Office of the Historian

224. Memorandum From Donald Fortier and Stephen Sestanovich of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (McFarlane)1

Washington, January 2, 1985

SUBJECT

  • Yalta

This year’s World War II anniversaries will affect our Soviet policy, our alliance management, and our public diplomacy. The most important of these—VE Day—has already surfaced in the Bonn Summit preparations.2 But we also need an approach to the anniversary of Yalta,3 which raises issues like the division of Europe, Soviet compliance with agreements, etc. It is only a month off. How we position ourselves on this first case will make later anniversaries that much easier (or harder) to handle.

We have three audiences—domestic (Polish and other groups will sound the cry to “renounce Yalta”); allied (before agreeing to include the Soviets in VE Day observances, the FRG may want to see we won’t sacrifice German interests for superpower atmospherics); and the Soviets themselves. Our message to all three audiences must reflect the ambivalence of the anniversaries: they recall both an era of US-Soviet cooperation and the collapse of cooperation in the face of unacceptable Soviet actions.

Our established line on Yalta—that it must be observed, not discarded—sends the right message. Shultz has said this often (even to Gromyko) and has a strong interest in the issue. The anniversary, in short, doesn’t require a new line, but it does challenge us to show that [Page 971] the old line isn’t just an evasion.

Brzezinski’s recent articles (his Times piece is at Tab A)4 offer an agenda of general but interesting suggestions for meeting this challenge. His proposals cover both the short-term (commemorating the anniversary with a joint statement by Western heads of government) and the long (encouraging European defense, bringing East Europeans into European institutions). We’ll hear more such ideas, from him and others.

Our concern now is with short-term commemorative measures, but we need to coordinate them with our planning for 1985 as a whole. There are obviously many possibilities: e.g., CDE speeches by Western reps, a Shultz or Kirkpatrick address in the Security Council, a White House statement, Bush to the European Parliament, etc. Some of these would take quite a lot of advance work, and may not be feasible at this late date; others may be possible now, but only if we get to work immediately. Our intention is to form a subcommittee of the NSC summit review group to ensure that treatment of these important related events is imaginative and consistent. I’ll have some recommendations for you after Geneva.5

  1. Source: Reagan Library, European and Soviet Affairs Directorate, NSC Records, Subject File, U.S. Foreign Policy; NLR–170–13–48–11–4. Confidential. Sent for information. Copies were sent to Matlock, Sommer, and Dobriansky.↩
  2. The G–7 Economic Summit meeting was scheduled to take place in Bonn, May 2–4.↩
  3. See footnote 5, Document 168 and Documents 220 and 221.↩
  4. Attached but not printed is Zbigniew Brzezinski, “To End Yalta’s Legacy,” New York Times, December 27, 1984, p. A21.↩
  5. See footnote 3, Document 220.↩