A Tangled Web by William P. Bundy

Author:William P. Bundy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-06-16T04:00:00+00:00

BONN

After Rainer Barzel’s “no confidence” motion narrowly failed to carry on April 27, backstage discussions began, with the CDU and SPD negotiators in regular touch with Soviet Ambassador Valentin Falin, the foremost Soviet expert on Germany. For the next ten days, the German negotiators wrestled with the terms of the resolution, in effect rearguing the issues of 1970. Did the treaties establish the new frontiers forever? Did they affect the chances of Germany’s ultimate reunification, or impair West Germany’s freedom of action?

By the morning of May 9, the conferees had managed to reach agreement on a draft resolution, which then went to Falin. (This must have been the “agreement” Kissinger reported to Dobrynin that day.) As The New York Times reported the following morning, Falin challenged two of its points, particularly one that suggested that the Polish treaty did not create a legal basis for the Polish-German boundary (in effect since 1945) well to the west of the 1937 lines.34

This was the height of the crisis, the moment of greatest uncertainty. That evening, Falin and Horst Ehmke, an SPD foreign policy expert, met for three hours. Finally (surely on instructions), Falin made a major concession: the agreed resolution interpreting the treaties need not say that the borders were legally established and permanent; a side pledge that West Germany would never seek to change the new frontiers by force would suffice. This was the final turning point.

On May 10, the final Bundestag vote was postponed until May 17 to enable members to examine the resolution. In the interval, as Brandt and Scheel had hoped, the doubts of many in the opposition and the general public were eased and the tide started running strongly in favor of the Brandt government. Barzel’s own somewhat equivocal position became clearer, and several CDU members decided not to oppose the treaties as now interpreted. When the final Bundestag vote was taken on May 17, Brandt had 247 votes; with most of the CDU/CSU abstaining, ratification was approved. When the Bundesrat followed suit on May 19, the ratification was complete, after the most difficult and prolonged parliamentary crisis in West Germany’s history.

Why did the Soviet Union decide not to cancel or postpone the summit? In the history of the latter part of the Cold War, there may have been equally important decisions, but none more dramatic. It made a new atmosphere of detente possible and gave Nixon a great boost with the American public. The spectacle of American bombing of North Vietnam going on while the Soviet leadership sat down calmly with Nixon lifted morale in South Vietnam and lowered it in the North. And in the Communist world, the decision stamped the Soviet Union as a traitor to “international solidarity,” letting down its most beleaguered and dependent Communist regime for its own wider purposes.

In his memoirs, Kissinger concluded that “with hindsight it is possible to see why the Soviets chose not to confront us.” He listed four possible factors: that cancellation would increase Soviet-American tensions and,

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