1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 16

  After the weekend, Baker would leave on Monday for an extended trip that would eventually take him to Moscow. He was therefore out of Washington as resistance to what he and Genscher had just agreed started building in the NSC.72 Scowcroft and his team wondered how West Germany could stay in NATO, combine with the East, and yet not extend NATO to its new territory. It made no sense to the NSC from the point of view of German unification alone, to say nothing of military considerations.

  Similarly, Genscher would soon face opposition in Bonn from Defense Minister Gerhard Stoltenberg, a member of the CDU, for much the same reason. The NSC and Stoltenberg had identical worries about their respective foreign ministers’ plans: that an East Germany de facto excluded from NATO would be impossible to defend.73 Indeed, the prospect of acquiring an indefensible territory might derail unity altogether. This was not the first time that Stoltenberg had disagreed with Baker. The two had clashed over interest rates when they had been finance minister and treasury secretary, respectively, contributing to the crash of October 1987.74

  But Baker had headed to Moscow with the idea fixed in his head that the agreement with Genscher—no extension of NATO eastward—was the basis for his negotiations. This idea would have consequences far beyond the immediate time period of German unification. In Moscow, he would find a leader who, having realized the restoration model would not work, was now swinging toward the other extreme—namely, a heroic model, with new pan-European institutions replacing both the Warsaw Pact and NATO.

  Such an idea was not entirely new. In May 1989, the Warsaw Pact had issued a statement indicating that the end of both alliances might be desirable. Shevardnadze repeated a similar idea in a speech to the Supreme Soviet in October 1989 and again three days later in Warsaw.75 The new Czechoslovakian president, former dissident Havel, had shocked Washington by suggesting that all foreign troops should leave Europe, so Europe could set up a security commission and provide for its own defense. Even Falin, opposed to Gorbachev on so many issues, saw the end-of-both-alliances option as viable.76 Now, Gorbachev’s briefing papers from early February for his meeting with Baker show that he had decided to prioritize this concept. He wanted a pan-European structure, or a common European home, intended to make both alliances obsolete. It would contain a Germany that would be neutral for the time that the pan-European structures were under construction. Although he appears not to have known it, some of these ideas echoed the thinking of Thatcher. Her foreign minister, Hurd, had encouraged her to “come forward with some positive ideas” so that the UK did not “appear to be a brake on everything.” She replied to him that British efforts should focus on “building a wider European association, embracing … the East European countries, and in the long term the Soviet Union.” Such an association would in turn link to a strengthened CSCE. If Gorbachev knew of this idea, he did not make use of the overlap between it and his own; he similarly missed an opportunity to emphasize the commonalities between his ideas and those of many East European leaders.77

  Gorbachev’s heroic visions do not seem to have been the result of consensus in Moscow; rather, they represented the thinking of the Soviet leader and his closest allies. Gorbachev and Shevardnadze had, for a while, achieved something roughly similar to what Nixon and Kissinger had done in the détente era: they kept the real decision-making secret from their own colleagues. Falin would complain bitterly that Gorbachev and his closest aides excluded nearly every member of the party and government leadership from either taking part in conversations with foreign leaders or seeing transcripts of them afterward. By keeping old military and party hierarchies out of the real decision-making process, the two had created what one historian calls “virtually unlimited space for foreign policy innovations.” 78 They could essentially launch trial balloons all by themselves.

  But this came at a cost: having cut critics out of the loop at home, they were less prepared than they should have been for critics abroad. No domestic constituencies had forced them to make their visions specific. Gorbachev and his trusted aides thus lost time mulling over broad ideas, and were not prepared for the rapid pace of events. In addition, after they made top-level decisions, lower-level negotiators who disagreed with them would seek to have input belatedly, by undercutting their bosses in the details of implementation. Countries dealing with the Soviet Union would, as a result, continually face contradictions between what seemed to be agreed on at the top level and what would actually be offered in practical terms once experts got down to work. Gorbachev and his aides also seemed to miss the urgency of the timing of events; their own views would not ripen soon enough. A U.S. State Department assessment of the Soviets’ ideas concluded that “beneath it all is an increasingly plaintive insistence that they must be given some new, enduring role.” 79 Nonetheless, it was with this vague concept of pan-European unity that Gorbachev would greet Baker during his Moscow visit of February 7–9 and Kohl one day later.

  “NATO’S JURISDICTION WOULD NOT SHIFT ONE INCH EASTWARD”

  Baker’s visit proved to be a fateful one, and later, the source of a conflict about NATO expansion.80 What happened when Baker visited Moscow in February 1990? In order to understand the answer, it is worth taking a moment to survey the mental maps of those involved. Baker and Gorbachev brought different expectations and experiences to this meeting, even though on paper they seemed similar. Both had been born within a year of each other (Baker in 1930, and Gorbachev in 1931), gotten married in 1953, started families soon thereafter, and climbed to the highest political levels of their respective home superpowers. But Gorbachev had attained adulthood in a country devastated by two world wars, whereas Baker did the same in a country made rich and powerful by them.

  Gorbachev’s childhood memories of the 1930s included the disappearance of his grandfather, Pantelei Yefimovich Gopkalo, who was taken away in the middle of the night during Stalin’s purges of 1937–38. His grandmother moved in with the Gorbachevs, and neighbors shunned them as a result, fearing guilt by association. Even relatives would only visit at night. Gopkalo was eventually released, but refused to say what had happened, and would die not long afterward. Later in life, Gorbachev would write about how he tracked down the records of his grandfather’s interrogation and spoke to his cell mates. Gopkalo had refused to confess, which intensified the tortures. When beating did not work, both of his arms were broken. When that did not work, he was forced to sit on a burning stove. Gorbachev, when he met his future wife, Raisa, would find out that his family had been lucky; they had at least seen their grandfather again. Hers, arrested under similar circumstances, had been convicted and executed.81

  In contrast, having the good fortune to grow up in a democratic and prosperous country, Baker had quite different memories of the 1930s and 1940s. Baker thought of the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, Texas, as his “second home” when he was a child, and forged a close bond with his tennis coach there, Andrew Jitkoff, whom he correspondingly viewed as a second father. A refugee, Jitkoff had been born in Russia at the turn of the century, but fled during the Bolshevik revolution. Jitkoff would reminisce about Russian history to Baker, who later, as a student at Princeton University, would choose to study the subject for himself.82

  Even though both Gorbachev and Baker went on to attain success in their chosen fields—the former in party work, and the latter in the law—the discrepancy in the living standards between their two countries continued to shape the men’s lives into adulthood. When newly married, even though he was the first secretary of the Stavropol city party organization, Gorbachev and Raisa lived in a small room. They had no running water; instead, they had to fetch it from a pump. The intervention of well-connected friends got the young couple moved to an apartment with both a kitchen and a toilet—but also roommates, including “a welder, a retired colonel, a mechanic working in a garment factory, and their families” along with “an alcoholic bachelor and his mother” in addition to “four single women.” 83 The Soviet Union’s chronic housing s
hortage meant such combinations were not uncommon. Gorbachev even felt lucky compared to the conditions in the countryside. Later in life he remembered a visit to the nearby Gorkaya River valley. “As far as the eye could see, scattered at random,” there were groups of “low, smoke-belching huts, [and] blackened dilapidated fences.” He could hardly believe that “in those miserable dwellings, people led some kind of life.” The streets, which hardly deserved the name, “were deserted” as if “the plague had ravaged the entire village,” and “no contacts or ties existed between these shanty-town microcosms, just the everlasting barking of dogs.” He recalled that this sight, sad as it was, inspired him, because he wanted his country to be able to provide a better life for its residents.84

  The material conditions of daily life in Houston in the 1950s and 1960s were vastly superior to those in Stavropol, especially for someone at the apex of the city’s social ladder. Baker enjoyed the fruits of his hard work and success as a lawyer, including membership at the Houston Country Club, where he and his doubles partner, Bush, won repeated championships. Despite his wealth, however, Baker was not untouched by suffering: doctors were unable to save his wife from an early death of cancer, leaving him a single father in 1970. Bush’s efforts to distract Baker from his sorrow afterward included getting him involved in politics, and the two began their ultimately successful rise to the White House and the State Department.

  Baker only fully appreciated the discrepancy in living standards between the United States and the USSR when he finally visited the Soviet Union for the first time in May 1989. As his car drove into Moscow, he felt as if he “had been transported back in time. … Stalinesque buildings that seemed to have been built in the 1930s and 1940s looked as though they hadn’t been repaired or painted since then. The few cars and trucks on the streets appeared to have come from the 1950s and 1960s.” But he was also struck by Shevardnadze’s hospitality. The Soviet foreign minister invited Baker and his second wife to a dinner at his private apartment. Baker was particularly pleased when Shevardnadze gave him a shotgun as a gift. The evening was the beginning of a “warm friendship.” 85

  Now Baker was back in Moscow, but between his initial visit in May 1989 and the one in February 1990, the world had changed significantly. Back in May, Baker had been impressed by Gorbachev’s positive outlook. The secretary remembered that the Soviet leader “exuded optimism, and in this regard, he reminded me time and again of Ronald Reagan. President Reagan filled the room with his upbeat outlook, buoying everyone in it.” In February, though, Gorbachev and his advisers were in a tougher position. That week’s Central Committee meeting had been overshadowed by an unprecedented protest of a quarter million people in Moscow, calling for greater democracy. Rising nationalism was intensifying throughout the Soviet Union, causing intense regional conflicts; the following week, ethnic rioting would erupt in Tajikistan, and problems with the Baltics would intensify soon thereafter. In contrast, the United States saw its star in the ascendant in the Cold War contest, given the clear desire of East European countries to separate from Moscow. The two men’s backgrounds, and that of Shevardnadze as well, would all play a role in how they dealt with these issues.86

  In addition to these problems, Gorbachev and Shevardnadze approached their talks with Baker with a further expectation that would prove to be a liability. They had both grown up in a system with decision-making authority concentrated at the top. A few men, or even one man, made far-reaching decisions—ones that sent grandfathers to interrogations or soldiers to the front. Those decisions overrode any written constitutional or legal guarantees. Soviet negotiators of all ranks might be sticklers for legalistic detail in their dealings with the West, but the elite level was another matter. Baker, in contrast, had made his professional living in the contentious field of the law. He understood the dynamic between speculation and agreement; that much could be said, contested, denied, or promoted in discussion, but that what was agreed in writing at the end was what mattered. In his memoirs, he wrote that he viewed international politics as “ongoing negotiation.” Moreover, both he and Kohl understood that when an agreement was reached, it was advantageous to use publicity to solidify that agreement. As Gates remembered, “what he [Baker] didn’t know about dealing with—and manipulating—the press was hardly worth knowing.” At one point Baker would even advise Gorbachev on how to deal with the media, telling him that “you need to feed them to make them happy.” 87

  Baker’s meetings began on February 7. He spent two days in talks with Shevardnadze, and then saw Gorbachev at the end of the visit. As in the past, arms control was a large component of all meetings. It was an abiding passion of Gorbachev’s. One study of Gorbachev describes him as follows: he “was admirable, as Reagan was, in his sincere belief in a nuclear-free world—a mirage that made it difficult for the two leaders to reach an agreement on more practical matters.” 88 Bush did not share that dream, but he did believe—despite the objections of Baker and Cheney—that it was time for a reduction in conventional forces. As a result, in his January 1990 State of the Union address, President Bush had proposed the reduction of U.S. and Soviet troops in Central and Eastern Europe from roughly 300,000 and 600,000, respectively, to 195,000 each.89 Yet he wanted to keep more U.S. troops in Europe outside the central zone, and the Russians were not happy about it. The issue was not resolved there, but later in the month Gorbachev would accept Bush’s proposal.90 Chemical weapons and the negotiations on conventional forces in Europe, ongoing since March 1989, were also discussed.91

  The future of Germany also received attention from the foreign ministers.92 The secretary’s handwritten notes from their meetings indicate that they discussed the 2 + 4 framework as a better alternative to four-power meetings, which the “Germans won’t buy.” They also discussed the U.S. desire for Germany to remain in NATO. In the handwritten notes, Baker put stars and an exclamation point next to one of his key statements: “End result: Unified Ger. anchored in a *changed (polit.) NATO—*whose juris. would not move *eastward!” 93

  According to both Baker’s and Gorbachev’s records, Baker repeated this remark to the Soviet leader on February 9. Gorbachev followed up on this by emphasizing that any expansion of the “zone of NATO” was not acceptable.94 Baker responded, according to Gorbachev, “we agree with that.” This agreement was extremely significant to the Soviet leader. He later recalled it as the moment “that cleared the way for a compromise” on Germany.95

  It also formed the nucleus of the controversy that remains unresolved to this day. Unwisely, Gorbachev let the meeting end without securing this agreement in any kind of written form. Emerging from a political culture in which the word of a leader overruled the law, hoping that he could still find a way to disband both military alliances entirely, and hesitating to agree to his end of the bargain (a unified Germany), Gorbachev did not try to resolve the matter there in writing. In the future, once NATO started expanding, he would therefore leave the Soviet Union’s successors empty-handed when they protested against NATO enlargement. Later, Russian presidents would assert that this meeting had given them assurances that NATO would not expand. The United States would remember this meeting differently: as one in a number of conversations and negotiations limited solely to Germany, and until the final documents were signed, changeable.96

  Moreover, the matter could hardly be decided without the West Germans, who were arriving the next day. Baker intentionally departed for Romania and Bulgaria even as Kohl was landing in Moscow on Saturday, February 10. The secretary and the chancellor wanted to avoid meeting. The goal, as Baker put it, was to prevent “the public impression in the Soviet Union that somehow the Americans and the Germans were conspiring against them.” In reality, of course, “we were consulting continuously.” Even while he was still at the negotiating table with the Russians, Baker had delegation member Dennis Ross, his trusted director of policy planning, begin drafting a secret letter summarizing the U.S.-Russian talks for Kohl’s eyes. Baker later a
pproved this letter and made sure it was given to the West German ambassador in Moscow, Klaus Blech, who arranged for Kohl to see it as soon as possible once he arrived in Moscow on February 10.97

  “Dear Mr. Chancellor,” Baker’s note began. “In light of your meeting with President Gorbachev, the President wanted me to brief you on the talks I’ve had in Moscow.” The secretary summarized Gorbachev and Shevardnadze’s fears about German unification, and indicated that he had tried to assuage them by proposing the 2 + 4 mechanism, in which they seemed interested. Baker said that he had also explained to Gorbachev that a united Germany would choose to stay in NATO. “And then I put the following question to him. Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?” Baker quoted Gorbachev’s response verbatim: “‘Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.’ (By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable.)” In short, Baker thought that Gorbachev was “not locked-in” and he looked “forward to comparing notes with you after your meeting. Sincerely yours, Jim.” 98