Cold War era fades with Bush’s passing
WASHINGTON — On Sept. 16, 1991, Angela Merkel, then a young protégé of Chancellor Helmut Kohl of Germany, watched in the Oval Office as her boss and President George H.W. Bush wrestled with the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. Without an influx of emergency aid, Germans feared that refugees could pour across the border, threatening the stability of their newly reunified country.
Merkel shared that memory with President Donald Trump at the Group of 20 summit meeting in Buenos Aires the morning after Bush’s death. Later, she told reporters, “Helmut Kohl could rely on this friend of the Germans in the White House.” If not for Bush’s sure-footed handling of those historic events, Merkel added, she “would hardly be standing here.”
With Bush’s death, a generation of Cold War leaders has passed from the stage. Of the major figures of that era, only Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the Soviet Union’s last leader, is still alive. But at 87, he was too ill to attend Bush’s funeral. Kohl died last year; even his protégé Merkel, who attended the funeral, is now in the sunset of a political career that made her Germany’s first female chancellor.
Merkel’s reminiscences about Bush were all the more poignant, given that she was about to sit down with Trump, who grew up during the Cold War but has gleefully tried to dismantle the European and global institutions that Bush and his Cold War-era colleagues built.
“What Merkel is viscerally remembering was the American-European partnership at its height, in a period of emergency and world crisis,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who advised Bush on German reunification and the breakup of the Soviet Union.
“Now here were are, as the system these leaders created is drifting into great jeopardy.”
“What exactly is the partnership that is managing this now?” he asked.
It is easy to forget, as the tributes to Bush pour in, that these Cold War partnerships were not without their bumpy roads. While Bush and Kohl agreed on the need for food and medicine for the Soviets, they differed over how quickly to provide economic assistance. Bush wanted the Soviets to undertake sweeping marketoriented changes first.
Some analysts argue that it is pointless to wish for the restoration of the U.S.-led international order that Bush
helped create. That system was beginning to fray well before Trump took office, for all sorts of reasons unrelated to him, and it is likely to keep unraveling, regardless of who follows him into the White House.
“This is essentially the old adage about generals always fighting the last war,” said John C. Kornblum, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany who now works as a consultant and commentator in Berlin. “There is nothing to save. We are already deeply into the new order.”
Still, Kornblum and others said, there were lessons to be learned from Bush’s approach to foreign policy, which can be applied to the upheavals of today. He was a master at building coalitions, a skilled diplomat who understood how to corral balky allies, like Britain and France, and deal adroitly with failing adversaries, like the Soviet Union.
By declaring his faith in a united Germany, even before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Bush helped secure a united Europe. He also frustrated last-ditch Soviet efforts to dissolve the Atlantic alliance. Gorbachev paid his respects.
“We had a chance to work together during the years of tremendous changes. It was a dramatic time that demanded great responsibility from everyone,”
Gorbachev told the Interfax news agency. “The result was an end to the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.”
In addition to winding down the Cold War, historians credit Bush with helping facilitate the reunification of Germany and Europe, as well as the peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. And he was an apostle for free trade, negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement and laying the groundwork for the World Trade Organization.
“We had a leader in Bush who had a superb sense of timing, who knew when to coddle and when to cajole,” said Josef Joffe, a member of the editorial council of the German newspaper Die Zeit.
“Trump doesn’t believe in give and take, and preserving the dignity of the adversary,” Joffe said. “He is just the real estate guy who says you either take it or leave it.”