Helmut Schmidt
Essay
May/Jun
1997
A look back at perhaps the most important foreign policy success of the postwar period. Edited by Peter Grose, with contributions by historians Diane B. Kunz and David Reynolds, a memoir by Charles P. Kindleberger, a profile of Marshall and Acheson by James Chace and one of Will Clayton by Gregory Fossedal and Bill Mikhail. And reflections from Roy Jenkins, Walt Rostow, and Helmut Schmidt.
Essay
Spring
1981
The beginning of the 1980s has been difficult, and the problems will be mounting as the decade goes on. Judging from the experience of the past year, the Western democracies' firmness, their resolve to stand their ground, and their willingness to cooperate will be tested, above all, in the following areas:
Essay
Apr
1974
Anyone who, in these weeks and months of the "oil crisis," is asked to forecast the future development of international economic relations and who looks for fixed data and reliable trends to support his forecast will soon run into serious difficulties. Even after the mid-February Energy Conference in Washington, the impression, disturbing in many respects, remains that the world economy has entered a phase of extraordinary instability and that its future course is absolutely uncertain; it may bring stability, but also still greater instability. More integration, closer coöperation, an improved division of labor may increase the overall prosperity of nations. But the future course may just as well be characterized by disintegration, national isolation and the search for more self-sufficiency, thereby enhancing the contrasts already existing in the world.
Essay
Oct
1970
The rationale of West German foreign policy is very simple: the postwar era has ended. Its hallmarks were high hopes for Western political structures on the one hand, and high tension between East and West on the other. Now a new epoch is in the offing. In the West it is going to be characterized by less ambitious objectives and more pragmatic approaches. The achievements of the fifties and sixties will not be dismantled, but the aims for the immediate future will be lowered. Dreams of "Atlantic Union Now" or "Instant Europe" must give way to expectations more closely geared to realities: wider and deeper coöperation, without necessarily institutional perfection. Between East and West the new era could be one of diminished tension and growing détente, of more coöperation and less confrontation. Not unlike President Nixon, the Bonn government is also trying to "build agreement upon agreement" without in any way deluding itself that this could be a process easily or speedily accomplished.
