The German Origins of the Cold War

James Byrnes, the Secretary of State and among the most exasperated among Truman's officials by Soviet conduct, led the retreat into a policy of “amicable divorce.” The reception of Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech was instructive: whatever fissures had divided the bourgeois powers, they now stood in closer concert than before. The Soviet rejection of General Lucius Clay’s all-German import-export program—conceived as an experiment in the joint management of world affairs—was judged a violation of the spirit of Potsdam. The founding of the Cominform—a Moscow-managed centralized organization of the European communist parties—and the clear divide proclaimed by Truman and Zhdanov alike, unthinkable in January 1945, drove the Western powers toward the charge that the Soviets had “declared war on European recovery.” It was to this end that revolutionary strikes were instigated in France after May 1947 when the Communists there had been forced out of the postwar ruling coalition.

What led to this dissolution of postwar Soviet–U.S. consensus? The answer lies in the so-called German Problem. The West’s answer to the problem of accommodating resurgent German power was to dissolve the German state into a larger whole: the new West Germany would be folded into the defense architecture of Western Europe, and Germans taught to see themselves as “West Europeans.” This patchwork of security interdependence would, it was hoped, temper German nationalist impulses. Trachtenberg locates in Charles “Chip” Bohlen’s formula the groundbreaking signal of such intent—the “three western zones should not be regarded as part of Germany but as part of Western Europe.” George Kennan, in his 1949 Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) papers and his 1956 radio lectures, was the outlier, pressing the case for a strong and neutral Germany as a counterweight to the Eastern Bloc under the antique logic of maintaining a balance of power in considering the limits of American projection capabilities. Kennan was undoubtedly arguing from his perspective of Soviet aims, which he took to serve Russian nationalist ends rather than global communist ends. That they possessed a vast glacis extending from the Russian heartland, the Soviets had little incentive to press westward, or so Kennan believed. Contemporaries, Acheson foremost among them, found this line of reasoning bizarre. Cutting Germany loose, even under supervision, was unthinkable. John McCloy, the American high commissioner in the Federal Republic, gave the fine balancing act of facilitating German integration its most poetic form—“a struggle for the soul of Faust.” The anxious hesitation reached the high levels of power. Truman himself, Trachtenberg notes, regarded the notion of a West German contribution to European defense in 1949 as “decidedly militaristic,” evoking how the rump Reichswehr had once furnished the basis for “training the greatest war machine that ever came forth in European history.”

West Germany's nuclear ambitions and Eisenhower's encouragement of them constitute the postwar development that most sharply demarcates the stark contrast with the status quo established by Roosevelt and Stalin; Trachtenberg is clear that it was these two factors that precipitated the Berlin Crisis of 1961. For instance, Eisenhower granted the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) immense autonomy from the Joint Chiefs of Staff: an arrangement that ran so loose that Britain and France enjoyed something close to full control over American nuclear weapons stationed on their soil: under the “dual key” custodianship, Thor and Jupiter intermediate-range missiles stood effectively at the disposal of British authorities, with a parallel arrangement in Italy, where the 36th Air Brigade operated Jupiters. Eisenhower carried none of his predecessor’s inhibitions. The former Supreme Commander envisioned a Western European bloc that, once it summoned the will and the resources, would constitute a third global power; the transfer of technology was meant to underwrite the national programs not only of Britain and France but of West Germany as well. His efforts were directed to “one great and ultimate purpose . . . the political and economic unification of Europe,” a continental order that would serve as a counterweight to the Soviet Union. The impulse was partly fiscal: the United States could not indefinitely bear the burden of European defense, and Eisenhower recoiled from the prospect of playing “modern Rome guarding the far frontiers . . . for no other reason than that these are not, politically, our frontiers.” The break with Rooseveltian assumptions is clear. As far as Eisenhower was concerned, it would be regarded as a failure of NATO if American troops had not withdrawn from Europe within a decade. In May 1957, John Foster Dulles—“out of conviction or out of loyalty to Eisenhower”—counseled West Germany’s Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to answer a Soviet protest by affirming a purely defensive use of weapons, with the parting admonition that “the Federal Republic will not accept the dictates of any country: least of all a country which holds some 20 million Germans in bondage.” In November Dulles went further, conveying the president’s wish to French officials that the United States meant to hand over intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) blueprints for production in Europe.

Under Kennedy the doctrine pivoted toward the suppression of European nuclear ambitions and their subordination to American authority within NATO, under the rubric of the "flexible response” nuclear strategy. The preferred instrument was a Multilateral Force (MLF), a NATO fleet of warships and submarines bearing nuclear weapons subject to an American veto. The irony, as Trachtenberg observes, is that when the term surfaced in the outgoing Eisenhower correspondence of October and December 1960, it had denoted a purely European force. The standing State Department anxiety, inherited from the Eisenhower years, was that a permissive nuclear weapons sharing policy might invite a Soviet first strike. Even the bomber-based understanding with the British was now deemed obsolete; they too were to “join with the rest of NATO in accepting a single US dominated force,” as McGeorge Bundy wrote to Kennedy. The Acheson Report on securing NATO weapons against unauthorized-use led to the adoption of the Permissive Action Link (PAL), the coded device thereafter fitted to the warheads. Trachtenberg is candid about the administration’s interest in “limiting SACEUR’s autonomy and downgrading the NATO Command as a whole.” A convergence of anxieties followed—over a Chinese bomb, and over the West Germany about which the Soviets never ceased to warn. Yet the convergence, Trachtenberg insists, had nothing to do with stockpiles, production, or nonproliferation as such: Kennedy had begun to indulge France’s independent ambitions and was permissive toward Israel as a proliferator. Kennedy’s anxieties concerned China and West Germany alone. The American guarantee of a non-nuclear Federal Republic became, in the end, the “most attractive carrot the U.S. government had dangled in front of the Soviets in its attempt to reach a negotiated settlement of the [Berlin] crisis.” The Partial Test Ban Treaty (PTBT) of July 25, 1963, was but one step toward the fuller settlement of the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)—the treaty of which Adenauer, in one of the book’s more memorable formulations, spoke as confirming Germany’s status as the “Morgenthau plan squared.”

France’s refusal to sign the PTBT struck the Americans as wholly irrational. They wanted Paris aboard as it would further isolate China and check West German nuclear ambitions. Kennedy went so far as to volunteer information and materiel for underground testing, conceding that his earlier opposition to France had been a mistake. But this decision had a long prehistory, which Trachtenberg reconstructs in his earlier chapters. It would not be much of an exaggeration to speak of de Gaulle and France as a single entity. In 1958 de Gaulle had been prepared to build a national nuclear stockpile with American help—part under joint NATO control, part under national control—and officials of the Fourth Republic had already championed the case for a national stockpile. Proposals offering nominal control and a right of use limited to emergencies, however, fell short of satisfying de Gaulle’s and his predecessor’s wishes. Eisenhower judged de Gaulle’s old-fashioned nationalism oblivious to the military realities of the age, which demanded integration at the continental scale; and he held that the American preponderance in NATO that de Gaulle resented was not Washington’s doing but Europe’s, particularly France’s—the legacy of French statesmen like Georges Bidault and René Pleven, whose enthusiasm for “building Europe” had been, at bottom, an enthusiasm for neutralizing the German threat.

De Gaulle himself hesitated to mount a direct challenge in the late 1950s, wary that West Germany might follow in his footsteps into asserting independence. To this was joined his deeper misgivings about integration as such: an ersatz Europe after the manner of Jean Monnet would be a passive instrument of American interests, not a genuine third bloc. Since both men sought the same end—a Europe weaned from its excessive dependence on the United States—Eisenhower took de Gaulle’s indifference to the 1958 nuclear sharing proposals, and his resolve to proceed alone, as a personal disappointment. Trachtenberg recounts a telling episode: de Gaulle’s desire for a tripartite NATO governing council. Eisenhower had broached it with Macmillan and de Gaulle in a private meeting at Rambouillet, but when Secretary of State Christian Herter—who had succeeded Dulles in April 1959—learned of it, the State Department diluted the proposal into a merely informal council without any binding force. De Gaulle was incensed at the impotence of presidential authority within the American system, a “congeries of semiautonomous fiefdoms.” Episodes of this kind accumulate into an explanation of de Gaulle’s later exasperation with Washington. Eisenhower’s sympathy for the French position never lapsed—he told de Gaulle plainly, “I would like to be able to give it to you,” and even floated a “French SACEUR” that would place European defense in European hands—but he felt his administration bound by the limits Congress had set upon the executive.

The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan had made the cultivation of a closer and more deferential relation with the United States the centerpiece of his foreign policy once the Suez debacle had taught its lesson—to play “Greece to America’s Rome.” The book’s third chapter shows this to have been the dominant disposition of British policy as far back as Attlee and Bevin. Between 1957 and 1960, Washington came to regard its initiatives with Britain as the mere prelude to a wider system, insisting that British defense be oriented above all toward a Western European arrangement. Macmillan, practicing the dark Etonian art of intimation, met a direct question from de Gaulle about German reunification with the reply that “in theory . . . we must always support German reunification in theory, there is no harm in that.” Of all the players covered in the book, it was Britain that most resisted the prospect of an independent German deterrent. Yet a balance-of-payments crisis and a yawning deficit made Britain at the same time the keenest advocate of disengagement from the continent—a posture the Americans rightly judged incoherent. Because the British and the French, and the Italians too, still wished to retain a portion of the nuclear force under national control, the Kennedy State Department concluded that all the allies must be taken “out of the nuclear business,” which an American-led multilateral submarine force would supersede.

On the German question Eisenhower drew no special distinction and remained largely untroubled by the prospect of a German buildup, regarding a strong Germany as a counterweight to a strengthening Soviet Union. Dulles dissented on the degree of autonomy: willing enough to promise the Germans a nuclear capability, he held that the United States and the Soviet Union shared an interest in keeping Germany under some external restraint, and that even a reunified Germany would have to accept military limits as part of any general settlement. Adenauer’s criticisms of American policy across the years the book surveys are catalogued in detail; his stance hardened until, by 1961, he could declare in private, “Wir müssen sie produzieren!”—we must produce them. As early as 1956 German defense doctrine had come to favor a small but mobile, nuclear-armed Bundeswehr capable of blunting a sudden Soviet thrust through the Fulda Gap. German soldiers would not serve as cannon fodder; Germany would be no “atomic protectorate” but an equal partner in NATO. The ambition, Trachtenberg suggests, was natural enough “in the context of 1950s attitudes about nuclear weapons.” The Soviets, for their part, dreaded the day a revanchist Federal Republic might turn such a force against them, driven by the wish not only to reclaim the East but to press beyond the Oder–Neisse line. At home, too, opposition to a German bomb ran deep. Adenauer had to await an opportune moment.

Trachtenberg is clear that Adenauer had many points of disagreement with de Gaulle, but the essential fact is that Adenauer and his defense minister, Franz Josef Strauss, were playing the game of covertly supporting de Gaulle’s nationalistic posture and nuclear program while holding out for an American allowance for Germany to follow suit. The book gathers its momentum in the approach to the Elysée Treaty. The events of Kennedy’s term—the Cuban missile crisis above all—had altered his earlier position and compelled a reckoning. Kennedy was now prepared to draw a line, but to draw it after France. When he received the French ambassador Hervé Alphand in December 1962, and when Bohlen, now ambassador in Paris, spoke with de Gaulle, a multilateral force returned to the table—not necessarily mixed-manned, but a composite assembled from national components. Kennedy and McNamara meant to press the multinational design; during the crisis McNamara had even been willing to exchange the submarine-launched Polaris for the inferior airborne Skybolt at the 1962 Nassau Conference, and both men agreed that whatever was offered to Britain would be offered equally to France. The system, as de Gaulle never tired of bemoaning, failed to reflect the president’s wishes. Trachtenberg details the quiet subversion of presidential authority spearheaded by Henry D. Owen and in particular George Ball, Kennedy’s under secretary of state. Ball himself flew to Europe to tell Adenauer and French Prime Minister Couve de Murville that “the emphasis of Nassau’s arrangements was on a mixed-manned force,” substituting his own interpretation for the president’s intention—for Kennedy, Trachtenberg insists, “multilateral meant multinational” at Nassau.

De Murville was caught off guard. De Gaulle had had enough and broke ranks. Hence the famous press conference of January 14, at which he announced his veto of British entry into the Common Market; he had pre-empted the schemes of the pro-MLF faction in the State Department. Neither the composition of the Nassau force nor its withdrawal clauses—invokable in a national emergency, such as a threat to Kuwait or Singapore—reassured him. Britain was an “American satellite,” a Trojan horse, and Adenauer concurred. On this last point Trachtenberg notes an inverse logic: Kennedy wanted British accession precisely because a Europe that included Britain would be “less parochial, more open, more Atlantic” than a purely continental bloc. The interview Kennedy granted in November 1961 to Alexei Adzhubei—editor of Izvestia and Khrushchev’s son-in-law—in which the president confessed he “would be reluctant . . . to see West Germany acquire a nuclear capacity of its own,” predictably was not well received by the Germans. When Adenauer reminded Kennedy’s secretary of state, Dean Rusk, in June 1962 of the promises Dulles had made over the preceding decade, Rusk was astonished—a plain failure of American intelligence, in Trachtenberg’s judgment. Germany, now shored up by France, could present its policy as European, pursued in concert with Paris, and therefore as less parochial. Britain held to the Macmillan formula in line with Nassau, with only British Gaullists like Peter Thorneycroft in dissent. By January 22 the chancellor was in France to sign the treaty of friendship. Where the diplomat Herbert Blankenhorn had earlier done no more than tease the prospect of German aid to the French nuclear program, de Gaulle now declared his sympathy for German nuclear aspirations outright. The Fouchet Plan had collapsed, but the General was driving ahead with his vision of a “European Europe.” He had told the NATO Secretary General Paul-Henri Spaak in September 1958 that France, Germany, and Italy ought to set alliance policy; by early 1963 he was persuaded that the “Battle for Germany” weighed as heavily as the “Battle for France.” The Americans could conclude only that French policy bore the sign of a de Gaulle “largely animated by anti-American prejudice” in all that he did.

The Americans reacted to the coalescing Paris–Bonn axis with fury. Kennedy now let it be known that the Germans “faced a choice between working with the French or with us.” There followed a direct intervention in German domestic politics on a scale unseen since the 1953 election had been steered in Adenauer’s own favor—an episode the author lays out with disarming candor. American and British officials goaded Ludwig Erhard and the Atlanticist wing of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) against Adenauer and his allies. The Social Democratic Party (SPD), too, aligned itself with Washington and the alliance, soliciting guidance on exactly what line to take toward the Franco-German Treaty and abandoning altogether its early postwar neutralism. With the further damage of the Spiegel affair, which drove Strauss out of the defense ministry, Adenauer’s days in office were numbered; he was forced from office before the year was out and replaced by the more pliant Erhard. The Franco-German Treaty was ratified, but shorn of any assertion of sovereignty: Germany had chosen a comfortable vassalage in the American bosom, and a preamble was appended to the document affirming as much by implication. It is here that the settlement comes into view. The American reaffirmation of a non-nuclear Federal Republic and of a permanent troop presence—proclaimed in Dean Rusk’s Frankfurt speech of October 27, 1963—allayed Soviet fears. These premises, Trachtenberg argues, laid the ground for an eventual accommodation. He further drives the point home in his coda with a 1990 exchange between James Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev, evidence of how durably the understanding held: that Germany, even a Germany permitted to reunify, was to remain constrained.

De Gaulle’s infamous withdrawal from NATO’s integrated command came only later, but the book stops at a well-chosen point, preserving its coherence and fixing upon the decisive event: the realignment of Germany into the American fold, which concluded the European settlement, foreclosed the clearest opening for a genuine European order, and in the same motion crystallized America’s imperial entanglement. Even the abrupt French withdrawal would be cushioned by the contingency understanding known as the Ailleret–Lemnitzer agreements—the secret accords established to grant France strategic autonomy from NATO command in the event of potential military confrontation. All post-McNamara doctrine rested tacitly on the premise of Soviet conventional superiority; the question of nuclear deployment was never whether but when. As the European front stabilized, the superpower antagonism shifted away from Western Europe toward other theaters—Asia and the Middle East. Most poignant of all is the note on which Trachtenberg ends: that “the Cold War may have ended, but the Cold War political system remains largely intact.”

If Wilson’s intervention in the First World War and the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 signified the dismantling of the last embodied vestiges of the droit public de l’Europe, the conclusion of a “European settlement” arrested the resolution of the continent’s crisis of order, substituting a new configuration—a normative order capable of partitioning space and of bracketing war and peace on its own terms. By persisting in its claim to planetary power and its role as world policeman, and by discarding wholesale its older purely defensive and isolationist principles, the United States effected an inversion of the foundations of international law and established the rationale for further entanglements to come across the globe. This sequence of events is precisely what completed the passage from a grounded jus publicum europaeum to the amorphous “West” with its political center of gravity now lodged firmly in Washington.