BEING FRIGHTENED OF GERMANY. It turns out that there was another set of fears about German reunification—fears that never occurred to me at the time. The same week that the Russian documents were reported on, the British foreign office released documents about fears that arose after the Berlin Wall fell. This article in the London Times recounts a conversation at a luncheon at the Elysee Palace two months after the Wall fell. A British diplomat recorded that President Mitterrand said that “reunification would cause the re-emergence of the ‘bad’ Germans who dominated Europe” and that “a unified Germany could win more ground than Hitler ever did.” In hindsight, it appears obvious that Britain and France, who had fought two wars with Germany in the century would have trepidations about reunification. I must have failed to realize that because I was thinking in terms of the Cold War, which had dominated the news in my lifetime.
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George H. W. Bush rarely gets the plaudits he deserves for what Mandelbaum called his strategy of “reassurance.” He let the two Germanies negotiate with occupying powers staying in the background, thus presenting the Soviets with a fait accompli. Who would have imagined that the USSR would agree to a unified Germany within NATO and depart from their most prized sattelite without any hint of force! Bush provided guarantees for the nervous Eastern Europeans and western allies that the US would not tolerate the emergence of a belligerant or expansive Germany.
Too bad that his son’s record taints his brillant foreign policy legacy. How ironic that the Obama national security team seems confortable with a kind of “realism” and multilateralism akin to that of George H. W. Bush.
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