“Winners” and “Losers”: France, the United States, and the End of the Cold War*

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f r é d é r i c b o z o

“Winners” and “Losers”: France, the United States,

and the End of the Cold War*

In July 1990, a troubled Hubert Védrine, François Mitterrand’s strategic adviser

and spokesman, wrote to Zbigniew Brzezinski. He was frustrated with an interview

that the former U.S. national security adviser under Jimmy Carter had

given to a leading French daily newspaper a few days before. In the interview

(Moscow had just given its final green light to German unification by accepting

that Germany would remain a full North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

member), Brzezinski, a widely respected pundit, had declared that “for many

years, we have known that the end of the Cold War would make two winners:

the United States and Germany, and two losers: the Soviet Union and France.”1

Responding to what in his eyes was a “debatable” viewpoint “to say the least,”

Védrine argued that France, since General de Gaulle in the 1960s and under

Mitterrand throughout the 1980s, had in fact made persistent efforts to overcome

the Cold War and its consequences. Denying that its policies had been

premised on the enduring division of Germany, he emphasized that “the

German unification process had unfolded in accordance with what the French

President had wished as early as July 1989.” In any case, Védrine concluded, it

made no sense to designate victors and vanquished in the Cold War.2

We do not know whether Brzezinski ever responded to Védrine. Yet over the

years, it appears that he held to his viewpoint. In a 2007 essay on the achievements

and failures of U.S. policies since the end of the Cold War, he wrote that the

United States, thanks to “a forty year bipartisan effort,” had been the main factor

behind the downfall of the Soviet Union. As for France, he argued, no longer

able “to piggyback on the partitioned Germany,” it had been marginalized by

*A first version of this piece was presented at the international conference “The Making

of U.S. Grand Strategy: The End of the ColdWar and its Legacies,” Beijing, November 19–21,

2007. I wish to thank Prof. Niu Jun and Dean Wang Jisi of the Beijing University School of

International Affairs for this opportunity to present my work to an outstanding audience.

Thanks are also due to Professor Jeremi Suri for his helpful comments on the paper during that

conference and to the two anonymous individuals who reviewed this article and made stimulating

suggestions. Finally, I am grateful to my friend Axel Krause for his editorial assistance.

1. “Zbigniew Brzezinski au Figaro: L’URSS et la France, les grands vaincus,” Le Figaro,

July 18, 1990.

2. Védrine to Brzezinski, July 31, 1990, 5AG4, box 7010, Archives Nationales (hereafter

AN), Paris, France.

Diplomatic History, Vol. 33, No. 5 (November 2009). © 2009 The Society for Historians of

American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Published byWiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street,

Malden, MA, 02148, USA and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK.

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the end of the Cold War. True, Brzezinski distanced himself from the notion

of a “Reagan victory” in the ColdWar, which he saw as the intellectual basis for

the ill-conceived policies of the GeorgeW. Bush administration.3 Still, Brzezinski

to a large extent reflected what in effect became a dominant narrative, at least

among American international relations specialists and historians. Védrine’s

anticipation of this trend was, no doubt, what had prompted his reaction to

Brzezinski’s 1990 interview.

Védrine was right. Two main features indeed characterize the vast literature

that has emerged on the topic over the past fifteen to twenty years, especially—

but not only—in the United States. First, that country occupies central stage in

the events that led, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to the peaceful winding

down of the East-West conflict, German unification, and the emergence of a

new European and international order. In the dominant narrative, the U.S. role

is generally considered to have been overwhelming and even, in some aspects,

exclusive. Of course, important actors whose roles cannot easily be overlooked,

let alone dismissed entirely (e.g., the Soviet Union or Germany), are duly

included in the narrative, but other significant players are often neglected and

their records sometimes distorted. Second, the most common interpretation,

explicitly or implicitly, is that of an alleged U.S. “victory” in the Cold War.

Whether the claim is made loudly or more subtly, many accounts tell of how

Washington prevailed over the Soviet Union thanks to its economic and strategic

superiority,