Everyone Loses: The Ukraine Crisis and the Ruinous Contest for Post-Soviet Eurasia

The burning question on the security agenda in 1989–90 was what should be done with a post-Cold War Germany. Its front-line status in the Cold War, centrality to the two world wars, and sheer demographic and economic bulk made Germany distinctive. The Soviets were goaded to act by the death throes of their handiwork, the GDR. Leaders of the Federal Republic of Germany (aka West Germany) and the US stewed over the question of how long the opening for progress would last. Gorbachev could be dethroned, resign in exasperation or change his mind and order in the tanks, as the USSR had done against an East German workers’ uprising in June 1953. ‘We were running against a clock’, Bush’s national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, wrote later, ‘but we did not know how much time was left’.[6]

Gorbachev’s initial goal was to administer German affairs through a revived Allied Control Commission of the occupying powers from 1945: the Soviet Union, the US, the UK and France. In 1989 he came out in favour of a bi-state Germany implanted in a ‘common European home’, a pan-European mansion of many diverse rooms, but with ‘a certain integral whole’.[7] Gorbachev and his aides, notes Mary Sarotte, ‘would never think their ideas through fully, and their plans would remain vague until the end’.[8] Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany gravitated from a confederation of the two Germanys to the approach that was to prevail: outright reunification, and on Western terms.[9] Gorbachev signalled a green light for a merger in talks with Baker and Kohl in February 1990.[10] The details were thrashed out that summer and the deed was done in October (Kohl had first forecast the transition would take ten years). The GDR would be absorbed into the pre-existing structures of the Federal Republic, the consolidated Germany would stay put in the Euro-Atlantic alliance and the EC, force levels on all sides would be drawn down, no non-German NATO troops would be based on the territory of the former GDR and the 400,000 Soviet troops there would depart by 1994.

Gorbachev originally swore that he could never accept the reborn Germany as a member of NATO, the alliance dedicated to containing the USSR. He several times recommended Germany be incorporated into the Warsaw Pact, a non-starter, after which he was briefly enamoured of dual membership of NATO and the Pact. ‘That made no sense to anyone on the American side’, recollects Baker, ‘but Gorbachev made a personal plea to the President [Bush]. “You’re a sailor. You will understand that if one anchor is good, two anchors are better.”’ Bush scoffed at the concept to Kohl, calling it ‘screwy’. Gorbachev’s fallback was German neutrality, an outcome Soviet policy preferred back in the 1950s, but he was also willing to toy with fresh scenarios. With Baker in May 1990 he made the stunning suggestion that if he could not stop Germany from joining NATO, the Soviet Union itself should apply for membership. ‘After all, you said that NATO wasn’t directed against us, you said it was a new Europe, so why shouldn’t we apply?’ It was ‘not some absurdity’, he said, but a serious question. Baker rejoined that a journalist had put the same query to him at a news conference and was otherwise noncommittal, preferring to concentrate on Germany.[11]

Gorbachev was eventually won over to the American position that an amalgamated German state was more of a hazard to Soviet interests if non-aligned (and with the technical capabilities to go nuclear) than if knit into an alliance system. With the Warsaw Pact on the rocks, the sole alliance on offer was NATO. Gorbachev, Scowcroft writes, ‘appeared unable to come up with a better idea than what we were urging on him’. Had he been resolute about German neutrality, ‘he perhaps could have accomplished that’.[12]

The long-standing German problem was thus laid to rest. Two other daunting security questions were not: What would be the new regional order once the Warsaw Pact and COMECON had vanished? And how would its Soviet/Russian metropole relate to the Western camp?