Downing Street Years - Margaret Thatcher [490]
Then on Friday 19 May I suddenly learnt that the American line had shifted. They were now prepared to concede the principle of negotiations on SNF. Jim Baker claimed in public that we had been consulted about this US change of tack, but in fact we had not. Without in any way endorsing the American text, which I considered wrong-headed, I sent two main comments to the Americans. It should be amended to make the opening of SNF negotiations dependent upon a decision to deploy a successor to LANCE. It should include a requirement of substantial reductions in Soviet SNF towards NATO levels. Jim Baker replied that he doubted whether the Germans would accept this. The attitude of Brent Scowcroft — the President’s National Security Adviser — was sounder. But I could not tell what the President’s own view would be. In any case, I now found myself going to Brussels as the odd man out. Everyone else accepted the principle of SNF negotiations, and the differences between them existed only on the conditions to be met before these were held. I did not want any negotiations at all. And, if there had to be any, I wanted tougher conditions than those in the American text. Above all there must be no fudged language on the ‘third zero’.
This was not like a European Council: it was important that we demonstrated the unity of NATO if it was to be effective and so I felt that compromise in some circumstances was a moral duty rather than a matter of weakness. However, I put my case very strongly in the speech I made. I said that I was profoundly sceptical whether negotiations on SNF could possibly be to NATO’s benefit. I was prepared to consider a text which would envisage such negotiations, but only after an agreement for the reduction of conventional forces had been reached and partially implemented. This, moreover, could only be on the basis that another ‘zero’ was excluded.
In fact, at the last minute the Americans brought forward proposals calling for conventional forces reductions and for not just further deep cuts but accelerated progress in the CFE talks in Vienna, so that those reductions could be accomplished by 1992 or 1993. This sleight of hand permitted a compromise on SNF by enabling the Germans to argue that the prospect of ‘early’ SNF negotiations was preserved. However, I emphasized in my subsequent statement to the House of Commons the fact that only after agreement had been reached on conventional force reductions, and implementation of that agreement was under way, would the United States be authorized to enter into negotiations to achieve partial reductions in Short-Range Missiles. No reductions would be made in NATO’s SNF until after the agreement on conventional force reductions had been fully implemented.
I felt that I had done as much as was humanly possible — without firm support from the United States for the line I really wanted — to stop our sliding into another ‘zero’. I could live with the text which resulted from the tough negotiations which took place in Brussels. But I had seen for myself that the new American approach was to subordinate clear statements of intention about the alliance’s defence to the political sensibilities of the Germans. I did not think that this boded well.
President Bush’s remarks in his speech in Mainz on 31 May 1989 about the Germans as ‘partners in leadership’ confirmed the way American thinking about Europe was going. When the President came to London he sought to deal with the problems those remarks had caused by saying that we too were partners in leadership. But the damage had been done. Now, as 1989 wore on, the march of events in eastern Europe and the prospect of German reunification added a new element, inclining the