[Mb-civic] OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Not Much Kinder and Gentler By STEPHEN SESTANOVICH

[Michael Butler]

 The New York Times
February 3, 2005
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Not Much Kinder and Gentler
By STEPHEN SESTANOVICH

Washington

AS Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice leaves today for a fence-mending
swing through Europe, many Europeans have seized on her experience working
for President Bush's father as a reason to hope that she will revive a
pragmatic, nonideological, less unilateral foreign policy.

They forget what the diplomacy of the first Bush administration was really
like. In dealing with the biggest European security issue raised by the end
of the cold war - German unification - the United States opposed the major
European powers (other than Germany, of course), ignored their views, got
its way, and gave them almost nothing in return.

In "Germany Unified and Europe Transformed," her much-praised history of
this period, Dr. Rice made clear that American policy was not based on
consensus-building and respectful give-and-take. Her experience, she said,
taught her the importance of pursuing "optimal goals even if they seem at
the time politically infeasible." She considered single-mindedness as the
key to diplomatic success: a government that "knows what it wants" can
usually get it.

Is this just memoir braggadocio? Not at all. When the Berlin Wall fell,
European leaders hated the idea of German unity. François Mitterrand told
President Bush it would lead to war. Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev
proposed a peculiar scheme to keep a united Germany in both NATO and the
Warsaw Pact. But the bloody historical experiences behind such views didn't
sway Mr. Bush. If others didn't trust the Germans, that was their problem,
not his.

Washington favored unification and wanted to achieve it as quickly as
possible. In particular, American officials hoped for the rapid
dismantlement of the East German state - a prospect our allies viewed with
horror. Robert Zoellick, then the State Department official responsible for
German policy and now Dr. Rice's deputy-to-be, recalled that once the United
States decided to accelerate the process, it encouraged the East German
public to demand immediate unification and to vote out leaders who favored
gradualism.

American policymakers hoped that consultative mechanisms would disguise
their effort to override allied views. Secretary of State James Baker has
written that the "two plus four" framework, which ostensibly gave all four
World War II victors a role in shaping a deal on German unification, was
really intended to exclude them. It worked. German unification is to this
day associated with the wholesome-sounding phrase "two plus four," yet not
one major issue was handled in this forum.

American tactics were sometimes less subtle. Just before deciding to speed
up unification, Mr. Bush promised Mr. Gorbachev he would not do so. Changes
in NATO strategy were rammed through with little warning. Mr. Bush recalled
in his memoirs that the issue was "too important...to review with the allies
in the usual way."

In the end, President Bush and his advisers made no real adjustments to
conciliate worried allies. The memoirs of Mrs. Thatcher, Mr. Gorbachev and
Mr. Mitterrand are shot through with frustration over how Washington kept
them divided.

What explains this high-handedness? The Bush administration believed what
most recent administrations have believed: our allies were shortsighted and
confused, and not tough-minded enough to achieve lasting success on a large
scale. This was Ronald Reagan's view when he scrapped détente. It was Bill
Clinton's view when he abandoned the policy of "containing" genocide in the
Balkans. And it was Madeleine Albright's view when she explained what she
meant in calling the United States an "indispensable" nation: "We see
further than other countries into the future."

Many Europeans might describe such ideas as arrogant or pernicious. But
American maximalism needs to be understood for at least two reasons.

First, it is our tradition. Even the first Bush administration, for all its
reputed pragmatism, reached for big solutions that cut against the grain of
events. When it acted more cautiously - like the "Chicken Kiev" speech
warning Ukrainians not to seek independence and the muddled end of the
Persian Gulf war - the results were less favorable. Dr. Rice and her
colleagues, who learned maximalism early, may need a new approach, but they
won't find it in a mythical past of multilateral consensus-building.

More important, over the past quarter century, maximalism has worked: one of
its clearest results is the post-cold-war emergence of a stable and unified
Europe. Iraq may illustrate the hazards of a maximalist approach. But anyone
who wants to frame an alternative, not least the allied leaders whom Dr.
Rice will meet this week, must begin by reckoning with this record of
success.

Stephen Sestanovich, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and
a professor of international diplomacy at Columbia, was United States
ambassador at large to the former Soviet Union from 1997 to 2001.

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