The Foreign Service Journal, June 2012

the Italians stepped forward to meet German desiderata despite the politi- cal weight of their domestic commu- nist party. The first stage of the negotiations ended on Dec. 12, 1979, when NATO defense and foreign ministers met in Brussels to confirm the agreement. Only then did it become evident that there wasn’t an agreement. The pro- ceedings quickly devolved into a chaotic effort to overcome Belgian and Dutch demurrals and permit pub- lication of an official communiqué; it wasn’t hammered out until mid- evening. (As a consequence, I cele- brated my 15th-wedding anniversary at midnight with chocolates and a bot- tle of liberated champagne originally designated for a never-held celebra- tory vin d’honneur.) It was now clear that a singular INF deployment track could never be sold to European publics. Thus, a parallel negotiation track became part of the communiqué package. NATO’s es- sential negotiation proposal was “zero- zero”: NATO would not deploy if the Soviets withdrew or destroyed their SS-20s. Fat chance. The NATO proposal was the equiv- alent of offering to trade a bucket of ashes for a bucket of diamonds. Moscow was betting it could break the questionable unity of the prospective basing countries because each govern- ment faced elections prior to INF de- ployment dates. Crunch Time While the various electoral scenar- ios were being fought out, Washington began negotiations with Moscow in November 1981. Led by senior states- man Paul Nitze, these were ritualized time-fillers, as both sides advanced proposals for freezes and reductions (including Nitze’s famous “walk in the woods” with his Soviet counterpart). But the baseline question remained: would NATO remain unified enough to carry out actual INF deployments? At least the American delegation had time to relax, with flag football games pitting “INF” against “START” (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty). In one of these encounters, Nitze (then 76) asked for the ball, but the quarter- back declined, saying that if Nitze were injured, NATO would collapse, and he — not Nitze — would suffer the consequences. Other participants still remember a party at which the least salacious element was consuming an alcoholic beverage from the shoe of one of the delegation wives. Diplo- macy can be serious without being dry. NATO didn’t crumble, even when the first ground-launched cruise missiles to arrive in Britain, in No- vember 1983, generated furious pro- tests by women from the Greenham Common Peace Camp. They per- sisted in demonstrations until 2000 — nine years after the last of the missiles had been removed. (Occupy Wall Street protesters are kindergarteners in comparison.) The Soviets ignored the U.K. de- ployments, but shortly thereafter, when Pershing IIs arrived in Ger- many, their delegation walked out. This was a classic error by Moscow, for those absent are always wrong. Adroit NATO commentary pointed up the Soviet refusal to negotiate as further rationale for deployments. Still, Moscow kept pressing, hoping to break one of the other basing coun- tries from NATO’s consensus. It was not until the last of the recipients had accepted missiles on the ground (and the West had paid the very substantial “treasure” and political “cred” to do it) that the Soviets decided to resume ne- gotiations. On March 11, 1985, Mikhail Gor- bachev was elected general secretary by the Politboro, three hours after Konstantin Chernenko’s death. It was presumably coincidental, but still sig- nificant, that the arms control negoti- ations resumed in Geneva the very next day. Negotiations with Moscow — and Washington The revived INF Treaty process now had a new leader. Paul Nitze had retired from the fray and was suc- ceeded by his deputy, Mike Glitman, who had been present at the creation during NATO’s deployment negotia- tions and the chaotic Dec. 12, 1979, ministerial. Ambassador Glitman was imbued with a creative energy that turned a sometimes-fractious group into a coherent team focused on get- ting an agreement that would hit NATO objectives (e.g., equal missile levels) with effective verifiability. That said, the U.S. team’s most dif- ficult negotiations frequently took place back in Washington rather than with the Soviets. Substantial ele- ments within the Reagan administra- tion clearly wanted no obtainable agreement to be reached, and conse- quently argued for positions such as “anywhere, anytime” inspections that were deliberately unrealistic. Imag- ine Soviet inspectors rummaging through the White House basement or commercial laboratories. For two years, pressure-cooker in- tensity mounted as we inched toward agreement. In November 1987, U.S. and Soviet officials announced that the treaty was completed — except it wasn’t. Yes, we agreed on many vital basics, such as the global elimination of INF and shorter-range missiles. But the devil truly was in the details scattered throughout the text, each of which extracted its share of anguish from the negotiators. With delegation members working 20 hours a day, the atmosphere was akin to a series of pre–final exam college “all-nighters.” While our commitment to com- pleting the agreement was absolute, equally absolute was a commitment to letting the treaty fail rather than end- ing up with an unworkable or unrati- fiable text. Epitomizing this attitude was a photograph of the “delegation in exile” with bags over their heads in 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 2