GALE-FORCE WINDS, pummeling rain, and fifteen-to-twenty-foot seas buffeted the American naval cruiser anchored in Marsaxlokk Harbour in Malta. President George Bush, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and other administration officials had flown into Valletta and taken the USS Belknap down the coast to meet with President Mikhail Gorbachev, foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, Marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, former ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin, and other Soviet advisers. But with the miserable weather—the worst in a decade, locals said—the seasickness-prone Gorbachev decided to remain on the cruise ship Maxim Gorkiy, moored at the dock, rather than transferring to a Soviet naval cruiser anchored out at sea as originally planned. So the Americans had to make the wet, uncomfortable trip by a small launch from the Belknap to the Maxim Gorkiy. Their shipboard meetings were to be reminiscent of Franklin Roosevelt’s August 1941 meeting at sea with Winston Churchill off Newfoundland.125
The summit, scheduled for December 2 and 3, 1989, had been slow in coming. Two weeks after Bush’s inauguration, on February 3, 1989, the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack F. Matlock, had cabled a long memorandum to the White House that described the Soviet economy and the Communist Party government as physically and intellectually bankrupt and saddled with an unsustainable military burden. Matlock explained that Gorbachev’s announced reforms reflected the fact that he was under great internal pressure from a society and an economy near collapse.
We now know that Matlock was right. But at the time, many in the Bush administration—especially Dick Cheney, Dan Quayle, and Bob Gates—had grave doubts about Matlock’s assessment as well as about Gorbachev’s and Shevarnadze’s proposals for across-the-board arms reductions, including the withdrawal of five hundred tactical nuclear weapons from Eastern Europe.126 So, too, did many intelligence officers and Pentagon analysts, who in their reports suggested that the idea of Gorbachev “being so embattled” was “a figment of the imagination.” They thought there was little chance that Soviet military leaders and other top party officials would accept Gorbachev’s reforms, and they didn’t put much stock in Gorbachev’s staying power. Cheney essentially called Gorbachev a fraud and imposter; Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater famously called him a “drugstore cowboy.”127
By contrast, James Baker and many of his colleagues in the State Department, as well as others in the CIA and the foreign policy community, agreed with Matlock that the Soviet Union had no choice but to alter its politics, society, and economy, and they were more sanguine about the prospects for glasnost and perestroika and about the future of US-Soviet relations. Accordingly, they believed that the United States needed to rethink its foreign policy.
Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger were somewhere in the middle, although more skeptical than optimistic. President Bush himself was not sure what to think. He was probably closest to Scowcroft’s position, though he leaned at times toward Baker’s more optimistic view.
But since Bush and Scowcroft couldn’t be certain of Gorbachev, they were wary of taking the Soviet leader’s statements and political overtures at face value.128 Gorbachev’s attempts to reform Soviet society might represent a genuine ambition to dismantle totalitarianism, but they might also represent efforts to stimulate the economy, enhance worker productivity, boost the Soviet Union’s legitimacy both at home and in the West, and ultimately strengthen the Soviet empire without fundamentally altering its character.
Bush and Scowcroft understood that the administration had to establish its own firm position from which they could embark on any diplomatic initiatives. And the president and his top advisers unanimously agreed that any East-West initiatives they launched should be “bold ones.” None of them liked being put in the position of having to react to Gorbachev and his favorable press coverage. They wanted to get out ahead of the Soviet leader.129 But how should they do this, and what larger strategic goals should shape the specific tactics that the Bush administration would employ in dealing with the Soviet Union? The answers to these questions were far from obvious.
Most outside observers had expected that the newly inaugurated George H. W. Bush would continue the foreign policies of the Reagan administration. So it came as a surprise when Bush’s newly appointed national security advisor, Brent Scowcroft, went on ABC’s World News Tonight Sunday and declared that the Cold War wasn’t over. Gorbachev was “interested in making trouble within the Western alliance,” Scowcroft proclaimed. And while there might be light at the end of the tunnel, he said, he wasn’t sure if it was “the sun or an incoming locomotive.”130
Scowcroft’s over-the-air comments marked a retrenchment from the optimism of President Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz. At a time when American and European leaders were unilaterally dismantling their Cold War defenses, Scowcroft feared that Gorbachev was in fact restructuring the Soviet economy and that the United States might wake up one day to find a rejuvenated Soviet Union and a West in shambles.131
Thus, Scowcroft was wary of the warm relations Reagan and Shultz had established with the Soviet Union in their last years in office, and he was particularly critical of the Reykjavik summit, held in early October 1986, when Reagan and Gorbachev had proposed to get rid of nuclear weapons entirely.
Scowcroft recalled that episode vividly. He and Bush had been having dinner together at the vice president’s residence during the Reykjavik meetings, “watching television, eating,” when he saw “Shultz—with tears in his eyes—saying how close we had come to something.” He said he had the opposite feeling: relief. “We dodged a bullet,” he told Bush, who replied, “What do you mean?” Scowcroft told him, “That would have been a classic disaster. Because there was no counter plan or anything else to support Europe and defend against the Soviet Union if they chose this path.”132
James Woolsey, Scowcroft’s partner in the Scowcroft Commission and frequent op-ed coauthor, agreed. Reykjavik was “one of the worst performances in foreign policy by an administration that this country has seen in the nuclear age,” he said. It held up “for the world a completely unrealistic view of the possibility of doing away on the one hand with all ballistic missiles or on the other with all nuclear weapons,” Woolsey said.133
Scowcroft had also spoken out against the White House’s proposed ban on intermediate-range nuclear forces, which he viewed as “the wrong treaty” because it eroded Europe’s nuclear and thus military defense and left it vulnerable to the Soviets’ existing long-range nuclear weapons and to the Warsaw Pact’s superior conventional forces. He thought the Reagan administration had put its plans for strategic weapons on the table for negotiations with the Soviet Union before those plans had been vetted by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Department of Defense.134 Shultz and Reagan were both being naive, in his judgment, and overly credulous. He thought they’d been “snowed,” acting as if they were living in a make-believe world.135
Listening to Gorbachev’s calls for reform, Scowcroft felt as if he had seen it all before. Scowcroft had repeatedly warned of “the cyclical oscillations between euphoria and alarm which have been the hallmark of the American reaction to United States-Soviet relations in the past.” The United States, he wrote in 1979, couldn’t afford the “complacency” that accompanied the giddy optimism of “the spirit of Glassboro [New Jersey, 1967], the spirit of Camp David, and other euphoric manifestations.” He didn’t explicitly refer to the 1972 Moscow summit, SALT and détente in his warnings, but they were the obvious referents.136 And now, American policy makers, the press, and the public were again succumbing to the false muse and counterproductive euphoria of Gorbachev—what some were labeling “Gorbymania.” Just because Gorbachev was changing the Marxist-Leninist foundations of Soviet society through glasnost and perestroika, Scowcroft told the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel in October 1988, it didn’t mean that he would change “the historical Russia, a major power with historical claims to the world.” Moreover, Bush’s national security advisor doubted “Gorbachev’s use of the word ‘democracy’ matches up with the West’s.”137
In Scowcroft’s view, Reagan and his advisers were warming up to the Soviet Union in the absence of any clearly defined strategic plan. For all of the seeming promise of the late 1980s thaw in US-Soviet relations, the Soviet empire was still very much in place when President Bush took office. It was still in command of the sixteen Soviet republics and Eastern Europe. It continued to have a one-party communist leadership in charge of a police state and a command economy. It still controlled a formidable arsenal of nuclear and conventional weapons that threatened the United States, Europe, and US allies around the world. It still was helping communist regimes and allied governments in Cuba, Angola, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua. It had neither renounced Marxism-Leninism and the belief in class conflict nor retracted its hope for the triumph of the workers and the defeat of capitalism.
The only thing that had changed, as far as Scowcroft could tell, was Soviet rhetoric. And he had had enough experience of dissembling by Soviet leaders to distrust Gorbachev’s lofty pronouncements—at least not without concrete actions to back up his speech.
Worse yet, Reagan had been going about things the wrong way. His famous “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” was a “lousy statement,” in Scowcroft’s judgment. The phrase itself didn’t “advance anything,” since the Berlin Wall remained standing. Not only did the United States have no way to enforce Reagan’s declaration, but the statement was counterproductive, he pointed out—both belligerent and disrespectful. “It was presumptive and arrogant to tell another head of state how to act.” Simple psychology suggested that by making such a blunt demand, Reagan “made it less likely that Gorbachev would tear down the wall,” Scowcroft noted.138 President Bush wholly agreed. “Every chief of state and head of government has pride in his country and should be treated with dignity and respect,” he remarked on a separate occasion, “and that must include consulting with them.”139
Rather than demanding that the Soviet Union take down the Berlin Wall, Scowcroft wanted a different approach, one that would make the wall “no longer necessary” by creating the underlying conditions that would cause it to be torn down. For the Bush administration to chart a new course, he believed the president first had to repair the damage done to both the substance and processes of national security policy. He had already seen the Reagan administration’s 180-degree swing from being too harsh at the outset (calling the Soviet Union an “evil empire”) to becoming “too embracing.” He thus had reason to question Reagan and Shultz’s handling of the US-Soviet strategic relationship. Where was the steady course? What was the overarching vision? What was the end game?
Scowcroft’s understanding of the need for a comprehensive new strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union lay behind his call, in the first few weeks of the Bush administration, for strategic reviews of US foreign policy and of US-Soviet relations in particular—which was “obviously our first priority.”140
Unfortunately, the review of US-Soviet policy turned out to be “very bureaucratic” and “very unimaginative,” in Scowcroft’s description (in large part because the political appointees in the State Department were carryovers from the Reagan administration who remained in office until the Senate approved their successors). So Scowcroft had Condoleezza Rice redraft the analysis based on a very productive and very positive talk the two of them had had in December 1988 about “getting ahead of the ferment in Eastern Europe.” Rice’s subsequent thirty-page memo outlined a process whereby the Bush administration would encourage change in Eastern Europe and try to get the Soviet Union to pull its troops out of Eastern Europe without provoking Gorbachev “to clamp down” or inducing “a hostile reaction against him.” The United States should seek to “institutionalize” Gorbachev’s reforms and then proceed to “move them in the direction we want.”141
Getting the US-Soviet relationship right was the key to everything else, in Scowcroft’s view, and the key to getting the US-Soviet relationship right “was Eastern Europe and changing things there.” This meant building on what was happening in Poland and Hungary so that the administration could help the countries of Eastern Europe reform their own societies. But it also meant the United States would be reversing one of its Cold War policies: instead of encouraging those satellite countries that pushed back against Soviet authority, such as Romania under the Ceausescus and Yugoslavia under Tito, it needed to support East European leaders who were already embarking on internal reforms—even if such reforms coincided with the very policies Gorbachev was himself advocating. So Romania, “one of the most Stalinist of states,” went “to the bottom of the list” under this logic, Scowcroft noted, while the Eastern Bloc states that were making most progress on political and economic reforms rose to the top of the list.142
Baker and Scowcroft delayed setting up any personal meetings between Bush and Gorbachev until they were sure of the direction they wanted to go. In July, Bush made a four-day trip to Poland and Hungary and attended the G-7 summit in Paris; he met with Gen. Wojciech Jaruzelski and Lech Walesa, and was enthusiastically received in Hungary. Only after this did Bush sit down on Air Force One, flying back from Paris, and write Gorbachev a note inviting him to meet in person in advance of their planned formal summit in Washington in 1990. Had Bush called for a meeting any earlier than this, Gates said, “Gorbachev would not have had to face reality.”143 Bush and Gorbachev scheduled the summit for December 2–3 at the island of Malta in the central Mediterranean.
Before then, on September 22, the administration signaled a fundamental shift in US-Soviet relations. National Security Directive 23 proclaimed that after forty years of containment, “a new era may be now upon us.” Because the Soviet military still posed a threat, however, NSD 23 directed Cabinet members and agency leaders to promote “fundamental alterations in the Soviet military force structure, institutions, and practices” that, once started, “could only be reversed at great cost.” The alterations would emphasize verifiable arms control negotiations on reductions in force levels, transparency and confidence-building measures, and nonproliferation. They would further include economic, political, and cultural cooperation between the two superpowers so as to integrate the Soviet Union into the international system.144
Given the ten months that elapsed between Bush’s inauguration and the Malta summit, a period that saw fast-moving events in Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, the Bush administration came under criticism for its “pause”—what the critics regarded as the administration’s unneeded delay at working toward an end to the Cold War and its squandering of the positive US-Soviet relations achieved by President Reagan and Shultz in their last years in office. Not only did Ambassador Matlock disagree with the pause, so, too, did Margaret Thatcher. Others were yet more critical. The White House had “no philosophy” and was “drifting,” the Polish activist Adam Michnik said. It was “sleepwalking through history.” The Washington Post’s Don Oberdorfer similarly wrote of the “fledgling Bush administration[’s] . . . painfully slow pace.” The Washington Post’s David E. Hoffman was equally critical of what he considered to be the needless delay and, following Soviet official Anatoly Chernayev, called 1989 a “lost year.” And on May 20, the New York Times editorialized: “Imagine that an alien spaceship approached earth and sent the message: ‘Take me to your leader.’ Who would that be? Without doubt, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev.”145
Of course, it is impossible to know what would have happened had an earlier summit been held. But the subsequent success of the Bush administration in achieving its ultimate ends—culminating in the almost entirely peaceful end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet empire—suggests that the critics were mistaken.
“You have to remember that this was a very amorphous time,” the NSC director of Soviet affairs, Nicholas Burns, commented. “We were looking into the future and couldn’t see clearly. The Warsaw Pact was falling apart; Eastern bloc states were expecting independence; [Boris] Yeltsin and Gorbachev were competing for power. [It was a] lot to handle.”146 And with the immense political, economical, and military stakes in play, Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft wanted to proceed cautiously and very deliberately.
Some on the NSC staff disagreed with Scowcroft’s caution. “We saw this huge opportunity to change the Soviet Union,” Burns noted, but Scowcroft “was very worried about all that could go wrong. Brent would bring us back to what could go wrong. Will it break up violently? Will we have warlords? What if it breaks up, if there are ethnic rebellions? It was a very, very prudent view, and got us to look at both sides of the equation,” Burns commented. “But he was very much focused on this, and wanted to see change come peacefully.”147 Notwithstanding his deep-seated caution, Scowcroft was willing to be persuaded by new evidence and of new points of view. “Despite the fact that his experience and depth far exceeded ours,” Burns added, “he listened to us.”148
“We didn’t know the depth of [the] forces” in play, Scowcroft conceded, and any number of outcomes were possible. It was “a matter of guiding and managing forces. Part of our goal was to keep things from moving too fast, and not have revolutions in Eastern Europe.”149 The transitions to new governments in Eastern Europe had to be handled very delicately, given the complexity of the situation there, the possibility of crackdowns and bloodshed by the ruling Soviet-backed communist governments, and the immensity of the stakes. Polish independence, the liberalization of East-West economic relations, and any other major changes in Eastern Europe could only occur peacefully if the Soviet Union allowed them.
Scowcroft and others in the administration wanted to encourage Gorbachev “in his moves to increase productivity, cut absenteeism, drinking, corruption,” he explained, even though by doing so the Soviet leader “was pulling apart the sinews that held the system together.” By encouraging reform and “trying to cultivate . . . ‘little Gorbachevs’ who would have popular support,” Gorbachev was himself, oddly, acting the part of a US ally, Scowcroft observed. But what Gorbachev’s pro-reform rhetoric ignored, he pointed out, was the fact that the communist regimes in Eastern European would likely be overthrown at the first opportunity, since their governments had been imposed from the outside, by the Soviet Union.150
It clearly wasn’t in the United States’ interest to incite “the military, KGB, or Party officials opposed to [Gorbachev’s] reforms [to] energize enough to throw him out or to force him to turn and back away.” Neither did the Bush administration want to leave a defeated Soviet Union feeling embittered and betrayed, as Germany had been after the Treaty of Versailles.151 Scowcroft and the administration thus wanted to move slowly so as to coordinate changes in East-West relations with other developments on the balance of conventional weapons and nuclear forces, trade and finance, and political liberalization. The delayed response to Gorbachev’s overtures and the quickly unfolding developments in Eastern Europe masked the care with which Bush and Scowcroft and Baker were orchestrating US policy.152
The administration wanted to move on several fronts. As soon as Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft were “confident about [their] purposes and agenda,” they planned to communicate their intentions to the American public and international audiences. The White House needed to signal its commitment to the security of the United States’ European allies, to the credibility of the NATO nuclear deterrence, and to making progress on arms control. It needed to take advantage of the “potential weak link” of Eastern Europe, where the best lever the United States and its allies had was economic aid. And it had to move “aggressively to promote regional stability” in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Central Asia, Indochina, Central America, and elsewhere.153
The administration proceeded according to the principles spelled out in Rice’s memo of March 1989. President Bush would deliver a series of foreign policy addresses, while the administration simultaneously took additional steps.
They took up European security first. Following up on their conversations from the transition period, Scowcroft proposed to Bush that the United States and Soviet Union each withdraw their ground forces from Central Europe, with the Soviets pulling back their troops into the USSR and the Americans pulling their forces back across the Atlantic. Scowcroft’s logic was that the “NATO minus US and [the] Warsaw Pact minus USSR” would be to the United States’ net advantage, and thought it was precisely the sort of bold initiative the administration needed to be making. After all, it was the presence of Soviet soldiers that allowed the Soviet Union to dominate its satellite countries, so it made sense for the administration to see if Gorbachev was actually willing to pull his conventional forces out of Eastern Europe in his stated effort to improve East-West tension and renunciation of repression.
The proposal generated a firestorm. “Many people thought it was a terrible idea,” Scowcroft reported, and “Cheney about had a heart attack.” In any event, the “idea got people thinking.”154 Bush decided to go ahead, but he did agree to scale back the plan, calling for each side to withdraw thirty thousand troops (instead of Scowcroft’s larger number). The plan exemplified the dual basis by which Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft wanted to proceed: they would be proactive and look for real opportunities with the Soviet Union, on one hand, but also test the Soviets, on the other.
Scowcroft recognized that in the reductions in conventional force levels in the European theater were inevitably linked the numbers of nuclear weapons, especially with respect to short-range nuclear forces, whether nuclear missiles, nuclear artillery shells, or other nuclear weapons (SNF). And because he wanted to avoid a split in NATO—a majority of Germans opposed SNF—any change in strategic weapons had to be considered in conjunction with changes in the balance of conventional forces. Furthermore, any adjustment in the numbers of nuclear weapons placed in Germany had to be coordinated with other NATO members, especially Great Britain and France.
This promised difficult negotiations. The Bush administration wanted to keep its short-range nuclear missiles in Germany (the mobile-launched Lance missile) so as to have a credible deterrent, given the Warsaw Pact’s great advantage in conventional forces. Scowcroft saw the short-range missiles as indispensable to German and European security. (In fact, Scowcroft had wanted to keep the INF and get rid of SNF, but the Reagan administration had already eliminated the INF.) However, a broad coalition of Germans wanted to eliminate the short-range missiles as well from German soil and, if possible, to denuclearize Europe. As one Bundestag member said of the Lance, “The shorter the range, the ‘deader’ the Germans.”155 Making things worse for Scowcroft and the Bush administration, the Soviets were openly encouraging West Germany to remove the Lance missiles.
The resulting controversy made the resolution of the Lance issue and the setting of conventional force levels in Europe exceedingly difficult, which was why Scowcroft called the administration’s first six months “agony.”156 “What we needed to do, if we were to use nuclear weapons short of ICBMs,” Scowcroft said, “was to get behind the front lines and be able to interdict Soviet reinforcements coming up to the battle line. Those are the INF forces,” he pointed out. “They’re not the short ones.” Scowcroft continued:
I thought we gave ourselves two problems with INF. We removed our ability to do the kinds of strikes that they were useful for, what we really needed to stop a Soviet assault. It left us with weapons [the SNF forces] that were increasingly difficult politically to maintain, and to have acceptable in Germany. Actually, when the Cold War began to collapse in 1989 and things started to break down, it created a tremendous problem for us, especially with German unification coming up. Those weapons would all go off in Germany.157
Fortunately, the compromise on the conventional force reduction and Lance that Scowcroft and the administration would come up with made Bush look like a hero.158
With a possible summit meeting still months away, the administration wanted to provide a context for future negotiations with the Soviets. The president thus agreed to deliver a series of speeches to communicate the administration’s views of US foreign policy to the Congress, the public, US allies, and, especially, East European and Soviet audiences.
The historic changes brewing in Poland—including the legalization of Solidarity on April 5, 1989, the creation of the position of president of Poland, the establishment of a one-hundred-seat senate, and the promise of democratic elections—gave the White House an excellent opportunity to present its message. If the Polish elections were held as scheduled, it would mark the beginning of the end of communist rule in Poland and set a stunning precedent for the rest of Eastern Europe.159
The administration planned its first speech for April 17 in a Polish American enclave near Detroit by the name of Hamtramck. In the speech, which Scowcroft described as the administration’s “first major step on Eastern Europe,” Bush spoke of the passing of totalitarianism, the spread of freedom, the right of self-determination for Poles and other East Europeans, and the need for an end to Soviet domination. He emphasized the United States’ desire for a prosperous, free, and peaceful Poland and Eastern Europe, and said that the United States was willing to extend its economic support to those goals. The White House came up with a symbolic $100 million (Poland had requested $10 billion) and agreed to reschedule the Polish debt, conditional upon its adoption of market reforms, support of human rights, promotion of cultural openness, and opposition to international terror. There could be no progress without “significant political and economic liberalization,” Bush stated, but should Poland undertake political and market reforms, US and Western assistance would be forthcoming.160
Although the speech received little coverage domestically—the mind-set of American reporters seemed to be that nothing of importance could possibly be announced in a small Polish community in the Detroit metropolitan area—Bush’s address attracted careful attention from audiences in Poland, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and Western Europe.161
However, the Hamtramck speech revealed two chronic problems besetting Scowcroft and his NSC staff. One was that Scowcroft and his staff rarely had as much control over the speechwriting as they would have liked—“a major irritant,” in Scowcroft’s words. Sununu ran the speechwriting out of the White House Office of Communications, and he tended to side with the speechwriters and their wish for “more dramatic rhetoric” rather than with the members of the NSC staff. Unfortunately, the snappy prose and the built-in applause lines didn’t always match the seriousness of the foreign policy being proposed or the president’s personality—to say nothing of Scowcroft’s own sensibilities and those of his aides. In particular, Scowcroft complained of the “choppy political-campaign style” of the text, “hardly befitting a serious discussion of important policy issues.” (Bush conceded that the problems were partly his own fault for not spending enough time with his speechwriters before giving an address.)
The second problem was money. The United States needed to encourage the changes happening in Poland, Scowcroft argued, and financial aid was one of the chief instruments available to the administration. The secretary of the treasury disagreed. Brady’s argument in a NSC meeting of April 4 was that the United States had previously poured funds into Poland, but, without economic reforms in place, Poland ended up heavily in debt and no better off. He said, in effect, “Look, Poland squandered the money we gave them in 1976—let’s wait.” The president himself was torn; he recognized that the administration needed to be able to offer some financial assistance, but he would have preferred the program to be self-funding.
Scowcroft said this fight between the NSC and the Treasury Department was never settled, and so the administration ended up allocating “pathetically small amounts” of aid. Not only did this situation last throughout 1989, with the administration offering only $25 million to support Hungary, but it prevailed throughout the Bush administration’s four years in office.162 The Commerce Department wasn’t much help, either, with officials worried that any changes in the United States’ trade laws would create problems with its existing trade partners. Remarkably, Scowcroft found that Congress was more prepared to allocate money than was the administration. Where the government was willing to spend billions of dollars to fight wars, Scowcroft noted with irony, it wasn’t willing to spend much to help its former adversaries adjust to their new democratic societies and market economies.163
The next opportunity for the president to present a fuller view of the administration’s new policies came less than a month later, on May 12, at the Texas A&M commencement. This time, Scowcroft drafted most of the speech.164
“Containment worked,” Bush told his College Station audience. The United States and the world were now “approaching the conclusion of an historic postwar struggle between two visions: one of tyranny and conflict and one of democracy and freedom.” The United States therefore wanted US-Soviet relations to move “beyond containment” and integrate “the Soviet Union into the community of nations.” But the United States had to be cautious, Bush warned, in consideration of the Soviet Union’s “awesome military capabilities.” He insisted that the Soviet Union stop aiding Cuba and Nicaragua, retract its ties with Libya and other terrorist states, respect the integrity of Chinese territory, and return Japan’s northern territories.
Bush further exhorted the Soviet Union to reduce the numbers of tanks and military personnel stationed in Eastern Europe, to support the self-determination of East European states, to cease its support of Afghanistan and Angola, to expand its political freedoms at home, and to join the United States in combating global problems such as the drug trade and environmental destruction. If the Soviet Union sincerely wanted to establish a new relationship with the West, as Gorbachev said it did, then that relationship had to be earned and manifested through the Soviet Union’s own actions; “promises,” Bush stated, “are never enough.” Still, “we are ready to extend our hand” and “are ready for a hand in return.” He held out the carrots of increased trade with the United States and the West, greater foreign investment, and more financial aid should the Soviet Union reform its economy.165
The president provided further detail on his vision for Europe on May 21 at the Boston University commencement. He spoke of NATO as the centerpiece and, for forty years, the guarantor of European security. He emphasized the importance of the Atlantic alliance’s flexible response—that is, the array of conventional and nuclear forces at NATO’s disposal—and he warned of Western complacency. The Warsaw Pact still maintained a twelve-to-one advantage over NATO forces in short-range missiles and rocket launchers capable of delivering nuclear weapons and a two-to-one edge in battle tanks, for example. The United States sought “a real peace . . . of shared optimism,” Bush declared, “not a peace of armed camps.”166
Three days later, on May 24, Bush spoke at the US Coast Guard Academy. Unfortunately, the speech as drafted was “bombastic, hard-line, and full of ‘macho’ Cold War expressions,” in Scowcroft’s description. Luckily, Scowcroft was able to pull the draft, and he worked through the night to get it into shape.167
The final draft struck a balance between firmness and openness. On one hand, Bush called communism a “failed system” that was unable “to deliver the goods,” and he warned of the “misguided notions of economic nationalism.” He spoke of the commitment and resolve on the part of the United States and its allies, who were “strong, stronger really than at any point in the postwar period.” The president also affirmed that US policy was to “defend American interests in light of the enduring reality of Soviet military power,” and pointed out the indispensable role that nuclear deterrence had played in the United States’ Cold War strategy. He also noted the United States’ commitment to the Strategic Defense Initiative.168
Bush was careful to match his strong words with gentler ones, inviting the Soviet Union to join the world of democracies. So, on the other hand, he favorably referred to the “voices” in Tiananmen Square “speaking the language of democracy and freedom” (although two weeks later Chinese authorities would squash those very voices). He offered the prospect of Western aid should the Soviet Union “embrace free market reforms,” and he invited Gorbachev to cooperate with him on creating a Europe where war was no longer an option and on establishing “a better, more stable relationship” with the United States.169 As with the three previous speeches Scowcroft had helped draft, the New London address was at once plain-spoken, hard-nosed, and optimistic.
With the NATO summit in Brussels coming up at the end of May, the Bush administration settled on a proposal for levels of conventional forces in Europe. In order to avoid having the proposal derailed by NATO’s normal bureaucratic processes, Bush, Scowcroft, and Baker quietly presented it only to key allies such as British prime minister Margaret Thatcher and West German chancellor Helmut Kohl prior to the meeting. Their back-channel diplomacy paid off. At the Brussels meetings, the president and the European heads of state agreed to reduce the numbers of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and artillery as agreed upon by the Warsaw Pact nations, to cut existing NATO levels of combat aircraft and helicopters 15 percent below current levels, and put a ceiling of 275,000 on the numbers of US and Soviet soldiers in Europe—which meant the Soviets had to withdraw 325,000 troops, and the United States only 7,500, or 20 percent—and to a “partial reduction” of short-range nuclear weapons (not their total removal, as Germany wanted). All these measures were to go into effect by 1993.
Gorbachev welcomed the proposal as “a serious and specific response,” and even Britain’s hawkish prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, received the proposal warmly. As French president François Mitterrand said, “We need innovation. The President of the United States has displayed imagination—indeed, intellectual audacity of the rarest kind.” Scowcroft called the NATO summit “a resounding success.”170 Kohl and other European leaders had looked to Bush to provide leadership and direction, and Bush, Scowcroft, Baker, and their staffs provided it.
Bush and his foreign policy team then accompanied Kohl to Mainz, Germany, where Bush delivered the fifth, capstone address in the administration’s planned unveiling of its strategic vision for US-European and US-Soviet relations.171 He spoke for the first time of “a Europe whole and free,” in view of the fact that Poland was “taking the first steps toward real election, so long promised, so long deferred, and in Hungary, at last we see a chance for multiparty competition at the ballot box.” The United States sought “self-determination for all of Germany and for all of Eastern Europe,” he said. (Scowcroft struck out an explicit mention of “German reunification” from the final version of the speech, anxious not to unnecessarily stimulate German nationalism and foreign concerns by raising the “sensitive” topic.) The president voiced his support for a broadening of the Helsinki process, proposed that the United States work with Germany and other European nations on environmental issues, and called for an end to the arms race—especially in Europe, “the most heavily armed continent in the world.” He wanted a continent with “borders open to people, commerce, and ideas.”
Bush assured the Soviets that “our goal is not to undermine their legitimate security interests.” Rather, the United States’ “goal is to convince them, step-by-step, that their definition of security is obsolete, that their deepest fears are unfounded.” Real security isn’t based on “tanks, troops, or barbed wire,” Bush declared. “It is built on shared values and agreements that link free peoples.” After forty years, NATO’s original mission was almost complete.172
But the ultimate challenge was Berlin. What would happen with respect to East and West Germany, beyond the transformations already afoot in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria?173
THROUGHOUT THE REVOLUTIONARY changes that occurred as the Cold War moved toward its end—such as the election of a non-Communist government in Poland in early April and the cutting of the barbed wire on the Austria-Hungary border in late June—Scowcroft managed US policy with a light hand, trusting his staff and coordinating policy with the State and Defense Departments as well as other relevant agencies. The national security advisor delegated extensively and saw to it that the president’s speeches, diplomatic and military negotiations, intelligence, and other aspects of US national policy were consistent with the administration’s objectives and coordinated across the government.
Scowcroft also participated as a policy maker in his own right, though because he did so behind the scenes, few outside the White House recognized his influence.
Part of this influence took the form of restraint: policy making through inaction. In this respect, Scowcroft’s conservative and cautious attitudes in most cases coincided with those of George Bush.
The administration advocated a deliberate pace for self-determination in Poland, given that events were happening at a “stunning speed,” and it avoided “rhetoric or the appearance of interference, which could only rankle the Soviets at a time when we hoped they would acquiesce in the positive evolution they had helped foster.”174 And when General Jaruzelski, who lacked the support needed to elect his own candidate as prime minister, asked Solidarity to form a government—with Walesa agreeing, in turn, to keep Poland in the Warsaw Pact and to name Communist Party members as the ministers of defense and interior—Scowcroft and others in the White House were overjoyed. But because the administration “did not want to embarrass the Soviets with Polish freedom at stake,” its “public posture was therefore very restrained,” with press secretary Marlin Fitzwater saying only that Bush “would encourage” the establishment of a noncommunist government.175
Later, the two men agreed there would be no celebrating after Hungary and Czechoslovakia renounced and overthrew their Communist governments and “no jumping on the wall” after the Berlin Wall fell. For the president, going to Berlin and making a triumphant speech, as some were urging, was “the last thing” he wanted to do because he still wanted “to be able to work with Gorbachev. We’ve got a big agenda out there, and if I do that I will have lost him because he will have been humiliated in his own context.”176
Scowcroft sought to exert restraint in other ways—not always with success. When Gates planned to give a hard-line speech at Georgetown, Secretary of State James Baker objected and Scowcroft toned down the phrasing. Later, when Baker refused to let Gates give the softer address, Scowcroft didn’t contest Baker’s decision, and Gates wrote Baker a note of apology. Worse, Baker or one of his aides then leaked the story of Gates’s squelched speech—that is, of the deputy national security advisor losing a turf battle to the secretary of state. While the leak enhanced recognition of Baker’s clout within the administration, it undermined the administration’s determination to present a united front in support of Gorbachev’s reforms since it brought attention to Gates’ (and others’) pessimism on the prospects for Gorbachev and the Soviet Union.177
THE PRESIDENT’S NINE-DAY trip in July to Poland and Hungary met with resounding acclaim from both Polish and Hungarian leaders and their public audiences. Afterward, Bush, Scowcroft, and Baker traveled to the G-7 summit held in Paris on July 14–16. The meeting went smoothly and finished earlier than expected, with the United States managing to avoid establishing a general policy with respect to North-South economic issues, preferring to proceed bilaterally. The United States and the other six economic powers were able to establish a unified policy with respect to Poland’s and Hungary’s debt and to a program of foreign aid for them both—an accomplishment that Scowcroft credited Baker with achieving, in view of how little the United States had to contribute.178
But the US delegation did not appreciate Gorbachev’s interruption of the meetings, in effect, to demand, via a letter he asked chairman François Mitterrand to read, that the Soviet Union be allowed to participate in the promotion of worldwide growth and the mitigation of the Third World debt. Gorbachev was effectively seeking to join the exclusive G-7 fraternity. “Perestroika,” the Soviet leader wrote, “is inseparable from a policy aimed at our full participation in the world economy.” Upon hearing Gorbachev’s message, Baker exclaimed, “He’s trying to hijack the summit! He’s butting in, screwing up what we want to accomplish here.” Scowcroft called the Soviet leader’s actions “pure grandstanding!”179
Meanwhile, the growing popularity of the Russian democrat and populist leader Boris Yeltsin presented a separate problem. Cheney, the Department of Defense, and some in the intelligence community wanted the administration to be more aggressive with respect to US relations with the Soviet republics, and Gates and Condoleezza Rice doubted that Gorbachev would remain party secretary for long. For these reasons, they wanted Bush to meet with Yeltsin and other reformers in the Soviet Union. Gates remembered what had happened with the Ford administration not inviting Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to the White House, and he thought it was dangerous for the president to pin everything on one leader, especially when that person was walking a political tightrope.
Scowcroft and Bush and Baker, for their part, were more protective of Gorbachev. Bush and Scowcroft were wary of a White House meeting with Yeltsin—who seemed to be a boor and drank too much—and they didn’t want to undermine their relationship with the Soviet leader or assist his opposition in any way. Baker, especially, had developed a good relationship with Soviet foreign minister Shevardnadze and didn’t want to jeopardize their relationship. It was only after what Gates called a “huge fight” that he and Rice had with Scowcroft that the national security advisor agreed to arrange a visit with Yeltsin. In order to deflect attention from the press and reduce expectations, they decided to have Yeltsin come to a side entrance to the White House to meet with Scowcroft in his own office, then have the president intentionally “drop by.”180
Yeltsin wasn’t pleased with the plan. It was only after some difficult persuasion and intense effort that Rice managed to override Yeltsin’s objections, take hold of his elbow, and march him up to Scowcroft’s corner office. Worse, once Yeltsin started reviewing at length the many ways the United States could help the Soviet economy, Scowcroft nodded off; fortunately, Yeltsin didn’t appear to notice. Even better, his mood improved markedly (“chameleon like,” Gates said), and Scowcroft woke up once the president arrived. Bush and Yeltsin then had a productive talk, notwithstanding Bush’s affirmation of his support for Gorbachev.181 Afterward, Yeltsin held a press conference outside the West Wing, telling reporters that he had presented the president and vice president a ten-point plan to save perestroika. Scowcroft didn’t like his grandstanding, complaining that “Yeltsin was ‘devious’ and a ‘two-bit headline grabber.’”182
Ten months later, on June 12, 1990, Yeltsin would be elected president of Russia.
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1989, at 12:01 A.M., the gates between Hungary and Austria lifted and an unbroken stream of East German cars, carrying about ten thousand people in all, fled from behind the Iron Curtain. Less than a month later, on October 7, 1989, the Hungarian Communist Party dissolved, replaced by the Hungarian Socialist Party. In Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party fell on December 5, replaced by an elected government, and on December 29 playwright Vaclev Havel was elected president. After the changes in Poland and now Hungary, East German leader Erich Honecker came under increasing pressure for reform.
Scowcroft watched Gorbachev carefully: with Honecker on the edge, would the Soviet leader “swallow his principles” to support his own Soviet empire, or would he distance himself from an unsympathetic Honecker? In fact, Honecker had met with the deputy prime minister of China, sympathized with his plight, and hinted that the East Germans could face the same violent response as the protesters in Beijing. Ambassador Matlock, too, warned the White House that the Soviet Union might intervene.183
Fortunately, it never came to that. On October 18 Honecker resigned, replaced as prime minister by Egon Krenz. Two weeks later, on November 1, half a million East Germans took to the streets in protest. Although Egon Krenz was no more successful at quelling the East German crowds, he reassured Gorbachev that he didn’t want to fire on the demonstrators.184 Less than a week later, on November 7, the whole East German cabinet resigned.
The influx of East Germans was making life difficult in West Berlin and for Helmut Kohl, who estimated that West Germany would have 150,000 refugees by Christmas.185 Scowcroft worried that East Germany “would collapse into violent chaos” and then draw in West Germany and perhaps the Soviet Union, given East Germany’s location on the front line of the Cold War and its prominence as the wealthiest and most successful Warsaw Pact state.
The fast-moving events culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989. Upon hearing at about three o’clock in the afternoon that the Wall had opened, Scowcroft went into the Oval Office and told the president, where they were soon joined by Marlin Fitzwater. The three of them went into the small study off the Oval Office and watched live television images of the joyful crowds. Scowcroft then said he didn’t know what was going on, and he urged rhetorical restraint. It was no time to declare, “We won, we have a victory.” It wasn’t the time to gloat over what most would see as a defeat for Gorbachev and the Soviet Union, he said. The only thing they knew for sure was that people were going through the checkpoints without hindrance. Both he and Bush wanted “to anticipate Gorbachev’s reaction—and that of his opposition” within the Soviet Union, they later wrote.186 It might take years for the situation in Germany to become clear, they thought.
The president did invite the White House press pool into the Oval Office. It was then that CBS correspondent Lesley Stahl said, “You don’t seem very happy about this. Isn’t this the fundamental breakthrough in the Cold War?”
“Well, I’m not an excitable kind of guy,” Bush replied. He didn’t want to say too much, especially things that might later be contradicted. His “mind kept racing over a possible Soviet crackdown, turning all the happiness to tragedy.” He had been to the Wall and seen “where young East Germans had been shot as they tried to cross to freedom in the West.” He knew that the process had to continue, and didn’t want a false step to “destroy the joy” felt in Berlin and East Germany. But in being so reticent, he was blamed for being uncaring.187
Gorbachev reacted immediately to the news of the Berlin Wall. He cabled Bush, exhorting him not to overreact, and warned Kohl not to talk about reunification. Nevertheless, “overnight, the most important symbol of the Iron Curtain had been struck down,” Scowcroft remarked. More than 250,000 East Germans had already left for West Berlin, and the “frontiers are absolutely open,” Kohl told Bush over the telephone.188
Anatoly Chernyaev, Gorbachev’s adviser, didn’t miss the significance of what had happened: “The Berlin Wall has collapsed. This entire era in the history of the socialist system is over. . . . For it has to do not only with socialism, but with the shift in the world balance of forces. This is the end of Yalta . . . the Stalinist legacy and the ‘defeat of Hitlerite Germany.’”189 And within weeks, the Communist governments in Bulgaria and Czechoslovakia also fell.
As the December summit in Malta approached, one of Scowcroft’s concerns was that Gorbachev might have a “surprise” for President Bush—a bold gambit for which they weren’t prepared. Baker suggested the reverse: that Bush seize the initiative by proposing seventeen different initiatives. Scowcroft didn’t like Baker’s presentation, though, which he called “unprofessional at best and corny at worst.” Rather, he wanted the president to offer a “big picture” of US-Soviet relations, so as to review “the perils and opportunities before us.”190
But Bush decided to use Baker’s plan. First, however, Bush reworked the initiatives, going over “every one of them” on the plane over to Malta. He took out the conditions and caveats the State Department and Pentagon had put on what he was prepared to give the Soviet Union and instead made the US offers harder and stronger while simultaneously including more opportunities for the Soviet Union.191
As revised by the president, Baker’s plan worked. Bush presented Gorbachev with a long list of proposals: the renewal of strategic arms reduction talks (START); the expansion of trade and possibly bestowing most-favored-nation status on the Soviet Union (thus waiving the Jackson-Vanik restrictions); the further emigration of Russian Jews; the establishment of a detailed protocol for the conduct of on-site inspection of nuclear weapons; the determination of the terms of German reunification; a plan for cooperation in Latin America; and other initiatives. Each proposal was matched by a US concession. Hearing the points, Marlin Fitzwater reported that “Gorbachev’s face lit up like sunshine”; the moment “defined a new relationship” and “set a whole new course for the East-West relationship.”192
Scowcroft described the atmosphere on the Maxim Gorkiy as “friendly” although “not relaxed,” even though he and Bush knew every member of the Soviet delegation. He recognized that Baker’s gambit had worked: Bush “had obviously upset” whatever Gorbachev had planned, Scowcroft later wrote in A World Transformed. The Soviet leader “appeared nonplussed after having been buried in an avalanche of US proposals.” On all fronts, the Bush administration had hoped to push the Soviets—and it succeeded in doing so.193
Following the opening plenary session, Bush met with Gorbachev privately for four and half hours, accompanied only by Scowcroft, adviser Anatoly Chernyaev, and their interpreters. Afterward, the US delegation barely managed to get back on board the USS Belknap because of the roughness of the seas, which meant that the Americans had to eat their dinner alone since it would have been impossible for a boat or helicopter to bring Gorbachev to their ship. For a brief time, the president and his staff were “truly isolated” from the outside world.
Though the weather improved a little by the next morning, Gorbachev still didn’t want to budge from his ship. In the second day’s meetings on the Soviet cruise ship, President Bush stressed that he “couldn’t disapprove of German reunification” and that both sides were aware of the Helsinki Accords’ position on national and German borders. Bush also emphasized the significance of the Baltics, notwithstanding Gorbachev’s point that they had large Russian populations and had coexisted with the Soviet Union for fifty years. Scowcroft believed that Gorbachev signaled he would “restrict himself to non-coercive measures.”194 The two sides couldn’t cover all of the points that Bush initially raised, since the weather had forced the cancellation of one of the sessions; Bush agreed that Baker and Shevardnadze would work on the remaining items.
In Bush and Scowcroft’s judgment, the summit had been a great success. The president thought he had established a rapport with Gorbachev. Scowcroft thought the meeting had gone better than planned, since it renewed the impetus for further US-Soviet negotiations on conventional forces, START, chemical weapons, Cuba, Nicaragua, and other issues. (Gorbachev, in response, asked Bush why the United States was then able to intervene in Panama, Colombia, and most recently, the Philippines.)195 For Scowcroft, “the key accomplishment was the exchange on almost every topic of mutual interest.” Scowcroft further appreciated the fact that his fears hadn’t been realized: Gorbachev did not try to use the concluding joint press conference to one-up Bush, score points, or distort the contents of the talks.196
As important, perhaps, Bush and Scowcroft began to get a feel for Gorbachev over the course of the meetings. They began to like the Soviet president and empathize with his predicament in trying to reform an economically struggling Soviet Union, especially with a powerful, resistant military establishment lurking in the background. Although Scowcroft and Bush had been more cautious initially, Baker reports that by Malta, they all “came to the conclusion that these guys were genuine reformers, that we should work with them, that we could work with them, and that we hoped that they would succeed in the perestroika and glasnost.”197 Gorbachev also viewed the summit as a “clear success” and as allowing for a rapport to develop between him and Bush as well as between their two foreign ministers.198
If the Malta summit went as well as could be hoped by preparing the way for reductions in conventional and nuclear forces, the banning of chemical weapons, establishing further economic relations, and creating a rapport between the American and Soviet leaders (“Scowcroft said his conversation with General Akhromayev was the best he had ever had with a Soviet official,” Bush reported), some issues remained unresolved.199 Bush and Gorbachev could not agree on Cuba (that the American president open a dialogue with Fidel Castro), on US intervention in Panama and the Philippines (where the United States acted unilaterally in both countries), and on Afghanistan (where the administration would not recognize the Najibullah government, even though Gorbachev claimed that “his position is stronger and many commanders and tribal authorities are cooperating with him”).200
However, the Malta summit started a process of positive engagement, accompanied by diplomatic exchanges and punctuated by further meetings. In the face of Gorbachev’s deteriorating political condition within the Soviet Union, Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft were able to offer the Soviet leader a consistent agenda and political structure within which to respond. In practical terms, this meant that the president, Baker, and Scowcroft avoided threatening the integrity of the Soviet Union or challenging it directly. Wary of the sensitivity and continued power of the Soviet military and Communist Party hard-liners, they didn’t want to give Soviet conservatives anything to seize upon.
Meanwhile, the situation on the ground in central Europe—particularly in Germany—was changing fast, all too fast. The Bush administration’s existing theories of geopolitics would require rethinking in dealing with this volatile new world.201