Diplomacy (A Touchstone book) by Kissinger Henry

Author:Kissinger, Henry [Kissinger, Henry]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2011-12-26T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY

Negotiating with the

Communists: Adenauer,

Churchill, and Eisenhower

In March 1952, before the Korean War had ended, Stalin made a diplomatic overture to settle the Cold War for reasons quite contrary to the expectations of the fathers of containment. This initiative was not caused by the transformation of the Soviet system, as they had predicted. Instead, the arch-ideologue sought to protect the communist system from an arms race he must have known that it could not win. Indeed, given his combination of Marxism and paranoia, Stalin probably could not believe that America would mobilize so much power for primarily defensive purposes.

Stalin’s offer said nothing about the establishment of a harmonious world order. Rather than do away with the conditions which had caused the Cold War, Stalin’s proposal called for mutual recognition of that bugaboo of American thinking—two spheres of influence: one for America in Western Europe, the other for the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe with a unified, armed, neutral Germany between them.

Ever since, historians and political leaders have been debating whether Stalin’s move represented a missed opportunity to settle the Cold War, or whether it had been a clever ploy to draw the democracies into a negotiation, the very opening of which would have blocked German rearmament. Was Stalin trying to tempt the West into actions that would have weakened its cohesion, or did he mean to reverse the ever-deepening East-West confrontation?

The answer is that Stalin himself had probably not decided how far he was prepared to go in order to ease tensions with the West. Though he made offers which the democracies would have eagerly accepted four years earlier, his conduct in the interim had made it nearly impossible to test his sincerity—indeed, it had rendered his sincerity almost irrelevant. For, whatever Stalin’s ultimate intentions, testing them would have severely strained the cohesion of the Atlantic Alliance and therefore removed the incentive which had led to the offer in the first place.

In any event, the arch-calculator had neglected to consider one decisive factor: his own mortality. A year after Stalin had made the proposal, he lay dead. His successors did not have the tenacity to insist on a comprehensive negotiation, nor did they have the authority to make the sweeping concessions which would have been required to sustain it. In the end, the peace overture lingered as a tantalizing episode illustrating, above all, the vastly different premises that motivated the two sides in the Cold War.

Dedicated to the proposition that legal commitments create their own reality, America waited for Stalin to implement the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. Considering an agreement obligatory only if it reflected a balance of forces, Stalin waited for the democracies to insist on their rights in some manner that would enable him to analyze the risks and rewards of carrying out the agreement. Pending that, Stalin would bide his time, collecting as many bargaining chips as possible in preparation for some concrete move—or what Stalin considered a concrete move—by the democracies.

That moment seemed to have arrived in the early 1950s.

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