We’ve got to slow this thing down. We can’t let ourselves be driven by Moscow at breakneck speed.
—BRENT SCOWCROFT
VICE PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH WAS one of those in the Reagan administration alarmed at the breathless pace of President Reagan’s rush toward full reconciliation with the Soviet Union. Whereas during Reagan’s first term Bush had worried that the president’s good-versus-evil approach to U.S.-Soviet relations could provoke unnecessary confrontations between the nuclear superpowers, Bush looked on in troubled amazement at Reagan’s fascination after 1985 with the idea that total mutual nuclear disarmament had become feasible and desirable since Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was no longer an enemy of the West. Unlike some in the Reagan administration who were convinced that Gorbachev’s bid to end the Cold War was only the latest Soviet attempt to dupe the West, Bush was willing to suspend judgment while the United States probed Soviet intentions—experimentally, pragmatically—in the arms control arena and in various regional conflicts, such as Afghanistan, Angola, and Nicaragua.
If elected president, Bush would have an open mind toward the prospect of reviving the détente relationship initiated by Nixon and Kissinger; like them, he could be indifferent to the form of government and human rights situation in the Soviet Union as long as the Kremlin was willing to play by the rules of the game internationally. But first he would have to win the Republican nomination against a field of more hawkish contenders, including Senator Robert Dole and former secretary of state Alexander Haig. Bush privately cautioned Gorbachev in late 1987 to ignore the anti-Soviet rhetoric of his forthcoming election campaign.1
TESTING THE WATERS … PRUDENTLY
After the election Bush encountered an impatient Gorbachev willing to forgive the American politician’s campaign statements but anxious to take up the building of the post–Cold War relationship where he and Reagan had left off. On December 7, 1988, in a remarkably forthcoming speech before the United Nations, the Soviet leader threw down a dramatic challenge to the president-elect to move beyond the Cold War. “New realities are changing the entire world situation,” said Gorbachev. “The differences and contradictions inherited from the past are … being displaced.” It had become obvious that “the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy.” The superpower disarmament process had commenced in earnest with the treaty eliminating U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range nuclear forces (INF). The INF treaty was but one expression of “a new historic reality—a turning away from the principle of super-armament to the principle of reasonable defense sufficiency.” In accord with this principle, Gorbachev announced, the Soviet leadership had decided to unilaterally reduce its armed forces by 500,000 men and to withdraw and disband six tank divisions from Germany, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary by 1991, along with comparable reductions in artillery and combat aircraft in the European theater.2
But rather than reciprocate, Bush instinctively held back. He would consult with his top foreign policy aides and order studies of possible responses. If this was a historic juncture in world politics, he wanted some breathing space to formulate an appropriate set of policies. His cautious reaction was backed by both his designated secretary of state, James Baker, and his designated national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft—each skeptical of Gorbachev’s motives; they still viewed the charismatic Soviet leader as a master manipulator of international public opinion and a coldly calculating Marxist-Leninist. Gorbachev’s rhetorical embrace of a kind of “global humanism” and of détente and arms control, and his domestic perestroika (restructuring) were all possibly a rational grand strategy to provide for a temporary reallocation of resources and reordering of priorities to allow the Soviet Union—aided by Western technologies and financial credits—to renew its bid in the near future for global dominance from a stronger base.
A different perspective came from Henry Kissinger. Bush’s former boss from the Nixon era proposed that Bush boldly seize the initiative with respect to the implications that Gorbachev’s new policies had for the situation in Eastern Europe and by so doing help bring the Cold War to an end. As with Khrushchev’s efforts at liberalization two decades earlier, Gorbachev’s policies could unleash a degree of revolutionary chaos among the East Europeans, particularly in East Germany. The results might lead to Soviet military intervention and West German threats to counterintervene. To prevent such situations, Bush should offer Gorbachev the following deal: the Soviets would agree not to use military force to suppress anticommunist regime uprisings in Eastern Europe in exchange for a NATO promise not to intervene or otherwise attempt to exploit the ferment there at the expense of “legitimate” Soviet security interests. This mutual forbearance accord would help Gorbachev hold off the Soviet hard-liners who were opposing his efforts to reduce Soviet foreign obligations, and it would allow the East European countries greater leeway to gradually dislodge themselves from Soviet hegemonic control. Bush should understand, however, and so should Gorbachev, that any public knowledge of such a deal at this time would be inadvisable, for it would invite charges from the American right wing that Bush and Gorbachev were engaging in a “Yalta”-type arrangement to preserve a sphere of Soviet influence in Eastern Europe.
Bush liked the idea and suggested that Kissinger explore it with Gorbachev and his advisers during Kissinger’s forthcoming trip to the Soviet Union.3 Meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow two days before Bush’s inauguration, Kissinger encountered a wary response. Still mistrustful of the incoming administration’s intentions, the Soviet leader suspected a ruse to get him to reveal too much of his own plans for Eastern Europe.
The new administration did not have an agreed-upon basic policy toward Gorbachev. Over the next ten months, Bush’s lieutenants often contradicted one another while the president himself awkwardly straddled various positions—both in public and in deliberations with his advisers.
Two days after the inauguration, Scowcroft publicly cautioned that “the Cold War is not over” and warned that Gorbachev’s plan (dubbed the “peace offensive”) might be a calculated strategy to get the West to let down its guard while the Soviet Union built up its power for a new global offensive.4
At his first presidential press conference on January 27, Bush was asked about these expressions of mistrust by his national security adviser. He replied that the administration was engaged in a “reassessment” of U.S.-Soviet relations:
Let’s take our time now. Let’s take a look at where we stand on … our bilateral problems with the Soviet Union; formulate the policy and then get out front. … I want to try to avoid words like “Cold War” if I can because that has an implication. If someone says Cold War to me, that doesn’t properly give credit to the advances that have taken place in the relationship. So I wouldn’t use that term. But if it’s used in the context of—do we still have problems; are there still uncertainties; are we still unsure in our predictions on Soviet intentions—I’d have to say, yes, we should be cautious.5
The sub-cabinet and working-level officials who played an influential role in the administration’s Soviet policy review included unreconstructed cold warriors like Robert Gates (Scowcroft’s deputy) and Robert Blackwill (who had the Soviet portfolio on the National Security), skeptics like Lawrence Eagleburger (the impeccably professional deputy secretary of state), and pragmatic détentists like Dennis Ross (director of the policy planning staff at State). Of this group, Gates and Blackwill were the only ones who could claim to be experts on the Soviet Union. The analytical balance thus tended to tilt toward the naysayers and skeptics, with the burden of proof borne by those who believed the end of the Cold War was in sight. During the first few months of the Bush administration, the center of gravity of U.S. Soviet policy shifted back from the venturesome latter-day Reagan approach to a cautious conservatism—reflected neatly in Scowcroft’s remark; “There may be … light at the end of the tunnel. But I think it depends on whether the light is the sun or an oncoming locomotive.”6
The hard-line former CIA cold warriors, Gates and Blackwill, tended to discount the depth of the transformation taking place under Gorbachev. Well into the spring of 1989, as Bush began to appreciate the pervasiveness of the turbulence spreading through the Soviet sphere, they continued to voice doubts even of Gorbachev’s commitment to fundamental reform, citing his statements that he was still a loyal communist. By contrast, Dennis Ross, increasingly influential with Secretary Baker, saw the survival of Gorbachev as crucial to the dramatic positive changes that were taking place. But Eagleburger and other State Department professionals, including Ambassador Jack Matlock in Moscow, although persuaded that the revolutionary ferment was transforming the societies in the Soviet sphere from top to bottom, worried that Bush and Baker were becoming overly enthralled by Gorbachev and Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze, overlooking the shallowness of their domestic political base in the vast country they were trying to restructure.
The hawks attributed Gorbachev’s pleas for an end to the Cold War (which they saw as only a temporary truce) almost entirely to Reagan’s U.S. military buildup and full-court press on the Soviet Union. This was no time to let up on the pressure. But Ross and his analysts understood Gorbachev’s perestroika to be the product of recognition by the new leaders in the Kremlin of fundamental contradictions in the Soviet system. The Gorbachev modernizers wanted to reorient the country’s material and human resources away from the arms race and worldwide power rivalry with the United States to the enormous task of restructuring facing them. For the United States to take a hard line would make it very difficult, if not impossible, for Gorbachev and his associates to pursue the historic transformation of Soviet society they were determined to bring about. Rather it was important to try once again, as Nixon and Kissinger had done, but now with a more enlightened group in the Kremlin, to give the Soviets positive stakes in a stable peace.
Bush’s ambivalent posture toward the Soviet Union during the early months of his administration reflected these internal policy debates. He received no help from a vague mid-March report on the policy review he had ordered. And the lack of clear guidance from the Oval Office was license for others in the administration to put their own interpretations on what was happening in the Soviet Union and the implications for U.S. foreign policy. Thus Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney offered a “guess” in a television interview on April 29 that Gorbachev would ultimately fail in his reform efforts and would be replaced by a leader more hostile to the West. Secretary of State Baker’s anger at this comment prompted an explanation by White House press secretary Marlin Fitzwater that Cheney was only expressing “personal observations.”
Finally, chafing at the criticism that he was dragging his feet in responding to a historic opportunity to bring the Cold War to an end, the president used a commencement address at Texas A&M University on May 12 to announce that his administration’s review of U.S.-Soviet relations had just been completed and had produced a “bold” and “ambitious” new policy:
Our review indicates that 40 years of perseverance have brought us a precious opportunity, and now it is time to move beyond containment to a new policy for the 1990s, one that recognizes the full scope of change taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself. … The United States now has as its goal much more than simply containing Soviet expansionism. We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations.
But the president made it clear he was not yet ready to fully welcome the Soviets into the world order. This would be the ultimate result of a process of which “we are only at the beginning.” Rhetoric and promises were not enough:
The Soviet Union says that it seeks to make peace with the world and criticizes its own postwar policies. These are words that we can only applaud. But a new relationship cannot be simply declared by Moscow or bestowed by others; it must be earned. … The Soviet Union has promised a more cooperative relationship before, only to reverse course and return to militarism. Soviet foreign policy has been almost seasonal: warmth before cold, thaw before freeze.
Similarly, with respect to Gorbachev’s domestic reforms, the president was positive with respect to the potential, while maintaining his posture of wait and see before committing the United States to any initiatives to assist in the Soviet system’s modernization:
We hope perestroika is pointing the Soviet Union to break with the cycles of the past—a definitive break. … And let no one doubt our sincere desire to see perestroika succeed. But the national security of America and our allies is not predicated on hope. It must be based on deeds. And we look for enduring, ingrained economic and political change.
The president then proceeded to outline the deeds the Soviets would have to perform to qualify for full participation in “the world order.” These included:
First, reduce Soviet forces … to less threatening levels [than those already announced by Gorbachev] in proportion to their legitimate security needs. Second, adhere to the Soviet obligation, promised in the final days of World War II, to support self-determination for all nations of eastern and central Europe. … And third, work with the West in positive, practical—not merely rhetorical—steps toward diplomatic solution to … regional disputes around the world. I welcome the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Angola agreement. But there is much more to be done. … And fourth, achieve a lasting political pluralism [in the Soviet Union] and respect for human rights. We are impressed by limited but freely contested elections. We are impressed by a greater toleration of dissent … Mr. Gorbachev, don’t stop now. And fifth, join with us is addressing pressing global problems, including the international drug menace and dangers to the environment.7
The president, with an eye to the headlines, proposed an additional test of Gorbachev’s commitment to change and openness—a variation on the Open Skies proposal offered thirty-four years earlier by President Eisenhower to a post-Stalin leadership also professing a readiness to change. “Open skies” would allow unarmed aircraft from the United States and the Soviet Union to fly over each other’s territory to open up military activities of each side to mutual scrutiny. In 1955, said Bush, the Kremlin had failed the test by refusing Eisenhower’s offer. The willingness of the present Soviet leadership to embrace such a concept would “reveal their commitment to change.” In fact, the United States and the Soviet Union were already conducting such “open skies” military surveillance via orbiting reconnaissance satellites. But the president evidently realized he needed a dramatic gesture to counteract the impression that the rest of his speech was a rigidly unimaginative and unreciprocal response to Gorbachev’s bid to end the Cold War. As it turned out, the revived Open Skies proposal was a public relations failure: journalists, having interviewed Pentagon experts, revealed that it lacked any serious arms control or strategic rationale.
The Texas A&M speech was reassuring to conservatives in the administration and Congress. But it was disappointing to those who wanted the president to step out boldly with a new, dynamic definition of the post–Cold War era. The aura of global leadership was gravitating toward the magnetic Gorbachev. Clearly George Bush was no Ronald Reagan.
THE PUBLIC RELATIONS GAME
The president’s increasing irritation at Gorbachev’s ability to upstage him was reflected in a public complaint by Fitzwater that Gorbachev was “throwing out in a kind of drugstore cowboy fashion one arms control proposal after another.”8 Privately, Bush complained to Scowcroft that he was “sick and tired of getting beat up day after day for having no vision and letting Gorbachev run the show.”9
Looking toward the NATO summit in Brussels at the end of May, Bush wanted to steal a march on the Soviet leader in the European arms control arena with new proposals that were both militarily prudent and imbedded in a vision of a post–Cold War Europe that would appeal to European and U.S. public opinion. Bush’s determination to push for a breakthrough on European arms control was welcomed by French president François Mitterrand and German chancellor Helmut Kohl who themselves were increasingly frustrated with the Americans for failing to appreciate the extent to which the NATO–Warsaw Pact military balance had become a matter of political symbolism rather than military security and that the West was losing the contest of public opinion to Gorbachev.
The Soviets had captured the public imagination with their proposal to follow up the INF treaty with an agreement to remove all short-range nuclear weapons from the European theater. The United States had opposed any negotiations on short-range nuclear weapons, arguing that this would countenance the very denuclearization of Europe that had been a major part of Soviet grand strategy for decades. But sophisticated strategists understood the anachronism of the old rationale for the deployment of battlefield nuclear weapons on the Central European front. This rationale had become obsolete with the realization that the Soviets no longer had any inclination to start a European war and that whatever residual deterrence was still needed to prevent a Soviet squeeze on West Berlin or attack on West Germany was best provided by a continued U.S. commitment to become militarily involved and by the maintenance of a capability to inflict unacceptable damage on the Soviet Union itself in a U.S.-Soviet war. Moreover, in a volatile post–Cold War period in which violent incursions across the East-West border in Germany were quite conceivable, Germans on both sides of the divide had the highest incentive to do away with deployments that guaranteed that local military encounters would trigger explosions of nuclear weapons on their soil.
If the military balance of power in Europe still had relevance to important political issues, then why not respond positively to the Soviet bid to finally do away with Warsaw Pact superiority in conventional forces? There was a limit to what Gorbachev could do unilaterally without provoking a backlash from his own military; if he needed some reciprocal concessions from the West, perhaps this was the time for NATO to be more forthcoming in the conventional forces in Europe negotiations. If one-upmanship in arms control was now the name of the game and if the NATO partners did not mind—indeed, if they wanted it—then why not be truly bold? These considerations were reflected in the package of arms control proposals the president brought with him to Brussels and championed in speeches in Germany. The key elements of the new package were the invitation to the Soviets to agree to a ceiling of 275,000 troops each for the United States and the Soviet Union to station in the European theater, along with similarly substantial reductions down to common numerical ceilings on tanks, troop carriers, artillery, helicopters, and land-based combat aircraft. Although the Soviets had already agreed in principle to common numerical ceilings in some of these categories, the new levels Bush was proposing would require the Soviets to make vastly disproportionate reductions, particularly in troops and tanks. The president called on the U.S. and Soviet negotiators to reach a comprehensive conventional arms control agreement within six months to a year, with the reductions to be implemented at the latest by 1993. There was no reason, he said, for the five- to six-year timetable suggested by Gorbachev. Bush also let it be known that the United States was dropping its opposition to a ban on the deployment of short-range nuclear weapons on the continent.
Bush told his European audiences that his new proposals for a “less militarized Europe” were based on the premise that the Cold War could finally be brought to an end. But it would end, he said, only when Europe because “whole and free.” At Mainz, Germany, on May 31, he gave special emphasis to these themes. One idea was sweeping across Eurasia, he said, the “passion for freedom.” This was why the entire communist world was in ferment. This was why the very concept of a divided Europe was under siege. And in an attempt to take the high ground from Gorbachev’s slogan of “a common European home,” he intoned: “There cannot be a common European home until all within it are free to move from room to room.”10
To the surprise of the administration, the Soviets, instead of objecting to the asymmetrical U.S. formulae for arms reductions in Europe, agreed to proceed with the accelerated negotiations Bush was urging. Encouraged, Bush sent Gorbachev a parallel set of asymmetrical proposals in June for the strategic arms reduction talks (START): large cuts in heavy intercontinental ballistic missiles, relatively minor reductions in submarine-launched ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, and no concessions on SDI. And once again, although reports had it that Gorbachev was angered, the Soviets conceded to a resumption of negotiations basically under the U.S. terms of reference.
THE SMELL OF VICTORY
Bush drew two lessons from his initial foray into the European disarmament arena with Gorbachev: The first confirmed the assumption of the détentists that Gorbachev was in fact sincere in wanting to call off the Cold War. The second confirmed the assumption of the anti-Soviet hawks that the Soviet economy was in such dire straits that the Gorbachev regime was willing to do virtually anything the West demanded in order to get out of the arms race. In other words, the time was ripe to press on to a full victory in the Cold War and to lock in Soviet concessions so that a post-Gorbachev regime would find it very costly to attempt to regain anything approaching military and geopolitical parity with the United States.
But Secretary Baker appeared to have some qualms, fed by Shevardnadze’s expressed concerns that humiliating Gorbachev would play into the hands of hard-liners in the Soviet military and the Communist Party who were alleging that the Soviet reformer was a dupe of the West. Bush took these concerns seriously enough to deny himself any public gloating over his victories, but when it came to the larger issues still outstanding—the role of Germany in a post–Cold War Europe, a new pan-European security system, and the conditions under which the Soviet Union would be granted membership in the International Monetary Fund—he allowed Gorbachev no quarter. Indeed, the more the Soviet sphere of control began to crumble, the more imperious Bush became about the right of the United States—the only remaining superpower—to define the arrangements of the post–Cold War order.
A dramatic indication of the depth of Gorbachev’s intentions to renounce a hegemonic role in Eastern Europe came in Poland in June 1989 with the stunning electoral victory of Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement over the ruling Communist Party of President Wojciech Jaruzelski. Whereas in 1981 the Reagan administration had assumed that General Jaruzelski had been directed by Leonid Brezhnev to impose martial law to control the challenge to communist rule posed by the Solidarity Workers’ Party, now the tables were completely turned. Jaruzelski had been prompted by Gorbachev to allow Solidarity to legally contest for seats in the June 1989 parliamentary elections. Upon Solidarity’s victory, Gorbachev let Jaruzelski and the world know that as far as the Soviet Union was concerned, the election results had to be accepted, and the noncommunists had to be given power in the government commensurate with the election results.11 Bush, jumping the gun, suggested that it was time for the Soviets to pull their troops out of Poland; but when it got back to him that Gorbachev regarded this as meddling, he claimed no intention of trying to call the shots in Eastern Europe. Ironically, when Bush visited Poland a few weeks later (on a previously scheduled trip) he got along better with President Jaruzelski, still head of state, than he did with Walesa, and implied in some of his remarks and body language that he was more comfortable with order, even communist order, than he was with the potential chaos of revolutionary change, even toward liberal democracy.12
The historically most significant test of Gorbachev’s determination to end the Cold War centered on East Germany—since 1945 the Soviet empire’s most strategically significant, heavily fortified, and tightly controlled forward bulwark against the West.13 The East German communist leadership was not responding well to Gorbachev’s insistence on “new thinking.” The Honecker regime went so far as to censor from the country’s press passages of Gorbachev’s speeches it considered too liberal; but East Germans received the information through television broadcasts from the West. Beginning in May 1989, hundreds of thousands of East Germans eventually took advantage of the decision of the Hungarian government to remove its barbed wire barriers along the Austrian border (a decision countenanced by Gorbachev) and made their way into West Germany through Austria. Thousands of others encamped temporarily in the West German embassies in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Poland while awaiting entry visas from the West German government. In the past, when communist East Germans had fled in any numbers, the Kremlin had provided decisive help in stanching the flow (e.g., the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961); now the leader in the Kremlin was talking about a “common European home” and—echoing Bush—the free movement of people.
In June, Gorbachev further energized the incipient reform movement in East Germany by signing a joint declaration with Chancellor Kohl of West Germany expressing “unqualified adherence … [to] the right of self determination.” On their television screens, East Germans along with viewers in Western Europe and the United States saw the Soviet leader being welcomed by West German crowds as if he were a conquering hero.14
The situation in East Germany came to a head in October 1989. Crowds numbering in the hundreds of thousands took to the streets in Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden. Gorbachev let Honecker know that Soviet troops in East Germany would not participate in any effort by the East German government to suppress the demonstrations, warning his host that “life punishes those who come too late.”15
Amid continuing demonstrations, the East German Politburo replaced the elderly Honecker with a younger party leader, Egon Krenz, who pursued a surprisingly reformist policy—legalizing freedom of travel to the West, forcing many of Honecker’s associates to resign, and promising democratic elections. Bush administration officials saw the hand of Gorbachev in all of this.
Then on November 9, 1989—in an act that more than anything else symbolized the end of the Cold War—the East German military, acting under directives from Krenz, began to dismantle the Berlin Wall. But the sudden opening of the wall only increased the force of the turbulent pressures. It was too late to salvage any legitimacy for the communist regime. The urgent question now for Germany’s neighbors, the United States, and the Soviet Union was how to contain the potentially explosive consequences of a total collapse of civic order. The old nightmare of West Germans and Soviets counterintervening in East Germany had become all too real a prospect.
A logical alternative to anarchy and bloodshed was another “unthinkable”—now suddenly quite plausible—the voluntary reunification of Germany. For the rest of 1989, the West German politicians themselves did a dance around the issue, ever sensitive to the historic fear of the reappearance of a powerful German superstate in the center of Europe (the Germans during these months were careful to talk only of the possibility of “unification,” never “reunification”). But the popular enthusiasm for the prospect became irresistible, and by the turn of the year Kohl and his Christian Democrats were ready, despite the awesome economic burdens.
It was not enough that the Germans were ready. The next question was whether the Soviets would agree to Germany’s unification on terms that were acceptable to the United States. For more than four decades, neither Washington nor Moscow would contemplate a reunification that would add the great material and human resources of Germany to the other side’s power. Nor, given the record of German imperialistic aggression, had the World War II victors been ready to countenance a totally independent and “neutral” Germany.
Something had to give, and as far as Bush was concerned that meant Gorbachev’s opposition to NATO. The Soviets were now talking about the need to rethink their objections to a neutral Germany—belonging to no alliance but subordinated into a pan-European security system evolving out of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Neither Kohl nor Mitterrand opposed such a revamping of the entire European security apparatus once the Cold War was over. But Bush, convinced that Gorbachev was leading from weakness, would have none of it. He lobbied Kohl in particular to insist on NATO membership for a reunified Germany, hinting that the United States might rather see a perpetuation of two Germanys than see Germany defect from the alliance. Baker made it clear to Shevardnadze that NATO membership for a reunited Germany was a prime condition for U.S. acquiescence to full Soviet participation in world economic institutions and for direct U.S. economic help. As a World War II victor power over Germany the Soviet Union would have a role in defining the new Germany. The Soviets would be a part of the authorizing group of four in the “two plus four” process for achieving unification—a formula generated in the U.S. State Department by which the details of the incorporation of East Germany into an expanded Federal Republic would be negotiated by the two Germanys and then ratified by the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and France.16 Some policy planners at the State Department, and perhaps Baker himself, worried that this tough posture on the NATO issue would severely weaken Gorbachev’s ability to stand up to his hard-line reactionary opponents; but Bush sensed a virtually unconditional victory in the Cold War.
Simultaneous with the efforts to settle the German issue, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged at all diplomatic levels (from Bush-Gorbachev summitry to private meetings between Baker and Shevardnadze and working-level commissions) in resolving the still outstanding Cold War issues. The frenetic diplomatic activity was taking place against a backdrop of growing turbulence in the USSR, as Gorbachev found himself caught up in a chaotic stampede towards political decentralization and economic privatization that was swifter and more radical than he could have anticipated or was capable of modulating effectively.17 Gorbachev needed some international success or at a minimum continuing international recognition of his importance to buttress his declining popularity at home. The Bush administration, playing on this need, was willing to give him the recognition but not the success—catering rather to the president’s own need to enhance a reputation for toughness in presiding over the end of the Cold War.
At the Malta summit of December 2–3, 1989—nicknamed the “seasick summit” for its shipboard sessions in the storm-tossed harbor—the wide-ranging discussions between the two leaders encompassed the conventional forces in Europe and START negotiations, the still volatile Germany question, Soviet and Cuban support for the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, and the sensitive issue of self-determination for the three Baltic republics. Bush came away from this exercise in personal diplomacy confident that Gorbachev, more than ever anxious to obtain most favored nation (MFN) trading status and qualification for Export-Import Bank credits, was prepared to cooperate on all of these issues. More so than in any of the previous discussions between Bush and the intellectually aggressive Soviet leader (on the phone or in person), Gorbachev was now equally a listener, a respondent, with Bush increasingly setting the agenda and defining the parameters for future negotiation.
By the time of the summit held in Washington and Camp David from May 30 to June 3, 1990, the shift in the relationship between the two countries was manifest in the contrast between Bush’s relaxed, almost imperious confidence and Gorbachev’s tense and often irritated demeanor at being reduced to the role of supplicant. In response to Gorbachev’s repeated emphasis on the importance for perestroika that the United States finally provide the USSR with MFN status and government backing for commercial credits, Bush continued to invoke his demands: in addition to the long-standing requirement that the Soviets rescind their restrictions on Jewish emigration, he included the new demands that Gorbachev accede to NATO membership for a reunified Germany, stop subsidizing Cuba and the Sandinistas, show more progress in instituting a market economy, and lift the economic sanctions that had been imposed on secessionist Lithuania.
As the results of this Cold War endgame materialized over the next year, Bush was sustained in his view of himself as the impresario of the new world order. After all, during his presidency:
• Eastern Europe had been released from political and economic bondage to the USSR, and Soviet military forces had been largely withdrawn from the region.
• The Warsaw Pact had been disbanded.
• The Berlin Wall had been torn down.
• East Germany had been peacefully reunited with (actually absorbed into) the Federal Republic of Germany, which Gorbachev finally agreed could remain in NATO.
• Soviet troops had been totally withdrawn from Afghanistan.
• Cuban troops had been withdrawn from Angola at the behest of the Soviets as part of a U.S.-brokered settlement between Luanda and Pretoria on independence for Namibia.
• The Nicaraguan Sandinistas, responding to Soviet pressures, had consented to an internationally monitored election, which they lost.
• The Soviets had ceased subsidizing Cuba’s economy.
• In the United Nations, the Soviets had cooperated in obtaining Security Council authorization for the United States to lead a military coalition to force Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait.
REACTING TO THE COLLAPSE AND DISINTEGRATION OF THE SOVIET UNION
By the spring of 1991, the Soviet Union itself was on the brink of economic and political collapse. The gross national product was in a precipitous decline, Gorbachev was under challenge from both the “right” (unreconstructed communists) and the “left” (believers in radical decentralization of the political economy, rapid privatization, and full embrace of market capitalism)—an ironic reversal of the standard labelling of Marxists as leftists and free-market proponents as rightists. Also most of the fifteen member republics of the Soviet Union were threatening secession so as to become fully sovereign independent countries.
Washington’s cold warriors were congratulating themselves: not only had the Soviets been forced to release their empire, but the whole Marxist-Leninist experiment was imploding at its very core. At the highest levels of the Bush administration the elation was tempered by the realization that some of the spoils of such a total victory could be bitter, even dangerous—and fraught with great financial burdens for the United States.
Gorbachev and his emissaries were now privately imploring the United States for massive aid—on levels comparable to the Marshall Plan assistance for the reconstruction of war-torn Europe. Without such help, the democratic restructuring that had been going on would be reversed, civic order would collapse, and a new Stalinist or fascist-nationalist dictatorship would be highly likely. Moreover, unless Moscow were provided the wherewithal for exercising major economic leverage over the restive republics, the USSR might well disintegrate into rival ethno-nationalistic states, some of which (particularly Ukraine, Belarus, and Kazakhstan) might try to gain control of the nuclear weapons and facilities on their territories.
Academic experts on the Soviet Union and editorial writers in the United States also weighed in. The Bush administration was once again being accused of procrastinating and dragging its feet when the situation cried out for bold vision and decisive action. But the administration saw itself in a bind: if it poured resources into the existing, still largely unreformed Soviet political economy, the very sources of the worsening economic downturn would only be reinforced; on the other hand, if the administration continued to condition any substantial U.S. economic assistance on a more rapid adoption of democratic capitalism in the USSR than the Gorbachev regime was able to deliver, the increasingly unpopular Gorbachev would be further discredited without any real prospects that the necessary reforms would materialize in the near future. Given Bush’s understanding that the huge U.S. budget deficit would be a major issue in his bid for reelection, the administration was not prepared to ask Congress to authorize a massive U.S. financial bailout of the USSR—with or without new performance conditions.
With the administration seemingly paralyzed by its inability to choose among unpalatable alternatives, some U.S. academic economists and political scientists, collaborating with a handful of radical free market reformers among Gorbachev’s advisers, worked up and energetically promoted a “grand bargain” designed to break the impasse. Graham Allison of the John F. Kennedy School of Government and his colleague, Robert Blackwill, formerly of the National Security Council staff, published the proposal in Foreign Affairs on the eve of the July 1991 economic summit, the Group of Seven (G7) meeting, in London. The industrial democracies, wrote Allison and Blackwill, should offer the Soviet Union a bargain of Marshall Plan proportions with substantial financial assistance to Soviet reforms conditioned upon continuing political pluralization and a coherent economic program for moving rapidly to a market economy.
• The “political pluralization” provisions of the bargain would require Soviet reaffirmations of commitments to respect human rights, including the right of the republics to decide whether to stay in the union or to become independent states. The more onerous and difficult provisions were in the economic realm, where the major steps included: (1) sharp reductions in fiscal and monetary deficits by cutting defense spending and subsidies to state enterprises; (2) legalizing private, individual economic initiative; (3) moving in stages to total price decontrol in which prices would reflect scarcity values, first within the Soviet Union and soon thereafter in the world economy; and (4) de-monopolization and privatization of state enterprises.
• The G7 side of the “grand bargain” would entail a commitment of “$15 billion to $20 billion a year for each of the next three years in grants, not loans” to both the central government and the republics “to motivate and facilitate the rapid transition to a market economy.” The funds would go for balance of payments support, infrastructure projects (like transportation and communication), and the maintenance of a “safety net as a part of a general ‘conditionality program’ that followed basic IMF–World Bank principles.” The funds would not simply be given over to the Soviets; rather they would be allocated “step-by-step” and be “strictly conditional” on the recipients’ adherence to their side of the bargain.18
Although much of the U.S.-Soviet dialogue on economic matters during the late spring of 1991 was informed by the “grand bargain” proposal, neither the Bush administration nor the Gorbachev government tried to have it become an official part of their negotiations. Bush and Baker appreciated the logic of the idea but felt that it was politically unfeasible for either side to make the contemplated commitments. They were told that some of the young radicals in Gorbachev’s cabinet favored it, as did Gorbachev’s political rival, Boris Yeltsin; but they were also aware that Gorbachev himself, now struggling to avert the breakup of the USSR into separate states, was mending fences with moderate elements in the Communist Party; nor were there any signs from the author of perestroika that he was willing to abandon his preference for a state-managed transition to a hybrid form of market socialism. Moreover, Bush knew that to be able to credibly offer the Soviets up to $20 billion a year in grant aid from the G7 (some economists were estimating the Soviet bailout would take five times as much) the United States would need to promise to contribute at least a quarter of that amount. While it was almost certain that the bargain would have been rejected by the Soviets, it would have been political suicide for Bush to publicly make the offer.
Still, Gorbachev would be a guest at the G7 London summit in July, hoping to charm and cajole his Western counterparts into helping him make the still-intact Soviet Union safe for capitalist investment. Fighting for his political life at home—Yeltsin just a few weeks previously had been elected president of Russia—Gorbachev’s aura was considerably diminished. The Western leaders heard him out but offered no substantial tangible assistance. Gorbachev reportedly left feeling humiliated and angry; even his petition for Soviet membership in the International Monetary Fund had been denied (the G7 said they would agree to “associate membership” for the Soviets in the IMF, which Gorbachev found demeaning).
The London encounter was not a complete failure—Bush and Gorbachev gave final approval to the START accord and confirmed plans for the treaty signing a few weeks later in Moscow. The treaty required both sides to reduce their strategic arsenals by roughly a third, leaving the United States with 8,556 and the USSR with 6,163 long-range nuclear warheads. A few years earlier this would have been celebrated with toasts all around; and prior to its approval, the highest officials on both sides would have pored over the details of the sublimits in various weapons categories to make sure the other side had not achieved even the slightest marginal strategic advantage. But it was a measure of the radical change away from their superpower rivalry that START had come to be regarded by the White House and the Kremlin as a sideshow to the central arena, which now featured negotiations on their economic relationship.
The Moscow summit of July 29–31, 1991, was an awkward affair for Bush. Gorbachev was still smarting from his rebuffs by the G7 and accused Bush of undermining the success of perestroika. Most embarrassing was Boris Yeltsin’s manipulation of Bush. The Russian president used Bush’s presence in Moscow to enhance his own prestige: he refused to attend a reception for the American president where he would be merely a leader of one of the republics and instead obtained a private session with Bush, after which—to Bush’s dismay—he briefed the press on the progress of their talks about economic cooperation. The principal reason for the summit, the START signing ceremony, got good press coverage as Bush and Gorbachev both made the appropriate statements about reversing the arms race and exchanged pens made from the metal of missiles dismantled under the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty.19
The next leg of Bush’s trip—a visit to Kiev, the capital of secessionist Ukraine—proved to be a public relations disaster. Gorbachev wanted Bush to cancel the planned Kiev trip, given the explosiveness of the self-determination issues throughout the USSR. But Bush and his aides thought that to cancel would only inflame the Ukrainians more and would make Bush look weak back home. He reworked his speech to help produce a conceptual framework for both sides, the Ukrainians and Gorbachev, to come to a modus vivendi. Instead, the speech angered his Ukrainian hosts and received highly critical coverage back in the United States. The most controversial passages were obviously late additions to an earlier draft: “Some people have urged the United States to choose between supporting President Gorbachev and supporting independence-minded leaders throughout the USSR,” Bush intoned from the lectern in the Ukrainian parliament.
I consider this a false choice. In fairness, President Gorbachev has achieved astonishing things, and his policies of glasnost, perestroika, and democratization point toward the goals of freedom, democracy, and economic liberty. … We will maintain the strongest possible relationship with the Soviet Government of President Gorbachev. But we also appreciate the new realities of life in the USSR. And therefore, as a federation ourselves, we want good relations—improved relations—with the Republics.
The president proceeded to give the Ukrainian legislators a lecture on the American concept of freedom as the ability of people to live without fear of government intrusion and without fear of harassment by their fellow citizens. The United States would support those who wanted to build democracy, “a system that derives its just power from the consent of the governed.” But first there was the pointed interjection that
freedom is not the same as independence. Americans will not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote suicidal nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.20
To Bush’s dismay, these remarks and the lack of any invocation of the concept of national self-determination earned for this thoughtful address disparaging references as the “chicken Kiev” speech.
Bush wanted to deal with those who were in power, in control. But this did not always serve him well where who was in control was up for grabs. Bush was vacationing at Kennebunkport on August 18 when he received the news that leaders of the Soviet army and several high government officials had staged a putsch in Moscow and put Gorbachev under house arrest in his holiday home on the Crimean coast. Bush’s initial reaction in a statement early in the morning of August 19 was that it was “a disturbing development” and that the leaders of the coup seemed to be “a very hard-line group” that had taken over by “extraconstitutional means.” He was concerned about the possible setback to democracy in the Soviet Union and to the new era of U.S.-Soviet cooperation. But he wanted “to watch the situation unfold” before fashioning any particular response.
I think it’s … important to know that coups can fail. They can take over at first, and then they run up against the will of the people. … All this stuff is unfolding, it just happened. … And let’s just remain open on this as to whether it’s going to succeed or not. … And it’s not a time for flamboyance or show business or posturing on the part of any countries, certainly [not] the United States. … We’re not going to overexcite the American people or the world. And so, we will conduct our diplomacy in a prudent fashion, not driven by excess, not driven by extremes.21
Bush’s first response to early reports that Boris Yeltsin was opposing the coup and calling for a general strike were also somewhat equivocal. “Well, we’ll just see what happens on that,” he said. “I think what he is doing is simply expressing the will of the people there to have … reforms and have democracy. … I hope that people heed his call.”22
Concerned that his reactions during the early hours of the crisis might be misconstrued as fence-sitting, the president had his staff issue a formal statement later on August 19 branding the coup as “illegitimate” and affirming “support [for] President Yeltsin’s call for ‘restoration of the legally elected organs of power and the reaffirmation of the post of USSR President M.S. Gorbachev.’”23 In his press conference the following morning Bush was even stronger, contending that the “unconstitutional seizure of power … puts the Soviet Union at odds with the world community and undermines the positive steps that have been undertaken to make the Soviet Union an integral and positive force in world affairs.”
When pressed by reporters to indicate what kind of support he was going to give Yeltsin or whether he was just going to “stay on the sidelines and offer verbal encouragement,” Bush held back: “Well, we’re certainly going to offer encouragement in every way we can,” he said. “And we’re making it clear to the coup plotters and the coup people that there will not be normal relations with the United States as long as this illegal coup remains in effect.” He was putting all economic relations “on hold.” What did this mean? Was he going to suspend grain credits? Was he going to delay MFN status? The president’s answer: “It’s simply—we’ve got to just take our time. We’ve got to be prudent, a word I think is applicable here. And I think we’ve got to be strong.”
The journalists also questioned the failure to give Gorbachev any hope of obtaining the financial help he had requested, particularly at the last G7 summit, implying in their questions that this might have been part of the reason for the coup. The president bristled:
You get this from the left saying if you’d written out a better check this wouldn’t have happened, and I don’t believe that for one single minute. And you get hit on the other side by people that are suggesting that if we hadn’t been supportive of the duly constituted President of the Soviet Union that things would have gone more swimmingly for democracy. I reject that.24
Over the next few days as the coup fell apart—after Yeltsin’s courageous public defiance of the coup, massive demonstrations on the streets of Moscow, defections in the Soviet military, Gorbachev’s refusal to resign, a chorus of international condemnation, and simple ineptitude on the part of the coup leaders—Bush felt that his prudential posture had been vindicated. But he also realized that he had become too heavily vested in Gorbachev’s leadership. Over the next few months, the administration and its emissaries paid just as much attention to the president of the republic of Russia itself, Yeltsin, as they did to the president of the weakening center of the union and became increasingly supportive, openly, of Yeltsin’s policies favoring the dismantling of the USSR into a loose “commonwealth” of fifteen sovereign states and a radical and rapid “shock therapy” conversion to a market economy.
On the weekend of December 20–21, 1991, the former republics of the USSR formed the Commonwealth of Independent States. On December 25, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the expired Soviet Union. That night, George Bush addressed the world from the Oval Office for a Christmas reflection of the meaning of these events. “For over 40 years,” he said, “the United States led the West in the struggle against communism and the threat it posed to our most precious values. … That confrontation is now over.”
The president took a few minutes to praise Gorbachev for his contributions to world peace and to the revolutionary transformation of the Soviet Union, and then proceeded to recognize the independence of each of the former Soviet republics, citing each by name. He closed by asking God to “bless the people of the new nations in the Commonwealth of Independent States” as well as the United States of America.25
The Cold War, as far as the president of the United States was concerned, had ended.