Holding a drink, a skeptical Willy Brandt sways backward but gestures forward with the open palm of his free hand. Cigarette in motion, Leonid Brezhnev bends his body toward Brandt's, striving to persuade. Aides surround the seated pair and strain to hear. Captured in the iconic photograph is the ambiguous dynamic of power and initiative that marked the diplomacy between the superpower and the freestanding remnant of Germany's former audacity.

A fascinating collection of essays accompanies this picture, and the strongest impression they leave is that of Brandt's perspicacity. The chancellor had a concept, fortuitous timing, diplomatic skills, receptive interlocutors, and a worldwide rooting section. He reassured suspicious friends, bargained effectively with adversaries, gauged risks and rewards, and appealed beneficially to the moral imagination. He grasped what was possible and quickly brought it to fruition. In doing so, he complemented but also jump-started the policies of his allies. Doubts and envy gave way to the recognition of opportunities and confluent interests. Winning points by conceding them, Brandt displayed how goodwill could be profitably leveraged. Emulation followed. But all of this was not without a steely edge. From Middle Eastern relations to nuclear commerce, Brandt demonstrated that Federal Germany's accommodation with past and present need not deprive her of maneuvering room.

This book moves the Ostpolitik beyond Europe and the superpowers. Not that they are bypassed: while the GDR indeed gets no essay, Poland (Krzysztov Ruchniewicz) and Czechoslovakia (Oldřich Tůma) do; so do France (Marie-Pierre Rey), the U.S.S.R. (Andrey Edemskiy), and the U.S. (Holger Klitzing). But after that, it is anchors aweigh. We visit communist China (Bernd Schaefer), nonaligned India (Amit Das Gupta), and divided Korea (Meung-Hoan Noh); call on the diplomatically beleaguered South Africans (Tilman Dedering) and Israelis (Carole Fink); then reenter Europe via communist-but-nonaligned Yugoslavia (Milan Kosanović). Coursing homeward, we are afforded a glimpse at how Bonn parleyed nuclear military abstinence into both intra-allied moral leverage and extra-allied proliferative commercialism (William Glenn Gray). Framing the specialized essays, the coeditors supply a thematic introduction and conclusion.

Good local guides help us sort our impressions. Braving rank-and-file skeptics who compared the Moscow Treaty to the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Brezhnev, writes Edemskiy, used his “risky” (p. 16) German Westpolitik to differentiate himself within the collective leadership; thus, party officials who cleaved toward the GDR found themselves demoted. Christian Democratic hardliners, Edemskiy argues, endangered this fateful Soviet turn. Yet in the end, Soviet technological hubris, suspiciousness about “Social Democratization,” and Brezhnev's congenital cronyism limited his follow-up.

Suspicions, adds Klitzing, also plagued Washington. Consistent with the Nixon Doctrine's notion of reducing American risks through regional devolution, National Security staffer Helmut Sonnenfeldt rejoiced that the Ostpolitik “Germanizes the German question” (p. 107), permitting the superpowers to focus on arms control. But despite close German-American coordination, Sonnenfeldt's boss, Henry Kissinger, worried that a policy that reduced Bonn's American dependence also created an opening for Soviet mischief. While facilitating regional change was not incompatible with defusing global risk, prioritizing the former might make Bonn susceptible to Soviet blandishments. As Rey notes, Paris overcame analogous trepidations, fearing Soviet efforts to spark a Franco-German bidding war or to neutralize or “Finlandize” Germany (pp. 116–117).

Given Kissinger's misgivings, Klitzing finds it ironic that, in demanding a Berlin accord as the price for ratifying the Moscow Treaty, Brandt and not Kissinger provided “the decisive linkages” (p. 94) that subsequently catalyzed the superpowers' own détente. It is a striking point, albeit overstressed. It was Kissinger who leveraged Berlin by multiplying its linkages, and it was Nixon who played the China card, whose German relevance Mary Sarotte has elsewhere demonstrated. Seeking to gain Soviet trust, Brandt, writes Bernd Schaefer here, delayed playing this card himself. This in turn led to problems with the Chinese, who perceived the Ostpolitik as freeing the Soviets to concentrate on Asia. But East Berlin's failure to heed Chinese warnings of a Soviet sellout confirmed Beijing's view that the GDR was a Soviet “vassal” (p. 131). After Kissinger's secret mid-1971 visit, the Chinese tilted toward West Germany.

The Bangladesh crisis and Indo-Pakistani War (also in 1971) erupted between the conclusion of the Moscow and Basic (German-German) Treaties. With Pakistan mediating Sino-American contact, nonaligned India sought Soviet support. While the Soviets might have demanded a landmark act of third-world recognition for the GDR, they proved more interested, writes Das Gupta, in European détente. With parliamentary ratification of the Moscow Treaty still pending, the Kremlin tolerated Indian sympathy for Brandt, who echoed the Nehru-like notion that the Third World's best hope lay in easing the Cold War. Wanting to balance their Soviet connection, the Indians could see little advantage in displeasing Bonn by outrunning the latter's own policy of movement.

In apartheid South Africa, Prime Minister Vorster invoked the impulse toward détente to seek German-aided diplomatic openings to the surrounding states. But racial exclusivism, writes Dedering, precluded any such facilitation. As for divided Korea (in the pre-“Sunshine” Park era), Noh interprets mimicking gestures that were meant to blunt a Brandt-like policy as though they were earnest efforts to emulate it.

The eastern/southern European essays provide new details on how Brandt's astute gestures of expiation and use of investment credits to mask restitution payments (“the future instead of the past,” p. 237) won influence for Bonn and emigration permits for ethnic Germans. But the Ostpolitik, as Carole Fink shows, hurt West German-Israeli relations. Bonn's eastern negotiating partners prevented Jewish emigration and armed Israel's Arab enemies. Far from challenging those policies, Brandt even wooed the Arab states directly. Considering itself the antithesis of the past, his government felt unconstrained by the memory-hugging “special” relations to which Israel clung for legitimization and security. Ironically, Brandt's skillful moral enhancement of his maneuvering room thus spelled danger and isolation for Israel. The morally obtuse aftermath of the Olympic massacre of Israeli athletes in Munich (Bonn traded three Palestinian perpetrators for skyjacking hostages), the Yom Kippur War one year later (1973), and the resultant oil shocks exacerbated the tension.

From eastern and southern Europe to east and south Asia, the Ostpolitik spawned sympathy and understanding for West Germany and encouraged correct rather than forthcoming relations with East Germany. Yet, this global resonance was possible only because the policy's moral claims transcended local self-interest. Despite its own moral problems, the Ostpolitik was “normative,” notes Gray (p. 244), in the sense that it was “intended to define standards of behavior for countries large and small.” To the editors, then, the Ostpolitik was less a harmony than a “counterpoint” (p. 269) to the superpowers' détente. Whereas America aimed at stabilizing global management, Brandt concentrated on incorporating regional initiative. Meanwhile, Soviet permission to cooperate with Bonn led to uncoordinated separate arrangements by the needy and mutually suspicious satellite states.

That Brandt's policies overcame Communist efforts to cast West Germany as a bogeyman seems beyond doubt; that the Basic Treaty immediately made the prospect of German reunification “more real” and encouraged “acceptance” of its “inevitability” (p. 272) seems an unwarranted projection. But Brandt's efforts to burnish Federal Germany's image and to offer a normative diplomatic model reverberated worldwide. As a step toward globalizing our understanding of the Ostpolitik, this volume accurately reflects Brandt's times and Brandt's ambition. It is a first-rate contribution to the literature.