NATO – A Bridge Across Time - Newsdesk Media

Former Soviet President Mikhail
Gorbachev (center) joins Foreign
Ministers Roland Dumas of France
(second left), Eduard Shevardnadze
of the Soviet Union (third left), U.S.
Secretary of State James Baker
(behind Gorbachev), East German
Prime Minister Lothar de Maiziere
(second right), West German
Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich
Genscher (behind de Maiziere) and
British Foreign Secretary Douglas
Hurd (right) in Moscow after the
signing of the treaty on German
reunification
The Atlantic Council
Pit quam si Igna feu
faccum onullum
Rostiscil elisit dionulla con henim
digna facil diat lortie magnit ad et,
responded affably that “he would be
happy to come for a quiet talk at any
time if it could be useful,” – sparkling a
frosty rebuke from 10 Downing Street
that the Prime Minister, not the Foreign
Secretary, was “in charge.”
Looking back after 20 years, Hurd
recognizes that Thatcher’s principal
worry was that German unity would
weaken Mikhail Gorbachev and thus
destabilize the Soviet Union’s passage to
reform. But Thatcher’s penchant for plain
speaking on Germany was problematic.
“We couldn’t be sure what she would
say,” says Hurd. “The danger was that she
would separate us [the U.K.] from the U.S.
and France and Germany, without having
any influence on Gorbachev.”
Kohl upset Thatcher, Hurd recalls, by
“breaking a window and passing through
it” on reunification. As a new Foreign
Minister thrust into an intoxicating spell
of diplomacy that ended the Cold War,
Hurd says, “I didn’t get anxious: it was
all great fun.” His diaries of the time are
studded with references to how others
found the experience less pleasurable. Of
a notable summit meeting in Strasbourg
in December 1989, Hurd wrote: “Kohl red
and cross throughout – especially with
MT.” The Prime Minister, he recorded,
was “unnecessarily abrasive – but less
than usual.”
Hurd, a student of human nature as well
as a diplomat, says that Thatcher has since
opined that, in similar circumstances, she
would have behaved in the same way as Kohl.
Hurd points out that the German Chancellor
turned out to be “completely robust” on a
key issue that particularly vexed the British
– united Germany’s NATO membership.
Contrary to expectations, Hurd notes,
the German economy, instead of instantly
benefiting from unity, experienced years of
problems. The personal advice given to the
Prime Minister, Hurd says, was that “the
addition of 15 million highly disciplined
Prussians and Saxons would give the
German economy such a boost as to make
it impregnable.” The outcome, Hurd
believes, confirmed the dictum of Britain’s
late 19th-century leader Lord Salisbury
that prime ministers should ignore the
advice of experts: “The clever people were
completely wrong.”
And what of Germany today? In 2009,
the country is under the wing of Kohl’s
Christian Democrat successor Angela
Merkel. “She is a sensible woman, a pastor’s
daughter. To have a protestant middle-class
lady in charge of the most powerful country
in Europe is about as good an outcome you
could possibly have thought of.”
Lord Douglas Hurd of Westwell was British
Foreign Secretary from 1989 to 1995.
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