1989- The Struggle to Create Post-Cold War Europe Read online

  In short, Bush was making clear to Mitterrand that the 2+4 should limit itself to the minimum necessary—renouncing four power rights—and that NATO had to remain the dominant security organization in post-Cold War Europe.25 One Mitterrand adviser summarized the U.S. position as follows: “The United States has recently rediscovered an interest in a structure that will allow it to participate in the Concert of Europe.”26 The president personally made clear that the two plus four talks, and the documents that would result from them, should avoid addressing any of the truly major open questions about NATO. The final 2+4 documents show that Bush succeeded in this effort.

  In contrast, high-level assessment of this issue continued internally in the Bush Administration through the summer of 1990. In July 1990, Baker and Zoellick briefed Bush on the potential need to provide structure for the Soviet Union and East European states after their own institutions collapsed.27 And in September 1990, Zoellick and his British colleagues refused to finalize the 2+4 accord on the unification of Germany until it was confirmed in an “agreed minute” that non-German NATO troops had the option of moving eastward over the alliance’s 1989 border. Although he did not explicitly discuss Eastern Europe, Zoellick later stated he had Poland on his mind.28

  To recap, the evidence now available shows that the question of NATO expansion arose as early as February 1990, and that for the Westerners involved it included speculative discussion of not only eastern Germany but also Eastern Europe. Moreover, the question of the future of NATO caused internal disagreements in both Washington and Bonn. In early February 1990, Baker, Kohl, and Genscher were willing to suggest to Gorbachev and Shevardnadze that NATO would not move one inch eastward beyond its 1989 border.29 As described above, such statements helped to inspire Gorbachev to agree, on February 10, to the initial steps down the road to German unification, namely the economic and monetary union that was enacted on July 1, 1990. Almost as soon as they made these remarks, however, Bonn and Washington reconsidered the matter internally and decided to cease doing so.

  THE CONSEQUENCES OF CAMP DAVID

  The documents surviving from the preparations for the Bush-Kohl summit at Camp David on February 24–25, 1990, show that, by late February 1990, the NSC and the West German defense ministry had both independently raised similar questions about the future of European security and of NATO.30 Genscher had considered the question of NATO’s expansion to Eastern Europe as something that Gorbachev would find unacceptable and want ruled out, but Genscher was finding himself ruled out instead. Kohl chose not to bring Genscher, his own foreign minister, to Camp David, even though Baker, Genscher’s U.S. counterpart, was in attendance—a major insult to Genscher, insufficiently papered over by attempts to make it look as if Baker had just shown up at the last minute.31

  By the time of the Camp David summit, Bush and Kohl had realized that they wanted more flexibility for NATO’s future than Baker’s earlier comments would allow. When the U.S. and West German leaders met at Camp David in February 1990 and the question of compromising with Moscow arose, Bush responded, “To hell with that! We prevailed and they didn’t. We can’t let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.”32 Kohl felt that he and Bush would have to find a way to placate Gorbachev, however. As described in 1989, Kohl specifically believed that compensation would probably be necessary: “It will come down in the end to a question of cash,” he told the president at Camp David. Bush agreed, and pointedly replied that West Germany had “deep pockets.”33 These phrasings were more elegant than the words later used by Robert Gates, the Deputy National Security Adviser in 1990, who summarized Bonn and Washington’s resulting strategy as follows: it was “to bribe the Soviets out.”34

  Given the deteriorating economic conditions in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev would indeed be susceptible to such inducement. In spring 1990, Matlock, the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, found that the Soviet leader was starting to look “less like a man in control and more [like] an embattled leader.” The “signs of crisis,” he wrote, “are legion: Sharply rising crime rates, proliferating anti-regime demonstrations, burgeoning separatist movements, deteriorating economic performance…and a slow, uncertain transfer of power from party to state and from the center to the periphery.”35 In addition, a crisis caused by a Lithuanian push for independence from the Soviet Union would soon begin troubling Gorbachev as well.

  In short, Moscow would have a hard time addressing its domestic problems without the help of foreign aid and credit. In light of the softening U.S. economy, however, Bush neither wanted to be generous, nor felt that he could justify giving aid to a country that was still ostensibly the United States’ greatest enemy. Therefore, Gorbachev would have to turn to West Germany for help. The question was whether Bonn could provide such assistance in a manner that allowed Gorbachev to save face—that is, avoid making it apparent that the Soviets were being bribed out—as he accepted a unified Germany in NATO.36 In other words, the West Germans would have to pay the bribes and to find some kind of face-saving way to do so. As described in 1989, Kohl accomplished both of those goals, first in a bilateral meeting with Gorbachev in July 1990 and subsequently in a series of fraught and emotional phone calls with Gorbachev in September 1990.

  By then, the discussion of European security, and NATO’s role in it, had suddenly become of secondary importance for Washington, following the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. Repelling this invasion quickly became Bush’s highest priority. It pushed the issue of European security well down his administration’s priority list. There seems to have been a feeling that Europe had achieved a new, peaceful post-Cold War status and that its remaining issues could thus be put on the back burner—while the crisis in Gulf, in contrast, demanded immediate attention. There also appears to have been an assumption that Bush could return to European security questions later in his first term, or even in his second.

  But Bush’s loss in the 1992 election meant that his foreign policy team had to vacate their offices years earlier than they expected. Communication between the outgoing Bush team and the incoming Clinton team seems to have been limited. As a result, knowledge among Clinton foreign policy experts of events described here appears to have been limited as well. Many Clinton staffers mistakenly assumed that once the question of NATO expansion arose once again, it was arising for the first time.

  CONCLUSION: THE PERSISTENCE OF PREFERRED MEMORIES

  The paragraphs above have drawn together in one place crucial pieces of evidence on the early origins of NATO expansion, both from the first edition of this book and from the sources that became available afterward. To summarize: this evidence shows not only that NATO’s future formed a key part of the negotiations on German unification but also that the preparations for the various negotiations included speculative consideration of Eastern Europe. In early February 1990, Baker, Genscher, and Kohl all discussed with Gorbachev the prospect that, if he allowed Germany to unify, NATO would not subsequently move eastward beyond its 1989 borders, in other words, not even into East Germany. Gorbachev responded orally that any expansion of “the zone of NATO” would be “unacceptable,” but nothing was written down and no formal agreements were reached. However, such wording generated immediate and strong opposition from other components of the governments in both Washington and Bonn. That opposition eventually succeeded in preventing any such language from being repeated, let alone written down, after late February.

  Because of these events, Russians to this day accuse the U.S. of lying and of betraying Moscow. Given the intense feelings surrounding this issue, it is helpful to take a step back from such emotional terms and instead summarize what happened based on the evidence available: the representatives of the U.S. and West Germany expertly outmaneuvered Gorbachev in the negotiations over German unification in 1990. They accomplished their goals of expanding NATO to East Germany and of leaving open the door for future expansion to Eastern Europe in an impressively swift and decisive manner. Indeed, at the tact
ical and operational levels, Bonn and Washington achieved success at nearly every turn during the unification process. One NSC staffer, Robert Hutchings, prepared a list of roughly eighteen possible outcomes to these talks, ranked in order from the “most congenial” outcome for the U.S. (number one, no restrictions at all on NATO) to the “most inimical.”37 In the end, the U.S. achieved the phenomenal feat of accomplishing an outcome somewhere between numbers one and two on the most congenial end of the spectrum (modest restrictions on NATO, such as limits on what non-German NATO troops could do in former East Germany). Rarely do international negotiations go so well for one of the parties involved at the tactical and operational level.

  It is at the strategic level, however, that the aggressive approach of “bribing the Soviets out” loses its luster. The only window of opportunity for establishing a new form of partnership between Washington and Moscow in decades was allowed to close without any serious assessment of a means of durable cooperation; instead, the short-term goal of pushing the Soviets back succeeded completely. By design, Russia got bribed out and left on the periphery of post-Cold War Europe. The line of division between NATO and non-NATO Europe from the Cold War persisted, just moved eastwards. We are still experiencing the consequences of this 1990 strategy today. A KGB officer named Putin who spent 1989 in divided Germany never lost his sense of bitterness at how Russia thereby lost its position in Europe.38 When, decades later, he had the power to act on this bitterness, Putin chose to do so by changing European borders with force and creating a new atmosphere of conflict and uncertainty in twenty-first century Europe.

  If we want to understand the decay in post-Cold War relations between the West and Russia, we must keep this sequence of events—as actually revealed by historical evidence, not as our preferred memory would wish it to be—in mind, even if these revelations are unwelcome tidings. As I write in spring 2014, relations with Moscow are at a post-Cold War low. Russia under Putin has experienced de-democratization, censorship, and rising xenophobia. Its neighbors have endured aggression, energy shut-offs, and armed incursions. Journalists and human rights activists attempting to call attention to these events, most notably Anna Politkovskaya, have died mysteriously, with no satisfactory clarification of these tragic deaths.39 In short, dealing with Russia in its current aggressive and hostile incarnation is difficult enough. We should not complicate it by simply ignoring uncomfortable evidence about one of the most contentious issues in Western relations with Moscow. The lane numbers at Bornholmer Street first faded, then fell to active destruction. We should not let other historical sources, particularly when they concern matters of on-going significance, suffer the same fate.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Although I discharged my professional debts at the outset of this book, I would like to close by expressing my personal thanks. Going back many years, I acknowledge the German Academic Exchange Service (or DAAD) for funding a year of study abroad at the Free University of West Berlin in 1988 and 1989. At the time I was simply trying to improve my German, but I learned much more than that. Once I began historical research into the end of the Cold War, I received support from Yale University’s International Security Studies Program, its contributing sponsors, the DAAD once again and, most importantly, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. After some initial investigations into and publications based on East European archives and interviews in the 1990s—I am grateful to the editors of German Politics for letting me reuse portions of an article here—I decided that I would prefer to wait for the availability of Western sources before proceeding and turned my attention to other topics. In the interim, I had the opportunity to serve as a White House Fellow, which gave me much more insight into politics than scholarship alone could provide. I am grateful to the Presidential Commission for granting me that experience.

  Once the requisite Western sources became available years later, fellowship and research support from the Humboldt Foundation once again, St. John’s College of the University of Cambridge, the Mershon Center of The Ohio State University, and the University of Southern California enabled me to work through them. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton provided the ideal setting for thinking through my findings during a year of sabbatical. I am grateful to the faculty of the Institute’s School of Historical Studies for selecting me and to the National Endowment for the Humanities for supporting my stay there.

  On top of these institutions, I am also indebted to a number of individuals. I benefited from more help and good humor than I had any right to expect over the years of work on this study. The staff members of archives and other institutions from Moscow to California and a dozen places in between worked hard to connect me to the sources that I wanted to see, and I thank them for their efforts. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Manfred Bolz, Dr. Günter Buchstab, Mary Curry, Jörg Filthaut, Pascal Geneste, Dietmar Haak, Buffie Hollis, Dr. Robert Holzweiss, Petra Jakobik, Shajaat Jalil, Sergei Kuznetsov, Dan Linke, Mircea Munteanu, Kathy Olson, Zachary Roberts, Professor Patrick Salmon, Dan Santamaria, Jennifer Sternaman, Alice Tkar, Anne Vogel, Roberto Welzel, Deborah Wheeler, Dr. Claudia Zenker-Oertel, and particularly Karin Göpel and Sylvia Gräfe, both former East Germans who have served for over a decade now as my incomparable guides to the written remains of long-gone regimes.

  My agent, Bruce Hunter of David Higham Associates, has been a source of good counsel from the moment we met. Dr. Chuck Myers of Princeton University Press encouraged this project from its first days to its last and improved it greatly with his knowledgeable suggestions. At the press, Taira Blankenship, Nathan Carr, Dmitri Karetnikov, Cindy Milstein, Blythe Woolston, and two anonymous reviewers helped enormously, and I am grateful to the board for selecting the book for inclusion into the Studies in International History and Politics series.

  I must also thank my student research assistants: Nick Reves, Bethsabee Sabah, Cate Veeneman, Jonathan Willbanks, and above all Mariya Grinberg, who was (fittingly) born in the Soviet Union in November 1989. Mariya was clearly a major scholar in a previous life, and, now that she is once again at a university, is picking up where she left off. My colleague in art history, Professor Kenneth Breisch, and my friend Jan Otakar Fischer helped with the architectural terminology. They and others have saved me from a number of errors; any that remain are, of course, my responsibility.

  In various locations around the world, I received help and support from col leagues, friends, and elders. Going (roughly) from East to West, these are Professor Alexander Polunov (Moscow); Professor Greg Domber (Warsaw); Dr. Hans-Hermann Hertle and his colleagues at the Center for Contemporary History, or ZZF (Potsdam); the Richter family and the Raskob family (Berlin); the Hadshiew-Tetu family (Hamburg); Dr. Georg Schütte and Dr. Steffen Mehlich (Bonn); Lieutenant Colonel Rich and Christy Morales, and the Rödder family (Mainz); Professor Frédéric Bozo (Paris); Peter Chapman and Christopher Fowler, the Choi-Undheim family, John Logan Nichols (who deserves special thanks for reading the entire manuscript twice), Dr. Sveta Rajak, and Professor Odd Arne Westad (London); the Drezner family and Dr. Mark Kramer (Boston); Professor Paul Kennedy and the late Professor Henry Turner (New Haven, CT); William Scot Murray (New York); Terrie Bramley, Professor Peter Goddard, Professor Robert Hutchings, Professor Andrew Moravcsik, and Professor Heinrich von Staden (Princeton, NJ); Captain Bill Cameron (retired), Colonel Kathy Conley (retired), Luke Faraone, Professor James Goldgeier, Dr. Jeffrey Richter, Dr. Svetlana Savranskaya, Colonel Terry Taylor (retired) and Mi Ae Geoum (Washington, DC); Professor Richard Herrmann, Professor Geoffrey Parker, Professor Bob McMahon, and the staff of the Mershon Center (Columbus, OH); Dr. Hillary Hahm (Atlanta); Professor Rory Rapple (South Bend, IN); Professor Mike Desch, the Engel family, and Professor Jason Parker (College Station, TX); the Lynn family (San Francisco); and finally my colleagues and friends in Los Angeles, especially Professor Laurie Brand, Professor Robert English, Professor Pat James, Sheri-Lyn Jones, Dean Steve Lamy, Professor John Odell, Petar Toshev, Professor Caro
l Wise, and the teaching assistants who stuck with me for multiple semesters dominated by this book, Christina Faegri, Dr. Kosal Path, and Sahra Sulaiman. My friend and colleague ever since our days at Yale, the wondrous Professor Jennifer Siegel, deserves special commendation for offering (1) useful archival advice, (2) excellent restaurant suggestions, and (3) a sofa to sleep on, in no fewer than three different countries.

  Finally, throughout the writing of this study, I was sustained by the love of my family, old and new: Frank, Gail, and Steven Sarotte; Dianne and Al Minicucci; Marc, Sylvia, and Timmy Scheffler; Claus and Rita Wulf; Jack and Mary Ann Schiefsky; and all the furry critters who bring so much warmth to our homes. This book is dedicated to my fiancé Mark Schiefsky, a classicist, despite his disapproval of many aspects of the story and his general belief that all history gets repetitive after about AD 200. As children in Detroit years ago (before we knew each other), we were both inspired by Carl Sagan’s magnificent television series Cosmos to commence our own intellectual journeys. It is now a great happiness to join together on this journey with someone who is at once so wise and so loving. I cannot express the feeling better than the dedication from the book version of Cosmos: In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with you.