ABSTRACT
During the cold war, Soviet hegemony provided a wonderful focus for the Western mind. The summer of 1990 took the German-Soviet relationship to a new, higher realm, comparable not so much to the 1922 Rapallo Treaty as to the Russo-German relationship of the nineteenth century before the Franco-Russian alliance. The future of German-Soviet relations became correspondingly more problematic for the Germans, the Soviets, and everyone else. Westerners quite rightly granted the Federal Republic of Germany sovereign status, but never considered the possibility of a German-Soviet rapprochement counter to their perceived interests. Russian disintegration, German unification, and American overstretch have severed the ties that made balance-of-power politics a game of the past in Europe. At the nuclear level, the progress of arms control and pressure for European denuclearization means a renewed reliance on strategic systems.
