MARC TRACHTENBERG
John F. Kennedy’s most basic goal as president of the United States was to reach a political understanding with the Soviet Union. That understanding would be based on a simple principle: the United States and the Soviet Union were both very great powers and therefore needed to respect each other’s most basic interests. The US government was thus prepared, for its part, to recognize the USSR’s special position in Eastern Europe. The United States would, moreover, see to it that West Germany would not become a nuclear power. In exchange, the Soviets would also have to accept the status quo in Central Europe, especially in Berlin. If a settlement of that sort could be worked out, the situation in Central Europe would be stabilized. The great problem that lay at the heart of the Cold War would be resolved.
But to reach a settlement based on those principles, Kennedy had to get both the USSR and his own allies in Europe to accept this sort of arrangement. The Soviets, however, were not particularly receptive when it became clear to them, beginning in mid-1961, what the president had in mind. The Americans, in their view, were making concessions because they were afraid the Berlin crisis would lead to war. Why not see what more they might get by keeping the crisis going?
As for the Europeans, they by no means welcomed the new Kennedy policy with open arms. The West German government was especially distraught. Germany was divided and there was obviously not much anyone could do about it. But for years the German government - the conservative government that Konrad Adenauer had led since the founding of the Federal Republic in 1949 - had insisted that those "realities" could not be officially recognized. To do so would put a kind of seal of approval on the division of the country. Nor was the Adenauer government pleased by what the Americans had in mind with
A more heavily footnoted version of this paper is available online at Www. polisci. ucla. edu/
Faculty/trachtenberg/cv/chcw(long).doc.
Regard to Germany’s nuclear status. A Germany with no nuclear forces under its own control would be utterly dependent on the United States for its security. Could any great nation rely so totally on a foreign power for its protection and accept the sort of extreme political dependence that such a situation implied? The Germans, of course, knew they had to pay a price for what their country had done during the Hitler period, and that meant that for the time being certain constraints in this area had to be accepted. But the German government also felt it had to try to keep the Federal Republic’s nuclear options open. It thus did not take kindly to the idea of formalizing Germany’s nonnuclear status, above all as part of a general settlement with the USSR.
The French, for other reasons, did not like the way Kennedy was playing the Western hand. It was not that they objected in principle to the sort of understanding with the Soviets he had in mind, but they felt he was giving away too much too quickly at a time when a lot more in the way of backbone was in order. Even the British were somewhat taken aback, in late 1961, by the Kennedy policy. But the president was prepared to move ahead regardless: the Europeans would have to "come along or stay behind."1
He was particularly rough with the Germans. The conflict came to a head in early 1963. If the Germans wanted to pursue an independent policy - a policy based on a strong alignment with the France of Charles de Gaulle, a policy, that is, with a distinct anti-American edge - they could just forget about American military protection. If they wanted the United States to provide for their security, they would have to follow America’s political lead. They would have to cooperate, in other words, with the policy Kennedy was now pursuing vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. And the Germans made their choice. Adenauer was forced out as chancellor and the Federal Republic more or less formally declared its loyalty to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and to the United States.
By that point, the conflict with the USSR had come to a head. The Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 was the climax of the great Berlin crisis of 1958-62.2 The Soviets had not been willing to make peace on Kennedy’s terms and they had in effect threatened war. But now, after the missile crisis, that Soviet policy was clearly bankrupt. The Soviets were still unwilling to make a formal deal, but the major powers reached certain more or less tacit understandings: the status quo in Berlin would be respected and Germany
1 Memorandum from J. F. Kennedy to D. Rusk, August 21,1961, US Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963 (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1971), vol. XIV, 359 (hereafter, FRUS, with year and volume number).
2 See James Hershberg’s chapter in this volume.
Would be kept nonnuclear. Indeed, one of the main goals of the Limited Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty of July 1963 - a treaty which the Germans were essentially made to sign - was to make it harder for West Germany to build nuclear weapons.735 But this was not a simple gift to the Soviets. It was linked to other understandings, most notably relating to Berlin, that mainly benefited the Western powers.
Taken as a bloc, those understandings provided the basis for a relatively stable international order. But many Germans - the German "Gaullists," as now ex-Chancellor Adenauer and those who basically shared his views were called - were bitter about the course that events had taken. German interests, as they saw it, had been sacrificed so that the United States could pursue its own goals. But in West Germany in 1963 that was a minority view, even in Adenauer’s own party. Most Germans were coming to see things in a rather different light.
It was important, Kennedy argued, in a speech he gave during his famous visit to Berlin inJune 1963, "to face the facts as they are, not to involve ourselves in self-deception." It was "not enough," he said, "to mark time, to adhere to a status quo, while awaiting a change for the better."736 His meaning was clear: the rigid German policy of the past had to be abandoned. But the Germans, by and large, were not appalled by those remarks. The Adenauer approach had not brought reunification any closer, so maybe it was time for something new. There was also a certain sense that the Federal Republic could not be too out of step with her Western partners, none of whom were (as de Gaulle often put it) in any rush to see Germany reunified. The Federal Republic could not afford to pursue a totally independent policy. She had to frame her policy with an eye to what her allies, especially the Americans, were willing to support.
Egon Bahr, chief adviser to Willy Brandt, mayor of West Berlin and the leading figure in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), made the key point in a famous speech he gave in July 1963, just three weeks after Kennedy’s visit to Berlin. The Americans were pursuing a peace policy, and if the Germans did not want to just sit on the sidelines as America pursued that policy, they would have to pursue an active detente policy of their own.737 A policy that sought to relax tensions in Central Europe might eventually lead to major changes in the Cold War status quo. At the very least, in the view ofpeople like Bahr, better relations with the Soviet Union might reduce the Federal Republic’s extraordinary dependence on America and thus might make it possible for the Germans to pursue a policy based more on their own national interests.
By the end of the decade, Brandt had become chancellor and Bahr was his right-hand man. Their way of thinking had strong support not just in their own party but also in the Free Democratic Party (FDP), the junior partner in the governing coalition. It was also supported to one degree or another by important elements in the conservative parties. Brandt and Bahr were thus able to pursue their policy of improving relations with the east - their Ostpolitik. The Soviets were receptive, their Western partners were supportive (for the time being at least), and by 1973 a whole package of agreements
36. US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and West German chancellor Willy Brandt in Bonn, March 1974. Kissinger never fully trusted Brandt’s Western orientation.
Had been signed and ratified: treaties providing for the “inviolability” of existing borders in Central Europe; a treaty establishing a framework for relations between the two German states; a four-power treaty securing the status quo in Berlin; and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), whose importance for the Soviets lay mainly in the fact that it would help keep Germany nonnuclear.
This was very similar to what Kennedy had wanted, and it is tempting to view the Ostpolitik treaties as just the icing on the cake - to assume that the system of great power relations in Europe, the heart of the international political system, was already quite stable, and that the only difference now was that this fact was getting a kind of formal recognition. But the system had a basic structural flaw: the military foundation on which it rested was not rock-solid. How stable it would end up being would depend, in large measure, on how that military problem was dealt with.
World History
