Until the advent of the typewriter and the copy machine, the drafting of document was a laborious process, limiting official papers to important matters of substance. And until the advent of the telegraph, communications were too slow for detailed tactical directions. Instructions to diplomats were, of necessity, conceptual. The foreign offices of even the Great Powers could do little more than convey general objectives and strategy; the appropriate tactics had to be improvised on the spot. Diplomatic reports, in turn, were obliged to be similarly conceptual. They needed to explain the relationship between what had occurred and the strategy that had been conveyed. At times — albeit rarely — a change in strategy could be requested by the diplomat. In either case, diplomatic documents were largely analytical.
Before printing, knowledge had to be based largely on memory. To establish any unified knowledge, it was necessary to concentrate on texts on which everyone could agree — essentially religious texts and epic poems. The medieval period was therefore inherently a religious age.
The printing press dramatically enlarged the range of available knowledge. No longer limited to the religious or the epic, human awareness exploded into the secular world. Science explored heretofore unimaginable areas; political legitimacy came to be increasingly based on secular criteria, on principles of reason rather than divine right. The range of knowledge grew exponentially.
Withal, knowledge from books had its limits. Reading is relatively difficult and time-consuming; to ease the process, style is important, increasing the appreciation of aesthetics. Since it is not possible to read all books on a given subject, much less the totality of all books, or to organize easily everything one has read, learning from books placed a premium on conceptual thinking — the ability to recognize comparable data and events and project them into the future. In this manner, the prevalent state of technology conferred a premium on learning dependent on perspective — in politics and foreign affairs, via a sense of history.
The computer has, to a considerable extent, solved the problem of acquiring, preserving, and retrieving knowledge. Data can be stored in unlimited quantities and in manageable form. The push of a button retrieves it; there is no need to store it in one’s memory or to undertake complex research to compile it. The mind can therefore be trained for other purposes. The computer makes available a range of data inconceivable in the age of books. It packages it effectively; style is no longer needed to make it accessible, thus destroying one element of aesthetics. In dealing with a single decision separated from its context, the computer supplies tools unimaginable even a decade ago.
But it also shrinks perspective. Because knowledge is so accessible and communication so instantaneous, there is a lack of training in its significance. Policymakers are forever tempted to wait for a case to arise before dealing with it; manipulation replaces reflection as the principal policy tool. But the dilemmas of foreign policy are not only — or perhaps even primarily — the by-product of contemporary events; rather they are the end product of the historical process that shaped them. Modern decision-making is overwhelmed not only by contemporary facts but by the immediate echo which overwhelms perspective. Instant punditry and the egalitarian conception that any view is as valid as any other combine with a cascade of immediate symptoms to crush a sense of perspective.
However different the great statesmen of history, they had in common as sense of the past and a vision of the future. The contemporary statesman is constantly seduced by tactics. The irony is that mastery of facts may lead to loss of understanding of the subject matter and, indeed, control over it. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an adventure in shaping the future.
The problem of most of previous periods was that purposes outran knowledge. The challenge of our period is the opposite: knowledge is far outrunning purposes. The task for the US therefore is not only to reconcile its power and its morality but to temper its faith with wisdom.
But Vietnam was a symbol, not a cause, of the national trauma of the 1970s, which arose from the gap that had opened between historic convictions regarding America’s mission and the practical challenges of a new international environment. For the greatest part of our history, the US had been sufficiently powerful and remote from the rest of the world to sustain the assumption that, alone among the major nations of the world, we had the choice of whether or not to commit ourselves to an international role and that, if we chose to, we would be able to overcome in a definite time frame whatever challenge had elicited our involvement.
As the Cold War progressed, both assumptions were proved largely wrong. We found ourselves involved in conflicts in parts of the world most Americans could not locate in their atlases for causes which either were ambiguous or which seemed to require enormous exertions with no end in sight.
The form of this rebellion was in a classically American mold: not as a quest to understand better the emerging new world but as an effort to oblige it to conform to our maxims of to our power. Rejecting limits, both poles of the American domestic debate put forward an increasingly assertive and militant Wilsonianism. One group charged that the inconclusive nature — as it seemed to them — of our international role was due to having strayed from Wilsonian idealism. In their view, our frustrations could be ended by a rededication to the spread of democracy around the world by conversion if possible, by pressure if necessary. We were failing in Vietnam, that group argued, and were embroiled in difficulties elsewhere because we had chosen means incompatible with our moral values in support of leaders unable or unwilling to act on our principles. It was a demand for moral cleansing — if necessary, by means of a temporary period of withdrawal — as a prelude to creating a new world order reflecting America’s version of order.
The opposite criticism held that what frustrated us was not moral shortcomings but our inhibitions against the full deployment of our power in pursuit of our existing values. The Cold War was winnable and universal peace could be achieved, it was argued, not just by attrition — as official policy held — but by ideological mobilization and deliberate confrontation.
This philosophical debate masquerading as a political contest buffered the entire period of the Ford Administration. The real issues were rarely those dominating the headlines but invariably resulted from conflicting assumptions about the nature of American foreign policy. Based on our improving relations with our allies, the triangular diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing in which we were in the driver’s seat, our domination of Middle East diplomacy, and our blunting of Third World radicalism, we thought we had demonstrated that a wise foreign policy would blend morality and power rather than risk everything on pursuing one or the other. Our message of balance ran up against the Wilsonian sense of American mission; we affirmed gradualism, the critics urged fulfillment.
The difficulty of achieving a sense of proportion was magnified during the Ford presidency because the intellectual community, which might have provided perspective and ballast, was itself in the process of transforming into another political interest group. When I started in academic life in the early 1950s, professors did not view themselves as participants in the policy process. To have an impact on policy, they were generally obliged to advance a mid- or long-term view. This, it turned out, was also most helpful to policymakers ever in danger of succumbing to the urgent at the expense of the important, to the expedient over the long-range.
JFK’s presidency changed all that. Never had so many intellectuals attained policymaking positions, automatically raising the expectation in the minds of those not yet summoned that they were potential policymakers as well. It was not an unmixed blessing. For it foreshortened the perspective of intellectuals on the outside but ambitious to participate by focusing them on the immediate and the tactical. It also subjected those in office to the kind of jealous backbiting characteristic of university faculties.
This was the real issue between me and much of the academic community at the time. Having found a haven from Nazi tyranny in the US, I had personally experienced what our nation meant to the rest of the world, especially to the persecuted and disadvantaged. Therefore I viewed the Vietnam experience as the consequence of an American idealism which, in its exuberance for global reform, had strayed into regions where the relationship between ends and means had been lost. The radicals were railing against the alleged flaws of “Amerika” and interpreted them as symptoms of an incipient totalitarianism. I saw in the honorable extrication from Vietnam a challenge from which our country could learn the complexities of a world in which our desire for peace was limited by our commitment to the nation’s honor. But the liberal critics would not tolerate this equation. For them, there was only one route to national redemption, which was to make peace on any terms — if necessary, by jettisoning everything for which we had fought. The debate was not over policy but over America’s worthiness to conduct any foreign policy at all.
With the emergence of the neoconservative challenge, the roles were reversed. To the radicals of the Vietnam protest, our policy was much too hard-line; to the conservative and especially the neoconservative critics, it appeared far too accommodating. They insisted on two propositions: that the challenges to peace invariably arose from non-democratic governments, and that therefore the US had an obligation to advance the cause of democracy in all countries simultaneously and by use of sanctions, at the very least; and that human rights was our most effective weapon with which to undermine and defeat our Communist adversaries.
I agreed with the goal but considered the conclusions too simplified. In the West, democracy did not result from a single decision but rather from an evolution extending over centuries. The unique features of the Western pluralistic evolution began with the Catholic Church, which, while hardly democratic in its internal organization, did create the basis for it by insisting on its own distinct governance and by defining the moral order as having a claim superior to that of the state.
This separation of authority between God and Caesar amounted to the first step toward political pluralism and the limitation of state power. Centuries later, pluralism became institutionalized when the Reformation broke up the Universal Church by emphasizing the role of the individual conscience. These trends were accelerated by the Enlightenment, which stressed the dominance of reason; by the Age of Discovery, which stretched the intellectual horizons; and by capitalism, which rewarded individual autonomy and initiative and enlarged the middle class.
No other culture has produced a similar evolution. In Islamic societies, the separation of mosque and state is complicated because, for the true believers, the words of the Koran must permeate every aspect even of secular life. Inevitably secularization leads to tensions with religion. In most Confucian societies, neither religion nor nongovernmental groups have had the organization, the autonomy, or the doctrine to encourage the emergence of an alternative center of political authority.
Activists perform a service in recalling us to first principles. But policymakers need to show some humility in translating these appeals into day-to-day actions. In many countries, pluralistic democracy is likely to evolve only gradually, obliging us in the meantime to deal with governments occasionally falling short of our norms on human rights because other important interests are involved. If we treat all these issues as resolvable only by the overthrow of the offending government — or by its public surrender to American pressures — we will turn every problem into a life-or-death struggle, actually inhibiting progress on human rights. Our foreign policy must leave room for measures to influence the practices of other societies without being perceived as trying to undermine them.
Much of the anguish of foreign policy results from the need to establish priorities among competing, sometimes conflicting, necessities. This requires relating American idealism to the pragmatic imperatives of a given situation. The refusal to accept this dualism tends to conflate foreign policy and domestic politics as competing groups seek to impose their passionate views of justice on particular concerns to them. Oversimplification tempts the US into simultaneous overextension and abdication, into seeking to impose its views of appropriate domestic structures by sanctions and pressure or else to invoke the alleged moral shortcomings of potential partners as an alibi for isolationism.
The philosophical struggle that rent the US during my government service could have been overcome by strong presidential moral leadership of the kind FDR had demonstrated, in which he guided his isolationist country into WW2. But the two Presidents I served did not play this role. Richard Nixon had the background in international affairs and the record. He often gave thoughtful speeches but, as I have explained, he was more comfortable outmaneuvering than persuading his critics. And Gerald Ford, coming into office unelected, had neither the experience nor the formal background to lead a conceptual debate — though I believe that, had he been granted a second term, his combination of integrity, common sense, and courage might have enabled him to rebuild the necessary consensus.
American idealism, the underlying cause of the national debate on both sides of the argument, is, of course, a symptom of America’s strength — an expression of faith that our society is eternally able to renew itself, transcend history, and reshape reality. But we must take care that rebellion against the very concept of limits does not become the permanent feature of the American response to international politics. For the recognition of some constraints is an attribute, perhaps the price, of maturing in societies as well as in people. The test of a society is not the denial but the proper understanding of its constraints. Mediocre societies and statesmen limit themselves to the easily attainable. Great societies and statesmen strive at the outer reaches of their possibilities. But the denial of any limits leads to exhaustion or disaster.
For any student of history, change is the law of life. Any attempt to contain it guarantees an explosion down the road; the more rigid the adherence to the status quo, the more violent the ultimate outcome will be. But it is also one of the lessons of history that the more abrupt the change, the greater needs to be the violence to bring it into being. Fortunate is the society or the international order which can evolve organically without violence — or at least excessive violence — and without stunting growth. In such circumstances, a sense of shared obligations replaces force, and progress is achieved by consensus. The US — with the single exception of the Civil War — has found itself in such a situation. And so have international orders which witnessed long periods without major war.
But the more abrupt the upheaval, the less reliance there can be on consensus. Force must replace a sense of obligation. Victory is prized over continuity; opponents are eradicated, not persuaded. The great symbols of this attitude are the conqueror and the prophet. The conqueror makes no secret of his design; his mission is to impose his will, though if his conquest last, he must sooner or later transform dominance into a sense of obligation. This is how empires achieve legitimacy.
The prophet’s role is more subtle. Though his cause is based on proclaimed values, his claims are for this reason even more universal and insistent. Righteousness is the parent of fanaticism and intolerance. Opponents are extirpated — often, it is alleged, for their own good. Reigns of terror become necessities, not aberrations. The symbol of such a period is the commissar who kills millions without love and without hatred in the pursuit of an abstract duty. This is why crusades have often created as much havoc and suffering as conquests.
The totalitarian horrors of the 20th century should have brought home to us the fragility of the restraints that embody civilization. The domestic experience of the US, peaceful, stable, and content, inhibits our capacity to understand the vulnerabilities of other societies or international orders. Blessed by history and a benign environment, we are tempted to view our power as a dispensation and to use it to impose our preferences. Such an attitude runs the risks of being viewed as hegemonic by the rest of the world and will gradually be opposed by it. Excessive reliance on power and excessive insistence on our virtue may wind up corroding the very values in the name of which our policy is being conducted.
And we laid the basis for mastering the energy crisis. It was an extraordinary period of testing, but statesmen do not have the right to ask to serve only in simple times.
As Secretary of State I was responsible for a much broader range of problems than as the national security adviser, who has the luxury of selecting those issues that seem of paramount importance. More important, it fell to me to attempt to insulate foreign policy as much as possible from the domestic catastrophe. This role, imposed by necessity and by a seeming national instinct for survival, was buttressed in many fields by a bipartisan consensus that created almost a separate protected political process for the international conduct of the American government.
If Nixon was ready to bend this principle it showed how weak he had become.
I took the calls with mixed feelings. What might have been a simple moment of gratification was beset with deep anxiety, for the news conference dramatized how much the Administration was under siege. We were straining all our efforts to prevent the unraveling of the nation’s foreign policy as Nixon’s Presidency, and with it all executive authority, slowly disintegrated. I had achieved an office I had never imagined within my reach; yet I did not feel like celebrating. I could not erase from my mind the poignant thought of Richard Nixon so alone and beleaguered and, beneath the frozen surface, fearful just a few yards away while I was reaching the zenith of acclaim.
The bureaucratic pressures and personal rivalries that are such an integral part of life in Washington had lost much of their meaning for me. For I had decided to resign by the end of the year.
A few year earlier, at the height of some bureaucratic struggle or other, I had told William Safire, then a Presidential speech writer, that my victories were bound bo be both temporary and fragile. To continue my influence, I had to win every bureaucratic battle; to destroy my authority, a Cabinet member needed only one success. Such odds were not survivable over the long run. I had in fact avoided them for a full Presidential term, but there was no sense in courting fate with a new, able, and psychologically fresh group.
For 4 years I had read every scrap of information about the North Vietnamese, at once so self-absorbed and so bellicose, so brave and so overbearing. What is the blend of qualities that lifts a people to dominion over neighbors of roughly comparable endowments? What had given Rome preeminence in the world of city-states or Prussia in Germany or Britain in Europe? No doubt many physical factors were involved. But material elements needed the impetus of intangibles of faith and dedication. These — unfortunately for us — Hanoi had in obsessive abundance.
Lacking the humanity of their Laotian neighbors and the grace of their Cambodian neighbors, they strove for dominance by being not attractive but single-minded. So all-encompassing was their absorption with themselves that they became oblivious to the physical odds, indifference to the probabilities by which the calculus of power is normally reckoned.
More than passion the Vietnamese had an invincible self-confidence and a contempt for things foreign. This disdain enabled them to manipulate other peoples — even their foreign supporters — with a cool sense of superiority, by an act of will turning their capital for over a decade into a center of international concern.
To be sure, its geographic location at the junction of the French and British colonial spheres made it a natural buffer between European empires. But such a location had more often led to partition than to independence.
In any event, opportunity never translates itself into reality automatically. Thailand had maintained its independence because its leaders skillfully exploited its geographic position to rescue a margin of independence from the rivalry of physically stronger states; because it had a cultural identity relatively immune to subversion from neighboring countries; and above all the cause its policy had the resilience of a bamboo reed but also its toughness.
During WW2, Thailand supported Japan when the latter’s conquest made its predominant in Southeast Asia; it switched to the Allies when Japan’s defeat became inevitable. It accomplished these gyrations with such matter-of-fact grace that they appeared not as treachery but as the natural conclusions drawn by a self-confident nationalism. Thailand seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of leaders to embody the exact nuance of policy needed for a given circumstance. When conditions changed, the leader was discarded (though never deprived of honor). There was a personality for each situation, all sharing commitment to Thai independence. My friend LKY, the brilliant PM of Singapore, used to say that we needed to watch carefully when the Thai leaders associated with us would be replaced; it would herald a sea change, whatever the formal protestations.
The attempts to behave in a friendly manner were so studied and took so much exertion that they created their own tension; the slightest disagreement tended to bring to the fore the underlying suspicion and resentment.
Hanoi’s leaders soon showed that they had lost none of the insolence that for years had set our teeth on edge. My opposite number in these talks was Pham Van Dong, PM of the DRV for nearly 20 years. But the change of personality brought no alteration in the familiar style of condescending superiority or of deception masquerading as moral homily.
He was not — indeed, could not be — a partner, any more than Vietnam was China. Pham Van Dong represented a people who had prevailed by unremitting tenacity; Zhou Enlai was the leader of a country that had made its mark through cultural preeminence and majesty of conduct. Pham Van Dong’s strength was monomaniacal absorption with the ambitions of one country; Zhou was quintessentially Chinese in his conviction that China’s performance was morally relevant to the rest of the world. Pham Van Dong was of the stuff of which revolutionary heroes are made. Zhou, while a revolutionary himself, was of the stuff of which great leaders are made.
Perhaps no major nation has been so uncomfortable with the exercise of vast power as the US. We have tended to consider war as “unnatural,” as an interruption of our vocation of peace, prosperity, and liberty. No other society has considered it a national duty to contribute to the rebuilding of a defeated enemy; after WW2 we made it a central element of our foreign policy. In Vietnam we thought it a device to induce an undefeated enemy to accept compromise terms. The reverse side of our faith in what we consider positive goals is a difficulty in coming to grips with irreconcilable conflict, with implacable revolutionary zeal, with men who prefer victory to economic progress and who remain determined to prevail regardless of material cost.
When one breaks free of the monochrome drabness, the stifling conformity, the indifference to the uniqueness of the human personality, the result is a sudden easing of tensions, a feeling akin to exhilaration. Hanoi, as I have said, was probably the grimmest. In striking contrast, the very self-indulgence of Hong Kong’s rampant materialism was a garish reminder of the manifold human spirit.
The Chinese used my stay in HK for one of the subtle signs of goodwill that conveys simultaneously the futility of trying to outthink a people who have specialized in awing visitors for 3000 years.
A common danger clears the mind of trivialities; a further advance in our relations was clearly desirable to demonstrate that we had an interest in China’s territorial integrity.
To Zhou, China’s conflict with the Soviet Union was both ineradicable and beyond its capacity to manage by itself. One of the ironies of relations among Communist countries is that Communist ideology, which always claimed that it would end international conflict, has in fact made it intractable. In systems based on infallible truth there can be only one authorized interpretation; a rival claim to represent true orthodoxy is a mortal challenge.
In this ill-defined vastness sovereignty in the contemporary sense is a new phenomenon; borders have swayed back and forth throughout history with the ambition and power of the contending parties. Much of Central Asia was appropriated by the tsars only in the 19th century and was now governed by the new rulers in the Kremlin who have rejected the entire legacy of their predecessors except their conquests. All this alone would have doomed China and Russia to reciprocal paranoia. The superimposition of ideological conflict and personal jealousies turned inherent rivalry into obsession.
No Soviet leader could overlook the demographic realities. Close to 1B Chinese were pressing against a frontier that their government official did not recognize — in Chinese high school textbooks large area of Siberia are shown as Chinese — confronting a mere 30M Russians in a barren Siberia so forbidding to the Soviet nationalities that throughout history it has had to be forcibly colonized by convict labor.
No negotiation would be able to remove the Soviet military preponderance, which might last for decades, nor the Chinese demographic edge, which would last forever. Even were Soviet forces “thinned out” as part of some hypothetical deal, they could always return in a matter of weeks. And no “compromise” of Chinese boundary claims could alter the fact that sometime in the next generation the disparity between Soviet and Chinese power in Asia would first narrow and then tilt the other way; from then on, Siberia’s future would increasingly depend on Peking’s goodwill, which no Chinese government could ensure for eternity.
Indeed, during my secret visit in 1971, Zhou had specifically mentioned the possibility that Europe, the Soviet Union, Japan, and we might decide to carve China up again, though the professed indifference to ambitions that he was confident of defeating. The attitude was characteristic: China sought its safety in a reputation of ferocious intractability, in creating an impression, probably accurate, that it would defend its honor and integrity at any cost. It acted as if the smallest concession would start it down a slippery slope and hence had to be resisted as fiercely as an overt challenge to the national survival.
But the US possessed neither the conceptual nor the historical framework for so cold-blooded a policy. The many different strands that make up American thinking on foreign policy have so far inhospitable to an approach based on the calculation of the national interest and relationships of power. Americans are comfortable with an idealistic tradition that espouses great causes, such as making the world safe for democracy, or human rights. American pragmatism calls for the management of “trouble spots” as they arise, “on their merits,” which is another way of waiting for events — the exact opposite of the Chinese approach. There is a tradition of equating international conflicts with legal disputes and invoking juridical mechanisms for their resolution, a view considered naive by the Chinese, who treat international law as the reflection and not the origin of the global equilibrium. The legacy of America’s historical invulnerability makes us profoundly uncomfortable with the notion of the balance of power, and with its corollary that encroachments must be dealt with early (when they do not appear so clearly dangerous) lest they accumulate a momentum stoppable only by horrendous exertions, if at all.
The US in 1973 was still militarily more powerful than the USSR and would remain so in mobilizable strength for the indefinite future.
The US therefore had a margin for maneuver unavailable to China. The Soviet Union was likely to recoil before confrontation with us, if we could only convey our determination sufficiently clearly; nor were we likely to be given ultimatums. A Soviet Union confined to its national territory posed no unmanageable threat to the US. The danger to us was the rate of Soviet armament would fuel Soviet global adventurism against others. With our superior productive capacity, and that of our allies, we would be able to outproduce the Soviets, and if we understood our interests, we possessed the means to contain aggressive moves. The US therefore had the option of playing for time to see what modifications the Soviet system might undergo if it were firmly blocked as it dealt with its inherent stresses.
Peking did not enjoy this luxury; it was far more immediately threatened. Its greatest peril would arise, ironically, when it had settled its own internal schisms and began to grow economically at a steady rate. This would face the Soviet Union with the prospect that at some clearly predictable point China would become an unmanageable obstacle, especially in conjunction with the other countries Moscow was driving into an adversary status. Whenever Chinese growth appeared self-sustaining the Kremlin would be sorely tempted toward a preemptive attack, unless China was prepared to make drastic concessions to the Soviet Union.
For Peking there was no benefit and some risk in America’s dealings with Moscow. Even if the Chinese had some personal confidence in Nixon and me as his representative, they could not be certain how our successors would use the freedom of maneuver we had gained between the Communist capitals. And in any event no serious statesman of equilibrium rests his country’s security on personal trust in individuals. From the Chinese point of view, the worse US-Soviet relations were, the less China needed to worry about its strategic nightmare of a US-Soviet condominium; the better would be China’s bargaining position with respect to both superpowers.
Once it was clear that America was unable to prevent major aggression in Asia, Japan would begin to dissociate from us. Faced with a Soviet colossus free to concentrate entirely on the West, Europe would lose confidence and all its neutralist tendencies would accelerate. Southeast Asia, too, would bend to the dominant trend; the radical forces in the Middle East, South Asia, Africa, and even the Americas would gain the upper hand. Thus we could not possibly wish to encourage a Soviet assault on China. We would have, in my view, no choice except to help China resist.
The second possibility is, and the evidence seems to point more in that direction, that the Soviet Union has decided that it should pursue a more flexible strategy for the following objectives: to demoralize Western Europe by creating the illusion of peace; to use American technology to overcome the imbalance between its military and economic capability; to make it more difficult for the US to maintain its military capability by creating an atmosphere of detente and isolate those adversaries who are not fooled by this relaxation policy.
As I have said, America had no interest in a policy of unremitting, undifferentiated confrontation with the USSR as China undoubtedly preferred. We saw no need to become a card that Peking could play. China had to be able to count on American support against direct Soviet pressures threatening its independence of territorial integrity; it must not be permitted to maneuver us into unnecessary showdowns. Complex as it might be to execute such a tactic, it was always better for us to be closer to either Moscow or Peking than either was to the other — except in the limiting case of a Soviet attack on China.
By the same token we had to resist the temptation of playing the China card in our turn. To strengthen ties with China as a device, to needle the Soviet Union would run the dual risk of tempting a Soviet preemptive attack on China — inviting the very disaster we sought to avoid — and of giving Peking the unnerving impression that, just as we tightened our bonds to respond to Soviet intransigence, we might relax them in response to Soviet conciliation. China would be transformed from a weight in the scale into an object of bargaining — an approach quite incompatible with the necessities that brought about the rapprochement in the first place.
He could not understand why Europe was so reluctant to transform its economic strength into military power, or why a continent capable of defending itself would insist on relying on a distant ally. It was clear that China, if it had comparable resources, would not accept a similar dependency.
A unified Communist Vietnam in Indochina was a strategic nightmare for China even if ideology prevented reality from being explicitly stated.
For all the years of the Vietnam war, Peking had been building a foothold in Laos on the flank of the advancing North Vietnamese to counteract the possible domination of its presumed ally over all Indochina!
It was astonishing for a leader of the country that considered itself the fount of revolution to state that the complete communization of a country might magnify its problems. But it was the truth. Complete communization would render Sihanouk irrelevant, demoralized Saigon, and virtually hand Indochina to Hanoi.
He was prepared to discuss technical arrangements immediately — thus proving that he had given our “proposal” more thought than we had.
The emphasis on personality in a Marxist system that in theory asserted the predominant role of material factors and historical forces was astonishing. It was as if the titanic figure who had risen from humble origins to rule nearly a quarter of mankind did not trust the permanence of the ideology in whose name he had prevailed. Challenging the gods, he sought immortality in the adoration of those vast millions who had endured the passage of so many conquerors, who had absorbed so much forced transformation only to transcend events by their endurance, their practicality, and their pervasive humanity.
And Mao sensed the ephemerality of this acclaim; sycophancy was the device of the least trustworthy. Dreading the fate of the Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, who had revolutionized China for 20 years only to sink into the oblivion reserved for those who presume to alter China’s elemental rhythms, Mao may have accelerated what he was so eager to avoid. By attempting to inflict upon his country the tour de force of a permanent revolution he also reawakened the historical Chinese yearning for continuity. The Chinese people have survived not by exaltation but by perseverance, not by spurts but by a steady pace. They have become great by a unique blend of culture, common sense, and self-discipline. Their greatest leaders find themselves assimilated sooner or later by this enduring mass of individualists who will suffer but not change their essential character and who understand, even when they cannot articulate, that in China ultimate stature goes to those who can reduce historic goals to the human scale. The Chinese people are talented but also skeptical, aspiring but also conscious that no one man’s intuition, however tremendous, can provide the answer to the dilemmas of history.
And Mao immediately gave this commonplace significance by stressing one of the basic principles of Chinese statecraft: the maneuvering for petty advantage is shortsighted and that we should do nothing to undermine mutual confidence. “Let us not speak false words or engaged in trickery. We don’t steal your documents. You can deliberately leave them somewhere and try us out.” There was no sense in running small risks, Mao was saying. And while he was at it he questioned the utility of big intelligence operations as well. Indeed, he considered intelligence services generally overrated. Once they knew what the political leaders wanted, their reports came in “as so many many snowflakes.” But on really crucial matters they usually failed. The Chinese services had not know about Lin Biao’s plotting nor about my desire to come, he said. He suspected that our intelligence agencies gave us the same problem.
In short, large goals required farsighted policies, not tactical maneuvering.
So long as the objectives are the same, we would not harm you nor would you harm us. Actually it would be that sometime we want to criticize you for a while and you want to criticize us for a while. That, your President said, is the ideological influence. You say, “away with you Communists!” We say, “away with you imperialists!” Sometimes we say things like that. It would not do to do that.
In Mao’s view the US would serve the common interest best by taking a leading role in world affairs, by which he meant constructing an anti-Soviet alliance. Long gone was the day when Peking denounced the American system of alliances as an imperialist device; in its current view they had become pillars of international security.
Personalities were not, however, the heart of China’s domestic problem. What confronted Mao in his last days was the centuries-old dilemma of Chinese modernization. Historically, China has established its preeminence more frequently by the force of its example and its cultural superiority than through the displays of raw power that have characterized the political history of Europe. Indeed, China has been so dominant in Asia for centuries that it has had not direct experience with the notions of balance of power or sovereign equality in its own sphere. (All the more remarkable how adept it became at it when the outside world gave no other choice.) Other societies have been considered not in equilibrium but in some sort of tributary relationship to China. So firmly established was the concept of Chinese majesty that its rulers often considered it prudent to make larger gifts to their vassals than they received in tribute.
It was a massive shock when in the 19th century China learned that the barbarians of the West had acquired a technology that could enable them to impose their will on the Middle Kingdom as well as on other Asian states. But while Japan reacted to the same challenge by deciding to modernize at whatever cost (and miraculously preserved its individuality in the process), China was not prepared to hazard its culture on which it based its claim to greatness. Modern technology is universal; it brings with it a degree of standardization that carries uniformity in its train. To be like everyone else was to the Chinese a repellent thought. Technology and modernization thus threatened China as no other nation, for they challenged its essence, its claim to uniqueness.
Deliberately, China rejected the Japanese route; it encapsulated itself in its traditions, relying on its marvelous diplomatic skill and self-assurance to ward off the hated (and feared) foreign devils. And China in fact fared better than any other nation where European colonizers established themselves. By manipulating the rivalries and greed of the imperialist powers, China maintained a larger margin of independence than any other country in a comparable position.
Mao’s revolution reflected the same historic Chinese ambivalence. In a curious way it was both a rebellion against China’s old values and a confirmation of them. Maoism sought to overcome China’s past but like traditional Confucianism it saw society as an ethical and educational instrument, though infused with a diametrically opposite doctrine fashioned by the peasant’s son from rural Hunan province. The object of the Great Cultural Revolution unleashed by Mao in 1966 — and where else bu tin China would a bloody political upheaval call itself “cultural”? — was precisely the eradication of those elements of modernity that were not uniquely Chinese, an assault on the Western influences and bureaucratization that threatened to level China and absorb it into a universal culture.
By February 1973, when we met, the aged Chairman had realized that while his latest grandiose conception had dramatized his country’s independence, it had simultaneously doomed it to impotence. He knew now — if perhaps only as a transient conviction — that China’s continuing to live apart from the rest of the world would ensure its irrelevance and expose it to untold danger. China, he indicated not without melancholy, would have to go to school abroad.
The Nixon Administration did not have much use for either club. Its key members mistrusted the Federal City as too liberal and the Metropolitan as too Establishment. Nothing could better signify their isolation from the permanent community of the nation’s capital and political life — an isolation that contributed to their undoing.
As a nation, we have been shaken by the realization of our fallibility, and it has been painful to grasp that we are no longer pristine, if we ever were. Later than any nation, we have come to the recognition of our limits. In coming to a recognition of our limits, we have achieved one of the definitions of maturity, but the danger is that we will learn that lesson too well; that instead of a recognition that we cannot do everything, we will fall into the illusion that we cannot do anything.
Nothing is more urgent right now than a serious and compassionate debate of where we are going, because if we lose the capacity for great conception, we can be administered but not governed. I first saw government at a high level over a decade ago, at a time which is now occasionally debunked as overly brash, excessively optimistic, even somewhat arrogant. Some of these criticisms are justified, but a spirit prevailed then which was quintessential American: that problems are a challenge, not an alibi; that men are measured not only by their success, but also by their striving; that it is better to aim grandly than to wallow in mediocre comfort. Above al, the Administration then in office, and its opponents, thought of themselves engaged in a common enterprise, not in a permanent, irreconcilable contest.
In the 1920s, we were isolationists because we thought we were too good for this world. We are now in danger of withdrawing from the world because we believe we are not good enough for it. The result is the same and the consequences would be similar. So it is time to end our own civil war.
To be sure, we should leaven our optimism with a sense of tragedy, and temper our idealism with humility and realism. But we have had enough of the liturgies of debate, and what we need most is the unity of which Senator Cooper spoke, which is the prerequisite for mastering the future and overcoming the past.
The fact was that there was no true Nixon; several warring personalities struggled for preeminence in the same individual. One was idealistic, thoughtful, generous; another was vindictive, petty, emotional. The was a decisive, philosophical, stoical Nixon; and there was an impetuous, impulsive, and erratic one. One could never be certain which Nixon was dominant from meeting to meeting. Nor was it wise to act upon an impulsive instruction without making sure that the reflective Nixon had had a crack at it. Strangely enough, the thoughtful analytical side of Nixon was most in evidence during crises, while periods of calm seemed to unleash the darker passions of his nature.
If his decency reduced his effectiveness in the more brutal sparring of high-level government, it also gave depth to his role as a conscience for the President and as confidant to his friends. His title, Special Consultant to the President, was grand enough, but without a specific area of responsibility; he had no regular access to the President or a day-to-day schedule.
As a general rule, influence in the White House must not be judged by job descriptions. Many unwary neophytes are enticed into service by promises of constant contact with the President. But influence on Presidential decisions depends more on the substantive mandate than on theoretical access to the Oval Office. Whatever the President’s intentions, he is usually overscheduled. Inevitably, he faces problems requiring more decisions than he can comfortably handle. Conversation not related to his agenda, no matter how stimulating or instructive, soon becomes a burden. If the adviser agrees with the bureaucracy, he is a waste of time. If he disagrees and even if he should convince the President, he raises the problem of how to marshal bureaucratic support so as to implement the suggested course. I can think of no exception to the rule that advisers without a clear-cut area of responsibility eventually are pushed to the periphery by day-to-day operators. The other White House aides resent interference in their spheres. The schedulers become increasingly hesitant in finding time on the President’s calendar.
A massive purge in the 5th year of a Presidency raises profound doubts about the incumbent’s judgment for not having spotted the malfeasance earlier.
I met no one in public life for whom I developed greater respect and affection. Highly analytical, calm and unselfish, Shultz made up in integrity and judgment for his lack of the flamboyance by which some of his more insecure colleagues attempted to make their mark. He never sought personal advancement. By not threatening anyone’s prerogatives, and, above all, by his outstanding performance, he became the dominant member of every committee he joined. He usually wound up being asked to sum up a meeting — a role that gave him influence without his aiming for it. If I could choose one American to whom I would entrust the nation’s fate in a crisis, it would be George Shultz.
It was easy to underestimate Arthur Burns. As he puffed on his pipe while considering a proposition, he seemed to be a fuzzy-minded, slightly abstracted academic, and indeed he had been a professor at Columbia University for three decades. His deliberate manner of speaking might be occasionally taken by the unwary as a reflection of the pace of his mind. But Burns had an unusual ability to get swiftly to the heart of any problem. He was both brilliant and incredibly persistent; and he proved to be one of the canniest bureaucratic infighters in Washington. He had not been filling his pipe reflectively throughout the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations without studying and learning what made government tick. He worked patiently at lining up support for his position; he lost few battles while I observed him in action. Yet this did not diminish the admiration for his integrity, dedication, and subtle intelligence held by those of us whom he usually outmaneuvered.
Whether the strategic stakes justified such a massive American involvement in Vietnam must be doubted in retrospect. But once American forces are committed, there is no logical or valid goal except to prevail. The Kennedy and Johnson administrations trapped themselves between their convictions and their inhibitions, making a commitment large enough to hazard our global position but then executing it with so much hesitation as to defeat their purpose. They engaged us in Indochina for the objective of defeating a global conspiracy and then failed to press a military solution for fear of sparking a global conflict — a fear that was probably as exaggerated as the original assessment. There are no awards for losing with moderation; neither domestic nor foreign critics are placated by failure.
The process of an honorable withdrawal was inevitably confusing to a public that was still being asked to sacrifice in the name of an abstract, unprovable goal of maintaining America’s global credibility. Many of the young, on whom the burden of conscription fell, found a messy war in a faraway country incompatible with their ideals. For the first time in history, the average person could see the ugliness of war every evening on his TV screen. Thousands of decent and patriotic Americans from every walk of life were moved to protest against an enterprise that exacted such a human toll. At the same time, poll after poll showed the overwhelming majority of the American public unprepared to accept an outright, humiliating American defeat. The result was an intractable and increasingly bitter domestic stalemate.
The leadership group in America that had won the battle against isolationism in the 1940s and sustained a responsible American involvement in the world throughout the postwar period was profoundly demoralized by the Vietnam war. They, indeed, had launched their country in the 1960s into this war of inconclusive ends and ambiguous means. When it ran aground, they lost heart. The clarity of purpose that had given impetus to the great foreign policy initiatives of the late 1940s was unattainable in Indochina.
To that most vocal hard core of dissenters, the issue in Vietnam was not the wisdom of a particular American commitment but the validity of American policy in general and indeed of American society. They saw the war as a symptom of an evil, corrupt, militaristic capitalist system. They treated the Viet Cong as a progressive movement, North Vietnam as a put-upon, heroic revolutionary country, and Communism as the wave of the future in Indochina, if not the entire developing world. They were outraged by our incursion into Cambodia less because of the alleged extension of the war into sanctuaries than because they feared it might lead to success. By the same token, our fear of the decline of American global credibility and its impact on international security was interpreted in radical circles as using the peoples of Indochina as pawns in some overall American strategic design. Indeed, in these terms the decline in America’s world position was welcomed as a contribution to world peace.
This process destroyed any compassion for the complexity of the task the Nixon Administration had inherited. To withdraw fast enough to ease public concerns but slowly enough to give Hanoi an incentive to negotiate, to show flexibility at the conference table while conveying a determination that there was a point beyond which our national honor would not permit us to go, required a firm strategy sustained by an understanding public. The persistent domestic pressures — however different the motives — turned this task into an ordeal.
Critics claimed a monopoly on the desire for peace, ridiculing and condemning all other concerns as subterfuges for psychotic commitment to killing for its own sake. The systematic undermining of trust deflected us from what should have been our principal national debate.
In the early 1970s America needed above all a complex understanding of new realities; instead it was offered simple categories of black and white. It had to improve its sense of history; instead it was told by its critics that all frustrations in the world reflected the evil intent of America’s own leaders. The Vietnam debate short-circuited a process of maturing. It represented a flight into nostalgia; it fostered the illusion that what ailed America was a loss of its moral purity and that our difficulties could be set right by a return to simple principles. Whatever our mistakes, our destiny was not that facile. A self-indulgent America opened the floodgates of chaos and exacerbated its internal divisions.
And if one lesson of Watergate is the abuse of Presidential power, another is that if a democracy is to function, opposition must be restrained by its own sense of civility and limits, by the abiding values of the nation, and by the knowledge that a blanket assault on institutions and motives can paralyze the nation’s capacity to govern itself.
I replied that I did not know enough to answer. However, adopting a formulation from which I never deviated, I ventured one piece of advice: Whatever would have to be done ultimately should be done immediately, to put an end to the slow hemorrhaging.
There is also a serious bureaucratic obstacle to assigning the VP major responsibilities. The VP is the only member of the Executive Branch not subject to removal by the President. To give him a regular task is to gamble on his permanent willing subordination; in case of policy disagreement, the President’s capacity to enforce discipline upon a VP controlling his own segment of the bureaucracy would be circumscribed. Hence, VPs usually wind up with odd jobs in widely different fields or with clear terminal dates. This prevents the articulation of a clear-cut, coherent policy position or the creation of a bureaucratic base. (As VP, Nelson Rockefeller used to joke that he was an avid reader of the obituary pages to see when he might be sent abroad as head of an American funeral delegation.)
To be sure, the VP sits on the NSC meetings, where the gravest decision of national policy are considered. But no on in an advisory position can prosper without staff help or the ability to follow up. The VP either supports the existing consensus, in which case he enhances the prevailing prejudice as to his irrelevance, or he challenges it, in which case he usually lacks detailed tactical knowledge and he risks becoming a nuisance. On one or two occasions when Agnew took a position challenging Nixon’s, he was excluded from a subsequent meeting even though the President adopted Agnew’s point of view. Nixon just wanted to make sure that everyone understood who was in charge.
While Cabinet members are not infrequently the target of these attitudes, they at least have the solace of having responsibility for many problems the President does not wish to touch because he lacks the staff to do so or because they are too controversial. And Cabinet officers have large bureaucracies of their own, more or less loyal to them. The VP has no such safety nets; he is the natural victim of the White House staff’s zeal; any consistent attempt to assert himself runs the risk of reducing his prospects for his paramount ambition: receiving the President’s endorsement for electoral succession.
Harlow was a man not of soaring imagination but of encompassing prudence. He knew what the traffic would bear in Washington, but, more important, he understood what restraints must not be tested if democracy is to thrive. He had a deep sense for the Presidency, its power, its majesty, and the awful responsibility it imposes. His fundamental loyalty to a President was bounded by his personal integrity, his reverence for our institutions, and a sense of duty to the nation.
He had 3 teenage children caught up in the campus upheaval and their travail touched him deeply. But no one could survive the White House without Presidential goodwill, and Nixon’s favor depended on the readiness to tall in with the paranoid cult of the tough guy. The conspiracy of the press, the hostility of the Establishment, the flatulence of the Georgetown set, were permanent features of Nixon’s conversation, which one challenged only at the cost of exclusion from the inner circle.
Rough talk and confrontational tactics did not come naturally to Ehrlichman. Every Presidential Assistant is tempted to purchase greater influence by humoring a President’s moods. Ehrlichman overcompensated; he felt compelled to translate some of Nixon’s musings into action, and as the official in charge of Nixon’s domestic programs he was in the front line of bitter tests of strength.
Toward me Ehrlichman showed a mixture of comradely goodwill and testy jealousy. He respected my views though not the assurance with which they were presented. But he would have been superhuman had he not resented the contrast between us by the media.
Haldeman tended to confuse policy with procedure and substance with presentation. Much of the time between President and chief of staff was devoted to discussing how to manipulate the press — a quest doomed to futility so long as both rejected the most obvious, and indeed only possible, strategy: conducting a serious, honest, and continuing dialogue with the hated, feared, and secretly envied representatives of the media.
Diffidence must have played a large part, a failing of which I am rarely accused. Even though I had never held a formal news conference before being appointed security adviser, I did well and as a result was treated in the White House as if I possessed some special advantage in public relations. Perhaps, so my associates reasoned, it was because of my Ivy League background and my tangential relation in the early Sixties with the Kennedy Administration. (The Kennedy White House, it must be recorded, saw no such gifts in me; I was kept miles away from any representative of the media.) At any rate, I was encouraged to cultivate the media and was then resented when my press relations were better than those of my associates.
A White House staffer sat in on every meeting with an outsider so as to ensure some follow-up on Presidential promises (and to be aware on occasion of the need to disavow them).
Haldeman was free of personal ambition or at least his ambition was fulfilled in the position he occupied. Precisely because there was nothing more to achieve, he had no need to engage in bureaucratic backbiting.
Haldeman’s chilly discipline here was functional; he sought unquestioning obedience from his staff to short-circuit apparently wayward Presidential commands. But there are two ways of achieving discipline: by motivating subordinates so that they want to agree with the principal’s objectives; or by establishing a rigid hierarchy, making it inconceivable that an order is ever challenged because no subordinate is granted the privilege of independent judgment. Haldeman chose the latter course. He selected miniature editions of himself — men and women (mostly men) with no political past, whose loyalty was determined by a chain of command and whose devotion was vouchsafed merely by the opportunity to play a part in great events.
But men who lack a past are unreliable guides to the future. They grow euphoric in authority and panicky at the thought of losing it. During Nixon’s ascendancy, too many staffers were overbearing; they sought to surcease from Haldeman’s insatiable demands in the browbeating of their own subordinates, including the established Cabinet departments that were not technically subordinates at all.
Haldeman’s relations with me had ingredients for friction. He was a conservative middle-class Californian, with all the sentiments, suspicions, and secret envy of that breed. He had rarely met and had never needed to deal consistently with a man of my background (though he overestimated how close I really was to the despised Establishment). He had stuck with Nixon after the gubernatorial defeat of 1962 when only a congenial outsider would remain with so unpromising a figure. He genuinely believed in Nixon’s mission. It was bound to be irritating to him to see a newcomer, a member of the Rockefeller team, one who had consistently opposed Nixon, garner so much publicity. But he rarely showed jealousy. The key to our relatively quiescent relationship was that he did not feel competitive with me. He affected tolerant amusement about what he took to be my excessive passion for policy and, in fact, he treated any indication of more than routine interest in substance as excessive. We sometimes clashed when he insisted on his prerogative to screen access to the President in a manner that I considered mindless or when the obsession with public relations was pushed to a point where I thought it harmed policy. But such disagreements were in fact much less frequent than might be expected between chief of staff and national security adviser.
The White House is both a goldfish bowl and an isolation ward; the fish swim in a vessel whose walls are opaque one way. They can be observed if not necessarily understood; they themselves see nothing. Cut off from the outside world, the inhabitants of the White House live by the rules of their internal coexistence or by imagining what the outside world is like.
The authority of a Presidential Assistant is like that of a trainer in a wild-animal act. His mastery depends on never being challenged; even if he survives an initial assault, he has lost the presumption of his dominance. Every command becomes a struggle; attrition is inevitable. Once Watergate broke and they were thought to be involved, Haldeman and Ehrlichman were doomed to an endless struggle as many who considered themselves abused would now test the limits of their power.
I admired the self-discipline by which he wrested a sense of direction from the chaotic forces at war within him; I was touched by the vulnerability of a man who lived out a Walter Mitty dream of toughness that did not come naturally and who resisted his very real streak of gentleness. For all his ambiguities, he had by conspicuous courage seen our nation through one of its great crises. He had inspired and run the risks for a sweeping and creative revision of our foreign policy. His strange mixture of calculation, deviousness, idealism, tenderness, tawdriness, courage, and daring evoked a feeling of protectiveness among those closest to him — all of whom he more or less manipulated, setting one against the other.
It was not easy to tell from his remarks whether he was concluding an era; it was impossible to believe that this rattled man could be ushering in a new one. His words were self-exculpatory; his demeanor did not convince one of his innocence. It was not the cold recital of available facts some of us had hoped for; but it was not a stanch defense of the record either. It felt between the two stools, defining rather than mitigating disaster. No one watching Nixon’s genuine desperation and anguish could avoid the impression that he was no longer in control of events.
Our Chinese Communist hosts clearly could not comprehend that a nation might destroy its central authority over the issues so far revealed — or anything comparable.
Watergate had begun to turn into a national obsession. No doubt Nixon’s distraught appearance, conveying an impression of both grief and evasion, did not offer the picture of a Chief Executive dominating a crisis.
The President lived in the stunned lethargy of a man whose nightmare had come true. The constant undercurrent of his life had been the premonition of a catastrophe, which seemed to obsess him in direction proportion to his inability to define it and which dominated him especially when things seemed to be going well. Now at what should have been the heights of his success it had all really happened; everything was crashing around him. Like a figure in Greek tragedy he was fulfilling his own nature and thus destroying himself.
Anyone who knew him realized that the coarse side of his nature was a kind of fantasy in which he acted out his daydreams of how ruthless politicians behaved under stress. He thought he was imitating his predecessors; he had never meant it as a central feature of his Presidency.
I did not doubt that they considered him more of a loyalist than me. As time went on, I began to wonder whether Haig always resisted Nixon’s version that I was a temperamental genius in need of reigning in by stabler personalities; or whether Haig objected to the proposition that he could be helpful to my chief in fulfilling that need, making them partners in tranquilizing me, so to speak.
Yet this is no more than saying that I recognized Haig as formidable. One of the most useful tools of the trade of chiefs of staff is to present unpleasant orders as emanating from an implacable superior who has already been softened to the limit; it was a tactic I used myself in my relationship to Nixon. Nor had I strenuously objected when others had put me in the position of the good guy in the White House. In that sense Haig hoisted me with my own petard.
It was vintage Nixon: the fear of confrontation; the indirect approach; the acute insight into my probable reaction; and the attempt to soften it through a preposterous charade that would get him over the first hurdle. Anyone familiar with Nixon knew that his need for a chief of staff could not possibly end in a week or two. In the midst of Watergate the need would be greater than ever. I had often witnessed, and occasionally participated in, little games just like this: the sugarcoating of unpalatable decisions, first establishing the principle and then obtaining acquiescence in the measures it inevitably implied.
Nixon was right, as usual, in his psychological estimate of me. It is always difficult to reverse the relationship with a subordinate. And given Haig’s interest in national security matters, there was the potential for rivalry on substance. Yet I realized, too, that the situation had gone far beyond normal bureaucratic rules or White House jockeying for position. If a national catastrophe was to be avoided, coherence had to be restored to the government and especially to its center in the White House.
I told Haig with conviction that he had to accept, even though it would probably mean the end of his military career. Haig replied that when he had gone on patrol in Vietnam he risked not only his career but his life; he had no right to abandon his Commander-in-Chief in distress. He was shamingly right.
This was ironically symbolic of a White House mood that had run essentially out of control: an excess faith in mechanical procedure compounded by a literal-mindedness that, assigned the task of producing a record, did so with a vengeance — in a manner certain eventually to destroy the image Nixon was so passionately cultivating.
I doubt whether anyone had begun to think about the problem of even transcribing, let alone organizing, 7 years of conversation: A psychiatrist friend once told me that he taped his patients until he realized “it takes an hour to listen to an hour.”
If the President’s own words are a quicksand for researchers, the responses of his interlocutors are hardly solid ground. A Presidential Assistant has to balance the wisdom of scoring a passing point against the risk of losing the President’s backing in his area of responsibility. Presidents, by nature, desire to prevail. But it was especially tempting to fall in with Nixon’s musings because experience had taught that his more extravagant affirmations rarely had operational consequences. No doubt many of us in the inner circle listened in silence to reflections we would have challenged in abstract intellectual debate; we sometimes made a contribution more to meet the needs of the moment — one of which was to be able to depart quickly in good grace — than to stand the test of deferred scrutiny.
Weirdly enough, I doubt that my new knowledge of the tape system in 1973 changed very much what I said to the President afterward.. He was so much in need of succor, so totally alone, our national security depended so much on his functioning, that these goals overrode the knowledge that what was being said would be heard and read by posterity long after its context had been obliterated.
Foreign policy is made both by commission and omission. It is affected by mood and nuance, by judgments of strengths and weaknesses, by one government’s measure of another’s will as well as its ability to act, by one national leader’s perception of a rival or friendly leader’s political standing in his own country and its affect on both national power and policies.
There was now an entirely different atmosphere in the White House from that in the first term. Gone were most of the arrogant young men of the Haldeman era, cockily confident that all could be planned and every problem would yield to procedure.
At every press conference I was asked about the impact of Watergate on foreign policy. I consistently denied any relationship. Though everyone knew it to be untrue, only a show of imperviousness would enable us to salvage anything. A great power is given no quarter because it has trouble at home. We could surmount our perils, if at all, only by demonstrating self-confidence and continuing to insist that we would defend the national interest against all obstacles, foreign and domestic.
But I was filled with foreboding. The country seemed in a “suicidal mood,” and it was bound to erode our world position. Four or five years of amassing capital in nickels and dimes is being squandered in thousand dollar bills. At no crisis in the last 15 years did I think the country was in danger. But I genuinely now believe that we could suffer irreparable damage.
The difference in any effort you have ever known as between greatness and mediocrity is a nuance. You can’t describe it. And it took us two years when no one understood what we were doing to get it. One success created the necessity of the other. When it unravels it will go the same way. For two years you won’t see anything, and then you start pulling the threads out. I can go to the Hill and say, gentlemen, here are the dangers. You will have a Mideast war if this keeps up.
While free of the anti-American bias of his predecessor, he shared the French intellectual’s assumption that in the long run America was too naive, clumsy, and unstable to be entrusted with the fate of Europe. On the other hand, he was realistic enough to understand that America was too powerful to be ignored and France too weak to go it alone.
Pompidou had been deeply offended when demonstrators protesting French arms sales to Libya had jostled him and his wife in Chicago during their visit to the US in early 1970. While it did not alter the courteous and conciliatory style of his diplomacy, it spawned an element of reserve, even of resentment, that was never completely dissipated; it burst forth with vehemence during his last tormented year when his reserves of self-control were strained to the utmost by a bone cancer whose ravages he managed to hide from all but a few intimates. I considered him a most farsighted and intelligent leader, a man who, whatever his doubts about America’s grasp of global events, would work within his principles to strengthen the values, the power, and the resolution of the democracies.
Pompidou listened to my recital with his characteristic courtesy before he calmly commented: “These are details. In my view you are condemned to succeed.” Pompidou had gone to the heart of the matter. The two sides were too committed to an agreement to turn back; one way or another the war was bound to end soon; our maddening frustration was in fact the final spasm of a decade of struggle.
The two superpowers excepted, Europe’s economic and potential military strength was now larger than that of any region in the world. With unity it was bound to articulate its own identity. We for our part, spiritually liberated from the trauma of Vietnam, looked to Europe to share in the regeneration of our purposes; it was, after all, that part of the free world with which we had most in common in history, culture, and moral values.
But I was not as sanguine as others were that this would com easily. For a generation, eminent Americans of both parties had taken for granted that a united Europe would ease our global economic burdens while continuing to follow our political lead. They remembered only the impotent Europe of the late 1940s, totally dependent on America for economic support and military security. They forgot the Europe that had invented the concept of sovereignty, whose centuries of statecraft had refined the philosophy of nationalism, and whose unwillingness to subordinate parochial interests to wider purposes had been a principal cause of the two catastrophic world wars of this century.
Western Europe, liberated from armies thanks to the essential contribution of American soldiers, reconstructed with American aid, having looked for its security in alliance with America, having hitherto accepted American currency as the main element of its monetary reserves, must not and cannot sever its links with the US. But neither must it refrain from affirming its existence as a new reality.
What concerned our allies was not the agreed strategy but the possibility that we might not be ready to employ it. Their own history gave them reason for concern; leaving allies in the lurch had not exactly been unknown in Europe’s recent past. The European solution was to encourage a large American troop deployment in Europe even while the agreed strategy was that a Soviet attack would trigger nuclear retaliation from America. The purpose was as straightforward as it was impolitic to articulate: A Soviet attack that enveloped American as well as allied ground forces would force us into a nuclear response nearly automatically.
For a few years the Soviet’s buildup was slow and their missiles remained vulnerable. But the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 brought home to the Soviets the penalty for strategic inferiority and they began a relentless program to remedy it. By 1971 the Soviets had caught up with us in total numbers. When numbers were frozen by the first SALT agreement in May 1972, they switched energetically to qualitative improvements.
But serious analysis and effective response were for too long prevented in America by the passions of the Vietnam war. Essential new weapons were decried as wasteful and dangerous, the mindless mania of the military-industrial complex. “Reordering national priorities” was the slogan of the day; it was the euphemism for cutting defense budget.
Europe was even less willing to confront the changed real world. Many of our allies continued to treat their own military capabilities as a token payment for the American commitment to Europe; they stopped well short of developing a realistic option for local defense. They dreaded the devastation of their territories; they were loath to leave the familiar shelter of our nuclear guarantee even as its premises were being eroded by technology. They were as reluctant to deal with the implications of the looming strategic parity as we were to raise them. They resorted to the ancient device of responding minimally to our importuning for a greater effort without, in fact, chaining the basic philosophy. The Alliance continued to be held together, as was once said about the British Commonwealth, by the highest common platitude.
For their part, the Europeans resented the shock tactics by which we had proceeded to reform the international monetary system in 1971. There were many complaints that by abandoning the modified gold standard we were exporting our inflation and penalizing our allies for our refusal to discipline ourselves domestically.
And beyond these immediate strains, little had been done to shape a common policy toward the developing countries and international commodity markets, not least of which was oil, the Achilles’ heel of the West. As Pompidou told James Reston, a solution could not be found on the technical level; it required some political decisions subjecting the disputes to the overriding imperative of our political and moral unity.
But we had an additional motive having to do with trends in the Atlantic Alliance. We did not want NATO to be perceived as an obstacle to peaceful coexistence. We sought to discourage the Europeans from unilateral initiatives to Moscow by demonstrating that in any competition for better relations with Moscow, America had the stronger hand. The tactic served its purpose; European pressures for concessions decreased in direct proportion as we developed our own option toward Moscow. The Alliance stopped being controversial in almost all countries of Western Europe. The irony was that as Soviet-American relations improved, some of the statesmen who had urged conciliation began to see in it the harbinger of the long-dreaded Soviet-American condominium, de Gaulle’s nightmare of a “super-Yalta” carving up the world.
Unjustified and occasionally irritating as we considered these European suspicions, the uneasiness was yet another sign that the Atlantic nations had lost a shared sense of direction. Indeed, the reason for our passionate commitment to the new initiative lay largely in the psychological and moral realm. The democracies, we were convinced, could not continue simply to administer their patrimony. They had come this far through through successive acts of faith that had enabled them to transcend the vicissitudes of history. A whole generation had grown up who knew nothing of the perils of the 1940s that had produced the Alliance or of the vision of man that had shaped their political institutions. In America their formative experience was the nasty debate of the 1960s over Vietnam. In Europe it was the boredom of the welfare state. It had been a long time since the idealism and self-confidence of the Western tradition had found expression in a rededication to major positive tasks. Every great achievement was a dream before it became a reality. We thought we were tapping the idealistic tradition of the democracies when we put forward the Year of Europe. We did not know what we were letting ourselves in for.
Nixon was beside himself. As a passionate believer in the Atlantic Alliance, he simply could not understand how our allies could turn on us at a moment of such importance and sensitivity.
Great historical achievements often evolve from simple concepts, for an enterprise requiring the collaboration of multitudes rarely thrives on complexity. Monnet’s contribution to European unity was two propositions of great seeming simplicity: First, the various European state, encapsuled in their jealous sovereignty, would not, without prodding, take the leap into the future implicit in the notion of European unity. Second, the US might well provide that prod if it did not fear that a united Europe would turn on America.
The man who achieved this influence was an unlikely candidate for such eminence. The quintessential Frenchman, slightly built, somewhat pedantic in his manner, only the bright eyes revealing the inner fire, he would be unnoticed in any large group. He was the embodiment of one of his maxims: “Everybody is ambitious. The question is whether he is ambitious to be or ambitious to do.” Monnet clearly was ambitious to do. He was restless with pretentious rhetoric. He sought no glory for himself. He impact reflected anonymous dedication. Monnet was that rarest of all prophets who put people at ease; that most unusual of revolutionaries who overturned the prevailing order without alienating the upholders of existing institutions.
I often wondered what a conversation between Monnet and de Gaulle might be like. “You fool,” says my imaginary Monnet, “don’t you see that you frighten Americans to no purpose? You are seeking to extort what I can get them to hand to us for free. Only history will decide what we will actually do with our strength and unity.”
“You dreamer,” replies my hypothetical de Gaulle. “Don’t you understand that some possessions are meaningless if received as a gift? We will able to use them only if we seize them.”
It is quite possible that both would be right. There would have been no European unity without Monnet and no European identity without de Gaulle — producing the final paradox: that the most nationalistic country in Europe made the largest single contribution to the emergence of a European community.
So able and self-assured were our British counterparts that they managed to convey the notion that it was they who were conferring a boon on us by sharing the experience of centuries. Nor were they quite wrong in this estimate.
A product of the lower middle class, he had risen to leadership of a party still essentially upper-class in its orientation if no longer in its composition. He had the insecurity that the British class system inflicts on those not born into the upper echelons. Some compensate by disguise, affecting the accent, postures, and bonhomie of the well-bred.
Ted Heath had clearly chosen a different course. He gave the impression of a man who was in essence warmhearted and must have been in his youth jolly and gregarious but who had steeled himself by iron self-discipline to rest his eminence not on personality but on performance. He eschewed any claim to personal charm even though at one time he must have had it in considerable measure; he insisted on prevailing through mental superiority and a somewhat aloof air. He made a citadel of personal excellence. In the process his smile grew mirthless; the few excursions into human warmth he permitted himself were tentative and sharply separated from his political actions. His personality and chilling integrity would have inhibited the “special relationship” even if his convictions had not.
Nixon’s relationship with Heath was like that of a jilted lover who has been told that friendship was still possible, but who remembers the rejection rather than being inspired by the prospect.
And yet once Brandt had accomplished his destiny of breaking stereotypes, he possessed neither the stamina nor the intellectual apparatus to manage the forces he had unleashed. He in fact became their prisoner, wallowing in their applause instead of disciplining it with a sense of proportion or a long-range policy.
At first I ascribed his long moody silences to depression; later it occurred to me that having accomplished his major task he had in fact nothing left to say but could not admit to himself that he had no further contribution to make. He possessed the rare gift of embodying the hopes for a more humane world, but the very spontaneity of his gestures precluded him from managing his own achievements. He was a paradox: He had changed the course of history but by doing so had made himself irrelevant (and in some respects dangerous).
Unprepossessing physically, extremely agile intellectually, indefatigable, Bahr showed what consistent commitment can achieve even from relatively subordinate positions. He was the intellectual driving force behind Brandt’s Ostpolitik.
Outsiders may debate who manipulated whom; serious students of international affairs know that common policies can endure only if both parties serve their purposes.
Like Bismarck, he sought to exploit German’s central position for its national goals. Bahr had sufficient confidence in his dexterity to believe he would avoid the pitfalls that had produced disaster on earlier occasions when Germany had struck out on such a complicated course.
Kosciusko would have won no prizes for charm. He was a classic product of the grandes ecoles, those indelibly French institutions of whose graduates Petain said in a perceptive moment: “They know everything. Unfortunately they do not know anything else.” Kosciusko was brilliant, analytical, and unsentimental. Conducting foreign policy on the basis of the national interest was, for him, the implementation of a concept developed in France at least three centuries earlier. He understood immediately that we had no desire to reopen the controversies of the Sixties. We would raise no objection to European autonomy; we would break no lances over the issue of national identity that had so preoccupied de Gaulle. We did not, I told him, challenge Europe’s right to conduct its own policy. What we sought was a harmonization of separate judgments, not a legal document that proscribed different opinions. I stressed out fundamental concern: “The question is whether the Western world will have a good consistent policy, or will we be like the Greeks and be overwhelmed by the outside world?”
His professional manner hid a razor-sharp political mind, and he was more interested in foreign policy than any of his predecessors whom I had met. But the last thing he wanted was to add foreign policy to his bursting cupboard of problems. The Italian PM is a chairman of a committee, moreover, not Chief Executive; his power to give orders to his Foreign Minister cannot be taken for granted. It depends much more on their relative position within the Christian Democratic party structure than on the hierarchy of government.
Italy was in the position of having to choose between ideological cohesion at the price of parliamentary instability, and parliamentary stability at the risk of philosophical, and hence practical, chaos.
Not surprisingly, most of the conversations between Andreotti and Nixon concerned not the Year of Europe but the subtleties of the Italian domestic scene, whose intricate and ruthless maneuvers national unification had transposed from the city-state to the political arena in Rome. Andreotti could not restrain himself from expressing the perennial Italian illusion that Italy could contribute by reasons of propinquity to the solution of the Middle East problem. But while every Italian leader I met advanced this proposition, none acted as if he believed in it.
Perhaps we should have sensed from the lack of precise response to our approaches that our allies, who had urged us for years to give higher priority to Atlantic relations, were going to disappoint us. To the degree that we were conscious of European hesitations, however, we regarded them as yet another reason for a major effort to work on the elaboration of common purposes. We thought the best way to concentrate minds was to advance a formal proposal.
These factors have produced a dramatic transformation of the psychological climate in the West — a change which is the most profound current challenge to Western statesmanship. In Europe, a new generation to whom war and its dislocations are not personal experiences takes stability for granted. But it is less committed to the unity that made peace possible and to the effort required to maintain it. In the US, decades of global burdens have fostered, and the frustrations of the war in Southeast Asia have accentuated, a reluctance to sustain global involvements on the basis of preponderant American possibility.
We will never consciously injure the interests of our friends in Europe or in Asia. We expect in return that their policies will take seriously our interests and our responsibilities.
When he arrived in Paris, he remarked opaquely that he supported the plan for a new Atlantic Charter and considered the idea fully understandable. This left Japan’s response wide open; it did not even imply that Japan would participate. Tokyo was not about to enmesh itself through an excess of explicitness.
It was hard to avoid the conclusion that all of our major partners had found excuses to postpone a response to a major American initiative involving them.
Mutual suspicions were dwarfed, however, by our domestic upheavals. Nixon’s speech announcing the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman had occurred the evening before the first meeting of the two leaders. Nixon was more shaken by this decision than by any other until his own resignation a little more than 15 months later. That Nixon managed to get through the Brandt visit without any show of emotion was a spectacular feat of will.
I could not tell whether Brandt was aware of Nixon’s distress; he could not avoid sensing some of it. How else to explain the change in Brandt’s demeanor? It was only a nuance, but of the stuff that alters human relationships irrevocably. Whether he intended it or not, Brandt became a shade less deferential; he was uncharacteristically crisp and businesslike. There was neither the bonhomie of former times nor the long pauses with which Brandt had punctuated his earlier conversations and which had contributed no little to Nixon’s restlessness. The briskness with which he went through the agenda reflected his strategy — to settle nothing.
To our astonishment we learned — it was all over the German media — that our final joint statement’s reference to a “balanced leadership” was an indirect rejection of any attempt by us to dominate — an ambition of which we were unaware. The omission of the words “Atlantic Charter” from the communique was hailed as a success, as if avoiding an American offer to tie our destiny formally to Europe was a test of statesmanship.
The purpose was to give the Congress, the public, the media, and foreign leaders an insight into our thinking, something our secretive procedures, which often excluded the bureaucracy, made essential. It was the most concise guidance available to officials eager to carry out established policy but not always privy to its formulation. On occasion we used the Foreign Policy Report to indicate or hint at important changes of policy. Every year key members of my staff spent weeks producing essays that we hoped would be at once thorough, illuminating, and readable. I was general editor. To this end I would free 2 weeks to do nothing else.
Try as we might, we never succeeded in our principal objective of using the Foreign Policy Reports to spark a thoughtful public discussion. Part of the reason was the media’s insatiable hunger for the new; concepts and goals are too abstract to be newsworthy. Part of the reason was the burgeoning length of the produce (the first was 160 printed pages, the fourth, 234), which made it difficult even for journalists with the best of intentions to do justice to it. Perhaps we never briefed the press on it properly — though as the principal briefer I would hate to think so. Whatever the reason, the only chapter that generally received attention by the American media was the one dealing with Indochina.
Radio, in Safire’s view, was a safe medium for establishing a reputation for thoughtfulness without risking a dispute over substance.
My reference to Europe’s regional role in the Year of Europe speech was endlessly replayed and castigated, no one bothering to point out that I was describing a condition that we deplored. It may not have been wise to make reality explicit, but European carping over the phraseology represented a mixture of hypocrisy and subterfuge.
At the present stage of the debate it rather looks like a case of everyone telling everyone else that something out to be done and then waiting for the other chaps to do it or suggest it. That is probably inevitable in a period when so many important developments are proceeding together, some in parallel, others apparently on collision courses. But it is the duty of statesmen to think ahead. European leaders, take note.
This, in our view, was the essence of the problem. A purely pragmatic approach could not solve even the technical issues. Above all, it would fail to inspire the generation that had grown up since the last acts of Western creativity.
By May the demonstrations of European indifference should probably have caused us to postpone our initiative. After all, in any realistic assessment, our allies should have had at least as much to gain from a new impetus to Atlantic relations as we. But Watergate made us more persistent than prudent.
The only trouble was that every British scheme left it to us to gain the approval of the other allies and kept open just exactly what would be discussed or, for that matter, what Britain would do should the other allies balk. Britain could not be counted to take the lead in forming a European response to our initiative or, as it turned out, even to support its own ideas if we put them forward and France objected.
We were convinced that France’s unsentimental conception of the national interest would lead it to the same conclusion that we had reached: that Western solidarity was crucial to European security and freedom.
The assessment turned out to be badly mistaken. Before the year was out, we found ourselves embroiled with France in the same sort of nasty confrontation for which we had criticized our predecessors. The reasons for it are not fully clear to me even today.
For about 4 weeks Jobert and I worked in harmony, or at least so he made me believe. He even offered to help draft the new “Atlantic Charter.” And indeed major portions of the joint declaration ultimately signed in June 1974 were written under Jobert’s aegis. But by then it had been drained of significance by Jobert’s tactics. As the months passed by, he worked to thwart our policies with demonic skill. This does not affect my view that no foreign minister I met surpassed Jobert in intelligence and very few equaled him. And strange as it may seem, I liked him enormously through all our conflicts, and a kind of friendship — tinged with exasperation — grew up between us. He was a cultured, charming man with whom it was a pleasure to exchange ideas. Slight, sardonic, with a sensitive face dominated by luminous eyes, Jobert was a formidable intellect and a fierce debater. As befits a nation where rhetoric is still an art form, his aphorism were often as apt as they could be biting.
What Michael Jobert lacked was neither intelligence nor analytic ability but a sense of proportion. I do not believe that he started out seeking a confrontation with the US. His initial aim was that the traditional goal of French diplomacy in the Gaullist Fifth Republic: to create at least the appearance that France had shaped whatever it was that was happening. In a later conversation Jobert told me that it would not do for him simply to accept an American proposal. France needed “a certain space for maneuver,” and he did not mind if journalists invented stories of confrontation; it would in fact facilitate agreement:
There will be incidents, happenings, progress, uncertainties — this may help your projects because it will make it more important. Otherwise, it would be too simple; people would lose interest. Therefore we should maintain an appearance of a difficult dialogue.
The wily Jobert had confronted us with a Catch-22 even more impenetrable than Brandt’s. To show our dedication to European unity we were asked to bypass European institutions, leaving it to France to shape the consensus through its relations with the other national capitals. The initiative had slipped from our hands.
It is always a mistake to give one’s proxy to another sovereign state. It soon transpired that whether he had planned it or not, Jobert knew how to use opportunity when it came his way. Ruthlessly exploiting our aloofness toward the EC, which he had encouraged, he organized its ministers and officials — a touchy group in the best of circumstances — against us, and made himself their spokesman. An American initiative enabled Jobert to pursue the old Gaullist dream of building Europe on an anti-American basis.
What seems to have diverted Jobert on the way to cooperation with us was the heady wine of publicity distilled from the grape of Franco-American conflict. Like a character in a Pirandello play, Jobert became what he started out pretending to be. When I first met him he thought my admiration for de Gaulle excessive. Gaullism, he said, was immobilism leavened with rhetoric. By the time he was through he had carried Gaullism to lengths unimagined by the great general, who was too much of an historian to give any quarrel a personal cast and who never would have stepped over the line that risked the global equilibrium. Having started in an adversary role to lay the psychological basis for cooperation later — or so he professed — Jobert became so intoxicated with it that he never again could find the language of cooperation. He forgot that disputes are not ends in themselves; they have value only as a stage toward a settlement, even between adversaries.
The impasse was made worse by Jobert’s passionate nature, which masqueraded as cynical nonchalance. The wheels of diplomacy are oiled by conciliatory forms that distinguish disagreements over policy from personal animosity. The elegant protocol rituals symbolize that the diplomat, however much he may differ with his interlocutor, pursue a cause, a principle, an interest, but never a personal vendetta. Jobert refused to act in this manner. Once launched on a confrontation, he quickly turned it into a personal assault. Though our private meetings remained pleasant and were cordial, he never missed an opportunity for the most cutting formulation in the presence of others.
Still, it was true that Pompidou had spotted its weak point: Detente might confuse tactics with strategy, rhetoric with reality. If a leader as subtle as Pompidou was uncertain, the was a serious risk that in the effort to demonstrate a commitment to peace we might demoralize the traditional opponents to Soviet expansionism. In removing the argument that NATO was an obstacle to peace, we might also confuse its perception of the danger.
Pompidou had indeed asked the basic question that Americans above all are reluctant to address: Do we, as the strongest free nation in the world, resist the fact of change or the method of change? Do we seek to prevent only that Soviet expansion brought about by illegitimate means (however “illegitimate” is defined), or do we have a stake in defending the geopolitical equilibrium whatever the method by which it is challenged — even if, as Pompidou put it, the assault on it is disguised as a “progressive tide”?
A tradition of faith in international law and an historical reluctance to think in terms of balance of power incline Americans to the view that we resist only the method and not the fact of change. And of course we cannot, and should not, be wedded to a blind defense of every status quo. Justice as well as stability must be a goal of American foreign policy, and indeed they are linked. Yet there are changes in the international balance that can threaten our nation’s security and have to be resisted however they come about. For a century England went to war rather than permit the port of Antwerp to be acquired by a major power, by any methods. Control of the seas, the prerequisite to Britain’s survival, was considered incompatible with the existence of a secure naval base so close to Britain’s lifeline.
Intellectually, I agreed with him. The security of the free peoples depended on whether the US could develop a concept of national interest that we would defend regardless of the guise that challenges to it might take. But I also knew that this ran counter to American stereotypes of foreign policy and that I was in no position to give him an unequivocal answer.
For reasons extraneous to our foreign policy we were losing the ability to make our fundamental point: that our nation had a duty to defend the security of free peoples if it wanted to preserve its own; that to resist challenges to the equilibrium in the early stages is an inherently ambiguous task. For if one waits till the challenge is clear, the cost of resisting grows exponentially; in the nuclear age it may become prohibitive.
A nation and its leaders must choose between moral certainty coupled with exorbitant risk, and the willingness to act on unprovable assumptions to deal with challenges when they are manageable.
The statesman’s duty is to bridge the gap between his nation’s experience and his vision. If he gets too far ahead of his people he will lose his mandate; if he confines himself to the conventional he will lose control over events. The qualities that distinguish a great statesman are prescience and courage, not analytical intelligence. He must have a conception of the future and the courage to move toward it while it is still shrouded to most of his compatriots. Unfortunately, while it is true that great are the statesmen who can transcend ambiguity, not everyone who confronts ambiguity is a great statesman. He may even be a fool.
But even as I uttered these reassuring phrases, I was sick at heart. The America of Watergate would probably not be able to muster the domestic support to give effect to them, and the Europe of competitive approaches to Moscow might not listen even after America had recovered its unity. Yet to admit this would accelerate all the dangerous trends. Sometimes one can do no better than maintain the faith against seeming odds and trust to Providence to prevent the worst.
Reluctant to face the debilitating impact of Watergate, constrained by procedures marvelously designed to confuse the issue, impelled more by righteous conviction than by cool calculation, we read the tea leaves to give us the answers we wanted. We would not face the fact that it was either too late or too early for the new era of creativity, the vision of which had sustained us through the anguish of Vietnam.
Jobert was turning the Year of Europe into a wrestling match. Whatever contingency he discussed became an attack on our purposes or a reason for stalling. He ascribed to us motives of nearly paranoid deviousness, the very articulation of which destroyed the significance of any reply: If we were capable of what Jobert was accusing us of, he was beyond reassurance.
Jobert changed his approach; he suddenly was as sympathetic as his tense nature permitted. He indicated that he was putting that he was putting forward Pompidou’s ideas, while his own were more benign. (This is an old trick of Presidential confidants, designed to deprive themselves of negotiating flexibility without turning matters into a personality clash. I, too, used it on occasion.)
He had that withdrawn appearance of cancer patients, as if the private battle in which he was engaged made irrelevant the matters at hand. It was a tall order to ask him to be a partner in launching a new initiative of undefined duration when he was contemplating his own demise.
Of course there must be individual meetings, but there must be some underlying philosophy that animates all of us. Otherwise, those shrewd and determined men in the Kremlin will eat us one by one. They cannot digest us all together but they can pick at us one by one.
Pompidou replied in a lapidary manner that submerged the essence of the problem in elegant paradoxes. He began with an analysis of the international situation. It was acute but lacked his customary relevance. He simply would not bring it to a point; whatever aspect he considered was shrouded in complexity.
Pompidou made procedural sense, but it is the responsibility of a statesman to resolve dilemmas, not to contemplate them. Pompidou’s presentation amounted to either a permanent perplexity or to the deliberate thwarting of a major initiative to give a sense of direction to the democracies — exposing them to the risk of consuming their substance over tactics while drifting gradually into a pervasive sense of impotence that would weaken domestic structure and create mounting foreign danger.
Pompidou was in fact saddling us with a procedural monstrosity. If the Four consulted bilaterally, then six negotiations on the same subject would be going on simultaneously (and if Italy joined, eight). There would be no way to agree, for everything discussed with one partner would have to be communicated to all others, with infinite potential for confusion, misunderstanding, and mischief. With no central focus and without any specific proposal, chaos was certain. But if we approached existing forums with a draft proposal — the only rational approach — we would be accused of organizing Europe against France and of seeking to dominate NATO with an American document.
Nixon never fully understood that panegyrics on de Gaulle tended to irritate Pompidou more than reassure him. Heads of government generally prefer to distinguish themselves from their predecessors rather than be considered in their shadow. After all, de Gaulle had dismissed Pompidou as PM, and only his unexpected resignation had saved Pompidou from oblivion.
Pompidou, at any rate, felt no obligation to reciprocate. He replied sardonically: “President Nixon and I were matching Gaullisms but there was neither victory nor vanquished” — a formula always uttered by the side that believes it has won.
But once again, before any work could start, Jobert wished to see our own document. Convinced that we would get nowhere unless we showed him something, I agreed to produce a draft by the time he came to America at the end of June. He in turn indicated that he would do some drafting of his own, perhaps in response to our version. Painful as it is for me to admit it, I had fallen into another trap. For once I gave Jobert a draft I was at his mercy. If I showed it to other allies he would accuse us of ganging up on him. If I waited for his response, he could begin undermining our position with his partners by nitpicking it or stop its going forward at all.
As a sign of good faith I gave him both our drafts — usually a poof procedure because it enables the opposite number to choose what is most advantageous to him and to learn of one’s internal disagreements.
His air of easy camaraderie tended to create the impression that he was veneer all the way through. But that was a grave error. A conciliatory manner was allied with a first-class intelligence. He skillfully pursued Ostpolitik but there was never the slightest question about his commitment to the unity of the West.
The elephantine procedure Jobert had imposed on us was now creating its own havoc. Draft documents were like pollen in the spring air. In addition to the German outline which we had seen, a thin Dutch draft had been submitted to NATO, Jobert had promised a French draft to us alone, and there were two American drafts shown only to Jobert.
It was impossible to tell who had actually seen what or approved what. I found it hard to believe that the German outline had been prepared without consultation with anyone.
But out of “friendship” he advised me to engage in the bilateral talks I desired with more realistic documents. He would not offer a text, however, to convey the “sense of realism” that was acceptable. To do this, he feared, might embarrass me; on reflection, he wrote, he felt it better to remain silent. In other words, we could submit documents but would be given no clue to what was desired. Nor would we be told why our proposals had been rejected.
After a few more days, we began to understand that what had happened in Copenhagen was not only to put the Year of Europe on ice for two more months and to cold-shoulder a Presidential visit — two unprecedented events in Atlantic relations — but also to turn the European-American dialogue into an adversary proceeding.
We both realized that if these tendencies continued, we were at a turning point in Atlantic relations. For the sake of an abstract doctrine of European unity and to score purely theoretical points, something that had been nurtured for a generation was being given up. Atlantic relations had thrived on intangibles of trust and consultation. They were now being put into a straitjacket of legalistic formalisms.
But by then it had been drained of its moral and psychological significance by a year of bickering.
History, it became obvious, cannot be repeated on demand. The idea of a dramatic speech by an American to inspire Europe was copied too self-consciously from Secretary George C. Marshall’s unveiling of the Marshall Plan. Encourage by European exhortations to shift our attention back to the West and away from Southeast Asia, and seduced by our own nostalgia for historic initiatives, we ran afoul of conditions that had changed drastically since 1947. Then Secretary Marshall had offered to nations that had no alternative what was in effect a free gift: massive American aid in the reconstruction of Europe. Europe’s problem was to organize itself to make sure of the bounty — a pleasant assignment not unhelpful to politicians. The Atlantic Declaration of 1973-74 conferred no immediate benefits; it forced every government to grapple with tough problems on a broad agenda — an assignment elected political leaders generally prefer to pass on to their successors.
There was a complex psychological reason at the hart of our frustrations. We were so eager to liberate ourselves from the trauma of Vietnam that we failed to give sufficient weight to the fact that Europe could not possibly share this largely American imperative — at least to the same extent.
They had to wonder more and more about the risks to themselves of signing a solemn document with an increasingly discredited Chief Executive. Had there been immediate gains to show, they might have taken the chance. But the Atlantic Declaration highlighted the dilemma of the modern democratic leader: The time frame for a policy to bear fruit is longer than his term of office, while the downside of the policy begins to operate immediately. And the issues we raised were all complex; better to bury them by ignoring them.
Without a vision of their future, publics were increasingly demoralized by technical issues beyond the ken of nonexperts. Fear, not purpose, became the dominant ingredient of the policies of too many democracies; adaptation, not taking charge of one’s destiny, defined political prudence.
To make doubly sure that its interests were safeguarded, Israel put forward a demand as seemingly reasonable as it was unfulfillable: that the Arab states negotiate directly with it. In other words, Israel asked for recognition as a precondition of negotiation. The Arabs, not to be outdone, demanded acceptance of their territorial demands before they would consider diplomacy. No Arab leader, however moderate, could accede to Israel’s demand and survive in the climate of humiliation, radicalism, and Soviet influence of the period. No Israeli PM could stay in office for a day if he relinquished the claim to the occupied territories as an entrance price to negotiation. Israel chased the illusion that it could both acquire territory and achieve peace. Its Arab adversaries pursued the opposite illusion, that they could regain territory without offering peace.
The US had no interest in vindicating such a course. We were being given the privilege of meeting Nasser’s peremptory demands in return for diplomatic relations, which if they meant anything had to be as much in Egypt’s interest as in our own, and for a cease-fire with Israel, which already existed de facto.
Sooner or later, I was convinced, either Egypt or some other state would recognize that reliance on Soviet support and radical rhetoric guaranteed the frustration of its aspirations. At that point, it might be willing to eliminate the Soviet military presence and to consider attainable rather than utopian goals. Then would come the moment of a major American initiative, if necessary urging new approaches on our Israeli friends.
And in crises — whatever his calculation of who was ultimately at fault — Nixon never lost sight of his priorities. He understood that we could not mediate effectively until it was clear that our actions had not been extorted by Soviet pressure. Thus at the end of the day — by a different route — Nixon came to the same conclusion as I: that the American national interest required a demonstration of Soviet and radical inability to achieve Arab objectives and that no progress could be made until at least moderate Arabs were willing to make a peace of genuine compromise.
But Israel’s security could be preserved in the long run only by anchoring it to a strategic interest of the US, not to the sentiments of individuals.
Subtlety is not a Soviet forte. They dealt with their dilemmas by mixing — perhaps unintentionally — an explosive brew. The Soviet may have seen in this strange half-policy — of acquiescing in a limited but not an all-out attack — the safest means of procrastination; in fact, it tempted an explosion that it did not have the ability to contain. It encouraged crisis that it thought it could exploit by appearing as the spokesman for Arab interests. But it lacked the capacity to shape what it had wrought. In the end, the Soviet effort caused it to lose everything in Egypt, proving that futile half-measures are not a monopoly of the bourgeois West.
The Kremlin may have calculated that a crisis would force the US to engage itself. But excessive cleverness rarely pays in diplomacy. Moscow’s dilemma was that it could contribute to a settlement only by urging its Arab clients to compromise. Unwilling to do this, it both encouraged a blowup and recoiled from its consequences, condemning itself eventually to a seat on the sidelines.
My [Nixon’s] course in Vietnam also showed, however, that we do not betray our friends. A great power does not enhance its power by behaving in such a way. There are severe limits to what we can compel Israel to do…
Egypt must have no illusions. It cannot achieve its maximum demands in any settlement that is conceivable. In the absence of a settlement, on the other hand, Egypt has little prospect of ever recovering anything. This is not our doing; this is the reality as we perceive it. Both Egypt and Israel will have difficult decisions to make.
We are now Israel’s only major friend in the world. I have yet to see one iota of give on their part — conceding that Jordan and Egypt have not given enough on their side. This is the time to get moving — and they must be told that firmly.
The time has come to quit pandering to Israel’s intransigent position. Our actions over the past have led them to think we will stand with them regardless of how unreasonable they are.
Tall, erect, and with thinning gray hair, he had the bearing of the military officer he once was and the natural dignity of the educated Egyptian. For four millennia the peoples of Egypt have witnessed the foibles of eager foreigners and achieved a margin of maneuver by being conciliatory, impermeable, supple, and infinitely resilient. Through all the changes of racial composition brought by successive waves of conquerors, an archetypical Egyptian has survived, his face etched on the statues and temples that are the closest any nation has come to achieving eternity — an expression at once gentle and transcendent; a posture at once humble and enduring; a look both human and yet gazing into an infinity beyond the limitations of the human scale.
He understood Egypt’s fear that an interim solution might become frozen, he said. Still, it had the advantage of feasibility; hence Ismail should explore it with me as a bridge to further steps. We favored a permanent settlement, Nixon averred, and he pledged his best efforts in that direction. But he did not think it possible to solve the entire Middle East problem in all its aspects all at once. That, too, should be explored by Ismail and me, though in strictest privacy.
The opening of a complicated negotiation is like the beginning of an arranged marriage. The partners know that the formalities will soon be stripped away as they discover each other’s real attributes. Neither party can yet foretell at what point necessity will transform itself into acceptance; when the abstract desire for progress will leave at least residues of understanding; which disagreement will, by the act of being overcome, illuminate the as-yet undiscovered sense of community and which will lead to an impasse destined to rend the relationship forever. The future being mercifully veiled, the parties attempt what they might not dare did they know what was ahead.
Almost invariably I spent the first session of a new negotiation in educating myself. I almost never put forward a proposal. Rather, I sought to understand the intangibles in the position of my interlocutor and to gauge the scope as well as the limits of probable concessions. And I made a considerable effort to leave no doubt about our fundamental approach. Only romantics think they can prevail in negotiations by trickery; only pedants believe in the advantage of obfuscation. In a society of sovereign states, an agreement will be maintained only if all partners consider it in their interest. They must have a sense of participation in the result. The art of diplomacy is not to outsmart the other side but to convince it either of common interests or of the penalties if an impasse continues.
If Cairo sought to manipulate us by playing off one channel against the other, it could no doubt cause us embarrassment but only at the price of guaranteeing itself a deadlock. This was the tactical problem. The deeper challenge was to establish a basis of confidence. I invited Ismail to “tell me candidly what you think and feel.” We had to find a concept before we drew up proposals:
There is no sense doing anything — drawing maps, and so on, unless we know exactly what we want to accomplish, unless we have some idea of what is doable. Otherwise we will just be buying ourselves three months of good will, and great distrust afterwards. You must have the sense that when you deal with the White House, our word counts. I would rather tell you honestly we can’t do something than to tell you something we can do and later we would not deliver.
This was far-reaching but one-sided and not essentially different from what had produced the deadlock. The price paid for the return to the prewar borders would not be peace but the end of belligerency, not easy to distinguish from the existing cease-fire. Formal peace would come only after the Syrians and Palestinians had settled in an extremely cloudy procedure — giving the most intractable parties a veto, in effect, over the whole process.
They left us with little reason for optimism. The hint of a separate Egyptian-Israeli accord was so heavily qualified with unacceptable conditions that it was more compatible with a come-on to get us involved than with a serious effort to negotiate.
Jordan’s involvement in the peace process thereafter only complicated its already precarious existence. For Hussein was caught between the passions of his Arab brethren and his own realism, for which he paid the price of several radical attempts on his life; he was trapped in the paradox that he was the Arab leader most ready to make peace, yet of all the territories it had conquered Israel was most reluctant to relinquish the Jordanian portion, which it most intimately connected with its own traditions.
Hussein’s mastery of this challenge stamped him as a formidable personality. His legendary courtesy, which the uninitiated took for pliability, was a marvelous way to keep all the contending forces at arm’s length. He was imperiled by the intransigence of Israel, the embrace of the West, the hegemonic aspirations of Egypt, and the revolutionary fervor of Syria and Iraq. He emerged as his own man. Hussein did not take refuge in blaming America for the humiliation of 1967. He did not break relations with us, as did several other Arab states, but he maintained his insistence on a solution just to the Arab cause — even the cause of those who sought to bring him down.
She had seen too much of the human character to rely on such intangible assurances as recognition of Israel’s existence. She knew only too well that recognition of their existence is where the security problem of all other nations begins, not ends.
Nixon was not about to contradict this judgment but added cautiously: “We are realistic about the dangers which still exist. Many here say that since the world is at peace we can reduce arms to spend on ghettos. But we need more [arms] until our adversaries really change.”
Egypt, she argued, was looking for someone to help it get everything for nothing. First Cairo had tried the Soviets, now the US: “The trouble with Egypt is that they want the end before they begin.”
We had a delicate task. We had to nudge Egypt toward direct negotiations on a realistic program and Israel toward greater concessions than it had ever envisaged. But if we raised Arab hopes too much and then could not deliver, we would evoke an anti-American backlash. If we pressed Israel too far, it might launch a preemptive war while it still had the upper hand. And we had to fend off Soviet importuning for a direct Soviet-American agreement to impose terms even more impossible to achieve than Ismail’s. I never saw any sense in a deal with Moscow unless the Soviets were willing to press the Arabs as they urged us to press Israel.
For these reasons I was extremely wary of putting forward a detailed plan for which everyone was volunteering us. The worst diplomatic posture is to be committed without having the ability to bring about one’s designs. We had to explore the terrain carefully lest booby traps go off all around us.
In the exuberant atmosphere of the Arab world, “keeping a secret” has a special connotation. Since Arab leaders feel both a bond of solidarity with their brethren and the tug of a wild individualism, none of them would believe — indeed, would be profoundly disquieted by — any assurances from Sadat that nothing was going on. Judging their colleagues by their own proclivities, Arab leaders are convinced incessant maneuvers are always taking place whereby each “brother” seeks to advance his own position even while ostensibly defending the Arab cause. In this cacophony of voices secrecy, ironically, can best be maintained by drowning all one’s partners in a Babel of conversation that eventually overwhelms the distinction between epic poetry and reality.
There is no fury like that of a Foreign Service Officer bypassed, especially when he is head of a diplomatic mission, even a small, so-called Interests Section as in Cairo. The offended diplomat has two choices. If he is wise, he limits himself to inquiring discreetly of his superiors about what is going on and leaves the bureaucratic sorting out to Washington. But he also the option of standing on prerogative; he can report his knowledge in regular channels, thus spreading it through the bureaucracy by means of the computerized distribution system. This will quickly churn out enough copies to explode any aspiration to secrecy. The upshot of such maneuvers almost invariably is not to increase the responsibilities assigned to the diplomat — who tends to become the victim — but to reduce the options of Washington.
In fact, Sadat had decided on war during the summer of 1972. What drove him to the throw of the dice was not the immediate deadlock in the negotiations but the objective stalemate in the real positions of the parties. Sadat was shrewd enough to understand that he would not get his territory back all at once. Somewhere along the line he would have to make some significant concessions. But timing was crucial. If he suggested a phased negotiation — what later came to be called a “step-by-step” approach — he would lose the support of Syria and the Soviet Union, on which he depended for the threats without which the negotiation would never get off the ground. If he hinted at a separate peace, he would stand naked without the means to negotiate it.
Sadat decided to cut the Gordian knot by war. He went through the motions of diplomacy but at a pace that made it impossible to crystallize the issues, much less resolve them, setting deadlines so short that they permitted no real exploration. The utility to Sadat of both the diplomacy and the military preparations was to raise a cloud of dust behind which he was forging what everyone considered the most improbable contingency: a unified Egyptian-Syrian attack on Israel. But Sadat was the only figure aware of the diplomatic revolution he was planning. We had maneuvered to bring his reorientation about but did not yet recognize it that Sadat considered a war was necessary before he could take the decisive steps to fuel the peace process with some genuine give-and-take. For in the mood of Arab humiliation following the defeat of the Six Day War, concessions would in all likelihood be ascribed to military weakness rather than statesmanship.
In these beautiful surroundings we had what the diplomats would call “useful” — that is to say, ultimately unproductive — talks.
Was it a ruse to lull us while the Kremlin prepared a geopolitical offensive? Or were the Soviets sobered by Nixon’s firmness into settling for a period of restraint reinforced by the possible gains from economic relations? Did they seek detente only as a tactical maneuver? Or was there a serious possibility for a long period of stability in US-Soviet relations? Could the Moscow summit of 1972 have been a turning point, or was it always destined simply to be an ephemeral moment of euphoria?
We lost both the stick and the carrot. Whether our East-West policy was doomed in any event by the dynamics of the Soviet system or by the inherent ambiguity of our conception will be debated for a long time. The issue became moot when the executive power in the US collapsed. Fortunately for our state of mind, that future was still obscure when we arrived in Zavidovo.
A little later he invited my colleagues and me to dinner at his villa, which he first showed off with all the pride of a self-made entrepreneur. He asked me how much such an establishment would cost in the US.
Brezhnev could not hear often enough my avowal that we were proceeding on the premise of equality — an attitude inconceivable in Peking, whose leaders thought of themselves as culturally superior whatever the statistics showed about relative material strength.
I confessed that I was touched by this insecurity even while I recognized that the country he represented had a record of seeking assurance in bullying and safety in domination.
While Brezhnev calmly selected his victim, I reflected on the vulnerability of the greedy — only to have my rudimentary philosophy quickly disproved by a very large wild boar that emerged from the forest. One could see easily why it had attained such a size. It was not greedy; it set about to investigate the bait. It examined the ground before every step. It looked carefully behind every tree. It advanced in a measured pace. It had clearly survived and thrived by taking no unnecessary chances. All its precautions attracted Brezhnev’s attention, however, and he felled it with a single shot. Only Brezhnev’s jubilation prevented me from launching on another train of thought about the perils of excessive intellectualism.
The Bolshevik believed in the prevalence of material and military factors; the aged leader was exhausted by the exaction of a pitiless system. Doubtless no more than any Soviet leader would Brezhnev resist taking advantage of an opportunity to alter the power balance; nothing can take off our shoulders the imperative of preparedness. But within that constraint some leaders, driven by the impossibility of suppressing human aspiration forever, may well emerge eventually to explore the requirements of genuine coexistence. The West’s policy must encompass both possibilities: uncompromising resistance to expansionism and receptivity to a serious change of course in Moscow.
As a good Communist Brezhnev was, of course, dedicated to the victory of his ideology; as a believer in objective factors he could not justify failing to take advantage of a superior position of strength that our domestic divisions increasingly presented to him. It was then — and remains — our principal responsibility to prevent such temptation from arising. But there was also in Brezhnev a clearly evident strain of the elemental Russia, of a people that has prevailed through endurance, that longs for a surcease from its travails and has never been permitted by destiny or the ambitions of its rulers to fulfill its dream.
Urged on us insistently when we entered office, hailed exorbitantly as a turning point when 3 years later we carried it out, later blamed for all our contemporary dilemmas, detente has been more a barometer of our domestic controversies than a subject of serious analysis. For the statesman in any event, a foreign policy issue does not present itself as a theory but as a series of realities. And the realities of Nixon’s first term was stark. We had to end a war in Indochina in the midst of a virulent domestic assault on all the sinews of a strong foreign policy. It was followed by the impotence of the Presidency as a result of Watergate. Detente was not the cause of these conditions but one of the necessities for mastering them. Any discussion of it must begin with understanding this fact.
Our age must learn the lessons of WW2, brought about when the democracies failed to understand the designs of a totalitarian aggressor, sought foolishly to appease him, and permitted him to achieve a military superiority. This must never happen again, whatever the burdens of an adequate defense. But we must remember as well the lesson of WW1, when Europe, despite the existence of a military balance, drifted into a war no one wanted and a catastrophe that no one could have imagined. Military planning drove decisions; bluster and posturing drove diplomacy. Leaders committed the cardinal sin of statecraft: They lost control over events.
An American President thus has a dual responsibility: He must resist Soviet expansionism. And he must be conscious of the profound risks of global confrontation. His policy must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions. If the desire for peace turns into an avoidance of conflicts at all costs, if the just disparage power and seek refuge in their moral purity, the world’s fear of war becomes a weapon of blackmail by the strong; peaceful nations, large and small, will be at the mercy of the most ruthless. Yet if we pursue the ideological conflict divorced from strategy, if confrontation turns into an end in itself, we will lose the cohesion of our alliances and ultimately the confidence of our people. That was what the Nixon Administration understood by detente.
The Nixon Administration sought a foreign policy that eschewed both moralistic crusading and escapist isolationism, submerging them in a careful analysis of the national interest. America’s aim was to maintain the balance of power and seek to build upon it a more constructive future. We were entering a period when America’s responsibility was to provide a consistent, mature leadership in much more complex conditions than we had ever before faced and over a much longer period of time than we ever had had to calculate.
The percentage of the world’s GNP represented by our economy was shrinking by 10% with every decade: from 52% in 1950 to 40% in 1960, to some 30% in 1970 (it is at this writing 22%). This meant that if all the rest of the world united against us or if some hostile power or group of powers achieved the hegemony Peking warned of, America’s resources would be dwarfed by its adversaries’. Still the strongest nation but no longer preeminent, we would have to take seriously the world balance of power, for if it tilted against us, it might prove irreversible. No longer able to wait for threats to become overwhelming before dealing with them, we would have to substitute concept for resources. We needed the inward strength to act on the basis of assessments unprovable when they were made.
How to avoid nuclear war without succumbing to nuclear blackmail, how to prevent the desire for peace from turning into appeasement; how to defend liberty and maintain the peace — this is the overwhelming problem of our age. The trouble — no, the tragedy — is that the dual concept of containment and coexistence, of maintaining the balance of power while exploring a more positive future, has no automatic consensus behind it.
Liberals equated relations among states with human relations. They emphasized the virtues of trust and unilateral gestures of goodwill. Conservatives saw in foreign policy a version of the eternal struggle of good with evil, a conflict that recognized no middle ground and could end only with victory.
Through the early part of the 20th century the US thought of itself as standing above considerations of national interest. We would organize mankind by a consensus of moral principles or norms of international law. Regard for the purity of our ideals inspired conservatives, to put Communism into quarantine: There could be no compromise with the devil. Liberals worried about the danger of confrontation; conservatives about funking it.
Conservatives at least remained true to their beliefs. They wanted to truck with Communism whatever the tactical motivation. They equated negotiation with Moscow the moral disarmament of America. They rejected our argument that if we did not take account of the global yearning for peace we would isolate ourselves internationally and divide our nation again over the same issues that had polarized America over Vietnam.
The liberals’ position was more complex. Viscerally they opposed the balance of power theory implicit in containment. But what could they say about detente, so long championed by them and now put forward by that hated Cold Warrior Nixon? Their frustration mounted when Nixon, in stealing some of their clothes, could not resist taunting them with some of their own rhetoric. The tendency to hyperbole, unnecessary for such a sensible case, provoked liberal critics at first into attacking detente as just another version of balance of power, as not going far enough, as a tactic — almost as a Cold War tactic — rather than as policy for the genuine relaxation of tensions.
The result was a dangerous contradiction. On the one hand, the lesson of Vietnam was allegedly to be that we had no moral right to engage in distant enterprises. On the other hand, the Administration was now accused of amoral callousness in not insisting on the internal amelioration of all the other societies, be they friendly or adversary. A new doctrine of political intervention into the domestic affairs of other states emerged, even while we were bing pressed to withdraw American power from remote continents.
The subtlest critique of our policy held that our emphasis on the national interest ran counter to American idealism and national character. Americans, on this thesis, must affirm general values or they will lack the resolution and stamina to overcome the Soviet challenge. In other words, America must commit itself to a moral opposition to Communism, not just geopolitical opposition to Soviet encroachment, or its policy will be based on quicksand. But while I sympathize with this point of view, a statesman must relate general theorems to concrete circumstances. Crusades rarely supply the staying power for a prolonged struggle. Obsession with ideology may translate into an unwillingness to confront seemingly marginal challenges, depicting them as unworthy because they appear not to encapsulate the ultimate showdown. And the overemphasis on ideology would create a characteristically American vulnerability: The doctrine of redemption would make us peculiarly receptive to Soviet peace offensives that seemed to imply that Soviet purposes had changed. Our moral convictions must arm us to face the ambiguity inseparable from the long haul or else they will wind up disarming us.
Whatever policies they conduct, statesmen always gamble on their assessment of the future.
In short, I rejected the proposition of our critics that the Soviet Union stands to benefit more from peaceful competition than do the democracies. It is a counsel of despair, the opposite of what I believe to be reality. It shows an unwarranted historical pessimism, a serious lack of faith in the American people. Nothing has changed in the intervening two decades to suggest that the Communist world, inferior in resources and organization, can outstrip the West in prolonged competition. If the Soviet Union overtakes the West in military power, this will be caused not by detente but by the failure of the democracies to do what is clearly necessary.
The system had failed to deal seriously with the desire for political participation of the intellectual and managerial elite that industrialization inevitably spawns. Or else it sought to preempt their political aspirations by turning the ruling group into a careerist “new class” bound to produce stagnation.
Total planning seems to obstruct growth in direct proportion to the scale of the economy. All incentives work in the wrong direction. Factory managers understate their potential output lest they be locked into targets that bottlenecks outside their control will prevent them from meeting. Planners do not have the test of the market to gauge the preferences of consumers (even industrial consumers). In such a vacuum they produce merchandise that is both unwanted and inferior. Quality is impossible to guarantee by directives; hence each manager tends to fulfill his quota in the manner least dependent on other sectors of the Soviet system.
With no discretion to change plans, managers are forced to operate at the margin of bureaucratic legality: to hoard scarce materials or to seek reliable suppliers on the sly. This culminates in the paradox that a totally planned economy requires a black market, that is, a secret free market, to function at all. But this only magnifies the classic weakness of Communist economies: chronic shortages and chronic surpluses side by side. The dilemma of Communism is that it seems impossible to run a modern economy by a system of total planning, yet it may not be possible to run a Communist state without a system of total planning.
The Communist Party’s raison d’etre is its monopoly of power — but this produces another anomaly. The small group of votaries who arrogate to themselves superior insight into the processes of history derive from this conviction the monomaniacal intensity required to make revolution. But once they are firmly in power, what is their function? They are not needed to run the government or the economy or the military. They are guardians of a political legitimacy that has long since lost its moral standing as well as its revolutionary elan. They specialized in solving internal crises that their centralized system has created and external crises into which their rigidity tempts them. The Party apparatus duplicates every existing hierarchy without performing any function. Its members are watchdogs lacking criteria, an incubus to enforce order, a smug bastion of privilege inviting corruption and cynicism.
In every Communist state — it is almost an historic joke — the ultimate crisis, latent if not evident, is over the role of the Communist Party. If Moscow is prevented by a firm Western policy from deflecting its internal tensions into international crises, it is likely to find only disillusionment in the boast that history is on its side. I remain convinced that a long period of peace will favor the pluralism of a democratic system — the economic vitality, genius for technological innovation, and creativity of free peoples.
No Western leader who specialized in “understanding” them, as if foreign policy were like personal relations, ever succeeded. Soviet leaders have come up through a hard school. They have prevailed in a system that ruthlessly weeds out the timid and the scrupulous. Only a great lust for power — or near-fanatical ideological conviction — can have impelled them into careers in which there are few winners and disastrous penalties for losers. Personal goodwill, that mirage of Western diplomacy, cannot move them. Their ideology stresses the overriding importance of material factors and the objective balance of forces. They cannot defend conciliatory policies toward the outside world amid the struggle for power that characterizes the Soviet system except by emphasizing that objective conditions require them.
This is why unsentimental realists seem to find greater favor in that capital whose ideology rejects the proposition that man can alter the foreordained course of history. And Nixon was nothing if not a realist. Few leaders were less likely to confuse coexistence with psychotherapy or peace with good personal relations. His personal insecurity made him doubt that he could charm anyone — especially the dour Soviet leaders. He knew that there was no substitute for posing calibrated risks that would make aggression appear unattractive; he strove mightily to preserve the balance of power. But he was not afraid to explore incentives to give the Soviets a stake in cooperation even while he sought to make expansionism too dangerous.
He had been schooled in the deadliest of bureaucratic arenas, as the dean of a university.
Most Favored Nation status is, of course, a misnomer. It grants no special favors; it extends to the recipient country only the tariff treatment already afforded to all other nations (over 100) with which we have normal commercial relations. In other words, MFN treatment ends discrimination against the country that receives it. It benefits our traders as well as foreign ones. Even with MFN, Soviet exports to the US were not expected to grow rapidly or significantly. The MFN status was important to the Soviets for symbolic rather than for commercial reasons; it conveyed the appearance of equality in the economic field.
But I took Dobrynin’s lame explanation to indicate that the Kremlin was having second thoughts; it was looking for both a scapegoat and an exit.
Once it was passed, it was no longer useful as leverage; the Soviet could not possibly change their policies in response to the act of a capitalist legislature; they were more likely to move in the opposite direction. Far from spurring emigration, the Jackson amendment in fact wound up substantially reducing it.
By then Nixon was badly wounded. The day before, he had acknowledged the possibility that Watergate involved high levels of his Administration. In these circumstances the Congress was not seeking a collaboration; it was looking for opportunities to prove its independence. The legislators assembled in the Roosevelt Room of the White House listened politely. None had thought such a Soviet collapse possible. Yet it was difficult to avoid the impression that a few of them up for reelection in 1974 preferred to have the issue rather than its resolution.
Yet in the prevailing public mood in America, no legislator could afford to dissociate himself from the demand and risk charges of being “soft” on Soviet emigration. And if Congressional pressures led to deadlock, one could always blame the Administration for not having pursued a Congressionally mandated objective with adequate energy and conviction. It was our first exposure to what came to be a staple of Watergate and its aftermath: a Congressional mandate for an unfulfillable course that sapped our credibility abroad without giving us the tools to deal with the consequences of the resulting tension.
Nixon and I did not help matters by misunderstanding Jackson’s thrust. We thought that eventually he would work out some accord with us for what was attainable. In fact, he kept escalating his demands.
The collapse of national civility and cohesion made it difficult for the disputants to hear each other. The Administration felt aggrieved, not the best attitude in dealing with Congress; our critics sensed our vulnerability, not the ideal precondition for serious dialogue.
We shall never condone the suppression of fundamental liberties. We shall urge humane principles and use our influence to promote justice. But the issue comes down to the limits of such efforts. How hard can we press without provoking the Soviet leadership into returning to practices in its foreign policy that increase international tensions? Are we ready to face the crises and increased defense budgets that a return to Cold War conditions would spawn? And will this encourage full emigration or enhance the well-being or nourish the hope for liberty of the peoples of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union? Is it detente that has prompted repression — or is it detente that has generated the ferment and the demand for openness which we are now witnessing?
These questions have no easy answers. The government may underestimate the margin of concessions available to us. But a fair debate must admit that they are genuine questions, the answers to which could affect the fate of all of us.
New weapons were decried as excessive, as symptoms of a military psychosis, as wasteful and dangerous. The ABM program passed the Senate by only one vote and was the emasculated in the appropriations process. Ironically, it was those most opposed to the arms race who rejected flexible military options; they clung to the most bloodthirsty nuclear targeting strategies because mass extermination of civilians, in the weird logic of the nuclear age, requires the smallest number of strategic forces.
In theory our defense problems should have been amenable to the rational weighing of carefully elaborated choices that outsiders see as the process of government. Reality is not like that. Decisions emerge from a combination of personal convictions, bureaucratic self-interest, administrative trade-offs, and Congressional and public pressures, with the dividing line between these elements often blurred in the discussion and even in the mind of the participants. In this instance, astonishing as it may seem, hawks and doves alike were reluctant to face the implications of our evaporating strategic superiority.
In the first term my influence had been greatest where the departments were eager to avoid the onus of public controversy (as on Vietnam negotiations), or where no one wanted to take the responsibility for a major change of course (as on China).
In that period, my chairmanship of interdepartmental committees had enabled me to learn the views of the various agencies, encourage analysis, and narrow the options. I could then use this knowledge in secret negotiations with some confidence as to where I had bureaucratic support and what could cause difficulties. The agencies still assumed that they shared responsibility for the outcome of a negotiation, including its failure.
But by 1973 they had discovered that the major negotiations took place without their knowledge. Hence I could be blamed for failure, or be made to bear the brunt of whatever controversy even success was sure to bring. Each department thereafter would stake out its maximum objective, whatever sense it made. If that pristine position was not achieved, the agencies were not responsible. The inevitable compromise that would be necessary for a solution, and which in normal procedures they would have urged, could now be blamed on inadequate vigilance by the negotiator. My position, in short, had become bureaucratically untenable.
This was a symbolic objective that reflected domestic pressures, not a political or strategic analysis. It is impossible to achieve by negotiation what one is not willing to pursue by one’s own effort. In effect, the proposal meant asking the Soviets to reduce unilaterally without sacrificing any American program or threatening any American buildup if the proposal were not accepted. How to accomplish it was generously left to my discretion.
While these esoteric debates were going on, and despite its obsession with equality, the Defense Department continued to reduce our forces by administrative decisions throughout the nearly 7 years that SALT II was being negotiated. It thus gave the Soviets for nothing benefits for which we could at least have attempted to exact some reciprocity in the negotiations.
Since our government had not yet formulated any position, and was preoccupied by the Presidential elections and the final negotiations on Vietnam, we arrived at a tried and true response: We proposed an “exploratory” meeting. Its purpose was to elicit Soviet reactions and to develop a “work program” — in short, to make sure that nothing much controversial could occur.
For six months theoretical papers were pushed back and forth while we consumed ourselves in near-academic debates about options that, even had we been able to agree on them, had no relationship to any negotiating reality.
Nixon also had an acute instinct for the right moment to act. The Soviets had given no indication that they were ready for serious discussion. Our own deliberations were largely exploratory and theoretical. No one understood better than Nixon the principle that a President should not spend political capital unless he can calculate high odds for success.
If you want my personal opinion, I’ll give it to you. If you want my official opinion, the standard answer is no.
The idea that the head of a Soviet negotiating team would not have a Politburo mandate was preposterous. The proposition that elements of the Soviet government would squabble while dealing with foreigners was cleverly geared to American preconceptions of the “doves” in the Kremlin fighting a valiant battle against “hardliners.” The general assigned to SALT in 1973, Nikolai Ogarkov, eventually became Soviet Chief of Staff — a position unlikely to be given to a man perceived to be second-rate — though I do not doubt that the Soviet military were as suspicious of the newfangled theories of arms control as generals the world over.
No one had any new ideas to offer. Defense and the Joint Chiefs had only one position: equal aggregates in every category and every weapons system, no matter how different the design of our own forces from that of the Soviets. After hearing for years about the dangers of the Soviet heavy missile if MIRVed, we were now told that stopping their MIRVing was “not worth much.” This caused me to ask: “If this is true, can someone explain what the hell this negotiation is all about?”
The proposition that we should probe without having a position of our own — indeed, after we had explicitly failed to reach an internal agreement — was guaranteed to elicit my sarcasm:
What do you probe for without knowing what we want? I’d rather go from our own position than from theirs. It’s a sad commentary on the ability of our government if our own position would not be better for us than theirs would be.
We retreated to the idea of signing some “general principles” on SALT at the June summit. This is the usual refuge of diplomats unable to agree, unwilling to admit the impasse, and skillful in finding formulas to permit each side to maintain its original position.
Gromyko worried about this because he feared that a failure to meet the deadline, even for technical reasons, might sour our relations. We thought that a deadline was the only way to stop endless procrastination within our government and at Geneva.
On the other hand, while it was a good illustration of the stamina required to deal with Soviet diplomacy, when it was all over we had avoided danger, but achieved little that was positive.
Soviet diplomacy knows non resting places. A scheme is presented as a major contribution to relaxing tensions; if we will only accept it there will be an “improvement in the atmosphere.” But as often as not, no sooner has one agreement been completed than the Kremlin advances another, which is pursued with characteristic single-mindedness and with the identical argument that failure to proceed will sour the atmosphere.
He was a profound student of Soviet behavior. He had an unsentimental assessment of Soviet purposes. He was convinced that the threat of general war was one of the chief fears of the Soviet Union; anything that lessened Soviet concerns on that score would weaken deterrence. In his view, the Soviets wanted to reduced the margin of their own uncertainty while seeking to magnify allied inhibitions against the use of nuclear weapons. Our course must thwart those designs.
We knew that we would be able to achieve Soviet acquiescence only if we could slow down exchanges until some new deadline — like a summit — would produce Soviet anxieties sufficient to modify Brezhnev’s proposal fundamentally. So we marked time, using the need to end the Vietnam war as a pretext.
Patience was not Brezhnev’s strong suit. He used every opportunity to try to speed up negotiations.
If the Soviet Union renounced the use of nuclear weapons, he argued soothingly, we could be “two hundred percent” sure that it would also refrain from employing conventional weapons against us or our allies. (This, of course, left China and the Middle East conveniently uncovered.) Brezhnev sought to give force to this assurance — qualified by region as it was — with an appeal to Soviet constitutional practice: “Such a prospect would be completely contrary to the declaration of the Party Congress of our Party.” It was mind-boggling to imagine what would happen if we presented an agreement to the North Atlantic Council, much less to Peking, based on our confidence in a pledge made to itself by the Congress of the Soviet Communist Party.
Gromyko was an expert draftsman. He understood immediately what I had done. He complained that we were not proceeding in the “spirit” of the initial exchange. He noted (correctly) that “nothing” remained of the original Soviet proposal of the renunciation of the use of nuclear weapons.
Still, during the final phase of the Vietnam negotiations, we were not eager for additional disputes. So I went back to stalling. Using the tried-and-true tactic of Presidential assistants, I hide behind Nixon, claiming somewhat disingenuously that the nuclear field was an area in which I had less latitude than in others. I doubt that Gromyko believed me. After all, in Moscow Nixon had evaded talking about the nuclear treaty by assigning the subject to Dobrynin and / or Gromyko and me. Now I was reversing the argument. But Gromyko had few cards to play. So he acquiesced, as the Soviets usually do when faced with an unchangeable reality.
But the bargaining positions had changed. Once the Soviets had set the date for the summit, time worked against them. We had next to no interest in the project; Brezhnev had made it one of his priorities. The Soviets had to move in our direction if they wanted to have anything to show for Brezhnev’s visit.
Now, if ever, was the moment of truth. We had skillfully avoided any final commitment to the project. We should probably have dropped it now that the Vietnam war was over and the summit was settled. But the price of stalling had been the implication that we would negotiate something; abandoning the negotiation — though in retrospect correct — seemed then too drastic.
Their motives are obvious: to create the impression of detente, to create the impression of great power bilateralism and to give them a relatively free hand for blackmail — at the same time they are steadily increasing their strategic forces in an eerie way. Now it could also be to leave open the option of genuine detente further down the line. So our objective is to give them enough of the form without any substance.
There was no other government which we would have dealt with so openly, exchanged ideas with so freely, or in effect permitted to participate in our own deliberations. All documents were made available to the British, sometimes with a time lag, but significant moves were always joint ones. Brimelow occasionally showed us British analyses. He did most of the actual drafting. The final version owed, in fact, more to British than to American expertise.
Brezhnev’s idea of diplomacy was to beat the other party into submission or cajole it with heavy-handed humor. My tactic was to reduce matters to easy banter to avoid personal showdowns and to give emphasis to our sticking points when I turned serious. The negotiation became a contest between a bull and a matador, except that at the end of the contest the matador for all his intricate cape-play had only slightly winded the bull, who was assembling his energies for a new charge.
Joining a US-Soviet alliance against China was not exactly our idea of detente. Nor was I about to be bested in the department of long speeches, especially when the passage of each hour improved our bargaining position.
I noted, slightly sarcastically, that without the President’s personal relationship with Brezhnev the proposed agreement would have never gotten so far — implying that it was not a top priority for us from the point of view of national interest.
After an introductory period of Brezhnev jokes, we turned at last to the text. At once a haggle broke over which text to use. We had won three-quarters of the battle when it was decided to use our text as a point of departure. Then we found ourselves in a typical pettifogging debate. Hard as it is to believe that grown men could quarrel over such trivia, the issue was whether someone should read out the entire text or only the disputed portions and if so who. We favored concentrating on disputed points to avoid introducing new issues, especially the idea of renouncing the use of nuclear weapons.
In short, in over a year of negotiation we had transformed the original Soviet proposal of an unconditional renunciation of the use of nuclear weapons against each other into a somewhat banal statement that our objective was peace, applying as well to allies and third countries and premised on restrained international conduct, especially the avoidance of the use of the threat of force.
Brezhnev grumbled that I seemed constantly to stress what the agreement was not, rather than its positive aspects. He had a point. But he had no choice except to go along with the briefing.
Peace between the two superpowers will hardly be ensured by legal documents. And whether we resist attacks on threatened countries depends less on artful interpretations of a complicated agreement than on our perception of the national interest. The Soviets proposed the document for symbolic reasons, and we had rewritten the content to render its symbolism either harmless or to the West’s advantage.
Technically, it was one of our better diplomatic performances. It represented ingenious drafting (mostly by Brimelow) and stubborn negotiating. Yet in retrospect I doubt whether the result was worth the effort. We gained a marginally useful text. But the result was too subtle; the negotiation too secret; the effort too protracted; the necessary explanations to allies and China too complex to have the desired impact.
But the cool calculators in Peking did not see it this way. They did not believe their security enhanced by unenforceable obligations; they recognized the potential for a misleading euphoria in a document purportedly devoted to preventing nuclear war.
The complex Soviet system craves predictable partners. The capacity of an American President to make good on his threats or to fulfill his promises is the principal currency in which they deal. And precisely this was in question in 1973. Tempting as was the prospect of a weakened American executive, the Soviets seemed for many months restrained by the uncertainties involved. It took them nearly 2 years before they moved aggressively to exploit our domestic upheavals by supporting proxy forces in Africa.
In the abstract, Jackson was right. In practice a cancellation after so much preparation and on such grounds would have gravely undermined the authority of the US government. It would have signaled that we had lost the capacity to negotiate — and therefore also to protect our interests — during the unforeseeable course of a prolonged investigation. Once this principle was admitted to the Soviets, it would have to be applied to all other relationships. We would have made ourselves an international basket case long before events imposed that condition upon us.
We had no choice except to pretend that our authority was unimpaired. For that, we had to do business as usual; we could afford no appearance of hesitation; we needed to project self-confidence no matter what we felt. Of course, Nixon also had a more personal motive. For him to concede that his ability to govern had been impaired would accelerate the assault on his Presidency. He could not bring himself to admit the growing disintegration of what he had striven all his life to achieve.
As for Brezhnev, his boisterousness never quite managed to obscure his insecurity. A visit to the US was obviously a big event for him. He desperately wanted to make a good impression. In his public appearances he sought to hide his vulnerability behind heavy-handed clowning.
It was also a transparent ploy to catch Nixon off guard and with luck to separate him from his advisers. It was the sort of maneuver that costs more in confidence than can possibly be gained in substance. Concessions achieved by subterfuge may embarrass; they are never the basis for continuing action between sovereign nations because they will simply not be maintained.
The issue, at bottom, is not really a legal question but turns on one’s perception of the national interest. Our determination to enforce the Agreement came up against all the passions unleashed by the Vietnam war. Those who had always wanted us to wash our hands of the non-Communist peoples of Indochina sought to vindicate their course upon the war’s conclusion. Letting free Indochina go as the result of an agreement seemed to them no more pernicious than their previous insistence on unilateral withdrawal. They saw the Paris Agreement not as the honorable compromise it was, but simply as a fulfillment of their old prescription to disengage unconditionally.
We had no intention of letting slip by inaction what 50K Americans died to achieve, or of abandoning the millions who in relying on our promises had fought at our side for a decade. We were convinced that the impact on international stability and on America’s readiness to defend free peoples would be catastrophic if we treated a solemn agreement as unconditional surrender and simply walked away from it. And events were to prove us right.
How was the Paris Agreement then to be maintained? “By diplomacy,” the favorite answer of our critics, was no answer at all. It was diplomacy, after all, tedious years of it, that hat produced the very Agreement that was being violated. But it had not been diplomacy in a vacuum. We had brought military pressure to bear on Hanoi. Effective diplomacy depends on other countries’ assessment of incentives and penalties, not on the eloquence of some individual. To argue otherwise is a bromide, an evasion of the problem.
Radical critics, of course, wallowed in charges of blood lust and esoteric psychological theories of our alleged propensity to violence. But they were acting out of their own inner turmoil, not advancing a reasoned analysis.
Where will we be if what was a very solemn agreement, very painfully achieved, in which we made very major concessions, is simply disregarded?
There is no doubt many people who were simply tired of the war, fearing it would go on forever, but they also did not want to lose it. Exhaustion is no guide to policy.
Here, indeed, is the central dilemma of the statesman. Nixon was not the first American President, nor will he be the last, to face the core question of leadership in a democracy: To what extent must a national leader follow his conscience and judgment, and at what point should he submit to a public mood, however disastrous for the nation or the peace of the world he considers it to be? The question permits of no abstract answers. The extreme cases are easy. The dilemmas arise in the gray area where the national consensus is itself vague or contradictory, or where its convictions are ill founded and likely to lead to a debacle though the statesman cannot prove it.
A President who identifies leadership with public opinion polls dooms himself to irrelevance; a President who substitutes his judgment totally for that of other elected representatives undermines the essence of diplomacy. Weak Presidents try to hide behind a public opinion that, in the end, will not forgive debacles when caused by its own preferences. In 1938 after Munich, Neville Chamberlain was the most popular man in Britain; appeasement exactly reflected the dominant opinion. Twenty months later it had become a byword for weakness of will. Strong Presidents sometimes rely excessively on their judgment; some are later revered as great because they did so.
Most senior members of the Administration had found some excuse for being out of town. It was a shaming experience. In my days in Washington, several Communist leaders had been received with honor. Senior officials had vied to attend State dinners in honor of neutralist leaders who specialized in castigating the US. But the staunch President of a friendly country was a pariah.
To be sure, South Vietnam was hardly a democracy in our sense. There were justified criticisms of harshness and corruption. But when Thieu’s disgruntled opponents in Saigon’s turbulent pluralistic politics expressed these to our press, no contrast was drawn with Hanoi, where no opposition was tolerated, the press was controlled, and access to foreign media was prohibited. It was not, in short, a fastidious assessment of degrees of democracy that was at work on American emotions about Thieu. He was the victim of a deeper, more pervasive confusion that manifested itself in double standards in all the democracies.
Meanwhile, Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the so-called foreign minister of the phantom Communist Provisional Revolutionary Government, which could not boast even a capital, was lionized in Eastern Europe.
In the postwar years we have seen Western newspapers replete with the transgressions of the regimes in Spain, Portugal, South Korea, Greece, Iran, South Vietnam, and others, while being much more restrained — almost apologetic — about the cruelties of the “people’s democracies” of Eastern Europe, the left tyrannies of the Third World, and of course Communist North Vietnam.
In an ideal world, our democratic principles and the needs of our security would coincide. But the reality is that constitutional democracy, which we consider “normal,” is, in fact, a rarity both in the sweep of history and on the breadth of this planet. This is no accident. Constitutional democracy places authority in an abstraction: obedience to law. But constitutionalism can function only if law is believed either to reflect an absolute standard of truth or grow out of a generally accepted political process. In most parts of the world and in most periods of time, these conditions have not existed. Law was the verdict of authority, not of legislative process; politics has been about who has the right to issue orders. Personal authority has been made bearable by a concept of reciprocal obligation, as in feudal societies, or when limited by custom, as was the authority of kings who ruled by the claim to divine right in the 17th and 18th centuries. In each case tradition was a limiting factor; certain extractions were impossible not because they were forbidden but because they had no precedent. No ruler of 18th-century Europe could levy income taxes or conscript his subjects; authoritarianism, in short, was quite precisely circumscribed.
It was, paradoxically, the emergence of popular government that expanded the scope of what authorities could demand. The people by definition could not oppress itself; hence its wishes, as expressed by assemblies or rulers in its name, were absolute. The growth of state power has gone hand in hand with the expansion of populist claims.
In this context modern totalitarianism is a caricature, a reductio ad absurdum, of democracy; modern authoritarianism is a vestige of traditional personal rule. This is why some authoritarian governments have been able to evolve into democracies and why no totalitarian state has ever done so. Personal rule has inherent limits; government that claims to reflect the general will countenances no such restraint.
But for this very reason, authoritarian governments are infinitely more vulnerable to internal subversion than totalitarian ones. When the personal bond of reciprocal obligation is broken, both rulers and subjects become demoralized; the former because they have no legitimacy for governing on a sustained basis by naked force, the latter because once the criteria of obedience have evaporated, every directive appears oppressive. Our dilemma is that in almost all developing countries on this planet, authority is still personal. The transition to constitutionalism is a complex process that, if force-led, is more likely to lead to totalitarianism than to democracy.
One of the premises of the democratic process is that the loser accepts his defeat and in return is given an opportunity to win on another occasion. It depends on a moderate center. Such an evolution is almost inevitably thwarted in a developing country when a totalitarian element succeeds in organizing a guerrilla war. This impels the government into acts of repression, starting a vicious circle that traps both government and opponents and destroys whatever moderate center exists — fulfilling the central purpose of the insurgency. Moreover, the victims of terrorist attacks are almost invariably the ablest and most dedicated officials, leaving in place the corrupt, whose transgressions multiply as they attempt to make up for the peril of their station by accumulating the maximum material compensations.
The American response to this historical phenomenon is usually expressed in the conviction that a government under siege can best maintain itself by accelerating democratic reform and by expanding its base of support by sharing power. But the fundamental cause of a civil war is the break down of domestic consensus. Compromise, the essence of democratic politics, is its first victim. Civil wars almost without exception end in victory or defeat, never in coalition governments — the favorite American recipe. Concessions are ascribed to the weakness of those holding power, not to their magnanimity, and hence accelerate rather than arrest the disintegration of authority. The proper time for reform is before civil wars break out, in order to preempt their causes — though this does not always work when the insurrection is inspired, financed, trained, and equipped from outside the country. The next occasion for conciliation is after victory, but Western inhibitions about force and authoritarian incompetence usually combine to prevent the testing of this hypothesis.
This is why the perennial American pressures for political talks tend to demoralize allied governments with which we are associated. When they crying need is for an assertion of authority, our advice usually dilutes it. And hard-pressed government beset by an implacable domestic enemy are often reduced to paralysis by advice which they know is dangerous if not disastrous but which they dare not reject. This was the fate of Nguyen Van Thieu, as it was later of the Shah of Iran.
I had little personal affection for Thieu but I had high regard for him as he continued his struggle in the terrible loneliness that followed America’s withdrawal. He received scant compassion or even understanding. It did not dent his dignity.
The “political contest” so passionately advocated by some in America during the war would never be undertaken by Hanoi in peacetime. It would not risk a generation of struggle on ballots that it disdained in its own country.
It has a slightly unreal quality because the American participants knew that Congressional support even for economic development assistance was eroding fast. The liberals were losing interest because they had little commitment to the survival of South Vietnam, and the conservatives believed that they had discharged their obligations by supporting the war to an honorable conclusion.
Despite his usual suspiciousness and the gathering omens of future difficulties — our hesitation over both Hanoi’s violations and economic assistance — Thieu had an unshakable conviction that the US would come to South Vietnam’s aid in a crisis. It was a confidence entertained before and since by other allies of the US, a faith that has constituted one of our principal assets in the world and that we were determined not to dissipate.
There was a fashionable slogan that we could not guarantee the future of South Vietnam for all eternity. This was probably true. But 8 weeks hardly qualified as “eternity.”
Our critics give us no awards for our restraint. What do you think they’ll say if we lose Vietnam? They will attack the agreement as a sellout and forget that they were advocating a real sellout just a few months ago.
If they now believe that we may not react and we fail to do so, we will encourage increasing and even more blatant violations. If we react we will demonstrate the costs which they must expect to bear if they abrogate the Agreement. There will be recriminations. But in my judgment if we do not react, the Agreement may well break down precisely because we did not. The recriminations in that event will be not less severe.
In crises the most daring course is often the safest. The riskiest course in my experience has been gradual escalation that the opponent matches step by step, inevitably reaching a higher level of violence and often an inextricable stalemate.
For 5 years it had been an article of faith among critics that strong actions marred the climate for negotiations. The truth was quite different. We had invariably found that Hanoi was never more tractable than after a violent American blow.
There was a division of opinion in the CIA about what Hanoi was up to. One school reasoned that it would act soon to thwart the political gains Thieu was making; another argued that it was building up secure base areas for an assault much later. This was a normal pattern for the role of intelligence in finely balanced policymaking. It usually mirrors the prevalent division of opinion, following rather than creating policy preferences.
There is almost always in a crisis a division between doves who seek evidence for delay, wrapping their hesitation in the mantle of “diplomacy,” which without leverage is bound to be dilatory and inconclusive, and hawks who want early preemptive action. Generally the advocates of passivity seem to have the stronger case in the beginning of a crisis because the risks of action are evident while those of passivity are deferred or conjectural. The bane of preemptive action is the impossibility of proving it was necessary. The penalty for gradualism is that one becomes the prisoner of events. The temptation is nearly irresistible to try to combine both courses, striking bureaucratic compromises rather than seeking real solutions, or to confuse the two. A hawkish policy is coupled with dovish methods that deprive it of effectiveness (the Bay of Pigs syndrome). Or a dovish policy is carried out with hawkish rhetoric (the Iran hostage syndrome). With respect to the violations of the Paris Agreement we had used the rhetoric of hawks, but were forced to be doves. For the first time we had threatened and not followed through.
Perhaps I should have called off the negotiation when it became apparent that we would not conduct the air strikes that had been intended to precede it. Unfortunately, our domestic divisions had left us bankrupt. We had nothing much left we could do except negotiate and hope that peaceful pressures — and bluff — might work. We were reduced to relying on naked diplomacy just as our critics had urged.
Negotiations do not prosper by debating points or sarcastic remarks of the kind we had exchanged; they require a balance of interests and risks.
With respect to Laos, we managed to extract yet another written understanding to the effect that a political settlement would be achieved by July 1, 1973. In fact, it took until July 29 to achieve a preliminary agreement, until Sept 14 to agree on a coalition, and until April 5, 1874 to set up the coalition — without having the slightest effect on the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops.
In retrospect this judgment was totally wishful thinking. A careful reading of the statements suggests that whatever desire Sihanouk may have had for conciliation, he was himself a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge and of his own 1970 declaration of war against the Cambodian government.
The irony was that everybody’s estimate of the Cambodians turned out to be wrong; each of the major Communist rivals backed the wrong horse because both overestimated our determination to back the existing structure in Phnom Penh, for without this both the Lon Nol group as well as Sihanouk were doomed.
As in many authoritarian societies there had always been corruption. This is partly because in traditional societies the distinction between the private and public sectors tends to be less sharply defined and partly because the insufficient power to tax invites corruption as a means of financing the costs of government. It was perhaps inevitable that Lon Nol should lean increasingly on the few people he trusted, who tended to be his family, especially his younger brother who unfortunately carried corruption and favoritism to new heights beyond what could be explained by sociological analysis.
Despite his obvious self-interest in Peking’s preferred solution, Sihanouk understood that the Khmer Rouge and Hanoi were determined to block such an outcome. He was too weak to abandon the only base he had — whatever his convictions.
Le Duc Tho would commit himself to no more than a pledge that both sides would put forward “their best efforts to bring about a peaceful settlement.” By now, “best efforts” was a clear euphemism for doing nothing. It it depended on the North Vietnamese, Cambodia would be settled on the battlefield. Our diplomacy would have to seek other channels.
Any familiar with Zhou Enlai could be certain that he would not check so meticulously except to signal that he was committing himself, and he would not act as intermediary unless he expected to succeed. The careful Chinese would never risk demonstrating their impotence to affect events in Southeast Asia; they would never offer to pass on a message that they thought would be turned down.
No one can expert that an agreement for a cease-fire will be observed simply because it is written down, and the Congress and others have to ask themselves whether it is possible to maintain an agreement without either sanctions or incentives.
I was desperate. A bombing cutoff would destroy our only bargaining chip — and the sole stimulus for Chinese involvement.
The Congress was determined to impose the withdrawal that had been thwarted by the executive for half a decade; it was no longer prepared to listen to arguments about the complexities of diplomacy. Legislators would not risk the bitter media opposition to prevent a Communist takeover of what seemed to them an obscure corner of Indochina. Our political system can work only through a set of delicate understandings sustained by the confidence in each other of coequal branches of government. But that confidence had been destroyed by the bitter struggles over Vietnam policy, capped by Watergate. The debate was dominated by the desire to settle scores rather than by consideration of a common objective. There was little understanding of the Administration’s basic anguish. We knew that the public was tired and the Congress hostile. But we also thought that if the American executive abandoned its friends of years’ standing to Communist domination, confidence in us worldwide would be undermined in a manner that would exact an even heavier toll later on.
Laird was not too upset about this prospect: “Politically, you’d be better off — I don’t think Cambodia will ever work out very well anyway and I’d like to be able to blame these guys for doing it, myself.” I was less interested in an alibi than an outcome. I was sickened to see the chances of bringing even a fragile peace fo Cambodia being destroyed by a senseless orgy of partisanship and the venting of the accumulated resentments of a decade.
I told Laird that it was senseless and self-defeating: “They are going to throw everything down the drain for nothing.” Laird insisted that we had no choice if we wanted the government to continue to function.
On June 30, leading newspapers were jubilant that Nixon had agreed to stop bombing in Cambodia by August 15. The NYT claimed that his compromise would permit “delicate negotiations” to continue. It was an illusion; the negotiations had been killed.
If Zhou was still willing to transmit an offer whose central element — the cease-fire — had been made irrelevant by legislation, the Chinese must have been nearly as desperate for a political settlement as we were. Huang Zhen confirmed that a visit by me in Pekin in early August would be welcome. Zhou Enlai clearly would not give up our joint plan easily. At the very least, it reflected the extreme reluctance with which the Chinese break their word once given.
Insolence is the defense of the weak. I was staking too much on a losing hand. To link Sino-American relations this explicitly to the outcome in Cambodia would compound the Chinese quandary without adding to China’s leverage. The simple fact was that Zhou had lost the ability to shape events — as a result of American actions. We had overturned the framework of the negotiations we had ourselves proposed and there was no way for even the best-intentioned Chinese leader to ask the Khmer Rouge to forgo the total victory we had handed to them.
And thus gradually the scheme so laboriously put together unraveled. It was clear that in order to obtain a “solution” as outlined in the Chinese note we did not need to “negotiate” — least of all with the Chinese. Nor could we leave the impression that we were being panicked. As de Gaulle once replied to Churchill when chastised for being too intransigent: “I am too weak to be conciliatory.”
The bombing cut-off had fundamentally changed the situation in Cambodia. Formerly, Sihanouk’s utility to the Khmer Rouge had been that he gave them legitimacy they had not had. Now they didn’t need legitimacy; they saw they could win.
The best way to handle defeat is to minimize it. Qiao did his best to dissociate China from what was going on in Cambodia; clearly, he wanted to pay no further price in Sino-American relations on a matter we both had lost the capacity to affect.
Sihanouk returned to Cambodia but only to face humiliation, house arrest, and the murder of several of his children. He had no independent forces left to balance, no chance at a pivotal role as head of state.
Perhaps the most grievously wounded victim of the Congressional action was Zhou Enlai. The Chinese Premier had staked his prestige on a complicated scheme, the essential premise of which was that strong American military action had produced a Cambodian stalemate and required a compromise. But Zhou’s effort also run up against the pressures of the radical faction inside China, who saw China’s security best assured by militancy in defense of revolutionary rectitude.
But I have convincing reason to believe that a significant event in the ascendancy of the Gang of Four during the summer of 1973 was the collapse of the Cambodian negotiation. Our Congressionally imposed abdication humiliated Zhou. He had staked ideological capital and we had not been able to pay in geopolitical coin. He would never have recovered his domestic position after this even if illness had not put an end to the public career of my extraordinary friend.
The fashionable critics who apply their ingenuity to blame those who sought to resist Cambodia’s doom thus have a right to ask to be spared opprobrium; they meant well. But they should have the decency not to reverse the truth by blaming those who sought to resist the Communist takeover all along. If they cannot bring themselves to admit fallibility, they should at least in the stillness of their souls ask themselves whether self-righteousness cannot extract its own fearful penalties.
The Administration was perhaps too abstractly analytical when it sought to sustain by executive action alone on more exertion to complete what had already cost so much. Our critics had passion without analysis; we had concept without consensus. Watergate destroyed the last vestiges of hope for a reasonable outcome.
There is no other comparable honor. A statesman’s final test, after all, is whether he has made a contribution to the well-being of mankind. And yet I knew that without the ability to enforce the Agreement, the structure of peace for Indochina was unlikely to last. I would have been far happier with recognition for a less precarious achievement. Without false modesty, I am prouder of what I accomplished in the next 2 years in the Middle East.
The moment must have been painful for Nixon. There was no recognition for which he yearned more than that of peacemaker. And in fact the major decisions that had ended the Vietnam war had been his, whatever my contribution in designing or executing the underlying strategy. He might well have won the award for the Vietnam peace and other achievements — the diplomatic he brought about with China and the USSR — had not Watergate destroyed this dream together with all the other aspirations that had sustained the incredible self-discipline of his march to the top.
Only those who knew Nixon well could perceive beneath the gallant congratulations the strain and hurt that I was being given all the credit for actions that had cost him so much. I sought to restore some perspective in a formal statement that mentioned him twice.
To the realist, peace represents a stable arrangement of power; to the idealists, a goal so preeminent that it conceals the difficulty of finding the means to its achievement. But in this age of thermonuclear technology, neither view can assure man’s preservation. Instead, peace, the ideal, must be practical. A sense of responsibility and accommodation must guide the behavior of all nations. Some common notion of justice can and must be found, for failure to do so will only bring more “just” wars.
As Alfred Nobel recognized, peace cannot be achieved by one man or one nation. It results from the efforts of men of broad vision and goodwill throughout the world. The accomplishments of individuals need not be remembered, for if lasting peace is to come it will be the accomplishment of all mankind.
The Chilean Ambassador to the OAS spoke of the US-Latin American relationship as one of “serfdom in the economic, political, social and even cultural realms.”
As is too frequently the case, the US’s position was less the product of an overall strategic assessment than the uneasy result of interdepartmental feuding. For once, the conflict was not between my office and the State Department but between the State and the Treasury Department, headed by the redoubtable John Connally, who was once again seeking to confirm his predominance in economic matters.
There was no American public figure Nixon held in such awe. Connally’s swaggering self-assurance fulfilled Nixon’s image of how a leader should act; the found it possible to emulate this conduct only in marginal comments on memoranda, never face to face. As a result, Connally was spared the maneuvers by which Nixon pitted his associates against one another. Nor did Nixon ever denigrate him behind hid back — boon not granted to many. He could identify with Connally, who had arisen from similar humble origins without seemingly being driven by his insecurities.
I suspect that the difference was not in the existence of insecurities but in the way Connally and Nixon handled them. Neither cherished being challenged; neither was really quite sure of himself. But Connally sought to cow opposition while Nixon’s strategy was to outmaneuver it. For Connally a victory was meaningless unless his opponent knew he had been defeated; for Nixon the most exquisite triumphs were those in which the victim did not know who had done him in, or maybe even immediately that he had been done in.
Connally proceeded to give Peterson — himself an able and strong man — a short course in the fact of life that no Presidential Assistant can stand up to a strong Cabinet member determined to insist on his prerogatives. When he had something to take up with the President, Connally would simply walk across the street that separated the Treasury Department and from the WH and insist on an appointment. He personally delivered any memorandum in which he was interested; he was prepared to demand an immediate reply. And Nixon was incapable of turning down even a less formidable personality to his face — this indeed was the reason for the staff system in the first place.
Chile also agreed to negotiate nationalization problems with each affected country — but on the basis of 2 criteria that canceled each other out. Chile expressed a willingness to pay “just” compensation for nationalized property in accordance with both Chilean law (effectively meaningless since Chilean law provided for the retroactive excess profit tax that could take away whatever sum might be defined as “just” compensation) and international law (which Chile immediately declared contained no principles to cover expropriation). The practical result was that without any change in its policies Chile obtained relief from nearly all its debts due for 1 year — a form of economic aid exceeding any received in 1 year by the previous democratic government. Pending negotiation of specific bilateral agreements with each creditor nation, Chile continued to benefit from a de facto moratorium on debt repayments.
It was obvious that, regardless of what we did or did not do, Allende needed the demonology of a hostile US to shore up support for the increasingly unpopular march toward his version of socialism.
By then Chile had fallen into a classic revolutionary pattern. At some point in the disintegration of authority, there is not enough force left for repression nor sufficient legitimacy to derive any benefit from concessions. In fact, after that stage is reached, repression as well as conciliation tends to accelerate the collapse: the use of force because it will prove inconclusive and concessions because they are ascribed to a generous policy but to the strength of the opposition.
My experience is that 60-40 means you are certain something won’t happen, but you don’t want to be too wrong if it does.
Either by design or through the dynamics of his radical coalition — most likely a combination of both — Allende had by 1973 produced such a polarization in Chile that it could end only in one of 2 ways: a Cuban-style dictatorship or a military government. All the democratic parties had come to the same conclusion, though they no doubt underestimated the eagerness of the military, once it had abandoned its historic stance as guardian of the Constitution, to maintain itself in power.
The Chilean junta was triggered into action by incipient chaos and the pleas of the democratic parties. It moved, and from all the evidence with extreme reluctance, only when it felt it had the support of the majority of Chileans. When it took on political responsibility its political inexperience, if not naivete, became apparent — though one should not lightly dismiss its basic judgment that the existing party structure, having brought Chile to the brink of civil war, was unlikely to be able to overcome the conditions that had made military intervention necessary.
As a general proposition we recognize countries, not governments. Practically, however, we would do our utmost to avoid being among the first to acknowledge and deal with the new government.
A naval officer of great courtesy but no experience in diplomacy, Huerta was genuinely baffled on how to deal with this strange country whose press and Congress were increasingly antagonistic to a friendly government in Santiago while they had largely ignored, or been mildly sympathetic to, a Marxist predecessor explicitly whipping up anti-American radicalism throughout the Western Hemisphere.
We could not convince ourselves that undermining the new government would serve either the cause of human rights or our own security. Yet there was no blinking the fact, either, that the very opposition parties and newspapers that we had attempted to keep alive under Allende were suppressed by the junta. The imposition of an authoritarian regime in a country with the longstanding democratic tradition of Chile was a special pity — but the circumstances that brought it about were extraordinary, too.
Unfortunately, the issue arose in America at the worst possible time. In the aftermath of Vietnam and during Watergate, the idea that we had to earn the right to conduct foreign policy by moral purity — that we could prevail through righteousness rather than power — had an inevitable attraction. There was a mood of resignation from the world of hard tactical choices, reinforced by the historical American animus toward the concept of equilibrium. It was not the first time in our history that the aversion to power politics took the form of a moral crusade. And the fetid climate of Watergate endowed the charge of the Administration’s moral obtuseness with a certain credibility.
There is no doubt that our insistence on quiet diplomacy weakened our case at home even as it succeeded with Chile in many individual cases. It is equally true that many of our critics were retroactively blind to the totalitarian implications of Allende’s policies, ignored the danger of his alliance with Cuba and the Soviet Union, invented a role for us in bringing him down, and acted as if overthrowing the junta was now the sole valid national objective.
One of the more cruel torments of Nixon’s Watergate purgatory was my emergence as the preeminent figure in foreign policy. Nixon wanted nothing so much as to go down in history as peacemaker. He had organized his government so that he would be perceived as the fount of foreign policy, in conception and execution. I was his principle instrument because I seemed ideally suited for a role behind the scenes. As a Harvard professor, I was without a political base; as a naturalized citizen, speaking with an accent, I was thought incapable of attracting publicity; in any event, since I was a member of the President’s entourage, my access to the media could be controlled by the WH.
Nixon no longer insisted on keeping me in the state of insecurity that he had fancied was essential to my sense of proportion. He had never been willing to engage personally in the petty harassment by which this strategy was implemented, and with Haig installed as chief of staff he now lacked subordinates prepared to do it for him.
I found myself in a truly extraordinary position. I, a Presidential appointee on the President’s own staff, unconfirmed by the Senate, totally dependent on the President’s goodwill and confidence, had become a Presidential surrogate. Amid the wholesale assault on the Administration, most critics seemed willing to spare me, even to protect me, from the mounting rancor as if to preserve one public figure as a symbol of national continuity.
All this placed Rogers in an impossible position. If he approved a telegram or option before it was passed to the WH, he might see his judgment overruled in full view of his own subordinates. If he waited until I had stated my view, he has in the position of either rubber-stamping or challenging what for all he knew had already been approved by the President.
The journalists act simultaneously as neutral conduit and tribunal, shielding their witnesses by the principle of “protection of sources” and often determining the outcome by the emphasis they choose to give competing versions. The press is thus both spectator and participant. The people may have “a right to know” — but only what the press chooses to tell it. In bureaucratic infighting, masking the identity of the leakers is frequently a suppression of the most important part of the story. The journalist may strive for objectivity, his competitors may have an incentive to knock down his story, but leakers can always initiate a drama that creates its own momentum through the reactions of the victim and the power brokers. Rarely, it seems, does anyone worry about the motives of the source, though there are serious ethical problems when the journalist’s interest in a scoop and the source’s self-interest coincide, as in some “investigative” journalism. It becomes difficult to determine who is using whom.
Haig called on the Secretary of State on August 8 to suggest his resignation. Rogers, who throughout behaved with extraordinary strength, honor, and aplomb, in effect threw Haig out of his office. If Nixon wanted his resignation, he said, he would have to ask for it himself. He would not give up the senior Cabinet post to an intermediary.
And I was also oddly relieved. On being made PM, Churchill remarked that he felt liberated: At last he alone would bear the responsibility. I had not reached that eminence. Nor were my feelings quite so unambiguous. But I did feel the quietude that comes with the knowledge that one’s convictions would stand or fall on their merits without being strained through the uncertainties of clashing personal ambitions.
He would have done yeoman work as a private counselor; his temperament and training caused him to recoil from extracting a coherent strategy from an ambivalent bureaucracy or from defending it against hostile media and Congress. There is no doubt that Nixon counted on these inhibitions to assert his own dominance. I certainly exploited them mercilessly.
These traumatic events have cast lengthening shadows on our traditional optimism and self-esteem. Where once a soaring optimism tempted us to dare too much, a shrinking spirit could lead us to attempt too little. Such an attitude — and the foreign policy it would produce — would deal a savage blow to global stability.
In addition to the Watergate atmosphere, there were the dynamics of television. Elected officials depend on publicity for survival. They know that the evening news program rarely give more than 2 minutes to any news event and they are far more likely to use a segment reflecting confrontation or controversy than harmony. I used to joke with Jacob Javits that when the saw the red light of the TV cameras he would ask even his most constructive questions in a loud voice, set off by a pointed finger and a throbbing vein in his forehead, leaving the unwary viewer with the impression that what I had been eager to put forward had been extorted from me by this vigilant defender of the public weal.
The difficulty arises in determining what is relevant and what is self-serving, and in sorting out the difference perspectives of the participants. Even if the investigator is fair and all witnesses are honorable, it is next to impossible to recreate the context of individual decisions made years before. For one thing, the investigator, be he journalist or Senator, finds it difficult to grasp the pressures of decision-making. To him the subject being investigated is paramount; he is not concerned with other governmental duties or context. He operates as if what he is looking into had been the sole activity of the participants and had commanded their undivided attention.
A distinguishing feature of high office, however, is the disproportion between the gravity of actions and the time available to deal with them. To tear any decision from its whole context distorts its essence. The decision-maker will almost certainly not have known as much of its ramifications as the ex post facto investigator now does. He may have spent a few minutes on it; the later investigator has days and weeks, the opportunity of acquiring different perspectives — and hindsight.
If there are several participants in the decision, some of the evidence is likely to be contradictory. Each department or agency keeps its own records, which are generally unavailable to other agencies.
It would be naive to assume that the Executive and Legislative Branches will always agree. But, if the issues are debated openly and clearly, it should be possible to avoid the public confusion, mistrust and alienation which have developed during the last decade.
Each of the branches has its respective powers and responsibilities. Some conflict between the two is inevitable and may, on occasion, serve the national interest. From time to time in recent years each of the branches may have become overly assertive of its own powers but it is clear that the American institutional system works best when each branch has a clear sense of the limits of its authority and of the rights of the other. We hope that this balance can be restored for neither branch is all-wise or all-powerful.
There is no country in the world where it is conceivable that a man of my origin could be standing here next to the President of the US.
If I made it through the door I encountered the disapproving gaze of Jane Rothe. Coolly beautiful, unflappably efficient, Jane had served 4 previous Secretaries, imposed her own standards on how Secretaries of State should behave, and in the end proved as indispensable to me as to my predecessors.
Since his only responsibility is that assigned to him by the President, he can afford to take the “big view.” He can present geopolitical analyses unconstrained by the flood of detail or pressing problems that are the lot of the Secretary of State. If he is skillful, he can position himself in bureaucratic debates close to the President’s predilections, which he usually has the possibility to learn more intimately than his competitor in Foggy Bottom.
The Secretary of State’s responsibility if vastly different. He presides daily over a vast catalogue of international relationships that are not always reflected on the Presidential agenda or in the labors of the NSC and many of which are from glamorous. He must contend hour to hour with 150 countries and an array of multilateral issues and international organizations — economic problems, arms control, foreign assistance, visa and immigration policy, and so forth. He is responsible for a colossal enterprise.
In the short run, this vast effort places the Secretary of State at a bureaucratic disadvantage. Inevitably, he must grapple with many mundane or highly technical subjects. He is forced to champion unpopular causes, such as the annual appropriations for foreign aid. There is always the risk that the Secretary of State begins either to bore the President with arcane problems that require urgent Presidential decision, or to appear to him like some special pleader.
The more the State Department was excluded from policymaking, the less incentive it had to safeguard any information it managed to acquire on its own. Indeed, it was tempted to snipe at whatever emerged, out of wounded pride or ignorance of the difficulty of negotiating. And it was untenable to have several allied FMs better informed about major negotiations than our own.
The State Department is simply not equipped to handle interdepartmental machinery. Its key personnel by style and training are usually uncomfortable with conceptual approaches; its organization is better suited to dealing with the immediate than the long-range. A Secretary of State seeking to run the interagency process imposes a heavy burden on himself. For even should he succeed in overcoming the proclivities of his Department — as he eventually must, however interdepartmental machinery is organized — he would be in a hopeless position bureaucratically.
Our government tends to operate by adversary procedures. But the chairman of an interdepartmental group must develop a reputation for objectivity. When a department chairs an interagency committee, either it will be tempted to skew the process in favor of its predilections or else it will not adequately represent its own point of view — an ironic outcome of a grab for preeminence. Even should a Solomonic group of chairmen emerge from the Department of State, they would be forced to use up a great deal of energy in defending themselves against the criticism that they exploited their position. No department in our system will for long accept the formal preeminence of another one. It will challenge decisions that go against it, on procedural as well as substantive grounds. In the end, the result is not the predominance of one department but Presidential adjudication of a disproportionate number of disputes.
My dual position was, in fact, a handicap and a vulnerability. In November 1975 President Ford took away my job as NSA. I resented the decision bitterly because I thought it would undermine the perception of my position. For a few weeks I was even thinking of resigning.
It would have been a childish gesture. My influence was unaffected by the organizational change and my peace of mind greatly improved. I prevailed where I did because I managed to convince Ford and when I failed it would have been no different had I remained technically as chairman.
The NSA’s contact with media and foreign diplomats should be reduced to a minimum; the articulation and conduct of foreign policy should be left in the main to the President and the Secretary of State (and of course their designees). The preparation of options, which is in the main what interdepartmental machinery does, should be the province of a security adviser chosen for fairness, conceptual grasp, bureaucratic savvy, and a willingness to labor anonymously.
At the next echelon are the Assistant Secretaries: In my tenure there were 5 for various regions of the world, 1 for international organizations, and 7 for functional areas like economic affairs, educational and cultural affairs, oceans and scientific affairs, public affairs, Congressional relations, administration, and security and consular affairs. Then there is the Legal Adviser, as well as the Policy Planning Staff and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research, both headed by officials with the title of Director. In addition, the Secretary of State has a myriad of special assistants — for press relations, international labor affairs, narcotics, refugees, and human rights, in my time. Each of these officers theoretically reports directly to the Secretary regarding his or her specialty. But no executive can possibly direct so many individuals in a personal relationship. There has to be some intermediary staff.
According to the organization chart, the Under Secretaries on the 7th Floor are supposed to help the Secretary coordinate the 6th Floor, where the Assistant Secretaries are located. But the real world is not so tidy. The organization chart the reflects real lines of authority has not yet been devised. For one thing, the Deputy Secretary’s role depends importantly on the personalities involved and the Secretary’s own style.
These tendencies account for the mushiness and slow pace by which the State Department has driven so many outsiders to distraction. Since the Department at any moment threatens to disintegrate into practically autonomous fiefdoms — and surely does so under a weak Secretary — a great deal of time is spent on “clearances,” meaning that each bureau has to be consulted on any problem remotely involving its formal responsibilities. No bureau likes to be overruled — nor does it really want to win, because this implies that it might lose next time. All the incentives are thus skewed toward compromises reflecting the lowest common denominator and paralyzing the imagination.
Left to its own devices, the State Department machinery tends toward inertia rather than creativity; it is always on the verge of turning itself into an enormous cable machine. Too often policy filters up from the bottom in response to events, complaints, or pleas that originate abroad.
The country director drafts a cable to respond to a specific situation. He clears it with interested bureaus and sends it up through the hierarchy, sometimes with an explanatory memorandum, frequently not. The memorandum in any event is typically focused on the immediate problem, is heavily influenced by local context, and, if it deigns to present options, does so in a manner that all but impose the bureau’s preference. If it survives all obstacles, and if it is one of the minority that are of special policy importance, the cable winds up on the desk of the Secretary of State. He does not know which ideas were eliminated by the clearance process, what modifications occurred on the cable’s journey to him, or — unless he has studied the subject himself — what long-range purpose is to be served, if any. He can rewrite the cable, though he will rarely have time or the detailed knowledge to do so. He can reject it, though if he is not extremely vigilant the cable is likely to come back to him in only slightly modified form. (In the summer of 1976 I received so many essential identical cables on one particular subject I did not wish to act upon that only the threat of transferring the entire bureau stopped the pressure.)
The most difficult task for any Secretary of State is to impose a sense of direction on the flood of papers that at any moment threatens to engulf him. Even someone who, like me, had spent his lifetime on the study of foreign policy — and whose hobby it was, to boot — was sometimes overwhelmed. The system lends itself to manipulation. A bureau chief who disagrees with the Secretary can exploit it for procrastination.
I tried to impose coherence by 3 steps. First, I sought to carry out what I consider one of the key responsibilities of the head of any department: to elicit from his subordinates a standard of performance of which they do not know they are capable. I insisted on thoughtful memoranda; I drove my staff mercilessly. Many could not stand the pace of my temperament and resigned. The analytical work of the Department improved remarkably.
Secondly, I moved into positions charged with long-range planning key associates whom I had recruited for the NSC staff. They were familiar with my methods. They understood my insistence on a strategy.
Thirdly, I formed a kind of political staff group to help me plan strategy. I met with them as a body practically every day on key issues.
In 1970 he was close to resigning over the incursion into Cambodia. I appealed to him with the argument that if the young men of his generation channeled their idealism into protest, there would be none left to build a better world. He would serve his principles better by working for an end to the war within the government than by striking a pose outside.
In addition to speech writer, he functioned as my institutional memory. He did research projects; he made sure that what was being said in negotiation or publicly was consistent with previous statements on the subjects and with our internal planning. He attended nearly every sensitive conversation, technically as a note-taker, in reality as confidant and adviser.
The Foreign Service had developed in the earlier years of our history when no direct physical threat to America’s security was apparent. America’s foreign involvement was considered to flow less from a concept of national interest — which was thought morally myopic — than from enlightened notions of freedom of trade and the implementation of moral, or at least legal, principles.
Until the end of WW2, the Foreign Service saw its role as a negotiating instrument, not as the designer of a foreign policy; more as solving concrete issues as they arose than as conceiving a strategy and shaping events. Long service abroad created greater sensitivity to the intangibles of foreign societies than to those of our own. Conscious of the isolationist tradition in America, Foreign Service Officers had a tendency to seek to balance it by becoming spokesmen for the countries in which they were stationed or for which they were given responsibility in the Department of State.
Most foreign policies that history has marked highly, in whatever countries, have been originated by leaders who were opposed by experts. It is, after all, the responsibility of the experts to operate the familiar and that of the leader to transcend it. What the Department of State need is strong and consistent leadership grounded in a philosophy of the world and guided by a sense of purpose.
Our diplomacy must be prepared to act on assessments of whose truth it cannot at the time be sure. We must resist seemingly marginal changes because to wait until the challenge is unambiguous may also make it unmanageable. All this requires much greater self-assurance and intuition and daring and above all conceptual skill than have traditionally fostered.
In my address to the General Assembly I asked the nations of the world “to move with us from detente to cooperation, from coexistence to community.” I then state the main goals of our diplomacy, which in that forum obligates one to list every key region and trouble spot in some more or less meaningful sentence. The omission of a part of the world is likely to cause a diplomatic incident; frequently banality is the better part of valor.
The prerequisite for a fruitful national debate is that the policymakers and critics appreciate each other’s perspectives and respect each other’s purposes. The policymaker must understand that the critic is obliged to stress imperfections in order to challenge assumptions and to goad actions. But equally the critic should acknowledge the complexity and inherent ambiguity of the policymaker’s choices. The policymaker must be concerned with the best that can be achieved, not just the best that can be imagined. He has to act in a fog of incomplete knowledge without the information that will be available later to the analyst. He knows — or he should know — that he is responsible for the consequences of disaster as well as for the benefits of success. He may have to qualify some goals, not because they would be undesirable if reached but because the risks of failure outweigh potential gains. He must often settle for the gradual, much as he might prefer the immediate. He must compromise with others, and this means to some extent compromising with himself.
I pledge you that the US is ready to begin the journey toward a world community. Our sights will be raised even when our tread must be measured. We will make no excessive promises, but we will keep every promise we shall make. We look upon stability as a bridge to the realization of human dreams, not as an end in itself. We know that peace will come when all — the small as well as the large — have a share in its shaping, and that it will endure when all — the weak as well as the strong — have a stake in its lasting.
Two days later the Middle East war broke out.
A crisis does not always appear to a policymaker as a series of dramatic events. Usually it imposes itself as an exhausting agenda of petty chores demanding both concentration and endurance. One is forced to react to scraps of information in very limited spans of time; longing for full knowledge, one must chart a route through the murk of unknowing. Operationally, a crisis resolves itself into minutiae that must be attended with painstaking care, which includes the need to ensure that all parties work from the same body of information.
Diplomacy at the edge of war is an incongruous instrument. All one’s instincts make for haste, while precision requires time-consuming repetition.
I phone UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim with a brief summary of what I knew. He would not be able to influence substantive discussions, but he was well disposed and could be helpful on procedural problems. He was in a position to delay or speed up Security Council or General Assembly meetings. And he was a great gossip. One could be sure that he would convey what one was reluctant to say directly — veiled threats or plans for compromise too delicate to put forward under one’s own name.
Her Hebrew vocabulary is very rich and she poured it out.
Surprise attack has been the subject of military writing and analysis since the beginning of warfare, and in America particularly since December 7, 1941. A pioneering study of the intelligence failure at Pearl Harbor relates surprise to the potential victim’s inability to distinguish significant information from trivia. Evidence of an impending attack is usually overwhelmed by background noise, that is, the barrage of other information that is either ambiguous, irrelevant, or contradictory. A perceptive academic study of Hitler’s attack on Russia in June 1941 takes a step further: The attacker may reveal his activity but deliberately deceive as to its purpose. Thus Hitler in 1941 made no attempt to conceal the German military buildup on the Soviet frontier; indeed, its scale was such that it could not be hidden. But Hitler created the impression — and Stalin chose to believe — that there would be some specific German ultimatum that would trigger a negotiation rather than a war. The concept is hardly new. “All warfare is based on deception,” wrote Sun Tzu around 500BC.
Sadat boldly all but told what he was going to do and we did not believe him. He overwhelmed us with information and let us draw the wrong conclusion. October 6 was the culmination of a failure of political analysis on the part of its victims.
Every Israeli (and American) analysis before October 1973 agreed that Egypt and Syria lacked the military capability to regain their territory by force of arms; hence there would be no war. The Arab armies must lose; hence they would not attack. The premises were correct. The conclusions were not.
Sadat fought a war not to acquire territory but to restore Egypt’s self-respect and thereby increase its diplomatic flexibility. Rare is the statesman who at the beginning of a war has so clear a perception of its political objective; rarer still is a war fought to lay the basis for moderation in its aftermath.
The boldness of Sadat’s strategy lay in planning for what no one could imagine; that was the principal reason the Arabs achieved surprise. The highest policymakers in both Washington and Jerusalem did not lack facts. The error lay in the conclusion drawn from them.
I assured him that we were “watching the situation very carefully” — smug bureaucratese for our conviction that there was no real danger of war.
I did, however, ask for 2 contingency plans. The first was for the eventuality that Lebanon might get out of control. The second I outlined as follows:
… the kind of things the Egyptians might do, the various ways in which the Israelis might react and the diplomatic issues that might ensure. Short of actual Soviet intervention, it’s hard to envisage any direct US action. But we should consider what to do to keep the Soviets out; the ways in which we might use the crisis to get diplomatic movement, if that is what we want, or to return to the status quo ante if it is decided that is desirable.
There are 2 ways by which intelligence reaches top officials. One is through an agreed National Intelligence Estimate of all the different agencies represented on the US Intelligence Board. This usually requires several days to accomplish. Another is the individual assessment of the intelligence agency serving a particular Cabinet member. The CIA is technically available to all agencies of the government; however, it usually undertakes special studies for the President. Its director is the titular head and actual coordinator of all the various department intelligence units.
I remained uneasy, however, and asked Dinitz to review the assessment every 48 hours.
Our definition of rationality did not take seriously the notion of starting an unwinnable war to restore self-respect. There was no defense against our preconceptions or those of our allies.
It is also clear in retrospect that any effort by us then would have been academic. The Arab assault was deliberate, not even remotely prompted by fear of an Israeli attack. Any last-minute message to Egypt and Syria reassuring them that Israel would not preempt would only have been greeted with elation in the war rooms of Cairo and Damascus.
The breakdown was not administrative but intellectual. At the latest on October 5, as we learned of the Soviets’ evacuation of their dependents from the Middle East, we should have know that big events were impending.
The Israeli view that the Soviets might fear the outbreak of war should have given us pause. For if we had reflected, it would have been clear that the Soviets could not be fearing an Israeli attack. Had they done so they would have made urgent representations in Washington to get us to dissuade Israel, and perhaps added public threats. If the Soviets evacuated dependents because they feared a war, they must have had a very good idea that it would be started by the Arabs.
Policymakers cannot hide behind their analysts if they miss the essence of an issue. They can never know all the facts, but they have a duty to ask the right questions. That was the real failure on the eve of the Mideast war. We had become too complacent about our own assumptions. We knew everything but understood too little. And for that the highest officials — including me — must assume responsibility.
And they reacted immediately with their evacuation. Units of the Soviet fleet in Alexandria and Port Said put to sea on October 5. Did the Soviets expect us to pick up the signals, and did we fail to ask the right questions? Was it a form of warning to us without betraying their allies, or simple precaution?
There would also be a strong temptation to adopt a resolution in favor of an immediate cease-fire in place. We wanted to avoid this while the attacking side was gaining territory, because it would reinforce the tendency to use the UN to ratify the gains of surprise attack. And within a short time — less than 72 hours, according to our experts — the tide of battle would turn, with Israel pushing the Arab back. We would then face the complexities of an Israeli victory, Arab rage, Soviet meddling, and the danger that all frustrations would turn on us.
I therefore recommended to Nixon that we should seek to draw the Soviets into a joint approach in the UNSC. It would keep Moscow from harassing us with its own proposals; it might separate Moscow from its Arab clients. According to my scheme, the 2 superpowers would not assess blame but instead call for a prompt return to the lines at which the conflict had started.
Egypt’s purpose was limited, he declared. It was to demonstrate to Israel that a defense line along the Suez Canal did not represent real security; that security with a country like Egypt could be based only on mutual respect.
Zayyat had gotten to the heart of the matter. Every war ends in some peace, but too often leaders let military operations dictate their intentions. They ignore Bismarck’s warning of woe to the statesman whose arguments at the end of the war are not as plausible as the day he started it. The problem between Israel and the Arab states, especially Egypt, was to a significant degree psychological. Insecurity ironically pervaded the military overconfidence on one side; a sense of humiliation underlay the superior numbers on the other. The war might narrow the gulf.
Sadat’s ability from the very first hours of the war never to lose sight of the hear of his problem convinced me that we were dealing with a statesman of the first order. Hafiz Ismail’s message, while avowing sweeping terms, stated a modest and largely psychological objective: “to show that we were not afraid or helpless.” That objective Sadat achieved brilliantly. It was the precondition of his subsequent peace diplomacy.
We are its exclusive military supplier, its only military ally (though no formal obligation exists). The Arab nations blame us for Israel’s dogged persistence. Israel sees in intransigence the sole hope for preserving its dignity in a one-side relationship. It feels instinctively that one admission of weakness, one concession granted without a struggle, will lead to an endless catalogue of demands as every country seeks to escape its problems at Israel’s expense. It takes a special brand of heroism to turn total dependence into defiance; to insist on support as a matter of right rather than as a favor; to turn every American deviation from an Israeli cabinet consensus into a betrayal to be punished rather than a disagreement to be negotiated.
And yet Israel’s obstinacy, maddening as it can be, serves the purposes of both our countries best. A subservient client would soon face an accumulation of ever-growing pressures. It would tempt Israel’s neighbors to escalate their demands. It would saddle us with the opprobrium for every deadlock. That at any rate has been our relationship with Israel — it is exhilarating and frustrating, ennobled by the devotion and faith that contain a lesson for an age of cynicism; exasperating because the interests of a superpower and a regional ministate are not always easy to reconcile and are on occasion unbridgeable. Israel affects our decisions through inspiration, persistence, and a judicious, not always subtle or discreet, influence on our domestic policy.
I have repeatedly pointed out that trickery is not the path of wisdom but of disaster for a diplomat. Since he has to deal with the same person over and over again, one can get away with it only once at best, and then only at the cost of permanent stifling of the relationship. At any event, nobody could trick even once someone as resourceful and tough as Dinitz. Simcha and I worked together in war and peace. Yet neither of us ever forgot that our first duty was to serve our respective countries, which at a very minimum brought different perspectives to our common problems.
Like all experienced diplomats, we took great pains to keep our disagreements from becoming personal. One device, is to blame — usually transparently — someone else for painful decisions.
There was some grumbling that I had argued against condemnation of the Arab nations. That was overstated but reflected my dominant concern: Convinced that an Arab defeat was imminent, I saw no sense in making us the target of the expected wave of frustration.
I was the sole dissenter, for foreign policy, not military, reasons. I did not then doubt that Israel would win before any major aid could reach it. But I favored some arms aid to Israel unless the Soviets cooperated at the UN to bring about a rapid end of the war. If we refused aid, Israel would have no incentive to heed our views in the postwar diplomacy. If on the other hand Israel realized that in an extremity it would not stand alone, this would affect and perhaps moderate its territorial claims in the negotiations I was certain would follow the war. I was not, of course, insensitive to the threat of Arab displeasure. But in my view the outcome of the war would determine postwar relationships, not whether we supplied arms. The time to show understanding for the Arab position was after the war, when the peace process started.
In the event, the UNSC debate was devoid of drama. Zayyat focused blame on Israel in standard terms, avoiding serious contention with the US. Eban with customary eloquence gave exactly the opposite historical interpretation. Between the two they proved the saying that wars about whose version of history will predominate.
But the gods are offended by hubris. They resent the presumption that great events can be taken for granted. Historic changes such as we sought cannot be brought off by virtuoso performances; they must reflect an underlying reality. And that reality caught up with us in the middle of that night.
The unworthy thought crossed my mind that perhaps the Israelis wanted to commit us to a schedule of deliveries before their probable victory removed the urgency.
Gur asked for intelligence information. I instructed Scowcroft “to give them every bit of intelligence we have.” I never doubted that a defeat of Israel by Soviet arms would be a geopolitical disaster for the US. I urged a quick victory on one front before the UN diplomacy ratified Arab territorial gains everywhere.
Israel has suffered a strategic defeat no matter what happens. They can’t take two-to-one losses.
My low boiling point was exceeded when Senator Frank Church, our scourge on Vietnam and constant critic of “deceitful” methods, urged us to “slip in” a few Phantoms into Israel, presumably without anyone knowing it. I replied that I would not mind if he went public with his appeal — a reversal of our usual positions. I thought there was some advantage in being seen to be pressed by Congress to do more for Israel; it might deflect some of the Arab resentment.
I told Ismail ambiguously that our actions were the minimum that public opinion would tolerate — giving Egypt a face-saving formula for acquiescing in them. I stressed that the US “now understands clearly the Egyptian position with respect to a peace settlement.” But I avoided any comment on it. In diplomatic usage, that was tantamount to indicating it was a nonstarter.
Even now the answer is not clear. Probably the Soviet leadership tried to keep several options open and managed to combine all disadvantages. It did enough to ensure the continuation of the war but failed to affect the outcome. It may have sought a cease-fire, as all Arab leaders told us disdainfully after the war. But it did so tentatively — and, according to Sadat’s published version, so duplicitously — that it magnified Egypt’s doubts about its ally’s good faith.
The Soviet initiative for a cease-fire in place was now on the table in the worst possible circumstances for our strategy: If the Soviets pushed their proposal at that juncture, it would have had nearly unanimous backing, including by our European allies. On the other hand, Israel, with the prewar situation not yet restored, would have refused. Had we gone along with the Soviet plan and pressured Israel to agree, the war would have ended in a clear-cut victory for the Soviet-supplied Arab forces. The US’s position in the postwar diplomacy would have been severely impaired. The probability of another war would have been high, since Israel would want to regain its previous supremacy; the Arabs would become convinced that they could break every negotiating deadlock with a new assault.
Ismail must have known very well that there was still no possibility of obtaining Israeli agreement to these terms short of total military defeat. But in delicate negotiations it is not the substance of the modification that matters; it is the fact that is is offered at all, especially as Ismail did not put it forward on a take-it-or-leave-it basis but “for the consideration of Dr. Kissinger” — in effect inviting a counterproposal.
On the morning of October 13, when we finally realized the extent to which bureaucratic foot-dragging and logistical problems had delayed the charter plan, I restated our strategy to the WSAG, asking on the President’s behalf for the resignation of any official unwilling to support it.
More and more people are asking me, what is the Secretary-General doing to stop the fighting — a fair enough question considering that nearly a week for a major war had passed without any formal UN action whatever.
After the war, all Arab leaders complained to me that the Soviet airlift was grudging and the sealift was slow, as if to rub in the Arab’s dependency.
Dobrynin stiffened when I mentioned the alerting of Soviet airborne divisions. Nothing irritates Soviet officials more than evidence of our intelligence capabilities — particularly diplomats if they are not being kept informed of military deployments.
No one would be ready to proceed on such short notice; any sudden show of American anxiety would invite new pressures. More important, I said, “once you have been threatened it is better to stick to your course.”
It was a rule I sought to follow whenever possible. A leader known to yield to intimidation invites it. A statesman with a reputation for intransigence in the face of menace does not avoid all pressures but he reduces them to those that adversaries consider unavoidable. No leader can skirt all confrontations, but if the maneuvers carefully and with determination he can avoid provoking them by either excessive bellicosity or excessive pliability.
We are going to get blamed just as much for 3 planes as for 300.
Fundamentally, Israel’s problem lay not in the pace of our resupply but in the complacency induced by the memory of great victories. Israel’s strategy had been based on repeating the lightning thrusts of 1967. In the meantime the Arab countries had learned that if they kept from losing, their position would steadily improved by a war of attrition. Their lines bent but did not break. They inflicted casualties that a small countries of fewer than 3M people, however heroic, found difficult to bear.
The die was now cast; matters had reached a point where maneuvering would be suicidal and hesitation disastrous. The parties could not ye be brought to end the war by a calculation of their interests. All that was left was to force a change in the perception of their interests. We would pour in supplies. We would risk a confrontation. We would not talk again until there was no longer any doubt that no settlement could be imposed.
Conciliation is meaningful only if one is thought to have an alternative.
And we were prepared to risk more than Moscow. Once a stalemate had become apparent, either by Soviet design or confusion, we moved decisively, even brutally, to break it. I had learned in Nixon’s first term, largely under his tutelage, that once a great nation commits itself, it must prevail. It will acquire no kudos for translating its inner doubts into hesitation. However ambivalently it has arrived at the point of decision, it must pursue the course on which it is embarked with a determination to succeed. Otherwise, it adds a reputation for incompetence to whatever controversy it is bound to incur on the merits of its decision.
On Friday, The Portuguese government had stalled. It had no national interest in antagonizing the Arab nations. It sought to extract some military equipment for its colonial wars in Mozambique and Angola. To this we were not prepared to agree. I had therefore drafted a Presidential letter of unusual abruptness to Portuguese PM that refused military equipment and threatened to leave Portugal to its fate in a hostile world. By the middle of Saturday afternoon, the Portuguese gave us unconditional transit rights at Lajes airbase.
But he agreed we were now in a test of wills, saying that this was “one of those times” and “that’s what we are here for.”
Nixon, whatever his travail, would see it through. No faint heart would be able to appeal to him to reverse our course. And if his ordeal deprived him of his previous intensity, it gave him the composure of a man who had seen the worst and to whom there were no further terrors.
The next, perhaps most important, task for the remainder of the day was to make sure the key actors knew our purposes and to keep in view an ultimate end to the deepening conflict.
As I have pointed out, only amateurs believe that clever diplomacy consists of telling each party a different story. In act the only safe assumption is that the various parties will exchange information, especially in the Middle East, where tale-telling is an art form.
The US wishes to emphasize again that it recognizes the unacceptability to the Egyptian side of the conditions which existed prior to the outbreak of recent hostilities. The US side will make a major effort as soon as hostilities are terminated to assist in bringing a just and lasting peace to the Middle East. It continues to hope that the channel to Egypt established with so much difficulty will be maintained even under the pressure of events.
Later on, I learned that one does the Saudis no favor by asking for their approval on matters that they cannot influence and on which taking a position can only imperil their careful balancing act.
I said somewhat cattily to Schlesinger: “I must say when you want to work you are terrific. You are equally awe-inspiring when you don’t.”
I had learned in Nixon’s first term that one must never relax pressures when the opponent is weakening. The right strategy is to combine 2 seemingly contradictory courses: to increase the pressure and to show a way out of the adversary’s growing dilemma.
When press queries cascaded in, I did not back off the implied threat though I would not have recommended it. I instructed State Department spokesman to say simply that the President had spoken about “principles,” not tactics — a comment so opaque that its precise meaning eludes me even at this writing.
It is easy to go with the tide; more difficult to judge where the tide is going. But only the wisest of leaders have the foresight to look at at distance objective and in its name stand up against all pressures.
While restrained in public utterance, and courteous, he saw to it that we were aware he had other options. There is no doubt that he was the godfather of the oil embargo soon to descend on us.
I had not learned then — though I would soon enough — that Saudi Arabia was no more willing to confront the radical Arabs than to confront us directly. The Kingdom judged that its safety depended on presenting itself as the reluctant implementer of decisions of others.
The necessity was to convince Sadat of both the limits of the attainable and our seriousness in pressing to the full extent of these limits. There is a temptation to assign intractable problems to a personality who is then endowed with mythical qualities commensurate with the difficulty of the problem. Nowhere is this more true than the Middle East, that home of romantic figures. The various diplomatic spectaculars in which I had engaged had put the idea into the head of the Middle East leaders that I could perform the same role for them. While this was an asset, it also contained the danger that each party would ask me to take from its shoulders the burden of difficult decisions. That would be the road to disaster. Any negotiator who seduces himself into believing that his personality leads to automatic breakthroughs will soon find himself in the special purgatory that history reserves for those who measure themselves by acclaim rather than by achievement. They begin by deluding themselves; inevitably, they will disappoint others.
Gone were the hesitations of the previous week, the attempts to shift the potential blame for dangerous consequences. The most important role of a leader is to take on his shoulder the burden of ambiguity inherent in difficult choices. That accomplished, his subordinates have criteria and can turn to implementation.
I consistently urged a low-key public approach to the Soviets. Among superpowers the winner in a crisis must carefully judge when to rub in this fact to his opponent.
He repeated the familiar Soviet position that if Israel returned to the 1967 borders its security could be guaranteed by the superpowers of the UNSC. (This was a doubtful boon, given the fact that the UNSC had proved unable even to take a vote in the second week of a major war.)
It was a classic illustration of Israeli negotiating tactics — produced by a combination of extraordinary sense of vulnerability and a complex domestic political system. All Israeli leaders I have known have agreed almost instinctively on one proposition: never to accept the first proposal put forward by the US, whatever its merit. If Israel submits without a struggle — never mind the substance — the US may come to think of it as a docile client and God knows what we then might take it into our heads to impose.
What the international environment encourages, Israeli domestic politics makes inevitable. Israel’s domestic political procedures explain its maddening negotiating method, which is to haggle over even the slightest concession, never to make an unexpected compromise, and to settle only when everyone has reached a state of exhaustion that deprives the conclusion of exaltation or even goodwill. For only by demonstrating either duress or ultimately tenacity can those responsible for Israel’s national security prove to skeptical or ambitious colleagues that there was no alternative. They can afford no grand gesture because they might not hold their government together if they attempted it. Negotiation for Israel is a process of self-education. A PM runs the risk of being accused of softness if he simply accepts an American proposal without at least testing what else may be obtainable.
Dobrynin was much too subtle not to grasp that we were stalling — the usual tactic of the putative winner whose position is likely to improve with every passing hour.
The Egyptian army was now in serious difficulties. But it was not in our interest that the war end with Egypt’s humiliation. We had wanted to prevent a victory of Soviet arms. We did not want to see Sadat overthrown or Egypt radicalized by total defeat.
To make clear that we respected Egypt’s dignity, I paid special attention to the fact “that Egypt and its Arab allies have brought about important changes in the situation as a result of the strength and the valor demonstrated on the battlefield. None of this should be jeopardized by further prolongation of the fighting.”
But just as it is important not to flinch on the road to strategic success, so it is essential not to press beyond what is sustainable. We had been riding many wild horses simultaneously. We could not now confuse virtuosity with a long-range strategy. We had to avoid risking everything for marginal gains, for we had achieved our fundamental objectives.
We held the cards now. Our next challenge was to play our hand.
I cannot overemphasize the urgent need to keep me fully informed of the military situation. I need exact assessments, and I need them quickly and frequently.
Dinitz must, repeat must, report to you at least 3 times a day, and I must then have those reports immediately. Tell him to get his communications set up now if he has not yet done so. These reports must be clearly identified.
I cannot avoid mistakes if I am not kept fully up to date and know exactly what the situation on the ground is.
The conversation seemed a small price to pay to gain time, though its bizarre quality was not lost on us. The relationship of the 2 superpowers was being extolled, after all, at the very moment when both sides were introducing thousands of tons of war materiel daily to opposite sides in a desperate war, each seeking to reduce if not eliminate the influence of the other.
The Israelis and Arabs will never be able to approach this subject by themselves in a rational manner. That is why Nixon and Brezhnev, looking at the problem more dispassionately, must step in, determine the proper course of action to a just settlement, and then bring the necessary pressure on our respective friends for a settlement which will at last bring peace to this troubled area.
Usually, the Soviets stick to their formal positions for extended periods and then sell their abandonment of an outrageous proposition as a concession.
I believed then and I still believe that we achieved the maximum attainable. Any effort to squeeze out more would have involved risks of major crises for inconsequential gains that might well have jeopardized the peace process we were determined to start — and to dominate.
Weariness, physical and moral, was stamped on each face. The characteristic Israeli show of bravado was not absent, but it required so much effort that it seemed to exhaust the participants rather than armor them. They spoke of imminent victories but without conviction, more as if to prop up the image of invulnerability.
Deep down, the Israelis knew that while they had won the last battle, they had lost the aura of invincibility. It was entering an uncertain and lonely future, dependent on a shrinking circle of friends. What made the prospect more tormenting was the consciousness that complacency had contributed to that outcome.
Each of the Israeli leaders we met handled the trauma differently according to the stages of his or her career. They vaguely realized that the war had blighted their personal futures; indeed, within the year they were all out of power.
Dayan was a singular blend of the old and the new. Among his colleagues, he was unique in the sweep of his imagination, the nimbleness of his intellect, the ability to place Israel in a world context. His hobby was archaeology; this gave him an historical perspective beyond even the long history of his own people. He understood that the experience of catastrophe was not peculiar to Jews, even if destiny seems to have meted it out to them more amply than to most other peoples. He therefore had more understanding, and more tolerance, of the viewpoints of other societies than was characteristic of most Israeli leaders. He had the intuition of a poet. Sometimes he was able to see so many sides to a question that he lost the single-mindedness essential to all leaders and very marked in his own PM.
But heroes lose something of their faith in themselves when they admit fallibility. Dayan had so identified himself with his own public image that he could not bring himself to take the only course that might have enabled him to transcend his misfortune, and the one, in fact, taken by Golda: to admit an honest miscalculation.
I asked whether she thought Sadat could survive the military setbacks of the last phase of the war. Golda replied matter-of-factly: “I do. Because he is the hero. He dared.”
I left Israel elated and yet somber. We had achieved our strategic objective, but it had only opened the way to an unknown terrain that would required discipline, unity, and purpose to traverse.
We thought we had given Israel the maximum flexibility to bargain; it could use this negotiation to press some of its other concerns, especially the release of prisoners. But Israel wanted what we could not grant: a veto over all our decisions regardless of the merits of the issue and a free hand to destroy the Egyptian Third Army.
And if Israel had been less shaken by the events of the previous weeks, it too would have understood that what it sought would end any hope for peace and doom it to perpetual struggle. For if Sadat felt, the odds were that he would be replaced by a radical pro-Soviet leader; Soviet arms would in a measurable time reconstitute the equivalent of the Third Army; and sooner or later there would be another war reviving the same dilemmas we had just barely surmounted.
I told Dinitz that the art of foreign policy was to know when to clinch one’s victories. There were limits beyond which we could not go, with all our friendship for Israel, and one of them was to make the leader of another superpower look like an idiot.
The Arabs may despise us, or hate us, or loathe us, but they have learned that if they want a settlement, they have to come to us. No one else can deliver. Three times they have relied on Russian equipment, and three times they have lost it. So, strategically we have a very good hand if we know how to play it.
In a subtle way, this conversation added to the impact of Brezhnev’s threatening letter. It would have been easy for Dobrynin to say that the Soviets would in no case act until they had heard from us. He might have indicated in the hundred ways available to a seasoned professional that we were overreacting, that the threat of unilateral action was a figure of speech, the normal course of a sovereign country that feels pushed against the wall. Instead, Dobrynin permitted the impression to stand that a crisis was indeed impending, and that nothing had changed to defer the possibility of a unilateral Soviet military move in the Middle East. That awareness dominated the deliberations that our government was about to start.
When I returned to the Situation Room, agreement was quickly reached to test whether we could slow down the Soviet’s timetable by drawing them into talks. This suggested an American reply conciliatory in tone but strong in substance. There was consensus, too, that this would have no impact unless we backed it up with some noticeable action that conveyed our determination to resist unilateral moves. Ideally our response should be noted in Moscow before our written reply reached there.
But two could play chicken. Dobrynin made no comment except that he would transmit our message to Moscow. No reassurance; no claim of having been misunderstood; no suggestion that at midnight we all go to bed and resume our discussions in the morning because there was no real threat. Only the laconic comment that he would stand by for our reply.
If Dobrynin’s pose was designed to heighten our sense of menace, it succeeded admirably.
But I was adamant that we would have to act in the national interest regardless of media skepticism or political opposition: “If we can’t do what is right because we might get killed, then we should do what is right. We will have to contend with the charge in the domestic media that we provoked this. The real charge is that we provoked this by being soft.”
The second silver lining was an early morning report from John Scali at the UN. After his strong opposition to a joint US-Soviet force the previous evening, enthusiasm for the idea had cooled noticeably. The UNSC is rarely prepared to vote against the determined opposition of one of the superpowers if it is given any alternative. And it will be ingenious in finding alternatives.
But their support reflected more the Vietnam-era isolationism than a strategic assessment. They opposed a joint US-Soviet force because they wanted no American troops sent abroad; the American component of the proposed force bothered them a great deal more than the Soviet one. By the same token, they would object to the dispatch of American forces even if, in our view, they were needed to resist a unilateral Soviet move. That such an abdication might shake the global equilibrium and vital American interests was not considered conclusive. Several of the Congressional leaders expressed the gravest reservations. And while they did not go so far as to indicate outright opposition, they made it clear enough that support for the alert should not be interpreted as endorsing the movement of troops.
Could we sustain it, and for what purpose? What stronger course would the rhetoricians of toughness have proposed than the policy we were in fact pursuing? Detente was not a favor we did the Soviets. It was partly necessity; partly a tranquilizer for Moscow as we sought to draw the Middle East into closer relations with us at the Soviets’ expense; partly the moral imperative of the nuclear age.
It is easy to start confrontations, but in this age we have to know where we will be at the end and not only what pose to strike at the beginning.
I went on to explain, deliberately vaguely, that “the ambiguity of some of the actions and communications and certain readiness measures that were observed” had led to the decision to order precautionary military measures on our part. If crisis management requires cold and even brutal measures to show determination, it also imposes the need to show the opponent a way out. Grandstanding is good for the ego but bad foreign policy. A public challenge could provoke the Soviets to dig in beyond what the Politburo might consider prudent. Many wars have started because no line of retreat was left open. Superpowers have a special obligation not to humiliate each other. Precisely because we were well on the way to success — and the Soviets knew it — I presented the outcome in terms compatible with the Soviet self-respect.
My responsibility was not to score debating points; it was to defend American interests in a hazardous environment. And history teaches that the most perilous moment is often when an adversary is seemingly prepared to retreat and is then jolted into new defiance by an assault on his self-esteem.
We are attempting to preserve the peace in very difficult circumstances. It is up to you ladies and gentlemen to determine whether this is the moment to try to create a crisis of confidence in the field of foreign policy as well.
There has to be a minimum of confidence that the senior officials of the American government are not playing with the lives of the American people.
Maddened by the fact that they had been surprised, beside themselves with grief over the high casualties, deeply distrustful of Sadat, who had engineered their discomfiture, Israel’s leaders wanted to end the war with his destruction. Their emotion was understandable. But one of our interests was to give Arab leaders an incentive for moderation. Our exchanges with Cairo had convinced us that Sadat represented the best chance for peace in the Middle East.
A prickly, proud, and somewhat overwrought friendly nation had to be convinced not to persist in a course promising great domestic benefits in the run-up to an election, and we had to accomplish the goal while maintaining a public posture of close association. We had to preserve Egypt’s confidence in us through the agonizing hours required to convince Israel. It was a close race between our persuasiveness and the endurance of the Third Army and with it the prospect of a moderate government in Egypt. And, having just coaxed and pressured the Russian bear back into his cage, we had to be watchful lest he come charging out again. It turned out to be another long day.
Golda recognized the problem and sought to soothe us: “They [the Third Army] are not in a desperate situation; Sadat is.”
While waiting for the Soviet message, Nixon began his press conference at 7PM in the WH and it all but wrecked the delicate balance we had been seeking to maintain between firmness and absence of provocation. From my study of history I was convinced that the period just after any diplomatic victory is frequently the most precarious. The victor is tempted to turn the screw one time too many; the loser, rubbed raw by the humiliation of his defeat, may be so eager to recoup that he suddenly abandons rational calculation.
Nixon, however, had other imperatives. He was determined to show that despite a week’s hue and cry over the “Saturday night massacre” and despite the threat of impeachment, he was in control — indeed, indispensable.
I understood that Israel’s intransigence reflected a combination of insecurity and despair — molded of a fear of isolation, a premonition of a catastrophe burnt deep into the soul of a people that had lived with disaster through the millennia of its history, and the worry that if it once yielded to pressure it would invite an unending process of extractions. It also reflected the deadlock of a divided cabinet, none of whose members dared to appear “softer” than his colleagues. I had maneuvered all day to avoid a public American disassociation from Israel, to preserve Israel’s psychological substance even while persuading it not to press its advantage to an extreme. But it was becoming clear that Israel was in no position to make a decision. It seemed to prefer being coerced to release its prey rather than relinquish it voluntarily. My ultimate responsibility as Secretary of State of the US, not as psychiatrist to the government of Israel. With the utmost reluctance I decided that my duty was to force a showdown. The only act of friendship I could show to Israel was to keep it private, if Israel would let me.
Let me give you the President’s reaction in separate parts. First he wanted me to make it absolutely clear that we cannot permit the destruction of the Egyptian army under conditions achieved after a cease-fire was reached in part by negotiations in which we participated. Therefore it is an option that does not exist. Secondly, he would like from you later than 8AM tomorrow an answer to the questions of non-military supplies permitted to reach the army. If you cannot agree to that, we will have to support in the UN a resolution that will deal with the enforcement of Resolutions 338 and 339. We have been driven to this reluctantly by your inability to reach a decision. Whatever the reason, this is what the President wanted me to tell you is our position. An answer that permits some sort of negotiation and some sort of positive response on the non-military supplies, or then we will join the other members of the UNSC in making it an international matter. I have to say again your course is suicidal. You will not be permitted to destroy this army. Your are destroying the possibility for negotiations.
As to the actions which the US took as a result of your letter of October 24, I would recall your sentences in that letter: “It is necessary to adhere without delay. I will say it straight that if you find it impossible to act promptly with us in this matter, we should be faced with the necessity urgently to consider the question of taking appropriate steps unilaterally.” Mr. General Secretary, these are serious words and were taken seriously here in Washington.
Even though I had transmitted our demand in the name of Nixon, Golda was too surefooted to tackle the President head-on. She made sure that her quarrels were always with subordinates. Placing the President on a pedestal gave him one more opportunity to change course by disavowing those who were undermining the harmony Golda postulated. And, if this failed, an ultimate concession to the President, with some skill and luck, could at least be turned into a claim for a future favor.
But if she had to make some concession, nothing could force the lioness to be graceful about it: “There is only one thing that nobody can prevent us from doing and that is to proclaim the truth of the situation; that Israel is being punished not for its deeds, but because of its size and because it is on its own.”
In a society used to relatively simple answers and in a body politic racked by Watergate, however, the public ambiguities of our policy increasingly tempted domestic opposition. Conservatives resented the very fact of a Soviet-American dialogue. Liberals suspected its pragmatism. Both shared the classically American nostalgia for policy based on concepts more “elevated” than the national interest. I was preparing a journey to the Middle East that would test not only our diplomacy but also our ability to manage the conflicting pressures at home.
My trip would not be a celebration, however, but only an opportunity, and perhaps a trap. Its best outcome would be to extend the maneuvering room for our strategy; if it failed, disaster was probable. In the face of a demonstration of American impotence, Saudi Arabia and Jordan would no longer dare to support the moderate course; Syria would stiffen its intransigence; Egypt could wind up again in the Soviet camp. The Soviets would more than recover the ground they had lost. Moscow had shown in the crisis just surmounted that it was prepared to back its words with threats if not always its threats with actions.
It was the contemplation of these alternative risks — of bogging down in niggling detail and of consuming our energies in the pursuit of comprehensive goals more yearned for than attainable — that induced us to decide instead on a “step-by-step” approach. A more ambitious effort, if it failed, would make us the target for everybody’s frustrations. The statesman must weigh the rewards of success against the penalties of failure. And he is permitted only one guess. Unlike the observer, he is not given the privilege, if his judgment turns out to be wrong, of revising it in another treatise. The statesman’s errors are likely to be irrevocable.
But as yet, all was theory. I had never visited an Arab country nor dealt extensively with Arab leaders. Except from their infrequent visits to Washington, I had no way of knowing whether what seemed logical to me appeared in the same light to them. Nor was it yet clear whether I could establish a relationship of confidence with them.
Like Sadat, he did not move toward us from sentimentality but from a cool analysis of Egypt’s interests. Nasser’s policies had brought disaster; the flirtation with the Soviet Union had failed to recover Egyptian territory. What could not be exacted from us by pressure might perhaps be attained through trust and a spirit of cooperation. Fahmy was adaptable in tactics but he was clear about his objectives and implacable about his principles.
Fahmy had come both to charm and to bully me. His romantic nature saw fit to endow me with diplomatic skills exceeding even my own not excessively low estimate. It seems to be in the Arab nature to believe that some epic event or personality will miraculously transcend the humdrum mess that is the usual human condition; a miracle worker is a mechanism for avoiding hard choices. A related tactic of Fahmy’s was to ascribe to me some outrageous design of astonishing complexity — which also put me on notice that a man capable of seeing through imaginary maneuvers of such stupendous subtlety would not be diverted by the cruder designs I might in fact produce.
Egyptians have not been manipulating foreigners for thousands of years without having learned that one of the best ways to induce someone to engage himself on your behalf is to give him a reputation to uphold. And the safest form of flattery is to praise him for what has already been accomplished.
If I spend my capital on every point of the cease-fire, there will not be any capital left to spend on the peace negotiations. If peace negotiations do not succeed, we can take the present line or the October 22 line — it does not mean anything for there will be another war. The question is how we get ceasefire arrangements that are good enough to get us through peace negotiations over the next 3 to 6 months.
The realization was beginning to sink that the war had been tactically victorious but strategically inconclusive. Israel’s aura of invincibility had disappeared as well as the self-confidence that went with it.
To fulfill the first role, we would have to act in effect as Israel’s lawyer; to achieve the second objective, we would have to gain Arab confidence and a reputation for fairness. If we were serious about the peace process, we had to take Arab views seriously; on occasion we would have to dissociate from Israel positions or actions we considered unreasonable.
But for the first time, we had indicated that our support was not unconditional. We had drawn the line at the destruction of the Third Army trapped after that cease-fire. Our dissociation from Israel on that issue was, we thought, the gentlest imaginable in the circumstances. But in Israel the substance was less important than the symbolism. If our dissociation should become habit-forming, Israel was lost.
She was drained; she hid her fears behind defiance. She spoke darkly of the one supply convoy as an Egyptian “victory.”
All this was a surrogate for Golda’s real worry, which went to the very heart of the process of peacemaking. If Israel’s negotiating positions were not sacrosanct, where then was the stopping place? If America reserved the right not to follow Jerusalem’s lead, what could Israel count on?
But dependence is not an easy relationship, especially dependence on a superpower. A small country’s survival in a hostile world can turn on nuances not easily grasped by faraway nations with wider margins of safety. The readiness to run risks for peace was bound to be greater in America than in Israel. And these risks involved America only indirectly; for Israel they were issues of survival. America could afford experiments; for Israel a single miscalculation could spell catastrophe.
The problem thus boiled down to a challenge as old as international relations themselves. In an interdependent world, each nation must adjust goals and policies to some extent to those of others; no country has the possibility of acting as if only its preferences mattered. For many a decade, Arab intransigence and Soviet pressure had created the illusion that Israel did not have to conduct a foreign policy, only a defense policy.
- You’re saying we have no choice.
- We face the international situation that I described to you.
- You’re saying we have to accept the judgment of the US. We have to accept your judgment? Even on our own affairs? On what is best for us?
- We all have to accept the judgments of other nations. We’re deferring to your judgment.
Golda’s apprehension was that if she once accepted our judgment of what was best — even if we were right — this would whet the appetite for even further Israeli concessions. So she went to the other extreme and insisted that Israel need not take into account the view of any other nation — an autonomy and luxury enjoyed not even by the superpowers.
Its dramatic mountains and barren deserts have spewed forth conquerors who ruled North Africa and Spain, sometimes brutally, occasionally magnanimously, for several hundred years. But its pivotal location has also exposed it to periodic invasions. Alternatively anvil and hammer, Morocco has seen the glories and the foibles of man, his triumphs and his degradations. Its upper classes are elegant and jaded, influenced by French rationalism but molded by Moslem certitudes. The mass of the population endures, as it has through the centuries, largely oblivious to what geography has imposed. Morocco has been for the past century at the intersection of the grand strategies of others, forcing its rulers to navigate by skill, shrewdness and self-assurance.
Where so much depended on intangibles, giving Sadat psychological reassurance was the greatest service the King could render to us.
My security personnel deployed. It was a losing effort. Like so many foreigners before them, they were engulfed by a sea of Egyptian humanity advancing inexorably like the nearby desert until the visitors stood there immobilized, finally surrendering to a fate made bearable by the obvious goodwill of those who had so flagrantly breached security.
I did not think it wise bo begin by rejecting one of the President’s ideas, however unrealistic. And I had no wish to play the bull to Sadat’s picador. So I changed the subject. Before we talked about the business at hand, I said, would the President tell me how he had managed to achieve such stunning surprise on October 6? That had been the turning point; what we were doing now was in a way its inevitable consequence.
Sadat narrowed his eyes, puffed again on his pipe, and smiled. He understood that I was paying him a compliment and establishing his status. He was not negotiating from weakness; he was not a supplicant; he had earned Egypt’s right at the conference table; he had, in short, restored Egypt’s honor and self-respect.
Slowly at first, but with growing animation, Sadat told his tale of lonely decision-making, his conclusion after the failure of the 1969 Rogers Plan that there would never be a serious negotiation so long as Israel was able to equate security with military predominance. It was impossible for Egypt to bargain from a posture of humiliation.
To teach Israel that it could not find security in domination and to restore Egypt’s self-respect — a task that no foreigner could do for it. Now that he had vindicated Egyptian honor, he had 2 objectives: to regain “my territories,” and to make peace. And he would be as determined and patient in the pursuit of these objectives as he had been in preparing for war.
The whole issue was a contribution to metaphysics, since we could find no evidence that any ships had ever actually been stopped in the first place.
Sadat had followed the method I grew to know very well: to cut through trivia to the essential, to make major, even breathtaking, tactical concessions in return for an irreversible psychological momentum. His acceptance of our draft proposal committed us to try to bring about the disengagement he really wanted. By being forthcoming on the issues of the October 22 line and release of prisoners, he helped ease Israel’s chronic suspicions of his motives. And yet what he conceded was essentially marginal: the improvements he might have achieved by haggling would have been cosmetic or a bow to vanity. Wise statesmen know they will be measured by the historical process they set in motion, not by the debating points they score.
Sadat, of course, must not be viewed as everybody’s genial uncle. He was as tough as he was patient. He was, after all, the man who had relentlessly, patiently, and against all probability prepared the October war. He was not ready to sheath all his weapons. He turned a deft ear to my pleas to help undo the oil embargo; he replied firmly that he could be persuasive with his brethen only after substantial progress had been made in the negotiations.
When we had finished going over the six points, Sadat clapped his hands and an aide appeared. Sadat asked him to call in Joe Sisco and Ismail Fahmy, who were sitting in full view in wicker chairs on the lawn. They would refine what we had discussed into the formal language of the six-point plan.
Usually, any one negotiation is a part of a long sequence; the conclusion more often yields exhaustion than relief. One participates in few events one recognizes as turning points. I had come to Cairo hoping for a step forward in a strategy that had been inching ahead for 4 years. Now in a single encounter with Egypt’s President, one month after the beginning of the war, we had achieved a breakthrough.
Isaiah Berlin once wrote that greatness is the ability to transform paradox into platitude.
Within a few years, Sadat overcame these riddles. When he died, the peace process was a commonplace; Egypt’s friendship with America was a cornerstone of Mideast stability. By his journey to Jerusalem in 1977 he had demonstrated to all those obsessed with the tangible the transcendence of the visionary. He understood that a heroic gesture can create a new reality.
The difference between great and ordinary leaders is less formal intellect than insight and courage. The great man understands the essence of a problem; the ordinary leader grasps only the symptoms. The great man focuses on the relationship of events to each other; the ordinary leader sees only a series of seemingly disconnected events. The great man has a vision of the future that enables him to put obstacles in perspective; the ordinary leader turns pebbles in the road into boulders.
Sadat bore with fortitude that loneliness inseparable from moving the world from familiar categories toward where it has never been.
For someone used to conventional topography, the unequivocal flatness of the countryside came almost as a shock. There was no geographic reference point, nothing to mediate between the individual and the infinite; one’s relation with the universe was established through the medium of a pervasive, enduring mass of humanity.
But a statesman must never be judged simply as philosopher or dreamer. At some point he must translate his intuition into reality against sometime resistant material. Sadat was neither starry-eyed nor soft. He was not a pacifist. He did not believe in peace at any price. He was conciliatory but not compliant. I never doubted that in the end he would create heroes if no other course he considered honorable was left to him.
Like many men of power, he had an almost carnal relationship with authority. He could hold his own with small talk, but on deeper acquaintance it became clear it bored him. He much preferred to spend idle time in solitary reflection. Most of his bold initiatives were conceived in such periods of seclusion and meditation, often in his native village. I know no other leader who understood so well the virtue of solitude and used it so rigorously.
His urbanity made it easy to forget that his early career as revolutionary struggling for his country’s independence and suffering for it in a succession of prison. Such men are never “regular fellows,” however charmingly they present themselves. Revolutionary leadership is a career that attracts only the deeply dedicated; its votaries forswear all the normal attributes of success because to them their cause transcends normal calculation. One can challenge the convictions of such men only if one is prepared for struggle; standing in their way is never free. Sadat took a long view but he would also insist on achieving it.
He handled each of the 4 American Presidents he knew with consummate skill. He treated Nixon as a great statesman, Ford as the living manifestation of goodwill, Carter as a missionary almost too decent for this world, and Reagan as the benevolent leader of a popular revolution, subtly appealing to each man’s conception of himself and gaining the confidence of each.
Great men are needed to break a mold; afterward, it is often their destiny to be so out of scale as to evoke a nostalgia for less demanding leadership.
Sadat, representing an ancient country with the innate sense that time was on its side, could afford the grand gesture. Israel, fighting for its right to exist, could savage its identity only by struggle — or so its history had taught it.
Golda had overestimated the pliability of her cabinet, which insisted on another hallowed ritual of Israeli negotiating tactics: a “Memorandum of Understanding” between the US and Israel. The consciousness of having one friend among the nations of the world produces an endless quest for reassurance in the form of additional concessions or side letters on the interpretation of existing agreements.
Golda spoke darkly of resigning in favor of a tougher negotiator — a truly frightening prospect, which we happily knew was unfulfillable.
Contemporary Saudi policy has been characterized by a caution that has elevated indirectness into a special art form. For if the Kingdom pursued a very forward policy, if it made itself the focal point of all disputes, it would be subjected to entreaties, threats, and blandishments, the cumulative impact of which could endanger either independence or coherence.
Thus there has grown up a style at once oblique and persistent, reticent and assertive. The Kingdom has maneuvered to keep itself out of the forefront of confrontation and even when its resources have sustained it — as was now the case with the oil embargo. It has been skillful in avoiding the impression that its unilateral views are decisive. It has always striven to gain the protection of a consensus for which somebody else must assume the blame. Something always has to be done by someone else before the Saudi can act. It is a marvelous way to avoid pressures and one absolutely consistent with the needs of the Kingdom.
There is thus no point in trying to sweep the wary rulers of the Kingdom off their feet. Most leaders’ vanity causes them to exaggerate their own significance; the Saudi princes under Faisal were immune to this temptation and they have not changed the basic pattern since. The opaque Saudi style is equally resistant to eloquence and to threats. To yield to either would imply a degree of latitude in decision-making that would invite endless repetition of foreign entreaties or demands. Much better to maneuver so that everything appears as the consequence of something outside Saudi control. Riyadh is not the place for scoring dramatic breakthroughs.
This faux pas threw Faisal into some minutes of deep melancholy, causing conversation around the table to stop altogether. In the unearthly silence my colleagues must have wondered what I had done so quickly to impair the West’s oil supplies. I did not help the matters by referring to Sadat as the leader of the Arabs.
Unfortunately, Saudi Arabia was in an “embarrassed” position; it needed some proof of tangible progress before a proposal to sheath the oil weapon could be put forward to the other Arab states. Faisal, precisely because he was a friend of the US, could not act alone.
The Shah took literally the Western academic doctrines according to which the source of political instability was the gap between economic expectation and achievement. And as the “revolution of rising expectations” was met, so the argument went, political instability would follow almost automatically. Western liberal maxims caused the Shah to build a secular, modern state in the reformist mold of Kemal Ataturk and to force-feed industrialization to a population that had barely left the feudal age. For nearly 2 decades he seemed to be succeeding. Iran’s GDP rose at the rate of nearly 10% a year. Land reform was instituted, public education and women’s rights fostered, workers’ profit-sharing and public health spurred.
But the result was hardly the political stability foreseen by academic theory. Industrialization uprooted rural populations and drew them into the congested cities where they found themselves morally and psychologically adrift. The increase in the GDP spawned a new social class that, just as in the comparable periods of European history, sought a larger role in government. Education produced intellectual ferment and the temptations of radicalism; it was surely hostile to absolute monarch in the Shah’s style. The modernizing cultural influences from the West, flooding over the broken dam of Iran’s cultural isolation, overwhelmed Iran’s religious and social traditions. The rootless, the newly powerful, the orthodox, and the spiritually dispossessed came together with disparate, often conflicting, motives and swept away the Shah’s rule in an orgy of retribution and vengefulness.
It was no accident. The concept of representative democracy requires a social cohesiveness unattainable in many developing societies. Where government provides the principal social bond, the distinction is not always made (or even possible) between opposition to government and undermining of authority and indeed of the state. Clearly, in Iran the leader of the revolution was not a democrat of reformist tendencies but an embittered reactionary who, as soon as he attained office, garnered himself dictatorial powers far exceeding those of the Shah.
The fact is that we lack a coherent idea of how to channel the elemental forces let loose by the process of development. Liberal democracy developed over centuries in essentially aristocratic and bourgeois societies; universal suffrage did not become general in the West until after WW1. In this cultural environment, the minority has a chance to become a majority and the political contest does not destroy the loser. It is different in countries with deep tribal or religious or racial divisions, or where a state has been created to govern populations whose principal common experience is colonial rule. Force-fed mass participation is more likely to lead to totalitarianism than to democracy. The contemporary irony is that Leninism has proved attractive to many developing countries not because of its economic theories, which have clearly failed, but because if offers legitimacy for staying in office — which is after all why most leaders of independence movements entered politics in the first place. Our dilemma is that we cannot abandon our own values, yet we have not yet learned how to build institutions capable of sustaining the political strains of development — at least in the initial phase.
Zhou understood that what was then possible on Taiwan was not desirable, because it would make US-Chinese ties controversial in both countries, though for obvious reasons of Chinese domestic politics he could not say so.
If you want to play for high stakes with very little risk, then you are likely to be in a continued state of dissatisfaction. The secret dream of our Western allies in the Middle East is to restore their position of 1940 without any risk or effort on their part and therefore, to the extent that we are more active, there is a vague feeling of jealousy and uneasiness.
I explained our strategy with respect to the Geneva Conference: We would use the plenary sessions for the formal reiteration of the familiar; the real negotiations would take place under our aegis outside the conference on a bilateral basis between the various Arab countries and Israel.
Zhou represented a country capable of a powerful intellectual analysis but without the physical means to implement it. I was the FM of a country that had the physical means and shared the geopolitical analysis but in post-Vietnam, Watergate conditions lacked the domestic consensus to execute its conceptions.
Soviet expansionism, he retorted, was “pitiful”; the Soviets’ courage did not match their ambitions, as had been demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis and America’s recent alert.
It seems that the number of unemployed has been cut down by an amount and the US dollar is relatively stable. So there doesn’t seem to be any major issue. Why should the Watergate affair become all exploded in such a manner?
Hence, Mao concluded, the Soviet Union could not attack China “unless you let them in first and you first give them the Middle East and Europe so they are able to deploy troops eastward.” And the converse was, of course, also true. We were thus the key to global security. The real danger was the potential victims’ lack of understanding of the requirements of the geopolitical balance. If all those threatened by Soviet aggression cooperated, each of them was safe and the Soviets would confront increasing difficulties; if they did not, each was in peril. In other words, containment.
It was important, therefore, not to confuse temporarily irritating tactics with long-term trends. We must stick to a firm line even if some of our friends seemed hesitant, and in time they would gain courage from our leadership.
The last thing Mao wanted at that point was the very domestic upheaval in America that his political theory foresaw and advocated.
I said that reality would impose the main lines of our policy regardless of which party was in office; there might be some hiatus while this lesson was being learned, however.
I said there was also a difference between our 2 parties in the willingness to be “very brutal very quickly in case there is a challenge.” Mao mused that it was not necessary to put up a diplomatic front; what I really meant was the willingness to risk war. I sought to curb the speculation: “We will not start a war in any event.” Mao was not all that pleased with such a reassurance. It elicited a parting warning: “As for the Soviet Union, they bully the weak, and are afraid of the tough.” In other words, do not deprive Moscow of the fear that we might prove bellicose.
It was an astonishing performance. David Bruce, who had met all the great leaders of Europe over a period of 30 years, said that we had witnessed the most extraordinary and disciplined presentation he had ever heard from a statesman — all the more impressive for seeming so spontaneous and random.
But what did it all mean? Why did Mao consider it necessary to place his enormous authority behind so detailed an assessment of the international situation?
In European foreign officers the political directors are civil servants; they cannot make political decisions. Any topic assigned to them is certain to receive careful, professional scrutiny; acts of vision and imagination they must leave to their political masters. The proposed dialogue was therefore at a minimum very time-consuming, since every new idea or disagreement would have to be passed to a higher level where it would undergo the same laborious process that produced the document in the first place.
- You must understand how difficult it is for the Nine to achieve what we have.
- Yes, it is a considerable achievement for Europe but not for Atlantic relations.
We felt that, more than 20 years after NATO was created, we needed a new vision of where we were going. We wanted to unite people on both sides of the Atlantic to join together to do something useful. The procedure should be less of an adversary negotiation.
- I will speak in English, although it is difficult for me.
- You do not need to know much English to say “no.”
Jobert wanted America fully committed to defend Europe but he wished to reduce our political links to Europe to the greatest extent possible. It was vintage Gaullism. After all, de Gaulle and all of his disciples had held as an article of faith that Europe need to pay no price for American military protection because the US was defending Europe in its own interest; it could not afford to let Europe be occupied by the Soviets. In Jobert’s view, there was no harm — indeed, there might be some benefit — in periodically reasserting the need for the common defense. But this implied no obligatory political consultation. What would serve these goals better than a strong NATO declaration and a weak Community declaration? Hence the paradox that Jobert was the assiduous supporter of the one and the indefatigable roadblock to the other.
But foreign policy is not an exercise in abstract logic; if it neglects psychological reality, it builds on sand. American public opinion would not hold still indefinitely for risking the lives of great numbers of American troops on a continent refusing to articulate the word “partnership” or “interdependence” or hedging on stating shared objectives.
The disputes so far largely concerned procedures rather than substance, timing rather than purpose. Everybody — even Jobert — had shied away from open confrontation and had taken pains to insist that disagreements reflected misunderstanding or technical disputes rather than conflicting interests.
Like the deep frustrations suppressed by a family for the sake of appearances that then explode with disproportionate fury at the first pretext, the accumulated tensions in our alliances suddenly erupted with the outbreak of the Middle East war.
For present purposes, the issue is not whose analysis was correct. I have explained our reasoning at length in previous chapters. The European position was certainly not frivolous; Europe’s dependence on oil was compounded by frustration at being a bystander to crisis in a region of its previous preeminence. The deeper problem raised by the October war was the proper conduct of allies in an emergency when they sincerely disagree with one another either about causes or about remedies: Should they use the occasion of their partners’ embarrassment to vindicate their own views? Or do they have an obligation to subordinate their differences to the realization that the humiliation of the ally who, for better or worse, is most strategically placed to affect the outcome weakens the structure of common defense and the achievement of joint purposes? In 1956, when faced with this choice during the British and French attempt to seize the Suez Canal, the US imposed its own assessment on its allies. While dubious about British and French military plans, I had bitterly opposed Eisenhower Administration policy then. I have always believed that many of our later difficulties have stemmed from our insensitive conduct toward our allies at that time, which both stimulated a long-festering resentment and fostered a sense of impotence that accelerated their withdrawal from overseas commitment and added to American burdens.
Europe avoided facing this painful reality by means of an essential legalistic argument to the effect that obligations of the North Atlantic Treaty did not extend to the Middle East. But our case for allied cohesion was based not on a legal claim but on the imperatives of common interests. When close allies act toward one another like clever lawyers, if they exclude an area as crucial as the Middle East from their common concern, their association becomes vulnerable to fluctuating passion.
The allies were really objecting not so much to timing as to the balance of opportunity to affect our decision. But imminent danger did not brook an exchange of views and, to be frank, we could not have accepted a judgment different from our own. There was no middle position between alert and no alert. At issue were only readiness measures, not actions. In our perception, nevertheless, it was a clear emergency, and it fell to us to act as custodians of Western security.
Europe, which gets 80% of its oil from the Mideast, would have frozen to death this winter if there hadn’t been a settlement.
The crisis in the Middle East suddenly brought home to us that the European objections were not simply formalistic or institutional as had been professed. Nor were they provoked by tactless American statements — though our phraseology was not always at its most felicitous. Europe, it emerged increasingly, wanted the option to conduct a policy separate from the US and in the case of the Middle East objectively in conflict with us.
To be sure, from the European point of view serious criticisms could be made against American policy. But this is another way of saying that the Atlantic Alliance, to remain vital, must do its utmost to prevent conflicting perceptions of fundamental interests from festering by being left unattended. This was the purpose of our Year of Europe. And if a crisis arises, each side of the Atlantic should weigh carefully the risks of dissociation as against the risks of closing ranks. In fact, it is an interesting question whether allies can afford to prevail against whichever partner is placed by circumstances in the position best able to shape events. An alliance for whose vitality partners are not prepared to curtail their freedom of action is on the way to disintegration.
In reviewing the history of the period, I find it striking that while our European allies left little doubt of their distaste for our policies, they never articulated a coherent alternative. Nor did they address themselves to the consequences for them if our strategy failed — though they seemed to base their policies on this expectation. Our allies were content to saddle us with the responsibility for the diplomacy, but they were not prepared to share its risks.
They assumed that we had the power to force Israel to do our bidding; if we hesitated, it must be because we were willing to subordinate European interests to our domestic pressures, which they now urged Nixon to face down regardless of his Watergate plight. None of them had any clear-cut idea of how to accomplish this.
All such arguments, if they found a hearing at all, were dismissed as rationalizations for a misconceived policy of subterfuges for maintaining American control of the negotiating process. As in the Atlantic dialogue, our allies clothed substance in procedure; they argued that they should, in some undefined way, participate in the postwar diplomacy. But their pro-Arab tilt and support for what amounted to an unworkable all-or-nothing approach ruled them out as mediators. They chafed at the fact that they were on the sidelines — though this wallflower role was brought about largely by their own actions, accentuated by their reluctance to adopt joint policies on oil.
Washington’s failure to consult, despite countless promises to do so, and its decision not to give its allies advance warning of a military alert that inevitably affected their interests, fits a dismally familiar pattern for this Administration. Mr. Nixon and Secretary Kissinger can speak eloquently about the indispensable American-European connection; but their actions, particularly in crisis, do not match their words.
On Nov 21, Professor Brzezinski repeated in a newspaper article what was beginning to turn into partisan refrain: “It is difficult to imagine a course more calculated to damage alliance relationships, and especially the notion of alliance consultations, than the one the US unilaterally followed in recent days.”
It is a root fact of the situation that the countries that were most consulted proved among the most difficult in their cooperation and those countries that were most cooperative were least consulted.
The difference between Europe and us was caused only superficially by inadequate consultation; the real trouble was a clash in political perspectives that no amount of consultation would be able to remove.
During the past 6 years — since the 1967 war — the US had ample opportunity to bring pressure on Israel to negotiate and has done nothing. When we have had Four Power meeting, we have been warned off by the Americans. We all knew what would happen and it did. Another war was inevitable. (The tenor of Heath’s comments made it clear that, in his view, Britain has disagreed with US policy since 1967 and British views have been given no consideration on the part of the US in formulating Mideast policy.)
America and its democratic allies were drifting not only apart but into a competition.
We are firmly alongside the US on East/West issues which could lead to serious confrontation. In any case of uncertainty the benefit of doubt would weigh decisively on the American side of the scales. But you must from your side do everything possible to reduce the area of uncertainty — that is to take us more systematically into your confidence and consult with us during the period of build-up towards crisis and confrontation. I think this applies to the Middle East also where, if I may say so, I think that over the years American Administrations have not given enough weight to such policies of ourselves and others, which have a lot and, perhaps more than a lot, to be said about them. I am sure that our aim should be to restore the old intimacy and I can see no reason why this should not be possible.
The next generation of leaders in Europe, Canada, and America will have neither the personal memory nor the emotional commitment to the Atlantic alliance of its founders. Even today, a majority on both sides of the Atlantic did not experience the threat that produced the alliance’s creation or the sense of achievement associated with its growth.
But let us also remember that even the best consultative machinery cannot substitute for common vision and shared goals; it cannot replace the whole network of intangible connections that have been the real sinews of the transatlantic and especially the Anglo-American relationship. We must take care lest in defining European unity in too legalistic a manner we lose what has made our alliance unique: that in the deepest sense Europe and America do not think of each other as foreign entities conducting traditional diplomacy, but as members of a larger community engaged, sometimes painfully but ultimately always cooperatively, in a common enterprise.
As we look into the future we can perceive challenges compared to which our recent disputes are trivial. A new international system is replacing the structure of the immediate postwar years. The external policies of China and the Soviet Union are in periods of transition. Western Europe is unifying. New nations seek identity and an appropriate role. Even now, economic relationships are changing more rapidly than the structures which nurtured them. We — Europe, Canada, and America — have only 2 choices: creativity together or irrelevant apart.
With respect to juridicial obligation, I reiterate my belief that if the Atlantic Alliance is reduced to its legal content, it will sooner or later fail even in the area covered by formal obligation. The lifeblood of an alliance is the shared conviction that the security, in its widest sense, of each ally is a vital interest to the others; in crises they must not have the attitude that they will check with their lawyers to determine their legal duty. Ultimately, the Western Alliance must be sustained by the hearts as well as the minds of its members. It follows that a threat to the vital interests of a partner cannot be treated with indifference even if it is not technically encompassed by any provision of the Alliance treaty.
Now that the Vietnam war was over, we sought creative tasks that would transcend our domestic traumas. But our allies had no such compulsions. On the contrary, the felt that they had enough on their plates.
When all is said and done, I have to conclude that, though the immediate attempt was doomed, it was right to try. We had posed the correct questions, of which the best proof is that most of them are still with us today under much more difficult circumstances. What finally defeated the effort was the inability of the key countries to mesh their domestic politics with the plain needs of the future — revealing the deepest challenge to modern democracy.
In the West, feudalism was gradually destroyed by industrialization in a process lasting over a century and a half. Japan modernized by merging feudal values of reciprocal obligation with the new ethos of industrial efficiency in less than a generation. The West developed a system of government based on a concept of authority: the right to issue orders that are accepted because they reflect legal or constitutional norms. Japan relies on consensus. A leader’s eminence does not imply a right to impose his will on his peers, but the opportunity to elicit their agreement — or at least give the appearance of doing so. High office in Japan does not entitle the holder to issue orders; it gives the privilege of taking the lead in persuasion.
Almost anywhere else, such a system of government would lead to stagnation. But Japan is not like anywhere else.
Japan risked its identity to be able to assure its independence — an act of extraordinary courage and devotion.
By contrast, Imperial China, facing similar pressures, did not dare to risk what had seemed to make life worth living; it relied on diplomatic skill to manipulate foreigners even from a position of impotence. At the cost of constant humiliation it avoided total colonization by giving the maximum number of nations a stake in exploiting China and preserved a margin of autonomy by playing off competing greeds against each other.
Japan had nos such confidence in its cultural preeminence or diplomatic skill. It decided first to become so strong that no foreign nation would dare to impose its will. In time Japan achieved a position from which it could impose on other nations what it was determined to resist for itself: It launched itself on the road of colonization.
Study missions were sent abroad to learn the techniques of the most successful nations in all fields: military affairs, government, business, education, the art. Britain was emulated for its navy and parliamentary institutions, Germany for its army, America increasingly for its technical know-how.
The methods by which that advance was achieved were well tested. The leadership group set carefully considered long-range goals. Consensus did not emerge from a compromise between individual preferences; it was based on meticulous investigation of major trends at home and abroad. Japan spent more on research into foreign practices and used it more effectively than any other major industrial country. Consensus became a method to explore the most effective way of dealing with the future rather than — as is the temptation elsewhere — a system of ratifying the status quo.
In the other industrial democracies, a problem is defined; the options are identified; someone chooses between them or compromises among them. Bureaucratic self-will and substantive concerns merge. There is either an identifiable winner and loser or else an amalgam of views reflective of a balance of forces. At every point it is possible to define the state of bureaucratic play.
In Japan, by contrast, everything is geared to avoid confrontation. There is no clear-cut elaboration of a formal position. There is a long process of consultation designed to achieve not compromise but a sense of direction. The art of Japanese decision-making is to avoid commitment in the early stages of the process, to enable a serious deliberation to go forward in which participants have the option of changing their minds and the need for decision is avoided until genuine agreement exists. Thus, even if outsiders could obtain correct information about the internal state of play — no easy matter — it would do them little good because the early stages of the process are amorphous and its subsequent evolution depends on group psychology.
Japan thereby acquires an enormous advantage. There is literally no one capable of making a decision by himself. Only amateurs would seek to pressure an individual Japanese minister; even when he yields out of politeness, he cannot carry out his promise. But when the consensus has formed, for whatever reason, it is implemented with speed, determination, and breadth unmatched by any Western country. So many key people have been involved in the decision-making process and they understand the implications of what has been decided so well, that they achieve tremendous momentum. What could be more effective than a society voracious in its collection of information, impervious to pressure, and implacable in execution?
A foreigner underestimates Japanese leaders at his peril. It is true that they are not as conceptually adept as, say, the Chinese, as articulate as most Europeans, or as boisterously open and forthcoming as Americans. They have not been selected for any of these qualities. They gather intelligence about foreigners; they do not seek to persuade them with words. They chart future action for their society; they do not need to articulate its purposes in rhetoric.
In Japan, the key skill of leadership is the ability to form a consensus not by talking people into what they do not wish to do but by making people wish to do what is in the common interest. Japanese diplomats almost never communicate by the usual process of putting forward a proposition that then becomes the subject of negotiation. This would imply that they have the power of individual decision. It would place them in the embarrassing circumstance of implying that they can change what they did not decide, or of refusing a compromise, or of imposing their will as a last resort — all acts that would offend the legendary courtesy of a country whose social conflicts are resolved without providing a scorecard of winners and losers.
In any event, by the time Japanese leaders appear at international conferences they have usually done far more homework than their counterparts. The reason that an unprepared meeting will force someone to yield or result in a compromise serving nobody’s purpose. Japanese leaders therefore tend to make their concessions before a diplomatic encounter by preparing negotiations as meticulously as all other decisions. They have the advantage of not being able to commit the government. They cannot be blamed for failing to put forward a position because they cannot be expected to have one. But their experience superbly equips them to explore the thinking of their interlocutors, which is then incorporated in the decision made in Japan that, to do Japanese leaders credit, usually take seriously into account the points of view of other nations.
By the same token, when a Japanese diplomat of high rank — and even more, a minister — asks a question, he is rarely seeking enlightenment. He is putting forward the consensus in the most tentative, hence the least demanding, manner. At that point, a meeting of minds is expected. If there is a genuine disagreement, it is important to present it gently to permit an adjustment without loss of face. And one must not expect one’s Japanese opposite number to be in a position to respond immediately; time must be left for a change of course.
In my early years in government I ignored unofficial emissaries, misunderstanding their “official” role. I listened carefully to what Japanese diplomats said but, more often than not, missed the intangibles that they attempted to convey. When we had a problem, I sought out the responsible minister and tried to persuade him to our point of view. Nonplussed by such lack of delicacy, too polite to admit that he had no authority to make a decision on his own, the hapless minister would seek refuge in evasion or, if pressed to the wall, would agree to propositions he did not know how to implement.
The energy crisis shook Japan to its core. Like the rest of the industrial world, Japan had built its prosperity on cheap energy. It was almost totally dependent on outside sources, importing 90% of its requirements.
The issue for Japan’s leaders was not the merit of the various points of view — to which they were largely indifferent — but a calculation of pressures that needed tending.
Machiavelli has been invoked for centuries as the incarnation of cynicism. Yet he thought of himself as a moralist. His maxims described the world as he found it, not as he wished it to be. Indeed, he was convinced that only a ruler of strong moral conviction could keep a steady course while engaging in manipulations on which survival regrettably depended. That, in a way, was the attitude of my Japanese interlocutors. They claimed neither justice nor even wisdom for their course of action. It reflected necessity and was thus beyond debate.
Tanaka’s fate was thus oddly parallel to Nixon’s. Like Nixon he had exceptional abilities; like Nixon he was very insecure and, what is even more remarkable for a Japanese, he showed it. He was PM for only 18 months. I found him extremely intelligent, unusually direct. He came closest of any Japanese leaders to speaking in the idiom of personal power that is conventional among heads of government of other countries. And strangely enough, it deprived his statements of some credibility. They were clearer than those of his colleagues but in a curious way less informative, for one could never be quite sure whether his assertions reflected the true Japanese consensus or only a personal preference. Thus in a subtle way the Japanese method, which is almost aesthetic in nature, of having the point emerge from a context, won its victory over the rational form of discourse favored by the West.
The risks are plain. Free societies cannot maintain even their domestic cohesion by simply managing the present and hoping for the best. All too frequently a problem evaded is a crisis invited. The future must be shaped or it will impose itself as catastrophe. That remains the key test of democratic statesmanship.
Our strategy had to be that when the Soviet Union, the British and French press, we stall — so all of them know only we can deliver.
Diplomacy depends above all on available assets. We had stronger hand; we played it.
And deadlock over disengagement was the last thing we wanted, since the separation of forces in the Sinai was the centerpiece of our strategy. On the other hand, we were not, to be frank, too eager for a breakthrough at Kilometer 1010 before the Geneva Conference. If disengagement disappeared from the agenda, we would be forced into endless skirmishing over broader issues on which I knew we would not be able to deliver quickly, if at all.
But fairness compels the recognition that Moscow never launched an all-out campaign against us. And we took pains not to humiliate the Soviet Union overtly even while weakening its influence. Detente is the mitigation of conflict among adversaries, not the cultivation of friendship.
What started as a Fahmy pressure play threatened, as so often in the Middle East, to turn into the real thing as the parties listened to their own rhetoric and liked what they heard.
Our warnings — which I suspect were not all that unwelcome to Sadat to use with his hot-heads — were balanced by our optimistic description of the diplomatic prospects.
Nothing so warms the heart of a professional diplomat as the imminence of a major conference. It provides a testing ground for all the arcane knowledge acquired in a lifetime of study about procedures, about abstruse points of protocol, about “auspices” and “chairmanship.”
Every trip to the Middle East required its own choreography. We were operating simultaneously in 3 dimensions: the US-Soviet relationship, the struggle for influence between Arab moderates and radicals, and the Arab-Israeli crisis.
I had also found that news traveled with wondrous rapidity through the Arab world, somewhat skewed at each stop, but in its total impact presenting an account that was on the mark psychologically if not factually. And since most political calculations occur in the minds of men, the psychological element is often decisive. The extra volubility of Arab leaders is a device by which they fine-tune their actions and establish the moral terrain. Since key leaders rely on the rumor mill, often giving it more credence than direct reports, it is usually the better part of wisdom to prepare the ground by making sure that some other Arab leader has been exposed to one’s arguments. Even if they discount part of what their brother Arab tells them — an almost obligatory test of manhood — they are apt to credit secondhand information as a tribute to their status as insiders and to believe that it gives them an edge over their rivals. One must take care, however, to reserve some important piece of information for one’s principal interlocutor. Much as he appreciates indirection, the prizes exclusivity even more.
He had the ascetic face and the piercing eyes of a fanatic, but his manner was elegant and his tone courteous. He acted like a man who would not be satisfied with having been the military leader of a cruel struggle for independence. Like many self-taught military men, Boumedienne did not prize the martial art as much as another field less familiar to him and therefore endowed with mystery: that of political philosophy.
I am an Arab of the generation that has been subject to 2 kinds of humiliations: The humiliation of colonialism, British or French, and the colonialism that one calls Israel.
The prerequisite for dealing with erstwhile or potential adversaries — as Algeria certainly had been and might well become again — is to establish philosophical premises that can sustain the inevitable wear and tear imposed by practical necessities. So I spent most of the meeting outlining the concepts underlying our policy, particularly seeking to counter Boumedienne’s obsession with the danger of superpower domination.
I told him that the Arab world was too complicated for me to invent a different story for each stop; he was free to report to Damascus what I had said to him — not much of a concession, since a main reason for seeing him was to get advance word of my attitude to Syria (another was, of course, to learn as much as possible of Asad’s thinking before I got to Syria.)
Oil was a question of principle for us. We could not accept being threatened by those who were at the same time asking for our help.
We decided to characterize the 2 hours of conversations with the phrases “frank” (meaning we had disagreements) but “very constructive” (meaning that a large area of common view emerged and a good atmosphere had been created).
He profoundly distrusted the Soviet Union, he said. On each visit to Moscow he had been humiliated by Soviet crudeness and condescension. The Soviets had only wanted to use Egypt for their own selfish designs.
And often with Sadat, shrewdness masqueraded as naivete. He had concluded that reliance on the Soviets guaranteed stalemate. He therefore saw no sense in threatening us with what thwarted his own designs. Better to offer the inevitable as a concession, establish a claim for reciprocity, and above all lay the basis for the mutual confidence that was the key to his strategy.
By his previous evasions, Nixon had lost the power to dominate events. He had become a prisoner of his versions of what had transpired in Watergate and — I remained convinced — of his very real ignorance of what was actually on the tape recordings.
I told him that it would be a mistake to lay down a hard-and-fast program. It was bound to leak; inability to achieve its precise terms would then be a token of failure overriding the very real accomplishment inherent in any significant Israel withdrawal and the separation of Egyptian and Israeli forces. I suggested we review the general principles that should guide the negotiations.
The government was dominated by Alawites — of which Asad was one — who through most of history had been a despised rural-based minority relegated to menial employment. But like many such privileged groups, they came to be disproportionately represented in the armed forces, which, as elsewhere, offered careers to the talented.
Asad never lost his aplomb. He negotiated daringly and tenaciously like a riverboat gambler to make sure that he had exacted the last silver of available concessions. I once told him that I had seen negotiators who deliberately moved themselves to the edge of a precipice to show that they had no further margin of maneuver. I had even known negotiators who put one foot over the edge, in effect threatening their own suicide. He was the only one who would actually jump off the precipice, hoping that on his way down he could break his fall by grabbing a tree he knew to be there. Asad beamed.
Asad opened by saying that he had heard from his Arab brothers about my conversations with them. Translated, this meant that I had better not try any funny business, but also that what he had heard was at least worth exploring.
The best we can do is our best effort. We have not given any promise we can’t keep. I’m in no position to make an agreement. It would be irresponsible for me to start drawing lines. I have not studied the matter. You wouldn’t respect me if I did this. I am a serious man.
By now I felt like an orchestra conductor who had to elicit a harmonious sound from varied and potentially discordant instruments.
Golda was tough enough to look at the real situation, not matter how painful, without flinching.
At one point I said in exasperation:
I’m trying to bring a sense of reality to this discussion. The mood in America is such that if Israel is increasingly seen as the obstacle to the negotiations and the cause of the oil pressure, you’ll have tremendous difficulty. Memorandum or no memorandum.
“I know that,” Golda replied wearily. She had her own domestic problems — a belligerent and united right wing and an insecure public. What we were about was not foreign policy but psychology.
He was to prove the wisdom of a remark by Metternich about a Russian diplomat of Tsarist times: “No one is easier to defeat than a diplomat who fancies himself shrewd. Only the totally honest are difficult to vanquish.”
Afterward, Rifai admitted to me privately that his tone reflected the necessities of Arab politics. The belligerence of the oratory was in direct relation to the conciliatoriness of the policy.
In my view, the Secretary of State should not, as a general rule, go abroad on a serious negotiation unless the odds are heavily in his favor. Since in diplomacy the margins of decisions are narrow, the psychological element can be of great consequence. A reputation for success tends to be self-fulfilling. Equally, failure feeds on itself: A Secretary of State who undertakes too many journeys that lead nowhere depreciates his coin. And it is dangerous to rely on personality or negotiating skill to break deadlocks; they cannot redeem the shortcomings of an ill-considered strategy.
Let me explain exactly what my position has to be, for the preservation of my own position. I cannot be in Egypt as Israel’s lawyer. I cannot be in Egypt to start with one position and then say to Sadat, wll, I will accept another one. The position that I will bring to him is the only position I will discuss. The only thing I can do is, acting as an interpreter of what I take to be your views, I can tell him if the line may be 5km more or less, or I can say to him it is a waste of time for me to bring it here. If he says, “I need 2 more battalions,” I cannot say I accept it. But I can say I will take it to Israel and see what they say. I, in no case, will go further than telling him that I will take certain things to Israel for your consideration. You will have the perfect freedom when I arrive to reject what I bring to you. I must do that, for my sake, because I do not want to be in a position where I have plenipotentiary powers from you and say I agree to 4 battalions rather than 3 battalions. That puts me into a bad position because it makes me look vis-a-vis him that I am trying to strike the best possible bargain for Israel. So it would destroy my usefulness even with Egypt. So the use I am as your intermediary is to give him my interpretation of your thinking and steer him away from some things altogether; others I bring here and you can still reject them.
Meticulousness did not necessarily ease my task. Mediation tempts the parties to advance extreme proposals and to blame the mediator for insufficient effort if they are rejected or to use him as an excuse for their failure to put forward what they know cannot be achieved.
Since I chose to remain in charge of State Department business even while traveling, an enormous volume of cable traffic poured in, handled by the aircraft’s skilled communications personnel, annotated by my own staff, digested by me and my colleagues, and sent out again over the same system. This small, rather exposed area was in effect the heart of the entire enterprise. Without it shuttle diplomacy would have been impossible.
They prepared briefing papers for the next stop — usually a memorandum comparing the positions of the 2 sides, our estimate of their flexibilities, and a checklist of what remained to be accomplished.
Some of this may have sprung from a wish to give purpose to the physical discomfort of the shuttle, or from the reality that our success would give a reporter more exposure and prestige. Whether these hard-bitten professionals would admit or not, I also believe that among their reasons was a hope that in the midst of Watergate their country could accomplish something of which they could be proud.
In this manner he performed the one function that a leader cannot delegate: He took on his shoulders the full responsibility.
Products of a freewheeling democracy, they had as yet no framework for grasping the sweeping gestures possible in a more authoritarian system, which were characteristic of Sadat and which were to startle them again and again. Sadat generally did not haggle; like Zhou Enlai, with whom he otherwise had little in common, he started with his real position and rarely moved from it.
As Dinitz had predicted, our Israeli opposite numbers submitted us to a merciless cross-examination on every technical aspect of the problem.
I told Sadat that in my view this was Israel’s real — not merely a bargaining — position.
The utility of a mediator is that if trusted by both sides he can soften the edges of controversy and provide a mechanism for adjustment on issues of prestige.
I knew Israel would accept this, but I held the concession back on this round to trade for it for the surface-to-air missile limitation, with respect to which I knew Israel would be adamant.
He had thought about my frequent references to Israel’s insecurity, he said. As a sign of his goodwill I could inform Golda Meir that he would not exercise his right to keep 30 tanks across the Canal. The principle that Egypt had the right to maintain its major weapons on its own soil was fundamental; now that it had been established, he would not use it. Then, dramatically, he asked me to take a personal message to Golda. He dictated it on the spot; it was the first direct message in 26 years from an Egyptian head of government to his counterpart in Israel. It stated:
You must take my word seriously. When I made my initiative in 1971, I meant it. When I threatened war, I meant it. When I talk of peace now, I mean it.
We never have had contact before. We now have the services of Dr. Kissinger. Let us use them and talk to each other through him.
Was Sadat pursuing a devious tactic to accomplish traditional aims, or an historic turn? I thought the latter, but no one could be sure and the Egyptian President could not bind his successors.
The seemingly inexorable rise in prosperity was abruptly reversed. Simultaneously, inflation ran like a forest fire through the industrialized countries and recession left millions unemployed. The poorer countries without oil plunged into deeper depression and unredeemable debt, while the oil producers suddenly had more money than they could possibly spend. Their vast, mobile cash balances played havoc with currencies as they moved among capitals for reasons economic or political. Transcending even the economic revolution was the emergence of oil as a weapon of political blackmail.
Lulled by the illusion of permanence, the soon-to-be victims treated as fleeting abberrations warnings that posterity now sees as self-evident. And therefore dikes that could have been strengthened to hold back the flood were left unattended until the suddenly burst and the torrents engulfed those who had never suspected danger.
In this way, the US had a decisive influence over the world price of oil. If the price of foreign oil went up beyond what we thought desirable, we could increase our production, restrict our imports, and force our foreign suppliers onto world markets. Of, if we really wanted to make a point, produce more American oil and sell it abroad. The Mideast oil producers therefore had an incentive to keep prices low. The OPEC, formed in 1960, was not perceived as a serious cartel.
The working level of our government, especially in the State Department, operated on the romantic view that Third World radicalism was really frustrated Western liberalism. Third World leaders, they believed, had become extremist because the West had backed conservative regimes, because we did not understand their reformist aspirations, because their societies were backward and eager for change — for every reason, in fact, other than the most likely: ideological commitment to the implacable anti-Western doctrines they were espousing.
And 25% of Europe’s energy requirements was supplied by Libya. The result was that within 4 months of Qaddafi’s coming to power, France had negotiated the sale of 100 advanced jet aircraft to Libya.
As is often the case, decisions that seemed prudent and restrained when they were made have come to appear reckless to posterity. In the cause of short-term economic prudence the West accepted Qaddafi’s revolution — and this, as it turned out, was bound to affect also the West’s political relations with the conservative oil producers. Libya taught these rulers a fateful lesson: The industrial democracies would not protect friendly governments so long as their radical, avowedly hostile successors did not challenge the democracies’ access to oil. Hence, there was no point in seeking to buy Western goodwill by restraint on oil prices or anything else.
Radical Libya then triggered a process by which the host governments gradually discovered, and began to exercise, their dominant power over the world oil market. There were 3 discernible stages in the revolution about to unfold: first, a creeping increase in prices; then the host goverments’ gradual, de facto takeover of ownership and operational control from the oil companies; and finally the resulting ability of the producer governments to link the sale of oil to political conditions, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Libya picked on the most vulnerable link in the chain, the independent company Occidental Petroleum, and imposed production cutbacks on it more severe than those on its competitors.
As soon as they prevailed, Libya would then invoke the loss of its premium to make new demands, triggering additional requests in the Persian Gulf, starting the cycle all over again. No true stopping point emerged; the international petroleum market structure of a generation was collapsing.
It was a clear warning that something was wrong but it was not so perceived. The price increases, while substantial in percentage terms, started from a very low base.
In effect, the oil producers were beginning to take full control of their oil. Too late the companies bestirred themselves. In January 1971 they agreed to what they had failed to do 4 months earlier: to bargain collectively and to resist selective blackmail by sharing oil. Ironically, to prevent leapfrogging tactics they also demanded that OPEC negotiate as a unit. In time OPEC accepted the proposal with a vengeance, forging an efficient cartel willing to reduce its production contrary to the historical practice of almost all its members.
At last the US government began to take an interest. It was urged on by the oil companies, which followed their time-honored pattern of asking for assistance on ly at the last moment, and then only ad hoc, not for a long-term strategy — which they feared would lead to government control. ***
Unfortunately, our government would have been hard put to define what it meant by “moderation.” The tactical need to meet the deadlines imposed by OPEC for new negotiations obscured the necessity for a more fundamental review.
Though I leaned to the arguments for a more active governmental role, I concluded that I was in no position to make a recommendation. Therefore I took the official’s time-honored way out: I ordered a study of the national security implications of the problem.
However, all of the activity so far is completely tactical and reactive. I have therefore called for a quick study of our basic objectives in the situation, and an analysis of what role we should be playing in trying to help solve it.
They argued (quite correctly) that the real price of oil had fallen over a 5-year period — that is, discounting for inflation — while the cost of goods they imported had risen.
I was more concerned about the principle of takeover than the level of compensation. What the Saudis sought ran the risk of turning American companies into instruments of foreign countries while escalating every disagreement into a government-to-government confrontation.
The one intercession of the US government had improved the immediate financial return to the companies. But the companies — in my opinion shortsightedly, at least from the national point of view — had yielded on what turned out to be the key issue. With the producer countries owning 51% of the equity, the companies would become instruments of nations whose interests did not necessarily parallel our own.
So long as supplies were ample and costs relatively low, the companies had effectively performed their role of exploration, technological development, and marketing, fueling generations of global economic growth. But nothing in the organization or philosophy of the companies equipped them to address the issues raised by ever more expensive oil, whose price and production would be controlled by a cartel of governments. The companies dreaded confrontation with the producers because they believed — from their perspective, quite accurately — that they would lose in goodwill what they might gain in any showdown. They had specialized in getting along with the countries in the area; they were emotionally unprepared for a siege. The day was rapidly approaching when the supply and price of oil would be determined by the unilateral decisions of producer governments, and no longer needed to be negotiated with the companies.
Free-market theology had kept the consumer governments, and especially the US, out of negotiations as the companies were rendered defenseless. Political demands had become mingled with economics.
The structure of the oil market was so little understood that the embargo became the principal focus of concern. Lifting it turned almost into an obsession for the next 5 months, partly because Nixon thought that it lent itself to a spectacular that would overcome Watergate.
The hesitant reaction of the consuming nations compounded their difficulties. Their reluctance to cooperate with one another perpetuated their vulnerability, virtually guaranteeing a permanent crisis.
On one level, it was a vainglorious pronouncement, since all indicators showed that our dependence was likely to increase, not diminish, by 1980. On the other hand, while Nixon underestimated the time required for the task, he pointed the country in the right direction. In international affairs, when faced with a problem, Nixon sought the means with which to root it out, not to palliate it. America would have to be less profligate in its use of energy and more inventive and determined in developing alternative resources. If we could reduce our dependence on imported oil, the bargaining position of all consumers would improve dramatically.
It took many months for this strategy to take effect, and it could not be achieved without cost, especially to allied relations. Once the process of dissociation — which we had not started — was under way, a vicious circle resulted. For proud nations that until recently had dominated the Middle East, it was not a little humiliating to be shown to be irrelevant to Mideast peace diplomacy. They in turn lost no opportunity to exacerbate the problem. By December 1973, we were being told that some of our allies were asking for preferential treatment from the Arabs for having disavowed our policy. The US, so the alleged argument ran, must not be rewarded even should our diplomacy make progress. The embargo against us should be kept in force for several months or else the European and Japanese dissociation from our policy would be seen to have been pointless.
And if we permitted the producers to erect one set of hurdles after another, there would be no end to the race. Each success would produce only a demand for yet another diplomatic exertion; the oil pressures would become permanent.
But in his country at that time, barred by birth from the political leadership reserved for princes and by talent from an ordinary existence, he emerged in a position as essential as it was peripheral to the exercise of real political power within the Kingdom. He became the technician par excellence, nearly indispensable for the industry central to his country’s and ultimately the world’s economy. Nothing was possible without him; but the ultimate decisions were made by others, on the basis of calculations to which his contribution was technical and in response to pressures he had no possibility of affecting (and perhaps evaluated in his own way).
There was thus an inevitable gap between Yamani’s influence in the world at large and inside Saudi Arabia. Globally, Yamani was celebrated, often feared. He appeared as the authentic voice of the Kingdom, occasionally even of the Arab world. But inside Saudi Arabia his position was much more ambiguous. Not a member of the royal family or of aristocratic rank, he had made his way in a traditional society by his uncommon ability. But he was far from the inner circle. He attended few of my meetings with the leading princes. When he did participate, he was seated in protocol order among the lesser officials in the room, and he never spoke. I have often wondered whether Yamani’s occasionally strident pronouncements did not reflect his insecurity in his own political hierarchy and his need to establish himself with key groups around the Arab world rather than the considered opinions of the Kingdom.
Feudal societies operate by traditional, reciprocal, largely personal obligations. The modern state seeks predictability through legal or bureaucratic norms. A feudal state stresses status; a modern state emphasizes achievement. Yamani represented a meritocracy whose influence would grow as fast as the oil income he was generating. Economic and social development challenges the traditional modes and sources of power; modernization trains thousands in foreign countries, inculcating values not easy to reconcile with those of an inward-looking, authoritarian state based on Bedouin loyalties. One Yamani was an invaluable asset. But what would happen when there are ten thousand? How would new status for such group be reconciled with the claims of a hereditary ruling class? How would past and future successfully meld?
The immediate aftermath of the embargo found Saudi Arabia in a most uncomfortable position. It prized its friendship with the US for emotional and practical reasons. It feared the tide of radicalism. Yet Arab solidarity corresponded to its moral convictions and to the security needs of the Kingdom. It could not afford isolation in the Arab world; it dreaded being an outcast, stigmatized as reactionary or accused of insufficient dedication to the Arab cause. The oil weapon had sharpened its dilemmas.
We had great sympathy for the difficulties of our friends in Saudi Arabia. But once we committed ourselves to impose political terms specified by others in return for oil, we would be on a slippery slope. Sooner or late we would have to draw a line. It was better for us to resist before matters got out of hand.
To convince one’s opposite number of one’s determination in a test of nerves, it is sometimes useful to adopt a public position from which retreat would involve a loss of prestige.
The relatively benign domestic politics of the industrial democracies had been nurtured by 2 decades of nearly uninterrupted growth. Welfare programs had been financed from a steadily increasing GNP. It was possible to benefit one group without depriving another. The happy idea developed that all social groups would be able to gain simultaneously and indefinitely.
Even now, the domestic political implications are still working themselves out. The political dilemma of democracy is that the time span needed for solutions to contemporary economic problems is far longer than the electoral cycle by which leaders’ performance is judged at the polls. How many politicians dare to risk their offices in proclaiming that the good times are over? Who is willing to tell his constituents that a wise policy will bring with it a decline in the standard of living, at least for a while? And what happens in the inevitable period of disillusion when young men and women leave school and college to find their skills rejected and join the millions thrown out of work since the oil crisis? The way is open for demagoguery, political polarization, and violence.
As for the developing nations, if it was ever true that economic aid was necessary to prevent the division of our planet into the few who were rich and the many who were poor, if the maintenance of peace required us to try to close the gap, then the oil price rise worked marvelously to defeat these objectives.
OPEC had developed to a fine art the shifting of responsibility from one member to the other. If one listened to our interlocutor, one was left wondering how prices could ever rise in the face of so much reluctance.
The Shah paid a high price for the vanity of a moment in the limelight.
We reacted to these decisions with less than the controlled rationality that textbooks ascribe to statesmen. We felt misled by weeks of exchanges with various Arab leaders.
In these circumstances, the continuation of the embargo was an inconvenience and an insult; it did not hurt us significantly. But it did not appear that way at the moment. The symbolism of continued discrimination against the country that was carrying the burden of the peace effort was hard to take.
But the event that was the subject of all this jockeying did not arise as rapidly as we had expected. Faisal had effectively given a veto to states with unsatisfied claims who had no interest in helping the US.
We were determined not to play this game any longer. Our credibility was at risk. We insisted on the promises that had been made. And we conveyed this decision in no uncertain terms.
Nixon sent a sharp letter to Faisal asserting in effect that we had been misled. We would not accept the imposition of new conditions; we would not proceed with a Syrian disengagement if the embargo remained in effect. We even hinted that we might publish the earlier Saudi promises. This provoked Saqqaf’s cool (and not incorrect) response that he would then make it known that our request had as often been geared to Nixon’s domestic necessities as to the American national interest — underlining the humiliating position in which Watergate had placed us.
Sadat proposed to move the mini-summit to Algiers. It was a shrewd move. Boumedienne, in the midst of reestablishing relations with the US, was less likely to insist on maintaining the boycott in his own capital than anywhere else.
The only long-term solution is a massive effort to provide producers an incentive to increase their supply, to encourage consumers to use existing supplies more rationally, and to develop alternative energy sources.
But forthcoming noises from governments stopped well short of commitment to action. The reason was that most of them believed in energy cooperation only in a limited tactical sense: to enlist American technology to develop alternative sources of energy and in an emergency to share in our increasingly stretched supplies. But they had no stomach for a concerted diplomacy, believing that the attempt to join forces would “provoke” the producers into retaliation. Nothing could have better illustrated the demoralization — verging on abdication — of the democracies. A producers’ cartel was deemed acceptable; a consumers’ grouping was considered too risky. Producers with a combined population of some 50M in underdeveloped economies were in effect blackmailing advanced industrial societies with a combined population of 1B, dictating not only the terms of trade but the framework of political relations.
But a party to a negotiation that is unable to risk its failure — the mildest form of confrontation — is reduced to choosing among varieties of appeasement. Fundamentally, most of our allies were convinced that their oil supplies were better assured by adaptation to Arab political demands than by forming a united front to resist pressures.
Philosophy was reinforced by expediency. France was in the forefront of those of our allies who were exploiting the embargo to line up bilateral deals with the producers — mostly arms for oil. And it was France that acted as spearhead of the so-called European-Arab dialogue, the European alternative to our Middle East diplomacy, whose rationale — never made explicit — could only be dissociation from the US.
Our allies did not hesitate to use NATO consultative procedures to inform themselves on American policies; at the same time they avoided discussing Community decisions with us until they were irrevocable, by shunting them off into tortuous new procedures requiring the prior approval of all allies. So long as this process was confined to Atlantic relations it was irritating, but its damage was limited to frustrating new departures. In the cauldron of the Middle East, however, the European initiative as a foreign ministers’ conference threatened to sabotage our carefully elaborated strategy.
Japan and Britain and Germany replied in a week accepting Nixon’s invitation. They indicated great reluctance to create a permanent consumer grouping, which they saw as “provocative” — though the oil producers had never consulted the consumers when forming OPEC and prided themselves on acting as a unit. Each leader made clear that he was looking for an early way to bring the producers into the work of the consumer conference — which was almost a contradiction in terms. All kinds of subterfuges were devised to avoid the only solution that would make any sense: a permanent organization of consumer solidarity.
But a group of ambassadors was a soporific, not a remedy. They would need instructions from meeting to meeting; they would lack a staff for serious work. After a few sessions such an institution would fall into desuetude.
The important countries in the area are Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both of them are completely dependent on American political support. Why shouldn’t Europe want to use this American political power in the energy field? What we have here is an opportunity for a moral demonstration of what the West can do when it wants to get together and that it cannot be pushed around. We have to have a perception that is is a common problem and that we must work for common solutions.
He wanted to use energy — as he had the Year of Europe — to create an identity for Europe, under French leadership, in opposition to the US. The French described our initiative as an American attempt to exploit the energy crisis to increase our influence in the Atlantic area and they fought it doggedly on those grounds.
The cooperative spirit did, to be sure, stop considerably short of what we thought was needed. Every minister I consulted was still terrified of possible confrontation with the producers. From the tone of their remarks, one would never have known that the producers had just quadrupled oil prices, slashed production, and imposed a selective embargo as a political weapon. If that was not a confrontation forced upon us, we would need a new vocabulary.
The West was beginning to act like the old Greek city-states; by exalting self-will it dissipated its inspiration. The conference about to start would become a symbol of our decline or, with luck, a turning point.
This degree of support for the American position was enough to set off the fireworks. One of the unwritten rules of diplomacy is to separate personal relations from official disagreements. The diplomat is presumed to reflect the interests of his country, not personal predilections. He assumed to quarrel not out of preference but for reason of state. This pretense is, of course, far too absolute. In reality, the subjective element cannot be so easily eliminated; still, the myth is useful. It maintains civility even in the midst of controversy. It permits compromise, even yielding, without involving the ego and thus smooths the way to a solution. Jobert was incapable of this distinction. He could be charming and insinuating; his mordant wit was as entertaining as it was perceptive. But once engaged — especially before an audience — Jobert did not seem able to maintain self-control.
Nixon said that he agreed. But he also liked to live dangerously. Even in his salad days, he had amused himself by showing how close he could come to transgressing against the “points to avoid” that he himself had insisted be part of the briefing memoranda for each meeting. Time and again he had skirted so close tot he precipice I had defined as perilous that it was hard to tell whether the briefing memorandum served as a warning or as a challenge.
On that occasion I was still an obscure member of the WH staff and, having just left academic life, slightly overwhelmed by the propinquity to power and not at all sure how I would fare. “You will be a great success,” she had said then. “You have that twinkle in the eye.”
She had seen too much of human foibles and of Washington skulduggery to be impressed by the self-important. He had experienced the perishability of fame; she knew the meaning of character. At the height of my power she had told me once that the day would inevitably come when I left office and then my test would be how I reacted to my successors — not publicly but in the recesses of my soul. Would I have compassion for their discomfitures or secretly relish them? She confessed that she and her father had failed that test miserably during the Administration of President Taft.
But as I thought of current leaders, I saw none who would age as gracefully as Alice Longworth. Lacking the inward assurance, they would be afraid to risk themselves. How many world leaders would be impressive separate from the power they exercised? How many could stand failure or loss of office without losing confidence in themselves? And if they were afraid to fail, how could they succeed? How would they dare to transcend the conventional — the requirement for truly dealing with revolutionary events — when they were emotionally anchored in it?
A century earlier, that would have been the end of it. But in our time there is a referee for international events awarding the palm of victory: The media follow their own necessities and they pronounce on the significance of the outcome. The diplomat is considered biased; the journalists act as judge and jury and they decide what the public will hear or read. By nature they are more finely attuned to the drama of the moment than to the trends of the future, which they discount with a skeptical, even cynical, eye. No international gathering is really over, in other words, until it has been explained in the media. Therefore each of the chief protagonists of the Washington conference was compelled to mount the stage, act out his part in the drama, and promote his own perceptions, seeking to influence future events by shaping the interpretation of current ones.
Brandt was only 2 months away from being forced out of office; he had the melancholy, faraway look I had come to know so well from Nixon that seemed to augur the imminent loss of something cherished. There were pauses in the conversation, but no tension.
The shock of being presented publicly and without warning with a fait accompli turned the meeting with Scheely chilly despite the fact that less than 24 hours earlier we had shared a most pleasant evening. Scheel now outlined a procedure, no aspect of which had ever been discussed with us. It was the French plan for the Euro-Arab dialogue. Scheel could have no doubt that we would be far from pleased. He tried to assuage us by promising a new draft of the declaration of the EC within 2 weeks, as if the rhetorical affirmation of Atlantic unity was a special to us for which we would accept unilateral actions belying that unity.
But I had had enough of the humiliation of having allies dangle an invitation to our President before us for bargaining purposes.
Yet strangle enough — and as much as both Syrians and Israelis will resent me for saying this — they were more similar in attitude and behavior than either was to Egypt, for example. The Egyptian leadership group is suave, jaded, cosmopolitan. Their Syrian counterparts are prickly, proud, quick to take offense. Egypt is accustomed to leadership in the Middle East; there is a certain majesty in its conduct and in its self-assurance. Syria fights for recognition of its merit; it consumes energy in warding off condescension. Israel shares many of Syria’s qualities.
The Egyptian President was sure of his authority; he did not need to build a consensus for individual acts, or if he did, he managed masterfully to obscure the process by which he achieved it. Sadat in one form or another had been negotiating since 1971; Asad was entering the negotiating process for the first time. For so controversial a move as a negotiation with Israel, he had to build a consensus daily, maybe even hourly. Even had he been so disposed, he could not dare the great gestures of Sadat, who sacrificed tactical benefit for long-term gain. The Syrian President needed to win every point if he wished to retain his authority; he could yield only to overwhelming force majeure. The Israeli leaders, for wholly different reasons, were in the same position.
Asad had given me his ideas for disengagement. They were not modest. He showed me his inexperience in negotiation by suggesting 3 options for Israeli withdrawal — guaranteeing that only the one most favorable to Israel would receive any consideration. But not much consideration. Even his minimum option required that Israel abandon all Syrian territory captured in the 1973 war as well as half o the Golan taken in 1967, in return for a mere ceasefire and separation of forces. But the hard line was less significant than the fact that Syria was willing to negotiate at all. That marked a sea change in Syria’s attitude.
In other words, Nixon favored superpower cooperation in the Middle East except where it did not serve his purpose. Where and how to work jointly, mused Nixon, was a tactical problem to be solved by Gromyko and me — thus neatly getting himself out of the line of fire.
In these circumstances, the best that could be accomplished by US-Soviet diplomacy was to soften the impact of the clashing Mideast approaches by maintaining enough of a Soviet stake in other areas of our relationship. And we succeeded. The Soviets did not dare risk a deterioration in other dimensions of US-Soviet relations. In that sense, then, it was detente that enabled the US to bring about a diplomatic revolution in the Middle East. We would not have had such a margin for unopposed action in a period of open, across-the-board confrontation with the Soviet Union.
It was explained that his hard-line response was a reaction to Israeli intransigence. And to be sure, on February 9, Golda had let herself be tempted into making some highly contentious and unwise statements to a group of Israeli settlers on the Golan Heights.
Asad was said to be facing major opposition within the Syrian government even for discussing disengagement; he would have to prove his manhood if he was to continue the process. In other words, a show of ferocity was needed to make possible a conciliatory position. Such is the Middle East.
When I bade him goodbye, he insisted on seeing me not only to the door of his suite but to the front door of the hotel. It was partly the legendary Egyptian politeness. At the same time the unworthy thought struck me that it was a neat way of keeping me from having a separate meeting with Saqqaf.
Uncharacteristically, I said nothing. My mind reeling from unconditional conditions and unlinked linkages, I was reflecting about my forthcoming journey to the Middle East. It would be a strange trip. I was being sent to extract from Syria a list of prisoners already in my possession and from Israel a negotiating proposal certain to be unacceptable. All the key actors knew this. But in the Middle East, poetry and reality merge; all agreed that only by acting out the script could the embargo be lifted and the war on the Golan Heights be ended. And as in many Middle East fairy tales, the charade became reality when during the course of my journey it transpired that the trip had been essential after all; the script suddenly changed. My task became less to make progress on negotiations than to make stalemate psychologically supportable.
I staggered to bed in the guest house at 4am for a few hours’ sleep, only to fall victim to what I considered in my exhausted state an example of Syrian psychological warfare. The state guest house was right next to a mosque. Starting at 4:30am, the muezzin began to call the faithful to prayer, aided by an electronic amplifier that seemed to be placed right next to my bedroom window.
And the vivid memory of centuries of persecution and attempted extermination is etched so deeply into the individual consciousness that the loss of even one person evokes premonitions of catastrophe. Like many basically sentimental peoples, Israelis sometimes cultivate a surface abrasiveness; it is because they dare not give vent to what they feel lest they be thought weak or prove unable to contain their emotions.
Part of it was tough negotiating tactics. If you start out by rejecting the very concept underlying the negotiation, you can avoid pressure on substance; any small movement after that (including the very presentation of a plan) is endowed with symbolic significance for which a price can be exacted. But part of it was a reflection of the primeval Israeli hatred and fear and suspicion of all things Syrian — an exact mirror image of what I had found on the other side.
Whether by design or instinct, the practical result was that we spent a great deal of time not on Israel’s plan for disengagement, for which I had come, but on why there should be negotiations at all — an exercise I had thought settled weeks earlier.
What Israeli gets out of the Syrian negotiation is to have a radical Arab state sign a document with Israel. It is to remove the pressures on Egypt, which really only Syria can generate. It gives the moderate Arabs an opportunity to legitimize their course. And from then on every argument with the Syrians will not be a question of principle but a question of tactics. And finally, with Syria having been drawn into this negotiation, the frantic Soviet effort to get itself involved will be thwarted for at least — since we are living here in a crisis, any 6 month period I consider an asset.
Beyond these tactical motives, Sadat and I shared similar philosophies about the conduct of diplomacy. We were both sure that passivity is the worst posture. Inevitably, other parties step in to define the terms of reference and one’s energies are absorbed in responding to initiatives one has not designed. Gradually one loses the ability to shape events. A sense of direction is lost; one comes to define success as calamity avoided. Much better to talk from one’s own agenda, or failing this, to prevail with a procedure that husbands the maximum degree of control.
In foreign affairs one usually must choose between posture and policy; the stronger one’s real position, the less one need rub in the other side’s discomfiture. It is rarely wise to inflame a setback with an insult. An important aspect of the art of diplomacy consists of doing what is necessary without producing extraneous motives for retaliation, leaving open the option of later cooperation on other issues.
We graduated from there to a discussion of Franklin Roosevelt’s foreign policy; I explained my view that Roosevelt was a great leader whose grasp of geopolitical realities was less sure than his feel for the idealistic values of America. FDR had understood, I said, that one of his problems was to conduct the war so as to have the best possible bargaining position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union afterward. Asad wanted to know whether I was rectifying that error in the conduct of our Mideast diplomacy. I was evasive.
Gromyko had been in the Syrian capital for nearly 24 hour before Asad had received him. The longest I had had to wait was a few hours an then only because Asad was at a State dinner. In foreign policy, small gestures often define important priorities.
For if the Soviet Union had been willing to contribute to a solution, or if it had been less concerned with appearances, it would have understood that our current preeminence was tactical. But the Soviet’s insecurity is such that they could not bear even the appearance of declining influence, and in railing against the inevitable weakened their position beyond necessity.
Omar Saqqaf, who suspected that I probably never grasped Saudi complexities, sought on the way to the airport to put my mind totally at ease. He said that it was clear from the conversation that the King would lift the embargo. Faisal had gone to great lengths to avoid saying anything of the sort. “That was,” said Saqqaf wearily in the face of such invincible dullness, “so that you would not be able to give it away in talking to the press at the airport; we cannot have the decision announced in Saudi Arabia.”
But the responsibility of leaders is not simply to affirm an objective. It is above all to endow it with a meaning compatible with the values of their society. If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, if the yearning for peace is not allied with a sense of justice, it can become an abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless. To build peace on reciprocal restraint; to suffuse our concept of order with our country’s commitment to freedom; to strive for peace without abdication and for order without unnecessary confrontation — therein resides the ultimate test of American statesmanship.
And against my original expectations, of all aspects of foreign policy Watergate affected crisis management the least. Until the day he left office, Nixon retained an international reputation for being willing to stake American power and prestige swiftly and ruthlessly. Adversaries did not dare to test, under the pressure of short crisis deadlines, to what extent his authority had been impaired.
We were like an acrobat on a tightrope who, having made it to the middle, see his safety net taken away and new weights added to his balancing pole; onlookers imagine that since he got this far the task cannot have been so difficult and can be made more complex without risks, tempting them to shout from below that there were better ways to get there in the first place.
The American perception of international affairs has traditionally been Manichean: Relations among states are either peaceful or warlike — there is no comfortable position between. Period of peace call for goodwill, negotiation, arbitration, or any other method that tends to equate relations among nations with human relations. In war the attitude must be one of unremitting hostility. Conflict is perceived as “unnatural”; it is caused by evil men or motives and can thus be ended only by the extirpation of the offenders.
Americans traditionally have seen foreign policy less as a seamless web than as a series of episodic events or discrete self-contained problems each of which could be dealt with by the application of common sense and the commitment of resources.
The Soviet Union is a tyranny and an ideological adversary, thus fulfilling our traditional image of irreconcilable conflict between good and evil. But Soviet ideological hostility translates itself into geopolitical rivalry in the manner of a traditional great power, seeking gains any one of which might be marginal but whose accumulation will upset the global equilibrium.
No society has ever faced such a manifold task; few could have been less prepared for it. The only kind of threat to the equilibrium for which history and experience had prepared us — an all-out military assault on the Hitlerian model — was the least likely contingency in an age of proxy conflicts, guerrilla subversion, political and ideological warfare. The modern challenges were ambiguous in terms of our expectations, were resisted hesitantly if at all, and caused profound division within our society. And the proposition that to some extent we had to collaborate with our adversary while resisting him found a constituency only with great difficulty; the emotional bias was with the simpler verities of an earlier age. Liberals objected to the premise of irreconcilable conflict and to the necessities of defense; conservatives would not accept that an adversary relation in the nuclear age could contain element of cooperation. Both rebelled against the concept of permanent exertion to maintain the global balance.
We had learned that in a democracy, the prerequisite for effective prolonged struggle is the continued demonstration of the willingness to end it. And we were convinced, finally, that the corrosive effect of a long period of peace on the cohesion of the Soviet system would be much greater than on ours.
Both liberals and conservatives felt safe in their attack on our East-West policy partly because of its apparent successes. As time went on and there appeared to be no immediate danger on the Soviet front, it seemed safe to challenge our policy — especially over human rights, which had the advantage of charging Nixon with moral insensitivity without any military or demonstrable political risks.
We began to realize that the attack was fundamental. Jackson sought to destroy our policy, not to ameliorate it. Stolid, thoughtful, stubborn, as could be expected from the combination of Scandinavian origin and Lutheran theology, Jackson mastered problems not with flashy rhetoric or brilliant maneuvers but with relentless application and undeflectable persistence. He had carefully studied Soviet strategy and tactics; he was convinced that their goal was to undermine the free world, that any agreement was to the Soviets only a tactical maneuver to bring about our downfall more surely. This was a true enough reading of Soviet intentions. Where we differed was in Jackson’s corollary that therefore all negotiation was futile and his implication that the struggle with the Soviets had only a confrontational mode.
In my view, we had to find a policy appropriate to both international circumstances and our domestic condition. Jackson was an absolutist; he saw issues in black and white. We were gradualists, seeking a policy that could be sustained over an historical period. Jackson objected to almost any agreement that afforded some benefits to the Soviet Union. We took it for granted that the Soviets would sign no agreement from which they did not promise themselves some gain; our test was whether we were, on balance, better off with an accord than without. We did not accept the counsel of despair that we were bound to be outmaneuvered; our experience in the Middle East and elsewhere had convinced us of the opposite.
We resisted, on the ground that the Soviet Union should first demonstrate a commitment to restrained international conduct and willingness to help settle concrete issues, including Vietnam and Berlin. That attitude — dubbed “linkage” — was decried as an unworkable relic of the Cold War, as a misguided device would generalize all conflicts and fritter away opportunities for settlement of specific problems. ***
We agreed with Jackson about the desirability of improving the rights of individuals within the Soviet Union as well as emigration procedures; we were working toward these ends by methods our experience had taught us were the only ones that would work.
And this is why the “men on the firing line” were not the best witnesses to design American strategy. Diplomacy may be, in Clausewitz’s terms, the continuation of war by other means, but it has its own appropriate tactics. It acknowledges that in the relations between sovereign states even the noblest ends can generally be achieved only in imperfect stages.
The public could not be expected to understand such intricacies. No Congressman wanted to be recorded as opposed to what was presented as a chance to increase Soviet emigration.
We were not, however, given a bigger stick, either. The rhetoric of confrontation did not lead to a willingness to support an increased defense effort. Liberals might favor an ideological showdown over human rights; they saw no connection between that and increased military preparedness. Our critics were thus tempting crises that at the same time they were denying us the means of managing.
No weapons system recommended by the Joint Chiefs and the Defense Department was ever disapproved in the WH. We sought, in fact, to increase our military options, to build a credible force to meet foreseeable levels of aggression.
The B-70 bomber, the ABM, the B-I, MX, the Trident II missile have all been canceled or delayed for years — sometimes for a decade — by constant reexamination. The principal target is whatever weapon is under consideration at the moment.
Generally, only one type of weapon was pursued lest the Congress select from among various projects those which in the Pentagon’s view least advanced its purposes.
Rhetorical toughness allied with neither strategic concept nor public support creates not a policy but an anomaly; that is where our domestic debate was driving us.
Experience has shown that the Soviet bureaucracy may be structurally incapable of originating a creative SALT position. If Dobrynin was to believed, each Soviet department was confined to issues in its jurisdiction. Thus the Foreign Ministry was not entitled to a view of strategic programs, which were within the competence of the Defense Ministry. Soviet proposals tend to be formalistic and outrageously one-sided. I know no instance in which a breakthrough did not result from an American initiative.
The worst posture was to be dragged kicking and screaming into a negotiation by outside pressures; a statesman should always seek to dominate what he cannot avoid.
How such a bargain was to be consummated was left to the negotiator. Since ultimately this was assumed to be me, no agency ran a great risk in putting forward a one-sided proposal. If I failed to achieve it, it could be ascribed to lack of negotiating skill or lack of firmness. It was the bureaucracy’s revenge for my freewheeling diplomacy in Nixon’s first term.
Anyone appointed to a senior position should engrave into his consciousness these fundamental principles of Washington public relations: One, never predict a result you are not 100% certain of achieving. And two, even then you are better off understating the probable outcome. The media never let you forget a failed forecast. They deal in deadlines and certitudes; they have little scope for nuances or probabilities. If the policymaker fails to call attention to imponderables, the media will rarely discover them on their own; even if he mentions them, they may be slighted because reporting lends itself better to simplifications than to qualifications. In the best of circumstances the promise of an achievement can never live up to its reality; the prediction will always be challenged when its is made and the achievement will be taken for granted afterward precisely because it has been foreshadowed.
All the SALT negotiations and, indeed, all the disarmament negotiations have gone through 3 phases. The is an initial phase of an exchange of technical information which usually takes place during a stalemate in the negotiating process; that is to say, the negotiating positions do not approach each other, but the technical comprehension of the issues is clarified.
Then — this is essentially what has been going on in Geneva up to now — then a point is reached where there has to be a conceptual breakthrough; that is to say, where the 2 sides have to agree on what it is they are trying to accomplish. And after that there has to be the hard negotiation on giving concrete contents to this conceptual breakthrough.
One final rule for aspirants to high office: If you cannot resist the urge to make a prediction, use turgid and impenetrable prose; you will never escape your mistakes if you have a talent for aphorisms.
We avoided a blowup on that issue and indeed obtained some Soviet concessions later int he month. But there are no free lunches in international relations. What we might gain on Jewish emigration was bound to reduce Soviet responsiveness in other areas.
Agreement would depend on many factors: pressures on the Soviet system, trade-offs for gains that the Soviets might seek in other areas, single-mindedness and unity in the American negotiating position, and the Soviets’ assessment of Nixon’s staying power.
Previous experience had shown that if one wanted progress, one had to keep up the pressure on an agreed concept, exploring the many variations and permutations until the Soviets could convince themselves concessions were imperative if they wanted to avoid a blowup.
By now our domestic debate had turned liturgical. Slogans had become the weapons in a philosophical dispute over the nature of the East-West relations. We encountered a dilemma already familiar from our experience in Vietnam: Philosophical opponents were even more afraid of the success of a negotiation than of its failure. Whenever we seemed to make even marginal progress, they surfaced new objections: demands for equal aggregates for which we had no unilateral program; complaints about throwweight totals that we had imposed upon ourselves and never tried to alter; now a denial of the significance of any MIRV limits.
But the world does not stand still so that one may gather one’s wits. While a diplomat is often flatteringly viewed as moving in an orderly manner from one chess puzzle to another, in practice that cocoon of urbane concentration is not often or easily reached.
They want to lump all the issues together in one big negotiation at Geneva, and we believe the whole process will stall unless we can continue to segment the negotiation into politically manageable units. Thus, we must continue to exclude the Soviets, while at the same time publicly minimizing their exclusion and privately reassuring them of our intention to keep them informed at every step of the negotiations. We are prepare to discuss the Syrian-Israeli disengagement in a general way or to discuss in theory the future role of the Geneva Conference, but we do not want to get into such detail as to enable the Soviets to build resistance to specific proposals.
Nixon threaded his way through that maze with admirable ambiguity. Nothing was further from his mind, he told Gromyko, than to exclude Moscow. Indeed, our whole strategy was designed to enable the Soviets to play a significance role — which was nearly as much news to me as to Gromyko. The US was simply dealing with those parts of the problem where it was better placed to produce progress.
Asad, of course, held the key. He could have ended our diplomacy at any time he chose. As a reflection of his crucial position, he was wooed with a lavish reception on his visit to Moscow.
Asad would not request such a meeting nor would he seek to undo my opposition to it; he would not, however, be the fall guy — that honor he reserved for me.
This Jordan could not accept; it was, in fact, an amazing reflection of how little the Israelis understood Arab psychology that the proposal was continually put forward; not even the most moderate Arab head of government could accept administering the West Bank under Israeli occupation.
Given the tenuousness of the Israeli domestic situation as well as our own, I was not sure whether we were pursuing an intellectual theory or an operational plan. I felt like the character in the nightmare who finds himself tied to a railway track and struggles to release as the express train thunders toward him.
It is a rule of politics, which I have never seen broken, that when a political crisis passes a certain point, the offering of sacrifices whets appetites rather than slakes them.
From abstract logic, you are reasonable. The civilians returning is reasonable. But these lines are impossible. We can present it only on the basis that something else can be done.
He reflected as well the dilemma of his country — fiercely proud and at the same time at little insecure, challenging and yet deep down eager for acceptance. Syria was not strong enough to insist on its views, but it was also too unsure of itself (hence the braggadocio) and too distrustful to rely on the help of others. It could not prevail by force but neither was it able to impose itself by moral assurance.
It was like saying Switzerland would be a flat country if someone would move the Alps.
Asad was claiming in the negotiation what he had not achieved on the battlefield. To the Israelis, a Golan disengagement looked suspiciously like a unilateral withdrawal to enable Asad to proclaim that Syria had not fought in vain — not a compelling goal for the victim of surprise attack.
For both Israel and Syria, in short, the negotiation was an anguishing experience. Doubt, frustration, and at times impotent fury assailed both sides. Once during the shuttle when I pointed out the strategic stakes, Golda responded emotionally that she was not prepared to pay for every very important American objectives in Israeli coin.
That radical guerrillas attack a sovereign state from sanctuaries in a neighboring country seems to be regarded as normal by a growing number of members of the world organization; the implication is that the nation being attacked is somehow outside international law. Acts of retaliation by the victim are condemned.
The moderate Arabs argued that an American veto would seriously impair their ability to urge restraint.
As a general proposition, it is best in such a situation to cut through the rhetoric to the hear of the matter. Oddly enough, to do the right thing is the wisest in practical terms. Once one begins to maneuver among conflicting pressures, one in fact encourages extremes as each side digs in to pull the “middle ground” as close to its own preference as possible. And the right course here was to condemn either both sides or neither. Once one obscures the simple verities with manipulation, the fundamental is lost in the expedient. This is especially true in the never-never land of UN voting procedures. There, soothing inanities tempt one to lose track of the reality that progress must have other criteria than amending the outrageous to the preposterous.
I was confident to the point of cockiness. I told Gromyko that I hoped to complete the agreement by May 9 or 10. He did not dispute it.
I said that I would not meet him in an Arab capital: “I won’t do it because I don’t want to leave the impression that he and we are dictating to Arab countries.”
I will speak frankly with you, Mr. President. I give you my first estimate. You’ve met them; you have your own opinion. They are not very far-sighted. They are very bureaucratic, very much affected by their internal maneuvering. They are prepared to pay a very high price for appearances instead of reality. They rely on intimidation but are not willing to run great risks. Therefore, when intimidation doesn’t succeed, they pull back immediately. That is my general evaluation.
On the other hand, in case of a war, they are afraid of a Syrian defeat because that might force them to make decisions they are not prepared to make and bring them into conflicts they do not wish. So their policy is confused. They don’t really want me to succeed, but they are also afraid of my failure.
The Soviets are complicated. We have long-time relations with them going back to 1963. In spite of this, I do agree their positions are always characterized by this aspect of hesitation.
For instance, Sadat was demanding weapons, emphasizing this before the October War. They sent weapons, but not in the quantities which were requested nor of the kinds that were requested. During the war, they were obliged to send Sadat the weapons he was demanding.
But in general, they have a limit which I call the red line. They will not go beyond the red line. It is the line draw between them and the US.
Boumedienne’s analysis reflected the Soviet dilemma in the Middle East. They were willing enough to fish in troubled waters but they were loath to run major risks. They wanted the fruits of success without its exertions or complexities. Their strength was not a master plan but the exploitation of the confusion of their adversary. They wanted no showdown with the US. There was thus a limit to expansionism provided we were determined and an opportunity for coexistence if we were farsighted.
For the next few weeks, Quneitra haunted every waking hour and probably our dreams (or rather nightmares) as well.
The WH released a huge compilation of the transcript of taped Oval Office conversations relating to Watergate. This extraordinary gesture of self-abasement was meant to show that the President had nothing to hide and that the tapes showed no wrongdoing. It was also designed to forestall even more sweeping requests for tapes from the Special Prosecutor or the House Judiciary Committee. It backfired. The blunt, hard-boiled, occasionally tawdry conversations were shocking to the public both for their content and for the crude language.
Israeli schizophrenia was well exemplified by the masseur of in the King David Hotel who gave me a rubdown with a violence that belied his goodwill. He was praying for my success, he allowed, pounding me with apparent affection; all of Israel was counting on me. How many kilometers on the Golan was it safe to give up? I inquired if only to gain a temporary surcease. “Give up? Kilometers? On the Golan? You must be crazy!” shouted my tormentor, returning to his task with a redoubled vigor.
If you strangle me, I don’t know how to go to the people and explain to them that, after all, never mind, there was a war, there was another war, more dead, more wounded, but we have to give up Syrian territory. Why? Because Asad says that it is his territory. I can never accept that there is no difference between the attacker and the attacked; I can’t accept that.
I had deep sympathy for Golda’s views; I understood her premonition. And yet my duty was to conduct the best policy that I could distill from sober analysis.
Later on it was alleged that my negotiating tactic was to tell each party what it wanted to hear. This is a superficial way of looking at diplomacy; it was emphatically not my method. The only safe assumption in a negotiation is that one’s counterpart is of comparable intelligence. It will not be possible to trick him for any extended period; he is bound to discover the truth eventually. If he has been misled, the basis of trust has disappeared forever. And since in foreign policy one meets the same people over and over again, the loss of trust can become an insuperable handicap.
In America right now you have an odd combination of circumstances in that the anti-Nixonites, the Jackson people, the anti-detente people, conservatives, they can all combine. So for about 6 months you may get an illusion of something in America, so long as it doesn’t cost anything or risk anything. I have managed enough crises to know. And the tough boys don’t know how to manage; all they know is how to posture, and they aren’t so tough when it is more than words. This is my nightmare.
But I call your attention to the difference between crisis management and speeches. One can make great speeches and still manage crisis in such a way that step by step you lose everything.
But that was not the point. Dayan’s “personal” idea showed that Israel had crossed the psychological Rubicon; it was at least considering pulling back from the prewar line.
Clearly, Israel’s journey toward the negotiable would be painful and prolonged. And exasperating as Israeli negotiating tactics could be, it was not in our interest to seek subservience. For once it was proved that we could make Israel do anything, Arab demands would escalate. Then we would be blamed for Israel’s failure to meet Arab terms, which would be raised with the ease of their accomplishment. Our strategy depended on being the only country capable of eliciting Israeli concessions, but also on our doing it within a context where this was perceived to be a difficult task.
It was a strange situation. So far, the negotiation had been between me and Israel. For weeks a series of Israeli proposition had been mad e— all unacceptable, as not only Asad but all other Arab had told me. I had conveyed them to Syria, sometimes through other Arabs, not as plans but as “illustrations” of Israeli thinking, as examples of the difficulty of the problem, as models; as anything, in short, other than a formal proposal. Asad had thus not been given an opportunity to reject any specific scheme; his prestige was not yet involved. I thought it best to reserve that for when the 2 positions were closer to each other. By the same token, in Israel I never put forward the original Syrian line as anything but an illustration of Asad’s thinking. Strictly speaking, I was less a mediator on this trip than a consultant on what the traffic would bear, a philosopher of the structure of international order, a political and psychological adviser about a neighbor who was a mysterious as a visitor from outer space.
There was a good chance that Golda was putting me through these paces to prove to her cabinet (perhaps to herself) that the proposal would not fly.
The many delays in the negotiation now deprived his journey of any purpose except perhaps to prove that a sober analysis of national interest is not the sole motivation of the actions of statesmen.
Wounded pride at being at the periphery where Soviet policy had been dominant no doubt played a role. Perhaps Gromyko’s clumsy persistence reflected Soviet internal strains. Some of our Sovietologists believed that within the Politburo Gromyko was being blamed for Soviet setbacks in the Middle East and that he sought to recoup Moscow’s position by frenetic, if pointless, activity.
Asad: The Syrian difficulty is that people here who have been nurtured over 26 years on hatred, can’t be swayed overnight by our changing our courses. We would never take one step except in the interests of our own people. We are all human — we all have our impulsive reaction to things. But in leadership, we have to restrain ourselves and analyze and take steps in our own interest and just peace is in the interest of our people.
It was comforting to have Saudi goodwill and Egyptian support. But as I flew toward Israel, I knew that I should not count too heavily on this under stress. Not that our Arab friends were insincere. But if there was a final rupture, the issue would be dealt with emotionally, not analytically, and the leaders would then perhaps be swept along by sentiments difficult to foresee or to contain. Indeed, a few days later, Asad cautioned me not to take his Arab brethen’s moderate statements too seriously. If instead of disengagement he insisted on reclaiming all his territory, none of them would be able to stand aside.
Bunker had come to diplomacy relatively late in life; he had nothing to prove to himself; he knew that when the passion were spent, the country would be left and that we would be judged not by how well we registered the emotions of the moment but by how steadfastly we upheld the principles of the US.
My presentation proved no more conclusive to the Israelis than to Asad. Precariously poised government tend to have little margin for the long-range. All my arguments were in effect judgments about the future; the domestic penalty for taking my advice was immediate, the benefits speculative.
I have always considered words of consolation in the face of tragedy an insult to the bereaved. Probably the best that one human being can do for another in such circumstances is to convey that one understands the anguish, and that should not require many phrases.
The best chance I have is to say, “Look, this is my judgment of the absolute maximum that can be attained. There is no sense for you to argue any more. There is no sense to haggle. This is what we can do with a bloody discussion in the Israeli Cabinet. More than this, no, and this I can do only if you say, yes.” But then it has to look somewhat significant. And then I can’t have stories all over the US and Israel that I betrayed Israel in my eagerness to get an agreement because I wanted to help the President, that in my eagerness to help the President in the Watergate crisis, I raped Israel.
16 dead Israeli children had achieved what had eluded diplomats in 3 weeks of testy exchanges: that when all was said and done, peace was important because its alternative would be paid for by the suffering of the innocent.
I used to chide him that for most people in most periods of history, peace had been a precarious state and not the millennial disappearance of all tension that so many Israelis envisaged. And yet he also wanted absolute security, which in practice meant reducing Israel’s neighbors to impotence or acquiring as a security belt what they considered their territory.
If emotion could fuel diplomacy, we would have left at 4:30 for the climatic meeting in Damascus certain of a breakthrough. But emotion can supply on ly the endurance to persist through the tedium by which diplomacy inches forward, adjusting nuances along the way.
Commentators described the shuttle as one of the greatest diplomatic achievements in history; there is no record indicating that I resisted the hyperbole. The story made the rounds that I responded to someone at a dinner party who thanked me for saving the world by the smug reply, “You are welcome.”
In fact, my mood was more complex. I was physically exhausted and emotionally drained. I was experiencing the letdown that always followed great exertions. And better than most, I knew how narrow had been the dividing line between success and failure. ***
Nixon handled it as well as its ambiguity permitted. He resorted to his all-purpose approach of implying that he agreed with interlocutor’s goals and that tactical problems should be handled by others. He hinted that he was heading in the direction desired by Sadat if by a slower, perhaps more indirect route; the final destination would emerge from the process.
Normally these generalities, delivered with the air of a man imparting a profound confidence, worked. Either Nixon’s interlocutor would be embarrassed to admit that he did not fully understand what the President was talking about, especially as he was being invited to share a deep mystery, or he would think it inappropriate to press the American Chief Executive. Some statesmen probably understood the game that was being played very well and decided on discretion as the better part of valor. Asad did not fit into any of these categories. His domestic position was too precarious to enable him to be polite and his rapprochement with the US was too recent to serve as a restraint.
I did not think it was achievable without demonstrating to Israel brutally and irrevocably its total dependence on American support. In my view, this would break Israel’s back psychologically and destroy the essence of the state. It would also be against America’s interest — not least of all because a demoralized Israel would be simultaneously more in need of American protection and less receptive to our advice.
Torn between our analysis and objective conditions, I played for time, keeping both the Egyptian and Jordanian options open — finally committing to neither — hoping that circumstance might resolve our perplexities. It is a course I have rarely adopted and usually resist intellectually. Circumstance is neutral; by itself it imprisons more frequently than it helps. A statesman who cannot shape events will soon be engulfed by them; he will be thrown on the defensive, wrestling with tactics instead of advancing his purpose.
What made Jackson’s accusations more effective than they deserved to be was that they concerned highly technical provision of the SALT agreement nearly incomprehensible to the layman. Indeed, the effort to rebut them involved so many complexities that the uninitiated were likely to believe that, where that much explanation was needed, something was bound to be wrong.
The wrath of officials who feel themselves bypassed can be wondrous; their method of combat is to argue that they would have done much better had they been consulted and to find retroactively some flaw that would never have passed their eagle eyes.
The American people in their simplistic way are not on a peace-at-any-price kick, but they want peace. Many of my friends are horrified at our even talking to the Soviet Union. But are we going to leave the world running away with an arms race, or will we get a handle on it?
A statesman’s tools are insight and authority. Nothing can substitute for the intuition of what events are interrelated and basic, and which are surface manifestations, what factors are relevant and which are diversions. That quality of insight Nixon maintained, even honed, until the bitter end. But a statesman’s labor becomes an academic exercise if he cannot convince his opposite numbers that he is able to implement his perception. The stuff of diplomacy is to trade in promises of future performance; that capacity Nixon was losing with alarming rapidity. Inevitably, he became less and less interesting to the Soviets as a negotiating partner.
Nixon and I constantly had to protect our flanks against sniping from those who specialized in showing the weakness of any position by comparing it with some ideal world, but who felt no similar compulsion to analyze what would happen in the absence of an agreement.
It was the classic worst-case scenario of military planning, the nightmare of the strategist in which everything goes wrong simultaneously. It is as unlikely to occur was it is necessary to prepare for it.
Military men cannot be expected to think creatively about restraining the arms race; nor is it desirable that they do so. Their duty is to keep the nation strong; their assignment must be to prevail should all else fail. Military men who become arms controllers are likely to neglect their primary mission. It is the political leadership that must strike the balance on which restraint may be based.
The gentle Soviet treatment of the mortally wounded President was indeed one of the best testimonials to the impact of his policies. The Soviet system has no categories for those who lose political power for whatever reason. It must have been tempting to make Nixon feel his decline. He could have been harassed in the manner at which the Politburo are masters. Instead, he was treated with respect and courtesy, a tribute to his predictability, which Soviet leaders prize more than sentimentality, and to his firmness and sober calculation, to which the Kremlin pays more attention than to professions of goodwill.
Nixon ascribed the successes of the Kennedy family to technique, not conviction, and he spent hours each week ruminating about the ruthless political tactics and PR gimmicks that he thought had made the Kennedys so formidable.
His self-image of coolness in a crisis was distorted by the dogged desperation with which he attacked his problems — born out of the fatalism that in the end, nothing ever worked as it was intended. His courage was all the more remarkable because it was not tied to a faith in ultimate success that distinguished leaders like de Gaulle or Churchill or Roosevelt.
And as he was talking softly and openly for the first time in our acquaintance, it suddenly struck me that the guiding theme of his discourse was how it had all been accidental. There was no moral to the tale except how easily it could have been otherwise. For the lesson I had been drawing from what I heard was that only a man of unusual discipline and resilience could have marched the path from candidate in a hopeless Congressional race to the Presidency of the US.
He achieved all these objectives at the end of 1972 and the beginning of 1973. And he lost them all 2 months later — partly because he had turned a dream into an obsession. On his way to success he had traveled on many roads, but he had found no place to stand, no haven, no solace, no inner peace. He never learned where his home was.
A good test of whether a country is seeking a pretext for military action or a basis for a compromise is whether it can live with its own proposals. If they are inconsistent with its real interests and with its previous stands, one can be pretty certain that a casus belli is being prepared.
For my part, I was convinced that the junta in Athens would not last out the week but I was certain that if we were perceived as the cause of Greece’s debacle we would pay for it for years to come.
A freewheeling Congress destroyed the equilibrium between the parties we had precariously maintained; it legislated a heavy-handed arms embargo against Turkey that destroyed all possibility of American meditation — at a cost from which we have not recovered to this day.
But even in the 3rd week of July it was clear that we were losing control over events. Foreign policy, as I have repeatedly stated, is the mastery of nuance; it requires the ability to relate disparate elements into a pattern. That coherence was rapidly disintegrating.
Very few top leaders have had as many hours to study the issues of nuclear strategy as the experts have had years. They risk becoming the victims of the simplifiers —mindless pacifism on the left and on the right the equally mindless insistence on treating the new technology as conventional.
I said that since the end of Nixon’s presidency was now inevitable, it was in the national interest that it occur as rapidly as possible. Haig and I had s special responsibility to end the agony if that was in our power and to bring about a smooth transition.
Only those who lived through the fervid atmosphere of those months can fully appreciate the debt the nation owes Al Haig. By sheer willpower, dedication, and self-discipline, he held the government together. He more than anyone succeeded in conveying the impression of a functioning WH. He saw to it that decisions emerged from predictable processes.
But the dominant feeling was one of awe — beyond righteousness, transcending the hatreds of a lifetime. For a fleeting moment there was a sense that we might all be in danger, that the public spectacle of the destruction of a President was more than a society should be asked to endure.
VP Ford dissociated himself in a statement saying that:
the public interest is no longer served by repetition of my previously expressed belief that, on the basis of all the evidence known to me and the American people, the President is not guilty of an impeachable offense.
If he resigned under pressure, he might turn out Presidential system into a parliamentary one in which a President could stay in office, only so long as he could win a vote of confidence from the legislative branch.
It was cruel. And it was necessary. For Nixon’s own appointees to turn on him was not the best way to end a Presidency. Yet he had left them no other choice.
Having worked closely with the President for 5.5 years, I owed it to him to say that his best service to the country now would be to resign. It was one thing to show fortitude in the face of political attack as he always had. But, I continued, an impeachment trial would preoccupy him for months, obsess the nation, and paralyze our foreign policy. It was too dangerous for our country and too demeaning to the Presidency. In my view, he should leave in a manner that appeared as an act of his choice. No matter what his decision, I concluded, I would not repeat these views outside the Oval Office.
It was not necessary; the decision had obviously been made. When I entered the Oval Office, I found Nixon alone with his back to the room, gazing at the Rose Garden through the bay windows. I knew the feeling from the time when I was a boy I had left the places where I had been brought up to emigrate to a foreign land: attempting to say goodbye to something familiar and beloved, to absorb it, so to speak, so that one can never be separated from it. In the process, sadly, one loses it imperceptibly because the self-consciousness of the effort destroys what can only be possessed spontaneously.
Nixon does not report it in his memoirs. So perhaps it did not happen and I only felt like doing it. Or perhaps when writing his book Nixon did not want to admit that he needed solace, an emotion that he considered weak but that was in fact the most human reaction possible.
What is the meaning of a political life? How does one assess a trend in international politics? Even in the best of times, not judgment is more tenuous than an assessment of the significance of a statesman’s actions. History is infinite compared to the human lifespan and the human perspective is even more foreshortened. Conventional wisdom often runs counter to the necessities of history, especially in times of great upheaval. The statesman has built truly only if he perceives the trend of events and puts it into the service of his purposes. For that task his scope is not unlimited. If he confines himself to riding with the trend, he will soon become irrelevant; if he goes beyond the capacity of his people, he will suffer shipwreck. If politics is the art of the possible, stature depends on going to the very limits of the possible. Great statesmen set themselves high goals yet assess unemotionally the quality of the material, human and physical, with which they have to work; ordinary leaders are satisfied with removing frictions or embarrassments. Statesmen create; ordinary leaders consume. The ordinary leader is satisfied with ameliorating the environment, not transforming it; a statesman must be a visionary and an educator. Blessed are the people whose leaders can look destiny in the eye without flinching but also without attempting to play God.
He urged me again to stay on and referred to the fact that we had always gotten along well. I pointed out that it was not his job to get along with me; it was my job to get along with him.