Foreign Relations of the United States, 1977–1980, Volume XXVII, Western Europe

115. Paper Prepared by William Griffith of the National Security Council Staff¹

Washington, undated

AMERICAN–WEST GERMAN RELATIONS THE DANGERS OF DETERIORATION

Analysis

West–German relations should be better than they are. Many previous irritants no longer exist: troop support payments, the Mansfield Amendment,² the Berlin problem, and—for the moment—the West German–Brazilian treaty.

Yet they have significantly worsened since this administration came into office. They are unlikely soon to improve unless major initiatives are taken to make them do so.

Moreover, they have been worsening while the Soviet Union has been cultivating Bonn more intensively than at any previous time, while simultaneously threatening it militarily by the SS–20 buildup and politically by hinting that unless Soviet-West German relations remain good, Bonn will lose some of its Ostpolitik gains vis-à-vis the GDR.

Finally, these changes have been going on at a time when, as a result of West German awareness of dissidence in the GDR, plus rising West German power, FRG public opinion is again absorbed with “the German question” and therefore more susceptible to Moscow’s cultivation of it.

The surface problem in Bonn–Washington relations is the mutual crisis of confidence. It is worse on the German side, for Washington is more important to Bonn than Bonn to Washington. Moreover, Chancellor Schmidt, despite some attempts at self-restraint, retains a deep distrust of the administration’s competence, unity, and decisiveness. (He is not ‘‘anti- American,’’ his is more the case of a disillusioned admirer.)

But this is a problem which can be, and in some small part has been, alleviated. What is more serious is that three new, basic “objective” problems have arisen which have not been solved and which are the underlying causes of the deterioration of Bonn–Washington relations. These are: (1) international/economics and finance, (2) security, and (3) relations with the USSR and the PRC.

1. International Economics and Finance. The economic positions and policies of the U.S. and the FRG have increasingly diverged. While FRG economic indicators are favorable and U.S. ones are not, to the point where the U.S. can no longer take major international economic decisions without the FRG (and Japan) cooperating, the FRG’s potential energy dependency is far worse than that of the U.S. and it has far less political or military potential to insure its safety of energy supply and price. Moreover, the FRG is more dependent on exports than the U.S. and the fall of the dollar and the rise of the deutschmark potentially endangers it more.

As a result, FRG and U.S. perceptions have diverged. Bonn sees Washington endangering the FRG‘s economic position by the dollar’s decline while asking the FRG to help it improve its own economic position, which, Bonn is convinced, has deteriorated because of lack of U.S. discipline re oil imports and inflation control. Washington sees Bonn wanting to preserve its balance of payments surplus and refusing to reflate to help OECD-wide recovery. The more OPEC oil prices go up, the more Bonn’s and Washington’s interests will diverge. The Schmidt- and Giscard-sponsored EMS arose largely from Schmidt’s political decision that, Washington having “abdicated international economic leadership,” he and Giscard must try to fill the gap.³

2. Security. Here also the Bonn-Washington relationship suffers from increasing asymmetry. Although the Bundeswehr is stronger and NATO is building up, the USSR has built up so much more militarily that Bonn is more dependent on Washington for its security than ever before. As Chancellor Schmidt himself first pointed out (in an IISS speech in London in October 1977), because this Soviet buildup, in the form of SS–20 and Backfire, has greatly increased the FRG’s “security deficit,” countermeasures are required from the military point of view.⁴

Only the U.S. can soon and effectively compensate for this new FRG security deficit in nuclear weapons by increasing the range and effectiveness of Pershing missiles in the FRG and/or targetting on the USSR more missiles based outside the FRG; and in conventional weapons, by the U.S. deploying itself and/or a giving Bonn for deployment, based in the FRG U.S. cruise missile technology. Both of these steps would, for the first time, mean that missiles based in the FRG could be targetted on Soviet territory.

It is natural, therefore, that the Soviets have been so anxious in the SALT II negotiations to limit cruise missile ranges and to limit Backfire vis-à-vis North America but not Western Europe. This brings me to the linkage between security and political problems in FRG and U.S. relations with the USSR and the PRC.

Since early 1978 the USSR has been cultivating the SPD. Its main purposes seem to be to prevent any increase in FRG military strength and improvement in FRG relations with the PRC, within the general context of Moscow’s principal defensive objective: to avoid encirclement by all actual or potential major nuclear powers: The U.S. the FRG, Britain, France, the PRC, and Japan.

Within this context, the USSR is trying to turn Bonn’s Ostpolitik gains to its advantage. These gains have been primarily in the GDR, the principal area of Bonn’s concern in the East outside the USSR itself. The principal objective of Bonn’s Ostpolitik was, as Brandt put it, ‘‘the maintenance of the substance of the nation”—that is, to keep common German national consciousness alive in the GDR, in the long-run hope of rapprochement and eventual reunification. Bonn’s Ostpolitik has scored some successes in this respect: 6,000,000 West Germans visit the GDR every year; there is much greater intra-German trade; West Berlin lives unharassed; the West German Deutschmark has become the second currency of the GDR; and 80% of all East Germans watch West German television every evening.

If one is a German patriot (and a fortiori if one is a German nationalist), these are no small gains, and they are well worth paying something to preserve them.

This is the West German background to the new Soviet cultivation of the FRG. Because the FRG has a special interest in the GDR, it has a special, stronger interest, in the SPD’s and FDP’s view—and even, if the cards are down, in the CDU’s as well—in keeping Soviet-U.S. detente going. For if detente collapses, Ostpolitik probably will also. Moreover, the SPD has long regarded arms control measures in Europe as essential for the FRG’s security and maintenance of the gains of Ostpolitik. Yet the FRG’s raison d’état and raison de la nation both forbid agreeing to any special political or military special limitations on the FRG as compared to other West European powers.

The Soviet Union is thus offering Bonn a carrot—maintenance of the Ostpolitik’s gains—while brandishing a stick—SS–20 and Backfire deployment, and it is trying to make the continuation of the former dependent on Bonn’s limiting its—and NATO’s—response to the latter. And there are significant signs in the FRG, particularly in the SPD, that Bonn’s policy is being affected by this Soviet cultivation. To put it another way, as Richard Lowenthal has said, Moscow is quite willing for Bonn to remain in NATO as long as Bonn follows arms control policies in it parallel to some extent with Moscow’s.

Moscow’s aims are similar with respect to the ‘‘Chinese card.” The Soviets are trying to persuade Bonn that detente and Ostpolitik are endangered by Washington’s improvement of relations with Beijing. Schmidt, conversely, has little or no confidence in Washington’s ability to ‘‘play the Chinese card,” and even if he did, he thinks its being played dangerous for the FRG’s interests in maintaining detente and Ostpolitik. (The FRG is still very provincial and Eurocentric. Few West Germans understand that Washington’s China policy has made Brezhnev (as his recent election speech showed) more, not less, interested in detente, not only because of their geopolitical shortsightedness but also because they have no confidence in the administration’s foreign policy tout court.)

The present serious controversy in West Germany about the appropriate answer to the SS–20 was precipitated by Herbert Wehner’s demand that the FRG not allow any U.S. deployment of new or modernized missiles on FRG soil unless and until there were new arms control negotiations on the subject with the USSR. (Brezhnev had earlier proposed much the same.) The CSU demanded such deployment immediately, before negotiations; the CDU was only slightly less strong; the FDP wanted deployment and negotiations. Schmidt cannot afford to offend either the FDP or Wehner. His fresh memories of the neutron bomb controversy made him feel that if he offered FRG soil for U.S. deployment, the U.S. might, as he saw it, again pull the rug out from under him. Like Wehner, he wants to preserve the gains of Ostpolitik. (He has commented favorably on Brezhnev’s proposal for European arms control negotiations.)

His solution has essentially been to delay. He insists that (a) the answer to the SS–20 is primarily a problem for the U.S., (b) it must be handled in the NATO context, (c) any new deployment or modernization must not be only on FRG soil, (d) arms control negotiations should occur before any deployment.

Does all this mean that Wehner, or even Schmidt, are “self-Finlandized?” Only Wehner, and only in part. Why? Until 1959–1960, and again now, Wehner has given priority to reunification, or at least rapprochement with the GDR, over European unity and, until 1959, even NATO. He has been the principal motor behind Ostpolitik vis-à-vis the GDR. He is a German patriot, even a German nationalist, and his priority No. 1 is “the maintenance of the substance of the nation.” He does not want the FRG to become another Finland; on the contrary, he wants the GDR to become one. Wehner is, in short, a strong proponent of FRG “peaceful engagement” with and in the GDR. Moscow and East Berlin know this, of course, and therefore engage with him as leerily as he with them.

But engagement also implies negotiations and therefore mutual concessions. And Wehner is prepared to make the kind of concessions to maintain the substance of the nation which, from the viewpoint of NATO, of the USG, and of the CDU/CSU endanger the FRG’s security position by not making up its security deficit, without any probable major Eastern concessions in return. To put it another way, the US has less interest in the GDR than Wehner does, and more interest in repairing NATO’s security deficit.

Where does this leave Schmidt? In my judgment he is less interested in the GDR than Wehner is, but he is still interested enough—as indeed, one must always remember, the vast majority of patriotic citizens of the FRG are and will be for the foreseeable future, so that this is one factor, but not the principal one, in his calculations. He feels he was trapped in the neutron bomb controversy and does not intend to be again.

He must maneuver between the FDP and Wehner. In my judgment, unlike Wehner, Schmidt is not self-Finlandized. But he has lost sufficient confidence in the present administration, and he is sufficiently interested in maintaining the substance of the nation, so that he is prepared to negotiate with Moscow on this range of issues. And he is not prepared, in my judgment, to give in to U.S. persuasion or pressure to agree, for example, to solve the problem by U.S. deployment of Pershing II on FRG soil only.

There are NATO military and political task forces working on this problem. But in my judgment, unless rapid action is taken to head it off, we are heading for another bomb controversy, this time one involving FRG domestic politics more than that did, and therefore more dangerous for FRG–US relations.

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Behind all these issues, and most important and difficult to understand, is a growing malaise, an estrangement of perceptions and emotions, between the U.S. and the FRG. No wonder! Never in history have two nations like the FRG and Japan had such economic power—and the FRG such conventional military power—and yet been so totally dependent on one super-power, the U.S., to defend them against another, the USSR. And when one adds, for the FRG, the partition of Germany, when one thinks of Germany’s alternation between empire and collapse during the last century, and when one thinks that Poland was not lost during 125 years of partition, must one not believe that “Germany is not yet lost”—at least in the minds and hearts of this and the next generation?

Moreover, there is another, growing barrier to U.S.–FRG understanding: the passing from power of both post-war generations. Fewer every year, in Washington and Bonn, actively and emotionally participated in the Soviet-U.S. cold war, the “golden age” of U.S.–FRG relations. Many younger, left-wing Americans reflect the anti-German suspicions of the pre-cold war period. The U.S. has become less Eurocentric. U.S. travel, study, and concern about Germany is less. Americans’ ability to read and speak German is declining even more rapidly. The generation of German emigres in America is dying out.

This analysis is intentionally pessimistic. True, the U.S. and the FRG are so bound to each other that I cannot foresee anything like a breakup of their alliance. But to manage that alliance has become more difficult—at a time when, I think, it is the more necessary. Alliances, like plants, need constant watering: this memorandum suggests why and how to do it.

Policy Proposals

1. Establish small NSC working group in order

(a) to discuss/refine (briefly) analysis in my paper

(b) to discuss the following policy proposals.

2. Political review of economic negotiations, assurance of running political participation in them.

3. NSC-chaired political task force re TNF/SS–20, initially to review/set down guidance for USDEL in NATO political group on this issue, including particularly its connection (see my analysis above) with U.S. and FRG relations with the USSR and the CPR.

4. Cultural: Prepare a long-range plan for major increase in training of younger specialists in German politics and economics. (Get Guido Goldman, who is trying to raise German money for this, in on this—only.)

5. Techniques re expanding these discussions to include FRG representatives:

(a) Begin with quite frank lunch with von Staden (only other participants: you and me).

(b) Expand, ‘‘unstructured,” to luncheons with FRG opposite numbers, asking for suggestions re problems, possible solutions, institutional structural revision. Make clear throughout that you are disturbed re state of FRG-U.S. relations, you want to understand problems/discuss new initiatives, that this is all your (and the President’s) initiative. Run it in NSC, with State, DOD, and CIA participation as decided.

6. Inform French and British, informally, say we intend to do same with them but find problems with Germans more pressing, ask their counsel, make clear that ultimate objective is Guadeloupe-type structure, within general NATO framework.

7. Suggested composition of first meeting:
NSC: Brzezinski, Aaron, Owen, Hunter, Ermarth, Bartholomew, Griffith. (Others as desired re specific problems: e.g., Quandt re FRG participation in Middle Eastern aid, and Henze re aid to Turkey.), Larrabee as secretary of group (knows German, Germany, including East Germany).

• State: Head of German desk.
• DOD: A representative when TNF discussed (Slocombe).
• CIA: [less than one line not declassified] NFAC (by far the best analyst of FRG in the USG). Arnold Horelick (for Soviet policy toward Bonn).

8. I am willing, if you desire, to spend up to 3 days a week in April and May to get this started; I am equally willing simply to participate and/or to do whatever in between.

1. Source: Carter Library, National Security Affairs, Staff Material, Office, Box 52, Chron: 4/1–9/79. Confidential. Outside System. Brzezinski forwarded Griffith’s memorandum to Hunter under cover of an April 2 memorandum that read: “We need to initiate a working group on Germany, and the enclosed memorandum by Bill Griffith provides a good way for kicking it off. Please note his specific recommendations at the very end. Proceed with scheduling an initial meeting; you might also discuss an appropriate agenda with Bill. Give me a ring if we need to talk about it.” (Ibid.)
2. See Document 112, footnote 4.
3. As he said recently at an Aspen Berlin conference which I attended. [Footnote in the original. On March 1 and 2, Schmidt took part in a conference on “The Federal Republic of Germany: Its Role in World Affairs,” at the Aspen Institute Berlin. (Conor Cruise O’Brien, “Spirit of One Germany,” The Observer, March 4, 1979) Griffith also participated in the conference.]
4. See Document 112, footnote 3.