EUROMISSILES AND GERMAN REUNIFICATION

On September 22, 1987, I was the speaker at the annual dinner meeting of the Marin Republican Council in Marin County, California. The details of that event are as always to be found in the biographical portion of my Mirror Section, but here in this section my emphasis is on the basic substance of my presentation.

The fact that I was invited by the local pillars of the Republican Party, despite my fiery criticism of many aspects of the Reagan Administration’s foreign policy, ought not to be too surprising. The right wing of their party was vociferously opposed to the signing of the INF Treaty with the Russians, and from my newspaper comments on the subject they superficially deduced that I was opposed to it too, ergo we found ourselves in the same camp of the Treaty’s critics, and therefore, I was welcome, and greeted with open arms. The fact that on most issues of foreign policy we were miles apart (and I was also kilometers apart on them with the Democrats!) did not seem to bother them at all, as long as on this one we were allegedly fellow travelers.

My speech was heralded as a big event, and reportedly drew a record crowd. The subject of my talk was the pending signing (it was actually signed on December 8, 1987 by President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev) and expected Senate confirmation (it was ratified on May 27, 1988) of the US-Soviet INF (Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces) Treaty, which, as I promised in my lecture, would forever change the situation in Europe. (And so, of course, it would, although the analysts never saw the connection between that INF Treaty and the subsequent reunification of Germany, plus the logical collapse of the Iron Curtain, which followed, exactly the way I saw it and publicly described a few years in advance of the event).

Back in 1987, I saw the unavoidable connection between the Reagan-Gorbachev nuclear weapons agreement and the events which were to take place years later. I used very simple logic to explain how after the elimination of the medium-range nuclear missiles, which could shoot over the heads of the Europeans without necessarily landing on their territory, the remaining theater nuclear weapons, located in Germany, East and West, had nowhere to hit, except inside Germany proper. I argued that even granted that it was an improbably hypothetical scenario only, the Germans would not like such a prospect at all, even theoretically, and would immediately start pushing for a decisive end to this situation, namely, for a German reunification.

So, isn’t this wonderful, I may be told, This is how we won the Cold War! Three cheers for the INF Agreement! Not so fast, though. Since the end of World War II, the division of Germany, and consequently of Europe, had been the principal rationale behind the presence of American troops in Europe, and for the existence of NATO. I also pointed out that, in fact, the infamous Iron Curtain had not even been Stalin’s, but Churchill’s own idea. The Soviets had wanted to have a united Europe, and not a divided one, like cold war propaganda had been suggesting for half a century! And so, the upcoming reunification of Germany, as a result of the INF Treaty, I argued, would entirely abolish the postwar coldwar world order, introducing a new world order, where the key Soviet objective of keeping the United States and Europe apart was to be finally realized.

…Looking back to it today, my analysis of what was to happen to the political map of Europe, in the wake of the INF Treaty, has essentially been confirmed. The key question, however, has always been whether the sweeping changes I was talking about were mostly in American or in Russian favor? Ideally, things should work out to the benefit of both, or, should I say, to the benefit of all? But in the real world they seldom work out that way. One side is always trying to take advantage of the other, and vice versa. As a rule of thumb, the better chess player will win, although his victory may not be visible at first to the lesser player’s eye. In fact, the poor guy sees a pawn he can cheaply grab and grabs it, never realizing that the pawn is poisoned with a slow-acting poison…

I confess that in the short run (and we are still within the tail end of the short run) the public percept ion of an American cold war victory over the Russians remains quite strong, and psychologically powerful. But in the long run (and we are now on the threshold of its frontal edge) the situation is bound to turn out notably differently. A United Germany has created a new pole of power, which is clearly in Russia’s interest, as the old West Germany, a divided Germany, had been an American client, but not anymore. Western Europe had been an American client too, by virtue of a divided Europe. But not anymore. As for NATO, I don’t see a great future for this organization, either. A Europe-only military union is likely to replace it soon, and today’s NATO looks more and more like a brain-dead patient on life support. There is no hope for the United States that the still ongoing Eastern European ‘blood transfusion’ will end up successfully for the United States in any realistic way. After all, the so-called “New Europe” is tightly squeezed between “Old Europe” and Russia, and it has nowhere else to go than to keep shuttling between these two, as her new friend America is still too far away, even in this age of instant global communications…

The Reagan-Gorbachev INF Treaty has brought us a United Europe. History is yet to show who has gained the most from that unification. So far, the Europeans seem to have moved somewhat closer to the Russians, and farther away from the United States. With cold war bipolarity gone and America’s hegemonic unipolarity an impossible dream, the latest political reality is multipolarity, and the Russians do not mind it a bit.