East [Theme]

Baker came to Moscow to bargain, to look for a compromise. He told Gorbachev: we understand perfectly well that you perceive the reunification of Germany as a threat to your security. We can give our guarantees. First: NATO will not advance “not an inch” to the East - as it was on the territory of Germany, it will remain there. Second: the United States is ready to not allow any deployment of NATO troops outside the zone in which they are currently located. We are ready to give written guarantees. But we want to know exactly what you need. We had different options. We could, for example, demand that Germany withdraw from NATO and consolidate the non-aligned status of the united Germany. It is not a fact that the Americans would agree to this, but it was possible to put forward such conditions. One could even talk about creating a kind of buffer - a belt of neutral states in the center of Europe. This would be insurance against a new cooling in relations with the West. Moreover, even then it was obvious: the Warsaw Pact would most likely cease to exist. We could also insist that NATO not move an inch east of its then borders, as Baker actually proposed. For a greater guarantee, one could demand the adoption of an official declaration, hold a major conference, say, in Helsinki, something like Helsinki-2, where new agreements would be proclaimed and an important declaration would be adopted, which, even without being a legal document, would commit to adherence to certain rules by both parties to the negotiations. But neither Gorbachev nor Shevardnadze, who headed the USSR Ministry of Foreign Affairs, presented anything similar to Baker. The Secretary of State is confused. He is trying to extract something from the Russian negotiators, at least some additional condition from them so that the agreement has a more solid basis, but he gets nothing. From Gorbachev he simply hears: “Okay, we agree.”