THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (105 page)

In February 1990 Gorbachev took two fateful decisions: He agreed to a plan for German unification and he essentially jettisoned the Communist
Party as the vehicle for guiding the Soviet state. In that month he engineered the decision by the Central Committee to give up the Party's monopoly on power and allow a multiparty system. This move was completed when in March, Article 6 of the Soviet Constitution was abolished, thus legitimating opposition parties, and at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in July, when the Party voted to give up its supervision of government by removing all government officials (except Gorbachev) from the Politburo.

But the Czech, German, and Polish revolutions in which Gorbachev had collaborated had encouraged rebellions in the Soviet republics. Widespread noncompliance with Soviet draft calls swept the country in 1990. The republics attempted to enhance their own legitimacy by declaring their separateness from Moscow, and assuring their publics that troops would not be used to suppress national movements. Boris Yeltsin, then the president of the Russian Republic, instructed Russian soldiers not to use force during the Lithuanian revolt, which occurred when the Baltic states asserted their independence from the USSR.

Gorbachev was no longer attempting to forge a more powerful and competitive Soviet Union; it was now a matter of simply preserving the Soviet state. This he decided could only be accomplished by joining the West. The vehicle for this partnership was collaboration in German unification. Such a partnership would offer him two advantages: it would enhance his personal political prestige as he would now be allied with the desirable West rather than the crumbling Party, and it would offer him access to financial support with which he might halt the Soviet state's quickening slide into bankruptcy.

This collaboration ended the Cold War. First fascism and then communism had been discredited, strategically and then constitutionally in the case of fascism, in the reverse order in the case of communism. Gorbachev's attempts to create a more strategically dynamic Soviet Union through constitutional innovation had in fact engineered a strategic collapse. In the wake of that collapse, legitimacy deserted the Soviet state.

The focus now shifted to Washington, where an exceedingly complex set of problems presented themselves. While for many persons the chief American figure in the collapse of the Soviet Union was Ronald Reagan, a better case can be made for the team of George Bush and James Baker, who in 1990 faced a delicate and dangerous set of issues they managed to resolve with consummate skill. The fact that the Soviet Union collapsed on
their watch did not, of itself, assure them a secure status in the pantheon of Western statesmen; to the contrary, had they pressed too hard in an effort to exploit the vulnerabilities of the Soviet position they might very easily have cast away the winnings earned by several generations of Allied leaders. Nothing could be more misleading than the cliché that the Bush administration “presided” over the demise of the Soviet Union.

George Bush and James Baker had formed their friendship in Texas. Bush's father had been an investment banker and later U.S. Senator from Connecticut; the son had come to West Texas to make his fortune in the oil business, and he had succeeded. Like the father, he now turned to public service. In Houston he met Baker; the two families soon became friends. Their backgrounds were not dissimilar: Bush had gone to Andover, then to Yale, where he studied economics and was tapped by Skull and Bones. Baker had gone to Lawrenceville, then to Princeton, where he studied politics and was bickered into the Ivy Club. Bush had joined the Navy after college and seen action in the South Pacific; Baker had joined the Marines during the Korean War. Baker had returned to Texas to go to law school and then had gone back to Houston, where his grandfather's firm was one of the largest and most successful in the country. Bush had moved to Houston to enter politics. When Baker was becoming the managing partner at a prominent Houston law firm, Bush was being elected the first Republican congressman from Houston in almost a century. The two men were tennis partners at the local country club. They had similar political views though one was a Republican by inheritance and the other a Democrat for much the same reason; both were centrist, mildly conservative, and rather non-ideological. When Baker's first wife died after an agonizing illness, Bush persuaded his friend to manage the Bush campaign for the Senate. Baker changed his registration and discovered a flair for politics that might have appalled his grandfather. Both men lost statewide races in Texas—Bush when he was defeated for the Senate in 1970, Baker when he ran for Attorney General in 1978. Neither man was a natural candidate. Indeed, excepting Bush's one successful race for the presidency (which Baker ran), neither has held public office by winning an election on his own since their defeats in Texas. Instead they flourished in high-level appointments in Washington, Baker first coming into the Ford administration as undersecretary of commerce, Bush having served Presidents Nixon and Ford in a series of senior posts (ambassador to the United Nations, director of Central Intelligence, envoy to the People's Republic of China). Bush arranged Baker's appointment at Commerce, and it was Baker who orchestrated Bush's most pivotal appointment, as running mate to Ronald Reagan in 1980. Baker managed the second Reagan-Bush campaign that assured Bush's primacy for the 1988 nomination.

Yet it was Ronald Reagan, who was a natural politician and had none of
the awkwardness and self-consciousness of the privileged when they take up politics in a democracy, who brought both men to real power. He, and not they, had caught the wave of reaction that swept the United States in the late seventies and eighties. He made Bush vice president and then, to general surprise and some consternation among conservatives, chose Baker as his chief of staff. In Reagan's second term, Baker became secretary of treasury (having been blocked by conservatives from becoming national security adviser).

When Bush was elected, Baker was promptly named secretary of state. The Treasury portfolio is an ideal post, in the current era, to prepare for the State Department. It commands far less media attention and less competition from other players trying to usurp its role than the top jobs at State. By all accounts Baker was an effective treasury secretary, was partly responsible for the creation of NAFTA, successfully talked the dollar down in a tour de force of media and market psychology, and gained a reputation as a skillful negotiator. The Baker Plan to relieve Third World debt, however, never quite succeeded. Baker took to the Department of Treasury a team he had worked with at the White House, and these—Kimmitt, Zoellick, Ross, and Baker's spokeswoman Tutweiler—along with others he subsequently took to the Department of State. Thus by the time Baker went to State he had had eight years at the highest levels of government, in concert with a highly respected staff with whom he knew he could work effectively.

For several reasons Baker was better prepared for the role of secretary of state than any appointee since Dean Acheson. Like Acheson, he had served at the Treasury and had conducted negotiations with foreign states at the highest levels; like Acheson he had been a successful lawyer and thus blended a sense of practical affairs with the ability to interpret and formulate messsages; like Acheson he had cultivated with success members of Congress and the media, the two most powerful constitutional entities in Washington; like Acheson, he had served a charismatic president but had reserved his trust and intimacy for that man's less glamorous successor. But above all, like Colonel House, he had engineered the nomination and election of a man who regarded him as a trustworthy and intimate friend.

Beginning in late 1989—as Gorbachev changed direction and began aggressively seeking a cooperative relationship with the West—Baker developed an intense collaboration with his Soviet counterpart, Shevardnadze. From the following February, Baker and Shevardnadze met every single month (with one exception) until the signing of the Paris Charter.
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There were of course many issues to be thrashed out in this breathtaking schedule of meetings, but two particular objectives dominated all others. First, the Soviet Union had to be moved along a path that would transform it from a communist to a parliamentary state. Second, the incorporation of a unified Germany into the Alliance that had in one coalitional form or another fought the Long War, had to be accomplished. Of course these two goals were to a large extent intertwined, and this added to the complexity and difficulty of the diplomacy by which they were achieved. If either objective had failed, that failure could have sunk the other. For example, at the Twenty-eighth Party Congress in July 1990, anti-Gorbachev elements counted on the spectre of German unification to rally opposition against the government. If West Germany (the FRG) had appeared more threatening—less linked to NATO's essentially defensive posture, more likely to acquire nuclear weapons—the result could well have been increased support in the balloting for Yegor Ligachev, who had become the leader of the anti-Gorbachev forces. The prospect of removing the most critical state, East Germany (the GDR) from the Warsaw Pact and simply handing it over to the stronger FRG—a conquest without cost—ought to have been frightening enough to threaten Gorbachev's hold on power. The United States, however, had proved itself a supportive and sympathetic partner since the Malta summit and NATO at its London meeting the same month had publicly agreed to “eliminate the last vestiges of the Cold War.” Gorbachev was able to defend his policies by saying that the “context” provided by the Americans supplied the reassurance that enabled further agreements. Or to take a different counter-factual, if a more confrontational regime had replaced Gorbachev in Moscow, the German objective of reunification would not have simply vanished—it had achieved far too much momentum. Rather it would have been pursued by other methods, perhaps including the move toward neutrality with which the Soviet Union had so often tempted the FRG in the past. Bush and Baker thus had always to so maneuver in one dimension, the Soviet relationship, that they could use positive developments there to achieve results in the other dimension, Germany—and vice versa—when the historic relationship between the two states suggested just the opposite, namely that strengthening either society would alarm the other.

The most important steps that Bush and Baker could take to keep Gorbachev on the path toward assimilation into the society of parliamentary states had to do with protecting the increasingly hollowed-out shell of the Soviet state. So long as that state existed and so long as Gorbachev was its dictator—he had managed to ram through decisions when most of the Politburo opposed them, even in the case of the decision to remove the Communist Party's leading role in government—the Soviet Union would become increasingly parliamentary. Gorbachev was now careening along a course that could have almost no other desirable terminus for him than the embrace of Western economic and political multilateral institutions. Only a coup d‘état would interrupt this trajectory. If the state collapsed altogether, however, Gorbachev lost the reason for which he had turned to the West, which was the survival of the state. In such chaos, it was not clear in 1989 what leaders would succeed Gorbachev and what their policies might be. It may have appeared that the Soviet Union was unworkable and that it was disintegrating under its own, entropic forces, but in actuality the Soviet economy was

Indeed it still possessed the world's largest arsenal of nuclear weapons. It was therefore imperative that Bush and Baker take every opportunity to insulate Gorbachev from the consequences of the ideological and political collapse of communism and to avoid appearing to exploit his troubles. After so long a struggle it would have been tempting to destabilize the Soviet system, covertly giving arms to the breakaway republics, flying into Eastern European capitals to make dramatic declarations on the order of Charles de Gaulle's “Quebec Libre!” speech, accelerating interest-payment schedules in order to increase pressure on the regime, and so on.
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From the West's point of view, however, the Soviet Union in some ways presented a more tractable set of problems than did the issue of German unification. Chancellor Kohl, who had often been derided as an unimaginative, plodding leader in comparison to his more glamorous (and rather more vain) predecessors Brandt and Schmidt, had seized the unification issue with an energy that surprised everyone, not least of all his allies. Legally, however, it was not an issue that was Kohl's to decide. The Four Power Agreement that originally divided Germany gave no sovereign status to either the GDR or the FRG. Unification would have to come about as
a result of negotiations and agreement among the signatories to that agreement, namely France, Britain, the United States, and the USSR. Each of these great states had substantial interests in the outcome of German unification. Britain, France, and the Soviet Union were far from eager to see a resurgent, single German state in the heart of Europe, united only by a shared sense of German nationalism. Each state looked to use its role as one of the Four Powers to protect itself by managing the course of any unification. This arrangement, however, would deny Kohl the leading role as architect of unification and inevitably pit the Soviets (and possibly the French) against the United States and the United Kingdom over German membership in NATO and the continued presence of U.S. troops on German soil. Yet only Kohl was capable of keeping the new Germany in NATO; the Social Democrats in both Germanys had just agreed that a united Germany should not belong to any military alliance. The United States would have to find a way to reassure its allies that unification should proceed on Kohl's timetable and largely under his direction, and at the same time trust that Kohl would not compromise on the Alliance issue even though he would be subjected to enormous pressures to do so. These pressures would come from two sources: first, Gorbachev might make renunciation of NATO membership the price of Soviet consent to unification, and second, Kohl would soon face a pan-German election in which a large part of the electorate would have recently been at least nominal communists while Kohl's own coalition held a bare majority in the West German Bundestag.

Baker and his team handled both sets of problems with such effectiveness that it can be argued that their ultimate resolution in Paris ranks in significance with House's bringing the United States into World War I and Acheson's skillful creation of NATO and the Marshall Plan after World War II. Of course everything depended upon the president in each of these instances. George Bush possessed the personal modesty not to showboat at Gorbachev's expense and the patience to let the Soviet Union metamorphose internationally according to its own inner dynamic. Bush had cultivated good relationships with Allied leaders and was trusted by them. Perhaps most importantly, he deeply believed in the goals of the Long War. Every president has in his mind a predecessor who sets the mold for how he thinks the presidency should be conducted. For Franklin Roosevelt it was Wilson; for Lyndon Johnson it was FDR; for George Bush it was Dwight Eisenhower; for Bill Clinton it was John Kennedy. And for every presidency this mental model eventually causes great difficulties. President Bush was criticized for not having a domestic vision because he basically held, with Eisenhower, that the domestic sector would take care of itself if left alone by government. Bush was praised for his Gulf War leadership in part because, like Eisenhower, he proved to be an excellent coalitional war leader, sensitive to the political dimensions of alliance warfare. Eisenhower's life had spanned the Long War, and he held a crusader's view of its goals, expressed in the flat rhetoric of a centrist Republican. Bush was ideally suited to bring the Long War to a close, but he needed a foreign secretary who could devote himself almost wholly to this problem and devise and execute a set of negotiating tactics through the thicket I have described above, confronting and persuading three difficult parties: the Soviets, the Allies, and the U.S. Congress.