James Mann - The Rebellion of Ronald Reagan

Throughout the early months of 1987, Reagan and Shultz were obliged to defuse one other source of potential opposition to their agreement with Gorbachev: America’s allies. Leaders in Western Europe had been rattled by the discussion between Reagan and Gorbachev at Reykjavik about cutting back or eliminating nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. They feared Western Europe might be left more vulnerable to an attack by conventional forces, in which the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies held a considerable advantage.

The most important and most vulnerable of the European leaders was West German chancellor Helmut Kohl. During Reagan’s first term in the White House, Kohl had confronted intense domestic opposition when he supported the deployment of American intermediate-range missiles on German soil. Now, only four years later, Reagan was talking about removing the same American missiles. To be sure, under the agreement under discussion, the Soviets would also remove their own missiles, the ones that had originally prompted the American deployment. Nevertheless, the Soviet-American deal seemed to leave Kohl in an awkward position.

In the spring of 1987, soon after his secretary of state returned from Moscow with the outlines of an agreement, Reagan went to work on Kohl. If the president could persuade him to go along with the deal, it would help deflect criticism not only in Western Europe but in Washington as well. Nixon, Kissinger, and Scowcroft based their objections in considerable part on the effect such an agreement would have on American relations with Western Europe. Kohl’s approval would undercut them.

On May 6, the president agreed to take the lead in a concerted campaign to get the German chancellor to go along with the ban on American and Soviet missiles in Europe. The following week, he called Kohl to lobby him. “I think he’ll be cooperative,” Reagan wrote in his diary. 13Day after day, the National Security Council monitored every possible clue about what West Germany might do. Finally, in early June, Kohl endorsed the Reagan-Shultz proposal and won approval from the West German Bundestag for it.

The chancellor’s decision was far from enthusiastic. He said the agreement contained “a very serious disadvantage for us Germans” because it would leave the Soviet Union with a “crushing superiority” in tactical nuclear weapons and a “clear superiority” in conventional forces. 14He gave his assent to the Soviet-American agreement with one important qualification. West Germany’s air force possessed seventy-two Pershing missiles, which carried American nuclear warheads. The agreement Shultz and Gorbachev had worked out covered only the missiles of the United States and the Soviet Union. Kohl said that while going along with the removal of the American Pershings, West Germany intended to keep its own.

Finally, in the summer of 1987, two closely related issues were settled to the Reagan administration’s liking. In July, Gorbachev announced he had decided to support a worldwide ban on Soviet and American intermediate-range missiles, rather than simply the removal of such missiles from Europe. The Soviet Union dropped its insistence on keeping one hundred missiles in Asia—a change that was welcomed in China, Japan, and other Asian countries.

West Germany still had a problem, however, because Soviet officials insisted that any deal should also cover the seventy-two West German missiles with American warheads. Kohl came under further pressure at home to support the movement toward disarmament by the two superpowers. Both the opposition Social Democrats and Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher urged him to give up on the West German missiles; but Kohl’s own conservative supporters urged him to stand fast.

In public, Reagan supported Kohl’s position, saying the United States couldn’t presume to speak or negotiate for West Germany. Privately, Reagan appealed to the West German chancellor. “We made it clear to Kohl and Genscher that they weren’t going to queer this agreement,” recalled Matlock. On August 26, the German chancellor yielded. He promised that after the United States and Soviet Union signed their deal and put it into effect, West Germany would dismantle its own Pershing missiles. The objections of the allies had been overcome. The outlines of a deal between Reagan and Gorbachev were complete. 15

The obvious question is why Mikhail Gorbachev should have been so accommodating. During the first nine months of 1987, Gorbachev made not one but several significant concessions to the Reagan administration. He dropped his insistence that the United States restrict research into strategic missile defense. He laid the groundwork for a far-reaching agreement to ban intermediate-range missiles. In the process of negotiating that agreement, he abandoned two previous Soviet positions: that the deal should apply only to Europe, and that the Soviet Union should be able to retain one hundred intermediate-range missiles in Asia.

What were the underlying causes for Gorbachev’s behavior? To answer that, one must look to the Soviet economy and to the series of suggestions Gorbachev was getting in 1987 from American visitors about how the Soviet Union might transform itself. Secretary of State George Shultz in particular had developed a new set of themes to offer Gorbachev, ones that were well attuned both to the Soviet leader’s interests and to his vulnerabilities at the time.

During Reagan’s second term, Shultz began to weave into his speeches and congressional testimony some material that had little to do with the nitty-gritty of American foreign policy or diplomacy. He would frequently depart from current events for an abstract discussion of the future. He did this so often that reporters who had already heard earlier renditions would roll their eyes.

What Shultz was saying amounted to a version of the set of ideas that eventually became popularized as globalization. What the secretary of state was saying in the late 1980s was strikingly similar to what prominent proponents of globalization—such as, for example, President Bill Clinton or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman—would assert in the following decade. Shultz spoke regularly about the information revolution, the impact of ever-faster computers and telecommunications, the speed with which money and capital flowed from one country to another, and the ways in which manufacturing could be transferred around the world. “With the advent of ‘real time’ transfers of information, an announcement made in the Rose Garden can be reflected two minutes later in the stock market in Singapore,” Shultz declared in one speech. In another, he said, “The very process of production crosses national boundaries…. It is often difficult to identify what is ‘national’ and what is ‘foreign.’” 1

The talk about globalization dated to the late 1970s, when economists noticed that manufacturing companies were beginning to transfer production from one country to another. In 1983, a business school professor named Theodore Levitt wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review in which he argued that changes in technology allowed companies such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola to operate throughout the world. He pointed out that consumers everywhere were beginning to use the same standardized products and wear the same clothes, such as blue jeans. Levitt’s article was titled “The Globalization of Markets.” 2

Shultz, an economist by training, had previously been the dean of the University of Chicago’s business school and U.S. secretary of the treasury. He didn’t use the word globalization, but simply talked about the information revolution and its impact. He got some of his information and ideas from his friend Walter Wriston, the former chairman of Citibank, who had described how easy it had become to move large sums of money around the world almost instantaneously. Wriston had also begun to talk and write about the larger political changes that would result from the advances in communications and information. A global marketplace meant that even democratic countries would have to adjust to “a wholly new definition of sovereignty,” Wriston wrote. For Communist governments and other closed societies, the impact would be even greater: they would no longer be able to control what their own people saw and heard.