1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 24
On top of the NATO meeting, Bush had also suggested to Gorbachev at Malta, back in December 1989, that he come to Washington for a bilateral summit. Gorbachev had agreed, and now it was time to finalize those plans. A date was set for the end of May 1990. As Hutchings, a member of the NSC at the time, remembers, “Gorbachev needed a successful summit, and we meant to give him one.” 48 A great deal of spectacle would be involved, including a state dinner and a grandiose departure ceremony. The timing of the U.S.-USSR summit could be useful to the Americans as well. It would force Gorbachev to decide what kind of result he wanted to bring home to the congress afterward: happy accord in Washington, inconclusive results, or new confrontation? In other words, it would (ideally) pressure Gorbachev into making a decision on the big issues.
To help the White House prepare for the summit, Kohl and a large delegation, this time including Genscher, visited Washington in the middle of May 1990. Hutchings recalls that there was a real sense of camaraderie between the Americans and the West Germans who were working on the same issues. Kohl in particular was becoming an unusually frequent visitor to the United States for a foreign head of government, and would appear twice in three weeks during spring 1990. The mid-May trip was an especially successful one. Hutchings made the following notes at the time: “Atmosphere. Couldn’t have been better. Kohl particularly, but all the Germans, were effusive in their gratitude for U.S. support. What a contrast to a year ago, when our mutual trust and confidence were slipping badly.” Teltschik had similar recollections, saying that the spirit of cooperation was exceptional.49
Kohl emphasized to Bush the need to prevent Gorbachev from slowing down the 2 + 4 talks since all other events were moving so quickly. Monetary union was now firmly scheduled for July 1, and Kohl had “not the least doubt that, in four years, the landscape would be blooming with economic success.” National German elections should follow not long thereafter, Kohl felt: “the mood in both East and West Germany is to vote soon.” Kohl explained that he felt like a farmer who was trying to get his harvest in before a storm, implying that he meant complete disintegration in the GDR—or the Soviet Union, given the challenges facing Gorbachev. The chancellor was also concerned about the Lithuanian factor. There was a lot of public sympathy in both Europe and the United States for its attempt to break away, but “people cannot live on sympathy.” Bush agreed, although he pointed out that every man had his pride, and Gorbachev would be particularly sensitive ahead of the contentious party congress, so they would have to move carefully. Moreover, the U.S. president was not willing to give the Soviet Union large loans, or even “Most Favored Nation” trading status, while the Baltic crisis was still going on and economic reforms stalled.50 The U.S. president was coming under criticism for doing too little for Lithuania—George Will’s cutting remark that the president’s timid response proved “Bushism is Reaganism minus the passion for freedom” had stung—and did not want to seem to be favoring Moscow at a delicate time. Still, the president did consider a trade deal, and one would eventually emerge from the Washington summit.51
Bush and Kohl felt that the trickiest issue would be to find a way to get rid of Soviet troops without parallel requests for NATO troop withdrawals. A concept that had been raised already by Baker on his visits to Moscow seemed like it might be the solution: use the “Helsinki Principle.” This phrase was a shorthand way of saying that Bush, at the summit, should once again cite the Helsinki Final Act of 1975 that had produced the CSCE. The Final Act, which the United States, the Soviets, both of the Germanies, and thirty-one others had signed, declared that a signatory must respect the right of each state “to define and conduct as it wishes its relations with other States.” In other words, signatories had “the right to belong or not to belong to international organizations, to be or not to be a party to bilateral or multilateral treaties including the right to be or not to be a party to treaties of alliance”; they also had “the right to neutrality.” Put bluntly, Helsinki signatories had the right to choose their own military alliances. As a result, if Germany united democratically and then chose to be in NATO, Western troops could stay there, thanks to Helsinki. Of course, the Final Act also explicitly gave the Germanies the right to choose neutrality, something that Washington wanted very much to avoid; discussion of the Helsinki Principle avoided this delicate topic. Instead, consensus emerged that getting Gorbachev to affirm his agreement with this principle would be very useful.52
Kohl believed that he had found another way to force Soviet troops to leave while allowing their Western counterparts to stay. The chancellor strongly suspected that if the continued presence of Soviet troops came to be seen popularly as an impediment to unification, then “anti-Soviet feelings” would arise. Public animosity toward their continued presence would compel Gorbachev to bring the troops home or risk a violent clash. The chancellor also repeated once again his belief that the appearance of the DM would demoralize Soviet troops. Kohl concealed his new knowledge of their field bank savings, however. Defense Minister Stoltenberg, who was also at the meeting, chimed in to encourage Bush to try to get arms control moving again as part of the process of assuaging Gorbachev. The CFE talks in Vienna were stalling. Stoltenberg hoped that the Bush administration would follow through on hints that it was willing to make concessions there.53
Even as the West Germans and Americans strategized for the summit in Washington, Baker and his delegation were back in Moscow yet again. There, the secretary found a Soviet leader trying to fend off opponents on both the Right and Left. On the Right, nationalistic unrest continued. Dozens of Armenians would soon die in clashes with police in Yerevan. On the Left, Gorbachev’s rival Yeltsin was already well en route to being the elected leader of the new Russian republic at the end of May 1990. This would give Yeltsin an independent power base that would ultimately allow him to challenge Gorbachev’s authority.54 A RAND delegation, visiting the Soviet Union on the eve of Baker’s arrival, found in particular that Falin, Akhromeyev, and Defense Minister Dmitri Yazov were pushing for a much harder line toward the United States. Of these, Falin was the most assertive vocally during the visit, telling RAND President James Thomson that the United States should not treat Soviet leaders “like kids.” 55 Akhromeyev and Yazov had increasingly serious doubts of their own. Originally willing to work with Gorbachev in the late 1980s, they were becoming despondent about the actions of their boss; both of them would eventually support the coup of 1991. Yazov would be actively involved in planning it, and Akhromeyev would take his own life when it failed, leaving a suicide note for Gorbachev that read “beginning in 1990, I was convinced, as I am today, that our country is heading for ruin.” Since Akhromeyev had devoted his life to the cause of the Soviet Union, he saw no other recourse but to share in its demise.56
Although Baker could not know that there would be a coup in 1991, he could clearly see that his counterpart, the Soviet foreign minister, was under more pressure than ever from military hard-liners. Baker noted in a report to Bush that Shevardnadze had even felt “compelled to start off reading his whole arms control brief in front of his whole delegation—as if to show he could be trusted to make the points.” The secretary tried to make progress on arms control with him, but his Soviet counterpart seemed unwilling to show initiative anymore. Baker’s visit got more curious when, after one meeting, Shevardnadze took him to hear an archbishop preach at the Zagorsk Monastery, an important site for Russian Orthodox believers. The archbishop’s remarks emphasized that people needed to believe in something; Baker took the point to be that if Communist ideology failed, others would fill the gap.57
It did not bode well for Baker’s talks the next day with Shevardnadze’s boss. Under siege at home, the Soviet leader was in no mood to be conciliatory to Baker. Gorbachev kept questioning the need for a united Germany to be in NATO, and accused Washington of game playing and not taking his concerns seriously. He worried that U.S. and Russian relations could become dramatically worse as a result. Baker reassu
red Gorbachev that he was not game playing.58 He called Gorbachev’s idea of a pan-European security institution “an excellent dream, but only a dream”; NATO was a reality, and a Germany solidly implanted in it would be in the interest of the Soviet Union. To make NATO more palatable, Baker echoed much of what Kohl had been offering and added more: he told Gorbachev that he was willing to offer nine assurances, including a future limitation on the size of the Bundeswehr, a prohibition against a united Germany developing nuclear weapons of its own, talks on tactical nuclear armaments, a transitional period for the Soviet troops to withdraw, changes to NATO itself, and finally, guarantees that the economic interests of the Soviet Union would be respected during the unification process.59
Gorbachev was still not convinced. If the continued existence of NATO was truly in the Soviet interest, he asked, then why couldn’t the Soviet Union just join it as well? He emphasized that this was not a “hypothetical point, not some absurdity,” but a serious question. Baker countered with the Helsinki Principle. Under it, he stressed, the Germans were allowed to choose their own alliance. But Gorbachev kept pressing his point, saying that Soviet membership in NATO was not a “wild fantasy or absurd idea.” The United States and the USSR had been allies previously, so why shouldn’t it be possible now? Baker repeated that some kind of pan-European security structure was just a dream and that it would be more realistic to address Soviet concerns as Germany joined NATO instead. He played on residual Soviet fears to bolster his point: given what disasters a standalone Germany had caused in the past, a quick and secure link to NATO would be in the Soviets’ interest. Gorbachev gave up his line of argument, indicating that he would pursue it at the summit.60
In a telegram to Bush the next day, Baker recounted how Gorbachev, for “the first time,” had accused Washington of taking advantage of “Soviet troubles.” As Baker put it, “he almost seemed to be saying that in his hour of need, he didn’t need us to complicate his life.” Baker concluded that “Germany definitely over-loads his circuits right now” and guessed that any breakthroughs were off the table until Gorbachev calmed down.61
Between the meeting with Baker and his arrival in Washington, Gorbachev kept articulating the same concerns, both in public and private. He gave a coverstory interview for the May 22 issue of Time magazine, which would hit the newsstands in the United States just before the start of the summit. In it, Gorbachev complained that for the Soviet people, “NATO is associated with the Cold War … as an organization designed from the start to be hostile to the Soviet Union, as a force that whipped up the arms race and the danger of war.” He continued that regardless of the promises that he was hearing about its transformation, it remained “a symbol of the past, a dangerous and confrontational past.” He concluded that “we will never agree to assign it the leading role in building a new Europe. I want us to be understood correctly on this.” 62
He also emphasized his opposition to NATO enlargement in a private conversation with Mitterrand on May 25, just before he left for Washington. Gorbachev told the French president that NATO “must not move into the Eastern part of the future united Germany.” In response, Mitterrand was sympathetic yet cautious; he agreed that the result of German unification “must not be an isolated Soviet Union. France will not agree to it.” If it were up to France, some kind of European confederation would have been the way forward, one that included the USSR. However, the French leader tried to point out delicately that the time for bargaining was rapidly disappearing. In Mitterrand’s opinion, unification had already happened in the minds of the German people, so now it was just a matter of practicalities. Kohl intended to unify Germany by the end of the year, and he had U.S. support in doing so.63
Gorbachev did not take Mitterrand’s point, emphasizing instead that the four powers retained final say over unification, so the issue of unification was still open. The Soviet leader indicated that he understood that Americans wanted a permanent role in Europe, and indeed that excluding them entirely would be destabilizing, but he was still unhappy with the idea of expanding NATO as the mechanism whereby they would stay. Rather, Gorbachev mentioned his quickfix solution—a united Germany in both alliances—and also speculated about demilitarizing the country. His goal was to make the united Germany, by whatever means, the link between East and West.
Fig. 5.1. President Bush with his wife, Barbara, and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, at the Washington Summit State Dinner. Courtesy of Time and Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Mitterrand demurred, saying that there was little he could do to help Gorbachev in implementing this vision. If the French president opposed Germany’s desire to join NATO, he would become isolated among his Western allies. “What can I do? Send a division?” Mitterrand asked. Gorbachev replied that he already had a division in East Germany.64 After the conversation was over, Mitterrand sent a summary of it to Kohl. The French president’s conclusion was that Gorbachev’s attitude was “not sensible.” 65
Aware of Gorbachev’s reticence about NATO, the White House had limited hopes for the summit. Rather than aiming for an absolute resolution of the matter, Washington would instead focus on components. Bush would agree to a renunciation by the united Germany of all “ABC” (atomic, biological, and chemical) weapons, and to a time period during which Soviet troops could stay. But there would be no massive financial aid, which is what Gorbachev really wanted. The briefing papers for the summit concluded that as a result, expectations should be low. In particular, one CIA preparatory paper concluded that the president should “not anticipate major movement on Germany.” 66 Bush even said as much in his first of many phone calls to Kohl during the event. Bush’s goal was simple: to have Gorbachev “come out feeling he has had a good summit, even though there are no major breakthroughs.” 67
The CIA and indeed Bush were right in this prediction. The Washington summit did not resolve the question of whether a united Germany could be in NATO, despite later claims that it had. Gorbachev voiced once again, this time to Bush directly, his quick-fix idea of Germany joining both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. The U.S. side rejected this notion as “schizophrenic.” 68
The closest the summit got to movement on German issues was when Gorbachev, in response to a direct question from Bush, confirmed his respect for the Helsinki Principle. In other words, the Soviet leader allowed that nations could choose their own military alliances under it. This acknowledgment did in fact represent an important achievement of the Washington summit. Both delegations knew that it was a critical point. On the Soviet side of the negotiating table, Gorbachev’s concession on this point caused a great deal of consternation among his team, which included the rebellious Akhromeyev and Falin. Gorbachev let Falin take over the negotiations while he withdrew to a corner to whisper heatedly with a number of his unhappy advisers. There was some note passing on the U.S. side too. Bush’s advisers wanted to confirm the concession and urged the president to ask Gorbachev about the matter again when he got back. Once Gorbachev had finished whispering and returned to the table, Bush repeated the question of whether the Soviet leader still supported the Helsinki Principle, hoping that all the theatrics had not changed the answer. They had not. Gorbachev, showing his delegation who was boss, said that he still did.69
No specific agreements about Germany or NATO resulted, however. This omission was not just due to Gorbachev’s reluctance. As Baker noted to Bush at one point during the talks, they needed to make it clear to the Soviets that on the subject of Germany, “we are not agreeing to any of this now—even a transition period [for Soviet troop withdrawal]. OK to talk further—but only to EXPLORE.” 70
Gorbachev had received an invitation to visit Camp David as part of his summit package. He and Bush flew from the White House to the Maryland mountains in the same helicopter. They sat together, watching the summer countryside roll by, with the military aides carrying the nuclear codes that still allowed the two leaders to render each other’s countryside lifeless.71
Afterward, Gorbachev distracted attention from his bad driving with even worse jokes. When offered a cup of decaf, he complained that “drinking decaffeinated coffee is like licking sugar through glass.” The group laughed heartily, and Gorbachev decided to toss out a little macho banter. “We’re all men here?” he observed, so he could say what he had really meant: “Having intercourse with condom is same thing as licking sugar through glass.” The line was a hit. As Gates remembers, Bush liked smutty remarks: “You could always get his attention with a good dirty joke—as long as it wasn’t really gross, and as long as only men were present.” Baker thought it was so hilarious that it was worth mentioning in his memoirs years later—although his ghostwriter, Thomas DeFrank, had to leave readers guessing what the punch line was, because Baker deemed it unsuitable for publication.73 But the secretary did have DeFrank describe Baker’s own condom joke to Gorbachev in return. When the secretary was in Moscow for a 2 + 4 meeting later that year after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he took with him a condom to show the Soviet leader. Its packet had a picture of the Iraqi leader on the front. The secretary rather remarkably let DeFrank quote verbatim in Baker’s memoirs, which are otherwise sober in tone, exactly what the packet said on the front: “For big pricks who don’t know when to withdraw.” 74