President Bush said the line in the press conference. I basically told him, "Call us if you have a problem with that." And I waited all night for them to call and say "No, that's not what he said." They never did. Rice: That night I went to the Soviet ambassador in Washington and said that in the press conference tomorrow morning President Bush is going to say that President Gorbachev and he agree that countries have the right to self-determination in terms of their alliances. ![]() SPIEGEL: Were you concerned he might try to take the statement back? We weren't sure whether Gorbachev wasn't prepared for that particular line of argument and just restated what's true in Helsinki without thinking about its implications for Germany - or whether he decided he wasn't going to be able to stop it and now was the time to show flexibility. Rice: That to me is the most remarkable question. SPIEGEL: What do you think caused his change of mind? You have said that under the Helsinki Accords, countries have the right to self-determination concerning your alliances." And Gorbachev said yes again. Right after it happened, during the meeting at the White House, we advisers passed a note to President Bush that said, "Get him to say it again." So President Bush said, and I'm paraphrasing here, "Let me just be sure that we both understand. Rice: I couldn't believe it when Gorbachev made that statement. We said the Germans had chosen to become NATO members and should he not accept this? When he came to Washington in May 1990, we actually mentioned the right to self-determination to him. We had to just work to make it possible for him to accept it. SPIEGEL: How could you be sure that Gorbachev would agree in the end? No one in the White House was planning for anything but the unification of Germany within NATO. We also believed that it was a way to make the French and the British less concerned about German unification, because what was the original purpose of NATO? It was to defend against the Soviet Union, but it was also to give the democracies of Europe a collective security umbrella. Rice: Fortunately, we didn't have to accept that. SPIEGEL: And what would have happened then? If the Germans had come and said, "We don't want to be a part of NATO," I guess we would have had to accept that. SPIEGEL: So national interests trump the peoples' right to self-determination? America's interests were that Germany would be united in NATO. Rice: As a foreign policy actor, you have to have a view of your interest and you have to try to pursue it. SPIEGEL: But you didn't give him any choice. We believed that he wanted to be a member of NATO. Rice: We believed Helmut Kohl did not want to remain neutral. SPIEGEL: So how could you force the Germans to become a NATO member? Could they not have decided to remain neutral? As to whether the Soviet Union would accept it, you had to slowly but surely bring the Russians to that perspective. But we left no doubt in the minds of our German colleagues that we expected Germany to be unified in NATO. Rice: It wasn't explicit that the United States would not support German unification unless Germany were unified in NATO. SPIEGEL: Did the chancellor have a choice? After a meeting with him at Camp David in February of 1990, Bush knew that Kohl would agree to this. Rice: The president knew that the one thing he had to do was to get Chancellor Kohl to go out and say that Germany would unify in NATO. SPIEGEL: Were you concerned that Chancellor Kohl might not agree to German NATO membership? ![]() It would have meant that at the last minute, with everything going our way, the United States capitulated on the essential thing in terms of the American presence in Europe. ![]() But we at the White House never considered the possibility of unifying Germany outside of NATO. Rice: There were debates in the American foreign policy establishment that maybe both the Warsaw Pact and NATO should go away. SPIEGEL: But who could really believe that the Russians would ever agree to that? And a really bad misstep would have been to pull Germany out of NATO, which would have collapsed the most important platform for the American presence in Europe. But we couldn't afford in the end game of the Cold War to make a bad misstep.
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