Harper, Keeping At It: The Quest for Sound Money and Good Government (New York: PublicAffairs, 2018); and C. Michael Aho and Marc Levinson, “The Economy After Reagan,” Foreign Affairs 67, no. 2 (Winter 1988): 10–25.
41. For a similar argument, but focusing more on technological changes in commerce and the role of petrodollars in stimulating the global flows, see Hal Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Post–Cold War Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016), 54–57.
42. On the transition from Mao to Deng, see Richard Baum, Burying Mao: The Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); on Deng’s development of the reform agenda, see Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 118–19, 218 (“backward”), 223 (“completely different”), 228 (“superiority of our system”). For “few parallels,” Julian Gewirtz, Unlikely Partners: Chinese Reformers, Western Economists, and the Making of Global China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 3.
43. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 242 (“emancipate”), 256 (Lord Ye’s view of dragons), 262–64 (on the March 1979 crackdown), 344 (“this one simple gesture,” quoting Orville Schell).
44. David Reynolds, One World Divisible: A Global History Since 1945 (New York: Norton, 2000), 512 (“a very antiestablishment revolution”); see generally Walter Isaacson, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014).
45. “The Computer Moves In,” Time, December 26, 1982.
46. From a creator of Czechoslovakia’s Ondra computer, made by Tesla (a Czech acronym, not the twentieth-century inventor or twenty-first-century company), quoted in Karen Dawisha, Eastern Europe, Gorbachev, and Reform: The Great Challenge, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 160.
47. The best biography of Kohl is now Hans-Peter Schwarz, Helmut Kohl: Eine Politische Biographie (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2012), 611 (“center”).
48. On Mitterrand, the best overall biographies are Franz-Olivier Giesbert, François Mitterrand, une vie (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996); Jean Lacouture, Mitterrand: Une histoire de Français, and for this period vol. 2, Les vertiges du sommet (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998); and (in English) Short, A Taste for Intrigue.
49. Charles Grant, Delors: Inside the House that Jacques Built (London: Nicholas Brealey, 1994), 56–58.
50. Moore, At Her Zenith, 392 (“half-admiringly”); Grant, Delors, 68 (“cool”). On Delors’s critical role as “the pragmatic visionary,” see Helen Drake, Jacques Delors: Perspectives on a European Leader (London: Routledge, 2002), 78–112.
51. On Cockfield’s role as a key causal factor in the Single Market story, see Christopher Lord, “Lord Cockfield: A European Commissioner as a Political Entrepreneur,” in Kevin Theakston, ed., Bureaucrats and Leadership (London: Macmillan, 2000), 151–70, 153 (“massively detailed”); Drake, Jacques Delors, 86 (“a coherent whole”); and Cockfield’s own account in The European Union: Creating the Single Market (London: Wiley Chancery Law, 1994), esp. 23–59. On his appointment and Thatcher’s evolving attitudes, see Moore, At Her Zenith, 390–94.
52. Moore judges that in giving way to the Single Market’s requirements, Thatcher was not only deceived a bit about the momentum of European integration, she was also “self-deceiving. For the Single Market to function, which she wanted, individual states could not be allowed to impose their own regulations on imports from the rest of the EU.… So when she complained later, she was in effect repudiating what she herself had driven forward.” Ibid., 394.
53. The evolution of British and U.S. attitudes during the crisis is charted expertly, with access to key evidence on both sides, in Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography, vol. 1, From Grantham to the Falklands (New York: Knopf, 2013), 665–744.
54. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 315.
55. Michael Green, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 389. Green regards Reagan’s first secretary of state, Alexander Haig, as a source of friction on Asia policy. He argues that Haig’s 1982 successor, George Shultz, was the most capable American secretary of state on Asia policy in American history, leading an exceptionally strong team of lower-level officials.
56. Diego Ruiz Palmer, quoted in Gordon Barrass, The Great Cold War: A Journey Through the Hall of Mirrors (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 193.
57. For a review based on East bloc archives, see Vojtech Mastny, “Imagining War in Europe: Soviet Strategic Planning,” in Mastny, Sven Holtsmark, and Andreas Wenger, eds., War Plans and Alliances in the Cold War: Threat Perceptions in the East and West (New York: Routledge, 2006), 15–45; the quote is from Mastny’s summary of his argument in the introduction, 3.
58. See, for example, the interviews with former lieutenant general Geli Batenin and former colonel general Andrian Danilevich in John Hines, chief editor, Soviet Intentions 1965–1985, vol. 2, Soviet Post–Cold War Testimonial Evidence, BDM Corporation report to the Office of the Secretary of Defense Net Assessment director, September 1995, excised version released in 2009 and available from the National Security Archive at https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb285/. The quote “hold all of Europe hostage” is from a 1992 interview with Danilevich (at p. 33 of the report); he was the main author of the authoritative three-volume Soviet strategy guidance on “deep operations.”
59. These agents were Dmitri Polyakov and Ryszard Kuklinski. Polyakov was arrested and executed in 1988, having been betrayed by Soviet agents working inside the CIA and the FBI (Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen). In December 1981, just before Poland declared martial law, Kuklinski was extracted from Poland with CIA assistance and lived out his life in the United States.
60. Barrass, The Great Cold War, 193. Barrass was a member of Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee and headed the Cabinet Office’s Assessments Staff during the last years of the Cold War.
61. The best account of the origins of the Euromissile confrontation is now Kristina Spohr Readman, “Conflict and Cooperation in Intra-Alliance Nuclear Politics: Western Europe, the United States, and the Genesis of NATO’s Dual-Track Decision, 1977–1979,” Journal of Cold War Studies 13, no. 2 (2011): 39–89.
62. William Perry, at the time a Carter administration defense official who was one of the fathers of the “offset” strategy, discusses the plan in The Role of Technology in Meeting the Challenges of the 1980s (Stanford, CA: Arms Control and Disarmament Program, Stanford University, 1982). An authoritative historical review is Edward Keefer, Harold Brown: Offsetting the Soviet Military Challenge, 1977–1981 (Washington, DC: Historical Office, Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2017), esp. 575–600.
63. Giesbert, François Mitterrand, une vie, 401.
64. In his memoir, Genscher calls attention to the impact of these contrasting messages from Mitterrand, Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko, and the G-7 summit statement (meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia). Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Rebuilding a House Divided, trans. Thomas Thornton (New York: Broadway Books, 1998), 163–65.
65. See the revealing transcript of the May 1983 Soviet Politburo meeting published in “More Documents from the Russian Archives,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin 4 (Fall 1994): 77–80; see also Jonathan Haslam, The Soviet Union and the Politics of Nuclear Weapons in Europe, 1969–81: The Problem of the SS-20 (London: Macmillan, 1989).
66. The best and most balanced overview of the Reagan administration’s foreign policies around the world, one emphasizing a turn toward reassurance and the promotion of democratic change in East Asia, Latin America, and South Africa by the mid-to-late 1980s, is Brands, Making the Unipolar Moment; the most balanced summary of Reagan’s strategy toward the Soviet Union is Melvyn Leffler, “Ronald Reagan and the Cold War: What Mattered Most,” Texas National Security Review 1, no. 3 (2018): 76–89.
67. A foundational argument observing the rise of “post-materialism” was published in 1977. Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977).
68. A balanced and well-informed summary of the 1983 war scare, including the Soviet alarm about the NATO command post exercise “Able Archer,” is in Barrass, The Great Cold War, 278–303.
Chapter 2: Perestroika
1. Rodric Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 51–52, recounting a February 1980 discussion. Braithwaite was one of the diplomats; the other was Christopher Malaby.
2. Odom’s note is quoted in Daniel Sargent, A Superpower Transformed: The Remaking of American Foreign Relations in the 1970s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 295. Sargent has the document dated in September 1979 and does not give the author. On checking with Sargent, it was learned the document is actually from September 1980. We believe, and Sargent agrees, that Odom was its author.
3. The outstanding scholarly works in a large literature on Gorbachev are now William Taubman, Gorbachev: His Life and Times (New York: Norton, 2017); and Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); as well as Robert English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and various essays by Vladislav Zubok, for instance in the relevant chapter of A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 278–321. Some of the best early short portraits of Gorbachev were offered by his aide Anatoly Chernyaev in “The Phenomenon of Gorbachev in the Context of Leadership,” International Affairs (Moscow) (June 1993): 37–48, and by a Western journalist acquainted with Gorbachev, Robert Kaiser, in Why Gorbachev Happened: His Triumphs, His Failure, and His Fall, rev. ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 21–92. See also Anatoly Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym: Po dnevnikovym zapisyam (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1993); translated as My Six Years with Gorbachev, trans. and ed. Robert English and Elizabeth Tucker (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2000). On the German occupation and the deportations of the Karatchay, Kalmyks, and other peoples in the wake of the German retreat, see Michel Tatu, Mikhail Gorbachev: The Origins of Perestroika, trans. A. P. M. Bradley (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1991), 6–10.
4. Gennadii Zoteev, in Michael Ellman and Vladimir Kontorovich, eds., The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System: An Insiders’ History (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 86.
5. “Let’s be mature”: in a 1986 Politburo meeting. Chris Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy: Mikhail Gorbachev and the Collapse of the USSR (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 88.
6. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping, 423–24.
7. Peter Nolan, China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall: Politics, Economics and Planning in the Transition from Stalinism (Houndmills, UK: Macmillan, 1995), 4; see also the kindred argument in Christopher Marsh, Unparalleled Reforms: China’s Rise, Russia’s Fall, and the Interdependence of Transition (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005).
8. This was, in fact, Eduard Shevardnadze’s phrase in discussions with Gorbachev about the state of the Soviet Union in 1985. He describes the evolution of his thinking and that of other “new thinkers” in Eduard Shevardnadze, Moi vybor: v zashchitu demokratii i svobody (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), 193–220.
9. Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, 81.
10. Details are in ibid., 119–44. One apparent implication is that, as a Soviet economist put it, “Gorbachev would have needed the full support of the entire party structure” to implement the needed reforms. But that goes too far.
Deng and his allies never commanded that kind of unanimity. Their own leadership was riven by factions. Hence the unusual vertical alliances in the Chinese case, often in rivalry with another vertical alliance, each with their backers in Beijing. Deng’s challenge, along with his closest allies like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, was to juggle all the sides without crushing one or the other, while giving the experiments a chance to work.
One of Gorbachev’s weaknesses may have been political. Perhaps he and his allies did not develop strong enough coalitions with allies at lower levels who could patiently try to develop workable policy designs. For example, another Chinese experimental innovation, the special economic zone, was also closely observed in the Soviet Union. A prime location to try this out would have been in Leningrad. There the local boss, Anatoly Sobchak, was interested and energetic. But movement there and in Vladivostok, another possible case, was delayed and hamstrung until it was too late. Miller has some suggestive evidence. Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, 107–18.
11. On the visit to Nizhnevartovsk, Michael Dobbs, Down with Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: Knopf, 1997), 134–36.
12. Andrei Grachev, Gorbachev’s Gamble: Soviet Foreign Policy and the End of the Cold War (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008), 47.
13. Judith Goldstein and Robert Keohane, in their volume Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), put it this way: “Ideas help to order the world.… Insofar as ideas put blinders on people, reducing the number of conceivable alternatives, they serve as invisible switchmen, not only by turning action onto certain tracks rather than others… but also by obscuring the other tracks from the agent’s view” (p. 12).
14. The debate between Stalin and his competitors for Lenin’s throne has been largely obscured by the ruthless means that he used to weed out the opposition. But in this debate Stalin emphasized his theory for achieving “socialism in one country”: That is, progress toward socialism in the USSR did not have to wait upon the achievement of worldwide revolution.
This debate about “socialism in one country” was perhaps the crucial ideological turning point for the Soviet Union’s course in the post-Lenin era. The question was whether the Soviet Union could survive without a global proletarian revolution. This was more than a matter of academic debate; it would determine whether the Soviet Union made building socialism at home its highest priority or tried to foment revolution abroad.
The proponent of “permanent revolution,” Lev Trotsky, while far more articulate and urbane, lacked a realistic plan for dealing with the Soviet Union’s immediate circumstances of weakness and vulnerability in 1926–27. Depending as it did, even rhetorically, on revolutionary uprisings in the capitalist world, Trotsky’s prescription simply did not accord with the world in which the Soviet Union found itself.
Stalin resolved any dilemma between the international movement and the Soviet Union’s existence: “An internationalist is one who is ready to defend the USSR without reservation, without wavering, unconditionally; for the USSR is the base of the world revolutionary movement and this revolutionary movement cannot be defended unless the USSR is defended.” J. V. Stalin, Ob oppozitsii (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1928), 220–93. The Soviet Union would prepare to go it alone, but as a temporary condition until the revolution triumphed in the capitalist world and provided a more hospitable international environment. Martin Malia resurrected this debate in The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994). The implications of “socialism in one country” for Soviet foreign and military policy are discussed in Condoleezza Rice, “The Making of Soviet Strategy,” in Peter Paret with Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert, eds., Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 648–76.
15. Ed Hewett discussed the marginalization of the Soviet economy in Ed A. Hewett with Clifford G. Gaddy, Open for Business: Russia’s Return to the Global Economy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1992), 1–32.
16. It is commonly believed in the United States that the CIA’s supply of Stinger antiaircraft missiles to the Afghan resistance caused the Soviet decision to withdraw. The first use of Stinger missiles against Soviet forces was in September 1986. The Soviet decisions to withdraw were made successively between June 1985 and November 1986. See, e.g., William Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 102–4. The Stingers may have been a prod to get it done, but probably no more than that.
17. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, 65 (“state within a state”).
18. On Gorbachev’s reaction to Chernobyl, Taubman, Gorbachev, 241; for the quoted comments at the April 1988 party conference, ibid., 356.
19. Chernyaev said he was always amazed at how much Moscow’s specialists on America liked America while some Soviet experts on Germany (such as Bondarenko) seemed to dislike the Germans. “Whatever their views,” he said, “they respected the Germans but they did not like them.” Rice interview with Chernyaev, Moscow, June 1994; letter from Chernyaev, February 1995.
20. Eduard Shevardnadze, The Future Belongs to Freedom, trans. Catherine Fitzpatrick (New York: Free Press, 1991), 13.
21. Quoted in Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era; The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1990 (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 119.
22. Both Yakovlev and Shevardnadze discuss these themes in detail in their written recollections. See Alexander Yakovlev, Muki prochteniya byitiya: Perestroika—nadezhdyi real’nost (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), esp. 73, 91; and Shevardnadze, Moi vybor, esp. 85–93. Yakovlev, in particular, links the confrontational division of the world along class lines to Stalinism. On the scholarly debates inside the USSR and the key scholars who contributed to the “new thinking,” see the early account in Jeff Checkel, “Ideas, Institutions, and the Gorbachev Foreign Policy Revolution,” World Politics 45 (January 1993): 271–300.
23. For a detailed review of the escalating conventional military rivalry in Europe during the late 1970s and 1980s, the role of technology, and the Soviet concepts for a conventional victory that would avoid use of nuclear weapons, see Diego Ruiz Palmer, “The NATO–Warsaw Pact Competition in the 1970s and 1980s: A Revolution in Military Affairs in the Making or the End of a Strategic Age?,” Cold War History 14, no. 4 (2014): 533–73.
The then-chief of the Soviet General Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, was a leader in publicizing the struggle for high ground in a “third revolution” in military affairs, a revolution in conventional military technology. Although the more politically sensitive Sergei F. Akhromeyev succeeded Ogarkov, his analysis of the general military balance was not very different. At the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1990, he told Rice that he suspected the United States of planning the war against Saddam Hussein that it had always intended to fight against Soviet military forces—one heavily dependent on the rapid transmission of information to independent weapons-carrying platforms at the front. He was right, of course.
24. Vitali Shlykov, former department chief of the Main Intelligence Administration of the General Staff, in Ellman and Kontorovich, eds., The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System, 43, 45.
25. The military wanted to look eager to get rid of nuclear weapons while assuring, as one general put it, that it “could hardly lead to any practical results in the foreseeable future.” Odom, Collapse of the Soviet Military, 115–16, 128–29.
26. Major recent overviews of the reciprocal unwinding of superpower tension between 1985 and 1988, attending to moves on both sides, are Robert Service, The End of the Cold War, 1985–1991 (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015) (the Reagan-Gorbachev period makes up most of this account); James Graham Wilson, The Triumph of Improvisation: Gorbachev’s Adaptability, Reagan’s Engagement, and the End of the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); and the summary in Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War (New York: Hill & Wang, 2007), 374–421.
27. The professional military opposed unilateral and asymmetrical arms control reductions. See Condoleezza Rice, “Is Gorbachev Changing the Rules of Defense Decision-Making?,” Journal of International Affairs 42 (Spring 1989): 377–97.
28. Then a career diplomat, Zelikow was the initial political adviser on the U.S. CFE negotiating team as it formed and molded a NATO approach to the new negotiations in 1986 and 1987, first under Ambassador Robert Blackwill, then under Ambassador Stephen Ledogar.
29. Odom, Collapse of the Soviet Military, 137.
30. “The service sector”: Ed A. Hewett quoted in Taubman, Gorbachev, 169; Yakovlev March 1988 memo quoted in ibid., 352.
31. In 1987, Gorbachev had read the writings of Nikolai Bukharin, a leading party figure of the 1920s and 1930s who had been executed by Stalin, prompted by Stephen Cohen’s gift of his book on the debates of the Stalin era. Rice interview with Chernyaev, Moscow, June 1994. This is not the only instance in which Western scholarship helped reintroduce Russians to their own past.
32. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, 184–86, 213–18. Gorbachev would later put his ideas into a series of speeches and articles. See, e.g., “Sosialisticheskaya ideya i revolutsionnaya perestroika,” Kommunist 18 (December 1989): 3–20.
33. For an excellent summary, distilling much past work, see Archie Brown, “Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?,” Europe-Asia Studies 65, no. 2 (March 2013): 198–230, which emphasizes the catalytic role of the Andreyeeva episode of the spring of 1988. Perestroika as “democratic socialism” from Aleksandr Galkin, in ibid., 204.
34. Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, 92; “philosophically impoverished”: Gorbachev to Chernyaev in 1988, quoted in Taubman, Gorbachev, 353.
35. On the internal political revolution during the first half of 1988, see Stephen Kotkin, Armageddon Averted: The Soviet Collapse, 1970–2000 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 73–83; Taubman, Gorbachev, 337–65; Zubok, A Failed Empire, 307–15. “Ultra-leftist loudmouths” is from Gorbachev to Chernyaev in January 1988, although Gorbachev still emphasized, “Conservatism is now the main obstacle.” Taubman, Gorbachev, 342.
36. On Western Europe a key man was Valentin Falin, who had been the Soviet ambassador to West Germany during most of the 1970s. On Eastern Europe, Georgi Shakhnazarov was in the lead. On American matters there was Georgi Arbatov.
For background, see Mark Kramer, “The Role of the CPSU International Department in Soviet Foreign Relations and National Security Policy,” in Frederic Fleron Jr., Erik Hoffmann, and Robbin Laird, eds., Soviet Foreign Policy: Classic and Contemporary Issues (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), 444–63.
37. See Odom, Collapse of the Soviet Military, 140–45; Taubman, Gorbachev, 418–20; Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” 383–85; and Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, 193–97. Shevardnadze’s suspicions about military implementation of the planned reductions are evident in the Politburo meeting on December 27–28, transcribed as doc. no. 35 in Svetlana Savranskaya, Thomas Blanton, and Vladislav Zubok, eds., Masterpieces of History: The Peaceful End of the Cold War in Europe, 1989 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2010) (hereinafter Masterpieces of History).
38. For the Soviet UN Mission’s translation of excerpts from Gorbachev’s speech, see “Excerpts from Speech to U.N. on Major Soviet Military Cuts,” New York Times, December 8, 1988, p. A16. Our estimate of the 500,000 number as a one-seventh cut assumes about 3.5 million in the active-duty Soviet forces in 1988. This 3.5 million number does not include construction troops and similar auxiliaries. It also does not include KGB and Interior Ministry troops. On the size and deployment of forces in Europe, as of the autumn of 1988, see International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), The Military Balance 1988–1989 (London: IISS, 1988). The IISS annual tabulations were a respected standard reference at the time. This particular edition included (pp. 230–33) an analysis on the NATO–Warsaw Pact conventional force balance that briefly summarized the past decade’s worth of expert quarrels in the West about how best to tally that balance.
39. Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, 255–60; Rice interview with Chernyaev, Moscow, June 1994.
40. Shevardnadze speech to the scientific-practical conference of the USSR Foreign Ministry, reprinted in Pravda, July 26, 1988, p. 4.
41. Yegor Ligachev speech reprinted in “Za delo—bez raskachki,” Pravda, August 6, 1988, p. 2.
42. Mikhail Gorbachev, “Speech to Council of Europe,” reprinted in Pravda, July 7, 1989, pp. 1–2.
43. Rice discussions with Gorbachev, Moscow, June 1994, and other informal discussions with Gorbachev while Rice was serving in the George H. W. Bush administration. Andrei Grachev, who entirely grasps the significance of the ideological shifts, also stresses this point. Gorbachev’s Gamble, 73–75, agreeing with Jacques Lévesque, “The Emancipation of Eastern Europe,” in Richard Herrmann and Richard Ned Lebow, eds., Ending the Cold War: Interpretations, Causation, and the Study of International Relations (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 109.
44. The American notes (prepared by Rice) are Bush-Gorbachev, 3 Dec 89 (second expanded session held aboard the Soviet passenger liner Maxim Gorkii), Bush Library. Soviet notes from this session are published in Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii, 1985–1992: izbrannoye (Moscow: Al’fa-Print, 1993), 176–79.
45. Some of the more interesting groundwork for this shift had been laid by Soviet academics almost a decade earlier. Among the more important participants in the debate were Oleg Bogomolov, Karen Brutents, and Yuriy Novopashin. On the scholarly debates that laid the basis for the revocation of the Brezhnev Doctrine and rejection of a segregated “socialist community of states,” see Jonathan Valdez, Internationalism and the Ideology of Soviet Influence in Eastern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
46. The best work on the Soviet Union’s earliest conceptions of CMEA remains Michael Kaser, COMECON: Integration Problems of the Planned Economies, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967).
47. To take a simple example of the effect of COCOM technology controls, the technology that permits multiple telephone lines on one instrument and that makes it possible to switch easily from one line to another was denied to the Soviet Union because it would have made it possible for the military quickly to establish alternative nodes of communication if the primary link was destroyed. Thus visitors to the offices of high-ranking Moscow officials often noticed that there were several telephones rather than several lines on one instrument, as is common in the West. It was often said that one could tell how important a Soviet official was by the number of phones on his desk.
48. Joseph Rothschild and Nancy Wingfield, Return to Diversity: A Political History of East Central Europe Since World War II, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 203.
49. “Polish disease”: in Stephen Kotkin with Jan Gross, Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment (New York: Modern Library, 2009), 28; “millimeter by millimeter”: Gerhard Schürer, October 1989, quoted in Charles Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 60.
50. Michael De Groot sees a turning point in Soviet behavior in CMEA price decisions of 1975. See his “Disruption: Economic Globalization and the End of the Cold War Order in the 1970s” (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2018); see also Fritz Bartel, “The Triumph of Broken Promises: Oil, Finance, and the End of the Cold War” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2017). The Hungarian buses example is from Kotkin with Gross, Uncivil Society, 26, citing the work of Charles Gati.
51. Kotkin with Gross, Uncivil Society, 30–31.
52. In “Disruption,” chapter 8, De Groot emphasizes this West German “Milliardenkredite” as a turning point in the terminal crisis of the East German regime. “We may sound very cynical”: editorial in PlanEcon, April 1987, quoted in Fritz Bartel, “The Power of Omission: The IMF and the Democratic Transitions in Poland and Hungary,” in Bernhard Blumenau, Jussi Hanhimäki, and Barbara Zanchetta, eds., New Perspectives on the End of the Cold War: Unexpected Transformations? (New York: Routledge, 2018), 203.
53. The critical period in the expansion of Soviet hard currency debt was in 1988 and 1989. At the end of 1990, Soviet and Western financial analysts calculated that the Soviet current account deficit in hard currencies, in foreign exchange, had swung from a surplus of almost $7 billion in 1987 to a deficit of $4 billion in 1989. The stock of short-term debt to foreign banks doubled from $9 billion at the end of 1987 to almost $18 billion by the end of 1989. By the end of 1989 the USSR had enough foreign exchange reserves left to finance about five months of foreign imports. IMF, World Bank, OECD, and EBRD, A Study of the Soviet Economy, February 1991, p. 40.
54. De Groot, “Disruption,” 17.
55. State Department officials had opposed Bush’s trip to Poland until they were overruled by Deputy Secretary of State John Whitehead. The recollection of Whitehead’s intervention comes from Rice’s discussion of the Bush trip with a State Department official in 1989.
56. Gregory Domber, Empowering Revolution: America, Poland, and the End of the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 200–205 (Bush quote is on 204, from Polish records of the meeting). Bush’s trip was in September 1987; the Paris Club agreement was reached in December.
57. Bartel, “The Power of Omission,” 214.
58. Domber, Empowering Revolution, 208–21 (the Brzezinski quote, in February 1988, is on 209).
59. Quoted in Seweryn Bialer and Joan Afferica, “The Genesis of Gorbachev’s World,” Foreign Affairs 64 (1985): 612. See also Ronald D. Asmus, J. F. Brown, and Keith Crane, Soviet Foreign Policy and the Revolutions of 1989 in Eastern Europe (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1991), 11.
60. For details, see Randall Stone, Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-bloc Trade (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
61. Alex Pravda, “Moscow and Eastern Europe, 1988–1989: A Policy of Optimism and Caution,” in Mark Kramer and Vit Smetana, eds., Imposing, Maintaining, and Tearing Open the Iron Curtain: The Cold War and East-Central Europe, 1945–1989 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014), 310 (“meager attention”). Mark Kramer carefully shows that Soviet policy toward the region did not begin to shift in any notable way until 1988. Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” in Kramer and Smetana, eds., Iron Curtain, 379–80.
62. Quoted in Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” 381.
63. Ibid., 385–91 (Shakhnazarov, Oct 88, quoted on 386).
64. Don Oberdorfer, “Thatcher: Gorbachev Has Ended Cold War,” Boston Globe, November 18, 1988, p. 7; George Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 1131, 1138.
65. Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen, “Global Weapons Inventories, 1945–2010,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2010, p. 82.
66. From a relatively dispassionate and bipartisan appraisal in Congressional Budget Office, Budgetary and Military Effects of a Treaty Limiting Conventional Forces in Europe, January 1990, p. 5, drafted by Frances Lussier.
67. Gorbachev address of December 31, 1988, quoted in Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind, 422.
68. Ronald Reagan, “Address to Members of the British Parliament,” 8 Jun 82, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1984), bk. 1, 742–48.
69. Address of Vice President George Bush at the Hofburg, Vienna, 21 Sep 83, in Department of State Bulletin 83 (November 1983): 19–23.
70. Address by Ronald Reagan, Berlin, 12 Jun 87, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Ronald Reagan, 1987 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1989), bk. 1, 634–37; “showboating”: Rozanne Ridgway Oral History, Association of Diplomatic Studies and Training, 2002, 124; Reagan-Shevardnadze memcon, 23 Sep 88, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1981–1988, vol. 6 (Washington, DC: GPO, 2016), 1216–17. The language in Reagan’s speech reportedly originated with a White House speechwriter, Peter Robinson. Lou Cannon, President Reagan: The Role of a Lifetime (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 774. In her oral history, Ridgway added, “I have run into people who believe that it was that speech in 1987 that brought the Wall down. I tell them that I don’t even want to discuss it, but will leave it to the historians. I did tell them that that speech did not bring the Wall down; in fact, in some respects, it threatened the process that eventually brought the Wall down. But I don’t have much hope of making a dent in people who view history that way.”
Reagan wrote that he offhandedly repeated the Berlin suggestion at the 1988 Moscow summit; see Ronald Reagan, An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990), 705–7; Bob Spitz, Reagan: An American Journey (New York: Penguin, 2018), 721. Chernyaev found no mention of the subject in Soviet records of these talks. Letter from Chernyaev, February 1995.
In the policy world, Reagan’s “Berlin initiative” became a working-level proposal to regularize Four Power controls. The State Department passed a proposal for talks to the Soviets six months after Reagan’s speech. While Moscow debated its response, the East Germans weighed in with what a Soviet diplomat called their “100 percent negative attitude.” Another ten months passed before the Soviet government replied to the Americans. That was that. The West did not return to the matter until the summer of 1989, after the Bush administration revived the issue during the president’s visit to West Germany. See Igor Maximychev, “What ‘German Policy’ We Need,” International Affairs (Moscow) (September 1991): 53, 58–60.
71. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 1138.
72. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, 1st American ed. (New York: Scribner, 1951), 12.
73. Ibid., 39–40.
74. “Even Jesus Christ”: in Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph, 1108, from the December 1988 meeting at Governors Island, New York.
Chapter 3: Hopes and Fears
1. Henry Kissinger, “A Memo to the Next President,” Newsweek (international edition), September 19, 1988, p. 34.
2. Henry Kissinger, “The Challenge of a ‘European Home,’” Washington Post, December 4, 1988.
3. Transcript of Politburo meeting, December 27–28, 1989, in Masterpieces of History, doc. no. 35, p. 337 (for the quote on Kissinger).
On the issue of just what the Soviets wanted to do next, or just what they wanted from the Americans, it is revealing to look at how little is said about that in Yakovlev’s notes for Gorbachev to prepare him for this Politburo meeting. Yakovlev’s lengthy memo is entirely devoted to abstract principles, for instance (which he underscores) that “the interdependence of the world means also the interconnectedness of all the processes of domestic development.” But there is nothing in it about concrete policies. Yakovlev, “Notes for Presentation at the Politburo session,” December 27, 1988, in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 168, at nsarchive.gwu.edu.
4. Ross to Baker, “Thoughts on the ‘Grand Design,’” 16 Dec 88, in Baker Papers, Box 1, Folder 4.
5. This account draws on both Kissinger’s reports and the Soviet records of the meetings. Kissinger-Yakovlev memcon, 16 Jan 89; Kissinger-Gorbachev memcon, 17 Jan 89 (Soviet), in Masterpieces of History, docs. no. 36 and 37; Kissinger-Gorbachev memcon, 17 Jan 89, and Kissinger-Dobrynin memcon, 18 Jan 89 (Kissinger), in Baker Papers, Box 108, Folder 1. The material Kissinger quoted from Gorbachev is presented in Kissinger’s memcon as being a verbatim quote. The same material is not in the available Soviet record.
The documents show that Kissinger’s firm faxed his written memcons, probably to the White House (from indications in Bush Library records, where these reports have not yet been released), on January 21. Baker marked up his copies and carefully noted the discussions about the proposed Scowcroft-Dobrynin channel.
In his memoir, Dobrynin does not discuss this episode with Kissinger. Kissinger was in Moscow for a meeting of the Trilateral Commission, a private group of worthies that he cochaired along with former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and former Japanese prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone. These three men met separately with Gorbachev, who reported on this trilateral meeting to the Politburo. In that report he alluded to Kissinger with a pejorative Soviet diminutive, “Kisa.” Report in Masterpieces of History, doc. no. 39.
6. Bush-Gorbachev memcon, 23 Jan 89, in George H. W. Bush Library, Memcons and Telcons online file, at https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/memcons-telcons (hereinafter Bush Library). This portion of the memcon is omitted from the Soviet record excerpted in Masterpieces of History, doc. no. 40.
A couple of months later Baker and his team alluded to Kissinger’s ideas in a way that derided them as an idea for a “Yalta II.” This episode further estranged Kissinger from both Bush and Baker and demolished any further role as a go-between. See Walter Isaacson, Kissinger: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 727–29; and Baker’s view in James A. Baker III with Thomas DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy: Revolution, War, and Peace 1989–1992 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995), 40.
7. Baker notes for meeting with Bush, “U.S.-Soviet Relations,” February 1989, as marked up by Baker, in Baker Papers, Box 108, Folder 2. Ross has confirmed to us that he was the initial drafter of this paper and that these points were for a meeting with Bush. For an example of Bush commenting on Sakharov’s warning, see Bush–Von Weizsaecker memcon, 24 Feb 89, Bush Library.
8. Based on Baker’s handwritten notes from the Bush-Mulroney meeting, Baker Papers, Box 108, Folder 2 (emphasis in original), and the Bush-Mulroney memcon, 10 Feb 89, Bush Library. Baker put a few stars by his note of Mulroney’s push for a major initiative. The official memcon does not include some of the material in Baker’s notes from the meeting.
9. Bush explained his commitment to personal diplomacy in George Bush and Brent Scowcroft, A World Transformed (New York: Knopf, 1998), 60–61; his comment on Gorbachev is on 10.
10. See Dennis Ross interview, August 2001, and Robert Zoellick interview, January 2011, Bush 41 OHP. As of 2019 the Zoellick interview has not yet been publicly released. Zelikow helped conduct the interview and Zoellick granted him access to the transcript.
Although she did not do conventional policy strategy, Margaret Tutwiler was Baker’s main adviser for handling the press, and much more. Baker’s main deputy in the Reagan years had been Richard Darman; in the Bush administration Darman became the head of the Office of Management and Budget.
11. Ross interview, Bush 41 OHP. Zoellick held the post of counselor of the department, which since the 1930s had been a place where the secretary can put a deputy who has no formal portfolio. (This is the job Zelikow was given when Rice later became secretary of state in 2005.) Ross chose the post of director of policy planning. Zoellick, who had been working with Baker since 1985, tended to also be a kind of chief of staff for Baker, and had more regular contacts with the line bureaus of the department. The deputy secretary of state was Lawrence Eagleburger, a career diplomat close to Scowcroft and to Kissinger.
From the summer of 1989 onward, the European bureau was headed by Raymond Seitz and his deputy, James Dobbins. They developed an excellent working relationship with Baker. Seitz was a diplomat’s diplomat, a man in whom grace and wit were joined to a keen, careful mind. Dobbins had recently been deputy chief of mission in Bonn and knew Germany well. More acerbic than Seitz, he had one of the quickest analytical minds in the Foreign Service. On this transition in the bureau, see James Dobbins, Foreign Service: Five Decades on the Frontlines of American Diplomacy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press and Rand Corporation, 2017), 103–4.
12. The quote “seemed connected” (quoting Lamar Alexander) is from what is now the best biography of Bush as a person: Jon Meacham, Destiny and Power: The American Odyssey of George Herbert Walker Bush (New York: Random House, 2015). 356. The press, Bush wryly observed to his diary, “keep playing it up that [Baker’s] always selfish, always looking after his own ass, always looking to be President, etc.,… but I have a lot of confidence in him.” Ibid. On tennis and “no daylight,” Baker oral history, 2011, Bush 41 OHP, 14.
13. The biography of Scowcroft is Bartholomew Sparrow, The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security (New York: PublicAffairs, 2015); on Scowcroft’s views of the Reagan White House see also Engel, When the World Seemed New, 84. On Gates, see his memoir of this period in his public service, From the Shadows (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 443–45 (for his confrontation with Shultz), 456–57 (which indicates some of his tension with Baker, whom he describes as a “real piece of work”).
14. Scowcroft on Blackwill in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 41.
15. Baker-Shevardnadze memcon, 7 Mar 89, Bush Library, NSC, Rice files, 89–90 Subject files. Zelikow was at this meeting.
16. Zoellick interview, Bush 41 OHP; see also Baker with DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy, 68.
17. Scowcroft to Bush, “Getting Ahead of Gorbachev,” 1 Mar 89 (read on March 6 by Bush, who jotted a laconic “Interesting paper”), Scowcroft USSR Chron Files, Bush Library. It originated with a February 7 draft by Rice that Gates had liked. Scowcroft appears to have revised the memo, however, before it went forward to Bush a few weeks later, on March 1.
From Moscow, Ambassador Jack Matlock had sent in a set of three cables offering his and his embassy’s assessment of Gorbachev’s prospects and policy recommendations. The assessment of the situation in the USSR was perceptive. But the policy suggestions were even more conservative than Scowcroft’s position. The lead summary was to stick with the traditional agenda. “We should continue negotiations for verifiable arms reductions but refuse to make these the centerpiece of the relationship. We should increase political pressure on Moscow to end, once and for all, its military involvement in Central America and to scale back substantially its military presence in Cuba.” Maybe, if all that went well, the United States might consider discussing multilateral cooperation and economic relations “based strictly on mutual profitability and reciprocal obligations.” Moscow cable, “U.S.-Soviet Relations: Policy Opportunities,” 22 Feb 89, in Masterpieces of History, doc. no. 47. The other two cables in the series are also reprinted as docs. 43 and 45.
18. Zelikow and Rice through Blackwill to Scowcroft, “Status of National Security Reviews on US-Soviet, US–East European, and US–West European Relations,” 2 Mar 89, Blackwill Chron Files, Bush Library.
19. Baker with DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy, 68–69 (“academic theology”); Baker’s March 8 meeting with Bush is discussed in ibid., 67–68, and his prepared notes for the Bush-Baker meeting, “Key Impressions from the Trip,” are at Baker Papers, Box 108, Folder 3; Zelikow interviews with Baker, Houston, January 1995, and Zoellick, Washington, D.C., January 1995.
20. Frédéric Bozo, Mitterrand, the End of the Cold War, and German Unification, trans. Susan Emanuel (New York: Berghahn, 2009), 33.
21. Genscher proudly devotes a chapter of his memoirs to “the struggle against modernizing nuclear short-range missiles.” With good cause, he claims a lead role in stopping this. Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Rebuilding a House Divided, trans. Thomas Thornton (New York: Broadway Books, 1997), chapter 9; it is also a chapter in the much longer original, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Siedler Verlag, 1995). On Thatcher pressing for “urgent” action on SNF, see Bush-Thatcher telcon, 23 Jan 89; for some of the tone of U.S.–West German handwringing, see also Bush-Lambsdorff memcon, 8 Feb 89; Bush-Schüble memcon, 9 Feb 89; Bush-Von Weizsaecker memcon, 24 Feb 89, all in Bush Library; Baker’s notes from his meeting with Kohl, 13 Feb 89, and notes for discussions with Genscher and Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg, Baker Papers, Box 108, Folder 2. Gorbachev’s comment on Baker’s “panic” was in a meeting with Soviet ambassadors to socialist countries, 3 Mar 89, in Masterpieces of History, doc. no. 51.
22. Taubman, Gorbachev, 440.
23. On the Polish crisis of 1980–81 as a turning point in Soviet reluctance to intervene, see Matthew Ouimet, The Rise and Fall of the Brezhnev Doctrine in Soviet Foreign Policy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).
24. Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” 387; Georgi Shakhnazarov, Tsena svobody (Moscow: Rossika-Zevs, 1993).
25. The best summary of this episode is Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” 387–91; see also Gorbachev-Károly Grósz [Hungarian party leader] memcon, 23–24 Mar 89, in Masterpieces of History, doc. no. 52.
26. See the instructions from Chernyaev to Zagladin, 4 Feb 89, in ibid., doc. no. 44.
27. See Michael R. Beschloss and Strobe Talbott, At the Highest Levels: The Inside Story of the End of the Cold War (Boston: Little, Brown, 1993), 14–17, 19–21, 45–46; and Thomas L. Friedman, “Baker, Outlining World View, Assesses Plan for Soviet Bloc,” New York Times, March 28, 1989, p. A1; see also Rice through Blackwill to Scowcroft, “Your Meeting with the Executive Board of the Polish American Congress,” 30 Mar 89, Scowcroft Files, USSR Chron Files, Bush Library.
28. For the speech, which was drafted principally by Rice, Dan Fried at State, speechwriter Mark Davis, and by Bush himself, see Bush address, Hamtramck, Michigan, 17 Apr 89, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990), bk. 1, 432; see also the discussion of the speechwriting process (and the would-be assassin) in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 50–52. Raymond Garthoff asserted that the timing of Bush’s speech on the day Solidarity was legalized was a coincidence. The Great Transition (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1994), 606. It was not. Bush’s speech on this topic was planned in advance and timed to follow the Warsaw announcement of the Roundtable outcome. See also Robert Hutchings (who joined Blackwill’s NSC staff later in the spring of 1989 to help on issues involving Eastern Europe and Germany), American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997), 39–40.
The Polish government agreed to hold free parliamentary elections in June. The Roundtable developed the procedures for these elections. The Hungarians followed this example after the shakeup of their government in June 1989, effectively creating a multiparty political system before fully free elections were held in March 1990. See Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Random House, 1990), 25–60; Bernard Gwertzman and Michael T. Kaufman, eds., The Collapse of Communism, rev. ed. (New York: Times Books, 1991), 3–40, 110–37, 161–63, 253–54.
29. Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 48–49. The new aid program, known as SEED (Support for Eastern European Democracies), was signed into law in November 1989. It became one among a number of bilateral and multilateral programs that Western countries started setting up in the second half of 1989.
30. Rice started work on the alternative paper in March, with the conceptual approach of looking beyond containment and imagining conditions in which the Soviet Union would be a cooperative partner. Elements of this paper then were worked into the Bush address, College Station, Texas, 12 May 89, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989, bk. 1. The paper evolved into a formal national security directive, NSD-23 (23 Sep 89), which is what is quoted in the text. That document reflected further work by Scowcroft, Gates, Blackwill, and Rice, with some help from Ross. That directive came out months later, having gone through an interagency clearance process that hedged some of the detailed language, at which point U.S. leaders were regarding the NSD as a formality that had already been overtaken by events. There is a discussion of the paper in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 40–41, that might be confusing this paper with another. Given the current state of declassification, it is hard to check.
31. Baker (2011), Bush 41 OHP, pp. 9–10. On Baker and Scowcroft silencing or distancing the White House from Cheney and Gates, see Baker, Politics of Diplomacy, 70, 75, 156–58; Gates, From the Shadows, 474, 480–81; Snider through Brooks and Blackwill for Scowcroft, “Secretary Cheney’s Speech for Tomorrow Evening,” 9 May 89 (with Scowcroft’s note) in Scowcroft files, USSR Collapse files, Bush Library; Engel also discusses the Cheney speech incident in When the World Seemed New, 137–38.
On May 28, David Ignatius published a column, “Why Bob Gates Is the Eeyore of Sovietology,” Washington Post, May 28, 1989, p. B2, that called him “someone capable of finding a dark lining in even the brightest cloud.” Gates sent a note to Ignatius saying that “he thought of himself more as Winnie the Pooh.” Robert Gates Papers, Box 83, Folder 10, Swem Library, College of William and Mary.
The intelligence community (which included the defense intelligence agencies) had just issued a National Intelligence Estimate (which also went to Congress) that still had a more cautionary tone. Leading the “Key Judgments,” it said, “For the foreseeable future, the USSR will remain the West’s principal adversary.” It described a Soviet desire, though, to shift the competition more “to a largely political and economic plane.” NIE 11-4-89, “Soviet Policy Toward the West: The Gorbachev Challenge,” 11 Apr 89, in Benjamin Fischer, ed., At Cold War’s End: US Intelligence on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1989–1991 (Washington, DC: CIA Historical Review Program, 1999), 229–32; the disagreements within the intelligence community about this estimate are itemized on 231.
32. Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 54. The Open Skies initiative led to negotiations that began in Ottawa in February 1990 (a meeting best known for the side discussions on Germany) and produced a 1992 treaty. The treaty gained thirty-five signatories. It entered into force in 2002, when Russia and the United States began conducting their first overflights. No territory could be placed off-limits.
The NSC staffers who had developed the idea (Blackwill and Zelikow) thought it had been important and ahead of its time in 1955. They believed its concept remained highly relevant in 1989. On the significance of the original 1955 proposal, see the interesting summary from one of its originators, Walt Rostow, in Concept and Controversy (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), 137–71. See also the context of “Glasnost and the Public Debate” on openness in the USSR, in Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military, chapter 8.
33. There is a large historical commentary about the so-called policy “pause” in the first half of 1989. The argument fits preconceptions, including partisan ones, about a supposedly much too cautious and unimaginative president. To be fair to the critics, however, the Bush team contributed to the impression, perhaps unavoidably, because of the ways they concealed what was going on, including from the disfavored holdover officials in their own administration. Engel, in When the World Seemed New, also has a “pause” chapter, a bit influenced by some of the factors we mention. He argues, though, that the “pause” seemed to be ending in March, which—six weeks after Bush’s inauguration—is not much of a pause. Engel believes the deliberations gave officials precious time to think anew and “in uncomfortable terms” (p. 135).
Most of the literature on the “pause” tends to ignore Baker, although he was actually driving most of the action in U.S.-Soviet relations. Baker’s retrospective comment is that “we gave Gorbachev a little bit of grief because he couldn’t figure out exactly what we were doing, but by May it was over. [He could see what the United States was doing.] After my meeting with Shevardnadze… in Vienna, and that may have been in March [March 7]… from about that time on [the United States was moving].… So do I think it cost the country anything? Absolutely not.” Baker (2011), Bush 41 OHP, p. 4.
34. Tilo Schabert, How World Politics Is Made: France and the Reunification of Germany, trans. John Tyler Tuttle, ed. and abridged by Barry Cooper (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2009), 175, 178.
35. Quoted in ibid., 174; on the June 1988 agreement with Kohl, see 184. A French policy planner in the Foreign Ministry, Jean-Marie Guéhenno, had argued in April 1989 that “the Germany of 1989 does not find in the postwar political and strategic framework a dynamic response to its new ambitions. The apparent fluidity of the situation in the East further increases its impatience to be a full actor in international relations.” “The Franco-German Relationship,” 30 Apr 89, in Maurice Vaïsse and Christian Wenkel, eds., La diplomatie française face à l’unification allemande (Paris: Tallandier, 2011), 55–60.
36. Kenneth Dyson and Kevin Featherstone, The Road to Maastricht: Negotiating Economic and Monetary Union (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 170–71.
37. Harold James, Making the European Monetary Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 210–63; and Dyson and Featherstone, Road to Maastricht. The president of the Bundesbank during this period was Karl Otto Pöhl. The head of the Bank of England was Robin Leigh-Pemberton. The head of the Banque de France was Jacques de Larosière.
James was granted access to records of the European Committee of Central Bank Governors and Bundesbank records, including transcripts of meetings of the Delors committee. More details about the important roles of Genscher and Kohl are in Wilfried Loth, “Helmut Kohl und die Währungsunion,” Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 61, no. 4 (2013): 455–63 (for this phase).
38. Dyson and Featherstone, Road to Maastricht, 186–87. The episode offers another good glimpse of the staff workings of the triumvirate. Mitterrand’s key aide on these issues was Élisabeth Guigou, often working with Pascal Lamy on Delors’s staff, and Joachim Bitterlich in the West German Chancellery.
39. Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa, The Road to Monetary Union in Europe: The Emperor, the Kings, and the Genies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 117–18.
40. For Kohl’s motives, Schwarz, Helmut Kohl, 518–20.
41. Blackwill to Zelikow, September 2018.
42. Bozo, Mitterrand, 46–47. The American memcons for these meetings are only partly open as of 2018. The lunch discussion of regional issues is declassified; an earlier discussion of European matters is not, but some of its contents along with Bush’s views of Mitterrand are in A World Transformed, 74–78.
43. This initiative was announced in the speech Bush delivered in Mainz, Germany, on May 31. It was the seed that ultimately led to the creation of the CSCE’s Office of Free Elections. Rice, having picked the idea up from Stephen Sestanovich, passed it on to Zelikow for inclusion in Bush’s speech. For some context, especially the West German philosophical debate over whether CSCE norms should extend from individual liberties to matters of democratic governance, see Timothy Garton Ash, In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent (New York: Random House, 1993), 263–64.
44. Bush address, Boston, Massachusetts, 21 May 89, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989, bk. 1; Rodman and Blackwill to Scowcroft, “Presidential Speech on Western Europe,” 11 Apr 89, Zelikow files, Bush Library. Baker’s warning is from his “Talking Points Cabinet Meeting,” 23 Jan 89, Box 108, Baker Library.
45. Memcons, Bush-Delors, 30 May 89 (Brussels) and 14 Jun 89 (Washington), both at Bush Library.
46. The March 30 session, for example, had Bush, Vice President Dan Quayle, Baker and his deputy Lawrence Eagleburger, Scowcroft and his deputy Gates, Cheney, and chief of staff John Sununu. Later discussions would sometimes include others like Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady or JCS chairman William Crowe. The account of this meeting in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 42–45, appears to draw on notes that have not yet been declassified.
47. Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 43; Gates remembered that “Cheney looked at Scowcroft as if he’d lost his mind.” Gates, From the Shadows, 462. Scowcroft had been looking for more sympathetic analysis on his and Kissinger’s troop withdrawal plan, including from a former Kissinger staffer, Peter Rodman. Rodman to Scowcroft, “Re: ‘Kissinger Plan’ for Central Europe,” 14 Mar 89, in Scowcroft Files, USSR Chron Files, Bush Library (still classified).
48. On Baker’s Moscow trip, Zelikow interview with Baker, Houston, January 1995; Soviet notes of Baker’s meeting with Gorbachev on May 11 are published in Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii, 1985–1992: izbrannoye, 136–48. For the atmosphere surrounding Baker’s trip to Moscow, see Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 61–68.
49. On the insight about linking the conventional and nuclear arms control problems, in which the Dutch foreign minister and West German defense minister also played important roles, see Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 82–83, 89–91; Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 45–46, 71–73.
Blackwill and Zelikow were familiar with the conventional arms control issues. In 1985–86, Blackwill had been the ambassador to the long-running predecessor negotiation, known as MBFR, that had been limited to Central Europe. Zelikow had worked for Blackwill on MBFR. Remaining there as the new negotiation, CFE, took shape, Zelikow became the political adviser during 1987 to the new U.S. ambassador, Stephen Ledogar.
50. The plan would cut Soviet foreign-deployed forces from about 565,000 to the new 275,000 limit. See IISS, Military Balance 1988–89. Oddly, Sparrow and Engel (relying on Sparrow) assert that the U.S. troop strength in Europe would be cut under this proposal by only 7,500, a number that Sparrow seems to have thought was 20 percent of the total U.S. troop strength in Europe (which was then about 320,000). The Strategist, 305; When the World Seemed New, 139.
To set the scene for the CFE arguments at the time: “In late 1988 in many NATO capitals (Ankara, London, Rome, and Washington, for example) NATO forces were considered too thin to maintain a credible conventional deterrent. Thus NATO could not afford to reduce any of its own forces even if facing a leaner [Warsaw Pact] force.” Jane M. O. Sharp, Striving for Military Stability in Europe (London: Routledge, 2005), 37. (For details on the aircraft and helicopters issue, see also pp. 22, 52.) For background on CFE issues as of the spring of 1989, see Barry Blechman, William Durch, and Kevin O’Prey, Regaining the High Ground (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); Jonathan Dean, “Conventional Talks: A Good First Round,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 45, no. 8 (October 1989): 26–32; Richard Falkenrath, Shaping Europe’s Military Order (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 29–48.
51. We recall the May 1989 debates in the U.S. government. Bush’s meeting with Mitterrand occurred in the midst of these debates. Bush previewed his planned moves. Mitterrand very much approved. See also Baker, Politics of Diplomacy, 93–94; Gates, From the Shadows, 462–63; Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: From the Cold War to a New Era; The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1990 (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991), 347–51; Baker’s May 19 notes on a May 17 meeting on his copy of Zoellick to Baker, “NATO Summit—Possible Initiatives,” 15 May 89.
52. “Some say we’re cold warriors”: Zelikow’s notes of Bush’s meeting with Italian prime minister Ciriaco De Mita, 27 May 1989, rendered slightly more formally in the memcon (2nd meeting), Bush Library.
53. Looking back after the treaty was concluded in 1990, it seemed evident that “by May 1989 the essential structural elements of the CFE treaty had been defined.” Falkenrath, Shaping Europe’s Military Order, 54; see also Blechman, Durch, and O’Prey, Regaining the High Ground, 65, 69.
54. On the “enthusiastic welcome” for Bush’s initiatives from both the Bonn government and the opposition Social Democratic Party (SPD), see Dennis Bark and David Gress, A History of West Germany: Democracy and Its Discontents, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 575–77. Bush’s reflections on the significance of the 1989 NATO summit for his presidency were related to Rice in 1993 discussions. For the Bush quote, see Oberdorfer, The Turn, 351.
55. Zelikow interview with Zoellick, Washington, DC, 1991.
56. Scowcroft to Bush, “The NATO Summit,” 20 Mar 89. Any U.S. documents that are cited without a public source, like this one, were accessed by Zelikow in 1991–94 in the preparation of the work that eventually became Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, paperback ed., 1997). We cited all our sources, including still-classified documents, and this has facilitated FOIA requests and more rapid declassification. But some of the original documents have not yet been released.
In this case Bush read the memo on March 26. He underscored and checked the paragraph about the priority to be attached to policy toward Germany. The NSC staff were thus effectively bypassing the formal review process, which had disagreed on this issue, among others. For more detail on the interagency differences about U.S. attitudes toward German unification, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified, 25–26. The Bush comment is from a Zelikow interview with him in Houston, January 1995. For more on how U.S. intelligence saw the political situation in West Germany at the time, see National Intelligence Estimate 23-89W, “West Germany: A More Self-Assured Role,” May 1989, in CIA FOIA files.
Bush eventually used the “commonwealth of free nations” phrase in his Mainz speech of May 31 and elaborated on it in a speech on U.S. relations with Europe delivered in Leiden on July 17. He used it again at the NATO summit on December 4. He used a similar phrase, simplified as a “commonwealth of freedom,” in another speech delivered to the Czech Federal Assembly in Prague on November 17, 1990.
57. Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Bush ‘Would Love’ Reunited Germany,” Washington Times, May 16, 1989, p. A1; on Bush’s 1983 trip and quotes, Zelikow interview with Bush, Houston, January 1995. Bush discusses the powerful impressions made on him by an earlier February 1983 trip to Bavaria in the Federal Republic, in which he also formed an important friendship with then–West German defense minister Manfred Wörner, in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 182–84.
At the same time, separately over at State, Zoellick was advising a receptive Baker “to get ahead of the curve” on the issue of German unification or Gorbachev “might grab it first.” Zoellick to Baker, “NATO Summit—Possible Initiatives,” 15 May 89; Zoellick, “Proposed Agenda for Meeting with the President,” 16 May 89, Box 115, Baker Library.
A few days before the de Borchgrave interview, Blackwill had written another memorandum for Bush on dealing with the West Germans. Blackwill urged again that the United States adopt this issue anew. In the context of renewed nuclear debates in NATO between Washington and Bonn, Blackwill argued that if the Western allies identified their interests more closely with Germany’s national aspirations, it would be easier to persuade the German people to reciprocate by continuing to identify their nation’s future with the Western alliance. See the proposed memo to Bush on “Dealing with the Germans,” in Blackwill to Scowcroft, 11 May 89.
Blackwill’s further advice in this May memo (following up on the earlier memo in March) cannot be causally linked to Bush’s statement to de Borchgrave. Scowcroft held up this particular memo and did not endorse it on to Bush until August 7. Bush read and initialed the memo on September 9. That memo did arrive at another important time. Nine days later, Bush made another comment to the press about German unification, discussed in the next chapter.
58. Compare Bush’s and Scowcroft’s separate comments at the top and bottom of Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 188.
59. Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Roland, La Décennie Mitterrand, vol. 3, Les défis (1988–1991) (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), 200 (from the French records); Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 77–78 (from the American records). Earlier that month, on May 3, Mitterrand had told his Council of Ministers, “That the Germans would want reunification is perfectly logical and normal. It is the job of our diplomacy to address such an irrepressible urge.” Favier and Martin-Roland, Les défis, 200.
60. For a characteristic example, see the Bush–De Mita memcon (1st meeting), 27 May 89, Bush Library. Bush posed the question to Thatcher on June 1. Her response is not yet declassified in the American or British records.
61. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989, bk. 1, 638. Paragraph 26 of the NATO summit declaration, adopted on May 30, 1989, states, “We seek a state of peace in Europe in which the German people regains its unity through free self-determination” (ibid., 625).
62. Oberdorfer, The Turn, 351–52.
63. Address by Bush, Mainz, 31 May 89, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, 1989, bk. 1, 650–54. The “Europe whole and free” phrase was coined by a State speechwriter on Ross’s staff, Harvey Sicherman.
64. This was more traditional boilerplate. The drafts of the speech from Scowcroft’s staff had suggested more radical phrases referring directly to German unification. Scowcroft did not want Bush to get ahead of what Kohl was saying. He “was concerned about unnecessarily stimulating German nationalism and took [such language] out.” Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 83.
65. Bark and Gress, History of West Germany, 581.
66. Zelikow and Rice interview with Teltschik, Gütersloh, June 1992.
67. For Teltschik, see General Anzeiger, July 6, 1989, quoted by A. James McAdams in Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 191–92. In the spring of 1988, leaders of the largest West German political party, the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), almost amended their formal party platform to set aside, as one of them put it, “the old continuing assumption that the German question [had] to be on the agenda.” Kohl’s two top advisers on these issues in the Chancellery, Wolfgang Schäuble and Horst Teltschik, and the minister of inner-German affairs, Dorothee Wilms, had supported the push for change in the CDU platform. Unnamed “key author” of draft CDU policy statement quoted from 1988 interview with McAdams, Germany Divided, 191 n. 36. The original discussion paper produced by the CDU party commission would have downplayed the goal of political reunification, but the document finally adopted at the June 1988 Wiesbaden CDU party conference was wrested back to language mirroring the time-honored usage of the FRG’s Basic Law. See Ash, In Europe’s Name, 446–47; and Karl-Rudolf Korte, Die Chance genutzt (Frankfurt: Campus, 1994), 20 n. 11.
In February 1989 the head of the West German Chancellery, Wolfgang Schäuble, talked about the old hopes “that the unity of Germany could be achieved through the reunification of both German states in the not-too-distant future.” But, he said, “we know today that these hopes [about a quick reunification] were illusory.” It was clear by 1961 at the latest that for the time being there was “no way to overcome the German division.”
What was left, given current realities, must be the preservation of the “substance of the nation,” the “commonality of the Germans,” which meant keeping open the “communication between the people.” Schäuble address to the Evangelical Academy, Bad Boll, February 25, 1989, quoted in Texte, 47; see also the statement of the government’s position by FRG inner-German minister Dorothee Wilms (CDU), address to the Friedrich-Ebert Stiftung, Bonn, January 24, 1989, quoted in ibid., 28.
68. Evident ambivalence and Kaiser quote in Marc Fisher, “The Unanswered ‘German Question,’” Washington Post, July 27, 1989, p. A25.
69. The quote “far ahead” is from Zelikow and Rice interview with Teltschik, Gütersloh, June 1992. In an interesting work of evidentiary comparison by Alexander von Plato, The End of the Cold War? Bush, Kohl, Gorbachev, and the Reunification of Germany, trans. Edith Burley (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), he seems to give Americans credit for advancing the unification theme before the West Germans (pp. 12–13, 16), after attacking us for having said so in an exaggerated way, attributing to us the position “that the Americans had initiated the reunification and the leading CDU politicians were prepared to take reunification off the current CDU agenda” (p. 9). In his interviews he then confronted people like Genscher and Teltschik with such purported claims. They then bristled, including at us.
This method, however, invents friction where there was none. We had interviewed Teltschik and Genscher about these matters. We never believed or wrote that the United States “initiated the reunification,” an inflammatory proposition.
Nor did we think that Kohl or Genscher were slow or backward on the matter, or trying “to take reunification off the current CDU agenda,” another inflammatory phrasing (p. 9). As we document in note 67, CDU party leaders had their internal intraparty debates and had chosen to stay carefully within the prevailing party consensus until they decided to edge forward.
We describe their decisions to edge forward in chapter 4, decisions that we think began in the second half of 1989 and did so, for Kohl, before the opening of the wall. Our position, and Bush’s, was that the West Germans should understand that the United States was ready to consider advancing this topic, if and when they were. Within the U.S. government, that evident readiness was itself a large and controversial policy step.
70. On West German perceptions of America’s “new orientation,” see Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 16–21. There was one suspected break in the partnership in November 1989, when Kohl surprised Washington with a major policy move that we will discuss in chapter 4. Washington came to realize that Kohl’s secrecy had more to do with West German coalition politics than any difficulty with Washington.
71. Washington (Acland) to Defense Secretary George Younger, 7 Jul 89, in National Archives of the UK (TNA), PREM 19/3210; see also Bonn (Mallaby) to Sir J. Fretwell, 27 Jul 89, in Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), Documents on British Policy Overseas: Series III, Vol. VII—German Unification 1989–1990 (London: Routledge, 2010) (hereinafter DBPO-Unification), 20–23.
72. Blackwill raised the concern with British ambassador to NATO Michael Alexander. Alexander reported this in an informal letter to Patrick Wright, who shared the report with Foreign Secretary Major. Alexander to Wright, 18 Sep 89, in DBPO-Unification, 31–33.
73. On the internal Soviet discussions see Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, 262; letter to us from Chernyaev, February 1995; see also Izvestiya, October 16, 1988.
74. Gedmin, The Hidden Hand, 51–52; Sodaro, Moscow, Germany, and the West, 355–62. See the Bush-Kohl telcon, 15 Jun 89, and Bush-Genscher memcon (quoted in the text), 21 Jun 89, both at Bush Library.
75. Wjatscheslaw Kotschemassow, Meine letzte Mission (Berlin: Dietz, 1994), 121–29, 143–44, 148–55; Reinhold Andert and Wolfgang Herzberg, eds., Der Sturz: Honecker im Kreuzverhör (Berlin: Aufbau, 1990), 62; Zelikow interview with Chernyaev, Moscow, January 1994. On Soviet attitudes toward the GDR more broadly, see Charles Gati, The Bloc That Failed: Soviet–East European Relations in Transition (London: I. B. Tauris, 1990), 65–135; and J. F. Brown, Surge to Freedom: The End of Communist Rule in Eastern Europe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 48–70.
76. See the analysis of the various German and Soviet meeting records in Von Plato, The End of the Cold War?, 22–31.
77. Taubman, Gorbachev, 478.
78. The text is in Masterpieces in History, doc. no. 73.
79. Taubman, Gorbachev, 436–37 (quoting Gorbachev’s comments at the Politburo meeting of May 11). Taubman sifts the evidence and sides with those who place accountability for the violence on party and military leaders in Georgia. The violence in Georgia took place against a background of prior national unrest. At the end of February and beginning of March 1988, Azerbaijani gangs had conducted horrific pogroms against Armenians, killing scores of people in the city of Sumgait. Troops slowly restored order, but Gorbachev was hesitant about declaring martial law. He sought political solutions. Ibid., 369–70.
80. Soviet memcon of Deng-Gorbachev meeting, 16 May 89, in Wilson Center Digital Archive; “Where is China’s Gorbachev?”: from editorial note in Zhang Liang, compiler, and Andrew Nathan and Perry Link, eds., The Tiananmen Papers (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), 172.
81. From secret recollections later smuggled out of China, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, trans. Bao Pu, Renee Chiang, and Adi Ignatius (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009), 254–55.
82. Soviet memcon of Zhao-Gorbachev, 16 May 89, in Wilson Center Digital Archive.
83. Quotes are from minutes of Politburo Standing Committee meeting (at Deng’s home), 17 May 89, in Tiananmen Papers, 189–90. See also the valuable additional evidence in Mary Sarotte, “China’s Fear of Contagion: Tiananmen Square and the Power of the European Example,” International Security 37, no. 2 (2012): 156–82. We do not share Sarotte’s evident skepticism about the value of the Tiananmen Papers and the Zhao memoir.
84. Li Peng, in minutes of Politburo Standing Committee meeting, 6 Jun 89, in Tiananmen Papers, 421.
85. Sergey Radchenko, in Jeffrey Engel and Radchenko, “Beijing and Malta, 1989,” in Kristina Spohr and David Reynolds, eds., Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 196–97.
86. Politburo meeting, 4 Oct 89, quoted in ibid., 196.
87. For Scowcroft’s comment on the press and Bush’s style, Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 129.
88. Mitterrand-Bush, 13 Jul 89, blending the material about Mitterrand’s statements from French records quoted in Favier and Martin-Roland, Les défis, 196, and the American memcon that Scowcroft prepared, at the Bush Library.
Bush’s endorsement of Jaruzelski as the necessary leader at that moment followed the view of the able American ambassador in Warsaw, John Davis, who in June had secretly worked on this point with the Solidarity opposition; they also supported keeping Jaruzelski in place—for a time—for their own reasons. Domber, Empowering Revolution, 238–45, 263.
Mitterrand’s discussion of “limits” may have been prompted by Gorbachev’s complaint to Mitterrand that Bush had made statements in Poland calling for the withdrawal of all Soviet troops and for the restoration of Poland’s 1939 borders. Gorbachev-Mitterrand memcon, 6 Jul 89, in Masterpieces in History, doc. no. 74. Bush had made an offhand comment about all Soviet troops leaving Poland in a press briefing before his departure to Europe, and regretted having said this publicly. He told Jaruzelski that he had only meant to say that perhaps someday all foreign troops might leave Europe. He asked him to be sure and pass this on to Gorbachev. Polish Foreign Ministry report on the earlier Bush-Jaruzelski meeting, 18 Jul 89, excerpted in Masterpieces in History, doc. no. 76. Bush had said nothing about the explosive topic of moving Poland back to its pre-1939 frontiers and was apparently unaware that anyone thought he had. Yet obviously someone had reported such an allegation to Gorbachev.
89. Ibid.
90. Engel, When the World Seemed New, 228–29.
91. Bush in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 131.
92. Acland to Major, “The Making of Bush Foreign Policy: East-West and West-West Relations,” 5 Sep 89 (this analysis was also shared with Thatcher), PREM 19/2682, TNA.
93. See, for example, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (New York: Penguin, 1987); David Calleo, Beyond American Hegemony (New York: Basic Books, 1989); and Walter Russell Mead, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987) (remarking on American decline since the 1960s). “The American Century is over” is from Clyde Prestowitz in Time, July 4, 1988, p. 28.
94. Samuel P. Huntington, “The U.S.—Decline or Renewal?” Foreign Affairs 67, no. 2 (Winter 1988/89): 76–92.
95. Rice refers to the Gates memo to Bush in Rice to Scowcroft, “The Impact of Soviet Internal Difficulties on U.S.-Soviet Relations,” 9 Aug 89, Master Chron for USSR Sep 89–Dec 89, Box 2, Bush Library. Hodnett’s analysis was circulated formally in CIA SOVA, “Gorbachev’s Domestic Gambles and Instability in the USSR,” SOV 89-10077, Sep 89, available in Fischer, ed., At Cold War’s End, 27–47.
The bulk of the U.S. intelligence community did not take such a radical view of Gorbachev’s prospects. The conventional position expected him to muddle through. The disagreement was spotlighted a couple of months later in a National Intelligence Estimate. See NIE 11-18-89, “The Soviet System in Crisis: Prospects for the Next Two Years,” November 1989, in ibid., esp. 55, 75 (vii and 18 in the original). We highlight the dire assessments from Hodnett/SOVA, representing CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, because they were more influential on Gates, Rice, Ross, and probably on Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft.
Chapter 4: The Pivot: A New Germany in a Different Europe
1. Dufourcq, “De l’Europe d’aujourd’hui à celle de demain,” 20 Feb 89, quoted in Bozo, Mitterrand, 62.
2. Quoted from the original meeting records by Jacques Lévesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe, trans. Keith Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 120.
3. Ibid., 130–31.
4. For a useful Hungarian perspective on what they heard in their interactions with Western countries in the spring and summer of 1989, see László Borhi, “The International Context of Hungarian Transition, 1989: The View from Budapest,” in Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow, and Leopoldo Nuti, eds., Europe and the End of the Cold War: A Reappraisal (London: Routledge, 2008), 78–92.
5. See Klaus Bachmann, “Poland 1989: The Constrained Revolution,” in Wolfgang Mueller, Michael Gehler, and Arnold Suppan, eds., The Revolutions of 1989: A Handbook (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2015), 60–62, influenced by evidence supporting the analysis of the former Polish communist intellectual and party leader, Jerzy Wiatr.
6. “Most Solidarity leaders”: Warsaw 8512, “How to Elect Jaruzelski Without Voting for Him, and Will He Run?,” 23 Jun 89, in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 42, ed. Gregory Domber. Domber has a good account of the U.S. efforts in Warsaw, including the role of Ambassador Davis. He describes Bush as seeking “stability,” that he “slowed the pace of change” and sought “evolution” rather than revolution. Empowering Revolution, 208. Yet he also seems to agree that “another failed revolution could have set the clock back a decade in Eastern Europe and derailed Soviet reform.” Ibid., 251.
7. A good brief summary of the formation of the Mazowiecki government in July–August 1989, informed by interviews with Mazowiecki, is Victor Sebestyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: Vintage, 2010), 304–9.
8. Gorbachev’s role during this crisis is traced in Kramer, “The Demise of the Soviet Bloc,” 397–402.
9. See Lévesque, Enigma, 123–26.
10. See Domber, Empowering Revolution, 228–46; Engel, When the World Seemed New, 219–20. Engel, like others, recounts how frustrated Scowcroft and Blackwill were that they could not make larger commitments of U.S. aid at this point. Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady is the usual villain. The essence of the argument is that the U.S. government lacked the vision that the Truman administration had, in 1947, to make a huge commitment. This argument naturally resonates with historians.
Some U.S. officials, including both of us, underestimated the problems at the time. The skeptics had a point. The aid ideas actually required careful analysis. There were and are some serious problems with the Marshall Plan analogy. We and our NSC staff colleagues had not analyzed what was involved in standing up a really large aid program. Nor, back then, had we looked hard at the designs (like the use of counterpart funds) involved in past U.S. aid successes like the Marshall Plan. For an example of one such analysis, an extensive one that counseled “against a Marshall Plan for the East,” see Barry Eichengreen and Marc Uzan, “The Marshall Plan: Economic Effects and Implications for Eastern Europe and the Former USSR,” Economic Policy 7, no. 14 (1992): 14, 16.
11. On the creation and coordinating role of the G-24 among guiding governments and more important institutions, see Kohl to Bush, 28 Jun 89, in Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik: Deutsche Einheit Sonderedition aus den Akten des Bundeskanzleramtes 1989/90, ed. Hanns Jürgen Küsters and Daniel Hofmann (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1998), 320–23 (hereinafter cited as DzD-Einheit); and Stephan Haggard and Andrew Moravcsik, “The Political Economy of Financial Assistance to Eastern Europe, 1989–1991,” in Robert Keohane, Joseph Nye, and Stanley Hoffmann, eds., After the Cold War: International Institutions and State Strategies in Europe, 1989–1991 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1993), 257–59.
On the background of the EC’s involvement and the Commission’s energetic role in standing up the G-24, see José Torreblanca, The Reuniting of Europe: Promises, Negotiations, and Compromises (London: Routledge, 2001), 31–32; and on the scale of food aid to Poland, Charlotte Benson and Edward Clay, Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union: Economic Change, Social Welfare and Aid (London: Overseas Development Institute, 1992), Table 5.1, p. 40 (we assume a population of about thirty-eight million Poles in 1989).
12. Bartel, “The Power of Omission,” 216 (“genuinely radical”).
13. The West European role in any major debt/aid/reform effort in Eastern Europe was bound to be crucial. Their banks held most East European debt and the West European countries had the most expertise on economic conditions in the region. But the West European governments also had not yet developed any substantial ideas about what might be done. Emergency aid, like food aid for Poland, was provided in significant amounts, as we mentioned in the previous chapter. The longer-term aid programs also began mounting varied programs for technical assistance.
Recipient government policy planning had been crucial in the development of the Marshall Plan designs during 1947 and 1948. Rather than a wrecked but basically capitalist system, manned by people who knew how to run a capitalist system and with viable institutions for private property and banks, post-communist reformers confronted a system organized on an entirely different basis.
At the beginning of September, Zoellick was noting for Baker that the main source of money to reform Eastern European economies would have to come from the private sector. Recalling how Western loan money had been wasted by the communist governments during the 1970s (especially in Poland), he noted, “We must avoid the mistakes of the 70s.” “In sum, the Marshall Plan of the 90s should rely on private capital and the help of those [West European countries] who were rebuilt by the first Marshall Plan.” Baker/Zoellick note, “Re Cabinet Meeting Presentation, September 5,” 5 Sep 89, Box 108, Folder 9, Baker Papers.
14. On the Polish assistance arguments in Washington in the autumn of 1989 and the results, see Condoleezza Rice, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (New York: Twelve, 2017), 144–52; see also the brief material in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 138–40; and Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War, 72–76.
15. The United States reallocated or appropriated about a billion dollars in grant money for Poland by the end of 1989, joining a larger flow of Western aid. See, e.g., Scowcroft to Bush, “Aid to Poland,” 18 Dec 89, in Scowcroft Files, Box 91125, Soviet Power Collapse in Eastern Europe (December 1989–January 1990), Bush Library.
16. A good contemporary appraisal is Simon Johnson and Marzena Kowalska, “Poland: The Political Economy of Shock Therapy,” in Stephan Haggard and Steven Webb, eds., Voting for Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, for the World Bank, 1994), 185–235. The Mazowiecki government plan was developed under the leadership of its economics chief, Leszek Balcerowicz. Among the most influential of the Western economic advisers to the Polish reformers in 1989 and 1990 were Jeffrey Sachs and David Lipton. In addition to their substantive expertise, these experts and a few others played a vital bridging role between the Poles, the U.S. government, and the international institutions. Thus, some of the important strategic planning by the governments occurred in this nongovernmental space.
17. Timothy Garton Ash, The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague (New York: Vintage, 1999), 64.
18. Dieter Grosser, “Triebkräfte der Wiedervereinigung,” and Friedrich Kurz, “Ungarn 89,” in Grosser, Stephan Bierling, and Friedrich Kurz, eds., Die sieben Mythen der Wiedervereinigung: Fakten und Analysen zu einem Prozeß ohne Alternative (Munich: Ehrenwirth, 1991), 37–38, 123–24, and 130 (for the quote from Prime Minister Nemeth, interviewed by Kurz); Maximilian Graf, “The Opening of the Austrian-Hungarian Border Revisited,” in Blumenau, Hanhimäki, and Zanchetta, eds., New Perspectives on the End of the Cold War, 139 (“masterpiece”).
19. Schabowski in an interview with Elizabeth Pond, quoted in Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germany’s Road to Unification (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1993), 90.
20. Lambert Der, originally for the Greenville News-Piedmont, 1990.
21. Kohl to Honecker, 14 Aug 89, DzD-Einheit, 355–56; see also Ralf Georg Reuth and Andreas Bonte, Das Komplott: Wie es wirklich zur deutschen Einheit kam (Munich: Piper, 1993), 56–58; “surprise”: from Zelikow interview with Kastrup, Bonn, December 1994.
22. The Hungarian leaders pleaded for the West Germans to help them with their debts, including with the Americans and the IMF. The West Germans did what they could, including arrangements to encourage West German banks to extend significant further credit to the Hungarians. West German records are at DzD-Einheit, 377–82; Zelikow interviews with Genscher, Wachtberg-Pech, December 1994; Teltschik, Munich, December 1994; and Kastrup, Bonn, December 1994; Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 30.
Neither the refugee question nor the government’s encouragement to West German banks are discussed in the West German records. Our interviewees heatedly denied a formal linkage between refugees and Hungarian debt help, but for more evidence on this point, see Andreas Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland: Die Geschichte der Wiedervereinigung (Munich: Beck, 2009), 74–75, and Hanns Jürgen Küsters and Daniel Hofmann, “Entscheidung für die deutsche Einheit: Einführung,” DzD-Einheit, 44–45.
23. The literature on the East German revolution of 1989 is now quite strong. See, e.g., Charles Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Ehrhart Neubert, Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR 1949–1989 (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 1998), 700–824; Walter Süß, Staatssicherheit am Ende: Warum es den Mächtigen nicht gelang, 1989 eine Revolution zu verhindern (Berlin: Links, 1999); Hans-Hermann Hertle, Der Fall der Mauer: Die unbeabsichtigte Selbstauflösung des SED-Staates, 2nd ed. (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1999); Gareth Dale, The East German Revolution of 1989 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); Konrad Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, Endspiel: Die Revolution von 1989 in der DDR (Munich: Beck, 2009); Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland, 62–127; Mary Elise Sarotte, The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall (New York: Basic Books, 2014) (about much more than the opening of the wall); and Hannes Adomeit, Imperial Overstretch: Germany in Soviet Policy from Stalin to Gorbachev, 2nd ed. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2016), 463–535.
Our earlier work has more detail on the play-by-play of international reactions to the GDR crisis as it unfolded, including the Soviet reactions. Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 63–101.
24. A nice summary is in Mary Elise Sarotte, 1989: The Struggle to Create Post–Cold War Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009, with 2014 update), 19–20. “Garbage dump”: quoted in Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, “The Revolution in Germany,” in Frédéric Bozo, Andreas Rödder, and Mary Elise Sarotte, eds., German Reunification: A Multinational History (London: Routledge, 2017), 26; Robert Darnton, Berlin Journal, 1989–1990 (New York: Norton, 1991), 11; see also 96–98. An excellent summary in English of the day’s events in Leipzig, based on her direct reporting, is Elizabeth Pond, “The Day Leipzig’s Residents Defied Their Masters,” Wall Street Journal (Europe), October 7, 1994.
25. Krenz-Gorbachev memcon, 1 Nov 89, in Bundesarchiv, Abt. Potsdam, Ei-56320. Charles Maier originally helped us locate this document. This sensitive material on the GDR debt issues is not included in the excerpt from the Soviet record of this conversation that is published in the National Security Archive’s online collection.
26. Minutes from the Politburo meeting, 3 Nov 89, quoted in Vladislav Zubok, “Gorbachev, German Reunification, and Soviet Demise,” in Bozo et al., eds., German Reunification, 90.
27. The quotation appears in Igor Maximychev, “Possible ‘Impossibilities,’” International Affairs (Moscow) (June 1993): 112–13, without an explanation of its origin. Maximychev, a top Soviet diplomat in the GDR, elaborated on the background of the quotation in an interview with Zelikow, Moscow, January 1994. See also Kotschemassow, Meine letzte Mission, 110 (placing “We will not forgive” on October 7). Gorbachev frequently called Kochemasov, unusual for a head of state. Ibid., 177.
28. Scowcroft, Gates, Blackwill, and Rice explicitly used alternative scenarios (rating the odds of the “violent crackdown” scenario at “less than 50 per cent,” which is still a very high number) to draw out some of the policy implications. Scowcroft to Bush, “The Future of Perestroika and the European Order,” Nov 89, Rice files, subject files 89–90, Malta summit papers (preparation), Bush Library.
In February 1990, discussing why the Soviets should support NATO and EC options for Germany, the British ambassador in Moscow, Rodric Braithwaite, told Chernyaev that although he wanted perestroika to succeed, there was “at least a 30 per cent chance that it would not.” This implied a 70 percent chance of success. Chernyaev replied “that he wished the odds [of success] were so good.” Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River, 131.
29. Baker/Zoellick notes, “Re Cabinet Meeting Presentation,” 5 Sep 89; and “Meeting with President, on September 6,” Box 108, Folder 9, and Box 115, Folder 6, Baker Papers.
30. Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 154–55.
31. Bush’s diary entry, 25 Nov 89, after a difficult meeting with Thatcher at Camp David, in ibid., 159.
32. Memcon of First Expanded Bilateral Session with Chairman Gorbachev, 2 Dec 89. This and other Malta summit memcons are in the Rice files, Soviet Union subject files, Malta summit memcons, Bush Library; see also the Soviet memcon of this meeting, published in Mikhail S. Gorbachev, Gody trudnykh reshenii, 1985–1992: izbrannoye, 173–76. For Bush’s key briefing materials on Germany at Malta, see Presidential Briefing Book, “Presidential Presentations,” 29 Nov 89. This book was prepared by Scowcroft, Rice, Ross, Blackwill, Zoellick, and Zelikow. It was distinct from the regular briefing materials and its contents were very closely held.
33. Greenspan memo for the record, 19 Oct 89, in Michael Boskin Files, Russian Trip 1990, Bush Library. Some of Greenspan’s substantive suggestions were employed by Bush and Baker, who referred positively to the Fed chairman’s visit. Baker had been following the issues closely. On October 4, he had offered his perspective on the Soviet economic future to the Senate Finance Committee; Zoellick had worked with him on the testimony.
34. Svetlana Savranskaya, ed., “The Diary of Anatoly Chernyaev, 1989,” trans. Anna Melyakova (2009), 23 Oct 89, p. 45, donated to the National Security Archive and available at www.nsarchive.org (hereinafter cited as Chernyaev diary). Chernyaev’s diary was also a source for the memoir he published in Russian, later abridged and translated into English (we have used both).
35. Chernyaev diary 1990 (2010), 2 Jan, p. 2; Taubman, Gorbachev, 498.
36. Scowcroft to Bush, “Objectives for US-Soviet Relations in 1990,” Dec 89 (drafted mainly by Rice and Blackwill), Rice files, USSR subject files, US-Soviet Relations 1, Bush Library. Scowcroft called out, as a key priority for diplomacy, to help manage Soviet-German relations, since the German question was the one issue “that might cause Moscow to reassess its course in Eastern Europe, even bring Gorbachev down.”
37. The Soviet military pressed Gorbachev and Shevardnadze to try and introduce naval arms control, the global control of naval size, as a whole new agenda for U.S.-Soviet arms control. Since the Soviet Union was not directly threatened by U.S. naval forces, other than by the nuclear missile submarines and sea-launched cruise missiles that were already on the table in the strategic nuclear talks, it is not easy to infer the reasons for this added push. The United States resisted it.
38. Chernyaev diary 1990, 2 Jan, p. 3. Chernyaev added, “There are more marshals and generals in Moscow alone than in the rest of the world combined! This is a political and social problem. It is fine that [Georgi] Arbatov and ‘Ogonek’ [a mass-circulation illustrated weekly magazine] are yelping at [defense minister] Yazov and [former army chief] Akhromeyev and tearing at their coattails, they’re in a good spot! But what is it like for Gorbachev with this horde and armada!”
39. Teymuraz Stepanov, 13 Jan 90, quoted in Zubok, “Gorbachev, Germany, and Soviet Demise,” 92.
40. Ibid.; see also Yakovlev’s urging that Gorbachev lead another wave of revolutionary change, in Chernyaev diary 1990, 28 Jan, pp. 8–9.
41. For a critical analysis of Gorbachev’s choice of indirect elections, see Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 198–205; Brown, Seven Years That Changed the World: Perestroika in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 209–10.
42. Excerpt from Thatcher-Gorbachev memcon, 23 Sep 89 (because he put his pen down, as Thatcher requested, Chernyaev added the material from his recollection when he wrote up his notes after the meeting). The record is in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 422, ed. and trans. Svetlana Savranskaya. The British record of this part of the discussion, if any, has not yet been released. “What a woman!”: Taubman, Gorbachev, 489.
43. Shevardnadze, “The Fate of the World Is Inseparable from the Fate of Our Perestroika,” Pravda, September 27, 1989, pp. 4–5.
44. For instance, the day before Gorbachev’s meeting with Krenz, President Carter’s former national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had told Yakovlev that “a united and powerful Germany would correspond neither to your interests nor to ours.” Taubman, Gorbachev, 490.
45. Bonn 29066, 11 Sep 89. Seiters replied cautiously, urging that America only help knock down intellectual and spiritual walls between the two Germanys.
46. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989, bk. 2 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1990), 1221. The week before, Flora Lewis had advised the administration to “Go Slow on Germany,” New York Times, September 12, 1989, p. A25.
47. The shift away from the old Ostpolitik consensus is evident, tracking the evolution of Kohl’s position from the beginning of October to his government’s statement on November 8. See Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland, 127–30; Schwarz, Helmut Kohl, 528–30.
48. Kohl-Bush telcon, 23 Oct 89, Bush Library. On the morning of Kohl’s call, President Bush and other top officials had been briefed by intelligence analysts on “German Reunification: What Would Have to Happen?” They explained how many hurdles would have to be overcome. They feared that Bonn might agree to attenuate or even drop its NATO ties. On October 27 the briefing was circulated in the National Intelligence Daily and this version has been declassified in the CIA FOIA files. Having heard such a briefing, Bush might have been especially sensitive to Kohl’s request. For the Bush interview, R. W. Apple Jr., “Possibility of a Reunited Germany Is No Cause for Alarm, Bush Says,” New York Times, October 25, 1989, p. 1; see also p. A12. For other signs of Bush’s thinking in this period, see Wörner-Bush memcon, 11 Oct 89, Bush Library.
49. See Bozo, Mitterrand, 98; Schabert, How World Politics Is Made, 220; and for a similarly philosophical approach suggested from the Foreign Ministry, Jacques Blot (head of the Quai’s European office), “Reflections on the German question,” 30 Oct 89, in Europe 1986–1990, Allemagne (Statut), Box 6122, Archives diplomatiques, Paris (hereinafter AD).
50. “Erklärung der Bundesregierung…,” Bulletin (Bonn, Presse und Informatiensamt der Bundesregierung), no. 123 (1989), p. 1053. For grudging acceptance of Kohl’s line, even from SPD leader Vogel, see “Kohl: Die SED muss auf ihr Machtmonopol verzichten,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, November 9, 1989, p. 1. The editorial board of the Washington Post promptly criticized Kohl for his comments, warning against movement toward reunification. See “Toward German Reunification,” Washington Post, November 9, 1989, p. A22.
51. EmbBerlin 8783, 8 Nov 89; see also the more detailed analysis in EmbBerlin 8764, “GDR Crisis: As the Plenum Meets, Can the SED Seize Its Slender Chance?,” 8 Nov 89. West German ambassador to the United States Jürgen Ruhfus told Undersecretary of State Robert Kimmitt that Krenz was increasing his freedom to maneuver but confided that Bonn was pessimistic about a new SED government’s chances for survival. The British ambassador to Washington, Antony Acland, said he was “nervous about something going very wrong.” The State Department reported these remarks to President Bush. Eagleburger to President Bush (for his evening reading), 7 Nov 89.
52. When Krenz and Gorbachev discussed East German party figures, it was clear that Gorbachev had a good opinion of Modrow. But Gorbachev reserved his strongest praise for longtime party veteran Willi Stoph, who he had thought had done the best he could while working with Honecker. Both Gorbachev and Krenz blamed Günter Mittag for the GDR’s deplorable economic problems. See memcon for Krenz-Gorbachev meeting, 1 Nov 89.
53. See memcon for Krenz-Gorbachev meeting; Krenz interview excerpt in Kuhn, Gorbatschow und die deutsche Einheit, 59.
54. Zelikow interviews with Tarasenko, Providence, June 1993, and Maximychev, Moscow, January 1994; Valentin Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, trans. Heddy Pross-Weerth (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1993), 488–89. For variations on this account, see the excellent reconstruction in Igor Maximytschew and Hans-Hermann Hertle, “Die Maueröffnung: Eine russisch-deutsche Trilogie,” Deutschland Archiv 27 (November 1994): 1137–58; and Kotschemassow, Meine letzte Mission, 185–86; Igor Maximytschew, “Was ist bei euch los?,” Der Spiegel, October 31, 1994, p. 43.
55. Maximychev, “End of the Berlin Wall,” International Affairs (Moscow) (March 1991): 106–7 (based on numerous discussions with East German officials); and Maximytschew and Hertle, “Die Maueröffnung,” 1146–48. Hertle expanded his account in his later book, Der Fall der Mauer.
56. In Bonn, for example, “there were no preparations or contingency plans for this situation, which had always been talked about, but in truth was considered most improbable. There was also no warning from the intelligence services.” Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 45. Kiessler and Elbe went on to criticize the West German intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), for having written reports that ignored the people of the GDR and focused only on the governing communist elite.
57. See Egon Krenz with Hartmut König and Gunter Rettner, Wenn Mauern fallen (Vienna: Paul Neff, 1990); Hans Modrow, Aufbruch und Ende (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur, 1991), 25; Heinrich Bortfeldt interview with Modrow, March 1993, in GDR Oral History Project, Hoover Institution, Box 2, pp. 15–16; Reuth and Bonte, Das Komplott, 160. Early accounts of the opening of the wall sometimes inaccurately assert that Gorbachev had approved the decision. The Soviet government had blessed a liberalization of travel laws but was taken aback like everyone else by what happened on the night of November 9–10.
58. Darnton, Berlin Journal, 85; see also Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland, 106–8; Sarotte, The Collapse, 93–119.
59. Schabowski, Das Politburo, 138–39. Unless otherwise cited, our account of the opening of the Berlin Wall is drawn from Krenz, Wenn Mauern fallen, 161–95; Schabowski, Das Politburo; Gedmin, The Hidden Hand, 109–10; Pond, Beyond the Wall, 132–34; Maximychev, “End of the Berlin Wall,” 106–8; Maximytschew, “Was ist bei euch los?”; Kusmin, “Da wussten”; and Greenwald, Berlin Witness, 258–65. For the U.S. embassy’s reporting of the events at the time, see EmbBerlin 8820, “GDR Plenum: Virtually Free Travel and Emigration in Force Immediately,” 9 Nov 89; EmbBerlin 8823, “… And the Wall Came (Figuratively) Tumbling Down,” 10 Nov 89.
60. Kohl-Gorbachev memcon, 11 Nov 89, DzD-Einheit, 515–17; an East German copy of the Soviet record of the call is in the German archives of the DDR (SAPMO), JIV 2/2A/3258K.
61. Hurd to Thatcher, “Eastern Europe,” 17 Nov 89, in DBPO-German Unification, 128. For more details, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 99–110.
62. FRG, Texte zur Deutschlandpolitik, ser. 3, vol. 7-1989 (Bonn: Deutscher Bundes-Verlag, 1990), 422–29.
63. On November 26 a group of thirty-one writers, respected reform Marxists, church figures, and opposition leaders all joined in a published appeal to their East German countrymen to “insist on GDR independence” and not to accept “a sell-out of our material and moral values and have the GDR eventually taken over by the Federal Republic.” Within two weeks two hundred thousand people had signed this manifesto of “antifascist and humanist ideals.” A prominent group of West German intellectuals responded with a parallel manifesto rejecting unification and dangerous nationalism. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity, 67.
64. Zelikow interview with Teltschik, Munich, December 1994; on opinion, see Der Spiegel, November 20, 1989, pp. 16–17 (Emnid survey); Teltschik, 329 Tage, 41 (ZDF Politbarometer survey); Lafontaine in Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 25–26, 1989, quoted in A. James McAdams, Germany Divided: From the Wall to Reunification (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 206 n. 74.
65. Schwarz, Helmut Kohl, 530–34, 533 (“geht kaputt”). See also Seiters-Krenz/Modrow memcon, 20 Nov 89, DzD-Einheit, 550–59. On Teltschik and his meeting with Nikolai Portugalov, see Teltschik, 329 Tage, 43–44, and more generally on this episode, 41–58. Portugalov himself had publicly denounced unification only a few days earlier in an interview. He had not forgotten these words; he actually referred to this interview in his meeting with Teltschik. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that both sides to the conversation heard each other selectively. Novosti interview, “Two Systems, One Nation,” in Frankfurter Rundschau, November 17, 1989, p. 2, in FBIS-SOV 89–222, November 20, 1989, 33–34.
66. Helmut Kohl, “Zehn-Punkte Programm zur überwindung der Teilung Deutschlands und Europas,” in Texte zur Deutschlandpolitik, 426–33.
67. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 58.
68. Ibid., 50–58. Unfortunately, probably because of a snarl in communicating the eleven-page message either in Bonn or in Washington, Kohl’s message to Bush arrived at the end of the day, hours after the story had been broadcast all over the world.
69. Bush-Kohl telcon, 29 Nov 89, Bush Library.
70. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989, bk. 2, 1603. Bush was referring to his speeches at Boston University (May 21), in Mainz (May 31), and in Leiden (July 17).
71. It is important to note that, legally, the terms “reunification” and “unification” were not the same, though people frequently treat them as if they are. “Reunification” implied that the previous unified German state before Hitler began his conquests, the state that existed in 1937, might be brought back together. Indeed, the FRG itself defined reunification in its Basic Law by reference to the borders of Germany in 1937. For a prescient discussion of this point, see Karl Kaiser, “Unity for Germany, Not Reunification,” New York Times, October 6, 1989, p. A31.
72. Bush-Mulroney dinner memcon, 29 Nov 89, Bush Library.
73. Julij A. Kwizinskij, Vor dem Sturm: Erinnerungen eines Diplomaten, trans. Hilde Ettinger and Helmut Ettinger (Berlin: Siedler, 1993), 16–17. For the explanation that Soviet inaction was a result of Gorbachev’s hope that Krenz and Modrow would stabilize the situation, see Vyacheslav Dashichev, “On the Road to German Reunification: The View from Moscow,” in Soviet Foreign Policy, 1917–1991: A Retrospective, ed. Gabriel Gorodetsky (London: Frank Cass, 1993), 170, 173.
74. Remarks of President Bush and Chairman Gorbachev and a question-and-answer session with reporters at Malta, December 3, 1989, in Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989, bk. 2, 1877–78.
75. On Putin’s experience, Lynch, Vladimir Putin and Russian Statecraft, 22–25. For the general situation, see Krasnaya zvezda and Izvestiya, December 5 and 6, 1989. For the reports on emergency measures taken by Soviet troops, see the same newspapers for December 8 and 9, 1989.
76. According to Shevardnadze’s close aide, Sergei Tarasenko, and Chernyaev, the Soviet leadership was becoming worried that the real problem for them if Germany unified would be a witch hunt carried out against those who had “lost East Europe and Germany.” Tarasenko claims that by the end of 1989, he and others knew that the unification of Germany was inevitable and were trying to figure out a strategy to keep this development from bringing down Gorbachev’s government. Rice interviews with Tarasenko, Moscow, October 1991, and Chernyaev, Moscow, June 1994.
77. S. F. Akhromeyev and G. M. Kornienko [a former deputy foreign minister who retired in 1988], Glazami marshala i diplomata (Moscow: Mezhdunarodniye Otnosheniya, 1992), 253–54, 259.
78. This discussion is based on the Soviet memcon, Gorbachev-Genscher, 5 Dec 89, in Gorbachev papers provided to Stanford, and the West German memcons both for this meeting and for Genscher-Shevardnadze, 5 Dec 89, in Andreas Hilger, ed., Diplomatie für die deutsche Einheit (Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2011), 73–82. See also Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, 306–9; Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Erinnerungen (Berlin: Siedler, 1995), 684–87. The “left no doubt” quotation is from Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 70. Shevardnadze’s reference to Hitler was in the context of an alleged German “diktat” in forcing the annexation of a neighbor. See also Pravda, December 6, 1989, p. 1, and Izvestiya, December 6, 1989, p. 4. Shevardnadze’s public criticism of Genscher was especially sharp. On the hardening Soviet line, see the analysis sent urgently to Washington in Moscow 35285, “Soviet Concerns About Germany,” 9 Dec 89.
79. Soviet memcon, Gorbachev-Mitterrand, 6 Dec 89, in Gorbachev papers provided to Stanford; for an account based on the French record, Schabert, How World Politics Is Made, 257.
80. Just after the wall opened, Kissinger told Bush he thought that, as unity became more likely, the Soviets would fall back to a choice between the second and third options listed here. Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 191.
81. Védrine was specific in five dimensions: EC buildup; monetary union by deferring to German monetary policy preferences; EC openness toward all of Eastern Europe; a CFE treaty; and EC efforts to help reassure the Soviet Union. Schabert, How World Politics Is Made, 221–23. From the Quai, Blot had made a similar argument. “Reflections on the German Question,” 30 Oct 89, Europe 1986–1990, Allemagne (Statut), Box 6122, AD.
82. Genscher, Erinnerungen, 679 (“most important”); the quotation from what Mitterrand told Genscher is from the West German memcon, Genscher-Mitterrand, 5 Dec 89 (the phrase at the end was quoted verbatim), in Hilger, Diplomatie für die deutsche Einheit, 58. Schabert’s reading of the French record is similar; see also Bozo, Mitterrand, 122.
Some French officials, like Guigou, deny any formal quid pro quo between EC decisions and French positions on unification. Ibid., 248. Others, like Caroline de Margerie, argued that the French “would not have dared” to push forward with the later stages of European unification without the fall of the Berlin Wall and “the shock of German unification.” Quoted in Jean Lacouture, Mitterrand: Une histoire de Français, vol. 2, Les vertiges du sommet (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1998), 390. The record of what Mitterrand said in conversations like the one with Genscher, and what the Germans heard, seems to reinforce de Margerie’s argument.
83. See the quotes from the French record, Mitterrand-Thatcher memcon, 20 Jan 90, in Schabert, How World Politics Is Made, 245–46. On musings about alternative alliance structures in No. 10 Downing Street, see Powell to Thatcher, “East/West Relations,” 8 Dec 89, p. 3, PREM 19/2992, TNA.
84. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 70 (“icy climate”); for the French side, see Bozo, Mitterrand, 129–32; on the Mitterrand-Thatcher discussions in Strasbourg, which developed no concrete common plan, Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 796–97.
In early December, the Soviets made another move. They requested a Four Power meeting. The British and French agreed to this while they were in Strasbourg. The United States went along, insisting that the meeting would only discuss some Berlin issues.
Despite the December 11 meeting’s modest content, the fact that it was held at all angered many West Germans. But one of the Soviet officials involved thought that the meeting had been the warning shot which “beyond all doubt, [was] one of the major conditions that enabled the revolution in the GDR to remain bloodless.” The Americans had reasoned that the best way to defuse tensions at that moment was to do something to bring the Soviets down from the ceiling. Moscow needed an outlet for its anxiety. So, in fact, did Paris and London.
The meeting—as uncomfortable as it was for the Germans—may have served its purpose. The United States then refused repeated Soviet proposals to hold any more of them. Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 140–41.
85. Mitterrand to Kohl, Latche, 7 Jan 90, quoted in Favier and Martin-Roland, Les défis, 257.
86. On November 13, Ross and Francis Fukuyama on Ross’s staff suggested the articulation of “four principles which should frame our policy.” They were: (1) The United States should support true German self-determination without endorsing any specific outcome; (2) unification must be consistent with Germany’s membership in NATO and an integrated EC; (3) moves toward unity should be gradual, peaceful, and step-by-step; and (4) on the issue of postwar borders, all should respect “the principles adopted in the Helsinki Final Act recognizing the inviolability of frontiers in Europe, and allowing for the possibility of peaceful change.” Baker made these points in his own pre-Malta press conference. Ross to Baker, “How to Approach the German Unity Issue,” 13 Nov 89; transcript of Baker’s pre-Malta press conference, 29 Nov 89, pp. 7–8; they led Teltschik’s prompt report to Kohl, “Reaktionen aus den wichtigsten Hauptstädten auf Ihren 10-Punkte Plan,” 30 Nov 89, DzD-Einheit, 574.
87. For the German account of this meeting, see Teltschik, 329 Tage, 62–64; and see memcon Bush-Kohl at Château Stuyvenberg, Brussels, 3 Dec 89, Bush Library; the account that follows also draws on Zelikow interview with Scowcroft, Washington, DC, June 1991. See also Scowcroft to President Bush, “Scope Paper—Your Bilateral with Chancellor Kohl” (in-trip briefing materials).
88. On the road, Blackwill and Zoellick had worked on the earlier Baker formula and then the principals refined and approved it. The earlier Ross-Fukuyama formula had included a qualifier, “if there is unification.” That phrase was dropped. An earlier State Department addendum saying the outcome must also be acceptable to Germany’s neighbors had also been dropped. The language referring to Four Power rights was new, added because the embassy in Bonn had complained of Kohl’s persistent failure to refer to these rights and because of the Americans’ care to mention their legal obligation for Berlin and “Germany as a whole.” See Bonn 37736, “Kohl’s Ten-Point Program—Silence on the Role of the Four Powers,” 1 Dec 89.
89. The text of the intervention, which had been prepared in Washington mainly by Blackwill and Zelikow, was subsequently released to the public. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1989, bk. 2, 1644–47. Bush relayed to Gorbachev his four principles on Germany. Bush to Gorbachev, 8 Dec 89.
90. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 64–67; Zelikow interview with Blackwill, Cambridge, Mass., 1991.
91. Thatcher, The Downing Street Years, 795–96. Thatcher’s views were growing further and further apart from those of her diplomats, who also sensed their loss of influence, and it would be months before she started heeding their advice.
92. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 67.
93. See address of Secretary Baker, Berlin Press Club, 11 Dec 89, State Department transcript released to press. The speech was principally drafted by Zoellick.
94. Genscher had also mentioned some similar ideas to the Americans. See, for instance, Genscher-Bush memcon, 21 Nov 89, in Hilger, Diplomatie für die deutsche Einheit, 45; and the more abbreviated U.S. version of the memcon at the Bush Library. Kristina Spohr noticed this point in “Germany, America and the Shaping of Post–Cold War Europe: A Story of German International Emancipation Through Political Unification, 1989–90,” Cold War History 15, no. 2 (2015): 221, 234.
95. Jean-Louis Bianco, Guigou, Védrine, and Mitterrand quoted in Schabert, How World Politics Is Made, 269–70; on the narrow vision for NATO, see Nicole Gnesotto, “The Future of the Military Alliances in Europe,” 29 Nov 89, Allemagne files, Box 6123, AD.
96. Zoellick to Baker, 27 Nov 89, quoted (with emphasis apparently in original) in Sarotte, 1989, 77.
97. Zelikow interview with Baker, Houston, January 1995, and Bush-Mitterrand memcon, St. Martin, 16 Dec 89, Bush Library.
98. The following account of the preparation of the speech was relayed to the authors in two interviews with the speech’s principal drafter, Sergei Tarasenko, Moscow, October 1991, and Providence, Rhode Island, June 1993. Tarasenko was assisted by Teymuraz Stepanov from Shevardnadze’s policy planning unit. Kvitsinsky also became involved in the speech drafting, along with the ministry’s longtime German expert, Aleksandr Bondarenko.
99. Quotations from the speech are drawn from “Europe: A Time of Change—E. A. Shevardnadze’s Speech at the European Parliament Political Commission,” Pravda, December 20, 1989, p. 4; see Eduard Shevardnadze, Moi vybor: v zashchitu demokratii i svobody (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), 229–30.
100. The account of Genscher’s reference to the Bild article was given to Zelikow by an official who was present. The article must have been Karl-Ludwig Günsche, “Schewardnadse: Sieben Bedingungen für die Einheit,” Bild-Zeitung, December 20, 1989. It is conceivable that Genscher or his staff had some hand in this article, but there is no evidence for this. See also Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 68–72.
101. Scowcroft to Bush, “U.S. Diplomacy for the New Europe,” 22 Dec 89, Blackwill chron files, Bush Library. Blackwill and Zelikow had sent the draft to Scowcroft on December 19 with Blackwill’s note that “I hope you like this memo. We over here believe it’s important.” Scowcroft agreed.
102. Gerd Langguth, Angela Merkel: Aufstieg zur Macht (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 2007), 124–34; Qvortrup, Angela Merkel, 111–21.
103. For more on the dreams of the civic groups, especially New Forum, see Sarotte, 1989, 89–99.
104. Baker to President Bush (for his evening reading), 20 Dec 89. On Kohl’s trip to the GDR, see Teltschik, 329 Tage, 87–96.
105. Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 47 (emphasis added). Elbe remembered Zoellick’s reply.
106. The legal issue was whether the FRG had the capacity to settle the border with Poland. The Four Powers had reserved ultimate authority over the border of Germany in the Berlin declaration and Potsdam agreement of 1945. They reserved their rights in all subsequent agreements.
The West Germans had also argued, with support from the United States and Great Britain, that “Germany” still existed as a passive subject of international law, awaiting its eventual reestablishment as a unified state. Only such a reestablished Germany could conclude a final agreement on its borders.
The Polish and East German position, occasionally shared by the Soviets, was that “Germany” had been extinguished in 1945. The FRG and the GDR were its successors. These two states had declared their assent to the existing GDR-Polish border in the 1950 Treaty of Görlitz (GDR-Poland) and the 1970 Treaty of Warsaw (FRG-Poland). See, e.g., Wladyslaw Czaplinski, “The New Polish-German Treaties and the Changing Political Structure of Europe,” American Journal of International Law 86 (1992): 163, 164; Jochen Frowein, “Legal Problems of the German Ostpolitik,” International and Comparative Law Quarterly 23 (1974): 105.
107. Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 159; see also British ambassador Malaby’s talk with Kohl, Bonn 92, “Call on Kohl: German Question,” 25 Jan 90, in DBPO-German Unification, 222–24.
108. Blackwill to Scowcroft, “1990,” 19 Jan 90, Blackwill papers, Box 2, German Reunification, Bush Library; Hutchings through Blackwill to Scowcroft, “Your Breakfast with Kissinger: Managing the German Question”; and Zelikow interviews with Baker, Houston, January 1995, and Zoellick, Washington, DC, January 1995.
109. Paris 139, “Call on Dumas: Developments in Europe,” 2 Feb 90, in DBPO-German Unification, 246. On her copy of this cable, Thatcher noted her agreement with this pessimistic judgment. PREM 19/2998, TNA.
110. Washington 276, “Bilateral Discussion of German Issues,” 2 Feb 90, in DBPO-German Unification, 243.
111. “Toad” refers to the happily reckless driver in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows. Powell to Thatcher, “Germany: Meeting with Herr Teltschik,” 9 Feb 90 (with Thatcher’s annotations), in DBPO-German Unification, 274.
112. Rice to Blackwill, “Thinking about Germany,” 23 Jan 90. Zoellick and Ross’s views, at State, were similar. But as we will discuss, they believed the creation of the Two Plus Four process would be a proactive way to offer an outlet for Soviet concerns about German developments.
113. Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 139–41, 146, 154–56; “open-ended negotiation”: Scowcroft to Bush, “Mitterrand, the Germans, U.S.-EC Cooperation, and the CSCE,” 15 Dec 89. In late December, Blackwill was so worried that the pace of unification might force America to accept such a Versailles-type peace conference that he even proposed that the United States might try to slow down unification in order to avoid this danger. Scowcroft did not agree. The United States would follow Kohl’s lead on the pace. Hutchings through Blackwill to Scowcroft, “Responding to a Soviet Call for a German Peace Conference,” n.d. (written in late December 1989). The memo contained a draft memo for Bush, which Scowcroft rejected. Zelikow interview with Scowcroft, Washington, DC, 1991. For more worries at the time among some staff members about how to negotiate the German issues, see Hutchings through Blackwill to Scowcroft, “Your Breakfast with Kissinger: Managing the German Question,” 26 Jan 90, Blackwill papers, German Unification 1, Bush Library. At the same time, over at State, Zoellick and Ross were developing the Two Plus Four negotiating plan for Baker.
114. For details, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 162–64; Chernyaev diary 1990, 28 Jan, p. 11. Compare Sarotte, 1989, 100–102. She indicates that the only source for what happened is Chernyaev, but there are some nearly contemporary accounts of the discussions from Shakhnazarov and Falin. At this time Chernyaev’s position on Germany did not quite reflect Shevardnadze’s or Gorbachev’s views.
115. Marc Fisher, “East German Offers Plan for Unity,” Washington Post, February 2, 1990 (“united fatherland”). This East German–Soviet plan, announced on February 1, was the essential context to understand Gorbachev’s positions when he met with Baker and Kohl eight and nine days later. Gorbachev explained the plan to Bush, Kohl, Mitterrand, and Thatcher. See, e.g., Gorbachev to Bush, 2 Feb 90; and Gorbachev to Thatcher, 2 Feb 90, PREM 19/2998, TNA.
On Modrow’s talks with Gorbachev, see Modrow, Aufbruch und Ende, 120–23; Kotschemassow, Meine letzte Mission, 211–17; and interviews with Gorbachev, Modrow, and Manfred Gerlach excerpted in Kuhn, Gorbatschow und die deutsche Einheit, 100–103; TASS, “Shevardnadze Outlines Policy on German Unity,” February 2, 1990, in FBIS-SOV 90–024, February 5, 1990, 33–35; Bericht des Bundesministerium für innerdeutsche Beziehungen, in Materialen zur Deutschlandfragen (Bonn: Kulturstiftung der deutschen Vertriebenen, 1989–1991), 243–44; “Rabochii visit G. Gysi v SSSR,” Vestnik, February 28, 1990, pp. 4–5.
116. See Dieter Grosser, Das Wagnis der Währungs-, Wirtschafts-und Sozialunion: Politische Zwänge im Konflikt mit ökonomischen Regeln (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998), 183; Rödder, Deutschland einig Vaterland, 206–16; Teltschik, 329 Tage, 122 et seq.; Powell, visiting on February 9, conveyed a vivid summary of the economic union rush in his report, “Meeting with Herr Teltschik.”
117. Grosser, Das Wagnis, 174–88, 177 (“riskiest”).
118. See Modrow, Aufbruch und Ende, 127–36; Teltschik, 329 Tage, 144–45.
119. See, for example, the East German interest in protecting the idea of “property pluralism” in a new German republic, in Sarotte, 1989, 115.
120. An excellent summary of the arguments on Article 23 versus Article 146 can be found in “Grundgesetz oder ‘neue Verfassung’?: Die Kontroverse über die Artikel 23 und 146 des Grundgesetzes,” in Gerhart Maier, ed., Die Wende in der DDR (Bonn: Moeller-Druck, 1991), 73–83. Article 146 of the Basic Law did not itself require the convocation of a national assembly. It said only, “This Basic Law loses its validity on the day on which a constitution enters into force which has been adopted by the German people in a free decision.” The name “Basic Law” itself originally had an interim quality, the implication being that it would eventually be superseded by a constitution. Since the West German government had maintained since 1950 that such a constitution would be prepared by an all-German, freely elected national assembly, Article 146 was interpreted as referring to this sequence of events. On the working group’s early attraction to Article 23, see Teltschik, 329 Tage, 128, 152–53.
121. See Henry Kissinger, “Delay Is the Most Dangerous Course,” Washington Post, February 9, 1990, p. A27. Also raising some of the same questions was Flora Lewis, “Peace Before Power,” New York Times, February 17, 1990, p. 27.
122. See Blackwill to Scowcroft, “Germany,” 30 Jan 90. This memo attached a draft memo for Scowcroft to forward to President Bush, “A Strategy for German Unification,” laying out the proposed policy. The blueprint (outlined in eight points) was in the draft memo to the president. A copy was also passed informally to Baker and Zoellick, all handled outside the normal paperwork system. We have been unable to determine when the “strategy” memo was actually forwarded by Scowcroft to Bush. We do know that Scowcroft agreed with it.
123. Zelikow interviews with Genscher, Wachtberg-Pech, December 1994, and with Kastrup, Bonn, December 1994; also Hans-Dietrich Genscher, “German Unity in the European Framework,” Tutzing Protestant Academy, 31 Jan 90. Quotations are from the English-language translation prepared for Genscher and passed by him to Baker when the two men met in Washington on February 2.
124. State 36191, “Baker/Genscher Meeting February 2,” 3 Feb 90, Kanter files, Germany—March 1990, Bush Library (this was a readout that Zoellick, who was at the meeting, provided to Jim Dobbins, sent for Scowcroft and Blackwill, then in Munich, and for U.S. ambassador Vernon Walters to go over with Teltschik, who the United States guessed might not know what Genscher was doing).
At this time Genscher envisioned that both U.S. and Soviet forces might remain in Germany in some way for some time, as the alliances became part of “the all-European security structure.” See, for example, Genscher-Hurd memcon, 6 Feb 90, in Institut für Zeitgeschichte, Die Einheit: Das Auswärtige Amt, das DDR-Außenministerium und der Zwei-plus-Vier Prozess (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015) (hereinafter Einheit Dokumente), 231–32; the British account is at DBPO-German Unification, 262–63.
125. The Havel and Mazowiecki material, and the argument, is from Mary Elise Sarotte, “‘His East European Allies Say They Want to Be in NATO’: U.S. Foreign Policy, German Unification, and NATO’s Role in European Security 1989–90,” in Bozo et al., eds., German Reunification, 78–79.
126. Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 80.
127. For details, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 165–69 and the notes.
128. On Baker’s CSCE plans, see “CSCE Summit,” 22 Jan 90, in Box 115, Folder 7, Baker Papers; and on Genscher’s agreement to the conditions, State 36191, “Baker/Genscher Meeting February 2,” cited earlier.
129. Meanwhile, key British and American officials were also trying to improve their working relationships, outside the constraints of the Bush-Thatcher channel. As Genscher was coming to Washington, Zoellick and Blackwill opened a secret channel with British counterparts, meeting in Washington, to begin a more intensive sharing of ideas with an old ally that recently had seemed more distant. The channel was opened on January 29 (at American suggestion, according to the cable, although we believe Thatcher had also urged creation of such a channel). Sir Patrick Wright (British permanent under-secretary at the FO) and Andrew Wood (British DCM in Washington) on the British side. See Washington 240, “Bilateral Discussion of German Issues,” 30 Jan 90, in PREM 19/2998, TNA.
130. See Scowcroft to President Bush, “Trip Report,” 4 Feb 90.
131. For Baker’s plan, see the outline for Baker’s meeting with President Bush, 31 Jan 90 (these outlines were usually prepared by Zoellick for Baker), Baker Papers. Baker’s outline revealingly, erroneously, treats the concept of a “demilitarized” eastern Germany as identical to Genscher’s suggestion that the former GDR remain outside NATO. For Scowcroft’s advice, see Scowcroft to President Bush, “Message to Kohl,” 8 Feb 90 (drafted by Blackwill and Zelikow).
132. Ibid. The message to Kohl went out on February 9. Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft had decided to use this NSC staff draft instead of an alternative approach, drafted by the European bureau of the State Department, in which the former GDR would be protected not by NATO but by new promises to defend this part of Germany that would be given outside of the NATO treaty, by the United States, Britain, and France. Blackwill to Scowcroft, “State Department Draft Message to Kohl,” 8 Feb 90. The previous day Blackwill and Zelikow had drafted for Scowcroft an analysis of the complete spectrum of possible German affiliations to NATO and outcomes for the U.S. security presence. See “German Unity: Variations on the Theme,” 8 Feb 90 (a copy was passed to Zoellick after his return to Washington).
Even before Bush’s letter went to Kohl, the NSC staff briefed the British on their proposed formula for NATO in a unified Germany. Practically overnight, the British government prepared its own analysis for Thatcher of all the possible options. The Foreign Office and Thatcher immediately agreed that the formula the United States had chosen was best. They emphasized that the United States needed to preserve its military commitment on the ground in Germany. For Thatcher’s decision and the attached analyses, see the set of documents from Wall to Powell, on to Powell’s reply, “Germany and NATO,” 9 and 10 Feb 90, DBPO-German Unification, 281–86.
133. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1990, bk. 1 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991), 266.
134. Baker-Shevardnadze memcon, “Second One-on-One,” 9 Feb 90, pp. 3, 8 (Ross was the notetaker), released in full in 2016, State FOIA Case M-2015-11816.
135. Baker-Gorbachev memcon (U.S.), Kremlin, 9 Feb 90. The Soviet record is similar.
136. Kristina Spohr, “Precluded or Precedent-Setting? The ‘NATO Enlargement Question’ in the Triangular Bonn-Washington-Moscow Diplomacy of 1990–1991,” Journal of Cold War Studies 14, no. 4 (Fall 2012): 4–54; see also Spohr, “Germany, America and the Shaping of Post–Cold War Europe,” 235–41.
137. Much of the debate about the February “no extension” positions thus make the argument seem stronger by simply omitting any mention of how Genscher had explained his own alternative plan. For instance, Joshua Itzkowitz Shifrinson spends three pages describing the Genscher-Baker discussions and assurances without mentioning, even in the footnotes, the CSCE or “cooperative security structures” half of Genscher’s design. Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal? The End of the Cold War and the U.S. Offer to Limit NATO Expansion,” International Security 40, no. 4 (2016): 7, 22–25.
Sarotte does spell out this counterfactual. 1989, 197–99. The issue then becomes one of whether the alternative design was viable. To analyze that, she or others would have to explain how this new structure might have worked and why it would have been plausible, even to the Soviet Union. The Soviet government did end up developing an alternative design during the spring, but it had some distinctive features of its own, especially to manage German military power.
It would have been hard for leaders of major powers to have endorsed Genscher’s alternative structure without seriously considering its design. For instance, one can assume that in such a “cooperative” system, defense guarantees would no longer be sought or offered, but that assumption must be analyzed. If, on the other hand, the participants would seek security guarantees from each other, it cannot be assumed that the United States would have made security guarantees for an all-European collective security system, that U.S. troops would have remained in Europe after NATO was taken down, or that other European countries would have sought Soviet security guarantees as part of such a system.
138. See “Debate Speech by Ye. K. Ligachev,” Pravda, February 7, 1990, p. 6; “Speeches in the Discussion of the Report [to the Central Committee],” Pravda, February 7, 1990, pp. 5–6. The letter is reprinted in Ligachev’s memoir, Yegor K. Ligachev, Zagadka Gorbacheva (Novosibirsk: Interbook, 1992), 98–99.
139. Shifrinson quotes this Gorbachev response, but he leaves out that last Gorbachev sentence, “But don’t ask me to give you a bottom line right now.” Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal?,” 23. The full exchange was as follows:
Baker: Let’s assume for the moment that unification is going to take place. Assuming that, would you prefer a united Germany outside of NATO that is independent and has no US forces or would you prefer a unified Germany with ties to NATO and assurances that there would be no extension of NATO’s current jurisdiction eastward?
Gorbachev: Well I am giving thought to all these options. Soon we are going to have a seminar among our political leadership to talk about all these options. Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO is unacceptable.
Baker: I agree.
Gorbachev: Also, I believe that the presence of US troops could be very constructive and be positive in the situation as it evolves. Let me say that the approach you have outlined is a very possible one. We don’t really want to see a replay of Versailles, where the Germans were able to arm themselves. The lessons of the past tell us that Germany must stay within European structures. This is especially true given its enormous economic capabilities and what that can mean for its military potential. The best way to constrain that process is to ensure that Germany is contained within European structures. What you have said to me about your approach and your preference is very realistic. So let’s think about that. But don’t ask me to give you a bottom line right now. (Baker-Gorbachev memcon, 9 Feb 90, released in full in 2016, State FOIA Case M-2015-11816, p. 9.)
The exchange shows that Baker is still adhering to the Genscher formula. It also shows that the whole discussion is about how best to handle Germany—and whether U.S. forces should stay there.
This kind of intense exchange would go on in coming months. Each side’s position continued to evolve. Kohl, Mitterrand, and Thatcher would all also weigh in with Gorbachev about this topic.
As Gorbachev suggested, the Soviet side considered “all these options” and would later go into much more detail about its preferred stand. The U.S. position on how to define Germany’s NATO status also changed (in fact, later that same day Baker realized that his president had a different view than the one he had agreed to with Genscher). To help Gorbachev accept the Germany/NATO position, in May 1990 Baker would spell out a set of nine assurances that we discuss in the next chapter. These previewed the ultimate agreement Gorbachev hashed out with Kohl, codified in NATO actions, the Final Settlement on Germany, the pan-European CFE process, and the pan-European CSCE process. The U.S. and other governments followed through on all nine of Baker’s assurances.
140. Bush-Wörner memcon, Camp David, 10 Feb 90, Bush Library (the memcon in the official records is incorrectly dated).
141. See Teltschik, 329 Tage, 142–43; the venomous comments about Teltschik are in Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 98.
142. Sarotte, 1989, 113 (saying, in response to Kohl’s NATO offer, that Gorbachev had agreed “Germany could unify”) and, in her 2014 update, 222 (saying that, in response to Kohl’s NATO offer, Gorbachev had agreed to Kohl’s plan for economic and monetary union). She thus argues that there was a quid pro quo, but Gorbachev just did not lock it in. Sarotte, “Not One Inch Eastward? Bush, Baker, Kohl, Genscher, Gorbachev, and the Origin of Russian Resentment Toward NATO Enlargement in February 1990,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 1 (2010): 119, 131. In her book and in her article, Sarotte does not mention the Gorbachev-Modrow work, in which Gorbachev had just helped prepare an alternative conception of German unification that he had just praised to Kohl, Bush, and others. Shifrinson also repeatedly asserts that Gorbachev’s assent to unification was a quid pro quo for the Baker/Kohl assurances. He also omits any mention of the Modrow-Gorbachev unification plan. Shifrinson, “Deal or No Deal?,” 15, 25.
On February 10, Gorbachev knew that Kohl was proposing negotiations for a currency and economic union and that Kohl hoped this process would happen sometime after the March elections. Gorbachev and Modrow’s plan had its own conception of economic union (for instance, one of the other two among the three options in Waigel’s list that we mentioned earlier). Gorbachev chose to let the Germans work this out for themselves, without Soviet intervention. Kohl was quite relieved that Gorbachev did not plan to intervene in the imminent inter-German negotiations to discuss the form or timing of possible negotiations about economic and monetary union. But, as his subsequent actions would show, it is wrong to construe Gorbachev’s reluctance to intervene in these inter-German talks as his abandonment of Modrow. It is also wrong to then construe this supposed choice as a quid pro quo for a NATO proposal about which Gorbachev was also studiously noncommittal.
143. For example, Valentin Falin blasted both the Bush and Genscher formulas for suggesting NATO membership for a united Germany; see interview with Rudolf Augstein, Der Spiegel, February 19, 1990, pp. 168–72. He could not have picked a more prominent way to do this in the West German elite press. For Bondarenko’s public effort to set the record straight from the Foreign Ministry, see A. P. Bondarenko, “The Truth Is This,” Trud, February 18, 1990, p. 3, in FBIS-SOV 90–040, February 28, 1990, pp. 23–24. The Soviet government organized an extraordinary collective statement of its Foreign Ministry. See TASS International Service (Moscow), “Foreign Ministry Collegium Statement on Germany,” February 24, 1990, in FBIS-SOV 90–038, February 26, 1990, p. 1. Tarasenko confirmed that the collegium statement was intended as a “slap at Kohl.” Zelikow interview, Providence, June 1993.
144. Gorbachev-Modrow memcon, 12 Feb 90, in Gorbachev papers provided to Stanford.
145. This was not some bureaucratic boilerplate. Chernyaev himself drafted this Pravda statement for Gorbachev. Chernyaev diary 1990, 25 Feb, p. 14. For the statement, Moscow Domestic Service, “Gorbachev Discusses German Reunification,” February 21, 1990, in FBIS-SOV 90–035, 21 Feb 90, pp. 50–53.
146. On the internal West German arguments, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 203–4; and Spohr, “Precluded or Precedent-Setting?,” 33–36.
147. The “honest and unadorned” and “historic bargain” quotes are from Scowcroft to Bush, “Meetings with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl,” 22 Feb 90, Rice files, 1989–90 subject files, Bush Library (drafted by Zelikow with Blackwill). Zoellick had given Blackwill suggested guidance on the Two Plus Four approach to use in this briefing for Bush. Details in Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 211–12, 431 n. 30.
148. For a recent account of the French withdrawal in 1966, see Timothy Andrews Sayle, Enduring Alliance: A History of NATO and the Postwar Global Order (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019), 125–27. France formally rejoined NATO’s military command in 2009.
149. Bush-Kohl memcon, Camp David, 24–25 Feb 90, Bush Library; also DzD-Einheit, 860–77; Bush-Kohl press conference, 25 Feb 90, Bush Library; Baker to Genscher, State 63344, “Message to Genscher,” 28 Feb 90; see also Dobbins through Kimmitt and Bartholomew to Baker, “NATO and German Unification: Message to Genscher,” 27 Feb 90.
150. In his May 1989 proposal Bush had suggested setting a ceiling on U.S. and Soviet stationed troop strength of no more than 275,000. That then meant about a 15 percent cut in U.S. forces and a withdrawal of more than half of stationed Soviet forces. To respond to the momentous events of late 1989, Bush was presented with three new alternatives. His Defense and military leaders wanted to stick with 275,000. So did Baker, until CFE was signed. The NSC staff recommended dropping now to 200,000. Bush chose the NSC staff position. The final number was 195,000 as a common ceiling for American and Soviet forces in Central and Eastern Europe, and 225,000 for Europe overall, by 1994. See Scowcroft to President Bush, “CFE Reductions,” 16 Jan 90, attaching separate memos from Cheney, Scowcroft, and Baker. The NSC staff approach that was ultimately adopted was crafted by Blackwill and Zelikow with Arnold Kanter and Heather Wilson from Kanter’s defense and arms control directorate in the NSC staff, then refined by Scowcroft.
151. Under the revised ceilings the United States and the Soviet Union would be limited to 195,000 military personnel in Central Europe (defined to include the two Germanys, the Benelux countries, Denmark, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary). The Americans would have the right to station an additional 30,000 troops elsewhere in Europe (e.g., Great Britain or Italy). The Soviets had no troops stationed in Europe outside the central zone, so they were given no such extra entitlement. Zelikow participated in these negotiations; see also Zelikow through Blackwill to Scowcroft, “Impressions from the Ottawa Conference,” 14 Feb 90.
152. Mitterrand interview, “German Reunification: Interview with President Mitterrand,” February 14, 1990; English translation provided to the U.S. government by the French embassy. Interestingly, the embassy chose to delete some of the more disturbing parts of the interview in the translation they gave to the Americans. The complete text of the press interview was reported and commented on in Paris 5018, “President Mitterrand on Architecture: Is the French President Afraid of History After All?,” 14 Feb 90.
153. Based on Zelikow’s notes at the meeting.
154. See Kiessler and Elbe, Ein runder Tisch mit scharfen Ecken, 99–100; Shevardnadze, Moi vybor, 225–27, 231–33. The background of the Two Plus Four was well described in the detailed background press briefings conducted by Zoellick and Ross at the time. See PA transcript, “Background Briefing by Senior Administration Officials,” 12 Feb 90, pp. 5–8 (Zoellick is the briefer in the cited portion); PA transcript, “Department of State Background Briefing on Results of Ottawa Ministerial,” 14 Feb 90 (“First Official” is Ross; “Second Official” is Zoellick).
155. Based on Zelikow’s notes of the meeting, echoed in other sources. On Thatcher’s support for the Two Plus Four design (although the British preferred to call it “Four plus Two”), see Powell to Wall, “German Reunification,” 15 Feb 90, DBPO-German Unification, 297–98.
The United States then turned to the task of structuring the Two Plus Four talks so that, as Scowcroft warned Bush, “we do not mismanage what will arguably be the most important set of talks for the West in the postwar period.” Scowcroft to Bush, “Preparing for the Six Power German Peace Conference,” 15 Feb 90 (drafted principally by Rice); see also Robert Blackwill, “German Unification and American Diplomacy,” Aussenpolitik 45, no. 3 (1994): 211, 214–15. Three tasks were then vital. First, commit the West Germans and other allies to a common position on the details of the security issues that would soon be so contentious. Second, delay. The Two Plus Four should start work very slowly, while German unification was happening very quickly. Third, when the Two Plus Four started up, the subjects for discussion should be “as limited as possible—dealing only with the legal issues related to the end of Four Power rights, the consequences of the absorption of the GDR into the FRG, and the issue of what becomes of forces on the territory of Germany’s eastern half.” Zoellick had already begun to think of the Two Plus Four as a “steering committee” with a narrow mandate. Kohl and Genscher and their teams also liked the American approach, and it prevailed in the discussions to prepare the talks.
156. For the Shevardnadze statement in Ottawa, see Pravda, February 16, 1990, p. 5.
157. Gorbachev in Pravda, March 5, 1990; Shevardnadze, published in an East German magazine aimed at the East German audience, in TASS, “Shevardnadze Discusses German Unity in Interview,” March 7, 1990, in FBIS-SOV 90–046, March 8, 1990, pp. 37–40. On Gorbachev’s meeting with Modrow, see Modrow, Aufbruch und Ende, 137–41.
All of this was closely followed in diplomatic and intelligence reports. U.S. ambassador Jack Matlock, for example, analyzed—in Moscow 8648, “Soviets Move Publicly to ‘Put the Brakes’ on German Rush for Unification,” 14 Mar 90—that “to Moscow, the rush toward German unification is not unlike a large Mercedes barreling down the autobahn showing little regard for public safety.… Moscow is sending the message that unless Kohl (and others) are prepared to meet the Soviets part-way, Germany’s journey to reunification could be far lengthier and slower than expected.”
158. See Hans-Dietrich Genscher, “German Unity as a Contribution to European Stability,” Nordsee-Zeitung, March 3, 1990. By SPD centrists we mean figures like Willy Brandt, Horst Ehmke, and Dietrich Stobbe. Opposed to NATO membership were the party’s chancellor candidate Oskar Lafontaine and Egon Bahr. The SPD had prepared a party platform calling for the dissolution of both alliances. See Scowcroft to President Bush, “SPD Thinking on a United Germany” (probably the last week of March); Baker to Bush (for his evening reading), 7 Mar 90.
159. See the joint “Erklärung zum Weg zur deutschen Einheit” issued by both SPD parties, February 19, 1990, in Materialen zu Deutschlandfragen, 192–93. The SPD joint statement also called for much earlier external intervention by the Four Powers in the unification process, envisioning a conference in the second half of April that would also include all of Germany’s neighbors, whose views would “be dealt with as a matter of the highest priority.”
160. Teltschik, 329 Tage, 173.
161. The election day’s cover of Der Spiegel read simply: “Kohl’s Triumph.” Among the best contemporary accounts of the campaign and election are “Es gibt keine mehr,” Der Spiegel, March 19, 1990, pp. 20–33; Timothy Garton Ash, “The East German Surprise,” New York Review of Books, April 26, 1990, p. 14; Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity, 115–28; Pond, Beyond the Wall, 199–201; Martin Mantzke, “Eine Republik auf Abruf: Die DDR nach den Wahlen vom 18. März 1990,” Europa-Archiv, April 25, 1990, p. 287; Maier, Die Wende in der DDR, 83–88; and Daniel Hamilton, After the Revolution: The New Political Landscape in East Germany (Washington, DC: American Institute for Contemporary German Studies, 1990), 14–18, 42–43.
162. Secto 2017, “Memorandum for the President: Namibia, March 20,” 20 Mar 90 (sent from Windhoek).
163. This was an important theme when Bush called Gorbachev to brief him directly on his talks with Kohl. Bush-Gorbachev telcon, 28 Feb 90, Bush Library.
Chapter 5: The Designs for a New Europe
1. Powell to Thatcher, “Seminar on British Defence Policy,” 21 Jan 90, in PREM 19/2992, TNA. Thatcher marked up and appears to have agreed with Powell’s argument. See also Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest, no. 16 (Summer 1989): 3–18. Fukuyama regarded liberalism as the durable synthesis, after the defeat of fascism and communism. He worked in 1989–90 for Ross on Baker’s Policy Planning Staff, but his much-publicized philosophical argument antedated and was unrelated to his State Department service.
2. See generally Kristina Spohr, Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World After 1989 (London: William Collins, 2019), chapter 5.
3. Thomas Banchoff, “German Policy Towards the European Union: The Effects of Historical Memory,” German Politics 6, no. 1 (1997): 60–76, focuses on Kohl’s historical understanding.
4. To piece together the story of the origins of the political union, compare the good accounts in Werner Weidenfeld with Peter Wagner and Elke Bruck, Außenpolitik für die deutsche Einheit (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1998), 384–414, 403 (“garbage heap”), 405 (“federalist excesses”); with Dyson and Featherstone, The Road to Maastricht, 204–9, 375–78; and with Bozo, Mitterrand, 235–37 (emphasizing Guigou’s role in late March); see also, appearing to kick off the main action, Hartmann-Ludewig-Delors memcon, Paris, 16 Feb 90, DzD-Einheit, 852–53. In the workings of the triumvirate Delors often was closer to Kohl than he was to Mitterrand. Delors’s aide, Pascal Lamy, could usually get his work done at the Elysée by working through Guigou (rather than Jacques Attali). Joachim Bitterlich was a key aide for Kohl, along with Teltschik. The foreign ministries became intensely involved in the last stage of the process, with Genscher and Dumas working well together, as usual.
5. See the summary in Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 447–57, 384–85, Table 6.2.
6. Dyson and Featherstone, The Road to Maastricht, xi.
7. Chernyaev diary 1990, entries for 22 and 30 Apr, pp. 25, 27.
8. This summary draws from Rice’s recollections; Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 222–29; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 239–44; Bozo, Mitterrand, 240–41. The use of Lugar as an intermediary arose from an American debate about whether the United States should pressure the Lithuanians to go along with the German and French initiative. Gates, Blackwill, and Rice were opposed. They argued that Washington should not leave its fingerprints on an effort to dissuade the Baltic states from seeking independence. Scowcroft, Baker, and Ross, however, believed that the Americans could send an “indirect” message to the Lithuanians that they wanted to see a resolution. “When progress stopped,” Don Oberdorfer, The Turn: from the Cold War to a New Era; The United States and the Soviet Union, 1983–1990 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 404 (from Oberdorfer interview with Rice).
9. On the historical evolution of conventional wisdom about the Sverdlovsk issue, up to a point, see Michael Gordin, “The Anthrax Solution: The Sverdlovsk Incident and the Resolution of a Biological Weapons Controversy,” Journal of the History of Biology 30, no. 3 (1997): 441–80. When Gordin wrote this article he did not know about the information that Soviet leaders of the BW program had already provided, from late 1989 onward, to the U.S. and British governments.
10. The first key defector, in October 1989, was Vladimir Pasechnik. Later there were other defectors and sources. The head of the Soviet biological weapons program, and Pasechnik’s supervisor, was Ken Alibek. In 1989, Alibek joined in the cover-ups, external and internal. In 1992, Alibek defected to the United States. He has since published a memoir about his work and his defection: Biohazard (New York: Random House, 1999). The best overall account of the Soviet biological weapons story is now Milton Leitenberg and Raymond Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). For more on the origins of the Soviet program, see Raymond Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program and Its Legacy in Today’s Russia (Washington, DC: National Defense University Occasional Paper 11, July 2016); see also the valuable narrative in David Hoffman, The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy (New York: Doubleday, 2009), 327–57. The Soviet program leaders, like Alibek, appear to have assumed that the United States and Britain also had large clandestine BW programs. They were profoundly shocked when they learned, including through Soviet site visits in the United States, that this was not true and that the Americans and British had actually complied with the BWC.
The 1990s-era memoirs, including that of the U.S. ambassador, Matlock, leave out any discussion of these BW issues. The British ambassador in Moscow published his memoir in 2002, after the Soviet defector identities and information had been made public, and he gave some information about this. Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River, 141–43, but Braithwaite did not feel able to discuss other details that have since come out.
11. Some British officials apparently wanted to publicize all that was known and have a public confrontation with the Soviet government. Bush and Thatcher, and their top aides, did not agree. See the sifting of the evidence on this in Leitenberg and Zilinskas, The Soviet Biological Weapons Program, 582–92 and their notes.
12. For the Matlock-Bessmertnykh discussion, ibid., 594–95. Leitenberg and Zilinskas have the best summary of the subsequent developments, including a substantial analysis puzzling over Gorbachev’s handling of this issue. Ibid., 595-630. They are mistaken on a small factual point: They date the first Baker-Shevardnadze discussion of the BW issues on May 2. In fact, these discussions were on May 17, after the initial demarches at the lower level. Hoffman did the initial reporting on Gorbachev’s recollection of his first discussion about the program with Bush. The Dead Hand, 350–51.
13. For the details of this diplomacy, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 213, 217–22; Bozo, Mitterrand, 224–28; Weidenfeld, Außenpolitik, 484–91.
One great irony was that the issue was propelled by the inability of the FRG to sign a treaty on behalf of the future united Germany. But the FRG’s March decision (formally announced on March 8) to unify by means of Article 23 made the point moot. If the FRG annexed the GDR, making it part of the existing Federal Republic, Bonn’s past international legal obligations—including its 1970 treaty with Poland guaranteeing the borders—remained intact. As a legal matter, that would have been enough to bind a united Germany to recognition of the Polish border. See Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 267, 435 n. 55, 451–52 nn. 30 and 31, 456 n. 9. But the issue was also about the political symbolism of reaffirming the border.
14. For variants of these Soviet positions, which were significantly guided by then–deputy foreign minister Yuli Kvitsinsky and the German expert Aleksandr Bondarenko, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 248–49, 261, 264–65, 295–97.
15. An even earlier precedent for such military controls were those placed on Russia in 1856, in the Treaty of Paris that concluded the Crimean War and required the demilitarization of the Black Sea. Russian leaders had detested these restrictions. The Russians had finally cast off these controls in moves between 1866 and 1871—at the time of Germany’s first unification. See Stéphanie Burgaud, “1866: Why the Russian Bomb Did Not Explode,” International History Review 40, no. 2 (2018): 253–72.
16. The proximate reason for the 1947 breakdown was disagreements among the Four Powers about the economic administration of occupied Germany. The Americans pressed their German disarmament plan but, amid the other quarrels, the Soviet government ignored it. Philip Zelikow, “George C. Marshall and the Moscow CFM Meeting of 1947,” Diplomacy and Statecraft 8, no. 2 (1997): 97–124.
17. Rice and Zelikow to Blackwill, “Two Plus Four: The Next Phase,” 10 May 90; Zoellick also made notes for himself around the same time, in his office files. He had discussed the issue with the West Germans and previewed it for Baker back in March. On that and also the difficult legal issue that would be confronted, effectively forcing the United States to adopt the kind of arguments that the Soviets had used in the 1950s during the Berlin crisis, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 246, 448 n. 9.
The British government disagreed internally on whether it was willing to let Four Power rights terminate. But Foreign Secretary Hurd and his team in London had about the same position as the Americans did. They pushed back hard against concerns voiced in No. 10 and from their ambassador in Bonn, and insisted that the British should let their rights lapse when Germany unified. See Weston to Wall, 18 May 90, answering Powell to Wall that day, reacting to Bonn 634, “German Unification: The Timetable Accelerates,” 17 May 90, in DBPO-German Unification, 390–94; see also the earlier Foreign Office analysis by Hurd’s policy planner, Robert Cooper, on “The Soviet Veto in the Two plus Four Talks,” 6 Apr 90, in ibid., 371–72.
18. On the Hurd-Kohl meeting, see Teltschik, 329 Tage, 235; Bonn (U.S. embassy) 15540, “Hurd’s May 15 Visit to Bonn,” 16 May 90.
19. Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 236.
20. On the details of this diplomacy, with the approach effectively settled among the Americans and West Germans in June 1990, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 239, 267–68, 274–75, 306–7, 308, 323, 333.
21. On the eventual scale and cost of German CFE compliance, Celeste Wallander, Mortal Friends, Best Enemies: German-Russian Cooperation After the Cold War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999), 104, 110.
22. CFE 1A was more formally called the Concluding Act of the Negotiation on Personnel Strength of Conventional Armed Forces in Europe, signed in Helsinki in July 1992. In that agreement, Germany reduced its ceiling to 345,000. France, which had about three-quarters of Germany’s population, had a ceiling of 325,000. With nearly double Germany’s population, Russia was granted a disproportionately large ceiling of 1.45 million, more than four times the German total. Ukraine, with about one-third the population of Russia, was granted a ceiling of 450,000.
23. Kohl-Bush memcons, Washington, 17 May 90, Bush Library; Teltschik, 329 Tage, 236–39; DzD-Einheit, 1126–27 (in which the records of the three meetings run together). The small discussion seeking the “honest opinion” was just with Bush, Kohl, Scowcroft, Teltschik, and the interpreters (the 10:00 to 11:30 meeting), on which the American record is more detailed than the German one, although the essence of the exchange is clear in all the sources. During April and early May, Bush had just completed another set of summit meetings with Thatcher and Mitterrand and Wörner, in addition to his talks with Kohl.
24. Bush address, Oklahoma State University, 4 May 90, Bush Library.
25. Kohl-Mitterrand memcon, Latche (near the coast in the French Pyrenees), 4 Jan 90, DzD-Einheit, 685.
26. The account that follows is drawn from Teltschik, 329 Tage, 221, 226–28, 230–35.
27. The discussion that follows is drawn from ibid., pp. 237–38; Bush-Kohl memcon, 17 May 90, Bush Library.
28. For the Zoellick-Ross drafted presentation on Germany that Baker took into his meeting with Gorbachev, see briefing paper, “One-on-One Points: Gorbachev Meeting,” n.d. For Baker’s summary to Bush on his meeting with Gorbachev, see Secto 7015 (from Moscow), “Memorandum for the President: Moscow, May 18,” 19 May 90. For Chernyaev’s vehement private dissent, see Chernyaev diary 1990, 5 May, p. 29.
29. Scowcroft to Bush, “A Strategic Choice: Do We Give Aid to the Soviet Union?,” 25 May 90, in Rice files, Soviet Union/USSR Subject Files, US-USSR Soviet Relations (2), Bush Library. The memo was drafted principally by Rice, working with Blackwill and Gates. It was highly classified at the time and handled outside of the normal paperwork system.
30. Quoted in Bozo, Mitterrand, 253.
31. The language appears in “Principle I” of the “Principles Guiding Relations between Participating States” in “Basket I” of the Helsinki Final Act of 1975, dealing with security questions: “[The participating states] also have the right to belong or not to belong to international organizations, to be or not to be a party to bilateral or multilateral treaties including the right to be or not to be a party to treaties of alliance; they also have the right to neutrality.” Within the American government Zoellick had seized on this principle months earlier as a way to strengthen the West’s position, since the CSCE document, though not legally binding on signatories, was one of the few bodies of principles clearly agreed to by both sides.
32. Central Committee staff to members of the Politburo, “O svazi otnosheniyakh c vostochnym-evropa,” May 1990, in Center for the Storage of Contemporary Documentation (TsKhSD), Moscow.
33. The German government has long had relatively broad authority to guarantee export-related loans, combined (not coincidentally) with close relationships between top government and banking leaders. An example is their “Hermes cover” program. In the U.S. government the strongest export credit guarantee authorities are confined to agricultural exports. The G-7 governments could help fund and try to persuade the international financial institutions to make loans, led by the IMF. This would require Soviet membership in the IMF, a process that began getting under way, precariously, in late 1990, and would then lead to setting policy conditions in order to get credit.
34. See Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 276–78.
35. See Oberdorfer, The Turn, 414–15; Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 217–18 (both sources are accurate on this episode, based on interviews with participants).
36. We have been unable to locate a memcon for this May 31 afternnon meeting in the American archives, but there are extensive quotes in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 281–83. When in doubt we have relied on their language. Part of the Soviet memcon is quoted in Chernyaev, Shest’ let s Gorbachevym, 348. Other details in the discussion that follows are drawn from Zelikow’s interviews with participants at the meeting (Chernyaev, Blackwill, and Zoellick); Zoellick’s and Blackwill’s handwritten notes from the meeting; and the memoir of another participant, Valentin Falin, Politische Erinnerungen, trans. Heddy Pross-Weerth (Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1993), 492–93.
37. Bush stayed close to a prepared presentation titled “The Future of Europe: Germany, NATO, CFE, and CSCE.” His talking points were drafted by Ross and Rice, then edited and refined by Blackwill, Zoellick, and Zelikow.
38. Rice interview with Chernyaev, Moscow, June 1994.
39. The conversation was recorded by CNN, with Gorbachev and the congressmen apparently unaware that the TV cameras were broadcasting it live to the world—and to Bush, who was watching in the Oval Office. Oberdorfer, The Turn, 418–19; Beschloss and Talbott, At the Highest Levels, 221–22.
40. Based on our understanding of the discussion at the time. As far as we know, there is no written record of the Bush-Gorbachev side discussions at Camp David about economic aid or about biological weapons.
41. See Teltschik, 329 Tage, 255–58; Bush-Kohl and Bush-Thatcher telcons, 3 Jun 90, Bush-Mitterrand telcon, 5 Jun 90, Bush Library. The written messages were sent out on June 4. Bush did tell both Kohl and Thatcher about the private discussions of economic aid. The letter to Thatcher did not mention Bush’s discussion of the biological weapons problem with Gorbachev. Some of those discussions were handled directly between Scowcroft and Charles Powell. Thatcher was kept up to date on the BW discussions and she followed up on the subject with Gorbachev when she went to Moscow later that month.
42. Hannes Adomeit, “Gorbachev, German Unification and the Collapse of Empire,” Post-Soviet Affairs 10 (August–September 1994): 197, 229 n. 28; Zelikow interview with Chernyaev, Moscow, January 1994.
43. Julij Kwizinskij, Vor dem Sturm, 16 (“surrealistic jumble”). One of the more complete summaries of the developed Soviet alternative emerged from the lengthy Genscher-Shevardnadze talks in Brest-Litovsk on 11 Jun 90. The memcon is in Hilger, Diplomatie, doc. 35, see pp. 175–77; and summarized in Dieter Kastrup’s report on the talks to NATO ambassadors, 13 Jun, in Einheit Dokumente, doc. 112, esp. pp. 559–60. Shevardnadze’s examples of the disputes that a CSCE conflict prevention center might address are from Genscher’s recounting of his May 23 meeting with Shevardnadze to Baker a couple of days later. Ibid., doc. 102, p. 510.
44. See Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 244, 293. However, in mid-June 1990 the Soviet government did table ideas for a proposed NATO–Warsaw Pact joint declaration that would create a joint pan-European collective military alliance open to all thirty-five CSCE states. The same draft also included multilateral peacekeeping forces “to maintain peace between East and West,” but it required that NATO drop its own mutual defense obligations. It also called for withdrawal of all U.S. forces, including nuclear forces, from Germany as Soviet forces left. It also required withdrawal of naval and air forces from Europe that might be used for “surprise offensive actions and large-scale operations” based in Europe. The United States and other NATO allies regarded this proposal as so obnoxious as to be nonnegotiable. The West Germans and British hoped to salvage the joint declaration idea if it could be made dull and substance-free.
Top Soviet officials never really explained their arguments for how such a pan-European military alliance would work. We believe this particular laundry list of ideas had not been seriously considered, but instead was tabled as a set of straw positions to slow down the diplomatic process. Ibid., 310–11.
45. Baker to Bush (sent as Secto 6013 from Bonn), “My Meeting with Shevardnadze,” 5 May 90; Baker made a similar point six weeks later, in June, after another tough meeting with Shevardnadze; on that and the context, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 303. “Demonic” is from a comment Genscher made in Kohl-Bush memcons, 17 May 90, Bush Library.
46. For the details of the American work, pre-summit allied consultations, and the summit itself, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 238–40, 303–24. In addition to the sources cited there, Ross’s handwritten notes of the pre-summit meeting with Bush in Kennebunkport (which Zelikow attended) are available in Box 109, Folder 3, Baker Papers. For the summit itself, the practically verbatim records of the head of state meetings at the London NATO summit, North Atlantic Council, 5 and 6 Jul 90, C-VR(90)36, Parts I and II, are now opened in the NATO Archives, available online.
47. On the origins of the diplomatic liaison mission move, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 304, 460 n. 36. Sarotte emphasizes a memo that one of Ross’s staffers, Harvey Sicherman, wrote on March 12 arguing that East European countries might want some sort of cooperation with NATO and the EC to ease their dilemma of being between Germany and Russia. Mary Sarotte, “Perpetuating U.S. Preeminence: The 1990 Deals to ‘Bribe the Soviets Out’ and Move NATO In,” International Security 35, no. 1 (2010): 110, 118. Sicherman’s memo was one among various ideas circulating in March and April that led us to come up with the liaison missions initiative, which we presented to Blackwill and Scowcroft in April, then to the interagency European Strategy Steering Group (which included Ross and Zoellick), which endorsed it. It thus became part of the U.S.-proposed NATO offer accepted by NATO leaders—an offer made to the Soviet government as well as to other former Warsaw Pact member states. Led by Delors, who favored this, the EC had started its own efforts to reach out to the East European states.
48. Eduard Shevardnadze, Moi vybor: zashchitu demokratii i svobody (Moscow: Novosti, 1991), 239; “Comments by Soviets on NATO,” New York Times, July 7, 1990, p. 5; TASS, “Shevardnadze on NATO Communique,” July 6, 1990, in FBIS-SOV 90–131, July 9, 1990; see also Chernyaev’s satisfied comment in his 1990 diary, 9 Jul, p. 39.
49. Hans Klein, Es begann im Kaukasus: Der entscheidende Schritt in die Einheit Deutschlands (Berlin: Ullstein, 1991), 234–35 (“Never in my life”). Details of the diplomacy, based on American, German, and Soviet sources, plus surrounding context, are at Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed. Both of us participated in the Two Plus Four talks. A fine narrative summary of this diplomatic endgame is Kristina Spohr, Post Wall, Post Square, chapter 4.
50. The nine points were:
1. limiting the Bundeswehr in CFE II [this was actually done in 1990 without waiting for CFE II];
2. accelerating SNF negotiations [Bush jumped over the negotiations in September 1991 with a unilateral withdrawal of practically all such weapons, which Gorbachev reciprocated];
3. ensuring that the Germans would not develop, possess, or acquire either nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons [this was done in the Final Settlement];
4. keeping NATO forces out of the GDR for a transition period [also done, with further details discussed in Soviet–West German talks];
5. developing a transition period for Soviet forces to leave the GDR [worked out between West Germans and Soviets];
6. adapting NATO politically and militarily [accomplished both in word and deed in 1990 and 1991];
7. getting an agreement on the Polish-German border [done in the manner we discussed above];
8. institutionalizing and developing CSCE [done in the 1990 Charter of Paris and the 1992 Helsinki CSCE summit, with solid Soviet, then Russian, participation]; and
9. developing economic relations with the Germans, while ensuring that GDR economic obligations to the USSR would be fulfilled [also worked out between the Soviets and Germans].
As Baker recalled, “Gorbachev took copious notes as I went through the list and made clear he approved of it very much.” Where Gorbachev still balked at that time, in mid-May, was the acceptance of a unified Germany in NATO. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 250–51.
Citing “insights from international relations theory,” Shifrinson has argued that the United States made “informal assurances” not to extend NATO and that it made a “false promise of accommodation” of Soviet interests. The promise was false, he asserts, because, in 1990, the United States and its allies hoped to preserve NATO and because, in 1990, the door to possible future NATO enlargement was “left ajar.” Thus “the United States was insincere when offering the Soviet Union informal assurances against NATO expansion.” “Deal or No Deal?,” 34, 38, 40.
The context of the “left ajar” quote provides a more accurate snapshot of U.S. views not only in 1990, but also onward until 1993, after the Soviet Union had disintegrated. At the end of October 1990, Zelikow briefed Gates on the state of play, in the European Strategy Steering Group, on the question of: “Should the US and NATO now signal to the new democracies of Eastern Europe NATO’s readiness to contemplate their future membership?”Zelikow reported that “all agencies agree that East European governments should not be invited to join NATO anytime in the immediate future. There is general satisfaction with the way the State paper ended up handling the issue of Eastern Europe [page numbers given]. However, OSD [Cheney’s civilian aides] and State’s Policy Planning Staff (and possibly Zoellick) would like to keep the door ajar and not give the East Europeans the impression that NATO is forever a closed club.” The rest of State preferred to just be “inscrutable,” treating the issue “as premature and not on the table, while of course reserving our options as the political situation in Europe evolves.” Zelikow through Gompert and Kanter to Gates, “Your Meeting of the European Strategy Steering Group,” 26 Oct 90, pp. 4–5, Wilson files, Bush Library. This reserved stance was precisely the approach that had animated our “liaison missions” proposal that NATO had adopted in July 1990, which then led to the 1991 creation of the NACC.
There were no “informal assurances” to scuttle or settle NATO’s future contours, one way or another. The American sources, which we know well, do not say different. Perhaps more to the point, the other governments so centrally involved, like the Soviet and West German governments, also did not believe at the time that they had struck such an agreement, formally or informally. Those who did the work were professionals who knew what they were agreeing to, or not.
Bush, Baker, Kohl, and Genscher actually worked conscientiously and in good faith to accommodate Soviet and Russian security concerns. Those looking for informal assurances meant to accommodate such concerns can readily find them: Baker presented his list of nine assurances to Gorbachev in May 1990, a list circulated and discussed among allied governments, and repeatedly stressed in the subsequent diplomacy.
51. Blackwill’s July 25 remarks were reported by a British embassy attendee a week later. DBPO-German Unification, 470 n. 9.
52. On the last-minute tensions, centered on a quarrel among the Western allies over how to delimit allowable foreign troop movements in the former GDR, a blowup that the West Germans blamed on the British, details are in Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 359–62. See, for the amusing British version of the story, Weston to Mallaby, “Two Plus Four: The End Game,” 17 Sep 90, in DBPO-German Unification, 466–71.
53. See, e.g., Scowcroft’s comments in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 297–98.
54. The metaphor of a “bribe” is vivid because it sounds corrupt. E.g., Sarotte, “Perpetuating U.S. Preeminence: The 1990 Deals to ‘Bribe the Soviets Out’ and Move NATO In.” Sarotte attributes the original “bribe” expression to Gates, and she applies it liberally, even to moves like the London NATO summit. There was nothing corrupt about this bargain. Gorbachev displayed integrity in office. In the case of the Soviet troop maintenance and withdrawal costs, he had a legitimate case that, for several reasons, was better addressed to the German side. The German money included, for example, items like money for construction of more than forty-five thousand apartments for returning troops, itself only a fraction of the Soviet military housing problem. Odom, The Collapse of the Soviet Military, 279.
55. Chernyaev diary 1990, entries for July 14 and 15 [there is a typo in the month given for the July 14 entry], p. 41.
56. Grosser, Das Wagnis, 433. West German grants related to Soviet troop withdrawal totaled about DM 15 billion, or about $9 billion. German Finance Ministry, “Deutsche Unterstützungmaßnahmen für den Reformprozeß in der UdSSR,” 12 Apr 91, in ibid., 432–33.
57. As of April 1991, the German credit guarantees totaled DM 24.7 billion (including balance of payments credits and portions of EC credits) and the Germans carried a balance of DM 16.9 billion in transferable rubles. Ibid.
58. On this point, see, e.g., Stanley Fischer, “Stabilization and Economic Reform in Russia,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 1 (1992): 84–85 (comparing Soviet export income to a Soviet foreign debt of $80 billion by the end of 1991).
59. Baker, Politics of Diplomacy, 529.
60. Zelikow participated in the work on these NATO operations. In the case of the movement of the U.S. VII Corps, the procedures for large international movements of military forces had been put in place with standing NATO agreements (called STANAGs) and rehearsed in more than twenty REFORGER exercises practicing movement of American forces in Europe, as well as movements that had already begun to withdraw U.S. forces from Europe to comply with the soon-to-be-signed CFE treaty.
61. The other occasion when foreign troops were deployed into Israel to aid its defense was during the Suez War of 1956, when French forces, mainly aircraft, were secretly deployed to Israel and operated from Israeli bases.
62. David Gompert, “The United States and Yugoslavia’s Wars,” in Richard Ullman, ed., The World and Yugoslavia’s Wars (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1996), 122; see also, including on the prescient, gloomily detached November 1990 intelligence estimate, Hutchings, American Diplomacy and the End of the Cold War, 305–6.
63. Dumas, in Pierre Favier and Michel Martin-Roland, La décennie Mitterrand, vol. 4, Les déchirements (1991–1995) (Paris: Seuil, 1999), 197.
64. Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 268, discussing the exchanges with Mitterrand about NATO’s future at the April 1990 Key Largo summit.
65. The French views in this period are well summarized in Bozo, Mitterrand, 245–82. French troops in Germany were there as part of alliance defense, but not under NATO’s integrated military command, which France had left in 1966 (when NATO headquarters left Paris and moved to its present home on the outskirts of Brussels).
66. Bozo, Mitterrand, 346, 390; for the best overall analysis of the argument in the early 1990s, compare the account in Bozo with Kori Schake, “NATO After the Cold War, 1991–1995: Institutional Competition and the Collapse of the French Alternative,” Contemporary European History 7, no. 3 (1998): 379–407.
67. Short, A Taste for Intrigue, 514; Favier and Martin-Roland, Les déchirements, 168–69, 201–19.
68. For a succinct overview of why it took ten years to sort all of this out, see Jolyon Howorth, “The EU, NATO, and the Origins of CFSP and ESDP,” in Frédéric Bozo, Marie-Pierre Rey, N. Piers Ludlow, and Leopoldo Nuti, eds., Europe and the End of the Cold War: A Reappraisal (London: Routledge, 2008), 259–70.
69. Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 355.
70. Quotes are from the Kohl-Mitterrand memcon, Latche, 4 Jan 90, DzD-Einheit, 687; Kohl-Mitterrand dinner memcon, 15 Feb 90, in ibid., 850. In their January conversation, Mitterrand observed that if Gorbachev could be a candidate for the office of a European president he would have a better chance of being elected than in the Soviet Union. Ibid., 689.
71. Frédéric Bozo, “The Failure of a Grand Design: Mitterrand’s European Confederation, 1989–1991,” Contemporary European History 17, no. 3 (2008): 391–412; and see Vojtech Mastny, “Eastern Europe and the Early Prospects for EC/EU and NATO Membership,” Cold War History 9, no. 2 (2009): 203, 209, 213 (on the conception and fate of Mitterrand’s concept).
72. Genscher had suggested ten ideas for building up the CSCE in his January 31 Tutzing speech. On the formative staff work in the U.S. government, see Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 443 n. 105 and 305–6.
73. Compare the CSCE ideas Shevardnadze presented to Genscher in Münster on June 18 with the ideas Baker presented confidentially to Shevardnadze in Berlin on June 22 (previewing what America hoped its allies would agree to at the upcoming London summit). Ibid., 293 (on Münster), 302 (on Berlin); see also Genscher-Shevardnadze memcon, Münster, 18 Jun 90, in Hilger, Diplomatie, docs. 37 and 38, esp. pp. 200, 203–4, 213.
74. The CFE treaty was much more impactful for the Soviet military than any nuclear arms control agreement. It had a significant political impact in Soviet domestic politics too, since Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had to use their waning authority to push this through. Those two leaders may not have been fully aware of the measures being taken to circumvent the treaty’s restrictions (there is an analogy in the biological weapons story). The CFE treaty would have halved Soviet armored equipment west of the Urals. Before the treaty came into effect, the Soviet military began massive movements of such equipment into Asia, moves probably put in motion during 1989 and well under way by the time the treaty was signed in November 1990. Other more flagrant measures to circumvent CFE limits (for instance by turning army units into “naval infantry”) became a subject of acrimonious negotiations at the end of 1990 and during 1991. See Zelikow and Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed, 261, 449–50 n. 19.
75. See Stuart Croft, “Ratification of CFE and Agreement on CFE 1A,” in Croft, ed., The Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty: The Cold War Endgame (Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth, 1994), 241–63; Wallander, Mortal Friends, Best Enemies, 104–7, is a good summary and recounts the German and Russian views of the process. CFE 1A also kept the promise that Germany’s national limits would become part of a system in which all the other participants accepted such limits.
76. Pál Dunay, “On the (Continuing, Residual) Relevance of the CFE Regime,” Helsinki Monitor, no. 4 (2004): 263, 264. Dunay was writing before Russia suspended its participation in the CFE system at the end of 2007. See also the overview of the emergent European security system, from a former U.S. diplomat, in Jenonne Walker, Security and Arms Control in Post-Confrontation Europe, SIPRI Research Report (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
On the difficult negotiation of the 1996 “flank” limits, see the German and Russian views in Wallander, Mortal Friends, Best Enemies, 107–10. On the evolution of Russian views about CFE during the 1990s and 2000s, see Mark Wilcox, “Russia and the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE Treaty)—A Paradigm Change?,” Journal of Slavic Military Studies 24 (2011): 567–81.
77. State Department paper for Baker, “CSCE Summit,” 22 Jan 90, Box 115, Folder 7, Baker Papers. The economic preparatory conference was held in Bonn in March–April 1990.
78. Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1996), 548.
Chapter 6: The Designs for a Commonwealth of Free Nations
1. Sir T. Smith, De Republica Anglorum (1583), quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary, “commonwealth,” definition 2.
2. Bush address to the Brazilian Congress, 3 Dec 90, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: George Bush, 1990, bk. 2, 1738.
3. Baker with DeFrank, The Politics of Diplomacy, 138–42.
4. Chernyaev diary 1990, 21 Aug, p. 44; Taubman, Gorbachev, 526 (“gravediggers”).
5. Chernyaev diary 1990, 21 Aug, p. 46.
6. Moscow 23603, “Looking into the Abyss: The Possible Collapse of the Soviet Union and What We Should Be Doing About It,” 13 Jul 90; and Scowcroft to Bush, “Turmoil in the Soviet Union and U.S. Policy,” n.d., possibly 18 Aug 90, both in Rice files, USSR subject files, USSR Political, Bush Library.
7. Scowcroft to Bush (drafted by Rice), “Your Meeting with Gorbachev in Helsinki,” n.d. Sep 90, Scowcroft files, USSR Collapse files, U.S.-Soviet Chron, USSR Collapse: U.S.-Soviet Relations Thru 1991, Bush Library; for the analogous perspective of the American ambassador in Moscow, see also Jack Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire (New York: Random House, 1995), 406–9.
8. Bush-Gorbachev afternoon meeting memcon, 9 Sep 90, Bush Library (Rice was the notetaker); and (including “None of the Soviets asked”) Burns through Rice for Scowcroft, “Results of Presidential Business Development Mission to the USSR,” 20 Sep 90, Scowcroft files, USSR Collapse, Box 12, Bush Library.
9. Chernyaev diary 1990, 18 Sep, p. 53, quoting Abel Aganbegyan and Shatalin.
10. Chernyaev has an especially thoughtful reconstruction and reflection on Gorbachev’s choice. My Six Years with Gorbachev, 284–95; see also Taubman, Gorbachev, 521–30, 530 (“worst”); Anders Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution: Why Market Reform Succeeded and Democracy Failed (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute for International Economics, 2007), 61–62.
Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski make the curious argument that it was the IMF and Western interests that helped derail the “500-day plan.” The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms: Market Bolshevism Against Democracy (Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace, 2001), 176. In fact, at the time, reporters following this were told, “Officials at the IMF, who were commissioned at the July Houston economic summit to come up with recommendations on how the Soviet economy might be helped, welcome the new [500-day] initiative. For the first time, they see recognition in Moscow of the need for drastic change. Until now, says one official, ‘it wasn’t even possible to engage in a policy debate because there was nothing to bite on.’” Hobart Rowen, “The Soviet Union Needs IMF, Bank,” Washington Post, September 23, 1990. The IMF’s positive interest was echoed at the White House, at State, and from Matlock in Moscow.
11. French Foreign Ministry, “Internal Situation of the USSR: Troubled Times,” and “Internal Evolution of the USSR: What Possibilities for the Next Two Years,” both briefing memos for Gorbachev’s upcoming visit to Paris, 24 Oct 90, in Europe 1986–1990, URSS, Box 6686, AD.
12. Scowcroft offers his perspective on Shevardnadze’s role and Gorbachev’s temporizing in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 493–95; “By the turn”: Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River, 199.
13. Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, 451.
14. Yeltsin quoted in Odom, Collapse of the Soviet Military, 270; Matlock, Autopsy on an Empire, 471 (“zigs and zags”).
15. The “prerevolutionary” quote comes from Scowcroft in A World Transformed, 499 (referring to assessments in March 1991); see the comments on Yavlinsky, new prime minister Pavlov, and Yevgeny Primakov, in Chernyaev diary 1991, 17 May, pp. 58–59. On the Yavlinsky-Allison idea and the G-7 meeting in London, see Taubman, Gorbachev, 590–95.
16. Baker’s marked-up notes for his meeting with Shevardnadze (now seeing him as a friend and adviser), 6 May 91, Box 110, Folder 4, Baker Papers.
17. Baker, “Points for Meeting with Primakov, et al,” 28 and 29 May 91, Box 110, Folder 4, Baker Papers; and Gates, From the Shadows, 503.
18. Chernyaev diary 1991, 21 Jun, p. 72.
19. Ibid., 6 Jul, p. 79.
20. Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 503–9.
21. Chernyaev diary 1991, 23 Jul, p. 91; “we simply did not know enough”: Bush in A World Transformed, 540; see also the discussions in Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, 385–89.
22. The best general account of the breakup of the Soviet Union in the second half of 1991 is Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
23. On the origins of the work, see also Gates, From the Shadows, 526–27.
24. For the state of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin-Kravchuk work on the new Union treaty, along with U.S. views and Bush’s Kiev visit, a balanced synthesis is Plokhy, The Last Empire, 24–69.
On the START treaty, Plokhy approvingly quotes Strobe Talbott’s comment, immediately after the Bush-Gorbachev Moscow summit that “the U.S.S.R. has conceded so much and the U.S. reciprocated so little [in the START treaty] for a simple reason: the Gorbachev revolution is history’s greatest fire sale” (p. 15).
START codified an overall equality in U.S. and Soviet strategic nuclear delivery vehicles and weapons. The supposed great Soviet concessions were that it gave up too much on land-based ICBMs while not getting enough reductions in U.S. bombers and submarine-launched weapons. Perhaps Gorbachev was more farsighted about what the Soviet Union really needed than were his critics. It is hard to imagine that, even a year later, in 1992, Plokhy or Talbott would wish that Gorbachev had stalled the treaty or held out, just to ensure that his government could deploy, within its overall total, more heavy or mobile ICBMs.
25. Putin quoted in Plokhy, The Last Empire, 120–21.
26. On the early September arguments and Baker’s five principles, see Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 540–44; Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 524–26; Dick Cheney with Liz Cheney, In My Time: A Personal and Political Memoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 232; Gates, From the Shadows, 529–30; “Secretary Baker’s Five Principles Guiding U.S. Policy Toward the Soviet Union,” 4 Sep 91, Box 110, Folder 8, Baker Papers. “Set the philosophical”: from a memo to Baker by Andrew Carpendale and John Hannah (on Ross’s staff), in Baker, Politics of Diplomacy, 525.
27. The 35,000 number is from Robert Norris and Hans Kristensen, “Global Nuclear Weapons Inventories, 1945–2010,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 66, no. 4 (2010): 77, 82. Their comparable estimate for the U.S. stockpile in 1991 is 19,000. At the time, outsiders, like the Harvard group working on this, estimated the Soviet number at 27,000. Kurt Campbell, Ashton Carter, Steven Miller, and Charles Zraket, Soviet Nuclear Fission: Control of the Nuclear Arsenal in a Disintegrating Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard CSIA, November 1991), which also has a good breakdown of weapons distribution (pp. 16–22). The Cheney quote is from Graham Allison, “What Happened to the Soviet Superpower’s Nuclear Arsenal? Clues for the Nuclear Security Summit,” Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center paper, March 2012, p. 1.
28. See Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 545–46; Cheney, In My Time, 233–34; Chernyaev, My Six Years with Gorbachev, 390. The Soviet total was 14,000 weapons redeployed to Russia, many of them then dismantled. Allison, “What Happened,” 4.
29. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “The Premature Partnership,” Foreign Affairs 73, no. 2 (1994); Mearsheimer, “The Case for a Ukrainian Nuclear Deterrent,” Foreign Affairs 72, no. 3 (1993).
30. See, e.g., how Undersecretary of State Reginald Bartholomew was addressing the “Russia-only” nuclear issue in Yakovlev-Bartholomew (undersecretary of state) memcon, 8 Oct 91, in “Nunn-Lugar Revisited,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 447, ed. Tom Blanton and Svetlana Savranskaya, with Anna Melyakova, doc. no. 5. The National Security Archive documentary sets are an essential resource on the cooperative denuclearization process of the 1990s. See their Electronic Briefing Books Nos. 447, 491, 528, and 571.
31. On the unofficial work with Ukrainians during late 1991, see Zelikow to Allison et al., “Harvard Discussion with Kravchuk on Nuclear Weapons,” 30 Sep 91 (relayed by Allison to Hewett); Hewett to Scowcroft, “Ukrainian Approach to Defense Matters,” 8 Nov 91 (relaying debrief of Zelikow’s Geneva talks with Ukrainian officials), both in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 447. A Harvard group then journeyed to Kiev in December to continue the discussions. After that, the USSR ceased to exist, the U.S. government recognized the Ukrainian government, and U.S. officials took over the work.
Ukraine appeared to agree to give up nuclear weapons on its territory in the December 1991 Minsk agreements with Yeltsin creating the Commonwealth of Independent States and ending the Soviet Union. Yeltsin so informed Bush. Yeltsin-Bush telcon, 23 Dec 91, Bush Library. It is still hard to tell whether Ukraine’s later reluctance during 1992 and 1993 was a choice to tear up that Minsk deal, or was a bargaining strategy, or both.
32. See Wallander, Mortal Friends, Best Enemies, 110–15, 123, and n. 37.
33. Bush-Nazarbayev memcon, 19 May 92, Bush Library (small meeting from 11 to 12).
34. An excellent analysis is Mariana Budjeryn, “Was Ukraine’s Nuclear Disarmament a Blunder?,” World Affairs 179, no. 2 (2016): 9–20.
35. A good overview of the post-Soviet nuclear and biological legacy and the remarkable effort to cope with it is Hoffman, The Dead Hand, part III.
36. Paul Bernstein and Jason Wood, The Origins of Nunn-Lugar and Cooperative Threat Reduction (Washington, DC: NDU Press, 2010), 5. The special election, which sent an electric shock through American politics, was Democrat Harris Wofford’s November 1991 victory over a veteran Republican, Richard Thornburgh.
37. Ibid., 5–7; Hoffman, The Dead Hand, 380–85; the November 1991 Harvard report was Campbell, Carter, Miller, and Zraket, Soviet Nuclear Fission; the follow-on was Graham Allison, Ashton Carter, Steven Miller, and Philip Zelikow, eds., Cooperative Denuclearization: From Pledges to Deeds (Cambridge, MA: Harvard CSIA, January 1993).
38. Bush to Kravchuk, 4 Dec 92, in National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book 447, doc. no. 36.
39. See Ashton Carter and William Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2000); William Perry, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 77–102; see also William Potter and John Shields, “Lessons from the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program,” Asia-Pacific Review 4, no. 1 (1997): 35–56; and on total spending, the tables in Mary Beth Nikitin and Amy Woolf, “The Evolution of Cooperative Threat Reduction: Issues for Congress,” CRS Report, June 2014.
40. In the first few years, 1989–92, the main multilateral aid institutions were the IMF, the World Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD), and the EC. Much of this work was coordinated through the G-24 process created in July 1989, which we discussed in chapter 3, and the EC’s “PHARE” (Pologne/Hongrie, Assistance à la reconstruction économique) program. Poland was the major early recipient of aid and debt relief. Most food aid was distributed through bilateral channels, by the EC and the United States. Poland again received most of the early deliveries, but significant deliveries also went to the Soviet Union, Romania, and Bulgaria during 1990 and 1991. During 1992 the scope of aid of many kinds was dramatically expanding across Eastern Europe and the now-former Soviet Union.
Working with the Bush administration, the U.S. Congress appropriated American bilateral aid in two major stages, first in the Support for Eastern European Democracies (SEED) Act of 1989 and then by the FREEDOM Support Act (FSA) of 1992. The United States also provided significant assistance from Defense Department funds for denuclearization of the former Soviet Union, mainly in the Nunn-Lugar legislation.
41. Ivan T. Berend, From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union: The Economic and Social Transformation of Central and Eastern Europe Since 1973 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 201–2.
42. Philipp Ther, Europe Since 1989: A History, trans. Charlotte Hughes-Kreuzmüller (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 82.
43. The Marshall Plan system was fashioned in 1947–48. It operated from 1948 to 1952. A group of European governments got together to develop an elaborate European Recovery Program, working with the Americans. The quotes are from Benn Steil, The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018), 372; see also the similar diagnosis of what worked about the Marshall Plan in Barry Eichengreen and Marc Uzan, “Economic Effects and Implications for Europe and the USSR,” Economic Policy 7, no. 14 (1992): 13–75.
44. A recent, detailed comparative reexamination of the data by experts working in the region is James Roaf, Ruben Atoyan, Bikas Joshi, Krzysztof Krogulski, and an IMF Staff Team, 25 Years of Transition: Post-Communist Europe and the IMF (Washington, DC: International Monetary Fund, 2014). Their measures of inequality use GINI coefficients.
45. The Marlboro example is from Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution, 53. The Sukhoi/aluminum example is from Pierre Lorrain, in Allen Lynch, How Russia Is Not Ruled: Reflections on Russian Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 2, section IX.
46. Joel Hellman, “Winners Take All: The Politics of Partial Reform in Postcommunist Transitions,” World Politics 50, no. 2 (1998): 203, 204–5 (emphasis in original).
47. The best-known exponent of “gradualism” was the Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, attacking the “Washington consensus” in the finger-pointing after the 1997–98 financial crises in Asia and Russia, not long before he was dismissed in 1999 from his position as chief economist of the World Bank. See Sebastian Mallaby, The World’s Banker (New York: Penguin, 2004), 193–95, 266–68. For a careful exposition and analysis of this alternative gradualist viewpoint, including the China analogy, from experts who worked in Eastern Europe and Russia, see Marek Dabrowski, Stanislaw Gomulka, and Jacek Rostowski, Whence Reform? A Critique of the Stiglitz Perspective (London: LSE Centre for Economic Performance, 2000).
48. On the slow rise of the catchall use of “neoliberalism” as “the linguistic omnivore of our times, a neologism that threatens to swallow up all the other words around it,” see Daniel Rodgers, “The Uses and Abuses of ‘Neoliberalism’,” Dissent, Winter 2018, at www.dissentmagazine.org/article/uses-and-abuses-neoliberalism-debate.
49. Reddaway and Glinski, The Tragedy of Russia’s Reforms, 663 n. 44. Their book is a valuably detailed account of the events inside Russia during the turbulent 1990s. It is not as reliable in its account of U.S. or international policy.
50. John Williamson, “From Reform Agenda to Damaged Brand Name,” Finance and Development, September 2003, pp. 11–13. The term “silent revolution” was one used in the early 1990s by IMF managing director Michel Camdessus to refer generally to economic liberalization, including the liberalization of international capital flows.
51. James Boughton, Tearing Down Walls: The International Monetary Fund 1990–1999 (Washington, DC: IMF, 2012), liii.
52. Lipton, foreword in Roaf et al., 25 Years of Transition, ix. The transformation process for the IMF and World Bank had already begun during the 1980s, because of the economic transitions we described in chapter 1. They were rapidly processing key lessons. For a snapshot in October 1990, see Vittorio Corbo, Fabrizio Coricelli, and Jan Bossak, eds., Reforming Central and Eastern European Economies: Initial Results and Challenges (Washington, DC: World Bank, 1991) (William Easterly offered an especially prescient paper on the dangers of partial reform).
53. Stanley Fischer, Ratna Sahay, and Carlos Vegh, “Stabilization and Growth in Transition Economies: The Early Experience,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 10, no. 2 (1996): 45, 46.
54. Boughton, Tearing Down Walls, 14. Leading this charge was IMF managing director Camdessus and his senior deputy, Stanley Fischer.
55. Anders Åslund, Peter Boone, and Simon Johnson, “How to Stabilize: Lessons from Post-communist Countries,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, no. 1 (1996): 217–313, quotes are from 227.
56. A sympathetic but balanced portrait of Yeltsin in the 1992 transition, including the rise and fall of Gaidar and Yeltsin’s juggling of the political factions, is Timothy Colton, Yeltsin: A Life (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 211–46. A vivid depiction of how one of Gaidar’s advisers saw the Russian economic situation at the time is Jeffrey Sachs, “Russia’s Economic Prospects,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 48, no. 3 (1994): 45–63.
57. Yegor Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory, trans. Jane Miller (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999 [orig. 1996]), 51; Åslund, Russia’s Capitalist Revolution, 118; for more on the underlying political weakness of Gaidar and the factions he represented, see Michael McFaul, Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 162–83.
58. Both of us left the White House in March 1991—Zelikow to return to the State Department and then, later that year, leaving government for a professorship at Harvard; Rice to return to her professorship at Stanford from which she had been on leave. Rice’s successor as Bush and Scowcroft’s chief adviser on Soviet affairs was Ed Hewett, an expert on the Soviet economy. Hewett fell ill in 1992 and passed away, much too soon, in January 1993. Blackwill had left in July 1990, eventually replaced by David Gompert.
59. Bush-Kohl memcon, small group session, 22 Mar 92, Bush Library.
60. To see both sides of this work, compare the section III on Soviet humanitarian aid in Baker’s markup of “Proposed Agenda for Meeting with the President,” 25 Oct 91, Box 115, Folder 8, Baker Papers, with the almost desperate exchanges about this with Gorbachev and Chernyaev shortly afterward in Madrid, with Baker urging the Soviets to grab this money while they could (he had struggled to get it) and Chernyaev depressed by his government’s lassitude in grabbing it. Chernyaev diary 1991, 2 and 3 Nov, pp. 145–46, 156.
61. See “Soviets,” 4 Dec 91, and “Soviet Points for Meeting with the President,” 10 Dec 91, both in Box 115, Folder 8, Baker Papers.
62. Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River, 308.
63. Edward Brau, “External Financial Assistance: The Record and Issues,” in Daniel Citrin and Ashok Lahiri, eds., Policy Experiences and Issues in the Baltics, Russia, and Other Countries of the Former Soviet Union (Washington, DC: IMF, 1995), 110 and Table 7.5.
64. See Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 654–58. The bill was the FREEDOM Support Act. For more on the role of Nunn and Lugar in this effort, and their work with Baker, which joined with their efforts to provide aid for denuclearization, see Bernstein and Wood, Origins of Nunn-Lugar, 9–10.
65. Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory, 153 (writing about Russia’s macroeconomic stabilization program, not the foreign fund to support it, though the two were supposed to be linked). Although the material in Braithwaite, Across the Moscow River (pp. 308–15), and Baker’s memoir is suggestive, there is not yet a satisfactory account of just what happened in the work on the planned IMF stabilization fund for Russia during 1992.
66. E.g., on the 1993–94 developments, Angela Stent, Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, the Soviet Collapse, and the New Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 175–76.
67. On the real world of post-Soviet political and economic “informal practices,” Alena Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works: The Informal Practices That Shaped Post-Soviet Politics and Business (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), is a good place to start. Comparative economic studies since the late 2000s generally do not regard Russia and Ukraine as cases where radical reform was effectively adopted. A political scientist, also focusing on the failures of democratic political reform, concluded that “gradualism, rather than shock therapy, best characterizes economic policy in post-Soviet Russia.” M. Steven Fish, Democracy Derailed in Russia: The Failure of Open Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 159–60.
The IMF does not generally involve itself much in issues of privatization. Such problems of microeconomic technical assistance are more in the province of the World Bank, or organizations like the EBRD, or national governments and the contractors or consultants they hire. The IMF does attend closely to macroeconomic stabilization and central bank management. Their people believe the technical assistance on these topics did prove valuable to Russians in 1999 and after, once the government restored fiscal and financial discipline.
68. Miller, The Struggle to Save the Soviet Economy, 160–64. Miller also perceptively observes that in the Soviet and post-Soviet case the powerful interest groups, including the military-security complex, blocked the tough reforms. In China, partly because of its underdevelopment and Deng’s firmer control, such obstacles were either not as difficult or they were overcome. Ibid., 177–83.
69. See Boughton, Tearing Down Walls, 297–334; and the drier account from a participant, John Odling-Smee, “The IMF and Russia in the 1990s,” IMF Staff Papers 53, no. 1 (2006): 151, 159–63, 165–72.
70. Ledeneva, How Russia Really Works, 1 (“rarely operates”).
71. The most balanced, archivally based account of the common ruble zone controversy is Boughton, Tearing Down Walls, 353–61; for an example of a more critical view, see Brigitte Granville, “The IMF and the Ruble Zone: Response to Odling-Smee and Pastor,” Comparative Economic Studies 54, no. 4 (2002): 59–80; for an acknowledgment of the criticism’s validity from one of the protagonists, see Odling-Smee, “The IMF and Russia in the 1990s,” 165 n. 25. “Why hold down the budget deficit”: Vitold Fokin quoted in Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory, 154.
72. Boughton, Tearing Down Walls, 312–13, 324–26. After another crash of the ruble in 1994, the Russian government had climbed back in 1995–96 and set the strong ruble, but then fell off the wagon in 1996–98, foreseeably setting up conditions for a major crisis. In November 1996, Gaidar predicted to Fischer that if the IMF did not enforce tough conditionality, “everything will blow up in one-and-a-half years” (p. 319). The catalyst for the 1998 crash came out of Asia. Still, it is notable that Gaidar’s prediction was off by only about a month.
73. Gaidar, Days of Defeat and Victory, 154 (“soft”); Boughton, Tearing Down Walls, 372 (“We made all possible mistakes”).
74. See Boughton, Tearing Down Walls, 373–79; and Anders Åslund, How Ukraine Became a Market Economy and Democracy (Washington, DC: Peterson Institute of International Economics, 2009).
75. For an example of the emerging critique coming out of work in the developing world, see Robert Klitgaard, Tropical Gangsters: One Man’s Experience with Development and Decadence in Deepest Africa (New York: Basic Books, 1991), an appraisal of microeconomic technical and infrastructure assistance later crystallized in the influential report by the World Bank, Assessing Aid (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); see also Steven Radelet, Challenging Foreign Aid (Washington, DC: Center for Global Development, 2003), 1–18. Arguments emphasizing the centrality of local policy choices and the frequently counterproductive effects of outside project aid in fueling local corruption and predation, associated with then-controversial works by experts like William Easterly in the early 2000s, now enjoy wide acceptance. For the most recent synthesis of his argument, see Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (New York: Basic Books, 2014); and, for an example of the emerging scholarly consensus, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York: Crown, 2012).
76. For an understandably angry but useful set of illustrations, mainly focusing on problems in technical assistance in Poland early on and in Russia later, with a particular focus on the scandal involving a group at Harvard, see Janine Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, updated ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001).
77. Randall Schweller, book review in Political Science Quarterly 115, no. 2 (2000): 315.
78. A good contemporary account of the historical evolution in East European views, free from knowing what would happen later, is Andrew Cottey, East-Central Europe After the Cold War: Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary in Search of Security (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995).
79. Zoellick-Kastrup telcon (debriefing on Baker’s meeting), 23 May 90, in Einheit Dokumente, doc. 101, p. 506 (Baker on Gorbachev not joking); Baker-Genscher memcon, Washington, 25 May 90, in ibid., doc. 102, p. 509 (Genscher’s reply).
80. Based on discussions with former Clinton administration officials and records of the Clinton-Yeltsin exchanges. On those, see Clinton-Yeltsin telcon, 22 Dec 93, Clinton Library, Mandatory Review case 2015-0782-M (on Yeltsin and Wörner); Clinton-Yeltsin memcon from dinner in Moscow, 14 Jan 94 (on the concert or “cartel”-like approach and “Russia is not yet ready”), quoted in Ronald Asmus, Opening NATO’s Door: How the Alliance Remade Itself for a New Era (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 67 (this memcon does not yet appear to have been declassified); Clinton-Yeltsin memcon for second one-on-one meeting, 28 Sep 94 (which also does not yet seem to have been declassified), in ibid., 90; Clinton-Yeltsin telcon, 27 Apr 95, Clinton Library (indicating Yeltsin’s assent to the two-track approach); Clinton-Yeltsin memcon, summary of one-on-one meeting, Moscow, 10 May 95, Clinton Library (concentrating on delaying enlargement until the end of the 1990s, or at least for a year and a half to two years, until after the 1996 election). In the May 1995 meeting, Yeltsin’s alternative to NATO enlargement was no longer Russian membership, which was no longer being mentioned at all, it was that “Russia will give every state that wants to join NATO a guarantee that we won’t infringe on its security.”
81. Wałęsa quoted in epigraph for Joanna Gorska, Dealing with a Juggernaut: Analyzing Poland’s Policy Toward Russia, 1989–2009 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2010).
82. Krzysztof Skubiszewski writing in 1999, quoted in Asmus, Opening NATO’s Door, 6–7. NATO secretary-general Wörner made it clear that, at first, the door was not yet open to new members. Mastny, “Eastern Europe and the Early Prospects,” 212–13.
83. Mastny, “Eastern Europe and the Early Prospects,” 213.
84. Clinton remarks, Brussels, 9 Jan 94, quoted in Asmus, Opening NATO’s Door, 65. Asmus offers the leading history of the enlargement process during the 1990s. It does a good job of presenting non-American perspectives as well. His well-documented conclusion about the turning point lines up with the analysis from a European perspective in Jonathan Eyal, “NATO’s Enlargement: Anatomy of a Decision,” International Affairs 73, no. 4 (1997): 695–719.
85. Theo Sommer, “The Problems of Enlargement,” in Anton Bebler, ed., The Challenge of NATO Enlargement (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 37.
86. Asmus’s account of Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott’s exploratory trip to Paris and Berlin at the beginning of 1997 nicely encapsulates the core positions in Europe, even after nearly four years of debate. Opening NATO’s Door, 183–88.
87. The main changes reflect the positive evolution of the NATO versus EU argument (including the rise of the “Euro-Atlantic” adjective instead of just “Atlantic”) and the discussion of enlargement. For an upbeat comparative analysis, see Paul Cornish, “A Strategic Concept for the Twenty-First Century,” Defense Analysis 15, no. 3 (1999): 241–60.
In 1997–98, State Department officials were urging that NATO be reformed to work with the Europeans to tackle problems outside of Europe, with an OSCE setting norms to promote democracy. E.g., Asmus, Opening NATO’s Door, 278–79. The memos essentially duplicated the memos their predecessors had written in 1990–91, seeming to forget that all these things (out-of-area efforts, Europe-wide democracy promotion with organizations like the OSCE) had not only been advocated before, but had been adopted and began happening on a rather large scale in 1990–92. It is not a tale of partisan differences, more of the institutional amnesia endemic in the American government.
During the mid-1990s there was a noisy public debate about the initial NATO enlargement. This debate served various political purposes on both sides of the Atlantic, and in Russia. The two of us were not involved much in it. Rice, who was provost of Stanford at the time, did not engage in it but generally supported NATO enlargement. Although Zelikow believed the 1990 diplomacy had left the issue of future enlargement open, he thought both sides of the enlargement debate were exaggerating its immediacy and importance, neglecting more burning issues in the Balkans and elsewhere. For instance, his essay “The Masque of Institutions,” Survival 38, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 6–18.
88. Joseph Stiglitz, from a 2007 column, and “actually determined,” both from Berend, From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union, 100–101.
89. For a mid-1990s glimpse at the converging criteria of both institutions, see Anton Bebler, “A Research Note on Eligibility for NATO Membership,” in Bebler, ed., The Challenge of NATO Enlargement, 49–57.
90. Berend, From the Soviet Bloc to the European Union, 101.
91. Asmus, Opening NATO’s Door, 247–48. Asmus was a key State official on the Baltic enlargement issues from the beginning. He details the strength and influence of Albright’s and Talbott’s views during the formative debates of 1997.
On NATO enlargement to the Baltic countries, at the time (July 1997), Asmus summarized the U.S. political divisions. “Right-wing Republicans want to bring them in now, Bush Republicans and Democratic defense hawks say never; Democratic internationalists such as you [Talbott] and me say yes in principle but not now; and liberal Democratic arms controllers say it is not worth risking the arms control agenda with Moscow because of the Baltic issue.” Ibid., 231.
92. Those who study the Gulf War diplomatic records of 1990–91 will find plenty of evidence of the enormous effort expended, amid great strain, to keep the United States and Soviet Union together in the political coalition, including the compromises made in the conduct of the diplomacy. The best analytical summary, from a core participant, is Dennis Ross, Statecraft: And How to Restore America’s Standing in the World (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), 77–96.
93. “I have never met”: Clinton-Yeltsin telcon, 19 Apr 99, p. 2, Clinton Library; “there will not be”: Clinton-Yeltsin telcon, 24 Mar 99, p. 3, Clinton Library; see generally Talbott, The Russia Hand, 298–349.
94. For a balanced appraisal, see Michael Green, By More Than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 425–52.
95. Thomas Zeiler, Free Trade Free World: The Advent of GATT (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 196.
96. In North America, they built on the U.S.-Canada deal that Baker had forged in 1988 and worked with new leaders in Mexico to create a 1990 initiative for a North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Reagan and Baker had originally hoped for a hemispheric-wide initiative. Mexico was a start, but the initiative had to come from the Mexican side. It came in February 1990 from Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The United States, Mexico, and Canada began the negotiations in 1991 and wrapped them up in August 1992.
NAFTA was a touchstone for debate in America, a major point for the populist third candidate in the 1992 presidential race, Ross Perot. The Clinton administration had a major decision to make about NAFTA. It decided to proceed with the agreement, after negotiating some side agreements with Mexico. Clinton faced off mainly against his own party in Congress in “the most epic trade-policy battle in Congress since the end of World War II.” He won. He won largely with Republican votes, but Bush might not have been able to carry the necessary margin of Democrats. Clinton did.
There is still great debate about the effects of NAFTA. Beyond the economic statistics, what it did most fundamentally is that “it connected Mexico to North America.… NAFTA’s orientation toward North America, and the opening of Mexican society, were definitely part of Mexico’s transition to democracy.” Robert Zoellick, “An Architecture of U.S. Strategy After the Cold War,” in Melvyn Leffler and Jeffrey Legro, eds., In Uncertain Times: American Foreign Policy After the Berlin Wall and 9/11 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 34.
97. Irwin, Clashing over Commerce, chapter 13.
98. Zoellick, “An Architecture of U.S. Strategy,” 38–40.
99. See David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson, “The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States,” American Economic Review 103, no. 6 (2013): 2121–68; Katherine Eriksson, Katheryn Russ, Jay Shambaugh, and Minfei Xu, “Trade Shocks and the Shifting Landscape of U.S. Manufacturing,” NBER Working Paper 25646, 8 March 2019.
100. On Saddam’s motives, using captured Iraqi records, see Hal Brands and David Palkki, “‘Conspiring Bastards’: Saddam Hussein’s Strategic View of the United States,” Diplomatic History 36, no. 3 (2012): 625–59, 627 (“strangle Iraq”); Emily Meierding, “Dismantling the Oil Wars Myth,” Security Studies 25, no. 2 (2016): 258–88; for similar conclusions without using the same Iraqi records, see F. Gregory Gause III, “Iraq’s Decisions to Go to War, 1980 and 1990,” Middle East Journal 56, no. 1 (2002): 47–70; and the commentary in Kevin Woods, David Palkki, and Mark Stout, eds., The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant’s Regime, 1978–2001 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). This outlook can be compared to the actual record of the prewar American policy toward Iraq described in Zachary Karabell and Philip Zelikow, “Iraq, 1988–1990: Unexpectedly Heading Toward War,” in Ernest May and Zelikow, eds., Dealing with Dictators: Dilemmas of U.S. Diplomacy and Intelligence Analysis, 1945–1990 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 167–202.
101. Baker, The Politics of Diplomacy, 276.
102. See, for example, Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 95–99, 195–97.
103. On the coalition work in this crisis, see the instructive summary in Ross, Statecraft, 77–99; see also Spohr, Post Wall, Post Square, chapter 6; Engel, When the World Seemed New, chapters 18 and 19.
104. Quoted in Michael Watkins and Susan Rosegrant, Breakthrough International Negotiation: How Great Negotiators Transformed the World’s Toughest Post–Cold War Conflicts (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), 195.
105. “To make war”: from war cabinet meeting, 5 Aug 90, in Favier and Martin-Roland, Les défis, 443–44; Jacques Attali, Verbatim, vol. 3 (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 551–53, 556–61 (cabinet meeting, 9 Aug 90, “false brothers”); Short, A Taste for Intrigue, 499 (“happy few”). Mitterrand would have entirely appreciated the irony of quoting Shakespeare’s phrase, spoken by an English king on the eve of a battle against the French.
In April 1991, Mitterrand expressed his regret to Bush that the war had not continued longer, so that Saddam Hussein could have been toppled from power. Ibid., 500 (date in Short’s notes, provided separately to the authors). We mention this to indicate the strength of Mitterrand’s views, although we believe this option was not viable. For a summary of the reasons why, see Baker on “the marching-to-Baghdad canard,” in The Politics of Diplomacy, 436–38.
106. Scowcroft in Bush and Scowcroft, A World Transformed, 400.
107. Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs 70, no. 1 (1990/91): 23–33, adapted from a lecture he delivered in September 1990.
108. Bush address to Congress on the Persian Gulf crisis and the federal budget deficit, 11 Sep 90, quoted in the perceptive essay by Jeffrey Engel, “A Better World… but Don’t Get Carried Away: The Foreign Policy of George H. W. Bush Twenty Years On,” Diplomatic History 34, no. 1 (2010): 25, 33.
109. Ibid., 23.
110. Chernyaev diary 1991, 25 Feb, p. 32.
Chapter 7: New Challenges Evolve
1. Bush-Gorbachev memcon, 25 Dec 91, Bush Library.
2. Jan-Werner Müller, What Is Populism? (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
3. Ironically, the 5 percent threshold had been set as Basic Law in Germany after World War II in order to prevent far-right political parties from rising to power the same way the National Socialist German Workers’ Party had gained a foothold in the 1924 and 1928 elections for the Reichstag.
4. “While [AfD] scored on average 11% in west Germany, it got 21.5% in east Germany, almost twice as much.” Cas Mudde, “What the Stunning Success of AfD Means for Germany and Europe,” Guardian, September 24, 2017.
5. Stalin wielded national communist parties as a “fifth column.” The aim was to assert communist influence abroad through support for indigenous communist movements. See Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (London: Palgrave, 1997); or older studies such as William Henry Chamberlin, “Russians Against Stalin.” Russian Review 11, no. 1 (1952): 16–23.
6. Quoted in Condoleezza Rice, No Higher Honor: A Memoir of My Years in Washington (New York: Crown, 2011), 715–16.
7. Amid a large literature, the best transatlantic overview is now Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World (New York: Viking, 2018); see John Taylor, “Government as a Cause of the 2008 Financial Crisis: A Reassessment After 10 Years,” October 19, 2018, at www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/research/docs/govt_as_cause_of_crisis-a_reassement_10.pdf; and the panel discussion of Taylor, George Shultz, Niall Ferguson, Caroline Hoxby, Darrell Duffie, and John Cochrane, Hoover Institution, December 7, 2018, at www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/hauck_-_revisiting_the_financial_crisis.pdf.
8. Dinara Bayazitova and Anil Shivdasani, “Assessing TARP,” Review of Financial Studies 25, no. 2 (2011): 377–407; Daniel Drezner, The System Worked: How the World Stopped Another Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); Eric Helleiner, The Status Quo Crisis: Global Financial Governance After the 2008 Meltdown (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014); and David Wessel, In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic (New York: Crown, 2010).
9. The meeting is described further in Rice, No Higher Honor, 716.
10. A good summary of the G-20’s development during the global financial crisis is Adam Tooze, Crashed, 265–75. Tooze does not discuss the Sarkozy-Bush meeting at Camp David.
11. Quoted in Tony Paterson, “Greece Debt Crisis: German-Greek Relations Slump Further After Der Spiegel Magazine Cover Prompts Controversy,” Independent (UK), July 14, 2015.
12. Quoted in Anthony Faiola and Stephanie Kirchner, “Greece Bailout Revives Image of the ‘Cruel German,’” Washington Post, July 16, 2015.
13. Quote from June 29 press conference by Angela Merkel in Anton Troianovski, “Germany’s Angela Merkel Takes Firm Stance on Greek Bailout,” Wall Street Journal, June 29, 2015.
14. For the “no” camp see Dani Rodrik, “Populism and the Economics of Globalization,” Journal of International Business Policy 1 (2018): 12–33; Janan Ganesh, “Populism Was Not Sparked by the Financial Crisis,” Financial Times, August 29, 2018; Greg Ip, “No, the Financial Crisis Didn’t Spawn Populism,” Wall Street Journal, September 18, 2018.
For the “yes” camp, see Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, and Christoph Trebesch, “The Financial Crisis Is Still Empowering Far-Right Populists,” Foreign Affairs, Online Snapshot, September 13, 2018; Fareed Zakaria, “Populism on the March,” Foreign Affairs 95, no. 6 (2016); Larry Elliott, “Populism Is the Result of Global Economic Failure,” Financial Times, March 26, 2017; and Philip Stephens, “Populism Is the True Legacy of the Global Financial Crisis,” Financial Times, August 29, 2018.
15. Shultz at the Hoover panel discussion, December 7, 2018, p. 3.
16. The history of European migration is laid out further in Rita Chin, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
17. “Thirty years ago, many Europeans saw multiculturalism—the embrace of an inclusive, diverse society—as an answer to Europe’s social problems.… As a political tool, multiculturalism has functioned as not merely a response to diversity but also a means of constraining it.” Kenan Malik, “The Failure of European Multiculturalism,” Foreign Affairs 94, no. 2 (2015).
18. While the United Kingdom, for instance, can trace the election of the first British-Indian member of Parliament to 1892, the diversity of Parliament did not begin to grow in earnest until the 1987 and 1992 parliamentary elections. In 1987, four minority members won their elections, including three Afro-Caribbean British and one British Indian. In 1992, three more minority members won, including two British Indians and one British Sri Lankan. See Muhammad Anwar, “The Participation of Ethnic Minorities in British Politics,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 27, no. 3 (2001): 533–49.
19. Ruben Atoyan, Lone Christiansen, Allan Dizioli, Christian Ebeke, Nadeem Ilahi, Anna Ilyina, Gil Mehrez, Haonan Qu, Faezeh Raei, Alaina Rhee, and Daria Zakharova, “Emigration and Its Economic Impact on Eastern Europe,” International Monetary Fund, July 2016. Other work by Ivan Krastev in After Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), 47, 50–51, finds that Polish émigrés between 2005 and 2014 were twice as likely to have a college education as the general population, and during this period, approximately one-third of young college graduates in Latvia had emigrated to the West.
20. Statistic in Valentina Romei, “Eastern Europe Has the Largest Population Loss in Modern History,” Financial Times, May 27, 2016.
21. Statistic from “EU Thumbs-Up for ‘Polish Plumber,’” BBC, November 18, 2008.
22. By 2015, approximately 2.9 million displaced migrants were in Jordan, 2.8 million were in Yemen, and 2.8 million were in Turkey. See “Middle East Migrant Population More Than Doubles Since 2005,” Pew Research Center (2016).
23. Patrick Kingsley, “Migration to Europe Is Down Sharply. So Is It Still a Crisis?,” New York Times, June 27, 2018; “Briefing: Illegal Immigration in the EU: Facts and Figures,” European Parliament (April 2015): 1–4.
24. Hungary suspended the rule on June 23, 2015, announcing that it would not take back refugees once they had traveled through the country. See “Defying EU, Hungary Suspends Rules on Asylum-Seekers,” Reuters, June 23, 2015.
25. For more on the linguistic history of this phrase and how it came to haunt Angela Merkel during the refugee crisis, see Joyce Marie Mushaben, “Wir Schaffen Das! Angela Merkel and the European Refugee Crisis,” German Politics 26, no. 4 (2017): 516–33.
26. Merkel quoted in “Merkel the Bold,” Economist, September 5, 2015; Pope Francis quote in Anthony Faiola and Michael Birnbaum, “Pope Calls on Europe’s Catholics to Take in Refugees,” Washington Post, September 6, 2015.
27. Obama quote from his speech to the United Nations on September 20, 2016; “gaps”: Paul Ryan quoted in Jennifer Steinhauer, “Senate Blocks Bill on Tougher Refugee Screening,” New York Times, January 20, 2016; 33,000 figure in Philip Connor and Jens Manuel Krogstad, “For the First Time, U.S. Resettles Fewer Refugees Than the Rest of the World,” Pew Research Center (2017).
28. For further reading on Viktor Orbán, we suggest Paul Lendvai, Orbán: Europe’s New Strongman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Scholars situate events in Hungary since 1989 as part of a larger populist trend in Central and Eastern Europe. See Umut Korkut, Liberalization Challenges in Hungary: Elitism, Progressivism, and Populism (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Jacques Rupnik, “Hungary’s Illiberal Turn: How Things Went Wrong,” Journal of Democracy 23, no. 3 (2012): 132–37; and Janos Kornai, “Hungary’s U-Turn: Retreating from Democracy,” Journal of Democracy 26, no. 3 (2015): 34–48.
29. Stephan Faris, “Power Hungary: How Viktor Orban Became Europe’s New Strongman,” Bloomberg, January 22, 2015. These results match similar polls cited in “End of Communism Cheered, but Now with More Reservations,” Pew Research Center (November 2, 2009), and “Hungary Dissatisfied with Democracy, but Not Its Ideals,” Pew Research Center (April 7, 2010).
30. “European Elections Database,” Norsk Senter for Forskningsdata, n.d.
31. Scholars who examine Putin and Orbán are divided on whether this is a fair comparison. For arguments in the “no” camp, see Péter Krekó and Zsolt Enyedi, “Explaining Eastern Europe: Orbán’s Laboratory of Illiberalism,” Journal of Democracy 28, no. 3 (2018): 39–51; Mitchell Orenstein, Péter Krekó, and Attila Juhaz, “The Hungarian Putin?,” Foreign Affairs, Online Snapshot, February 8, 2015. For arguments in the “yes” camp, see András Simonyi, “Putin, Erdogan and Orbán: Band of Brothers?,” New Perspectives Quarterly 31, no. 4 (2014): 33–35.
32. Our interpretation of what transpired in Hungary between 1989 and 2016 complements a growing set of work in the comparative institutions literature. See James Dawson and Sean Haley, “East Central Europe: The Fading Mirage of the ‘Liberal Consensus,’” Journal of Democracy 27, no. 1 (2016): 20–34; Aron Buzogány, “Illiberal Democracy in Hungary: Authoritarian Diffusion or Domestic Causation?,” Democratization 24, no. 7 (2017): 1307–25; Matthijs Bogaards “De-democratization in Hungary: Diffusely Defective Democracy,” Democratization 25, no. 8 (2018): 1481–99.
33. Orbán speech, 26 Jul 14, in Hungarian Government online archives, 2010–14.
34. Quoted in “Migrant Crisis ‘a German Problem’—Hungary’s Orban,” BBC, September 3, 2015.
35. Statistics from “Country Report Poland 2018” in “Assessment of Progress on Structural Reforms, Prevention and Correction of Macroeconomic Imbalances, and Results of In-depth Reviews Under Regulation (EU) No 1176/2011,” Commission Staff Working Document, European Commission, March 7, 2018, pp. 1–46.
36. See Aleksandra Wisniewska, “Unemployment in Poland to Hit 25-Year Low,” Financial Times, August 19, 2016.
37. A longer version of this story can be found in Condoleezza Rice, Democracy: Stories from the Long Road to Freedom (New York: Twelve, 2017), 159–64.
38. Megan Specia, “Nationalist March Dominates Poland’s Independence Day,” New York Times, November 11, 2017.
39. According to Jordan Kyle and Limor Gultchin, “Populists in Power Around the World,” Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (n.d.), populist leaders came into power in eight Central and Eastern European countries between 1990 and 2018: Belarus (Alexander Lukashenko), Bulgaria (Boyko Borisov), the Czech Republic (Andrej Babiš), Hungary (Viktor Orbán), Poland (Law and Justice Party), Russia (Vladimir Putin), Serbia (Aleksandar Vučić) and Slovakia (Robert Fico).
40. From “Facts on the Living Situation,” German Federal Statistics Office, October 1, 2018; and “The East-West Divide Is Diminishing, but Differences Still Remain,” The Local.de, October 2, 2018.
41. See Sabine Rennefanz, “East Germans Are Still Different,” Guardian, September 30, 2010; Kate Connolly, “German Reunification 25 Years On: How Different Are East and West Really,” Guardian, October 2, 2015; Ben Knight, “East Germans Still Victims of ‘Cultural Colonialism’ by the West,” DW, November 1, 2017.
42. Chrupalla quoted in “Why Is the Former East Germany Tilting Populist?,” Der Spiegel, November 17, 2017.
43. “Emmanuel Macron Speech, European Parliament,” French Elysée, April 7, 2018.
44. In the months before the referendum, the margin of support for “Remain” over “Leave” was in the double digits. A September 28, 2015, poll by ComRes, for example, found 55 percent for “Remain” and 37 percent for “Leave.” In February 2016, polls still reported marginal support for “Remain” in the upper single digits. However, polls began to tighten as voters made up their minds, and a small shift toward the “Leave” campaign began to emerge. Survey results conducted and released by YouGov, Opinium, and TNS the day before the referendum, predicted, on average, a 51 percent vote for “Remain” and 49 percent vote for “Leave.” More analysis on pre-Brexit polling can be found by Peter Barnes, “EU Referendum Poll Tracker,” BBC (2016).
45. For one insider elite reaction to Brexit, see Craig Oliver’s Unleashing Demons: The Inside Story of Brexit (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2017). Oliver was David Cameron’s communications director from 2011 to 2016.
46. “Leave” won with 51.9 percent of the vote; “Remain” secured 48.1 percent.
47. For a longer history on events leading up to this referendum, see Harold Clarke, Matthew Goodwin, and Paul Whiteley, Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
48. For more, see Michael Lewis-Beck and Daniel S. Morey, “The French ‘Petit Oui’: The Maastricht Treaty and the French Voting Agenda,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 38, no. 1 (2007): 65–87.
49. Thomas Bräuninger, Tanja Cornelius, Thomas König, and Thomas Schuster, The Dynamics of European Integration: A Constitutional Analysis of the Amsterdam Treaty (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).
50. “HR Key Figures—Staff Members,” European Commission (2018), and “Structure of the College of Commissioners,” European Commission (2018). The latter document outlines the twenty-eight members of the European Commission as the president, high representative on foreign policy and security policy, first vice president, four additional vice presidents, and twenty-one commissioners.
51. Matthew Dalton, “EU Corks Its Plan to Limit Olive Oil,” Wall Street Journal, May 23, 2013.
52. For samples of the argument, see Andrew Moravcsik, “Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union,” JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 40, no. 4 (2002): 603–24; and Moravcsik, “Is There a ‘Democratic Deficit’ in World Politics? A Framework for Analysis,” Government and Opposition 39, no. 2 (2004): 336–63; Andreas Follesdal and Simon Hix, “Why There Is a Democratic Deficit in the EU: A Response to Majone and Moravcsik,” JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies 44, no. 3 (2006): 533–62; and Mathias Koenig‐Archibugi, “The Democratic Deficit of EU Foreign and Security Policy,” International Spectator 37, no. 4 (2002): 61–73.
53. These results come from the annual Eurobarometer question that asked respondents to holistically decide if their country had “on balance benefited or not from being a member of the EU.” The perceived benefits of EU membership peaked in 1991 at 71 percent. Similar Eurobarometer questions aimed at trust in EU institutions and whether the EU was perceived as a positive force or not saw slightly different results. The EU’s positive image peaked in 2007 at 52 percent. Trust in the EU peaked in 2007 at 57 percent. See “Major Changes in European Public Opinion Regarding European Union, Exploratory Study,” Public Opinion Monitoring Series, European Parliament Research Service (November 2016), 13–14.
The Eurobarometer results reveal that the perceived benefits of EU membership declined in 1993–94, around the escalation of the Bosnian war, again in 2003–4 around the start of the Iraqi insurgency, and in 2009–10 as the severity of the Eurozone debt crisis began to reveal itself. See ibid., 13–17.
54. The failure of France and the Netherlands to approve the EU Constitution highlighted the growing Euroskeptic movements within these countries. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, fears of the “Polish plumber” became a rallying cry for populist movements to mobilize support against increased integration and the European Union. The efforts worked. For more, see Mabel Berezin, “Appropriating the ‘No’: The French National Front, the Vote on the Constitution, and the ‘New’ April 21,” PS: Political Science and Politics 39, no. 2 (2006): 269–72; Lewis-Beck and Morey, “The French ‘Petit Oui’; and Matt Qvortrup, “The Three Referendums on the European Constitution Treaty in 2005,” Political Quarterly 77, no. 1 (2006): 89–97.
55. Specifically, ten countries—the Czech Republic, Cyprus, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia—joined the EU in 2004. Two more countries—Bulgaria and Romania—joined the EU in 2007, and Croatia joined in 2013.
56. For more on the EU’s efforts to construct important symbols to deepen integration, see Michael Bruter, “On What Citizens Mean by Feeling ‘European’: Perceptions of News, Symbols and Borderless-ness,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 1 (2004): 21–39; and Ian Manners, “Symbolism in European Integration,” Comparative European Politics 9, no. 3 (2011): 243–68.
57. These results come from the annual Eurobarometer question that asked respondents whether they identify according to their nationality, their nationality and their European identity, or just their European identity. Self-identity as solely “European” peaked in 1994, shortly after the Maastricht Treaty and the formal creation of the European Union in 1993. Since then, individuals have been less likely to identify as European. See “Major Changes in European Public Opinion Regarding European Union, Exploratory Study,” Public Opinion Monitoring Series, European Parliament Research Service (November 2016), 38.
58. Edward Lawler, “Affective Attachments to Nested Groups: A Choice-Process Theory,” American Sociological Review 57, no. 3 (1992): 327–39.
59. Ronald Inglehart, “Cognitive Mobilization and European Identity,” Comparative Politics 3, no. 1 (1970): 45–70. According to Inglehart, technological developments and innovations have increased the overall welfare of individuals, satisfying their “materialist” needs for economic and physical security. This has opened space for a new set of “post-materialist” values to emerge in developed countries. Building on Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Inglehart defines post-materialist values as those further up in the hierarchy. These values emphasize personal freedoms and a sense of belonging.
60. “Confidence in Institutions,” Gallup Historical Trends Polling; see “Congress Less Popular Than Cockroaches, Traffic Jams,” Public Policy Polling (January 8, 2013). The poll found at the time that Congress’s favorability rating was 9 percent. This was smaller than the favorability ratings for cockroaches (43 percent favorable), Genghis Khan (37 percent favorable), and traffic jams (34 percent favorable).
61. “Income Inequality and the Great Recession,” U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2010), 1–11.
62. For a longer development of this, see “The American Experience,” in Rice, Democracy, 25–67.
63. Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018), 159.
64. Richard Rorty, “A Cultural Left,” in Achieving Our Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
65. “For if you turn out to be living in an evil empire (rather than, as you had been told, a democracy fighting an evil empire), then you have no responsibility to your country; you are accountable only to humanity. If what your government and your teachers are saying is all part of the same Orwellian monologue—if the differences between the Harvard faculty and the military-industrial complex, or between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, are negligible—then you have a responsibility to make a revolution.” Ibid.
66. See Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
67. Quotes from essay discussion by Isaiah Singleton (Oakland) and Annays Yacaman (Chicago) in American Creed, prod. Randy Bean and Dan Soles, Citizen Film, 2018.
68. Clark Murdock, Kelley Sayler, and Ryan Crotty, “The Defense Budget’s Double Whammy: Drawing Down While Hollowing Out from Within,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (October 18, 2012), 1.
69. Bill Adair, “Peace Dividend Began with a Bush,” Poynter Institute Politifact Organization (January 24, 2008).
70. Appendix, “UN Security Council–Authorized Military Operations, 1950–2007,” in Adam Roberts and Dominik Zaum, Selective Security: War and the United Nations Security Council Since 1945, Adelphi Paper no. 395 (London: IISS, 2008).
71. The meeting is described more fully in Rice, No Higher Honor, 62–63.
72. Other research focusing on the unique post-9/11 relationship between the two powers is Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Stephen Welch, “Russia and the United States After 9/11,” Terrorism and Political Violence 17, no. 1–2 (2005): 79–291; and Kari Roberts, “Empire Envy: Russia-US Relations Post 9/11,” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 6, no. 4 (2004): 1–23.
73. For more on these connections, including the activities of Chechen Al Qaeda affiliates the International Islamic Peacekeeping Brigade and the Caucasus Emirate, see Gordon Hahn, The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014); and Emil Souleimanov, “The Caucasus Emirate: Genealogy of an Islamist Insurgency,” Middle East Policy 18, no. 4 (2011): 155–68.
74. See 9/11 Commission, Report (New York: Norton, 2004), 165–66.
75. The Department of Homeland Security is responsible for overseeing counterterrorism, border security, immigration and customs enforcement, and disaster response programs. The homeland security adviser comments and helps coordinate local state responses on these issues. The military command for the continental United States includes the creation of a new combatant command center, “Northern Command.” It provides military support and is responsible for defending the United States against an external invasion. The director of national intelligence (DNI) grew out of the 9/11 Commission report as a way to coordinate activities within the intelligence community and mitigate the risk of future intelligence failures. The National Counterterrorism Center also formed on the recommendations of the report as a government organization designed to improve the government’s ability to detect and disrupt future terrorist attacks.
76. Bush, “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People,” White House Archives, 20 Sep 01.
77. Rice, No Higher Honor, 79.
78. The Iraq war is discussed extensively in Rice, No Higher Honor, and again in her later book, Democracy, 273–330. Zelikow’s first duty as counselor of the State Department, a deputy to Rice, in February 2005, was to join a group heading to Iraq to critique what was going on, the first of many such trips during the next few years.
79. Ibid., 215.
80. The foundational resolutions against Iran were UNSC 1696 (July 2006) and 1737 (December 2006). The foundational resolutions against North Korea were UNSC 1695 (July 2006) and 1718 (October 2006).
81. C. J. Chivers and Mark Landler, “Putin to Suspend Pact with NATO,” New York Times, April 27, 2007.
82. Quoted in Rice, No Higher Honor, 578.
83. Putin’s reference to Ukraine as a “made-up country” and the Bucharest summit are described in Condoleezza Rice, Democracy, 115–17; and Rice, No Higher Honor, 673–74.
84. The words “you are with us or against us” were first mentioned in the Bush statement to a Joint Session of Congress, 20 Sep 01.
85. See UN Development Program and Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, Arab Human Development Report 2002: Creating Opportunities for Future Generations (New York: UNDP, 2002).
86. Scholars argue that Russia’s reaction to the color revolutions varied according to the states involved, but the Russians primarily saw the events as undermining blizhneye zarubezhiye, or Russia’s ability to influence foreign policy “near abroad.” For a longer take on this argument, see Lincoln Mitchell, The Color Revolutions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
87. Rice, No Higher Honor, 360.
88. For more, see Rice, Democracy, 97–98; and Michael McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018), 23–50.
89. Quoted in Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine,” Atlantic, April 2016.
90. Quoted in Jack McCallum, “Lord of the Rings,” Sports Illustrated, February 18, 1991.
91. See Miklós Hadas, “The Olympics and the Cold War: An Eastern European Perspective,” in Alan Bairner and Gyozo Molnar, eds., The Politics of the Olympics: A Survey (London: Routledge, 2010).
Epilogue: To Build a Better World
1. John Barnes, “Lord Cockfield,” Independent (UK), January 20, 2007.
2. Zelikow was a managing director of a group, Rework America, that developed a comprehensive set of specific ideas. Rework America, America’s Moment: Creating Opportunity in the Connected Age (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). Sponsored in part by the Markle Foundation, Rework America’s “Skillful” initiative is now piloting projects in dozens of states. Rice has continued to work on education policy and to foster civic conversations about American aspirations, an “American Creed.” E.g., Condoleezza Rice & Joel Klein, “Education keeps America safe,” CNN (2012); and, working with the American Library Association, Jason Reynolds, “Can Dialogue Help Americans Overcome the Red and Blue Divide? Some Say Yes,” WYSO Excursions [Dayton, OH] (2019).
3. Eighty percent of Russia’s exports are in oil, gas, and minerals; 65 percent of its budget is dependent on this sector. This information is drawn from Fiona Hill, “Putin, Yukos, and Russia,” Brookings Institution, December 1, 2004.
4. Kori Schake, Safe Passage: The Transition from British to American Hegemony (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
5. Quoted in Simon Denyer, “Move Over, America. China Now Presents as the Model ‘Blazing a New Trail’ for the World,” Washington Post, October 19, 2017. Reagan was invoking the expression coined by John Winthrop as inspiration and warning to the colonists founding a settlement in the New World that would become America.
6. James Dobbins, Howard Shatz, and Ali Wyne, “Russia Is a Rogue, Not a Peer; China Is a Peer, Not a Rogue,” Rand Perspective, October 2018, p. 12; see generally Peter Frankopan, The New Silk Roads: The Present and Future of the World (New York: Knopf, 2019); Parag Khanna, The Future Is Asian: Global Order in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019); and Bruno Maçães, Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order (London: Hurst, 2018).
7. See John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
8. Nicholas Casey and Clifford Krauss, “It Doesn’t Matter if Ecuador Can Afford This Dam. China Still Gets Paid,” New York Times, December 24, 2018.
9. See, for example, the debate between Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, “Future Warfare in the Western Pacific: Chinese Antiaccess/Area Denial, U.S. AirSea Battle, and Command of the Commons in East Asia,” International Security 41, no. 1 (2016): 7–48; and Andrew S. Erickson, Evan Braden Montgomery, Craig Neuman, Stephen Biddle, and Ivan Oelrich, “Correspondence: How Good Are China’s Antiaccess/Area-Denial Capabilities?,” International Security 41, no. 4 (2017): 202–13.
10. John Deutch, “Is Innovation China’s New Great Leap Forward,” MIT Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 2018.
11. The reference to thirty-four million Chinese men is from Simon Denyer and Annie Gowen, “Too Many Men,” Washington Post, April 18, 2018.
12. Address in Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 9 (1943), 674–76; an audio recording is available online from the CBC Archives. Although most of this speech was drafted by Robert Sherwood and Samuel Rosenman, the quoted passage was written by Roosevelt himself. Samuel Rosenman, Working with Roosevelt (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952), 356.