Athree-Year US Presidency Offers Scant Time to Define an Era In

LuThdle owReal Years of Europe?

The Real Years of Europe? U.S.–West European Relations during the Ford Administration

✣ N. Piers Ludlow

A three-year U.S. presidency offers scant time to deªne an era in international affairs. When the president in question inherits a dominant secretary of state from his much-better-known predecessor and shows little of the command of world politics that would have been needed to wrest foreign policy leadership from the established expert, the likelihood that the presidency will be regarded as a deªning moment is low indeed. It is therefore unsurpris- ing that Gerald Ford’s presidency has been largely passed over by those working on the history of U.S.-European relations. And yet, as this article demonstrates, the three short years of the Ford presidency were a period of considerable importance in transatlantic relations. This had less to do with Ford’s personal contribution than with the circumstances he inherited, the constellation of European leaders with whom he and Henry Kissinger found themselves working, and the collective need for leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to confront the most serious economic downturn since the Second World War. The outcome was a moment of striking transatlantic cooperation that would stand in stark contrast to the much more problematic periods immediately before and immediately after the Ford presidency. The years under Ford also were a time of cooperation whose legacies altered the pattern of transatlantic relations well beyond the 1970s. The current historiography on transatlantic relations has little to say about the Ford presidency. A sizeable literature has recently sprung up about relations between the United States and its European allies during the Nixon era, and several recent studies have dealt with the “Year of Europe” affair. Of these, the most sophisticated treatments are a monograph by Daniel Möckli and a forthcoming book by Aurélie Gfeller.1 Catherine Hynes and Niklas

1. Daniel Möckli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War: Heath, Brandt, Pompidou and the

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Rossbach also focus on that episode, albeit from a somewhat narrower United Kingdom–centered perspective, and the Anglo-American dimension of the affair is also the subject of several chapters in edited volumes and journal arti- cles.2 Also relevant are three of the chapters in the volume edited by Matthias Schulz and Thomas A. Schwartz, The Strained Alliance.3 Marc Trachtenberg has recently explored this episode in the context of a wider exploration of Franco-American relations during this period.4 In all of these cases, however, the treatment extends no further than 1974 and Richard Nixon’s forced resignation. The literature that focuses primarily on Kissinger does talk about his role vis-à-vis Europe, but the main interest seems overwhelmingly to be the sound and fury of the Nixon years and much less Kissinger’s period as secretary of state to Ford. Jussi Hanhimäki’s A Flawed Architect, for instance, covers East-West negotiations, triangular diplomacy, the Middle East, and Angola at some length in its Ford sections, but barely mentions the Ford-Kissinger approach to Western Europe from 1974 to 1976.5 The literature on the United States and European integration is little better. Thomas Schwartz stops short at the end of Lyndon Johnson’s administration, as does Massimiliano Guderzo, and Pascaline Winand rounds off her analysis even earlier.6 A small amount has been written about Nixon’s down- grading of the relationship with the European institutions (building in part on Robert Schaetzel’s contemporary denunciation of this), but most such works have not taken the analysis beyond the early Nixon years.7 Dimitri

Dream of Political Unity (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008); and Aurélie Gfeller, Building a Political Europe: France, Europe and the World during the Pompidou-Giscard Era (New York: Berghahn Books, 2013). See also Alastair Horne, Kissinger 1973: The Crucial Year (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978). 2. Catherine Hynes, The Year That Never Was: Heath, the Nixon Administration and the Year of Europe (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 2009); Niklas H. Rossbach, Heath, Nixon and the Rebirth of the Special Relationship: Britain, the U.S. and the EC, 1969–74 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Alex Spelling, “Edward Heath and Anglo–American Relations 1970–1974: A Reappraisal,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2009), p. 638; and Keith Hamilton, “Britain, France, and America’s Year of Europe, 1973,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 17, No. 4 (2006), pp. 871–895. 3. See the chapters by Daniel Möckli, Alastair Noble, and Fabian Hilfrich in Matthias Schulz and Thomas Alan Schwartz, eds., The Strained Alliance: U.S.-European Relations from Nixon to Carter (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 195–256. 4. Marc Trachtenberg, “The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the Nixon-Pompidou Period, 1969–1974,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Winter 2011), pp. 4–59. 5. Jussi M. Hanhimäki, The Flawed Architect: Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6. Thomas Alan Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Massimiliano Guderzo, Interesse nazionale e responsabilità globale: Gli Stati Uniti, l’Alleanza atlantica e l’integrazione europea negli anni di Johnson 1963–69 (Florence: Aida, 2000); and Pascaline Winand, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the United States of Europe (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 7. N. Piers Ludlow, “Transatlantic Relations in the Johnson and Nixon Eras: The Crisis That Didn’t Happen—and What It Suggests about the One That Did,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies, Vol. 8,

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Grygowski’s survey of the United States and European monetary integration, while conªrming that something of a rethink occurred during the Nixon years, focuses most of its early chapters either on the U.S.–West European row surrounding the Nixon shocks of 1971 and their impact on plans for monetary union or on U.S. responses to the launch of the European Mone- tary System at the very end of the decade.8 The intervening period is passed over in silence. Similarly Duccio Basosi’s and Hubert Zimmermann’s work on monetary relations examines the 1969–1973 period but not the years that followed, although Basosi has also written about the late 1970s.9 Meanwhile, one of the few texts currently to attempt an overview of U.S.–West European relations over the whole postwar period, Geir Lundestad’s useful but slim “Empire” by Integration, deals with the Ford period in a couple of sentences— the chapter breakdown includes sections on the Nixon “rethink” and the troubles of Jimmy Carter’s administration, but nothing on the period in between.10 The present article demonstrates that the relatively brief period under Ford did matter in terms of West-West relations. Indeed, the Ford years were a time when, in a largely pragmatic and unspectacular way, the whole architecture of transatlantic relations was rearranged, creating structures and features that endured well beyond the Ford and Kissinger double-act into the years under Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton. The article is based on research conducted in the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and the Nixon presidential materials that were stored until recently in the National Archives and have since been transferred to the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, and on a variety of sources available online. As an expert on Western Europe, I look at U.S. sources as much for what they demonstrate about the jockeying for power and inºuence among the different states of Western Europe as for what they show about U.S. foreign policy per se. The arguments advanced are thus primarily intended as a contribution to the discussion of the West-West diplomacy of the Cold War, the patterns of transatlantic dialogue, and the evolving nature of international governance.

No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 44–55; and J. Robert Schaetzel, The Unhinged Alliance: America and the European Community (New York: Policy Books, 1975). 8. Dimitri Grygowski, Les États-Unis et l’uniªcation monétaire de l’Europe (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2009). 9. Duccio Basosi, Il governo del dollaro: Interdipendenza economica e potere statunitense negli anni di Richard Nixon 1969–1973 (Florence: Polistampa, 2006); Duccio Basosi, “Principle or Power? Jimmy Carter’s Ambivalent Endorsement of the European Monetary System, 1977–1979,” Journal of Trans- atlantic Studies, Vol. 8, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 6–18; and Hubert Zimmermann, “Unraveling the Ties That Really Bind: The Dissolution of the Transatlantic Monetary Order and European Monetary Cooperation, 1965–1973,” in Schulz and Schwartz, eds., The Strained Alliance, pp. 125–144. 10. Geir Lundestad, “Empire” by Integration: The United States and European Integration, 1945–1997 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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Rebuilding Transatlantic Trust

The ªrst and most obvious transformation of transatlantic relations during the Ford period was the rebuilding of mutual trust and conªdence after the highly bruising late stages of the Nixon administration. Nixon had initially at- tempted to foster a sustained dialogue with West European governments. The brieªng materials for his ªrst visit to Europe in early 1969 noted that “you will be the ªrst American President to undertake a working trip to Western Europe in the last ªve and one-half years” and highlighted the positive Euro- pean response to the announced U.S. intention “to listen not to lecture.”11 Particular care, moreover, had been given to the need to rebuild a relationship of trust and cooperation with the French.12 The meeting on 1 March 1969 between Nixon and French President Charles de Gaulle—the bête noir of the previous Democratic administrations—was thus both constructive and ami- cable.13 Yet, despite the good intentions on both sides, the successful Nixon visit was not a prelude to a genuine breakthrough in U.S.–West European relations. On the contrary, West European governments grew frustrated with the way the initial priorities of the Nixon administration lay elsewhere—with Vietnam, with the opening to China, and with détente with the Soviet Union—as well as the new, more nationalistic edge to U.S. economic and monetary policies. U.S. ofªcials, especially Kissinger, seemed highly sensitive to any sign that the Europeans were ganging up on the United States. The ter- minal agonies of the Bretton Woods monetary system and the Europeans’ attempt to shield themselves from these problems by creating a regional zone of exchange-rate stability were accompanied by a level of transatlantic resentment and mutual sniping that cast doubt on the long-standing U.S. policy of supporting European integration for political reasons regardless of the economic costs.14 Kissinger’s belated and awkward effort to address these uncertainties through his Year of Europe initiative only made matters worse. Not only did he misjudge the tone of the speech—most notoriously with the passage that,

11. Secretary of State Rogers’s Memorandum for the President, n.d., in NARA, Nixon Presidential Materials (NPM), NSC Subject Files, Box 443, President Nixon’s Trip to Europe, Feb–Mar 1969 General Background materials folder. The NPM are now at the Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California. 12. Trachtenberg, “The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy during the Nixon-Pompidou Period, 1969–1974,” pp. 5–9. 13. See Memorandum of conversation, Nixon and de Gaulle, 1 March 1969, in Nixon Presidential Li- brary and Museum (NPLM), http://www.nixonlibrary.gov/virtuallibrary/documents/jan10/088.pdf. 14. William Glenn Gray, “Floating the System: Germany, the United States, and the Breakdown of Bretton Woods, 1969–1973,” Diplomatic History, Vol. 31, No. 2 (April 2007), pp. 295–323.

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in contrasting Europe’s “regional interests” with U.S. “global responsibilities,” seemed to endorse a reality that all European leaders were keen to change— but his central message, that transatlantic problems needed to be dealt with “comprehensively,” proved counterproductive.15 A holistic approach would maximize U.S. bargaining strength and European weakness. The economic gap between the United States and Western Europe had narrowed considerably since 1945. On economic matters, the Europeans could with some justiªcation expect to be considered near equals by U.S. ofªcials. The military balance, by contrast, had become more unequal, not least because of the way in which nuclear arsenals had become the key yardstick of international power. An approach that lumped together economic, political, and security questions also entirely overlooked the way in which the gradual integration of Europe meant that in some policy ªelds, such as trade, the newly enlarged Eu- ropean Community had to deal as a single entity with the United States, whereas in other areas the individual European states retained their full auton- omy. A single undifferentiated dialogue was hence not practical. The very suggestion of one, however, only conªrmed the suspicions of the many Europe- ans who had long feared that Kissinger neither liked nor understood the integration process. The West European response, meanwhile—to answer Kissinger’s call for a new Atlantic charter by drafting one collectively—only frustrated the U.S. administration further and made even more explicit Kissinger’s impatience with European cooperation.16 The slow-moving realities of European collective diplomacy and their inevitable corollary that pres- entational responsibilities would fall to whoever held the six-month rotating European Communities (EC) presidency—in this case Denmark—collided head-on with the preferences of a U.S. foreign policy supremo who favored secretive bilateral bargaining and had notoriously little patience for the representatives of small countries. As Kissinger complained,

There is no real negotiation, since the Europeans state their position, we state ours, and then the Europeans go away to work out their response after which the whole process is repeated. Thus, whereas we had hoped that the Common Mar- ket would lead to better relations with the U.S., we are now forced into a type of consultation that is worse than we have with any other country.17

15. The full text of the speech is at “Address Given by Henry A. Kissinger (New York, 23 April 1973),” The Department of State Bulletin, Vol. 68 (14 May 1973); also available online at http://www.cvce.eu/ obj/address_given_by_henry_a_kissinger_new_york_23_april_1973-en-dec472e3-9dff-4c06-ad8d- d3fab7e13f9f.html. 16. Möckli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War, pp. 151–179. 17. Memorandum of conversation, “US-European Relations,” 28 November 1973, in Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library (GRFPL), Ann Arbor, National Security Adviser Files (NSF), Memoranda of Conversations 1973–7 (MemCons), Box 3, available also at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/ faculty/trachtenberg/ffus/00928.pdf.

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An attempt to improve transatlantic relations thus went disastrously awry, ac- centuating rather than mitigating the structural problems the initiative had been intended to address. Some scholars and pundits have argued, with justiªcation, that there is scarcely a period when relations between the United States and Europe have not been described as being “in crisis”—a state of affairs that might have something to do with the fact that it is always much easier to make a speech, place an article, or sell a book with “crisis” in the title than one with “status quo,” “calm,” or, still worse, “consolidation.” But if any period can justiªably claim to be one of transatlantic crisis, it is the Nixon years from 1970 to 1973. The process of mending fences began before Gerald Ford took ofªce. The rapid disappearance from the political scene in the ªrst months of 1974 of all three of the European leaders most involved in the Year of Europe fu- ror—Georges Pompidou, Willy Brandt, and Edward Heath—through death, resignation, and electoral defeat, respectively, proved extremely helpful in drawing a line under the affair. That their replacements, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Helmut Schmidt, and Harold Wilson, were all more Atlanticist in their leanings made this nearly simultaneous change of key actors even more signiªcant.18 But the full extent of the transformation did not become apparent until after Nixon himself left ofªce in disgrace in August. The healing of the transatlantic rifts can thus be accurately associated with the Ford era. First and least surprising of the changes in Western European policy toward transatlantic relations was the effort by the new Labour government in Britain to undo any suggestion that Britain was deemphasizing the “special relationship” with the United States in the interest of closer ties to its new EC partners. In recent years a lively historiographical debate has sprung up about how far Prime Minister Heath actually went in redirecting the United King- dom’s foreign policy priorities away from the United States and toward Eu- rope. Kissinger himself had been one of those responsible for popularizing the notion that Heath sacriªced close ties to Nixon in favor of greater European commitment.19 Nor was this just a line Kissinger took later on in his memoirs. In 1974 he described Heath to Nixon as “the only British leader who was in- different to the United States. All the rest preferred ties to the U.S. rather than to Europe.”20 Numerous younger scholars have challenged this established view, suggesting instead that the pull of Washington over London remained

18. For Kissinger’s positive reaction to the changes, see Notes from Cabinet Meeting, 21 June 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 4. 19. Alex Spelling, “Edward Heath and Anglo–American Relations 1970–1974: A Reappraisal,” Diplo- macy & Statecraft, Vol. 20, No. 4 (2009), p. 639; and Henry Kissinger, White House Years (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 933. 20. Ford, Kissinger, and Scowcroft conversation, 14 August 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 4.

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strong and that a great deal of Anglo-American cooperation continued unhin- dered.21 Although this new work goes a long way toward demonstrating that the Conservative leader did not deliberately seek to weaken links with the United States, there is no doubt about Heath’s commitment to greater Euro- pean involvement. The effort to lead Britain into the European Economic Community (EEC) was the foreign policy priority of his premiership. Indeed, even before the United Kingdom had formally become a member, Heath par- ticipated enthusiastically in the collective European effort to create a more uniªed foreign policy. At a time of transatlantic tension and U.S. impatience with the practical effects of European integration, such a pro-European stance was bound to create problems between London and Washington. As a result, Heath’s replacement by a government led by Wilson that was much less pro- European—one of the ªrst actions of the incoming Labour team was to request a “renegotiation” of Britain’s terms of entry—lessened some of the dif- ªculties in the Anglo-American relationship.22 It is true that neither Ford nor Kissinger appears to have had much fondness for Wilson himself. Kissinger dismissed the new British prime minister as a “sneaky, devious character” and “a greasy sort of man.”23 The bilateral encounters at the top level were often unfocused and unproductive during the Ford administration.24 It is also true that the UK’s growing economic woes under Wilson’s leadership tended to marginalize the British in the transatlantic dialogue about how best to respond to the global recession. But Kissinger quickly struck up a stronger relationship with British Foreign Secretary James Callaghan, and Anglo- American conversations about political and security-related developments rapidly regained a high degree of trust and shared interest.25 The 1974–1976 period may not feature prominently in any list of years when the “special rela-

21. Spelling, “Edward Heath and Anglo–American Relations 1970–1974”; Rossbach, Heath, Nixon and the Rebirth of the Special Relationship; and Thomas Robb, “Henry Kissinger, Great Britain and the ‘Year of Europe’: The ‘Tangled Skein,’” Contemporary British History, Vol. 24, No. 3 (September 2010), pp. 297–318. 22. On the renegotiation request, see Aoife Collins, “The Cabinet Ofªce, Tony Benn and the Renego- tiation of Britain’s Terms of Entry into the European Community, 1974–1975,” Contemporary British History, Vol. 24, No. 4 (December 2010), pp. 471–491. 23. Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft conversation, 14 August 1974. 24. See Ford, Kissinger, Wilson, Callaghan conversation, 30–31 January 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 9, 1975; Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Sonnenfeldt, Wilson, Callaghan, and Hunt, 30 May 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 12, 1975; and Ford, Kissinger, Sonnenfeldt, Wilson, and Callaghan, 30 July 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 14. 25. For Kissinger’s evident pleasure that Callaghan had become foreign secretary, see Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft conversation, 14 August 1974. For an example of the interaction between the two over Cyprus, see “Transcript of Telephone Conversation Between Secretary of State Kissinger and British Foreign Minister Callaghan,” 22 July 1974, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the

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tionship” was at its most intimate or intense, but it was a major improvement on the period that had gone immediately before. Second, and of greater signiªcance for what was to follow, was the improvement in relations between the United States and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). Helmut Schmidt was a much more reassuring ªgure than Willy Brandt had been, with neither the suspect leftist leanings of the previous chancellor nor his desire to emphasize dealings with both Eastern Eu- rope and his Western European partners over the Bonn-Washington relationship.26 Moreover, Schmidt and Kissinger were friends and sparring partners of long standing: Kissinger told Ford that he had ªrst met Schmidt in 1957 when the West German was “a brash young senator from Hesse.”27 This is impossible to verify, but certainly as early as 1969 a note from Helmut Sonnen- feldt, a senior staffer for the National Security Council (NSC), urged Kiss- inger “to utilize your personal relationship with Schmidt to make some basic points about the U.S.-FRG relationship.”28 Schmidt, as defense minister and then, from July 1972, as ªnance minister, had become the interlocutor whom Kissinger could most trust in a West German government about which his feelings were decidedly mixed. Once Schmidt became chancellor of the FRG, this level of trust grew even more important. The links between them were strengthened by their shared interest in strategic affairs and by Kissinger’s evident respect for Schmidt’s economic expertise, which alleviated the misgivings that Kissinger often felt about leftwing political ªgures. Kissinger commented to Luxembourg’s Prime Minister Gaston Thorn that the only reason Schmidt had joined the left-of-center Social Democratic Party was that “he entered politics in Hamburg and realized that he could only be elected there if he was a Socialist.”29 Similar interests, a common streak of ruthlessness, a shared tendency to speak their mind regardless of the consequences, and a comparable degree of impatience with bureaucratic or diplomatic niceties were more than enough to compensate for the political differences between the two men. Kissinger informed Ford, who had just unexpectedly become president,

United States, 1973–1976, Vol. 30, Doc. 114 (hereinafter referred to as FRUS, with appropriate year, volume, and document numbers). 26. Gottfried Niedhart, “U.S. Détente and West German Ostpolitik: Parallels and Frictions,” in Schulz and Schwartz, eds., The Strained Alliance, pp. 23–44; and Bernd Schaefer, “The Nixon Administration and West German Ostpolitik, 1969–1973,” in Schulz and Schwartz, eds., The Strained Alliance, pp. 45–64. 27. Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft conversation, 3 December 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 7. 28. Sonnenfeldt to Kissinger, 5 November 1969, in NARA, NPM, NSC Country Files, Box 682, Europe, Germany Vol. 3, July 1969–November 1969 (2 of 3). 29. Breakfast meeting between Thorn, Wurth, Helminger, Ford, Kissinger, and Hartman, 29 May 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 12.

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that the FRG was the European country that would matter most in coming years and that Schmidt was hence the fellow leader with whom a strong relationship was most essential. In August 1974, Kissinger characterized the FRG chancellor as “our strongest ally in Europe.”30 Two weeks, later, in the eupho- ria that followed a successful bilateral meeting between Ford and Schmidt, Kissinger asserted: “With the two of you working together, the West, the alliance is going to be alright.” Kissinger hailed the “miraculous change from Brandt and Scheel.”31 This auspicious start does seem to have been followed by an unusually close and friendly collaboration between U.S. and West Ger- man leaders in the following two years. Revealingly, Schmidt titles the relevant section of his memoirs “Freundschaft mit Gerald Ford” (Friendship with Gerald Ford), and the feeling seems to have been reciprocated on the U.S. side.32 This emphasis on the importance of U.S.–West German relations can be seen as a “rebound” from the early Kissinger years when both Nixon and his foreign policy guru had perceived France as the key player in Europe only to see their overtures toward de Gaulle and then Pompidou go disastrously wrong.33 The Federal Republic might thus be a more reliable partner than the French. Rather more signiªcant, though, was Germany’s burgeoning economic strength—essential at a moment in international relations when so many of the most pressing challenges were economic—its new foreign policy self-conªdence, and its ability to act as an intermediary and guide in Wash- ington’s careful and fairly systematic effort to rebuild its relationship with the French. Giscard and Schmidt were known to be close (the two men had served simultaneously as ªnance ministers in the early 1970s and had emerged from this most difªcult of economic periods with friendship and mutual respect intact), and both Kissinger and Ford frequently consulted the chancellor about the best means of reaching out to the new French president.34 Schmidt’s work as an intermediary between Washington and Paris was an essential part of the preparations that led to the successful Martinique

30. Cabinet meeting, 26 August 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 5. 31. Ford, Kissinger, and Scowcroft meeting, 6 September 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 5. 32. Helmut Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte (Berlin: Siedler, 1987), pp. 202–221; and Gerald R. Ford, A Time to Heal: The Autobiography of Gerald R. Ford (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), pp. 220–221. 33. Trachtenberg, “The French Factor in U.S. Foreign Policy.” 34. Elizabeth J. Benning, “Economic Power and Political Leadership: The Federal Republic, the West and the Re-shaping of the International Economic System, 1972–1976,” Ph.D. Diss., London School of Economics, 2011; Michèle Weinachter, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing et l’Allemagne: Le double rêve inachevé (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2004); Hélène Miard-Delacroix, Partenaires de choix? Le chancelier Helmut Schmidt et la France, 1974–1982 (Berne: P.Lang, 1993); and Helmut Schmidt, Menschen und Mächte: Die Deutschen und ihre Nachbarn (Berlin: Siedler, 1990), pp. 185–222.

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summit of December 1974 at which a number of long-standing Franco- American differences were (temporarily) resolved.35 Rebuilding relations with France was the third and most gradual part of undoing the difªculties of the Nixon years. Giscard was immediately seen as an easier person to deal with than Pompidou, and Jean Sauvagnargues, his new foreign minister, as greatly preferable to his predecessor, Michel Jobert. (It helped of course that both Giscard and Sauvagnargues were perfectly com- fortable speaking English, an unusual thing at that time for French leaders.)36 The adverse impact of a rift with the French on the wider transatlantic relationship was also well understood in Washington; hence Ford’s warning to Kenneth Rush, his appointee as U.S. ambassador to France, that “on occasion they [the French] try to get Europe together organized against us.”37 But such was the level of mutual mistrust that considerably more time was needed before ties could be entirely rebuilt. The early Ford-era memoranda of conversations thus feature Kissinger outbursts about French behavior that would not have looked out of place during the worst phases of the Nixon years.38 The French refusal to participate in structures that Kissinger had set up to coordinate Western consumers’ response to the Arab oil price hike was also a source of discord between the United States and France and took time to heal.39 France’s ostentatious distancing of itself from any initiative of the North At- lantic Treaty Organization (NATO) also continued to irritate U.S. ofªcials throughout the period.40 In the spring of 1975, after the initial breakthrough had been made in U.S.-French relations, Kissinger could still tell Ford, apro- pos of Giscard’s reluctance to attend a NATO summit: “It is a disgrace. To think he can meet with the Communists but not the Allies. I can point out to the Ambassador that you would not take it lightly.” Ford seemed to endorse this sentiment, adding, “I personally resent it.”41 All of these features of Franco-American relations were made more difªcult, furthermore, by

35. Benning, “Economic Power and Political Leadership,” pp. 139–143. 36. Cabinet meeting, 21 June, 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 4. 37. Ford, Rush, Scowcroft meeting, 8 November 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 7. 38. See, especially, Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft meeting, 29 August 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 5. See also Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft meeting, 3 December 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 7. 39. For a non-meeting of minds on the subject, see Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft, Sauvagnargues, and Kosciusko-Morizet meeting, 28 September 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 64. For background, see Fiona Venn, “International Co-operation versus National Self-Interest: The United States and Europe during the 1973–1974 Oil Crisis,” in Kathleen Burke and Melvyn Stokes, eds., The United States and the European Alliance since 1945 (Oxford, UK: Berg, 1999), pp. 105–124. 40. Ford, Findley, Scowcroft meeting, 24 April 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 11; and Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft meeting, 9 May 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 11. 41. Ford, Kissinger meeting, 18 April 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 11.

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Giscard’s lack of a sufªciently large political base with which to free himself from dependence on Gaullist support. He had to go on appearing loyal to some aspects of the Gaullist foreign policy tradition even when his interests and instincts pushed him in the opposite direction.42 Despite these problems, the 1974–1976 period saw a dramatic improvement in Franco-American relations, beginning with the successful Martinique meeting between the two presidents, continuing with Ford’s productive participation in the Rambouillet summit suggested and hosted by Giscard, and culminating with Giscard’s visit to Washington in May 1976 during which the French president was quite open about his desire to be cooperative with the United States.43 The somewhat effusive claim by Ambassador Rush to Ford in January 1977 that “at Martinique you laid the basis for the best U.S.– French relations ever” should probably be viewed with all the skepticism necessary when interpreting an ambassador’s farewell visit to the outgoing president who had appointed him.44 Rather more trustworthy was the spectacle a month or two earlier of Kissinger advising the president not to side with his own secretary of commerce, Frederick Dent, in a row over the U.S. tariff on cognac, in order to avoid a ªght with France in his last few weeks in ofªce.45 The contrast with the bellicose and combative language that Kissinger had been using about France two years earlier could hardly have been starker. Also important in this general trend toward better bilateral relations between Washington and its main European allies was the way that Kissinger himself appeared to have learned the dangers of trying too hard to play one European power off against another. One of the most insidious aspects of the Year of Europe affair had been the national security adviser’s tendency to use his various back channels to the main European leaders to convey a subtly different message to each. Such Machiavellian games had played directly to the somewhat competitive element that has always existed in West European jockeying for inºuence, intimacy, and trust in Washington, making it still more difªcult for Paris, Bonn, and London to devise a common stance toward the United States. During the Ford period, however, there are few signs that this game continued. Instead, transatlantic interactions were helped both by the trend toward direct communication—either between leaders themselves

42. The Americans were aware of this potential problem from the outset. See “Issues Paper for the Sec- retary’s Brieªng of the President,” 21 August 1974, in GRFPL, NSF, Country ªles for Europe and Canada, Box 3, France (1). 43. For Martinique, see documents in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 8. On the May 1976 summit, see the materials in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 19. 44. Ford, Rush, Scowcroft meeting, 14 January 1977, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 21. 45. Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft meeting, November or December 1976, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 21.

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or between their foreign ministers, rather than through unofªcial back channels—and by the growing number of multilateral encounters. If the key problems of the day were to be discussed à quatre, à cinq, à six, or à sept, there was little point in trying to arouse suspicions in one European capital about the behavior of its partners. Such mistrust would serve only to snarl multilateral diplomacy in which the United States itself was directly engaged.

Toward a Political Directorate?

In his stimulating study of the early years of European Political Cooperation (EPC), the mechanism for foreign policy coordination created by the EC member-states in the early 1970s, Daniel Möckli paints a generally convinc- ing picture of how the short-lived hopes of genuine European foreign policy emancipation from Nixon’s United States faded in 1974. In particular he ar- gues that the so-called Gymnich compromise of 10 June 1974 (named after the West German castle where the foreign ministers of the nine EC member- states—the Nine—gathered to hammer out a compromise on the issue of how the EPC should relate to the United States) made all but inconceivable the idea that the Nine would take a united stance to which the United States was opposed. Under the new rules an item could remain on the EPC agenda only if the Nine were in agreement about how to handle consultation with the United States. A single loyally Atlanticist member-state could thus force an issue that displeased the United States off the European agenda. The radical vision of multilateral cooperation within Europe enabling the Nine to acquire the collective strength to say “no” to U.S. leadership thus faded in the face of British—and also West German and even French—desire to rebuild bilateral links with the United Sates.46 By stopping his analysis at the end of the Nixon presidency, however, Möckli overlooks the way in which this resurgence of bilateralism also brought about a signiªcant change in the pattern of transatlantic relations. Even though a truly revolutionary shift to intra-EC multilateralism did not materialize, the result was not a return to the status quo ante. Instead, a less radical, but still important, alteration occurred in the pattern of ties between the United States and Western Europe. In 1974–1976, bilateral discussions between Washington and the three largest European capitals became more intense and more equal in terms of the relative standing of the three European powers involved. Furthermore, U.S. ofªcials fell into a habit of transatlantic consultation that European partners had periodically sought (and ºeetingly

46. Möckli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War, pp. 315–322.

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believed they had attained) but that until the mid-1970s the Americans had always fought shy of institutionalizing.47 The NSC country ªles of the Ford administration thus reveal a pattern of growing consultation and discussion between Kissinger and the foreign ministers of Britain, Germany, and France. At ªrst the French were excluded from much of this correspondence. For example, in August 1974, at the height of the Cyprus crisis, Kissinger had written in fairly similar terms to both Callaghan and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the West German foreign minister—but not yet to Sauvagnargues—appealing for any ideas they might have on how to resolve the crisis.48 But in 1975 the steady improvement of U.S.-French relations turned these ad hoc three-way consultations into a much more regular pattern of four-power discussions, involving regular meetings, both ofªcial and ministerial, as well as intensive correspondence. A September 1975 memorandum from Kissinger to the president underlines how far the new arrangements had developed:

Taking up a suggestion put forward by UK Foreign Secretary Callaghan, I convened two extended dinner meetings in New York on September 5 and 24 [1975] with my French, British and West German colleagues, to discuss the sensitive questions of NATO’s Southern Flank, speciªcally Portugal, Spain, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece and Turkey. The next such meeting will take place during the December NATO Ministerial in Brussels. In the meantime, senior ofªcials of the four foreign ministries will meet, as they have twice in the past two weeks, to follow up the Ministerial discussions and to prepare analyses for the next meeting. The initial purpose of these sessions was to exchange assessments, develop common policies, and coordinate our actions in Southern Europe. The foreign ministers are, however, ranging much more broadly over Western interests and policies and as a result a de facto political steering group is emerging. This is something the French have in various ways been seeking since de Gaulle in the early sixties; yet at the same time they are extremely sensitive about these meetings, both because of likely domestic Gaullist and left-wing criticism if they become known, and because of resentment among the smaller members of the Nine. For us, these meetings give us what we struggled for fruitlessly during the “year of Europe”—organic associa- tion in which we work jointly on common problems.49

47. Matthew Jones, “Anglo-American Relations after Suez: The Rise and Decline of the Working Group Experiment, and the French Challenge to NATO, 1957–59,” Diplomacy & Statecraft, Vol. 14, No. 1 (March 2003), pp. 49–79. 48. For the letter to Callaghan, see “Message from Secretary of State Kissinger to British Foreign Secretary Callaghan,” 24 August 1974, in FRUS, Vol. 30, Doc. 144, http://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v30/d144. For the dispatch to Genscher, see State 186660, 24 August 1974, in GRFPL, NSC Country Files, Germany State Dept Tels, From SECSTATE— NODIS (1). 49. Kissinger to Ford, Meeting with French Foreign Minister Sauvagnargues, 27 September 1975, in GRFPL, NSA Country Files, Box 3, France (6); emphasis in original.

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So why had a model of transatlantic dialogue that both the British and the French had sought in vain in the 1950s (albeit without West German participation)—a model that Kissinger had proposed in 1973 only to have the idea indignantly rejected by the West Europeans—come to partial fruition by 1975?50 It helped of course that during the 1974–1976 period the United States felt severely overstretched, and the executive was acutely conscious of the way an assertive Congress was intent on (and partially successful in) reducing the foreign policy leeway of the executive branch. At a time when Congress had disregarded presidential pleas and imposed an arms embargo against Turkey that deepened the instability in the eastern Mediterranean, it made sense to use West European allies as intermediaries in the struggle to avoid either Greek-Turkish confrontation or Turkey’s departure from NATO.51 It also helped that the problems in the eastern Mediterranean were not the only primarily European crisis of the period.52 The aftermath of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution, the fate of Spain once the ailing General Francisco Franco died, and the issue of whether the electorally weakened Italian Christian Democrats would bow to pressure and conclude the much discussed compromesso storico bringing the Italian Communist Party (PCI) into government were all pressing concerns and all issues on which European allies had means of inºuence and sources of information that complemented those of the United States.53 Even the still-mistrusted Willy Brandt was listened to with interest—if not much agreement—when he talked about his contacts with Mario Suarez and other Portuguese democratic leaders.54 Cooperation in Europe’s own backyard made sense, especially once the Europeans had largely abandoned their un- welcome attempts to insert themselves politically into the Middle Eastern peace process.

50. For the earlier U.S. suggestion of a similar pattern of dialogue, see Trachtenberg, “The French Fac- tor in U.S. Foreign Policy,” p. 56. 51. The depth of Ford’s frustration over the line taken by Congress on aid to Turkey is well captured by the conversation he had with the British opposition leader, Margaret Thatcher, in which he termed it “the worst decision I have seen in my 26 years in Washington.” See Ford, Thatcher, Ramsbotham, and Scowcroft meeting, 18 September 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 15. See also Eirini Karamouzi, “Telling the Whole Story: America, the EEC and Greece, 1974–1976,” in Antonio Varsori and Guia Migani, eds., Europe in the International Arena during the 1970s: Entering a Different World (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 355–374. 52. Mario Del Pero, “The United States and the Crises in Southern Europe,” in Varsori and Migani, eds., Europe in the International Arena, pp. 301–316. 53. Mario Del Pero et al., Democrazie: L’Europa meridionale e la ªne delle dittature (Florence: Le Monnier, 2010). 54. NSF, Brandt, Ford, von Staden, Kissinger, and Scowcroft meeting, 27 March 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 10. The brieªng materials for this meeting are in GRFPL, NSA Country Files, Box 5, Germany (4).

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It was not just on European affairs that the United States, Britain, France, and West Germany established their new pattern of regular consultation and cooperation. Had that been the case, it might have offended the same European sensibilities that had been so riled by the tactless contrast Kissinger had drawn in his Year of Europe speech between America’s global responsibilities and Europe’s regional interests. The joint discussion and planning also encompassed African affairs: Giscard was able to interest U.S. ofªcials in his idea of a general increase in aid to sub-Saharan Africa; The United States was intent on exploit- ing Britain’s long-standing links with southern Africa and was well aware that the FRG was one of the few Western countries with deep enough pockets to provide aid to Angola and elsewhere.55 The main European allies were equally central to the much more general debate about how the global economy might be revived and how the imbalances and stresses triggered by the oil crisis might be resolved. The United States could not address these problems alone and was hence keen to involve the big three European powers (and the Japa- nese) as much as possible. Coordinated action reduced the direct costs the United States had to bear at a time when money was scarce and was also likely to be more effective at a global level than any measures taken unilaterally. Another factor that facilitated the emergence of this quasi-political directorate was the temporary near equivalence of power of the three Western Eu- ropean powers and the widening of the gap between them and their closest European challengers. In terms of objective power, the FRG was undeniably the strongest of the European big three. The 1970s was a time when West Germany’s relative economic strength reached its apogee (its share of world trade rivaled that of the United States during the ªrst part of the decade and was not overtaken by that of Japan until the late 1970s), and its economic power was backed up by budgetary wealth, the consequent ability to avoid the type of aid and defense spending cuts that other states were obliged to make during the economic downturn, and a newly acquired readiness to speak its mind in international affairs. That it also had a chancellor who was unusually knowledgeable about the type of economic issues that loomed so large on the international agenda, but who could also speak with authority and expertise on pressing security issues, only accentuated the Federal Republic’s burgeoning inºuence.56 Yet despite this newfound power, the country remained highly

55. On Giscard and aid to sub-Saharan Africa, see Ford, Giscard, Kissinger, Sauvagnargues, and Scowcroft meeting, 17 May 1976, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 19. On Anglo-American consultations over Rhodesia, see multiple telegrams from July 1976 and after, in GRFPL, NSA Country Files, Box 15, To SECSTATE—NODIS (4). On West German aid for Egypt, Zaire, and Zambia, see the discussion in Robinson to Kissinger, Bonn 04046, 11 March 1976, in GRFPL, NSA Country Files, Box 7, To SECSTATE—NODIS (5). 56. Benning, “Economic Power and Political Leadership.”

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conscious of the weight of the past and of its anomalous and divided state and was loath to punch its full weight, whether in Europe or beyond. The FRG therefore continued to be drawn toward cooperation with the other major Western powers rather than toward more hazardous unilateral actions. To use a musical metaphor, the FRG, despite its growing self-conªdence, was more at home as a chamber musician than as a soloist and was therefore ready to play harmoniously with Britain and France—and also with the Americans— rather than striking out on its own. West Germany may have been at the height of its relative power in the 1970s, but Britain was at the nadir of its strength and inºuence. The British economy has seldom performed worse than it did from 1973 until the end of the decade. British internal politics have rarely been as fractious and divided. In 1976 the International Monetary Fund (IMF) had to be called in to rescue the British economy, and both the Labour Party and the Conservatives fell prey to deep internal divisions and engaged in increasingly bitter contesta- tions with each other throughout the decade.57 The hoped-for solution to Britain’s economic and political woes—namely, EEC membership—turned out to be a source of further controversy and further dissatisfaction rather than the promised panacea. No sooner had the British entered “Europe” than they found themselves at odds with their supposed new partners, engaged in a lengthy but ultimately almost entirely fruitless renegotiation of the terms of membership, and deeply divided among themselves about whether Heath’s great achievement was a backward or forward step.58 The UK’s tempestuous role within the European Community had begun. Even so, Britain retained enough of the habits and reºexes of a former great power, especially when dealing with Washington, to go on acting as one of the European big three. The multiple levels of the dialogue between British and U.S. ofªcials that have always been the special relationship’s core strength persisted even at the height of the United Kingdom’s most troubled decade, enabling London to play a role in the transatlantic debate out of all proportion to its objective strengths. This was particularly the case when discussion centered on political and security affairs rather than economics. The French, meanwhile, occupied an intermediate position between West German economic strength and British economic weakness. Had the “realities behind diplomacy,” to use Paul Kennedy’s phrase, been the sole factor in determining the transatlantic power hierarchy, France would have been some way behind the FRG for much of the 1970s but some way ahead of

57. Mark D Harmon, The British Labour Government and the 1976 IMF Crisis (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press, 1997). 58. John W. Young, Britain and European Unity, 1945–1999 (Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 111–120.

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Britain.59 Its economic performance lay some distance behind the former and some way ahead of the latter. However, France’s position was equally affected by several less objective measures. The Franco-American relationship both de- rived strength from and was weakened by the legacy of previous tension between Paris and Washington. Because Ford and Kissinger were aware that French goodwill was much less automatic than that of Britain or Germany, they were all the more assiduous in their efforts to ºatter, charm, and woo Giscard. For similar reasons they were ready to tolerate a series of anomalies and inconsistencies in France’s pro-Atlantic stance that would not have been as easily accepted had either London or Bonn been responsible—notably, France’s ongoing refusal to participate fully in the international structures devised to respond to the oil crisis. But the exceptionalism of the Washington- Paris entente of the mid-1970s also meant that the relationship was more fragile and less deep than either the U.S.-UK special relationship or the ties between Washington and Bonn. When the French Socialist leader François Mitterrand sought to arrange a meeting with Ford in August 1975, for instance, the NSC staff pointedly observed that no pattern of regular meetings existed with the leader of the French opposition, in marked contrast to the state of affairs with Britain and West Germany, where both Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl had been received at the White House.60 Asare- sult, Mitterrand did not meet the president. Hence, if Giscard were to lose power, the durability of Franco-American rapprochement would be open to considerable doubt. The net effect, however, was to make the 1970s a period of remarkable equality in the three key bilateral transatlantic relationships. Whether mea- sured in terms of the frequency of the meetings, the numbers of subjects discussed, or the willingness to share secrets, each of the European big three was treated in largely similar fashion by the Ford administration. To be sure, some differences remained. The West Germans were the partners of choice for most economic affairs, and Britain’s strength remained security and intelligence cooperation. The newness of the Franco-American entente meant that high- level encounters between the United States and France had an edge and intensity largely absent from the more “normal” discussion between the United States and West Germany or the United States and Britain. The overall effect was to create a more balanced situation between the three powers than had prevailed in most periods and to lessen (although never to eliminate entirely) the jealously and rivalry between the three main European powers in their

59. Paul M. Kennedy, The Realities behind Diplomacy: Background Inºuences on British External Policy, 1865–1980 (London: Fontana Press, 1989). 60. Clift memorandum for Secretary Kissinger, 11 August 1975, in GRFPL, NSA Country Files, Box 3, France (5).

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dealings with the United States. This balance was further strengthened by the fact that the only other European country that might have aspired to join the big three—Italy—was going through such a period of economic and political turmoil that its claims for equal treatment were exceptionally weak. The Ital- ians did successfully argue their way into the early economic summits on the grounds that exclusion from high-level international dialogue would weaken still further the prestige of the ruling Christian Democrats and thereby accen- tuate Italy’s internal weaknesses.61 Nevertheless, even though Aldo Moro and his successors attended the Rambouillet and Puerto Rico summits (and all other subsequent G6 or G7 meetings), Italy in most other respects was more the object of concerned transatlantic dialogue than a full-ºedged participant. The possibility that the PCI would be invited to take part in the Italian government was indeed actively discussed within the new, informal, four- power framework. As Antonio Varsori has shown, U.S. and West German ofªcials grew extremely anxious about this prospect in both the run-up to and the aftermath of the June 1976 general elections in Italy.62 Consultations were thus held among the “big four” as they prepared for the Puerto Rico summit, with Ford, Giscard, Schmidt, and Wilson discussing the issue at the summit itself without the Italians, Japanese, or Canadians present. At this restricted meeting on the morning of the ªrst day of the summit—a meeting ostensibly about Berlin—Giscard was the most insistent that any ªnancial assistance provided to Italy be made conditional not simply on the PCI being kept out of the government but also on a series of economic measures designed to address the weaknesses that had permitted the PCI’s electoral success. The exact nature of these ºanking measures was then the subject of an even more bizarre four-power meeting in Paris in early July that brought together senior aides of the big four leaders. Here a list of necessary Italian reforms was drawn up, with each of the four undertaking to pass these “suggestions” on to a variety of senior Italian politicians. The somewhat farcical cloak-and-dagger nature of both the Puerto Rico and Paris meetings—after Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the U.S. representative, discovered that the restaurant in Paris where the four were to dine was also frequented by the Italian ambassador, he suggested that, if

61. Ford, Kissinger, Hartman, Sonnenfeldt, Moro, Rumor, Manzini, and Vallauri meeting, in Hel- sinki, 1 August 1975, in GRFPL, NSA MemCons, Box 14; and Ford, Rumor, Gaja, and Scowcroft meeting, 23 September 1975, in GRFPL, NSF, MemCons, Box 15. 62. Antonio Varsori, “Puerto Rico (1976): Le potenze occidentali e il problema comunista in Italia,” Ventunesimo secolo, Year 8, No. 16 (October 2008), 89–121. On this episode, see also Duccio Basosi and Giovanni Bernadini, “The Puerto Rico Summit of 1976 and the End of Eurocommunism,” in Leopoldo Nuti, ed., The Crisis of Détente in Europe: From Helsinki to Gorbachev, 1975–1985 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2009), pp. 177–189; and Giovanni Bernadini, “The Federal Republic of Germany and the Resistible Rise of the ‘Historic Compromise’ in Italy (1974–1978),” in Varsori and Migani, eds., Europe in the International Arena during the 1970s, pp. 317–337.

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they met any Italians, “Berlin” should again be invoked as a cover story— ceased to be relevant in mid-July when Schmidt took it upon himself to tell the press about the “conditions” attached to Western support for Italy. A mi- nor diplomatic storm ensued. The United States, Britain, and France all dis- tanced themselves from the chancellor’s outburst, and Moro insisted to the Italian press that this conditionality had never been communicated to him. But as Schmidt subsequently recalled with some satisfaction, the new Italian government led by Giulio Andreotti not only excluded the PCI but also car- ried out most of the economic measures requested. The PCI’s closest brush with governmental participation had passed by, and the Communists never again came so close to breaking their prolonged exclusion from power. Four- power coordination could have an effect, despite the element of awkwardness and potential embarrassment that intervention in the politics of an allied power like Italy might entail for all the countries involved.

Economic Summitry and the Downplaying of NATO

The other fundamental alteration in the international architecture that was to take place during the Ford years was the advent of regular multilateral summitry between the main ªve, then six, and ªnally seven Western powers. Bilateral economic consultation across the Atlantic was a feature of the West- ern system that stretched back to the Marshall Plan. The overarching economic framework had been assured since World War II by the Bretton Woods institutions—particularly the IMF—and, for trade matters, by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. Since 1960, this economic architecture had been supplemented by an institution for multilateral economic coordination among the main Western powers in the shape of the Organization for Eco- nomic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD’s remit had remained somewhat limited, however, and had rarely led to the type of high- level political meetings that might have profoundly altered the economic behavior of the bigger powers. High-level economic coordination remained something of a rarity outside the European Community—even within the early EEC, member-states retained essentially free hands in most macroeco- nomic decision-making. The collapse of the Bretton Woods structures in the early 1970s changed this picture dramatically. With the monetary stability of the earlier era gone, and with a darkening economic outlook across the West made darker still by the oil crises, economic discussions among the big powers could no longer be left to mere technicians. Instead, ªrst the ªnance ministers of the leading powers began to gather informally—in a forum dubbed “the library group”—

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and then, from 1975 on, the heads of government began to meet for what soon became a regularized meeting every six months.63 The initiative for economic summitry came from the European side. The idea was proposed ofªcially by Giscard, although it is unclear whether the notion originated with him or with Chancellor Schmidt.64 Both leaders discussed the idea bilaterally before the proposal was made public, and Schmidt energetically backed the French scheme once launched. Furthermore, the West German leader was largely responsible for turning the initial French suggestion of a monetary summit—a notion that almost certainly would not have been acceptable to most of France’s partners—into the much more appealing and further-reaching idea of a summit covering economic affairs more broadly deªned.65 But nothing would happen without U.S. participation, so the reaction of Ford and his advisers was crucial. This does not appear to have been entirely straightforward. William Simon, the U.S. treasury secretary, and many of his aides seem initially to have been opposed.66 In the end, however, Ford overrode Simon’s misgivings and gave his assent. Western summitry had begun, the ªrst major gathering occurring at Rambouillet in December 1975.67 This was a major development, one that placed much greater obligation on each leading Western government to consult about the main aspects of its economic policies. Of course the G5, G6, and G7 imposed no formal obligation on any of the participants. Any participant could walk away from the meeting and do precisely the opposite of what had been agreed collectively. More seriously perhaps, the lack of well-developed structures for following up decisions taken at Western summits meant that compliance was less thorough than was the case in comparable European structures that did have well- established enforcement mechanisms. Nevertheless, the start of summitry signaled a major change. First, it re- vealed that economic affairs and, in particular, a response to the global crisis were the priority ªeld of governmental action. Second, it reinforced the personal commitment of individual Western leaders to economic policymaking. Domestic economic policymaking and international coordination of efforts

63. Harold James, International Monetary Cooperation Since Bretton Woods (Washington, DC: Interna- tional Monetary Fund, 1996), pp. 266–270. 64. Johannes von Karczewski, “Weltwirtschaft ist unser Schicksal”: Helmut Schmidt und die Schaffung der Weltwirtschaftsgipfel (Bonn: Dietz, 2008), pp. 111–127. 65. Benning, “Economic Power and Political Leadership,” pp. 195–205. 66. Ibid., p. 201. 67. For the U.S. record of discussions, see “The Economic Summit at Rambouillet, June 1975–January 1976,” in FRUS, 1969–1976, Vol. 31, Docs. 122–125, http://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v31/ch3.

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to ªght inºation, combat energy shortages, or restart economic growth were no longer matters that could be left just to ªnance ministers and their staffs. This in turn made it less likely, although not impossible, that individual countries would carry out major economic policy changes without giving warning to their foreign counterparts. One might question, for example, whether the Nixon shocks of 1971 could have been adopted in an era of regular Western economic summitry. Third, economic summitry drew a much clearer line between the big and the small players in the world economy. Giscard’s vision of the summits as an informal ªreside chat involving just the key leaders would fade over time as the membership expanded, the structure became more bu- reaucratized, and the size of each national delegation increased inexorably.68 But the basic notion of singling out a small group of key countries as those primarily responsible for the direction and health of the international economy was an important departure from previous practice, and it was preserved throughout the Cold War and after. Fourth, and of particular importance for the argument of this article, the advent of summitry represented a remarkable acknowledgment of Europe’s weight in global economic decision-making. Four of the six participants at Rambouillet were West European (West Ger- many, France, Britain, and Italy; the two non-European countries were the United States and Japan), and although Canada took part from the Puerto Rico summit of June 1976 onward, this move away from European overrepresentation was more than offset by the subsequent agreements to permit the participation of ªrst the European Commission president and then, from the early 1980s onward, the country representing the rotating EC presidency.69 At most G7 summits from 1982 on, three non-European leaders were ºanked by ªve or six Europeans (the number varied depending on whether the EC presidency was held by one of the four larger EC member- states that would be going to the G7 anyway or by one of the smaller countries that did not normally attend). In meetings that did not operate with formal voting, the disproportionate European weight need not have mattered too much. But because the G7 was a forum emphasizing debate, discussion, and peer pressure, the extraordinarily high number of European “peers” un- doubtedly had an impact on the sort of concerns that were likely to be brought to the G7 table and on the decisions taken or not taken. Finally, the start of regular summitry signaled an important change in the way U.S. ofªcials conceptualized both their ties with Europe and the means

68. Robert D. Putnam and Nicholas Bayne, Hanging Together: The Seven-Power Summits (London: Heinemann, 1984), pp. 44–58. 69. Roy Jenkins, European Diary, 1977–1981 (London: Collins, 1989), pp. 20–22. See also Giuliano Garavini, “The Battle for the Participation of the European Community in the G7 (1975–1977),” Journal of European Integration History, Vol. 12, No. 1 (2006), pp. 141–158.

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by which they exercised leadership. Until the mid-1970s most U.S. leaders and foreign policy advisers perceived NATO as the most vital institutional transatlantic bridge. The regularity with which the NATO Secretary General visited the White House is one illustration of this; the way that U.S. presidents periodically used NATO summits to meet as many European leaders as possible in a short period of time is another.70 The role played by NATO in resisting the Gaullist challenge of the mid-1960s provides further conªrma- tion.71 But economic summitry abruptly altered this pattern. Suddenly it was the G7 that was most conspicuously bringing U.S. presidents into regular direct contact with their West European counterparts. The proposal to give NATO the wherewithal and expertise to become a forum for economic as well security debates—a trend to which Möckli’s otherwise excellent study wrongly attaches some importance—came to naught.72 NATO representatives indeed became quite anxious about what was taking place, and at least one permanent representative lamented that even issues such as East-West trade (an economic topic with a clear Cold War edge) were now being de- bated within the G7 rather than within alliance structures.73 At one level, this transformation stemmed mainly from a changed international environment in which economic challenges became more important than security issues.74 Moving the key locus for transatlantic dialogue away from NATO and toward a new structure primarily conceived to discuss economic affairs made sense at a time when the principal threat to the West came not from Soviet invasion but from the type of internal economic dislocation that was likely to push ever greater numbers of Italian and French voters toward Communist parties.75 But equally important was the way France ceased to be seen by the United States and its main allies as a likely source of turbu- lence within the Western bloc, the state of affairs that had characterized most of the period when de Gaulle had been in power and even the years under Pompidou. Instead, France was increasingly seen as an important part of the

70. Nixon’s March 1969 visit to Europe is a case in point. Revealingly, however, the meeting with de Gaulle did not take place on the margins of the NATO meeting, even though it occurred during the same visit. 71. Andreas Wenger, “Crisis and Opportunity: NATO’s Transformation and the Multilateralization of Detente, 1966–1968,” Journal of Cold War Studies, Vol. 6, No. 1 (Winter 2004), pp. 22–74; and James Ellison, The United States, Britain and the Transatlantic Crisis: Rising to the Gaullist Challenge, 1963–68 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). 72. Möckli, European Foreign Policy during the Cold War, pp. 336–337. 73. Ford, Kissinger, Scowcroft meeting, 7 July 1976, in GRFPL, NSA MemCons, Box 20. 74. Benning, “Economic Power and Political Leadership.” 75. Schmidt was particularly prone to pessimism along these lines. See, for example, the record of the Schmidt, Genscher, Ford, Kissinger, and Scowcroft meeting, 27 July 1975, in GRFPL, NSA MemCons, Box 14.

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solution. NATO’s usefulness as a vehicle for solving the West’s difªculties in the 1970s was restricted by French sensitivity to participation in any initiative that bore a NATO label and by the tendency of senior French representatives to absent themselves from key NATO meetings. Giscard, for example, did not attend the NATO summit in 1974 (despite its billing as a major celebration marking the alliance’s ªrst 25 years) and the following year traveled to Brus- sels only to attend a dinner hosted by the Belgian king that was not formally part of the NATO summit.76 The French also blocked a Canadian suggestion that NATO summits be convened on an annual basis.77 So if France was to be brought into any collective Western response to the economic crisis and not allowed to be a potentially disruptive outside inºuence, new structures dis- tinct from NATO needed to be devised. G7 was part of the answer. One ªnal institutional change that dates from this period and deserves to be mentioned is the advent in late 1974 of institutionalized European summitry with the creation of the European Council.78 This innovation was of major importance for the subsequent trajectory of European integration history—indeed it was arguably the single most important institutional change in the EC since the 1957 Treaty of Rome. But it was also a step that mattered in Atlantic terms. The existence of the council increased the likelihood that the multiple European powers that attended Atlantic-level gather- ings would do so with a greater degree of coordination of their individual national positions. The issue of European overrepresentation thus became even more acute because, on quite a few of the issues that were likely to be discussed at the G7 level, the four, ªve, or six European representatives would be bound to a predetermined common position. The creation of the council also mattered because of the way European summitry softened the division between the European powers that were included with the United States in the G5/G6/G7 and those that were not.79 Belgium or the Netherlands, for instance, would know that they had a valuable additional forum in which to press their views on the European countries that were represented in the high- est level of dialogue with the United States. The council offered them a chance to bind the hands of Europe’s global-level representatives by means of

76. Cabinet meeting, 4 June 1975, in GRFPL, NSA MemCons, Box 12. 77. Ibid. 78. Emmanuel Mourlon-Druol, “Filling the EEC Leadership Vacuum? The Creation of the European Council in 1974,” Cold War History, Vol. 10, No. 3 (August 2010), pp. 315–339. 79. An indication of the sensitivity of this issue for the smaller European countries is provided by the Luxembourg and Belgian démarches about the potential of the Puerto Rico summit to damage the EC. See Hormats to Scowcroft, 6–7 June 1976, in GRFPL, NSF, Country Files, Luxembourg; Son- nenfeldt to Kissinger, n.d. [but enclosing Sonnenfeldt-Meisch conversation, 5 June 1976], in GRFPL, NSF, Country Files, Luxembourg; and Sonnenfeldt to Kissinger, 4 June 1976, in GRFPL, NSA Coun- try Files, Luxembourg.

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prior, collective European decisions. This did not stop the smaller European countries from lobbying, ultimately with some success, for the G7 circle to be widened to include both the European Commission and the EC presidency. But it did make it easier to swallow the new, more naked hierarchy that had appeared among the Western powers.

An Enduring Impact?

Ford’s term in ofªce was a short one, and by 1977 he and Kissinger had lost power and been replaced by Jimmy Carter, who took U.S. foreign policy, especially relations with Western Europe, in less auspicious directions. The transatlantic convergence under Ford was replaced by arguments over who should inject growth and dynamism into the world economy, disputes over security matters (particularly the neutron bomb affair), and, most fundamen- tally, the start of a real divergence between a U.S. view of the Cold War that increasingly rejected détente and a West European approach that continued to value the concept.80 It could therefore be asked whether it is worthwhile getting excited about a series of institutional and attitudinal changes made in the course of one of the shortest U.S. presidencies of the twentieth century. For at least three reasons, the changes adopted during the Ford presidency and outlined in this article deserve to be studied. First, the general U.S. foreign policy approach to Western Europe and the behavior of Kissinger during the Ford administration, particularly Kissinger’s apparent readiness to ac- cept a much greater degree of multilateralism and international consultation than he had tolerated during the Nixon years, suggests that a signiªcant change occurred. As Ford’s secretary of state, Kissinger became more of a team player than he had been under Nixon. Whether this reºects Ford’s moderat- ing inºuence, the sobering effect of Nixon’s resignation, the greater strictures imposed on U.S. foreign policy by an ever-more-powerful Congress, the accu- mulated learning from mistakes made in the earlier period, the need for the United States to rely more on allies at a time of economic retrenchment, or something else entirely is a judgment best left to those better versed in the internal workings of the U.S. administration. But that there was a real change in Kissinger’s behavior and approach to West-West diplomacy in 1974–1976 seems beyond dispute. The second historiographical impact of the analysis presented in this arti-

80. Kristina Spohr Readman, “Germany and the Politics of the Neutron Bomb, 1975–1979,” Diplo- macy & Statecraft, Vol. 21, No. 2 (June 2010), p. 259; and Klaus Wiegrefe, Das Zerwürfnis: Helmut Schmidt, Jimmy Carter und die Krise der deutsch-amerikanische Beziehungen (Berlin: Propyläen, 2005).

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cle is to erode still further the notion that the 1970s were little more than an extended economic and foreign policy disaster for Western Europe. This char- acterization has long been open to question, despite the undeniable economic and political difªculties experienced by many West European states in the aftermath of the 1973 economic downturn. In the integration history ªeld, for instance, the identiªcation of the 1970s as “a dismal decade” overlooks the four crucial developments of the period; namely, the ªrst enlargement (1973), the creation of the European Council (1974/1975), the move toward the direct elections of the European Parliament (1979), and the launch of the Euro- pean Monetary System (1979). But what this article also suggests is that the 1970s were a time when Western Europe actually gained in collective weight on the world stage rather than lost inºuence. It is true of course that the radical vision of the early 1970s—a vision based on the idea that a united Europe could become a truly emancipated foreign policy actor equipped not only with a single voice in world affairs but also with a single currency—soon faded. But the replacement of it by an international system in which the United States had fallen into the habit of regularly consulting all of Europe’s big three about many of the key foreign policy issues of the day, and in which the United States had agreed to participate in a system of economic summitry in which Western Europe was almost grotesquely overrepresented, marks a highly signiªcant advance from the pattern of purely bilateral consultations with Britain, sometimes with West Germany, and occasionally with France that had characterized the ªrst 25 years of the Cold War. The lengthy economic crises of the 1970s and early 1980s, and the way their later stages were marked by a much-stronger-than-average performance by the Japanese and by a much quicker U.S. recovery under Reagan than was the case in Western Eu- rope, certainly led in the medium term to a structural weakening of Western Europe’s position in the world. But in institutional terms the 1970s somewhat paradoxically witnessed a signiªcant strengthening of Western Europe’s position. This shift constituted the belated institutional response to Western Eu- rope’s dramatic economic and political recovery after 1945. Finally and most importantly, the majority of changes discussed in this article were remarkably durable. No formal political directorate ever emerged, and the intensity of individual bilateral dialogues between Washington and the European big three waxed and waned depending on the issues of the moment and the personal chemistry between U.S. and West European leaders. But a preliminary reading of the Reagan papers reveals that the same pattern of regular consultation with Britain, West Germany, and France that began under Ford endured into the 1980s and, in the light of recently declassiªed documents on German uniªcation, probably continued until the end of the

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Cold War and maybe beyond.81 Likewise, economic summitry continued with Europe still disproportionately represented, a situation that persisted until the recent move to replace the G7 (or G8 as it had become with the inclu- sion of post-Soviet Russia) with the G20. The increased dynamism of the Eu- ropean integration process after 1985 almost certainly meant that the solid phalanx of Europeans who turned up at every G7/G8 meeting were even more likely to act in a uniªed fashion and punch signiªcantly above their global demographic or economic weight. All of this indicates that the international architecture of the ªnal stages of the Cold War for security issues and the management of the world economy was surprisingly Eurocentric. This may have been an era of the “global Cold War,” but the institutional mechanisms that the West devised to respond to the global challenge were overwhelmingly centered on the continent where the East-West conºict had begun.82

Acknowledgments

The research in U.S. archives on which this article builds was partly funded by a grant from the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines at the London School of Economics (LSE). The au- thor is very grateful for this support. Gratitude is also due to the participants in the LSE IDEAS Cold War History Seminar, where these arguments were ªrst presented, and to several individuals who were kind enough to offer com- ments on a draft version: Odd Arne Westad, Nigel Ashton, James Ellison, Kiran Patel, and Arne Hofmann.

81. For works evaluating Western European–U.S. relations under Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, see Kiran Klaus Patel and Kenneth Weisbrode, eds., European Integration and the Atlantic Com- munity in the 1980s (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Hanns Jürgen Küsters and Daniel Hofmann, Deutsche Einheit: Sonderedition aus den Akten des Bundeskanzleramtes 1989/90 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 1998); and Patrick Salmon, ed., German Uniªcation 1989–1990, Documents on British Policy Overseas, Series III (Abingdon, UK: Taylor & Francis, 2009). 82. Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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