1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Page 30

  Outside of Germany in the international arena, NATO was subject to the same dilemma of imperfect choices. The alliance began creeping eastward in response to the demands of the day, but without much assessment of the long-term consequences. Even Kohl’s own East German coalition partners balked at the swift installation of the Western military pact on the still-smoking ruins of the old Eastern one. They hoped instead that in a peaceful post–Cold War world, neither of the old military blocs would be necessary. They wanted to move beyond the East-West divide, not move its front eastward. An ideal model for the future would have been one that included a clear vision for both Eastern Europe and the former Soviet countries. But the path to this alternative future was not nearly as clear as the one to Bush’s and Kohl’s. The West German foreign minister, Genscher, was right to warn continually about Russian resentment as a result of the western plan, and Gorbachev’s wife, Raisa, was right to be worried about its costs for her husband.

  Summarizing the legacy of 1989–90 this way requires a corollary: a clear discussion of its implications for NATO enlargement. No less a figure than George Kennan may have termed such enlargement a “‘strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions,’” but his judgment requires context.18 Strategy is the calculated relation of means to ends. When assessing whether or not NATO enlargement was a blunder, it is necessary to ask first what ends it was meant to achieve: was post–Cold War NATO supposed to serve political or military goals? The answer to this question seems to have varied both over the years since 1990 and among the alliance’s leading members; but it is crucial, because it results in widely divergent assessments of expansion.

  If the alliance’s goal became a political one—namely, to provide an umbrella of stability to new East European democracies after the end of the Cold War, thereby reducing their external worries and allowing them to prioritize internal reform—then it was not a blunder. Nor was it illegitimate. As described above, NATO first began moving eastward when it absorbed former East German territory as a result of a democratic election there on March 18, 1990, and in accordance with signed and ratified treaties. After that, freely elected leaders in Central and Eastern Europe sought further enlargement of the alliance. Legitimate government entities on both sides of the Atlantic approved NATO expansion (such as the U.S. Senate, which ratified NATO’s addition of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic by a vote of eighty to nineteen on April 30, 1998). Baker himself would later argue that under a political understanding of NATO’s mission, Russia itself should be considered eligible for NATO membership—as long as it definitively “embraced democracy and free markets.” 19 In short, if the alliance’s mission was to be a political one, then the possibility of Soviet membership in NATO should have been seriously considered; failing that, the mission should have been given to an institution, possibly a new one, that could have included Russia.

  If the highest goal remained military security for alliance members even after the end of the Cold War, though, then the strategy of NATO enlargement starts to look more dubious. Strictly speaking, a military pact is supposed to increase the security of its members; but by converting new areas into territory covered by Article 5, the alliance increased its liabilities without a corresponding increase in capabilities. New members could not become equal military partners quickly. (The alliance in some ways thereby recapitulated its founding in 1949, when the United States had taken on West European countries still ravaged by war.) There were benefits, of course, such as increased options for troop and missile defense placements, but there were also new problems. The expansion perpetuated the military dividing line between NATO and its biggest strategic threat, Russia, into the post–Cold War world, which did not have to be the outcome of 1990.

  And regardless of which view is accurate, it is fair to ask questions about the implementation of NATO enlargement. There was an unfortunate lack of success in limiting Russian hostility toward the process. Such prevention was essential, if expansion were not to create new strategic problems. An ideal policymaker in the West would have recognized that the implementation of expansion created the greatest possible duty of care; Russia had only episodically shown interest in cooperation with the West, so a rare window of opportunity opened in 1989–90. An ideal policymaker in the East would have bargained much harder before implementation began; Moscow had opportunities during the unification process to seek written prohibitions on NATO movement eastward but did not do so.

  Instead, the evidence presented here about the early origin of NATO expansion reveals a gap between public expressions and private thinking. In the West, while Bonn and Washington publicly expressed sympathy for Gorbachev’s reformist goals in 1989–90, they privately sensed that they did not really need to accommodate him. To repeat what Baker wrote in a summary of U.S.-Soviet relations: the Russians “have to make hard choices. We do Gorbachev no favors when we make it easier to avoid choices.” Bonn and Washington realized that they could outmaneuver him. The discrepancy between what Kohl in particular suggested to Gorbachev in February—that NATO would not move eastward if the Soviet leader let Germany unite, which Gorbachev then agreed to let happen internally—and what transpired afterward created ill will in the long term. In other words, the goal of Bonn and Washington was, as Gates put it, to bribe the Soviets out of Germany, not to set up long-term cooperation or structures in which Gorbachev and his successors would be full partners. Gorbachev eventually came to feel that he had walked into a trap, and told Kohl so in those words in September 1990. Presumably the Soviet leader was also angry at himself for failing to have gotten more out of unification, particularly with regard to NATO, since the issue was such a toxic one for any Soviet or Russian leader. The Clinton administration, seeing how difficult NATO expansion could be for Yeltsin in terms of domestic politics, waited until after the Russian leader secured reelection in July 1996 before enlarging beyond former East Germany. It also, together with the NATO secretary general at the time, Javier Solana, organized a multinational conference in Paris in May 1997 to provide Yeltsin with a public relations boost. At this conference, the “Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation, and Security between the Russian Federation and NATO” was signed. This act created a Permanent Joint Council that included Russia, but neither it, nor its successor organization, the NATO-Russia Council, ever really lived up to expectations. Russians saw the new relationship as a counterintelligence opportunity. Western policymakers gave Russia only token consultative rights.20 The window of opportunity closed. Lacking some kind of successful Western-Russian consultation to smooth over the disagreements, NATO enlargement continued to increase tension between Washington and Moscow.

  As opportunities for cooperation dwindled in the course of implementation, Russian worry about NATO enlargement intensified. During the Cold War, Leningrad was roughly twelve hundred miles away from the nearest border of NATO. By 2008, the membership of Estonia meant that the border had moved to within a hundred miles of the city, renamed Saint Petersburg.21 Any country would be concerned about such a development, but Russia was particularly angry about it. It insisted that in implementing expansion, the United States and the West had thereby broken what Moscow perceived to be their promises; Ron Asmus, a Clinton State Department official who helped to enlarge NATO, remembers being continually confronted by such claims.22 U.S. government officials have responded to Moscow’s worries by trying to clarify what happened in February 1990. In the Clinton era, a memorandum written by Assistant Secretary of State John Kornblum and approved by the State Department legal team argued that Baker’s words applied only to divided Germany. In other words, when the secretary suggested to Gorbachev that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position, he was speaking solely in his authority as a representative of one of the four powers still occupying Germany in 1990. Baker meant only that NATO’s jurisdiction would not move eastward within a united Germany; he did not have the authority to speak for other regions, let alone NA
TO itself.23 On top of this, Zelikow published an article titled “NATO Expansion Wasn’t Ruled Out” in 1995. This op-ed contended that whatever Baker may have said, Gorbachev was informed about changes to the U.S. view afterward and signed a number of accords consistent with those later changes.24

  Fig. C.2. Ceremonial signing of the NATO-Russia Founding Act in Paris, with Russian President Boris Yeltsin (left) and NATO Secretary General Javier Solana, May 1997. © Pascal Le Segretain/Corbis Sygma.

  Yeltsin’s eventual successors, Putin and Dmitri Medvedev, were not swayed by these explanations. They saw the failure to resist NATO expansion as a massive strategic error on the part of their predecessors. Putin in particular, used to thinking of NATO as the “main opponent” from his days in Dresden, felt strongly that the alliance was an impediment to Russia assuming its full role in Europe. He felt that “no matter where our people live, in the Far East or in the south, we are Europeans.” Russians “would have avoided a lot of problems if the Soviets had not made such a hasty exit from Eastern Europe.” 25 Medvedev, Putin’s handpicked successor, followed his mentor’s lead by speaking sarcastically about “the unbridled expansion of NATO and other gifts to Russia.” He especially resented the decision in August 2008 to base ten U.S. interceptor missiles in Poland and the corresponding radar equipment in the Czech Republic as part of a planned missile defense; Medvedev suspected that the equipment could also have offensive uses. Even Gorbachev himself emerged from retirement to blame the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia—which he thought was justified—on the “unending expansion of NATO … set against the backdrop of sweet talk about partnership.” To counter it, Gorbachev endorsed a plan by Medvedev: to set up a new “security architecture” for Europe as NATO celebrated its sixtieth birthday.26

  The evidence and analysis offered in this book indicate that the controversy over February 1990 needs to be understood not just in terms of U.S.-Soviet history but also in terms of the relations of both with West Germany at the time, and subsequent events that same year. Baker suggested in a highly speculative way at the American-Soviet bilateral of February 9 that NATO would not expand eastward if Gorbachev allowed Germany to unite. It might have become a deal if the Soviet leader had insisted at the time, but their bilateral meeting ended without action or agreement. More problematic was the Soviet–West German bilateral of the next day, where Kohl echoed Baker despite receiving different U.S. wording directly from Bush. Unlike the previous day, the FRG-USSR meeting did end with action: Gorbachev allowed Germany to unify internally on the basis of what Kohl said. Unwisely, the Soviet leader neither sought nor received written agreement about NATO in return. But by the end of the month, Kohl would be at Camp David, agreeing to Bush’s language on NATO. Since there was nothing in writing, the wording was fluid. The accords that would be signed in late 1990 ultimately would be ones consistent with the Camp David position. Attempts by Falin and others to force Gorbachev to seek written guarantees failed, as the Soviet leader decided to accept vague promises in the Caucasus in July 1990 instead. By the end of 1990, Gorbachev himself would be bitterly unhappy, and later his successors would cry foul about these proceedings as well.

  Hence, when looking specifically at the legacy of 1989–90 for the issue of NATO enlargement, what emerges is not a formal prohibition against such an expansion; rather, it is Russian resentment—both at the West and former Soviet leaders for conceding in negotiations—arising from the informal proceedings. Such resentment has generated its own strategic problems. In December 2008, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer would complain about how hard it was to conduct dialogue with Russia, especially in the wake of Putin’s decision to suspend compliance with the CFE treaty and the Russian invasion of Georgia. “It’s not easy to know how to approach someone, in daily life or in foreign policy, who feels themselves victimized,” the NATO leader complained. This sense of victimization is a large component of the legacy of 1989–90 and the rushed, imperfect choices available to policymakers at the time. The West should have thought harder in the wake of 1990 about how it felt, longer term, to live in a once-great country that had to bring its soldiers home for lack of money.27

  This leads to a third component: Russia was not the only great power struggling to react to events in 1989–90. A close look at the imperfect choices of 1989–90 shows that little was under superpower control. Clearly, the United States and the Soviet Union were the two most important countries during the Cold War, but they were not the only important countries in the shaping of the post–Cold War European order. Consider the following questions: Why did the Berlin Wall become suddenly and unexpectedly obsolete on November 9? Why did Gorbachev agree to let Germany unify internally? Why did he assent to NATO membership for the united country, allowing its precedent-setting enlargement to former Warsaw Pact territory to begin? It is not possible to answer these questions, other than with generalities, solely by talking about the superpowers. The long-term contest between the U.S. and Soviet visions of the future assuredly provided the context for all of these developments. But as previously asserted, the endgame was heavily European.

  Because of this, it was fortunate for Washington that the German in charge was so deeply committed to NATO, and that he was able to win over the French leader. Of course, the United States was not without leverage. Quadripartite rights remaining from World War II gave it a veto over all changes in divided Germany. Simply stalling would have increased the likelihood of unification failing (if that were desired), because both Bonn and Washington knew that Gorbachev’s authority was slipping, and it was unlikely that anyone more cooperative would succeed him.

  Yet a number of other bargains for post–Cold War Europe could still have been struck between the Germans and Moscow. Knowing this, Scowcroft remembered in his memoirs how anxiously he waited for calls from Kohl whenever the chancellor had visited Moscow. At one point Scowcroft had one of his NSC staffers, Hutchings, prepare a memo for the U.S. president listing eighteen possible final scenarios to the drive for German unity, ranked in order of desirability for Washington. The scenario that actually emerged was outcome number two—number one would have been no restrictions on NATO in East Germany whatsoever—but a large number of less desirable outcomes were highly possible. Understanding how the process came to the result that it did requires looking beyond superpower shores.28

  A corollary to this is that Washington’s true talent in 1989–90 rested in its ability to recognize the significance of Bonn, not in its ability to direct all events itself. Indeed, Bush’s willingness to let Kohl lead on the issue of German unification was remarkable. As the U.S. president himself stated in his memoirs, Bush—rather amazingly—did not have strong feelings about how to proceed when the chaos of 1989 in Germany demanded a response. Thatcher reportedly complained that the problem with Bush was that he did not have strong feelings about anything at all.

  But Bush did have strong feelings about the future of NATO, to the anguish of not only the Soviet Union but also France at points. As the president said to Kohl at Camp David: “We prevailed, they didn’t.” United Germany would have full NATO membership as a result. Indeed, at times, Mitterrand’s aide Védrine wondered if NATO was “the only issue” that truly concerned Bush. Whether it was or was not, the American president clearly understood the alliance’s significance. It kept the United States in Europe, but it was also an organization created to contain a Soviet threat. NATO therefore needed new relevance as that threat seeped away; otherwise, it might disappear as well. The alliance had to change to survive. It is not surprising that Bush made time to go to Europe repeatedly for the NATO summits in 1989 and 1990, but did not attend the final ceremony for German unification, despite Kohl’s strong desire that he do so. The pressure of the contemporaneous Gulf crisis was of course part of the reason for his absence, but a major event celebrating the triumph of Western unity could also have been useful, if Bush had wanted one.29

  This finding yields a fourth and final componen
t: the legacy of 1989–90 shows the power of chance and contingency. At many points, all state leaders, superpower and otherwise, were simply reacting to change. They had to propose models of order for the future precisely because they were overwhelmed by disorder. Often they were not so much designing events as simply surviving them. The challenge was to make the best use of events, no matter how unexpected they might be.

  The most unexpected was the opening of the wall on November 9, 1989, which shocked everyone, and might easily not have happened at all. The severely sleepdeprived East German spokesman Schabowksi could have forgotten the piece of paper with incomprehensible new travel rules until after the end of his November 9 press conference. As it was, he got around to it only in the fifty-fifth minute of an hour-long session, when his memory was jogged by a journalist’s question on a related topic. Had he not remembered, the wall would not have fallen that night.

  Of course, the wall would have opened eventually, but not as easily, not for free, not when all East German leaders of any significance were incommunicado in a meeting, not when all Soviet leaders of any significance were asleep, and above all, not as soon and not at a time when a cooperation-minded Gorbachev still had sufficient authority to manage the Soviet reaction. If the wall had fallen when the separatist movement in the Soviet Union and the erosion of Gorbachev’s power were much more advanced, it could have played into the hands of opponents contemplating a coup. Or there may simply not have been enough time to complete the unification process before chaos engulfed the USSR. The process could easily have become fatally mired in the infighting of the Soviet elite, with U.S. attention diverted to the Gulf.30 Once the Soviet Union definitively fell apart, questions about the fractured legal successors to its rights would have gotten messy indeed.