Star diplomats of the early 1970s, notably Henry Kissinger and Egon Bahr, are not remembered for their keen attention to economic issues. Historians of European détente have typically followed the cues of these two influential protagonists, building their narratives around geostrategic problems—Sino-Soviet clashes, the Oder-Neisse border, access to Berlin. To Werner Lippert, such accounts shortchange the significant role played by trade. Willy Brandt's government sought to use Osthandel as a sweetener to pave the way for the Moscow Treaty of August 1970; yet Moscow reversed this leverage, wielding trade as a lever to split apart the western alliance. Emphasizing at all times the political meaning of trade rather than its material function, Lippert nevertheless identifies a disastrous economic reality flowing from all of this Osthandel: Europe's long-term dependence upon Russian natural gas.

This is not completely new ground. Political scientists Angela Stent and Michael Sodaro have written extensively on Soviet-West German trade, and historian Karsten Rudolph has penned a significant study of the Ost-Ausschuss der deutschen Wirtschaft. Nevertheless, Lippert is the first to employ U.S. and German archival documentation in an effort to link the high diplomacy of détente with the practical demands of east-west commerce. Scholars who specialize in the international history of the Nixon-Brandt years will have cause to flip to the relevant chapters of Lippert's book, and they may indeed be provoked by the sweeping assertions found there. The centrality of the Berlin problem for the entire history of Ostpolitik is spelled out in useful detail.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to recommend this work for wider audiences, for it is flawed in two respects: the argument is highly tendentious, and the text is replete with errors.

On the first count, the author renders Brandt's motives as darkly as possible, to the point of distortion. Brandt's positive response to the “Budapest Appeal” of 1969 is read here as “a willingness to conduct Ostpolitik without Westpolitik” (p. 31)—a point flatly contradicted by Brandt's constant insistence on the centrality of NATO for German defense. To Lippert, West Germany was a free rider, taking NATO security for granted while simultaneously undermining the alliance through independent dealings with Moscow. Tellingly, the German-Soviet agreement of August 1970 is mischaracterized by Lippert as a “friendship treaty” (p. 57). German criticism of Nixon's Vietnam policy, or even a reluctance to articulate full support, is seen by Lippert as a mark of disloyalty. Later, during the 1973 Arab embargo, Brandt is accused of “selling out alliance cohesion for Arab oil,” a perspective that fails to take account of West Germany's supportive role in the creation of the International Energy Agency the following year (p. 129).

More ominously, Lippert assumes that the Nixon administration had the power to block the course of Brandt's Ostpolitik and suggests that the president would have “reined in Brandt” were it not for the latter's unfortunate popularity (p. 58). Lippert chastises Kissinger for being slow to appreciate the significance of Bonn's Osthandel, for this impeded “effective U.S. control of West Germany's new foreign policy” (p. 53). In light of Brandt's delicate parliamentary situation, Lippert may be half-right in attributing this much influence to Washington. Harsh public words from Nixon might well have emboldened the CDU/CSU and many in the FDP to bring down the SPD-FDP coalition. Still, the fact that even Nixon and Kissinger respected the sovereignty of West Germany would seemingly be grounds for Lippert to do the same—rather than treating the NATO alliance as a form of vassalage to the United States.

In other respects, too, Lippert's text is marred by improbable overstatements. The Soviets allegedly swung from a state of complete disinterest in trade with West Germany (the 1960s) to obsession with German industrial products (1970–73) to renewed disinterest (after 1973). In this rendering, Brezhnev came to Bonn in 1973 as an indifferent suitor, unconcerned with closing fresh business deals with West Germany—which leaves one wondering what he was doing visiting all those factories. Lippert's goal is to highlight Brandt's agency in pushing Osthandel for political reasons, against the resistance of various ministers in Bonn; and on this count he is largely persuasive. Still, one could wish for less categorical language. Bahr's positions are described flatly as “anti-American” or “pro-American,” depending on the context, as if this was the most relevant way of sorting out the envoy's slippery views.

The errors found here range beyond the harmless slips found in many monographs—“Klaus” rather than Karl Schiller, Helmut Sonnenfeldt's name misspelled, various dates given incorrectly. One would expect an author on Osthandel to identify the West German ambassador in Moscow properly or place various bureaucrats in the proper ministries. (Helmut Schmidt was not finance minister until July 1972). Most perplexing is the misuse of charts. Chart 2–3 has mislabeled axes; Chart 1–4 (advertised in a footnote) is missing altogether. Such errors leave an impression of sloppiness, naturally. But they also highlight the author's willfully slanted readings of the data. In Lippert's text, “the majority of West Germans” in 1969 allegedly saw the Soviet Union as “the superpower on the rise”; the chart below puts the figure at twenty-one percent in 1970, as against twenty-eight percent for the U.S. (p. 32). What, to Lippert, marks a “deterioration of German confidence”? A drop in the proportion of Germans wishing to “work most closely with” the United States from ninety to seventy-two percent from 1967–71 (pp. 18–19).The author is trying much too hard to paint West German-Soviet relations in a negative light.

Lippert's conclusion does point to large themes worth further consideration. Did Osthandel create a captive West German business clientele, slavishly dependent upon the Soviet market? Did competing trade interests explain the contrasting U.S. and West German responses to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan? The economic dimensions of the Cold War merit more attention from historians. It is unfortunate that Lippert did not take more care in the production of this intriguing but flawed monograph.