JAN 14 1991

International Institute for Global Peace

Sogo Kojimachi Daisan Building, 1-6 Kojimachi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, Japan 102
Administrative Offices (2nd fl) Tel (03)222-0611 Fax (03)222-0610
Research Center (8th fl) Tel (03)222-0711 Fax (03)222-0710

January 8, 1991

Dr. Henry A. Kissinger
Suite 1021
1800 K Street N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20006
U. S. A.

Dear Dr. Kissinger,

First, I would like to wish you a very happy New Year. I hope you have enjoyed a restful holiday season and are doing well. Although I haven't had the pleasure of seeing you in person recently, I was pleased to see you on NHK television the other day in your interview with Mr. Hidaka.

I have been giving a lot of thought recently to what I can do to contribute to establishing a new world order of sustainable peace under such trying realities today as the possible collapse of the Soviet Union and impending war in the Gulf. In this regard, I would like IIGP to present a major symposium this year (the exact form is not yet decided) bringing together one, or a very selected few, world opinion leaders to join me in putting forward our thoughts on this critical subject. Your participation in our March '88 symposium was a major factor in its success and you, as our special advisor, are my first choice to participate in the forum I envision.

Before proceeding with further details about the event, I wanted to check your schedule and availability. We would like to present the event sometime in June. If you already have any plans to be in Japan during this time, or even in May or July, we would be very happy to adopt a schedule that will coincide with yours.

I look forward to hearing from you soon.

NEW MILFORD HOSPITAL FOUNDATION INC.

NEW MILFORD
HOSPITAL

49 East Street
New Milford,
Connecticut
06776

Tel. 203 355 2611
fax. 203 355 5978

JUL 17 1991

July 1991

Dear Friends:

"A Summer Mardi Gras" was certainly the _most_ spectacular auction we've had!! We raised $97,670 and the proceeds will be used to purchase new state-of-the-art equipment for the medical departments of the New Milford Hospital.

It's very obvious that we couldn't have done it without the very generous donations of people such as you. I hope you know how very much we appreciate your generosity! New Milford Hospital is very lucky to have such a tremendous and supportive community - year after year.

I've enclosed a copy of our auction booklet so you can see how your donations were listed and I've also made a copy of an ad which ran in two area newspapers thanking all of you publicly. I hope you are pleased with our efforts to show our appreciation.

Yours sincerely,
Sally A. Talarico
Special Events Coordinator

["ARTÍCULO 186 ROMA - VIA DI TORRE ARGENTINA, 76 RADICALIA PARTIDO RADICAL RADIKALE PARTEI RADIKALE PARTEI RADIKALE PARTEI RAD

Henry Kissinger and American Foreign Policy

JAMES A. NUECHTERLEIN

There once was a time, not so long ago, when Henry Kissinger led a charmed public life. No major government official can for long expect to escape substantial criticism, but Kissinger, during and beyond Richard Nixon's first presidential term, came as close to that state of political blessedness as anyone in recent American memory. Radicals of right and left launched occasional assaults, but virtually everyone in between joined in a Kissingerian celebration. There were, of course, those who could assume only the worst of any man associated with Nixon, but for a great many others — especially in the liberal community — there was a greater need to find someone to whom to attribute the apparent successes of Nixon's foreign policy. Liberal mythology could not easily find room for a Nixon committed to SALT agreements, détente and openings to China. So Kissinger became, in the public view, the better angel of Nixon's nature, the presumably lonely but influential dove in a covey of Nixonian hawks.

Things are no longer at all that way. Kissinger has become a highly controversial figure, and his memoirs (White House Years [Boston: Little, Brown; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1979]; pp. xxiv + 1521; $25.00) have received a decidedly mixed and uneven reception. The reasons for that divided reception almost certainly have less to do with their literary or intellectual qualities than with their point of view. Events since the early 1970s have drawn Kissinger out of his ideological closet, and the memoirs reveal him as the essential conservative he has always been. (The first unambiguous sign of that came in Nixon's own memoirs, which presented a Kissinger with whom no liberal could feel entirely comfortable.) White House Years has drawn fire (and support) because of what it so clearly stands for and what it equally clearly rejects. The argument over the memoirs reflects fundamental divisions over the nature and practice of American foreign relations. Appearing at the time of the crises in Iran and Afghanistan and the general disarray of the Carter Administration's foreign policy, the book has become the occasion for a Great Debate concerning the ways Americans should arrange their relations with the rest of the world.

That is, in a way, unfair to the book itself. Ideology for the moment aside, White House Years is an extraordinary accomplishment. Its size (1521 pages) provides only the roughest measure of its monumental qualities. Kissinger has brought to his labors prodigious amounts of intelligence,

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sophistication and insight. Even those who abominate the book's ideology or find it fatally lacking in moral urgency ought to acknowledge its seriousness of purpose and depth of perception. Critics might find the case the book makes uncongenial, but they cannot reasonably ignore the power and suppleness with which that case is argued.

What gives the book its particular value is the combination of perspectives Kissinger brings to it. American diplomats, even highly skilled ones, have seldom approached their efforts armed (or encumbered) with academic knowledge, and few professors of international relations have had the opportunity (or embarrassment) of attempting to test their elegant models of how the world works against recalcitrant political reality. *White House Years* gives us the intellectual-as-statesman, and there is nothing quite like it in American political letters. It is both a detailed account of the diplomacy of the Nixon presidency to January 1973 and a running analytical and philosophical commentary on the assumptions and conduct of modern American foreign policy.

It is also more surprisingly – a work of considerable literary merit. Kissinger's earlier scholarly writings had a reputation for heaviness of both substance and prose; this, too, is by any standard a weighty book, but it is not a ponderous one. (Though Kissinger was badly served by his editors: he has a weakness for repetition, and better editing would have saved readers a certain amount of tedium. Aphorisms, however witty and penetrating, lapse into banality the third time around.) The writing is always clear and often graceful. One could, for example, cull from *White House Years* a kind of diplomat's commonplace book, a slender, epigrammatic primer on the art of negotiation.

Kissinger also reveals a formidable talent for analysis of character. His sketches of various associates and world leaders are arrestingly shrewd, subtle and deft. His portrayal of Richard Nixon – about whom more below – captures the man as well as anyone ever has; it is at once unsparing and compassionate, and seems precisely right in its perceptions and judgments. Kissinger appears to possess an almost preternatural sense for the springs of motive and behavior; one quickly comes to understand his success as a negotiator. The character sketches are accompanied by a series of fascinating mini-essays on a broad range of topics, from the attractions of Marxist ideology to the tunnel-visioned lunacies of the White House public relations staff. All of this is spiced with frequent, often deadpan, wit (quoting Nixon at the Great Wall of China: "This is a great wall": or on the Italians' style in diplomacy: "one sometimes could not avoid the impression that to discuss international affairs with their Foreign Minister was to risk boring him").

The weapon of wit serves more than literary purposes for Kissinger. He is a master of the self-deprecatory comment, which he uses regularly to preempt and deflect criticism from others. Kissinger suffers neither fools

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gladly nor criticism lightly, and stories abound concerning his ego, his vanity, his tyrannical habits with staffers, his backbiting, his devious intrigues in palace politics. Yet charm covers many sins, and it is difficult to remain exercised about the egocentricity of someone who will disarmingly confess, as Kissinger does here, that "the capacity to admire others is not my most fully developed trait," or who can suggest to reporters that an appropriate form of address to him might be "excellency." The humor may alter nothing, but it does tend to confound criticism. No recent American political figure, with the possible exception of John Kennedy, has used the press for his own purposes more skillfully than Kissinger; indeed, those White House public relations men whom Kissinger delights to tease could well have taken lessons from him. Through flattery and subtlety, Kissinger was able to get from the press the respectful attention that Nixon, with more blunt instruments, never obtained.

As he has managed the press, so Kissinger, in *White House Years*, carefully handles others. He obviously does not consider his public career at an end, and he writes with some delicacy of those with whom he worked who might in future be in a position to grant favors or to inflict revenge. (Some critics have complained that, in this and other ways, the memoirs are self-serving; so they are, of course, but one waits for examples of memoirs which are not.) His depictions of men like Melvin Laird, Nixon's Secretary of Defense, or John Connally, who served briefly as Secretary of the Treasury, require a good deal of careful textual analysis for clues to their deeper meanings, and even then final judgments often remain oblique and ambiguous. Kissinger displays a courtier's talent for hiding his deeper feelings behind a surface frankness, and he is seldom entirely straightforward. His compliments are normally tinged with subtle reservations, his criticisms with at least token concessions. He affects an air of detachment and self-control in his reactions to others that on other evidence, such as Nixon's memoirs, he could not always in practice sustain. One feels sure that the Kissinger diaries, should they ever appear, will be far less ambivalent and restrained in their judgments on men and situations than are the Kissinger memoirs.

But the memoirs are what we have, and they are quite frank enough for public purposes, especially with respect to the analysis of major events and larger questions of policy that establishes their significance. Whatever personal or literary qualities Kissinger's book displays, it is with its substantive arguments that we are primarily concerned. And on those arguments, while there is still subtlety, there is not, in the end, either ambiguity or ambivalence. Kissinger has told us clearly what he thinks, and it is because he has done so that his book has received so controversial a reception.

Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger intended nothing less than a fundamental reconstruction of American attitudes toward foreign policy. From

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the beginning, they were united in their distrust, bordering on contempt, for a foreign policy establishment that in their view had lost its confidence and abdicated its responsibilities in the face of ideological challenges from an increasingly radicalized antiwar movement. The President was more open and blunt in his condemnations, but his Assistant for National Security Affairs shared his distaste for the self-doubt and even self-hatred they both saw at the root of a dangerously advanced loss of will in the national leadership community.

Kissinger, the Harvard academic, always hoped to win over by persuasion the foreign policy intellectuals whom Nixon assigned from the beginning to the ranks of the permanent opposition, but he had, in the end, little more patience or respect than did the President for the "inexhaustible masochism" of the demoralized liberals. Neither Nixon nor Kissinger doubted for a moment the fundamental purposes and values of American society, and that absence of doubt or questioning separated them fundamentally from their critics and allowed them to pursue without hesitation a set of policies anchored in a sure sense of the American national interest.

The two made, in some ways, an unlikely team. Prior to their initial meeting following Nixon's election in November 1968, Kissinger had shared the widespread disdain among intellectuals for Nixon, and, by his account, they were never personally intimate. He summarizes their relationship as "close on substance, aloof personally," and that description is reflected in his treatment of Nixon throughout the memoirs. The Nixon of *White House Years* is the personally graceless figure we are by now thoroughly familiar with from other sources: awkward (he conducted his first conversation with Kissinger so vaguely that Kissinger came away from it unaware that he had been offered the job as National Security Advisor), insecure, posturing, self-pitying, devious, impulsive, endlessly suspicious, instinctively combative.

Kissinger tells us that his personal dealings with Nixon were invariably courteous and generally amiable, but suggests that they each remained somewhat wary of the other. This may be, but it may be also that Kissinger is attempting in retrospect to establish the kind of gulf between himself and Nixon that, in the aftermath of Watergate, all the former President's advisors have attempted to construct. He does not tell us, for example, of the effusive personal note he wrote Nixon on the eve of the 1972 presidential election and which Nixon reproduces with evident pride in his memoirs. Nixon, a painfully shy man (an odd trait in a politician), found it difficult to establish close relations with anyone, but he appears to have felt toward Kissinger genuine affection as well as deep respect. Certainly his treatment of Kissinger in his memoirs is personally more generous than Kissinger's is of him in *White House Years*.

Whatever their personal relations may have been, their working relationship was close indeed. Nor is Kissinger's treatment of Nixon, taken

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whole, nearly as negative as some reviewers have indicated. The two men agreed on all the fundamentals and most of the specifics of American foreign policy, and they worked as a genuine team. But both remembered who was President. Much of the tactical maneuvering on issues Nixon left to Kissinger, but the broad strategic goals, though jointly conceived, remained the President's prerogative. They worked well together because, in the end, they thought so much alike. It is not surprising, then, that Kissinger pays high tribute to Nixon's intelligence and toughmindedness. But he also offers frequent and undoubtedly genuine testimonials to the President's courage and will. Passages like the following recur often in *White House Years*: "Nixon could be very decisive. Almost invariably during his Presidency his decisions were courageous and strong and often taken in loneliness against all expert advice." Nixon did his share of temporizing and agonizing, according to Kissinger, and he seldom could resist tasteless self-dramatization, but he was at his best when it mattered most. Kissinger's Nixon had no style at all, but he did have considerable substance.

The Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy, highly complex in operation, was simple in design: "Our objective," Kissinger says, "was to purge our foreign policy of all sentimentality." (In Kissinger's diplomatic lexicon, there exists no higher term of praise than "unsentimental.") Sentimentality involved any and all forms of unreality, anything that might get in the way of seeing the world as it is and of most effectively advancing the American and ambiguous, Kissinger displays a courtier's talent for hiding his deepest national interest in that world. For Kissinger, reality required a striving toward equilibrium both in international relations and, prerequisite to that, in American attitudes.

From the first time that he met Nixon, Kissinger emphasized that the goal of the new Administration's policy must be to moderate the nation's "violent historical fluctuations" between polar extremes – manic nationalism and peevish isolationism, euphoria and despair, global evangelism and global renunciation, expecting too much of national power and being ashamed to use it. This meant, above all, coming to terms with the realities of power – its uses, its necessities, its limits, its ambiguities.

Only a stable, mature America, Kissinger believed, could carry out its unavoidable leadership responsibilities with the kind of consistency and steadiness of purpose necessary to preserve a decent peace. To that end, it would have to disabuse itself of its illusions of a peculiar moral destiny. A moralistic America, bemused by notions of its own purity of motives, would in Kissinger's view inevitably fluctuate between feckless crusading and irresponsible abnegation, contributing in either case to dangerous international uncertainty and instability.

The balance of power he wanted America to pursue was neither an anachronism nor a moral insufficiency; it was nothing less than the guarantor of world peace. It was in this sense that Kissinger hoped to establish

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a new "geopolitical" tradition in American foreign policy. He never sug-
gested that America should discard or ignore its moral values, though his
critics, then and since, insisted that he was essentially amoral. But he was
persuaded that "there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice
without restraint." America, he warned, would have to learn to live in a
world marked by imperfect choices, partial fulfillments, and the absence
of final resolutions: "the management of a balance of power is a perma-
nent undertaking, not an exertion that has a foreseeable end."

The insistence on realism, the ready acceptance of power politics, the unashamed advocacy of the national interest, the suspicion of moralism, the preoccupation with stability and order: all these qualities led Kissinger's critics to label him, quite correctly, as a conservative. Readers will find few references in *White House Years* to such liberal concerns as human rights or the question of Third World attitudes towards the United States. Kissinger likewise says little about social justice or the unequal distribution of wealth among nations.

Indeed, conservative assumptions and conclusions predominate in *White House Years*. Kissinger's open distaste for India, particularly for Indira Gandhi, is obviously related to his general impatience with moral preach- ments. He challenges the widespread liberal assumption that social reform and economic development will necessarily blunt radicalism or bring political stability. He finds no difficulty in justifying American support for authoritarian regimes where the national interest requires it. The arms race is to him a function, not an independent cause, of international con- flict. He pays very little attention to the United Nations or to the vagaries of world opinion. His views on the origins of the Cold War and on Soviet- American relations in general fit comfortably into the cold warrior tradi- tion. He is, in short, in no way a man of the Left.

Yet if the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy was conservative, it involved a conservatism with which many American right-wingers felt distinctly uncomfortable. It was, after all, the Nixon Administration that established diplomatic contact with China, signed a SALT agreement with the Soviet Union, and in general popularized the concept of détente. None of these things made conservatives happy (one of them complained typically that he didn't mind Nixon going to China, he only objected to his return), while many liberals had to maneuver awkwardly to avoid indicating approval of Nixon's foreign policy accomplishments. (Thus the resort to Kissinger-as-good-fairy noted at the outset.)

Kissinger's impatience with sentimentality extended to the sentimentality of the Right. He did not flinch from the use of power, but he understood, as so many American conservatives of the "Why Not Victory?" school apparently did not, that the realities of nuclear weapons and of increasing Soviet military strength made the game of power politics more dangerous and more complex than it had been earlier. For Kissinger, the balance of

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power meant just that – a balance – and it precluded dreams of final triumphs over Communism or of America being able everywhere to have its way. America had overextended itself, and the wise use of power involved recognition of its limits as well as of its necessities. Kissinger did not intend that the United States should exchange liberal moral crusades for conservative ones, and where necessary his anti-Communism, however genuine and firm, deferred to his geopolitics. It caused him no ideological agonizing to strike deals, where possible and beneficial, with Marxist regimes.

Kissinger's most severe critics have portrayed him as essentially cynical in his approach to international relations, interested finally neither in ideology nor morality but simply in the exercise of power for its own sake. Ronald Steel has gone so far as to suggest that Kissinger's preoccupation "only with the mechanics of foreign policy, not its political content or moral weight" suggests that he could as easily serve the Soviet or any other government as the American. For Steel, Kissinger's counterrevolutionary tendencies derive simply from the accident of his representing a wealthy, status quo society. Given a different client, Steel argues, he could just as well function as spokesman for a revolutionary new international order.

It seems unduly harsh to ascribe to Kissinger, as Steel does, the view that "we live in a Hobbesian world where power is the only arbiter and the only morality" and that "the weak are meant to be victims and . . . the strong can avoid that fate only by being merciless." No doubt Kissinger's view of reality has its Hobbesian-Darwinian elements (and he could, after all, summon a great deal of historical evidence in defense of such a view) but not everyone who sees the world as a difficult and unforgiving place arrives at amoral cynicism as the only means for dealing with it. In the present case, Steel's attack ignores Kissinger's recurring argument that the pursuit of the balance of power requires a "moral compass" to provide ultimate direction and purpose to a nation's policies. Kissinger is uncomfortable with much moral rhetoric because, he suggests, that rhetoric often ignores the complexities and ambiguities of moral behavior, particularly in the tangled world of international relations. Such a perspective can, of course, serve as an excuse for amorality, but it does not do so necessarily.

It is true that Kissinger does not provide an extended justification for his obvious assumption that pursuit of the American national interest is entirely consistent, at least in general terms, with efforts to create a just and decent international order. The failure to provide the justification for that assumption may be an important omission in the argument of the book (though how it could be accomplished except through rhetorical assertion is not clear), but that should not lead us to suppose that the assumption is either nonexistent or unimportant. Indeed, it is not too much to argue that the most significant contemporary division in American attitudes

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toward foreign policy lies between those who can easily make that assumption and those who cannot.

Kissinger perhaps has better reasons than most for making the assumption. He grew up in a German Jewish family in Bavaria, and was nine years old when Hitler came to power. Several years later, after suffering considerable persecution, the Kissingers escaped to America. Kissinger says simply, "I therefore have always had a special feeling for what America means, which native-born citizens perhaps take for granted." When he tells us briefly a few sentences later of his faith in America, "its greatness, its idealism, its humanity," we have no reason for scepticism. Kissinger is no moralist, but he is, beneath all his sophistication, an old-fashioned patriot and nationalist.

Kissinger in power was a counterrevolutionary (although he never says so) because of both his own instincts and his sense of the national interest. America's had been a middle-class and democratic revolution, while the revolutionary of the twentieth century typically appealed to one form or another of authoritarian Marxian socialism, which meant he understood, even if most American liberals did not, that the United States was not his natural ally. American liberals found it difficult to be unambiguously anti-Communist (non-Communist was their preferred label) because of their instinctive identification with "progressive" movements and their lingering assumption that Marxism, however corrupted in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, remained in essence such a movement. Kissinger never allowed his own anti-Communism so to dominate his thinking as to rigidify his strategic options, but his conduct of foreign affairs cannot be fully understood outside his perception of the essential ideological component of modern international conflict and his sense of the relationship of that ideological conflict to the American national interest.

The final test of a foreign policy rests, of course, not in the elegance of its outlines or the sophistication of its philosophy but in the effectiveness of its practice. Even there, however, judgments can seldom be unambiguous. Different observers will use different measures of effectiveness, and, in any case, politicians find themselves as much or more the captives of events as shapers of them. They typically spend more time reacting than initiating. As Kissinger suggests: "There is little time for leaders to reflect. They are locked in an endless battle in which the urgent constantly gains on the important. The public life of every political figure is a continual struggle to rescue an element of choice from the pressure of circumstances." Still, both Nixon and Kissinger had high intentions for their foreign policy; the standards they set for themselves were in many ways more ambitious than those set for them by others, though they and their critics often had different standards in mind.

As ever in the postwar world, American policy had above all to concern

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itself with relations with the Soviet Union. There the perennial and contradictory imperatives remained: to persistently discourage Russian 'prob- ings and adventurism without regularly subjecting the world to the threat of nuclear war. For Kissinger, this meant that the United States would have to search seriously for ways to achieve peaceful relations with Moscow without letting the search for peace turn into "a form of moral disarma- ment." Again the key was equilibrium, the need for Americans to avoid excesses both of conciliation and of truculence. America had to maintain military deterrence, but it also needed to find diplomatic means to induce the USSR to keep cold war rivalries within manageable limits. Kissinger wanted both to persuade the Russians that the us would do whatever was necessary to protect its vital interests and to indicate to them that there existed possibilities for mutually respectful and beneficial coexistence.

Neither Nixon nor Kissinger harbored any illusions concerning Soviet attitudes or intentions. They both assumed that Russia's actions depended on her strategic opportunities and were therefore quite impervious to "gestures," "signals" or any other unilateral indications of "good will." Soviet-American relations should be conducted, Nixon and Kissinger insisted, on the basis of strict reciprocity. To act otherwise would be to trivialize the nature of great power conflict. Kissinger's reading of Russian history and Communist ideology persuaded him that the Soviets' attitudes toward the West were deeply rooted and would not be reversed, nor the actions flowing from them stemmed, by ingenious tactical maneuverings. The Soviet Union, after all, had its own national interest, one, moreover, which a fundamentalist ideology tended to set in concrete.

At the same time, Kissinger and Nixon also assumed that the Russian leaders were sane men with a rational interest in avoiding nuclear confrontation. The Soviet belief in inevitable conflict with its capitalist enemies did not preclude a genuine desire to prevent World War Three. Moreover, there were things the Soviet Union wanted - recognition of its interests in central and eastern Europe, nuclear parity, expanded economic relations with the West - that it was in the power of the United States to deny. These things Kissinger was ready to trade in exchange for assurances of Soviet political and military restraint and of a more stable pattern of coexistence. The Kissinger doctrine of "linkage" attempted to persuade Moscow that it could expect concessions only by seeing its relations with America in comprehensive terms, and not by pursuing piecemeal diplomacy that would attempt to extract Soviet benefits in specific areas of interest without reference to its behavior in other spheres. By this process, Kissinger, knowing that he could not transform Soviet ideology, nonetheless hoped to develop "habits of moderation" in Soviet conduct that might, over an extended period of time, cumulatively alter the nature of Russian policy. It was, in a sense, the application to international relations of the techniques of behavior modification.

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It was not a promising time to attempt to implement such a policy. The American disaster in Vietnam had, among other things, destroyed the national consensus behind containment of Communist expansion. The Kissinger-Nixon policy required broad support for a continuing commitment of military strength and political determination to challenge Soviet ambitions; the new relationship required that the US stand ready to impose penalties as well as offer incentives. To Kissinger, détente, if it was not simply to be a form of disguised surrender, had to follow from and not be a substitute for a true balance of power.

But Vietnam had sapped American will. The Administration found its military budget under constant attack – even though Nixon was already reducing the share of the national budget devoted to defense spending – and its diplomacy under persistent liberal suspicion that it was insufficiently responsive to presumed desires for improved relations on the part of the Soviet Union. Kissinger acerbically refers to the tendency of American intellectuals to accept “as an article of faith that every difficulty in US-Soviet relations had to be caused by American stupidity or intransigence.” (It might be noted generally that Kissinger carries on in *White House Years* a running polemical battle with liberal intellectuals. He indicates in the foreword that his intention is “to reconcile, not to score retrospective debating points,” but he concedes a page later that “the impulse to explain merges with the impulse to defend.” Defend Kissinger does, occasionally against the Right, but most often and with most feeling against the Left.)

More serious liberal criticism of the Kissinger Soviet policies (and later of *White House Years*) focused on his presumed tendency to perceive all other aspects of American foreign policy from within the framework of Soviet-American relations and Cold War assumptions. Critics have accused Kissinger of a kind of monomania, of seeing everything everywhere as fitting in somehow to the all-embracing East-West struggle. It is argued that Kissinger's habit of attributing all world tensions and conflicts to Soviet scheming led him to ignore other sources of upheaval – nationalism, poverty, anti-authoritarianism, indigenous radicalism – and to foster, in misguided appeals to strategic necessity and national security, the kind of indiscriminate American interventionism that had produced the catastrophe in Vietnam.

To Kissinger's supposed tunnel vision are ascribed such controverted American policies as uncritical support for the Shah of Iran. the "tilt" against India in the India-Pakistan war of 1971, and the efforts to prevent Salvador Allende's accession to the presidency of Chile in 1970. None of these actions can be discussed in detail here. but it may be noted that Kissinger makes a better case in defense of the first two policies than of the third. The case of the Shah is complex, but he had been a strong and strategically-located defender of American interests in the Middle East for

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a very long time, and, in any case, the alternatives to the Shah within Iran, as subsequent events have shown, were not attractive. In the conflict on the subcontinent, India clearly used the occasion of internal difficulties in Pakistan to settle old scores, and Kissinger and Nixon owed support for other reasons to the Pakistanis, who had given assistance to the US on a number of occasions, particularly in the delicate maneuvering leading to the opening to China.

Kissinger's defense of American policies in Chile is vigorous (“no responsible national leader could have done otherwise”) but not, in the end, persuasive. The financial aid channelled to Allende's opponents during the presidential campaign was not unjustifiable, though it may have been unwise, but the attempt to prevent the Chilean Congress from choosing Allende as President, if necessary by military coup (Allende ran first, with thirty-six percent of the total, in the popular vote in September 1970, but since no candidate had a majority, the final decision under the Chilean constitution then rested with the Congress), made neither political nor moral sense. (It should be noted in passing, however, that Kissinger insists that the US played “no role whatever” in the coup that removed Allende from power in 1973. He promises details on these events in his second volume.) Not only did Kissinger and Nixon act foolishly and wrongly in Chile, but it does seem that their actions stemmed, as their critics have charged, from excessive preoccupation with fears of Soviet penetration in the western hemisphere.

Specific policies for the moment aside, judgments on the effects of Kissinger's overriding concern with relations between the superpowers are difficult to make. No doubt Kissinger's concept of linkage, with its emphasis on Russian behavior in every sphere of international activity, reinforced a natural American tendency to suspect Soviet influences at work whenever potential or actual challenges to American interests arose. We can assume that this had the effect of introducing certain distortions into American perceptions.

On the other hand, it was simple necessity that placed US-Soviet relations at the heart of American foreign policy. All the then-fashionable talk of the decline of the superpowers ignored the compelling reality that the immense military capabilities of the two nations, including the capacity to destroy the world, made their strategic relations the inescapable central element in international relations. It would, therefore, be impossible to imagine a sensible foreign policy for America that did not place relations with the Soviet Union above everything else, and which did not to a considerable extent interpret events elsewhere within that framework.

More particularly, Kissinger knew that the Soviets stood ready to exploit situations which they might not have created but which nonetheless worked objectively in their interests. Thus, for example, the Russians had not been the main force behind the Cuban revolution, but they had still benefited

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immensely from it (a precedent Kissinger had all too clearly in mind during his calculations concerning events in Chile, especially since there was evidence at just that time that the Russians were attempting to establish a nuclear submarine base in Cuba). To some extent, then, American "paranoia" concerning Soviet behavior was impossible to avoid, as was that of Moscow towards the us. Each nation, in prudential concern for its own essential interests, had to suspect the worst about the other's activities and intentions. (Which, among other reasons, is why it is absurd to assess Cold War blame simply on the basis of who first did what to whom. The essential issues have always concerned fundamental political values.)

There is also a question as to how much difference a lesser emphasis on Soviet-American relations would actually have made to American policy. Kissinger almost always had the Soviet factor in mind when he considered policy options around the world, but it was seldom the only factor he had in mind. So in the Middle East, Kissinger remained leery of too-active American involvement and counseled a strategy of delay, partly because he wanted to make the Arab nations see that they could attain their ends only through turning away from Moscow toward Washington, but also because he understood, as the State Department apparently did not, that the proclaimed American goal of a "comprehensive settlement" could not be attained, given Arab attitudes, without unacceptable American coercion against Israel, America's closest ally in the region. (It would seem that the State Department still has not learned that lesson.) Here as elsewhere, American policy operated within limits that attitudes toward the Soviet Union affected, but did not normally determine.

If the Left attacked Kissinger (especially after Nixon's first term) as an unregenerate and anachronistic cold warrior, critics on the Right accused him of sacrificing American interests, and eroding American political will, through pursuit of an illusionary détente whose major effect was to lull the United States into a false sense of security under cover of which the Soviet Union gradually managed to establish military superiority. Liberals might view the Moscow and Peking summits as long overdue and as signaling, as Kissinger sardonically puts it, that "it was left to diplomacy only to sweep up the cobwebs left over from an already transcended Cold War," but conservatives worried that a premature euphoria over peaceful co-existence had, without changing strategic and political realities, eroded the vigilant anti-Communist consensus necessary to preserve Kissinger's ostensible goal of a balance of power.

It is significant that Kissinger does not dismiss these criticisms out of hand, as he often does with those of the Left. He in fact shared conservative suspicions concerning Soviet motives, saw that détente could undermine support for maintaining necessary American military strength, and worried whether American opinion could over time maintain the subtle combina-

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tion of fundamental will and flexible tactics necessary to make his policy work. He was not certain, in his own words, "whether America could sustain both the willingness to confront and the readiness to cooperate at the same time." Certainly the American record since the Nixon-Kissinger years has not been reassuring on that score, tending not so much subtly to combine cooperation and conflict as to alternate erratically between them.

Still, Kissinger felt the efforts toward détente had to be made. Part of the reason involved tactical necessity. As already noted, the misadventure in Vietnam created just the kind of "moral disarmament" Kissinger had feared; the pressures on the Administration toward conciliation and against any sort of hard line seemed irresistible. Kissinger favored the SALT agreement of 1972 on its own merits, but he also believed that, in a political atmosphere notably unsympathetic to military spending, it was as advantageous an arrangement on strategic weapons as America could obtain. In his more gloomy moments (Kissinger displayed an occasional weakness for cosmic pessimism) he entertained doubts whether the democratic West retained the confidence and will to withstand the relentless pressures, political and military, mounted by its enemies.

The yearnings and pressures for accommodation between the super-powers, which were in practice directed disproportionately towards the us, came from America's allies and from neutrals as well as from within, and the us could not afford to appear indifferent to the longing for peace. Kissinger understood and sympathized with conservative hesitations, but he could not, he finally concluded, accept a "counsel of despair" which assumed "that the American people could maintain their vigilance only by a strident militance that conceded to our adversaries a monopoly on the global yearning for peace, and that would gradually maneuver the United States government into isolation." And in the end, of course, Kissinger, as with any responsible modern statesman, felt he had to explore any possibility for limiting nuclear competition.

Most of what Kissinger says is plausible, and much of it is persuasive, but it does not tell the whole story. After all the defenses are offered, there remains an element of truth in the charge from the Left that Kissinger occasionally displayed excessive preoccupation with us-Soviet relations; and it also must be said that détente was, in the popular phrase, "oversold." Kissinger attempts to deflect to Nixon's 1972 campaign oratory any blame for extravagant claims that the Moscow and Peking summits had guaranteed "a generation of peace," but he himself expresses his doubts and qualifications more emphatically in retrospect than he did at the time. It is difficult to avoid the suspicion that Kissinger, like Nixon, felt more had been accomplished with respect to establishing a new relationship with the Soviet Union than was in fact the case.

The summits had been successes, and the praise for them was deep and

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widespread, so it was natural enough that Nixon and Kissinger should, in
pride at their handiwork, minimize marginal reservations. Even so, Kiss-
singer should have foreseen that the American people, watching their
leaders exchange enthusiastic toasts and expressions of appreciation with
the rulers of China and the Soviet Union, would reach the natural con-
clusion that the Cold War was indeed at an end. Surely he ought not to
have been surprised that in the aftermath of the summits renewed efforts
at containment of Communism would evoke quizzical and hesitant
responses.

Kissinger rightly attributes a good deal of the loss of American firmness
to the collapse of faith in the executive branch of government following
Watergate. There can be no doubt that the erosion of Nixon's domestic
support made conduct of a determined, or even coherent, foreign policy
virtually impossible, and the Russians naturally took advantage of the
opportunities that events within America handed them. None of that was
Kissinger's fault, but he did hold some responsibility for a confused set of
foreign policy attitudes that détente, however justified, had helped foster
and which contributed to the extreme difficulty of maintaining the balance
of power.

All other aspects of American foreign policy in the Nixon-Kissinger years fell under the shadow of Vietnam. Without success there, there could be no larger success for the Administration's foreign relations. By 1969, the us was thoroughly frustrated and disillusioned by the war and desperately wanted a way out, but most Americans still insisted that the way out not become a humiliation. The war had to be ended, but it had to be ended honorably; trying to accomplish both these things at once tested the Administration beyond any other issue, and it came close to tearing America apart. Kissinger's account of these events is the fullest we have to date. In putting it together he has created a fascinating and compelling defense of the government's policies. On no issue did the Nixon Administra-tion receive greater opposition from the foreign policy establishment; on no issue, it now seems clear, did it deserve greater support.

It had been the Administration of Lyndon Johnson that had enlarged
the war, found it unwinnable and unsettleable, and then passed it on to
Nixon and Kissinger. Yet soon after leaving office, major policy-makers in
that Administration such as Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman and Cyrus
Vance turned into born-again doves strongly critical of those who found
the mess they had left behind difficult to clean up. Increasingly, moreover,
that criticism was expressed in terms of moral outrage, even though, as
Kissinger notes concerning the emotional indulgence of antiwar critics in
general, "emotion was not a policy" and "no one had a monopoly on
anguish." Like so many other liberals, these men knew only that they
wanted America out of Vietnam, and in what Kissinger describes as "a

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headlong flight from responsibility," the greater part of the liberal com-
munity refused to see that until late 1972, when North Vietnam finally
reversed its previous position, the only way out was abject capitulation.

Only a relative handful of radicals wanted an American defeat, but a
very great many liberals refused to concede that the only "terms" the North
Vietnamese were interested in were unconditional American withdrawal
plus the American overthrow of the government in the South of Nguyen
Van Thieu. To antiwar critics, Nixon's policy of Vietnamization – gradu-
ally withdrawing American troops while helping the South Vietnamese
to build their own defense capabilities – merely provided a cover for a
perverse Administration insistence on a "military solution"; those same
critics had no difficulty believing in a genuine desire for a reasonable
settlement by North Vietnam. It annoyed Kissinger, during the secret peace
negotiations with the North, to be lectured endlessly on the futility of the
war and the duplicity of American diplomacy; it drove him to distraction
that Hanoi's favorite texts for those lectures were provided by prominent
American critics of the war.

Nixon and Kissinger offered ever greater concessions to the enemy, but
those concessions satisfied neither Hanoi nor the domestic opposition.
Encouraged by internal American divisions, the North remained obdurate,
while antiwar critics, forced at given points to recognize that concessions
which they had urged and had assumed would end the war did no such
thing, simply retreated, again and again, to some new set of proposals that
would – surely this time – bring an end to the fighting. (Kissinger's evidence
on this point is extensive and devastating.)

Kissinger found the tone of the debate even more disturbing than the
substance: the antiwar movement became ever more shrill and strident in
its attacks on American policy and on what it saw as American escalation
of the conflict. The incursion into Cambodia,¹ the renewed bombing and
the mining of North Vietnam's harbors, the B-52 "Christmas bombing"
that preceded the final settlement in January 1973: each of these actions
produced, in Kissinger's terms, an "emotional orgy" of condemnation and
moral outrage. He understood the passion and frustration of the critics, but
he resented their moral simplicities and their failure to concede the good
faith and moral decency of those who disagreed with them.

The irony was that both China and the Soviet Union indicated that they
understood what antiwar critics found so hard to believe: that the Nixon
Administration was indeed committed to withdrawal from Indochina.
Their willingness to conduct friendly negotiations with America while the
war wound down made sense on no other basis. (Even then, the negotia-
tions had the effect of leaving Hanoi increasingly isolated.) Peking and
Moscow displayed more realism about the course of the war and the
direction of American policy than did the indignant protestors inside the
United States.

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The opening to China, climaxed by Nixon's trip to Peking in February 1972, represented a particular triumph for Nixon and Kissinger. (Kissinger had handled the preliminary negotiations - and had preceded Nixon to Peking - entirely in secret. Most of the Administration's major diplomacy went through Kissinger's office rather than through the Secretary of State; Nixon's first term constituted, in many ways, a continuing humiliation of William Rogers and the State Department.) The new relationship with Peking put pressure on Hanoi, made Moscow nervous (and therefore more eager to make its own deals with Washington), and showed the Administration's critics that Nixon and Kissinger were not so bogged down in Vietnam as to be unable to initiate important new diplomatic ventures. Kissinger remained certain that the United States would be respected and taken seriously only so long as it refused to be humiliated or to abandon its commitments in Vietnam. Critics choked on the words, but to Nixon and Kissinger America's "honor" and "credibility" were indeed at stake in the manner in which the nation managed its withdrawal from the war.

It is for this reason that the Administration was determined to act so firmly in response to North Vietnam's massive spring offensive at the end of March 1972. Kissinger and Nixon alike saw this as Hanoi's last great effort to win the war in the field; they were convinced that failure of the offensive would force Hanoi to begin genuine negotiations. Conversely, they were also agreed that a victory for the North would require cancellation of the Moscow summit already scheduled for May; Nixon would not go to Russia having just suffered a humiliation accomplished by Soviet arms.

The stakes, then, were enormous, and so were the risks. Nixon and Kissinger felt that they had to take decisive action in order to display to North Vietnam their absolute determination not to be defeated. But the action they decided on, the mining of North Vietnamese ports, meant the possibility - even, they thought, the likelihood - that the Soviets would feel themselves forced to cancel the summit, which of course would generate a firestorm of domestic protest. The decision was made no easier in light of the opposition, because of the risks involved, of Secretary of Defense Laird and CIA Director Richard Helms. (Rogers, in Kissinger's acid formulation, "was for the operation if it succeeded and against it if it failed.") One can appreciate Kissinger's pride in describing the decision to go ahead with the mining as "one of the finest hours of Nixon's Presidency."

For the decision worked, better, almost, than could have been hoped. The Soviet Union did not cancel the summit (Moscow and Peking as usual did not match the moral outrage of American protestors), the SALT treaty was signed, and after the North Vietnamese offensive petered out, meaningful negotiations to end the war finally began. Hanoi no longer insisted on the overthrow of Thieu and on being granted, through negotiation, a share of the power in Saigon it had not been able to win through force. There were still hard times ahead, however. As Hanoi softened, Saigon

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hardened: Thieu objected to a peace settlement that left large numbers of North Vietnamese troops stationed on his territory; he now held out for a clear military victory, but Kissinger and Nixon knew that with a compromise settlement obtainable, the limits of American support for South Vietnam had been reached. Thieu's stubbornness produced renewed obstinacy from the North; in the end it took the Christmas bombing (and another outburst of moral revulsion) to break the deadlock and secure the settlement.

The settlement did not hold up, of course, but Kissinger insists that except for the collapse of executive authority because of Watergate, it could have. We will never know. In any case, the American share of the most disastrous war in its history was at an end. Whether or not it had ended in "peace with honor," it had at least not ended in the national humiliation Kissinger and Nixon had feared.

At the very end of *White House Years*, Kissinger describes himself, having just initialed the Paris agreement ending the war a few days after Nixon's second inaugural, in a mood of serenity: "I was at peace with myself, neither elated nor sad." One senses that he means to suggest, in his own mood, a metaphor for the kind of balance (neither euphoria nor despair) he had hoped to bring to American foreign policy.

In the short run, clearly, he had not succeeded. His dreams of a new geopolitical perspective in American thinking, of conscious focus on establishing and maintaining a balance of power linked to the national interest, had not survived his term in office. The Administration of Jimmy Carter explicitly rejected Kisinger's balance of power perspectives, and sketched ambitious new goals for American policy: greater concern for human rights, lesser preoccupation with Soviet-American conflicts, revival of American idealism and moral leadership. Kissinger's new sobriety had, apparently, been superseded.

By mid-1980, however, the Carter Administration found itself in a new mood. The euphoria of its earlier days had been replaced, if not by despair, at least by grim determination. Kissinger had not necessarily been vindicated, but a great many people were willing to listen again to his arguments. And it remained entirely possible, given certain circumstances, that Kissinger, not yet given over to the judgments of history, might find the opportunity to write not just one but several additional volumes in defense of those arguments. If so, the world of American political letters would be the better for it. So also, in my view, would be the conduct of American foreign policy.

NOTE

1. Kissinger attacks in detail and with some vehemence the criticisms of the Administration's Cambodian policy by the British journalist William Shawcross.

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