Chapter 74 Anglo-American concerns about German unification

Then, in November 1989, events in Eastern Europe took a dramatic turn.For most in Washington and London, it was an unexpected reversal.Mikhail Gorbachev met in secret with Honecker, the conservative leader of the GDR's Communist Party, perhaps with orders to make way for the mass freedom movement that had swept across the GDR starting that spring.Within a few weeks, the old order in the GDR was thrown into chaos in a genuine mass revolution.Clearly, Moscow has realized that if it continues to use the old method of maintaining an expensive and inefficient empire by force, it is likely to drag the Soviet Union down.

Moscow had always hoped that its bureaucratic reforms would pay off, and in 1986 world crude oil prices plummeted, perhaps the most fatal blow to that idea.The Soviet Union's oil export revenue to the West has been the main source of hard currency since the 1970s, but after 1986 the price of oil plummeted. At this time, the Soviet people's calls for reform forced Gorbachev to make many reform promises, These promises were far beyond his reach.The ensuing economic turmoil was the main reason Moscow's leaders cut ties with the Warsaw Pact's Eastern European satellites.Moscow hopes that a united Germany, backed by a strong West German economy, will be the right partner to help rebuild the collapsing Soviet system.

The United States officially welcomes the dramatic end of the Soviet Union's more than 40-year rule in Eastern Europe, but privately, President Bush has a completely different attitude towards it.Bush himself was a CIA officer, and his views on world politics were influenced by the invisibility of US intelligence agencies.In Britain, the Margaret Thatcher faction of the Conservative Party was equally alarmed at the prospect of a so-called Fourth German Reich. Pagekin Wothorne, editor of London's Sunday Telegraph, whose views are influential in the British establishment, has articulated Thatcher's Conservative views on the coming new Germany.Watthorn is the stepson of former Bank of England governor Montagu Norman.During the war, Norman was in constant contact with Hitler's finance minister, Halmar Schacht, and after 1919 worked closely with Morgan Bank in New York to impose a brutal Dawes reparation scheme on defeated Germany.

On July 22, 1990, he wrote a front-page editorial entitled "The Good German Question".In the editorial, Wathorne recalled Montagu Norman with derision: "My stepfather, Montagu Norman, was Governor of the Bank of England and, after the First World War, worked to save the German economy. He made a lot of contributions, and he lived long enough to see the beginnings of the German economic miracle." Wothorne recalls Norman commenting before his death: "I always thought we were going to beat the bad Germans; but, I hope we will be able to deal well with the Germans as well."

Wothorne made his point. Let us imagine that a unified Germany will inevitably become a good big country, what will happen next?Let us imagine that a united Germany would teach Russia how to be a good great power, and then what? … In fact, the danger may be greater, not less.If a united Germany is going to play by the rules and win, is there an effective way on earth to deal with her?Germany would be very powerful, and as Lord Acton taught us, power corrupts...but Germany's position would ultimately serve the wonderful role of bringing the Slavic peoples back to the land of decency. Wawthorne's Sunday Telegraph is owned by Hollinger & Co, an Anglo-American holding company whose directors include Dr Henry Kissinger and Lord Carrington, former British foreign secretary, who is also Kissinger's Partner at Kissinger Advisors, New York.

The Thatcher government's trade minister, Nicholas Ridley, was forced to resign after blatantly comparing the Kohl government to Hitler's empire.Referring to this controversial comparison, Wathorne sums up Ridley's brilliant comment against German reunification: Mr. Ridley is talking nonsense, but perhaps his nonsense isn't entirely bonkers... maybe Britain's role should be to remain independent enough to be free enough to make the most of these complaints when the time is right.In the process of being a good German, Germany will sooner or later have too many enemies, just as she has done bad things in the past, and the United States will inevitably be one of them...Sooner or later balance of power politics will be re-established.This may be an opportunity for the UK, which knows the balance of power well...

According to reports in the London press, that summer, Thatcher's government created a new unit within the British intelligence service in an effort to significantly intensify its operations in Germany.Separately, the Bush administration began strengthening its intelligence-gathering capabilities to monitor developments in Germany. In the spring of 1990, at a special meeting of the "Association of Former Intelligence Agency Officials" in Washington, former senior CIA official Theodore Thackeray warned American intelligence experts present that, given the conditions of the new Germany, they should begin to Recruiting from the disgruntled former GDR Ministry of State Security and related personnel to establish a US intelligence resource in Berlin.Thackeray has been involved in the overthrow of the Shah and the illegal gun-for-drugs trade.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union may rely on a unified Germany to open up and accelerate economic modernization.The potential long-term strategic implications of all this are crystal clear to strategists in London and New York.David Hale, an economist who writes investment reports for financiers and clients, warned in January 1990 that German reunification would pose a strategic "danger" to U.S. financial markets.He is said to have ties to Bush's Treasury Department. One of the most salient features of Wall Street economic research in recent weeks has been the possible impact of economic developments in Eastern Europe on the current global financial equilibrium that allowed the U.S. to borrow more than 10,000 in the 1980s. billion dollars of funds.For this research conclusion, they seem complacent.

Hale then pointed out: In fact, when recording the financial history of the 1990s, analysts may regard the fall of the Berlin Wall as a financial turmoil, comparable to the lingering Tokyo earthquake.The fall of the Berlin Wall symbolized an upheaval that would eventually redirect tens of billions of dollars to a region that had dominated world credit markets for 60 years. Hale's conclusion, said to be influential and circulated among those in Washington policy circles, is that Americans should take no comfort in the fact that Germany has in fact been a minor investor in American markets in recent years. Since 1987, the largest investor in the US has been the UK (over $100 billion in mergers and acquisitions), but such a large investment in the UK would not have been possible without drawing on Germany's remaining savings.

On November 29, 1989, days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, hit men blew up the highly protected car of Deutsche Bank chief Alfred Herhausen.Herlhausen, a key adviser to Kohl's government, had been speaking to the Wall Street Journal just a few days ago about his grand plan to remake the GDR into the most modernized economy in Europe within a decade. More than 60 years ago, Walter Rathenau was assassinated.Walter Rathenau was the architect of the Rapallo Plan, which envisaged the industrialization of the Soviet Union with the aid of German industrial technology.Thoughtful Germans link Herhausen's murder with Rathenau's.However, the Bonn government continued with plans to unify Germany and made Moscow's support for German reunification conditional on helping rebuild the collapsed Soviet economy.

The German chancellor announced the idea of ​​building a modern railway to the whole country in November last year.This modern railway linking Paris, Hannover and Berlin, and stretching to Warsaw and eventually Moscow, was the foundation of the infrastructure of the new Europe that was to emerge.For the first time since 1948, General de Gaulle's concept of European economic cooperation "from the Atlantic to the Urals" became a realistic possibility. Amid this ethos, City observers have noticed a dramatic increase in informal contacts between top French and British business and diplomats.The British strategy: exploit France's latent apprehensions about a powerful Germany.The socialist and French President François Mitterrand had a pro-British tendency throughout his life, and he was the best audience for British ideas.Britain quietly began to rebuild the pre-1914 bilateral alliance and prepared for the construction of a new Anglo-French Entente to deal with the "German threat".But the real strategic struggles always took place far from the center of Europe. One day in 1989, they made the decision to attack, using the Middle East and its rich oil reserves as the stage.This time, as in the 1970s, American and British strategists decided that the serious threat posed by the continent’s economic expansion must be countered with the Anglo-American “petroleum weapon”.However, the manner in which this action was taken quickly shocked the world.