## Essay

# A New Approach to Arms Control

By HENRY KISSINGER

*To halt the strategic arms race, the former Secretary of State recommends a dramatic new approach. His plan would scrap all MIRVs starting in, say, 1990 and rely instead on a mix of mobile, single-warhead missiles. The U.S. would implement this plan even if the Soviets refused to go along*

The nomination of a new director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency has prompted a major Senate debate over whether the Administration is seriously committed to arms control. The controversy misses the real question: To what kind of arms control should the Administration commit itself?

So far, the controversy has focused on negotiations over deployment of medium-range missiles in Europe. But even a success in these negotiations—likely now that the German elections are over—will make only a marginal contribution to the stability of

the U.S.-Soviet strategic nuclear relationship. And here we are trapped in a conceptual crisis. For too long arms control and strategy have been proceeding on separate, increasingly incompatible tracks. Technology has driven weapons procurement at the same time that it has made irrelevant the traditional doctrines of arms control. Weapons systems and arms control schemes developed in isolation from each other had to be squeezed into a more or less arbitrary framework.

This article seeks to sketch an approach by which strategy and arms control can be reconciled and strategic stability achieved by ending the disproportion between warheads and launchers that is at the heart of the current strategic instability.

### THE ORIGINS OF ARMS CONTROL

The concept of arms control evolved when a growing Soviet nuclear arsenal suddenly threw into doubt the comfortable premises of the decade after World War II. It had been complacently assumed that by means of the "balance of terror," technology supplied a shortcut to security. Even after we had lost our atomic monopoly, our superiority was so crushing that in 1954 Secretary of State John Foster Dulles could still declare a policy of massive retaliation, countering Soviet aggression anywhere by the threat to devastate the Soviet Union. There was little incentive to decide a question that seemed then only esoteric: What were rational targets for the apocalyptic arsenal we were assembling?

Soviet hydrogen weapons and Sputnik foreshadowed a kind of stalemate. Once general nuclear war threatened both sides with tens of millions of casualties, the very existence of nuclear arsenals came to be perceived by many as a menace. Traditional wars had been sustained by the conviction that the consequences of defeat or surrender were worse than the costs of resistance. The nuclear specter banished that conviction. Fewer and fewer objectives seemed worth the cost or the risk.

One result has been the growing determination to stabilize and ideally to reverse the arms race by negotiated agreement. There are at least two unprecedented aspects to the nuclear arms race. The destructiveness of the weaponry sets an upper limit beyond which additions to destructiveness become more and more marginal. At the same time, the complex technology of the nu-

clear age raises the danger of an automaticity that might elude rational control. For if one side should destroy the retaliatory force of its adversary, it would be in a position to impose its terms. That prospect could tempt the intended victim to undertake a "pre-emptive" first strike—or launch its weapons on warning. Mutual fear could turn a crisis into a catastrophe. Proponents of arms control thus saw it as their immediate objective to reduce the incentives and possibilities of surprise attack.

The goal was to reduce the vulnerability of strategic forces by

maintaining symmetrical numbers of strategic weapons. If neither side could hope to destroy its opponent, the incentive for surprise attack would disappear in the face of certain and intolerable retribution. So long as missiles had single warheads and airplanes needed hours to reach their targets, a surprise attack would require a vast numerical preponderance. (Even with highly accurate missiles, an attacker probably would not risk a first strike without two warheads for each target, to allow for malfunctioning, hardened targets or errors in accuracy.)

In these circumstances, numerically equal retaliatory forces were rightly conceived as adequate insurance against surprise attack. The optimum total should be large enough so that it could be overwhelmed only by a violation of the agreement too large to

be hidden. Yet it should involve a ceiling that would stop the accumulation of strategic weapons. This was the intellectual basis of the arms limitation talks proposed by President Johnson and implemented by President Nixon.

During 1969 and 1970, the Nixon Administration undertook painstaking studies to determine the lowest level above which a strategically significant violation could not be concealed. The culmination was the SALT agreements of 1972. These accords severely limited antiballistic missile defenses to discourage an aggressor from believing he could launch a surprise attack and then defend against a counterblow. The agreements also froze the number of offensive missiles for five years. At that point the Soviets had a numerical edge in missiles—though not nearly enough for a surprise attack with single warheads. But this advantage was counterbalanced, first, by our very large—and growing—advantage in warheads, since only we possessed MIRVs (Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry Vehicles) and, second, by our insurmountable superiority both in numbers and in the technology of long-range bombers, on which there was no limitation.

The SALT agreements of 1972 might well have achieved the objective of strategic stability. But both domestic and technical factors caused the accords to become increasingly controversial. The Viet Nam War and Watergate disintegrated the political consensus behind our defense and arms control policy just when technology was undermining its strategic premises. In the cli-

Illustrations for TIME by Eugene Mihaesco

TIME, MARCH 21, 1983

# Heads Up!

## Tomahawk tests go awry

The launch was textbook perfect. The 21-ft.-long unarmed Tomahawk cruise missile arched gracefully away a week ago Sunday from the destroyer U.S.S. Merrill, stationed off the California coast near San Clemente Island. It sped toward its target in Tonopah, Nev., 375 miles away but, to the chagrin of the Navy, never made it. The air-breathing projectile began behaving erratically above sparsely populated regions of Southern California and crashed harmlessly into Los Padres National Forest.

It is likely to be weeks before experts

of the manufacturer, General Dynamics Corp., determine the cause of the accident. Speculation among technicians centered on possible flaws in the TERCOM onboard computer program, which is designed to keep the missile on track with the preprogrammed terrain features below. It was the fourth such accident since mid-1979 along the ten-mile-wide test-flight path, one that happens to come within ten miles of Ronald Reagan's ranch. But the Pentagon says that the test results, on the whole, are not worrisome: of the 81 Tomahawk flights so far, 61 have gone according to plan—a respectable percentage.

For the Pentagon, the spectacular 6,200-ft. peaks of Los Padres Forest provide an ideal test of the missile's ability to hug terrain, as well as an imaginary bat-

tleground over which it can execute sophisticated flying maneuvers. But occasionally Tomahawks get more public attention than desired. Horseback riders once watched in disbelief as a missile crashed just 200 yds. away. Another missile plunged into a ravine on a ranch south of Lompoc. Said the owner: "If I were a Russian, I wouldn't be too worried." The Pentagon is certain it can keep everything under control. It points out that F-4 Phantoms always fly in the vicinity of the missile as protective chase planes. In the event the Tomahawk strays from its course, the F-4 pilots can push a button and send the missile plummeting to the ground. Promises the Navy: "There is no possibility the cruise will ever crash into a city." But it still might shock the cowboys. ■

# Americana

MICHAEL C. WITTE

## Government by Family Plan

Cuttyhunk Island (pop. 46) is a hilly, isolated spit of land off Massachusetts. Naturally, the sense of community is strong. "Everybody's involved," says A.P. Tilton. He should know. Tilton was town auditor for a decade, and has been a water commissioner and a selectman since 1961. Indeed, every resident either works for town hall or is related to somebody who does. Under such circumstances, getting a sewer pipe fixed or a pothole filled should be no problem.

But it is. A 1962 Massachusetts conflict-of-interest statute forbids awarding any municipal contract to a relative of a government employee. Violations are punishable by fines up to $1,000. To clear the air, Selectman Alan Wilder (who is also on the board of health and the planning, cemetery, police and conservation commissions) last week asked the legislature in Boston to exempt Cuttyhunk from the antinepotism provision. "You can't get anything fixed," complained Wilder.

State bureaucrats advised the islanders to cool it. They pointed out that a reform goes into effect in two weeks that should permit small towns to keep municipal work all in the family. Tilton, a retired carpenter, was unmoved: "Why don't they just leave us alone? There are just too many laws, and we get caught in the middle."

## A Brahman Not Cowed

At Disney World, just to the west, animals talk and dance. At Cape Canaveral, just to the east, sophisticated guidance systems are nothing unusual. In this mate, a pregnant, two-year-old Brahman cow named Julieann last week managed to navigate at least 25 miles of unfamiliar Florida terrain and get back to her for-

mer home. "We've had dogs that have come back five miles or so," says Read Hayes, from whose ranch near Christmas, Fla., Julieann bolted, "but nothing like this."

Julieann was the least manageable of Sidney Kraftsow's 70 Brahmans. It was her terrific "craving for citrus fruit," says Kraftsow, that led her to leap over (and even limbo under) 4-ft. barbed-wire fences or bound across her 5-ft.-wide concrete cattle guard. "She was really a menace," he says. Fed up, Kraftsow sold the

cow to Hayes for $350, a bargain price.

But Julieann had been away from home only a few hours when, at night in a driving rainstorm, she jumped out of her pen and over perhaps a dozen fences, crossed swamps and pastures and even swam across the Econlockhatchee River. Last Monday at dusk, 100 lbs. lighter, she arrived back at Kraftsow's. "An incredible journey," says Kraftsow.

For her trouble, Julieann was ordered back to Hayes. Says he: "Maybe motherhood will settle her down."

## No Complaints About the Food, Please

A man's home is supposed to be his castle. But his dungeon? Beginning this week, ten Albuquerque lawbreakers, instead of being sentenced to jail or to a toothless probation, are obliged to stay home every night. No police sentries are stationed outside, families are not required to snitch. Rather, confinement is enforced by remote control. Strapped to the ankle of each offender (mainly drunk drivers, all nonviolent adults on work-release) is a transmitter tuned in to a device on the home telephone. The phone in turn is connected to a computer downtown. It will monitor whether the electronically shack-

led prisoner strays more than a few hundred yards from his telephone. "Every morning," says Michael Goss, the local businessman who developed the contraption, "we'll give the probation officer a list of all their comings and goings."

The novel Albuquerque pilot program is the doing of a local judge. Says District Attorney Steven Schiff: "It ought to make everybody happy. Like a jail term, it keeps these people inside so they don't drive drunk." The operating cost of the contraption, $70 a month, will be paid by each plugged-in prisoner. Says Goss: "I think most people would pay to stay out of jail."

TIME, MARCH 21, 1983

mate of collapsing confidence, groups usually associated with
humane views came to advocate that the only way to keep our
Government from using nuclear weapons was to deprive it of all
alternatives to a strategy geared solely to the destruction of the
Soviet population; never mind that the targeting of civilians
guaranteed mutual annihilation. The other end of the spectrum
disdained the proposition that we lived in a new world. It insist-
ed that arms control was a trap and a delusion.

As we consumed ourselves in disputes over negotiations and
weapons systems, SALT I, at first widely acclaimed, was drawn
into that vortex. SALT II never emerged from it. Advocates of arms
control belittled the extent to which it was being overtaken by
technology. Opponents focused on the numerical "advantage"
that SALT I allegedly gave the Soviets, overlooking that the agreed
totals reflected exactly the level of U.S. forces the Pentagon chose
long before there was any thought of arms control and that we
retained a large numerical edge in warheads and airplanes.

Almost totally obscured in this debate was the reality that
multiple warheads were making the traditional SALT approach
obsolete. In SALT I a rough balance in the two sides' delivery vehi-
cles substantially reduced the possibility of surprise attack. But
multiple warheads—far exceeding the number of launchers—
were bound to restore the advantage of the attacker, who could
hope to overwhelm the opponent's fixed missile sites even with
equal numbers of missiles and warheads on both sides. The side
striking first would have an advantage—thus reviving the destabi-
lizing danger of surprise attack. From this point of view, a "freeze"
would perpetuate an inherently precarious state of affairs.

Fairness compels me to point out that the decision to proceed
with MIRVs was taken by President Johnson and was made irrevo-

cable in the Nixon Administration. We pro-
ceeded because in the climate of the Viet Nam
period we were reluctant to give up the one
strategic offensive program that was funded
with which to counter the rapid Soviet missile
force buildup; because we doubted that the So-
viets could achieve accuracies to threaten our
missile force in the foreseeable future; and be-
cause the Soviets ignored our hints to open the
subject of a MIRV ban in the SALT talks.
Whatever our reasons, there can be no doubt
that the age of MIRVs has doomed the
SALT approach.

The controversy over whether arms con-
trol was a boon or a trap—and some ill-
considered comments on the feasibility of nu-
clear war—left defense policy increasingly at
the mercy of the exploding public concern
about the dangers of nuclear war. No demo-
cratic leader can govern any longer without demonstrating his de-
votion to peace. The Reagan Administration soon learned that
the assault on what it called the "fatally flawed" SALT II treaty
made for better campaign rhetoric than foreign policy. It compro-
mised on the strange course of observing but not ratifying SALT II.
The Administration has proclaimed its devotion to arms control,
and I accept its sincerity. The challenge it faces is to resolve, final-
ly, the intellectual problem of how to ensure strategic stability
amid the revolution wrought by thousands of warheads on only
hundreds of launchers.

THE PRESENT DILEMMA

There is a "flaw" in SALT II, though not the one usually dis-
cussed. It is that SALT limitations were expressed in terms of num-
bers of delivery vehicles at the precise moment when the increase
in the accuracy and number of warheads caused numerical
"equivalence" to be more and more beside the point. With each
side possessing the capability (the Soviets' actual, ours latent) of
making its opponent vulnerable, arms control after a decade of
negotiations had returned to its starting point.

This problem cannot be solved simply by deep reductions in
delivery vehicles. Given the disproportion between warheads
and launchers, reductions either are irrelevant to the danger
of surprise attack or, perversely, *increase* it. With present
weapons, the greater the reductions, the fewer would be the tar-

gets for a first strike and the greater would be its calculability.

This is well illustrated by President Reagan's Eureka Col-
lege speech of May 9, 1982, which contains the basic American
proposal for the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START). It was
an advance over an uncontrolled arms race because it set a ceil-
ing. It was an advance over SALT in relating the ceiling to war-
heads rather than launchers. And it stressed significant mutual
reductions of strategic forces. It was a brave first attempt that
unfortunately did not solve the root issue of multiple warheads.
Even were the Soviets to accept our proposal, the Eureka scheme
would at best maintain the existing balance; it would almost
surely worsen rather than ease our dangers. A quick glance at
the numbers involved illustrates the problem.

Under SALT II about 5,000 Soviet land-based warheads
would be aimed at 1,054 American launchers—a ratio of
less than 5 to 1. The Eureka proposal would reduce the per-
mitted warheads to 2,500 on at most 400 launchers. Even were it
technically feasible to distribute warheads in this manner (and
the Soviets would have to redesign their entire strategic force to
do so), this would give the side striking first an advantage in war-
heads to targets of better than 6 to 1. And at these lower numbers
of launchers an attack would be far more calculable.

The Eureka proposal would also establish limits of 2,500 to
3,000 sea-based warheads. This would force a reduction of our
submarine force from the 42 permitted under SALT to 15 or fewer
(depending on the type). We could keep at most ten vessels at sea
at one time, vs. the current 25 to 30. If there are any advances in
antisubmarine warfare technology, as is probable, arms control
will have increased the vulnerability of both our underwater and

our land-based strategic forces—the supreme
irony. The Soviet proposal of a flat 25% re-
duction in launchers, while simpler, suffers
from the identical disability.

In short, a negotiation begun more than a
decade ago to enhance stability and reduce
vulnerability is in danger of achieving the op-
posite. Arms control is heading for an intel-
lectual dead end.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?

We face two related tasks. First, arms con-
trol requires not so much a new proposal as a
fresh concept. Second, it must become an or-
ganic part of defense policy. This requires that
we return to first principles. The principal
cause of instability with current weapons sys-
tems is the disproportion between warheads

and launchers. All the remedies that have been tried are vulnera-
ble to technology: hardening to accuracy, sea-based systems to ad-
vances in antisubmarine technology. There's no effective or intel-
lectually adequate solution to this problem except to seek to
eliminate multiple warheads within a fixed time, say ten years.

Fortunately technology, which creates the problem, can offer
a solution. According to published literature, it is possible to de-
velop a mobile missile that could be protected in a heavily ar-
mored canister. Its mobility alone could complicate the task of the
attacker. Moreover, the new missile could—and should—be
equipped with a single warhead. With strategic forces of such de-
sign, numerical limits would be both simple to establish and far
more significant than under SALT II or START.

Once we decided on such an approach, we could proceed with
it either as part of an arms control agreement or unilaterally as
part of our defense policy. For example, we could propose to re-
duce and transform the strategic arsenals of both sides to a low
number of single-warhead missiles over a ten-year period. The
totals should be set at the lowest number that could be monitored;
that is, at a level where a violation significant enough to overturn
it could not be hidden. The permitted number of missiles may be
as low as 500; at any rate, the number of warheads in this scheme
would be only a small fraction of current totals, probably 20% or
less of the Eureka scheme. Each side would be free to choose
whether the permitted missiles would be mobile or in silos. Mobil-
ity would reduce the incentive of surprise attack, but equivalence

TIME, MARCH 21, 1983

25

THE WASHINGTON POST, SUNDAY, JANUARY 30, 1983

# Mr. Shultz Goes to China

### Henry A. Kissinger

## What Should Come Out of This Trip

Sino-American relations have been on a roller coaster for the past generation. In World War II and its immediate aftermath, America somewhat sentimentally tried to promote a weak China, torn by civil war, to great-power status. Then, with the Chinese revolution and the Korean war, came a swing to the other extreme of seemingly permanent hostility, with contact between the two countries to all intents and purposes broken off. When a rapprochement finally took place in the early 1970s, many Americans fell prey to our nostalgic national habit of equating relations among states with relations among people and endowed it with qualities of personal friendship.

In the nature of things, this raised exaggerated expectations that could not be fulfilled. Almost inevitably, strains have developed. To some extent occasional squabbles are a sign of maturation, of a normal relationship between countries. Still, the tensions in recent years have gained their own momentum, threatening to damage the important common long-term objectives of both countries.

It is to reverse this process that Secretary of State Shultz has set out on his journey.

Conventional wisdom has it that the current difficulties are largely due to the clumsiness of the Reagan administration. To be sure, some of the exuberant early statements on Taiwan will not be landmarks in the annals of diplomatic finesse, and the unpropitious timing of the textile issue just prior to the Shultz visit makes one wonder about the coordinating mechanism in our government.

The fact remains that the administration has gone to extraordinary lengths—even more remarkable given its starting point—to emphasize its commitment to close ties with Peking. And it took two to make the textile issue intractable. The causes of the strains in Washington-Peking relations go deeper; they antedate the Reagan administration; they have been exacerbated in both countries by errors of judgment and domestic conflicts.

These strains originate, indeed, in the two countries' differing approaches to foreign policy. During the early period of renewed contacts, much innocent nonsense could be heard about how "unnatural" had been the estrangement between the American and the Chinese peoples,

as if rapprochement fulfilled a deep emotional necessity on both sides. The facts were far more prosaic. China, in its marvelous history of 3,000 years, has never had the experience of dealing with other societies on the basis of equality. It has felt most comfortable when able to be aloof, self-contained, as a culture whose uniqueness placed it beyond the reach of outsiders.

For China there was nothing at all unnatural about living apart from America. Nor can it be said that in 1971 there was a groundswell of grass-roots demand in the United States for an opening to China.

What brought the two nations together was not sentiment but awareness of a common threat. The Chinese saw an awesome buildup of Soviet military power along the border, including nuclear missiles and 40 modern combat divisions. By 1969, it was obvious to China that Marxist theory not only did not shield it from military pressures on the contrary, the newly promulgated "Brezhnev doctrine" claimed the right to enforce the unity of the Communist world by military might.

For the United States, opportunity combined with necessity. The expansion of Soviet military power and constant Soviet pressures on the international equilibrium had been for us a familiar feature of the postwar scene. But it was only in the late 1960s that the United States began to sense the limits of its power and to recognize the need for associations beyond our traditional allies. The process was given impetus by a sophisticated president to whom an unsentimental perception of power relationships was congenial rather than anathema. There were powerful incentives for a rapprochement with China: to balance the Soviet Union, either to restrain it or to induce it to negotiate seriously; to isolate Hanoi to give it an incentive to end the Vietnam War; to maintain American self-assurance amid our messy withdrawal from Indochina by demonstrating our continuing capacity for major positive initiatives.

The new links between China and America flourished so long as the two sides kept their eye on the common objective of resisting what their communiqués came to describe as "hegemony." Simply put, this meant resistance to Soviet attempts to overturn the global balance of power and some agreement on an appropriate strategy to achieve this end.

There were inevitable differences in tactical perspective. In the developing world, Peking

often relied on competing with Moscow in appealing to radical movements, which led it to back some leaders and causes that were hardly America's favorites. Also, China was leery of Washington's relations with Moscow, explicitly fearful that détente would undermine the West's willingness to stand up to the Soviet Union, implicitly suspicious that it might lead to a U.S.-Soviet arrangement at China's expense.

These differences were downgraded early on because each side had an interest in rapid and visible progress—the United States to demonstrate its new options amidst the frustrations of the Vietnam war; China to discourage the Soviet Union from attempting to apply the "Brezhnev doctrine" to it. Thus both sides strove to achieve a coordination of purposes if not of policies. High-level Chinese-American meetings were unique in that they rarely concerned concrete or technical negotiations; most of the conversations dealt with basic geopolitical assessments, projections and strategies. In the touchy field of Washington's relations with Moscow, the United States took great pains to keep Peking fully informed. In this manner, tactical differences were kept in perspective and not allowed to harm the essentials of Sino-U.S. relations. In that process, interestingly enough, our relations with the Soviet Union prospered as well.

The succeeding years made this mutual restraint increasingly difficult to maintain. Domestic upheavals preoccupied the leaders of both countries and spilled over into foreign policy. At first, relations with Moscow were at the heart of the problem. The United States always had a difficult passage to navigate: if Washington grew too exuberant about détente, we would disquiet Peking and stampe de it into its own overtures to Moscow in order to avoid being left at the gate. If we were too intransigent, Peking might take our counterbalancing of Moscow for granted and be tempted to flaunt opposition to us on bilateral issues or in some areas of the world without fear of being left alone with the Soviet Union.

The Carter administration oscillated between both extremes. The Vance wing gave clear priority to improving relations with Moscow; the Brzezinski wing spoke of a "China card" as if Peking were a weapon in our arsenal. But a card can be discarded as well as played; the

Page Two

unintended consequence was the unnerving in-
ference that, for the right price from Moscow,
we might loosen our ties with Peking.

The Reagan administration suffered from no
such ambivalence. Its anti-Soviet pronouncements
seemed to freeze us into a rigid hostility toward the
Soviet Union, which freed China to adopt, at little
risk, a militant Third World posture of "a plague
on both your houses." At the same time, some
members of the new administration expressed
philosophic convictions very different from those
of their predecessors with respect to China itself
and its relationship to Taiwan, causing Peking to
fear (incorrectly) a regression to the Dulles era.

Nor is the fault all on the American side. Since
the first American visit to China, Peking has ex-
perienced major domestic upheavals of its own. It
would be astonishing if China's internal political
battles remained confined to the publicized issues.
Inevitably, some of the stridency in the reaction to
American policies reflected, at least in part, fac-
tional rivalries exploiting the presumed embarrass-
ments of Chinese leaders at not obtaining greater
or more rapid concessions from the United States.
In recent years, the Taiwan issue—which is genu-
inely neuralgic for the Chinese—has nevertheless
been pursued with extraordinary stridency, even
after the Reagan administration had gone out of
its way to emphasize the priority it attached to Pe-
king. No president could have conceded more than
Reagan did in the August 1982 communique.
Nevertheless, the Chinese assault on him inexpil-
cably continued for many months. The ambiguous
reapplication with Moscow as well almost surely-
grows out of some internal maneuvering in the
People's Republic—perhaps an insistence by the
armed forces on some diplomatic respite so long as
the Chinese military buildup receives such a low
domestic priority.

Whatever the cause, U.S.-Chinese relations
are less good than they should be, given the en-
during parallel interests of the two countries in
maintaining the global balance of power.

A stock-taking on both sides is overdue.

The real story of Secretary Shultz's visit to
China will not be the familiar issues, such
as Taiwan, trade and normalization. At
stake will be something intangible: the way the
United States and China view their respective
roles on world affairs and, above all, whether
these views can be harmonized. And this trip is
of enormous importance. It is crucial above all
to be clear about what cannot be accomplished
and should not be attempted.

The Shultz visit cannot finally resolve the
Taiwan issues. In the Shanghai communique of
1972, the accord on normalization of 1979 and
even more explicitly in the communique of
1982, the United States has repeatedly commit-
ted itself to the proposition that there is only
one China and that it would not support any
variety of a two-China solution. Moreover, the
United States has already recognized Peking as
the government of all of China. In the process,
both sides have had to make painful adjust-
ments on such issues as American arms sales.

The future of Taiwan must now be left to his-
torical processes, and for the Chinese on both

sides of the Taiwan straits to work out in their
own subtle ways as Chinese leaders themselves
have affirmed. What remains for both sides is to
live up to the letter and spirit of existing under-
takings. The secretary will surely hear Chinese
views as to what that spirit entails. But formal di-
ploarchy has exhausted the subject; the legal
framework cannot be stretched further.

Nor would the subject of trade by itself war-
rant a trip to Peking by the secretary of state. To
be sure, trade and technology will become in-
creasingly important to China (the speed of its
modernization will depend on it). Both sides have
real complaints: Our tactics in the recent textile
nogotiations have been execrable. Chinese bu-
reaucracy can be maddening for American inves-
tors and companies to deal with. We have been
too slow in fulfilling promises on technology
transfer. The Chinese have changed their eco-
nomic plan repeatedly in recent years.

But at the heart of these issues—and the rea-
son they fester—is the inadequate political pri-
ority that U.S.-Chinese relations have received.
from both sides. Neither country can want to—
nor afford to—win these battles. Both have a
stake in overcoming bureaucratic inertia and
suspiciousness. It is high time for the top lead-
ers of both countries to address once again the
fundamental dimensions of the relationship
and to lift discussions to the strategic plane.

Above all, the United States should show no
nervousness over Sino-Soviet negotiations. A ma-
ture relationship between the United States and
China can only be based on the premise that each
side is quite able to assess its own national inter-
est without outside instruction. Washington and
Peking regulate their relationships with other
countries not as a favor to each other but to serve
their interests in peace, security and progress.

If each side is wise, it will not deliberately jan-
gle the nerves of the other by invoking a Soviet
option. China is entitled to ease tensions with its
northern neighbor if it can—just as we are trying
to do—but it must avoid doing so in a way that
makes Moscow the arbiter of both European-
American and Sino-American relationships. Each
side's freedom of action is in the end restricted by
a set of truths that each ignores at its peril:

First, it is a preeminent strategic interest of
the United States to prevent Soviet domination
of the Eurasian landmass—the much-stressed
hegemony—for that would shift the global bal-
ance of resources and power irreversibly to
Moscow's advantage. A threat to the security of
China would undermine the global equilibrium
as surely as Soviet domination of Europe. And a
weakening of America would jeopardize the se-
curity of China. Statesmen can make use of
these facts; they cannot uninvent them.

Second, China realizes—even when it does not
avow—that its frontier of over 4,000 miles with
the Soviet Union is its fundamental security
problem. As China modernizes, it turns into a
potential long-range danger for Moscow, if only
because it will be less and less subject to intimid-
ation. Peking knows very well, moveover, that it is
being wooed because the United States is in play;
in our absence it might be threatened. Just as the
United States—if it is rational—cannot push
U.S.-Soviet détente to the point of endangering

Chinese security, so China, if it is far sighted, can-
not wish to forfeit America's vital interest in its
security and territorial integrity.

Still, reality is not self-implementing. In
America, each new administration
proudly proclaims the failure of its prede-
cessor and its determination to start afresh—
obligious to the fact that this must unsettle all
leaders who have staked their country's fate on
the previous dispensation. The Chinese ap-
proach is patient and aloof; the Middle King-
dom has a horror of appearing as a supplicant.
Washington acts as if good faith and bonhomie
supply the lubricant of international relations.
Peking assumes that its interlocutor has done
his homework and will understand subtle indi-
jections; the Chinese approach can therefore
appear impersonal, even condescending. To the
Chinese, Americans often appear unstable and
slightly frivolous. To Americans, Chinese occa-
sionally present themselves as either inscruta-
ble or uncommunicative.

Thus both countries need to understand each
other's psychology better and to establish the
confidence that this understanding will last. We
have to face the fact that the Chinese have de-
veloped serious doubts about our political or even
emotional stability. At one point we seemed to in-
vite military cooperation and then backed away.
We promised cooperation on transfer of tech-
nology and in effect reneged. All this raised
doubts whether we were really interested in a
close relationship. Even where Peking acknowl-
edges our commitment to maintain the balance of
power, doubts have developed whether we are
able to interpret it correctly in concrete circum-
stances or act on our interpretation.

When the United States is perceived in Pe-
king as an inadequate guardian of the equilib-
rium, as it was over Angola, Ethiopia, Afghani-
stan and Iran, there are two consequences: Pe-
king is tempted toward Moscow despite all its
suspicions, if only to gain time. And the "bilat-
eral issues of Sino-American diplomacy—like
Taiwan or trade—must carry a disproportion-
ate burden of the relationship.

Chinese policy and rhetoric of the past few
years have made their own contribution to the
impasse. It does not build confidence to urge
the United States into a defense of the balance
of power and then give it equal billing as a
threat to peace with the Soviet "hegemonist."
In recent years the vocabulary of criticism from
Peking has been far more prevalent than that of
cooperation. Peking must understand that only
a relationship built on some strategic under-
standings and cooperation on some interna-
tional issues will command American public
and congressional support for the long term.
We cannot sustain indefinitely a relationship
that in the public mind consists of constant irri-
tation over Taiwan, some economic links (per-
ceived as helping China more than us), and
rhetorical battles in international forums.

Secretary Shultz—I am certain—will seek to
make clear that we view the world in geopoliti-
cal terms relevant to Chinese perceptions.
There are several areas in which Chinese and
American views should be harmonized, or at
least the range of our disagreements under-
stood. First, of course, is policy toward the

REAGAN AND THE RUSSIANS

# How to Deal With Moscow

The causes of tension are real, but so are the opportunities for peace—if we are bold enough.

By HENRY A. KISSINGER

The leadership change in the Soviet Union—only the fourth in its 65-year history—has produced much speculation about new opportunities for a breakthrough toward peace. In an age haunted by the threat of nuclear catastrophe the hope is as natural as it is necessary. Unfortunately some of the fashionable expressions of optimism are a familiar refrain heard at all previous successions. The new Soviet leader, it is said, appears to be more flexible and conciliatory than his predecessor (in this case it is because he supposedly likes Western music and reads English, hence understands us). We must strengthen, we hear, the "doves" against the "hawks" who were alleged, even in Stalin's day, to have been menacing the "reasonable and sensible and understanding" incumbent Soviet leader.

There are indeed new opportunities for peace. The 1980s may well give us a chance to make major progress with the Soviets on arms control, economic relations and, ultimately, even on developing some ground rules for international conduct. But Yuri Andropov's fondness for American novels and Western

fantasies about intrigues between hawks and doves in the Kremlin are not the sources of these opportunities. The arms race imposes dangerous uncertainties and staggering financial burdens on both parties, but especially on the Soviet Union. The recession in the West and economic stagnation in the communist world may compel both of us to re-evaluate our high levels of military spending as well as to seek mutually beneficial economic cooperation. And the increasing complexity of a world filled with regional tensions reminds both sides of the necessity of cooperation, lest a minor crisis explode into a major one, as it did in 1914.

The prospects for accord are not enhanced—they are in fact undermined—by the congenital Western tendency to psychoanalyze the personality of a particular Soviet leader or to search without evidence for some faction in the Kremlin allegedly devoted to peace in the abstract. I do not pretend to know what

Yuri Andropov's convictions are; I am certain that nobody in our government knows either. Only a few short weeks ago Western experts were nearly unanimous in the view that Brezhnev was the principal advocate of détente in the Kremlin—a theory to which, with qualifications, I myself subscribe. Why then should his death improve the prospects for a relaxation of tensions? How did the man who headed the Soviet secret police for 15 years—suppressing dissidents and inventing such “humane” devices as mental hospitals for intellectual critics—suddenly emerge as a closet liberal?

Even if Andropov were such a man, the power of the general secretary of the Communist Party, as it has evolved since the death of Stalin in 1953, is far from absolute—especially at the beginning of his term of office. In many fields of policy it is doubtful, in fact, that the general secretary has the discretionary power of the American president. His colleagues are suspicious, hardened by the power struggles of a lifetime. They are jealous of prerogatives that they have earned so painfully in their progress through the unwieldy bureaucracies they now control. Andropov can nudge them in his preferred direction, but any dramatic change endangers his position: Khrushchev's fate defined the risks of unorthodoxy for his successors. Brezhnev, in any event, never seriously tested these limits.

To base hopes for relaxation of tensions on changes in leadership undermines the very real

opportunities for diplomatic progress. It tempts the Soviet leaders into deferring the fundamental re-examination of their priorities and strategy without which the real causes of tension will continue unrelieved. And it demoralizes the democracies by trivializing the issue. We cannot ask our people to sustain the exertions and perils of a prolonged struggle if the outcome appears to depend so much on the idiosyncrasies of whoever happens to be in power in the Soviet Union.

The beginning of wisdom is therefore to recognize—as Secretary Shultz did in last Thursday's press conference—that there are objective causes of tension. In the last seven years we have seen Cuban troops supported by Soviet logistics in Angola and Ethiopia; Soviet military bases in South Yemen; Soviet military

equipment pouring into the rogue state of Libya; a communist coup in Afghanistan followed by an invasion by the Soviet Army; Soviet political and military support for the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia; and Soviet intelligence support for terrorist groups in many parts of the world. All this has been buttressed by the Soviet Union's relentless military buildup, begun long before that of the Reagan administration.

This is not to deny our own mistakes: our rhetoric has occasionally been exuberant and unrelated to sustainable strategy, our actions have sometimes been unilateral and uncoordinated with our allies, and above all we have allowed divisions both within and among the free nations. It is possible to explain this or that Soviet move as a reaction to our moves; it requires either wishful thinking or a special form of masochism to find the preponderant fault on our side or to ignore the consistent pattern of Soviet conduct which, whether by design or momentum,

Kissinger with Brezhnev (1973): 'Soviet negotiators make concessions to what they define as the balance of forces, not to personalities.'

Helmut Sonnenfeldt

30

NEWSWEEK/NOVEMBER 29, 1982

["Tass", "the Russians were playing the China card", "of \"reneging\" on its promises to Peking. Earlier, Huang Hua told an audience in New York that America's policy toward China adds up to \"big thunder, little raindrops.\"", "Partly as a result of Peking's unhappiness, civilian trade between the United States and China has begun to level off despite a few splashy deals. The Chinese are not rushing to buy American weapons, and Peking has cut back on its intelligence-sharing arrangements with the United States. The Chinese press has begun to compare", "American society unfavorably with Soviet life. American officials are worried by the trend, but they are convinced that the United States still has more to offer China than does the Soviet Union. \"What would the Chinese want to buy from the Russians?\" asked one. On balance, it seems that the Chinese are merely trying to find a safe middle ground between the superpowers, not an alliance with one against the other. Still, it was disconcerting to see the Russians playing the China card—with encouragement from Peking.", "**Misunderstanding:** Reagan had a similar problem on his European front. Two weeks ago, he lifted U.S. sanctions against the new Soviet gas pipeline; in return, he said the allies had agreed to curb high-technology trade with Moscow. The French quickly said they were party to no such agreement, and last week each side blamed the other for the misunderstanding. The Americans asserted that Paris had agreed in principle, and they complained that when Reagan telephoned French President François Mitterrand to work out the last details, Mitterrand did not return the call. The French contended that they had never given their final approval to the deal and that Washington had been told as much before Reagan made his announcement. In any case, what was left of the allied agreement may not be worth much to Reagan; in the free economies of the United States and Western Europe, imposing stricter limits on trade with Moscow will be easier said than done.", "Another point of friction in the alliance is", "arms control. Some of the Europeans seem more eager than Reagan himself for quick progress at the negotiating table. At home, Reagan is under pressure from the nuclear-freeze movement and from the CatholicOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPSOPS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threatens the global equilibrium. It is this assault that must be ended if there is to be true progress toward peace.

Any serious effort to improve relations with the Soviet Union must therefore begin with an analysis of realities—those that impede progress as well as those which, properly managed, offer reason for hope. Among the factors that make for tension, ideology still plays an important role. This may sound surprising in view of the widely reported cynicism of much of the Soviet population. Nor am I suggesting that Lenin is read at bedtime by Soviet leaders as a guide to the next day's actions. The impact of ideology is more intangible: ideological élan has been replaced by an orthodox interpretation of reality; personal conviction has given way to a kind of rote impetus to undermine Western democracies and the international equilibrium. To a Leninist, peace is neither a personal affirmation nor a static condition. It reflects "objective factors"—the balance of power, the state of the economy or technology. No Soviet leader, for example, can justify concessions on the basis of the personal good will or sincerity of a Western leader. Soviet negotiators make concessions to what they define as the balance of forces, not to personalities. They understand concrete proposals based on reciprocity; unilateral gestures are likely to be interpreted as a trick or as a confession of weakness. It is no accident that those presidents most eager for an improvement of relations, most prone to personalize their diplomacy and most resistant to the concept of balance of power suffered a shipwreck with the Kremlin; while those presidents who were least sentimental and insisted on strict reciprocity were the most successful. Absent a balance of forces and a concrete Western program for peace, all pressures within the Soviet society make for a continuation of the present course, if only as a result of philosophical and institutional rigidity.

There are some American conservatives in both parties who luxuriate in the myth of diabolic Soviet planners implementing a detailed master plan for world revolution. No one who has actually dealt with the top Soviet leadership has encountered such types. If they exist, they are well hidden from foreign visitors. The leaders one in fact encounters are tough, ruthless and persistent. But they have originated

no profound initiatives; they have usually avoided great risks. They have expanded into vacuums created by irresolution or weakness. They have systematically accumulated power not in support of a predetermined plan for aggression but rather because the notion that there may be an upper limit of usable power is foreign to them, and instinct leads them to believe that strength is directly translatable into bargaining position and political advantage.

Bureaucratic inertia reinforces ideological proclivity. The irony of communist systems is that they contain the seeds of Bonapartism. For the sole organizations outside the Communist Party with autonomous command structures are the armed forces and the paramilitary units—some 200,000 men strong—of the KGB. One way or another the armed forces emerged as balance wheels in the struggles among the hierarchs of the party; in Poland they have become the heirs of its disintegration, in the Soviet Union the head

of the secret police has taken over. Since no one can achieve eminence—much less the top spot—without military or paramilitary support, these forces are in a position to exact constantly increasing resources. The growth of Soviet military power is built into the system—if only as a result of internecine power struggles. If not matched by the West, this military expansion will inevitably create temptations for blackmail since communist ideology has no rationale for not exploiting a favorable power balance.

Only overriding necessity can alter this rhythm. Fortunately such conditions are likely to appear during the '80s. If Western policy is firm and creative, the Soviet leadership will have every incentive to consider alternatives. For one thing, Soviet foreign policy has not been a startling success. It has been said, and not only as a joke, that the Soviet Union is the only country in the world entirely surrounded by hostile communist states. The satellite orbit is an economic drain and in Poland a demonstration of political as well as economic bankruptcy. Afghanistan is a festering wound. China—whatever temporary tactical adjustments are made—is in the long term a geopolitical nightmare as its billion people modernize along a distant, disputed frontier 4,000 miles long. Lebanon has shown the near irrelevance of Soviet power and influence in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The Soviet adventure in Africa has led to no breakthrough.

Growing pacifism in some European countries is balanced by the advent of a conservative government in Germany and by declining communist strength in France and Spain.

Moreover, the Soviet Union will not be able to evade much longer the contradictions between the necessities of a modern industrialized society and the rigidities of the communist system. What institution in the West could survive with no method for replacing a governing board whose average age is over 70? Where there is no constitutional procedure, loyalty goes to the person, not to the office; power is exercised in a ruthlessly competitive struggle for survival. Leaders dare not relinquish the positions that ensure their power and subordinates dare not urge change because their personal fate is tied to their patron. The trend is toward gerontocracy. It is no accident

that each successive general secretary has come from an age group 10 years older than his predecessor. Stalin was in his 40s when he succeeded to office; Khrushchev was in his 50s; Brezhnev was in his 60s by the time he eclipsed Kosygin; Andropov will be at least 70 before he consolidates his power. His rule will be shadowed from the beginning by the relative imminence of a new succession.

The Soviet system is also an economic disaster. To run a large modern economy by central planning is to institutionalize backwardness and inefficiency. Ironically, the attempt to achieve total predictability leads to near-absolute arbitrariness. Where managers can choose neither customers nor supplies, all incentives work the wrong way. Managers deliberately underestimate their capacity lest the failure to reach an ambitious target reflect on their political reliability. Since they cannot influence allocations except by bureaucratic maneuvers outside the economic process, they

James L. Long Associates

MX-missile launch: 'The West could be heading for unilateral disarmament while sitting on the most destructive arsenal the world has seen.'

NEWSWEEK/NOVEMBER 29, 1982

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ment of the Soviet Union without insisting on some linkage to restrained geopolitical conduct? But tying sanctions to Poland only obscured this more basic issue, which would have had to have been confronted whatever happened to Solidarity. The promised studies of the East-West trade problem can lead to a more unified strategy of economic diplomacy only if our allies do not use them solely to gain time to tranquilize us and if we, for our part, are prepared to include measures that will require sacrifice from us as well, such as limiting grain sales. Both arms control and trade policy need to be freed of the penchant for spasmodic one-shot action and must be made part of a coherent national-security strategy.

The United States must learn to combine military strength with a strategy for peace. A positive diplomatic program is the prerequisite for maintaining public and allied support for a strong defense and foreign policy. It could help us avoid the danger that our body politic will be torn between peace movements advocating forms of escapism and official policies neither supported nor understood by our public. Alternating bellicose rhetoric with sudden concessions only raises doubts about our steadiness among supporters and will be dismissed as mere tactics by opponents. The United States should not be reluctant to make the opening move. Every successful East-West negotiation in the postwar period has resulted from American proposals. Conservative critics cite this as a sign of the West's tendency toward appeasement. And it is true that the free countries' impatience with deadlock enables the Soviets occasionally simply to sit back and elicit even more favorable Western offers. But this is particularly true if the public debate turns on whether to negotiate at all.

If, however, we pre-empt the negotiating process with a bold program, we have a chance to dominate both diplomacy and public discussion. Soviet bureaucratic rigidity is hostile to imagination—in diplomacy as in other fields. Not infrequently they are better placed to respond with a

counterproposal than to originate an offer. We should seize every opportunity to put before them negotiating proposals that reflect our definitions of genuine arms control, proper economic relations and restrained international conduct. It can only be to our advantage to negotiate from our agenda, not theirs.

Thoughtful, concrete proposals prosper better in quiet diplomacy than in dramatic public presentations that invite a propaganda battle. We must persevere in them for the time it takes to test the real, not the propagandistic, Soviet reaction. They must reflect a clear view of our own purposes, including what we will not accept. Our policy must be based on strength to discourage adventurism yet at the same time offer a vision of a better world for all peoples, including the peoples of the Soviet Union.

At home this requires an armistice in the debate that has rent our country for over a decade—between those extreme conservatives who reject all negotiations as a trap and every agreement as a

surrender and those extreme liberals who insist that most of our dangers are self-induced, to be remedied by unremitting pressure on our own government. The administration has the obligation to put forward an intelligible strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union. Until now it has alternated intransient assaults on a caricature of the détente policy of the 1970s with sweeping gestures better suited to fend off pressures than to achieve any permanent result.

But while the administration—as all new administrations—could benefit from greater coherence, it deserves recognition for having created the building blocks of a promising foreign policy. Its firm tone has prevented major Soviet challenges. Beneath the often exuberant rhetoric, the administration's actions have almost invariably been restrained and responsible. The major need is to relate the pieces to each other and to place them under unified strategic and tactical control. There exists, then, every reason for reconciliation.

Without reconciliation there can be no continuity. Without continuity we risk growing irrelevant. Americans do not always understand to what extent our freewheeling process of arriving at decisions unsettles those who have staked their political survival on us. When a foreign statesman follows our lead, he ties his reputation to our judgment. When we reverse course, we in effect undermine him. This happens almost across the board when

administrations change and, too frequently, even within administrations. The history of SALT and of various weapons deployments is replete with examples of key foreign leaders having been left high and dry by sudden and unilateral American reversals of positions. Over time they will seek to free themselves of such risks, thereby reducing our influence and pushing us to the sidelines.

It is equally crucial and more difficult to create a consensus among allies. Right now the allies are divided over the assessment of Soviet conduct, military strategy, important aspects of arms control and many issues outside the NATO area. These divisions invite the Soviets to apply détente selectively in order to split the West so that it can avoid having to face its own dilemmas. It is in fact conceivable that Soviet leaders can project Western disintegration

as a mirror image of Soviet trends described earlier; in that case they will seek to outwait us.

Whether this happens is largely up to us. The West is in the fortunate position that its problems—major as they are—almost without exception can be remedied by a new effort of unity, coherence and will on the part of the democracies. The Soviet Union cannot make this claim; its problems are systematic, structural and fundamental. If we can rally ourselves and develop a vision of a better future, a broad and comprehensive East-West negotiation could be within our grasp.

Henry Kissinger was national-security adviser to Richard Nixon from 1969 to 1975 and secretary of state from 1973 to 1977. In two subsequent NEWSWEEK articles, he will discuss in more detail what a Western negotiating position might include and the political implications of the global economic crisis.

Tass from Sovfoto

Soviet mini-bus factory: 'Shortcomings in Soviet technology cannot be remedied by pep talks; they require a structural change in the Soviet economy.'

NEWSWEEK/NOVEMBER 29, 1982

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UPI

Korniyenko greets Shultz on arrival in Moscow: Let's talk—and argue

# A Plea for ‘Good Relations’

A leading Soviet policymaker calls on the United States to revive the SALT II treaty.

Georgi Korniyenko, 57, is first deputy foreign minister of the Soviet Union and a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee. He played a leading role in the SALT II negotiations. As part of Moscow's current peace offensive, Korniyenko volunteered his views on super-power diplomacy to NEWSWEEK:

The new Soviet leadership attaches great importance to the development of Soviet-American relations, to which the Soviet Union contributed so greatly in the past. That was not a time-serving policy. It was an inalienable part of the strategic line in the foreign policy that the newly elected general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, Yuri Andropov, said our country is determined to continue.

When there is a will on both sides to develop good relations, more so on the basis of equality, then we can make progress and achievements. It was on the basis of equality that our countries did so many good things in developing relations in various spheres, including commercial and economic ones, during the '70s. But of special importance was the fact that the first steps were made toward curbing the arms race, averting the nuclear threat and preventing a war.

If the SALT II treaty had entered into force in time, by Jan. 1, 1982, the Soviet and American strategic arsenals would have been reduced by that treaty. It was planned that as soon as the treaty became effective, the sides would negotiate further reductions and qualitative limitations. As is known, the

SALT II treaty was first postponed and then torpedoed. U.S. officials now claim that SALT II would have benefited the Soviet Union alone. But why then, when it was signed, did the American supreme military command testify to Congress that the treaty was mutually beneficial because it intended to seal an equilibrium? The NATO council, too, officially hailed the treaty.

And why does Washington still insist on keeping to the treaty while refusing to bind its hands with its ratification? Could the American leadership seek a de facto observance of the treaty providing unilateral advantages to the U.S.S.R.? And finally, why did Mr. Weinberger say “no” so emphatically and wave his hands when asked if he would agree to have the American strategic arsenal changed for the Soviet one?

**Stronger:** These are but indications that SALT II does not suit Washington not because it is unequal or fails to seal parity, but because the men there want to have the balance of forces changed in their favor instead of sealing that parity. At first, Mr. Weinberger said bluntly that the U.S.A. must be superior to and stronger than the Soviet Union. Then, men in Washington seemed to be more careful about what they were saying, but as the words changed, the kernel of the matter remained the same.

This position is held by the U.S. delegation at the talks on strategic armaments now going on in Geneva. This position boils down to the following: it is proposed that the Soviet strategic missiles, both land- and sea-based, be dismantled, and that instead of them the Soviet Union should have the

same quantity and ratio of land- and sea-based missiles of the same weight and type and with the same number of warheads as the American side has.

One need not be a military expert to realize that the structure of our countries' strategic forces cannot be similar. The U.S.A. has two coasts—Atlantic and Pacific—which never freeze and allow U.S. submarines to leave their ports at any time to reach the areas from which they can threaten the Soviet Union. If one takes a look at the map of the U.S.S.R., the situation is quite different. This example illustrates that each side had a different approach to planning its strategic forces, with the U.S. emphasizing sea-based missiles and the U.S.S.R. land-based missiles. This example also makes clear the illogical and unrealistic position of the American side at the Geneva talks.

The Soviet Union is still prepared to put into effect the SALT II treaty, the result of a seven-year effort in which even the slightest details have been thoroughly considered. Yet we aren't holding a stone-deaf position on the issue. We have wasted time during which we could have made progress, and we are prepared to start making that progress now. According to the SALT II treaty, both sides were supposed to cut their strategic arsenals by 10 percent. We are ready to consider a 25 percent reduction of the arsenals.

**Muscles:** However, all the reductions, as well as the maximum limitation of the qualitative improvement of nuclear armaments, must be based on the principle of equality and equal security, i.e., with maintaining the equilibrium sealed by the SALT II treaty. But we do not feel that the U.S.A. wants to do so and deal with the U.S.S.R. on an equal basis. Apparently, some people would like to build up their military muscles and, while using the economic levers, force us to alter our missiles after the likeness of the American ones and, moreover, make us alter ourselves, too, in their own image so that we would develop a similar approach to human and other values, freedoms and rights.

We are prepared to exchange opinions and argue on that score. We have our own profound beliefs in what is better and what is worse, but as regards interstate relations, we are for peaceful coexistence and the right of nations to choose independently what social system they prefer. Any attempts to alter each other are futile and dangerous.

At one time some people tried to alter you and us. During World War II we fought jointly against our common enemy—fascism—in spite of the differences between our political systems and ideologies.

And now we also have a common enemy, hardly less dangerous than the one we fought together. That enemy is the danger of a nuclear catastrophe, and it threatens to destroy human civilization. So all of us, whether we read the Bible or the works of Marx and Lenin, must do our best to avert this threat and bring it to naught. Not only our governments but also all the citizens of our countries are responsible for that.

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REFLECTIONS ON A PARTNERSHIP:
BRITISH AND AMERICAN ATTITUDES
TO POSTWAR FOREIGN POLICY*

Henry A. Kissinger†

MICHAEL HOWARD, in his earlier lecture in this series, confirmed what I had suspected: that the United States deserves some of the credit for Britain's decision to create a Foreign Office in the first place. The Foreign Office was founded only a few months after the battle of Yorktown. The 'politicians' of the time having just mislaid America, the need was evidently felt for some more professional machinery to run Britain's newly expanded sphere of 'foreign' affairs.

Since then, Britain and America have never ceased to play important roles in each other's history. On the whole it has been a productive and creative relationship, perhaps one of the most durable in the history of nations. In the last 200 years, we have approached each other sometimes warily, and dealt with foreign affairs often from different perspectives. Still, on balance the relationship has been of considerable benefit to world peace. This has been true particularly of the period since the Second World War.

All accounts of the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War and in the early postwar period draw attention to the significant differences in philosophy between Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, reflecting our different national histories. America, which had never experienced a foreign threat to its survival, considered wars an historical aberration caused by evil men or institutions; we were preoccupied with victory defined as the unconditional surrender of the Axis. Britain had seen aggression take too many forms to risk so personal a view of history; she had her eyes on the postwar world and sought to gear wartime strategy towards forestalling Soviet domination of Central Europe. Many American leaders condemned Churchill as needlessly obsessed with power politics, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too colonialist in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little interested in building the fundamentally new international order towards which American idealism has always tended. The British undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic, and evading responsibility for helping secure

* Dr Kissinger was Secretary of State, United States, 1973-77, and has been University Professor of Diplomacy, School of Foreign Service, Georgetown University, since 1977.

† This article is the text of a lecture given by Dr Kissinger at Chatham House in May 1982 to mark the Bicentenary of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. His lecture, and three other lectures given to mark the same anniversary, have been published in *The Listener*.

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the global equilibrium. The dispute was resolved according to American preferences—in my view, to the detriment of postwar security.

Fortunately, Britain had a decisive influence over America's rapid awakening to maturity in the following years. In the 1940s and 1950s our two countries responded together to the geopolitical challenge of the Soviet Union and took the lead in creating the structures of Western co-operation for the postwar era which brought a generation of security and prosperity. In the process a rather ironic reversal of positions took place. Today it is the United States that is accused of being obsessed with the balance of power, and it is our European allies who are charged by us with moralistic escapism.

I believe, nevertheless, that the extraordinary partnership among the democracies will overcome the occasional squabbles that form the headlines of the day and, even more important, meet the objective new challenges that our countries face.

## Philosophies of foreign policy

The disputes between Britain and America during the Second World War and after were, of course, not an accident. British policy drew upon two centuries of experience with the European balance of power, America on two centuries of rejecting it. Whereas America had always imagined itself isolated from world affairs, Britain for centuries was keenly alert to the potential danger that any country's domination of the European continent—whatever its domestic structure or method of dominance—placed British survival at risk. Where Americans have tended to believe that wars were caused by the moral failure of leaders, the British view is that aggression has thrived on opportunity as much as on moral propensity, and must be restrained by some kind of balance of power. Where Americans treated diplomacy as episodic—a series of isolated problems to be solved on their merits—the British have always understood it as an organic historical process requiring constant manipulation to keep it moving in the right direction.

Britain has rarely proclaimed moral absolutes or rested her faith in the ultimate efficacy of technology, despite her achievements in this field. Philosophically, she remains Hobbesian: She expects the worst and is rarely disappointed. In moral matters Britain has traditionally practiced a convenient form of ethical egoism, believing that what was good for Britain was best for the rest. This requires a certain historical self-confidence, not to say nerve, to carry it off. But Britain has always practised it with an innate moderation and civilised humaneness such that her presumption was frequently justified. In the nineteenth century, British policy was a—perhaps *the*—principal factor in a European system that kept the peace for 99 years without a major war.

American foreign policy is the product of a very different tradition. The Founding Fathers, to be sure, were sophisticated men who understood the European balance of power and skilfully manipulated it to win independence.

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But for a century and more after that, America, comfortably protected by two oceans—which in turn were secured by the Royal Navy—developed the idiosyncratic notion that a fortunate accident was a natural state of affairs, that our involvement in world politics was purely a matter of choice. Where George Canning viewed the Monroe Doctrine in terms of the world equilibrium, ‘call[ing] the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old’, Americans imagined the entire Western Hemisphere a special case, safely insulated from the rest of the world. We had created a nation consciously dedicated to ‘self-evident’ truths, and it was taken for granted in most American public discourse that our participation (or non-participation) in the world could be guided exclusively by moral precepts. That geography gave us this luxury was only evidence of God’s blessing upon us; we owed Him that *quid pro quo*. The competitive, sometimes cynical, and always relativistic style of European power politics was viewed in America as an unsavoury example of what to avoid and as further evidence of our moral superiority.

In American discussion of foreign policy, even through much of the twentieth century, the phrase ‘balance of power’ was hardly ever written or spoken without a pejorative adjective in front of it—the ‘outmoded’ balance of power, the ‘discredited’ balance of power. When Woodrow Wilson took America into the First World War, it was in the expectation that under American influence the postwar settlement would be governed by a ‘new and more wholesome diplomacy’ transcending the wheeling and dealing, secrecy and undemocratic practices that were thought to have produced the Great War.¹ Franklin Roosevelt, on his return from the Crimean Conference in 1945, told the Congress of his hope that the postwar era would ‘spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed’.² Both Wilson and Roosevelt put their faith in a universal organisation of collective security in which the peace-loving nations would combine to deter, or combat, the aggressors. It was assumed that all nations would come to the same conclusions regarding what constituted aggression and be equally willing to resist it, no matter where it occurred, regardless of how far from their borders, irrespective of the national interest involved.

In the American view, nations were either inherently peaceful or inherently warlike. Hence, after the Second World War the ‘peace-loving’ United States, Britain and Soviet Union had together to police the world against Germany and Japan, even though the former enemies had been rendered impotent by unconditional surrender. If there were doubts about the peace-loving virtue of our wartime allies, they seemed to many American leaders to apply as much to Britain as to the Soviet Union: Roosevelt toyed with the idea of nonalignment between a balance-of-power-oriented, colonialist Britain and an ideologically

1. Woodrow Wilson, address before the League to Enforce Peace, Washington, D.C., May 27, 1916.

2. Franklin D. Roosevelt, address to Congress on the Yalta (Crimea) Conference, March 1, 1945.

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obstreperous Soviet Union. Even Truman took care not to meet with Churchill in advance of the Potsdam conference; he did not want to appear to be 'lining up' with Britain against Russia. The secret dream of American leaders, if great power conflict proved unavoidable, was to arrogate to themselves the role to which the nonaligned later aspired: that of moral arbiter, hurling condescending judgments down at all those engaged in the dirty game of international diplomacy.

As late as 1949, the Department of State submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee a memorandum that strove mightily to distinguish the new North Atlantic Treaty from traditional military alliances and above all from any relationship to the very balance of power it was supposed to establish. The Treaty, the memorandum said, 'is directed against no one; it is directed solely against aggression. It seeks not to influence any shifting "balance of power" but to strengthen the "balance of principle".'³

American attitudes until quite literally the last decade have embodied a faith that historical experience can be transcended, that problems can be solved permanently, that harmony can be the natural state of mankind. Thus our diplomacy has often stressed the concepts of international law, with its procedures of arbitration and peaceful settlement, as if all political disputes were legal issues, on the premise that reasonable men and women could always find agreement on some equitable basis. Theodore Roosevelt won a Nobel Peace Prize for helping mediate the Russo-Japanese war in 1905; thus Alexander Haig's recent efforts in the Falklands dispute have a long tradition behind them. There is also a perennial American assumption that economic well-being automatically ensures political stability, a belief which has animated American policies from Herbert Hoover's relief efforts after the First World War to the Marshall Plan to the recent Caribbean initiative—never mind that, in many parts of the world, the timeframes for economic progress and the achievement of political stability may be seriously out of phase. In our participation in the two world wars of this century, and afterwards, our bursts of energy were coupled with the conviction that our exertions had a terminal date, after which the natural harmony among nations would be either restored or instituted.

Disillusionment was inevitable. America fluctuated between moral crusading and frustrated isolationism, between overextension and escapism, between extremes of intransigence and conciliation. But history was kind to us. For a long time it spared us from the need to face up to fundamental choices. Not being called upon to help preserve the equilibrium—a service rendered gratis by Great Britain—we could avoid the responsibility of permanent involvement in world politics, of unending exertion with no final answers or ultimate resolution.

Even when the United States finally entered the world stage of permanent

3. U.S. Senate, Committee on Foreign Relations, *Hearings on the North Atlantic Treaty*, 81st Cong., 1st sess. (1949), pt. 1, Appendix, p. 337.

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peacetime diplomacy after 1945, it did so under conditions that seemed to confirm our historical expectations. For several decades we had the overwhelming resources to give effect to our prescriptions, and thus conducted foreign policy by analogy to the great formative experiences of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal translated into the Marshall Plan; resistance to Nazi aggression translated into the Korean 'police action' and the policy of 'containment'. We tended to attribute our dominance in the Western Alliance to the virtue of our motives rather than to the preponderance of our power. In fact, the United States enjoyed nearly half the world's Gross National Product and a monopoly in the atomic bomb; our NATO allies, given their dependence, conducted themselves less as sovereign nations than as lobbyists in Washington decision-making. It was therefore a rude awakening when in the 1960s and 1970s the United States became conscious of the limits of even its resources. Now with a little over a fifth of the world's GNP, America was powerful but no longer dominant. Vietnam was the trauma and the catharsis but the recognition was bound to come in any event. Starting in the 1970s, for the first time, the United States has had to conduct a foreign policy in the sense with which Europeans have always been familiar: as one country among many, unable either to dominate the world or escape from it, with the necessity of accommodation, manoeuvre, a sensitivity to marginal shifts in the balance of power, an awareness of continuity and of the interconnections between events.

Our perennial domestic debates reflect the pain, and incompleteness, of that adjustment. The American Right still yearns for ideological victory without geopolitical effort; the American Left still dreams of reforming the world through the exercise of goodwill unsullied by power. We are edging towards a synthesis but it will be a slow, painful, perhaps bitter process.

## The nature of the 'special relationship'

That two countries with such divergent traditions could form a durable partnership is remarkable in itself. The periods of the close Anglo-American 'special relationship', the object of such nostalgia today, were also times of occasional mutual exasperation.

For quite a while we stressed different aspects of our histories; in more senses than one, we lived in different time zones. It was only some while after the settlement of the *Alabama* affair just over a century ago that American and British interests began to run parallel. The need for intimacy seemed to be greater on this side of the Atlantic (that is, in Britain), and Britain began to avoid alliances that could entangle her against the United States—including a tantalising offer from Germany around the turn of the century.⁴ American memories were longer: the First World War was a temporary exertion, after which we withdrew into isolationism; during the 1920s the US Navy

4. See R. B. Mowat, *The Diplomatic Relations of Great Britain and the United States* (London: 1925), p. 92.

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Department still maintained a 'Red Plan' to deal with the contingency of conflict with the British fleet.

It was not until the war with Hitler that the gap closed permanently. In the immediate postwar period we were held together by strategic circumstances which imposed the same necessities, whatever the different philosophical premises. American resources and organisation and technological genius, and British experience and understanding of the European balance of power, were both needed to resist the sudden threat from the Soviet Union. The Marshall Plan and North Atlantic Treaty, while formally American initiatives, were inconceivable without British advice and British efforts to organise a rapid and effective European response. Ernest Bevin was the indispensable architect of the European response as well as the staunch helmsman of Britain's journey from power to influence.

Even then, Anglo-American difficulties persisted occasionally. The anguished disagreements over immigration into Palestine; the misunderstandings over atomic co-operation; competition over Iranian oil; the abrupt, unilateral ending of Lend-Lease; the race to demobilise; these were only some of the items in a stream of irritants. More serious policy differences were to follow in the 1950s, causing Anthony Eden to reflect on the 'tough reality of Anglo-American relations'.⁵ Even when the politics were parallel, the personalities were often divergent. Eden and Dean Acheson were friends as well as colleagues; the same could not be said for Eden and John Foster Dulles. Misunderstandings and conflicts of interest continued through European integration, the rearmament of Germany, and Indochina, right up to the tragic climax of Suez—to which I will return below.

That these irritations never shook the underlying unity was due to statesmanship on both sides. One factor was a brilliant British adjustment to new circumstances. To the outside world it may have seemed that Britain clung far too long to the illusion of Empire; in her relations with Washington, she proved that an old country was beyond self-deception on fundamentals. Bevin, the unlikely originator of this revolution in British diplomacy, shrewdly calculated that Britain was not powerful enough to influence American policy by conventional methods of pressure or balancing of risks. But by discreet advice, the wisdom of experience, and the presupposition of common aims, she could make herself indispensable, so that American leaders no longer thought of consultations with London as a special favour but as an inherent component of their own decision-making. The wartime habit of intimate, informal collaboration thus became a permanent practice, obviously because it was valuable to both sides.

The ease and informality of the Anglo-American partnership has been a source of wonder—and no little resentment—to third countries. Our postwar diplomatic history is littered with Anglo-American 'arrangements' and 'understandings', sometimes on crucial issues, never put into formal

5. Anthony Eden, *Full Circle* (Cambridge, Mass.; Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 225.

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documents. The stationing of B-29 atomic bombers in Britain in 1948 was agreed between political and service leaders but not committed to writing. Less happily, only general principles were recorded when Churchill and Roosevelt agreed in 1942 to co-operate in producing the atomic bomb. After Roosevelt died, Clement Attlee reflected with admirable restraint: 'We were allies and friends. It didn't seem necessary to tie everything up'.⁶

The British were so matter-of-factly helpful that they became a participant in internal American deliberations, to a degree probably never before practised between sovereign nations. In my period in office, the British played a seminal part in certain American bilateral negotiations with the Soviet Union—indeed, they helped draft the key document. In my White House incarnation then, I kept the British Foreign Office better informed and more closely engaged than I did the American State Department—a practice which, with all affection for things British, I would not recommend be made permanent. But it was symptomatic.⁷

For a brief moment in the early 1970s, Britain seemed to decide to put an end to the special relationship in order to prove itself a 'good European' in the year that it entered the European Community. The attempt was short-lived.⁸ By 1976, James Callaghan and Anthony Crosland had restored the traditional close relationship—without resurrecting the label—and it was enormously valuable, indeed indispensable, in the Southern Africa negotiations that began in that year. In my negotiations over Rhodesia I worked from a British draft with British spelling even when I did not fully grasp the distinction between a working paper and a Cabinet-approved document. The practice of collaboration thrives to our day, with occasional ups and downs, but even in the recent Falkland crisis, an inevitable return to the main theme of the relationship.

## Britain, America and Europe

Clearly, British membership of the European Community has added a new dimension. But the solution, in my view, is not to sacrifice the special intimacy of the Anglo-American connection on the altar of the European idea, but rather to replicate it on a wider plane of America's relations with all its European allies; whether bilaterally or with a politically cohesive European Community is for Europe to decide. The special frankness and trust that may have been originally resorted to as compensation for a disparity of power may now be even more essential in the partnership of equals that must characterise the future relations between America and Europe.

Europe has been a traumatic issue for both Britain and the United States. Americans often forget that Britain, too, has been a reluctant internationalist, at least as far as Europe was concerned. Tradition pulled Britain across distant

6. Clement Attlee and Francis Williams, *Twilight of Empire* (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1962), p. 108.

7. Henry Kissinger, *Years of Upheaval* (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson/Michael Joseph, 1982), pp. 274-86.

8. *Ibid.*, pp. 140-43.

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oceans. The glory of foreign policy was identified with Empire and Commonwealth, its problems and perils with the continent of Europe. It was Czechoslovakia, in the heart of Europe, which Chamberlain described as a small faraway country of which Britons knew little—after a century and a half of fighting on the borders of India.

In Britain, reluctance to enter Europe was always bipartisan, and somewhat mystical. Eden once said that Britain knew 'in her bones' that she could not join it; and Hugh Gaitskell spoke of the impossibility of throwing off 1,000 years of history. But there were more substantial reasons: worries about sovereignty—which on the Left were combined with concern for the unfettered development of socialist planning; an instinctive disinclination to deal with continentals on an equal footing; trade ties with the Commonwealth; and the special relationship. Even Churchill, despite his intimations of the future, remained as ambivalent in government as he had been prescient in opposition when he had called as early as 1947 for a United States of Europe. In office, he never quite found the balance among his three concentric circles—the Commonwealth, Europe, and the English-speaking peoples.

Only after Suez did the risks of isolation become obvious, as did the opportunity that the emerging Europe offered for exercising in a different but equally effective form Britain's traditional role of guardian of continental equilibrium. If the economic benefits were ambiguous, the political necessities were not: only as one of the leaders of Europe could Britain continue to play a major role on the world scene.

By entering the European Community, Britain did not abandon her instinct for equilibrium. But for the first time in peacetime she threw herself into the scales. As I have already noted, she did so with the fervour of a frustrated convert who had been kept waiting for a decade at the doors of destiny.

If Britain has had a difficult adjustment to make in its relationship to Europe, so has the United States. After the war, American leaders applied a heavy dose of their usual missionary zeal and the full rigour of their 'problem-solving' energy to the task of promoting European integration. Federalism, of course, was a hallowed American principle. Shortly after the Philadelphia Convention, Benjamin Franklin was urging on the French the attractions of a federal Europe. A similar evangelism, in a more practical form, shone through the Marshall Plan. Even Acheson, not usually seen as a moralist, was carried away by the European idea; he recalled listening to Robert Schuman outlining his plan for a European Coal and Steel Community: 'As he talked, we caught his enthusiasm and the breadth of his thought', Acheson wrote, 'the rebirth of Europe, which, as an entity, had been in eclipse since the Reformation'.⁹

Despite the idealism of our commitment, tensions between America and a unified Europe were inherent in the logic of what we were so enthusiastically endorsing. We had grown accustomed to the devastated, temporarily impotent Europe of the postwar period; we forgot the Europe that had launched the

9. Dean Acheson, *Sketches from Life* (New York: Harper & Bros., 1961), pp. 36-37.

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industrial revolution, invented the concept of national sovereignty, and operated a complex balance of power for three centuries. A Europe reasserting its personality was bound to seek to redress the balance of influence with the United States; Charles de Gaulle in this respect differed largely in method from Jean Monnet, who never disguised his hopes for a more powerful and effective European voice.

Thus, later American disillusionments were inherent in our goals. It was naive for Americans to take for granted that a federal Europe would be more like us, that a united Europe would automatically help carry our burdens, and that it would continue to follow American global prescriptions as it had in the early postwar years of European recovery and dependency. That cannot be so.

Yet even if some of our more unhistorical expectations were disappointed, our original judgment was correct: European unity, strength, and self-confidence are essential for the future of the West. It is beyond the psychological resources of the United States—not only the physical—to be the sole or even the principal centre of initiative and responsibility in the non-Communist world. (This is one reason why I always favoured the independent British and French nuclear deterrents.) American support for European unification was therefore an expression of self-interest even if it paraded under the banner of altruism; it was to our advantage even if we paid occasionally in the coin of clashing perspectives—provided we found a way toward creative unity on fundamentals.

## Britain, Europe, the United States and the Soviet Union

The central foreign policy problem that Britain, America, and Europe have had to confront together since 1945 is, of course, the Soviet Union. And the need for creative unity among us as we do so has not ended.

One thing that is clear from the historical record is that neither side of the Atlantic has had a monopoly of special insight into this problem. As soon as the war had ended, both Britain and America fell over each other in the rush to demobilise. All American troops were due to leave Europe by 1947. After a visit to Moscow in May 1945, Harry Hopkins told President Truman that he saw no major sources of conflict between America and Russia on the horizon.¹⁰

After Churchill left office, British policy for a brief period ironically fell prey to some of the same illusions that had bedevilled American leaders. The Labour Government at first hoped that 'Left could speak unto Left'. The brief moment of nostalgia reflected the hope that Britain would stand neither for the unbridled capitalism of the United States nor for Soviet communism. A resolution calling for 'progressive unity' between the British Labour and Communist parties was only narrowly defeated. There is not much doubt, in fact, that once the United States was committed after the Greek-Turkish aid programme in 1947, some in Britain were tempted—as Roosevelt and

10. Attlee and Williams, op. cit., p. 161.

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Truman a few years earlier—by the idea of enhancing British influence by remaining aloof not just from Europe but from the emerging superpower confrontation, adding to her traditional role as manipulator of the balance in Europe that of intermediary between East and West. This attitude has reappeared in some circles in Europe today.

No amount of revisionist distortion can change the fact that it was the Kremlin which turned Anglo-American hopes into mirages. There is today in some circles a curious assumption of diabolic Soviet cleverness and foresight. Yet in those years, Stalin's conduct of relations with his former allies made him the chief architect of NATO. A few more fleeting smiles on the wooden features of Mr Molotov, and a modicum of self-restraint and diplomatic delicacy, would have done much to prise apart the young and still brittle Atlantic co-operation: and all the boys might have been home, as planned, by 1947.

The Soviets did not manage this degree of subtlety. Instead, Moscow went out of its way to estrange and alienate, where it could have softened through a little courtship, however heavy-handed. The Russians declined Britain's invitation to send a Soviet contingent to a victory parade, and Stalin sidestepped an offer from Attlee to renew the wartime alliance. Every door that Ernest Bevin, mindful of the influential left wing of his party, was careful to keep open was resoundingly slammed and loudly bolted. As was soon to be shown in the persecution of social democrats in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union countenanced only one form of 'socialism' and fought other, democratic versions even more bitterly than capitalists. The outright Soviet rejection of the Marshall Plan was an egregious blunder; a mild expression of interest, however disingenuous, could have caused untold disruption and delay in the Western camp. Acceptance would have changed the face of postwar politics.

It was one of those moments when America's activism and idealism brought out the best in her. The 1940s were years of imaginative men and bold measures on both sides of the Atlantic: The Marshall Plan, the Truman Doctrine, the Berlin airlift, the Brussels treaty, and finally NATO, were inspired and creative initiatives. And in the years following, the United States and its allies stood fast against Soviet pressures and blackmail in crises over Korea, Berlin, and missiles in Cuba.

But we in America had only begun to scratch the surface of the long-term problem of US-Soviet relations in the nuclear age, which would soon produce more ambiguous challenges. The problem was, at bottom, conceptual. Americans were uncomfortable with the notion of a cold war. They tended to treat war and peace as two distinct phases of policy. Total victory was the only legitimate goal for war; conciliation the appropriate method for peace. In this sense the postwar period fulfilled neither of America's conceptual expectations. If in wartime we lacked a sense of political strategy, in peacetime we had difficulty forming an understanding of the permanent relation between power

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and diplomacy. The policy of containment, and its variant called 'negotiation from strength', were based on the experience with the anti-Hitler coalition. It focused on the build-up of military strength towards some hypothetical day of greater parity; it aimed at eventual negotiation of some kind with the Soviet Union but offered no clue as to either its timing or its content, nor even a clear definition of the nature of the relevant military strength. George Kennan's famous 'X' article in *Foreign Affairs* in 1947 looked vaguely to the eventual 'mellowing' of the Soviet system; Dean Acheson spoke of building 'situations of strength' which, somewhere down the road, would induce the Kremlin 'to recognize the facts ...'.¹¹ But how precisely this negotiation would emerge or to what end it would be conducted was left vague.

The flaw in containment was not only, as the cliché has it today, that it was overly preoccupied with military counter-force, but that it misunderstood that the West in the immediate postwar period was precisely at the apex of its relative strength. Containment thus deferred the moment for a diplomatic encounter with the Soviet Union to a later time by which Soviet power could only have grown. In 1945 the United States had an atomic monopoly and the Soviet Union was devastated by 20 million casualties. Our policy paradoxically gave the Kremlin time to consolidate its conquests and to redress the nuclear imbalance. The West's military and diplomatic position relative to the Soviet Union was never more favourable than at the very *beginning* of the containment policy in the late 1940s. *That* was the time to attempt a serious discussion on the future of Europe and a peaceful world.

As so often, Winston Churchill understood it best. In a much neglected speech at Llandudno in October 1948, out of office, he said:

> The question is asked: What will happen when they get the atomic bomb themselves and have accumulated a large store? You can judge yourselves what will happen then by what is happening now. If these things are done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry? If they can continue month after month disturbing and tormenting the world, trusting to our Christian and altruistic inhibitions against using this strange new power against them, what will they do when they themselves have huge quantities of atomic bombs? ... No one in his senses can believe that we have a limitless period of time before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make a final settlement. We ought not to go jogging along improvident, incompetent, waiting for something to turn up, by which I mean waiting for something bad for us to turn up. The Western Nations will be far more likely to reach a lasting settlement, without bloodshed, if they formulate their just demands while they have the atomic power and before the Russian Communists have got it too.¹²

11. U.S. Senate, Committee on Armed Services and Committee on Foreign Relations, *Hearings on the Military Situation in the Far East*, 82nd Cong., 1st sess. (1951), p. 2083.

12. Winston Churchill, speech at Llandudno, October 9, 1948, reported in *New York Times*, October 10, 1948.

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So the postwar world came into being. A precarious peace was maintained, based on a nuclear equilibrium, with occasional negotiations to ease tensions temporarily, but ultimately dependent on a balance of terror. The problem of maintaining security took on an unprecedented new dimension. Technology was soon to make the United States directly vulnerable to attack; the Atlantic Alliance increasingly based its defence strategy on reliance on weapons of mass destruction that posed risks more and more difficult to reconcile with the objectives being defended.

In the nuclear age, peace became a moral imperative; and it imposed a new dilemma. The desire for peace is the mark of all civilised men and women. Yet the democracies' desire for peace, if divorced from a commitment to defend freedom, could turn into a weapon of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless; if the desire to avoid nuclear war turns into undifferentiated hysteria, nuclear blackmail may well be encouraged. The problem of the relationship of power to peace, the balance between ends and means, has been evaded for a generation by an abdication to technology. But history tolerates no evasions. To develop a strategy that relates ends to means, to build military forces that avoid the choice between Armageddon and surrender, is a pre-eminent moral as well as political problem for our period. Of at least equal importance is to develop an Allied consensus behind proposals of arms control based on analysis, not panic, and freed of either the quest for confrontation or the tendency towards abdication.

## Third World perspectives: what is the limit of inter-allied conflict?

In a period of nuclear stalemate, ironically, conflict became more likely at the level of local, non-nuclear crisis. In an age of decolonisation, many of these clashes were bound to occur in the Third World. This was another area in which, in the immediate postwar period, American and European attitudes diverged sharply.

Americans from Franklin Roosevelt onwards believed that the United States, with its 'revolutionary' heritage, was the natural ally of peoples struggling against colonialism; we could win the allegiance of these new nations by opposing and occasionally undermining our European allies in the areas of their colonial dominance. Churchill, of course, resisted these American pressures, as did the French and some other European powers for a longer period than did Britain.

As Europe decolonised, partly under American pressure, there began a reversal of roles, the march by each side towards the philosophical positions vacated by the other—to an America focused on international security and a Europe affirming general moral precepts of conduct. On Third World issues especially, many in Europe have ended up adopting the attitude embodied in Roosevelt's anticolonialism and Eisenhower's conduct over Suez. Now Europe would seek to identify with Third World aspirations, economic and political,

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intensifying its efforts at conciliation the more insistent, peremptory, and
radical that Third World demands become. At the same time, the United
States, at least in some administrations, has come to a perception closer to
Eden's: that appeasement of radical challenges only multiplies radical
challenges.

Different perceptions of national interest were involved as well. Thus in the
India-Pakistan war of 1971 Britain did not share our sense of concern for the
country which had opened the first tenuous links to China; the historic
nostalgia for India was too strong. So too in the early stages of the Falkland
crisis America hesitated between its Atlantic and its Western Hemisphere
vocations. But neither of these disagreements did any lasting damage. In the
end we came together; the old friendship prevailed over other considerations.

The lesson I draw is that in the Third World we may occasionally operate
from different perspectives. But we must take care not to let these differences
reach a point where they undermine the basic self-confidence and sense of
mission of the other party, lest we threaten prospects for progress and stability
transcending the immediate issue.

In this context the experience of Suez is instructive. Our prolonged and
never-reconciled clash had lasting consequences not only for the Middle East
and the Third World but also for the long-term evolution of Western policies.

The details of that disaster are not relevant to my immediate purpose. The
British-French expedition against the Suez Canal was clearly misconceived.
The fact remains that Eden had got hold of what was intellectually the right
problem, while the American reaction, among other things, begged some
crucial questions: to what extent our 'revolutionary' historical analogy was
relevant; to what extent it was wise to humiliate one's closest ally; and what
would be the long-term consequence of such a course.

Britain and France, in my view, were acting on a strategic analysis which
may have been traditional and even self-serving but was far from frivolous.
Nasser was the first Third World leader to accept Soviet arms and to play the
radical, pro-Soviet game in an attempt to blackmail the West. Eden's
perception was that a dangerous precedent was being set: can there be any
dispute of this today? Had Nasser's course been shown a failure, a quite
different pattern of international relations would have developed, at least for a
decade or more. As it turned out, Nasser's policy was vindicated; revolutions
spread in the Middle East in the following years, and he has countless imitators
today around the world relying on Soviet arms to increase their influence and
to destabilise their neighbours.

Even more important, our humiliation of Britain and France over Suez was
a shattering blow to these countries' role as world powers. It accelerated their
shedding of international responsibilities, some of the consequences of which
we saw in succeeding decades when reality forced us to step into their
shoes—in the Persian Gulf, to take one notable example.

Suez thus added enormously to America's burdens—and simultaneously

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fuelled a European resentment at America's global role which continues to this day.

It is clear that a world of progress and peace requires that more than 100 new and developing nations be made part of the international system; no international order can survive unless they feel a stake in it. It is incontestable that many conflicts in the developing world arise from legitimate social, economic, or political grievances; this, however, does not exclude the possibility that these can be exploited by extremists and turned against the long-term security interests of the West. The democracies, whatever their shifting positions, have failed to relate their philosophical and moral convictions to a coherent analysis of the nature of revolution and an understanding of how best to foster moderation. Above all, disputes among the democracies over this problem should not be permitted to turn into a kind of guerrilla warfare between allies. Whatever the merit of the individual issue, the price will be a weakening of the West's overall psychological readiness to maintain the global balance.

The strategic position or self-confidence of a close ally on a matter it considers of vital concern must not be undermined. It is a principle of no little contemporary relevance. In this sense the Falkland crisis in the end will strengthen Western cohesion.

Suez, by weakening Europe's sense of its own importance as a world power, accelerated the trend of Europe's seeking refuge in the role of 'mediator' between the United States and the Soviet Union. The role that some American leaders naively saw the United States as playing between Churchill and Stalin, in the end too many Europeans seek to adopt between Washington and Moscow.

It is not a new phenomenon. It began, at least where Britain was involved, as wise advice to us that negotiation could be an element of strategy. This is a lesson of which Americans often need to be reminded. It has its antecedents in Atlee's flight to Washington for reassurance when Truman seemed to hint at using nuclear weapons in Korea; in Eden's efforts at various Geneva conferences to sponsor a dialogue in the era of Dulles's moralism; in Macmillan's appearance in an astrikhan hat in Moscow in 1959; in the strenuous Western European importunings of the Nixon administration in 1969 to join Europe in the pursuit of detente. But carried too far, it runs the risk of abdicating any share of responsibility for a cohesive Western strategy toward the Soviet Union, or toward anti-Western radicalism in the Third World.

And thus we see the ironic shift of positions reflected in some of our contemporary debates. The deprecation of the importance of power, the abstract faith in goodwill, the belief in the pacific efficacy of economic relations, the evasion of the necessities of defence and security, the attempt to escape from the sordid details of maintaining the global balance of power, the presumption of superior morality—these features, once characteristic of America, now seem

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to be more common in Europe. Where the United States has never quite abandoned its earlier moralism or fully developed a concept of equilibrium as Europe had once maintained, many in Europe paradoxically seem to have adopted some of the illusions that Americans clung to in years of isolation from responsibility.

The unity of the industrial democracies remains crucial to the survival of democratic values and of the global equilibrium. We must at last answer the perennial questions of all alliances: How much unity do we need? How much diversity can we stand? An insistence on unanimity can be a prescription for paralysis. But if every ally acts as it pleases, what is the meaning of alliance? There is no more important task before the Alliance than to deal with these problems concretely, seriously, and above all immediately.

## The contemporary debate

I do not claim that the United States is always correct in its perceptions. But Europeans ought to take care not to generate such frustrations in America that either an embittered nationalism, or unilateralism, or a retreat from world affairs could result.

I fully acknowledge that the United States by its actions has sometimes stimulated or intensified the feelings in Europe that Europe had to strive to maintain its own interests, its own policies, its own identity. Indeed, as I said, naive American expectations that a rejuvenated Europe would follow its lead are partly responsible for the sometimes petulant reaction to Europe's assertions of its own role. In recent times the United States may have appeared unintentionally callous towards the danger of nuclear wars or insufficiently alert toward the opportunities for peace. But the United States has nevertheless been more nearly correct than its critics in warning that those who seek peace not backed by strength will sooner or later find the terms of peace dictated to them; that peace to be meaningful must be just; that nations live in history, not utopia, and thus must approach their goals in stages. To ask for perfection as a precondition of action is self-indulgence, and in the end an abdication.

 Observers, including myself, have been sounding the alarm for decades about this or that 'crisis' in the Western Alliance. But today's, I am afraid, is more genuinely, objectively, serious than ever. It comes after decades of a relentless Soviet military buildup, when the West, for a decade, is edging in some areas toward a dangerous dependency on economic ties with the East; while in Poland the Soviet Union enforces the unity of its empire, its clients press on to undermine the security interests of the West from South-east Asia to the Middle East to Africa to Central America. Not all our difficulties are caused by the Soviet Union, but the Soviet Union has shown little restraint in exploiting them, and their solution—whatever their cause—has been impeded by the lack of a unified Western response.

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One of Britain's contributions to the Western Alliance has been to supply a needed global perspective: the knowledge, from centuries of experience in Europe, that peace requires some clear-eyed notion of equilibrium and a willingness to maintain it; the insight, from centuries of world leadership, that Europe's security cannot be isolated from the broader context of the global balance; the awareness, from heroic exertions in this century, that those who cherish the values of Western civilisation must be willing to defend them. In the Falkland crisis, Britain has reminded us all that certain basic principles such as honour, justice and patriotism remain valid and must be sustained by more than words.

The issue before the allies now is not to assess blame but to face our future. An alliance at odds over central issues of East-West diplomacy, economic policy, the Middle East, Central America, Africa, and relations with the Third World is in serious, and obvious, difficulty. Indeed it cannot be called an alliance if it agrees on *no* significant issue. Sooner or later such divisions *must* affect the field of security. For too long, all of us in the community of free nations have put off the uncomfortable questions; our evasions are now coming home to roost.

Thirty-five years ago, after the war, the democracies for a time overestimated the immediate dangers and underestimated their own capabilities; yet in the end they came up with a creative and effective response. Today, too, we may be underrating our own capacities and confusing long- and short-term dangers.

The strange aspect is that the disarray is taking place at the precise moment that the bankruptcy of the system that denies the human spirit seems to become clear beyond doubt. The communist world has fundamental systemic problems and has not shown any ability to solve them except by recurrent brute force, which only delays the day of reckoning. In its sixty-five-year history, the Soviet state has never managed a legitimate, regular succession of its political leadership; the country faces the demographic time-bomb of its growing non-Russian population, soon to be a majority. The system has failed to deal seriously with the desire for political participation of its intellectual and managerial elite. Or else it has sought to pre-empt their political aspirations by turning the ruling group into a careerist 'new class' bound to produce stagnation if not corruption. Its ideology is a discredited failure, without legitimacy, leaving the Communist Party a smug, privileged elite with no function in the society except its own self-perpetuation, struggling to deal with bottlenecks and crises which its own rigidity has caused. It is an historic joke that the ultimate crisis in every communist state, latent if not evident, is over the role of the Communist Party.

Soviet economic performance is a disaster. It seems impossible to run a modern economy by a system of total planning, yet it seems impossible to maintain a communist state *without* a system of total planning. How ironic that the West is tearing itself apart over how best to coordinate Western

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financial, technological, and agricultural *aid* to a so-called 'superpower' incapable of sustaining a modern economy.

In short, if Moscow is prevented by a co-ordinated 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. It is the communist world, not the West, that faces a profound systemic crisis. Ours are problems of coordination and policy, theirs are those of structure. And therefore it is not beyond the realm of hope that a coherent, unified Western policy could at long last bring into view the prospect of a negotiated global settlement that Churchill foresaw at Llandudno.

The solutions to the West's problems are, to a significant degree, in our own hands. One problem is that the democracies have no forum for addressing the future in a concrete way, let alone harmonising disagreements or implementing common policies. As my friend Christopher Soames has recently emphasised, the Atlantic Alliance has no institutional machinery for addressing economic or Third World issues, or any long-term political strategy; the European Community, while eminently successful in its political co-ordination, has no mechanism as yet for formulating a coherent European view on matters of defence. The economic summits of Western and Japanese leaders, begun in the mid-1970s, are an attempt to surmount this procedural impasse, but they can do little more than call key leaders' attention to key problems in an informal, unsystematic way. Procedures do not solve substantive problems. Nevertheless, creating an appropriate forum for broader and deeper consultation would be an important first step.

America has learned much in the postwar period, perhaps most of all from Britain. In the last decade we have also learned something of our limits, and in the new administration we have shaken off the trauma of perhaps excessive preoccupation with our limits. An America that has recovered its vitality and its faith in the future is as much in the interests of the West as a Europe shaping its identity.

Both Britain and America have learned that whatever their histories, their futures are part of the common destiny of freedom. Experience has taught that moral idealism and geopolitical insight are not alternatives but complementary; our civilisation may not survive unless we possess *both* in full measure. Britain and America, which have contributed so much to the free world's unity and strength, have another opportunity now, together with our allies, to show that the democratic nations are the masters of their destiny.

The Royal Institute of International Affairs does not itself express any opinions.
It is not, therefore, responsible for those of contributors.

Printed in Great Britain by The Eastern Press Ltd., London and Reading

The articles in this issue of
*International Affairs Bulletin*
are the revised texts of addresses delivered
on the first day of the
SAIIA's Second International Outlook Conference;

**FOREIGN POWERS AND AFRICA**

held in Pretoria on 6 and 7 September, 1982.
Dr Henry Kissinger was the keynote speaker

Henry Kissinger

**American global concerns and Africa**

I am honoured by the opportunity to address this distinguished group, in a country whose future evolution is of great perhaps decisive importance for the prospects of the entire continent, if not of world politics.

And it is, as well, a daunting assignment. For South Africa is geographically almost as far from America as it is possible to be on this globe. Its problems reflect a different history and its domestic structure a contrasting set of values regarding the problem of race. At the same time South Africa has many ties to the industrialised countries and its strategic importance to the free world is undisputed. Thus America's attitude to your country is inevitably ambivalent — a constant tug of war between geopolitical and moral considerations. As I shall point out later, it is in the interest of freedom everywhere that this gap be progressively narrowed and ultimately eliminated.

My assignment here is to describe the international situation as it appears from an American perspective. It must be remembered that from

*The Hon. Henry A. Kissinger* was U.S. Secretary of State under Presidents Nixon and Ford, from 1973 – January 1977, having been Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs from 1969 – 1973. From 1957–1969 Dr Kissinger taught International Relations and Government at Harvard. In addition to many other published works, two volumes of his memoirs, *The White House Years* and *Years of Upheaval*, have been published.

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the vantage point of the United States, Africa and southern Africa are part of larger global concerns, and our attitude toward this continent is incomprehensible otherwise. I will try to trace some of those broad perspectives; the American foreign policy in general; East-West relations; America and western Europe; and the problems of the developing world. Only in this context can one speak meaningfully about how America regards southern Africa and this country.

## The American Perspective

The American perspective on world events has undergone dramatic changes in the last generation.

Americans do not have a long experience with foreign affairs. Our founding fathers were quite sophisticated in manipulating the European balance of power to secure our independence. Since then, however, a century and a half of isolation encouraged the illusion that we did not really need a foreign policy — or rather, that foreign involvement was purely a matter of choice for us: We could involve ourselves, or not, as we preferred. It took two world wars in this century to shatter this illusion, but certain preconceptions lingered in the American psyche, for some decades afterward.

Americans in the isolationist period tended to look down on what they considered the sordid power politics of Europe. Our avoidance of involvement in the balance of power appeared to us not as a boon conferred by distance and the protection of the British Navy, but as a virtue, as a sign of our moral superiority. Since 1945, we are permanently active in world affairs and have reluctantly had to face the realities of power. Nevertheless, we still tend to view the world in moral terms and to hold ourselves — and our friends — to a high standard of moral conduct as we see it. We fall short of it from time to time but only at heavy cost: The sacrifice of the domestic support needed to sustain American leadership in the world.

For a time after 1945, it seemed relatively easy for us to equate power and morality — the secret American dream. In the aftermath of the Second World War, the United States produced the amazing figure of over half of all the goods and services in the world. We were so overwhelmingly powerful that our Allies tended to follow our prescriptions; since we offered them military protection and substantial economic aid, it was a relatively harmonious partnership. The principal developing countries looked to us as the source of capital for their economic development. All this gave Americans a distorted picture of what foreign policy was about; it caused us to identify a fortunate and temporary concatenation with a permanent state of affairs. The Marshall Plan was in effect a projection of our domestic experience — an overseas application of the new deal, in

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which economic progress brought with it political stability almost automatically. And the security problem represented by the Soviet Union, which prompted the Truman Doctrine and the foundation of NATO, seemed analogous to the threat posed by Hitler — that of unambiguous aggression by organised units across recognized frontiers.

It was a creative and brilliantly successful period of American foreign policy, yet never to be repeated. For our world leadership then was grounded in an inherently ephemeral set of conditions.

Since then we have seen that economic progress does not automatically produce political stability — sometimes quite the opposite. And threats to security can be much more manifold than attacks across national borders. Above all, from the late 1960's, for the first time, the United States was in the position that it had to conduct a foreign policy as most other nations in history: as one country among many, unable either to dominate the world or escape from it; forced to seek by, persuasion, accommodation, negotiation what it could no longer achieve by unilateral fiat; obliged to learn the traditional techniques of balancing incentives and penalties; required to be steady, reliable, sensitive to marginal shifts in the balance of power and aware of the interconnections between events.

Today, political, economic, and military power are much more widely diffused. The United States represents only about 21 per cent of world GNP — powerful but no longer dominant.

The very balance of power which we have deplored through most of our national experience must henceforth be one of the guiding principles of our foreign policy. Our position toward the rest of the world has become analogous to that of Britain towards Europe for the better part of three centuries.

Britain could not permit Europe to be dominated by any single power regardless of its peaceful professions. Britain knew that its resources could not match those of the entire continent; therefore a Europe united against it would sooner or later be able to impose its will. America's global position is no different. If most of the rest of the world fell under hostile control — directly or indirectly — we would be outmatched. Maintaining the balance of power is not a favour we do others but an imperative of our survival.

This confronts us with three major difficulties. Despite the claims of its detractors, America is, as I pointed out, reluctant to base its claims on its power, preferring to prevail by the purity of its maxims. Americans also are uneasy with — indeed they resent — relative answers, which are the essence of a policy of equilibrium. Throughout our history every problem we have recognised as such proved soluble — that is to say, we found a final answer — if only to overwhelm it with resources. A world in which part of our task is maintaining the balance of power is by definition relativistic, inconclusive, morally unsatisfying.

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Therefore, it is no accident that the main lines of the foreign policy that the United States has conducted for most of the post-war period have been attacked consistently by both ends of our political spectrum on the ground that it did not live up to American ideals and offered no final answers — by liberals because it was not sufficiently conciliatory, by conservatives because it was not adequately principled. One extreme tends to view foreign policy as a branch of psychiatry: the basic requirement of diplomacy, in this view, is to generate goodwill. Adversaries are believed to be hostile because they fear or resent us, because we have failed to reassure them that our objectives can be harmonised with theirs. Conflicts are seen to be an aberration from an otherwise natural state of harmony. This school of thought emphasises unilateral gestures of conciliation; it seeks negotiations regardless of Soviet acts of intransigence — and sometimes especially then. Communists in their view share some similar objectives; Third World nations — no matter how radical their professions — will rally to our standard if we only cleanse ourselves of our past errors.

The opposing school of thought tends to treat foreign policy as a branch of theology. Communism is consummate evil; there is no compromise with the devil. The new nations are either adversaries or cowards. In this view negotiation with the Soviet Union only confuses the American public and is itself a form of moral disarmament. And the new nations should be treated with indifference until they rally to our side. What is needed is to sound the trumpet, confront our enemies — and the walls of Jericho presumably will crumble.

Both these strains in American thinking, of course, have some features in common. Neither is comfortable with the notion of a long-term struggle without a final resolution; with a world in which ideals can be realized, at any point in time, only imperfectly and always gradually. Americans are, in some sense, in a state of permanent rebellion against the contemporary realities of world affairs.

Secondly, these psychological difficulties are compounded by the inherent complexity of assessing the balance of power in the modern period. Historically, military, economic, and political power were roughly congruent. In our time some countries are strong militarily but stagnant politically, for example the Soviet Union. Some countries, such as several oil producing states, are powerful economically but weak militarily. Some Third World nations have at times had a political influence out of proportion to their military and economic strength: India in the Fifties and early Sixties is a good example.

And the time scale for redressing the various balances is not identical. Restoration of the military balance is occurring more rapidly than the economic or political one. But success in one category of power does not

guarantee success in others.

These tensions produce a third obstacle to a consistent American diplomacy: our tendency to decide foreign policy issues by analogy to domestic disputes. This causes problems to be segmented into a series of individual decisions resolved by compromises between adversarial positions. In domestic legislation, where each issue is essentially discrete and completed with the passage of a law, this has proved quite effective — especially as in the democratic political tradition, the loser accepts his setback with grace also with the knowledge that he has a chance to renew the battle and perhaps prevail on another occasion. But foreign policy is a seamless web. Compromise between philosophical positions may yield the least common denominator, not the best conceived outcome in terms of a coherent, consistent long-term national strategy. The continual renewal of our domestic debate produces the lack of continuity about which some of our allies especially have complained. Each new administration seems to pride itself on repudiating the methods and assumptions of its predecessor. Leaving aside the merits, such a practice makes for no little uncertainty on the part of other nations. It causes friendly nations which depend on us to hedge their bets; it leaves adversaries confused.

For America, Vietnam was the catharsis that taught us our limits; but reality would have imposed itself in any event. The trauma of having to come to grips with a world of incomplete solutions and relative power is the mark of the American foreign policy debate in the Seventies. And we are emerging from it considerably wiser. The reflexive aversion to the balance of power has given way to a recognition of its essentiality. The period of self-doubt has come to an end. While tactical oscillations continue, the main trend of the current foreign policy has wide support.

But our friends must never forget the dual strains of American policy and the powerful impact of our historical convictions. Whatever the importance of geopolitics and equilibrium, however salient they may become in American foreign policy deliberations, the moral dimension of our national tradition will never disappear. At some point our foreign policy will always return to the wellspring of America's aspiration to promote justice, human dignity, and equality. And it will always give these terms a universal cast — not confined to a particular people. The task of American statesmanship is to combine these two strands into a consistent, coherent, and effective foreign policy.

## US-Soviet Relations

With this as background, let me turn to the East-West conflict. The Soviet Union presents us with a multifaceted challenge: A Superpower militarily, stagnant politically, in a crisis economically. The Soviet Union

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is clearly militarily extremely powerful. Even as the moral claims of its
ideology prove more and more hollow, the Soviet system is growing in
military strength and geopolitical reach. Historically, the emergence of a
new power usually produced a coalition against it, and a new equilibrium
could be achieved only after a test of strength. In the nuclear age, such a
contest would threaten global cataclysm.

The maintenance of peace is therefore a task of unprecedented
complexity. It is obviously the duty of the West to maintain the military
balance and to resist Soviet expansionism. The Soviet Union must
learn — through the West's vigilant resistance — that encroachments on
the global equilibrium will not be tolerated. It cannot be beyond the West's
capability — superior as we are in economic strength — to accomplish
this.

However, a great change has taken place in the nature of military
power. Strategic nuclear power is no assurance that challenges will be
deterred, or countered, locally. In the Fifties the industrial democracies
relied on their strategic nuclear arsenal, substituting technology for the
burden of conventional armament. But the American nuclear superiority
began to disappear in the Sixties. Technology tended toward equality, and
numbers approached levels beyond which additional increments of
destructiveness lost all relationship to the objectives likely to be in dispute.
Arms control theory and practice, with their formal emphasis on equality,
accelerated and legitimised this trend.

Logically, once the Soviet Union acquired the capacity to threaten the
United States with direct nuclear retaliation, the American pledge to
launch an all-out nuclear war on behalf of Europe was bound increasingly
to lose its credibility and public acceptance — and so would NATO's
defence strategy. For that strategy now rested on the threat to initiate
mutual suicide. But governments were reluctant to face the financial and
domestic implications of the conventional-force buildup that was required.
They continued the existing strategy, seeking to compensate for the
implausibility of the pledge of all-out nuclear defence by more emphatic
reiteration of it.

In these circumstances, the West faces a profound moral as well as
practical challenge. The risks of nuclear war produce a feeling of revulsion
verging on abdication. Yet if in the democracies, avoidance of war
becomes the sole objective of foreign policy, the world is open to the
domination of the most ruthless. The deepest challenge to the democracies
is to build support for the proposition that peace must be based on freedom
as well as restraint; that leaving the world to the totalitarians can produce
horrors even greater than the risks of resistance: witness Indochina.

The legacy of the evasions of two decades is a precarious combination of
a reliance on nuclear defence, trends toward nuclear stalemate, growing

nuclear pacifism, and continued deficiencies in conventional forces. If the
democracies are reluctant to resort to nuclear weapons, and if they
continue to evade the necessity of building up their conventional forces,
then the Western Alliance is left with no defence policy at all, and we are
risking the collapse of the military balance that has made possible thirty-
five years of Western security, prosperity, and democracy. We will in
effect have disarmed ourselves unilaterally while sitting on the most
destructive stockpile of weapons that the world has seen.

Thus the West, if it wants to maintain any public support for defense,
has no choice except to build up its conventional forces substantially.

But this is not in itself a strategy. While maintaining the balance of
power, we must not lose sight of the moral and political framework that
gives it meaning. It is clear that public sentiment in the democratic nations
will not sustain a policy of equilibrium without a parallel effort to end or
reduce conflict. Electorates will not support defence programmes or a
vigorous foreign policy if they imagine that their governments are the
cause of tensions or if serious efforts are not being made to push back the
spectre of nuclear war.

It is for this reason that arms control and efforts to reduce tensions have
been on the agenda of US-Soviet relations for most of the last fifteen years.
Arms control is not a substitute for a secure military balance, but it can be
a way of maintaining it at lower levels of forces or of reducing the risks of
the outbreak of nuclear conflict by miscalculation or panic. President
Reagan has made forthcoming proposals for strategic arms reductions. He
has wisely focused not only on reducing the numbers of nuclear weapons,
but on those types and characteristics of strategic weapons that most pose
the danger of surprise attack or first strike. And he has stressed as well the
need for restraint in superpower conduct.

Thus a long-term strategy for dealing with the Soviet Union must
combine power and diplomacy; both resistance to challenges and a
willingness to resolve political problems through negotiation. Both
defence of Western values and a recognition that we are forced to co-exist
on this planet in an era of thermonuclear weapons.

This becomes all the more important, because the inherent instabilities
of the Soviet system will make negotiations inevitable sooner or later.

Both sides in the East-West confrontation are betting on history. And
one of the ironies of the post-war period is the extraordinary structural
weakness that is now seen to lie beneath the impressive surface of Soviet
power.

The Soviet economy is a vast cumbersome machine burdened with
administrative bottlenecks, pervasive inefficiency, low productivity and a
level of performance all tending toward stagnation. It seems to require a
black market, that is, a secret free market, to function at all. The dilemma

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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 maintain a
communist state *without* a system of total planning.

In the 65-year history of the Soviet state, it has never managed a
legitimate, regular succession of political leadership. The system has failed
to deal seriously with the aspirations of the intellectual and managerial elite
that industrialisation inevitably spawns; instead the Soviet intelligentsia is a
cynical, careerist "new class" corrupted by privilege, its creativity stifled
by heavy-handed political rigidity. And the system has yet to cope with
the looming reality of its growing non-Russian population, soon to be a
majority, with the severe social and political tensions this will entail.

Finally, in every communist state — it is almost an historic joke — the ultimate systemic crisis, latent if not evident, is over the role of the Communist Party. What is the function of a Communist Party once it is entrenched in power? It is not needed to run the government, or the economy, or the military. It is the guardian of an ideological legitimacy that has long since lost its motivating appeal. The Party's functionaries specialize in dealing with internal crises which their centralised system has created and external crises into which their ambitions tempt them. In Poland, the Communist Party was nearly swept away because of its irrelevance, impotence, and total repudiation by the Polish workers in whose name it claimed to rule. It is another historic joke that the only spontaneous revolutions in industrialised countries have been against Communist governments.

And we are only at the beginning of that process of transformation. 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 hitory is on its side.

Then the time for serious negotiations on a broad front will have
arrived. The industrial democracies must convey now that they stand
ready to negotiate seriously, and that they will respect the legitimate
security interests of a Soviet Union conducting the policies of a national
state and not of a revolutionary power seeking to overthrow or subvert the
existing order. But diplomacy toward the Soviet Union is at the core of
some current disputes between the United States and its European allies.

America and Europe

Relations between America and Europe have undergone many periods
of stress in the past generation. To a significant degree, this is the result of
one of the great successes of American policy: our support for the
economic recovery of Europe and Japan, and for European integration. To
some extent, American expectations were exuberant and perhaps
somewhat naïve. It was thought by some of the sponsors of European

12

unity that a revived and unified Europe would share our burdens and
continue to follow our lead; it was not considered that a stronger Europe
would inevitably assert its own identity and role. Hence the occasionally
petulant reaction. In fact, a stronger, unified Europe is in America's
interest even if its perceptions at times differ from ours.

It would be idle to deny that fundamental differences have arisen over
an exorbitant number of issues. Some difference of perspective is, of
course, inevitable in any coalition of sovereign states. But today the
Western Alliance is at odds over central issues of East-West diplomacy,
international economic policy, the Middle East, Central America, and
relations with the Third World. Indeed, it is hard to find an important
issue on which the allies are united. Sooner or later such divisions *must*
affect the field of European security as well. For too long the allies have
evaded uncomfortable questions that divided us; our evasions are now
coming home to roost.

In too many NATO countries, the impression is created that it is
America's attempt to restore the military balance which threatens the peace
and must be resisted. Little attention is paid to the colossal Soviet military
buildup over the last twenty years or to a whole series of aggressive Soviet
actions, from the dispatch of Cuban troops to Africa through the
occupation of Afghanistan to the repression of freedom in Poland, which
threaten the global equilibrium.

Even less attention is paid to some basic facts of post-war history: that
but for Stalin's pressures in the immediate post-war period American
troops would have been withdrawn from Europe in the Forties, as indeed
they were from Korea: that but for the Korean War the US military budget
would have shrunk to derisory levels; that it was the threat to the freedom
of Berlin in the late Fifties which accelerated the American military
buildup; that for a variety of reasons the United States stopped expanding
its strategic arsenal in the late Sixties and slowed its modernisation for the
better part of the Seventies; and that all wars in the post-war period have
broken out where there were no American forces and no nuclear weapons,
while Europe under American nuclear protection has enjoyed the longest
period of peace in its history.

The clamour in much of the West is therefore addressed to the wrong
governments. Unmatched as it is by comparable agitation in the East, it
poses the danger that a psychological imbalance, indeed a form of
unilateral disarmament, will compound the regional military imbalances
which have already produced such a sense of insecurity in almost all
countries around the periphery of the Soviet Union.

But the basic problem within the Alliance does not derive from public
demonstrations; it resides in the attitudes of governments. Three major
differences have arisen: over military strategy and its corollary of arms

13

control, over the nature of East-West relations, and over East-West trade.

The transformation of the military balance has affected European-American relations acutely. So long as America possessed strategic nuclear superiority, the agreed strategy relying on nuclear defence coincided with the determination to banish war from European territory. But the growth of the Soviet nuclear stockpile puts a premium on the West's capacity for local conventional defence. Many in Europe recoil before that prospect, and not only because of the economic burden involved. They shy away from building a credible European conventional defence for fear that American troops will feel free to go home, and that it will weaken the American commitment to resort to strategic nuclear retaliation. Yet evasion of conventional defence in the longer term only makes the current American deployment in Europe untenable. Too strong for a trip wire, too weak for local resistance, the current NATO military establishment persists in a never-never land which encourages public escapism and inter-allied quarrels over security.

Some allies seek in arms control an escape from this dilemma. But arms control can stabilise or reduce only those armaments which exist; it cannot substitute for an adequate defence policy. If used to evade complex choices, it can have a doubly harmful impact: Freezing an untenable strategy while creating the illusion of political progress. The Alliance must agree on a coherent strategy if it is to give meaning to its defence policy and direction to East-West negotiations on the limitation of arms.

The second problem concerns East-West relations in general. The myth has developed in many quarters in Europe that the American administration is needlessly confrontational, too obsessed with the military balance, and too little interested in detente. It is an interesting and ironic reversal of historical roles. In the closing years of the Second World War, there were significant differences of philosophy between America and Britain. Many Americans thought Churchill needlessly preoccupied with the postwar balance of power, too rigidly anti-Soviet, too "colonialist" in his attitude to what is now called the Third World, and too little dedicated to building the fundamentally new, pacific international order toward which American idealism has always tended. Churchill undoubtedly saw the Americans as naive, moralistic, eager to evade the realities of security and their own share of responsibility for maintaining the global balance of power. While the United States has never abandoned its earlier moralism, it has been forced by post-war realities to deal, however reluctantly, with the problems of equilibrium. Concurrently, many in Europe seem paradoxically to have moved to the positions that America vacated and to have adopted some of the illusions to which Americans clung in years of isolation from global responsibility.

Whether the US Government's tactical judgments are always correct

need not be debated in this forum. But, in my view, America's insistence that true detente be based on maintaining the balance of power is correct; I believe that any attempt to base East-West relations on general goodwill or economic relations is doomed. The threat to world peace has not been American rhetoric — even in its most exuberant versions — but the Soviet military buildup and the Soviet geopolitical offensive from Angola and Ethiopia, South Yemen and Afghanistan, to the crackdown in Poland, and the Soviet Union's continuing support to various terrorist subversive groups around the world. Our objective is not to promote conflict, but to bring an end to Soviet assaults on the global equilibrium through a substantial reduction of military forces and a code of restrained international conduct.

As I have suggested, I expect that the Soviet system will have to come to grips with its internal and external stresses within this decade. At that point a major negotiation can and must take place. But such a negotiation can succeed only if the West does not give up its assets unilaterally ahead of time.

This is at the heart of the dispute over East-West trade, of which the recent European uproar over President Reagan's decision to block construction of the Siberian natural gas pipeline is symptomatic.

The fundamental problem can be defined as follows: Theoretically, trade reflects the mutual benefit of both parties. But East-West trade is distorted by two factors: By an objective analysis, the Soviet Union and its satellites are infinitely more dependent on East-West trade than the industrial democracies. The Soviet Union cannot feed itself without the non-communist world's grain; it cannot develop without Western technology and capital. The typical Western product for sale in the East contains advanced technology, hence new ideas; what the Soviet Union has to offer in return is raw materials — products which contain no conceptual input. The inequality in benefits would long since have reduced trade to a trickle had not Western governments stepped in with direct or hidden credits, which now amount to nearly $90 billion for the communist world. In addition, many export prices are subsidised by West European governments directly or indirectly. The communist countries thus are not only gaining a relative advantage in trade; they are being financed by the nations against whom they are simultaneously conducting a geopolitical offensive. Lenin's dictum that capitalists would compete to sell the rope with which they are to be hanged is coming true with a vengeance — for Lenin never guessed that Western governments would provide the money to buy the rope and subsidise the price to facilitate the purchase.

For these reasons, the issues raised by President Reagan with respect to the Soviet pipeline are central — whatever the views of the immediate tactics. If the industrial democracies subsidise exports and credits and

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provide large foreign exchange earnings to the Soviet Union during a period of a Soviet military buildup, proxy forces in Africa, brutal pressure on Poland, and occupation of Afghanistan, what possible incentive can the Soviet leadership have for the fundamental negotiations I outlined earlier?

Trade justified by commercial considerations is one thing — though even there I have always believed that the United States has been too profligate in the use of its agricultural resources. But subsidies or concessionary credits or bargain prices determined by other than strictly commercial considerations should certainly be made the subject of political negotiations. So far as one can tell, no serious study was made of possible alternative sources of energy for Western Europe, such as the largest deposits of Norwegian natural gas. If the industrial democracies feel the necessity of subsidising their exports by easy pricing and credit policies, the creative area for such efforts is in the developing world, particularly in the moderate, market oriented countries, not in the Soviet Bloc.

It is urgent for the industrial democracies to end the petty and unworthy disputes over tactics and concentrate on developing a common strategy. They must decide on a united approach to credit, exports, and alternative energy supplies.

## The Developing Nations: Africa

These issues may or may not seem of direct interest to South Africa but they define the context of American views of Africa and of your own country. And the American perspective on Africa is part of an over-all perception of the developing world.

The emergence of the developing countries no doubt will one day be seen as one of the seminal events in world history. In 1945 there were some 50 sovereign states; after a generation of decolonisation the number had tripled. Never before had foreign policy to be conducted with such a multiplicity of states in a world of instantaneous communication, shadowed by the spectre of nuclear war and under the pressures of a complex economic interdependence. For while the developing nations could not hope to achieve their aims without the aid of the industrialised states, the latter in turn could not sustain their prosperity without an assured supply of energy and raw materials at a fair price.

Mutual need did not necessarily — or at least immediately — produce mutual understanding or even serious dialogue. A vast philosophical gap separated the two sides. Many in the West saw in the new nations a replica of their own constitutional evolution; on the contrary, the new states were quite often in active rebellion against not only the tutelage but the institutions of the colonial powers. There was the naive Western assumption that the challenge to political stability was largely economic; that economic growth would more or less automatically produce political

stability. In fact, in many countries economic development undermined the traditional elements of political order. Iran is a good example. The Shah — for many years hailed as a modernising secular reformer — was overthrown by a coalition of forces that felt threatened by social progress, led by reactionary feudal landlords who resisted land reform, by Mullahs who objected to mass education, women's rights, and the cultural influences of the modern world, and by professionals threatened by the inflation inseparable from industrialisation. And the same process could repeat itself elsewhere, under conditions of the success of economic and social advance. The corollary is, of course, that economic and social advance not buttressed by corresponding political change makes an explosion inevitable.

Many new nations, after an initial flirtation with parliamentary democracy, chose some version of Marxism as their model. They did so ironically not because of the efficacy of Marxist economics but rather because its political theory provided a kind of answer to the riddle of political legitimacy. Marxism furnished a justification for oligarchic and occasionally one-man rule without the inconvenience of elections. But it brought with it as well the usual baggage of Marxist economic planning with the well known consequences of stagnation, administrative rigidity, and corruption.

For a while, these Marxist regimes sought to use the so-called non-aligned movement to exact by political pressure the economic development assistance that their system wasted and their politics made meaningless. The secretariat of the so-called group of 77 fell more or less into their hands. I once reviewed the declarations of the non-aligned conferences in the late 1970s and I found not a single statement of approbation for anything done by the United States nor any criticism of actions by the Soviet Union. Now it is statistically impossible for the United States to be wrong 100 per cent of the time and for the Soviet Union never to make a mistake. And it is absurd for a group to call itself "Non-Aligned" while professing such one-sided views.

Something deeper, more intangible was involved. There existed, to be sure, a certain ideological affinity for "Socialism" which came to be identified with the Soviet Union and an understandable resentment of historical colonialism. More important was the consciousness that criticism of the United States involved next to no risk while the penalties for opposition to the Soviet Union could be severe. This was all the more true because many developing countries, and almost all of those of Africa, faced exactly the opposite of the problem of their Western counterparts at a comparable stage of historical evolution. Most Western countries were nations before they formed states; in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, the state often preceded the nation. Boundaries were

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frequently artificial, reflecting the convenience and territorial compromises of former colonial rulers. In these circumstances the concept of a loyal opposition — the essence of modern democracy — is difficult to implement for reality supports the natural temptation of political leaders to consider an assault on their personal position as a threat to domestic cohesion. By the same token, an outside power known to have a considerable capacity for subversion can gain a disproportionate influence.

And yet sooner or later reality will impose itself. The Soviet Union can threaten subversion but offer no useful development programme. It exports weapons and proxy troops but no hope for economic or diplomatic progress. The non-aligned movement may at last begin to live up to its name. We are thus in a position to think of a serious and realistic economic and political dialogue with the developing nations of Africa and elsewhere based on true reciprocity and without ideological blinders.

The following principles should govern this dialogue:

As a superpower the United States has an interest — together where possible with its allies — to prevent the Soviet Union from exploiting the uncertainties, dislocations, and occasional turmoil of the process of development. Americans are beginning to learn that the danger of subversion or of exploited local discontent must be dealt with in a timeframe more immediate than even the best designed process of development and reform. We know even when some potential victims do not, that once Soviet totalitarianism — or its various proxy forms — is established, the process is very difficult to reverse. Indeed under the Brezhnev doctrine the Soviet Union claims the right to impose this irreversibility by force. For all these reasons the United States cannot abdicate its strategic interests in developing countries even when it is less than satisfied with all local circumstances. We will not fail to respond if the Soviet Union or its proxies seek to dominate areas of vital concern to us.

At the same time the developing world, and Africa especially, should not be viewed simply or even primarily as an arena of superpower confrontation. For the objective of our foreign policy must be to create an international system that most of its members wish to maintain. No international order can survive unless the more than 100 new and developing nations become supporting participants in it. And they will feel that only if they have a stake by sharing in the fruits of progress. The true challenge to the West is not to our economic capacity, but to our political understanding. We should not let ourselves be blackmailed; but we cannot make our contribution to international peace unless we help fulfill the hopes and aspirations of the responsible African states and other members of the developing world. In a broad sense, this is an important component of America's strategic interest in a stable and peaceful international order.

The conditions for such a dialogue have improved considerably in

recent years. Developing countries, especially in Africa, need not listen to Western preachments about the hopelessness of the Marxist system: All they have to do is survey the results of African experiments with it. In case after case, socialist models have brought near-bankruptcy to countries richly endowed with natural and human resources and vast potential. This need not continue to be so, but to reverse the trend toward stagnation and decay will require a new look at reality.

It is also becoming clear that tactics of confrontation are self-defeating. Developing nations in Africa are increasingly learning that if they rely on Soviet or proxy forces they will mortgage their independence. And more and more members of the so-called non-aligned grouping are coming to the realisation that they must find some relationship between their political rhetoric and their economic and social aspirations. They are sovereign states; they have a right to whatever domestic system and foreign policy they choose. But the industrial democracies are also sovereign, and have a right to give assistance to friends rather than congenital opponents. We have political, economic, and moral reasons to give aid, but Third World nations cannot expect both to conduct foreign policies consistently hostile to us and at the same time to receive our economic support. They will have to decide what meaning to give to genuine non-alignment.

Finally, in a period of austerity in the industrialised world, official aid budgets are not going to be substantially increased. Developing countries will have to adjust to the reality that foreign private investment is the most promising source of development capital. And they will have to reflect about the political and economic incentives to attract such capital.

As for the United States, there is every reason to hope that we have transcended our traditional oscillation between considering the developing nations simply as cold-war pawns and the sentimentality of seeking to win over radicals by pretending to share their slogans. Revolutionaries will not be charmed out of the convictions of a lifetime by invocations of abstract goodwill. The United States is at last prepared for a mature partnership based on mutually realistic expectations. We must find the means both to help the developing countries toward sustainable economic growth and to expand the world trading system which is the key to the wellbeing of all societies. On this basis there is an unusual opportunity for a new constructive relationship.

## South Africa

And so I come at last to my host country, the Republic of South Africa. I am not here with a blueprint of how to solve problems that the centuries have spawned and decades have made intractable. I want to describe how your country's international situation appears to a well-disposed outsider. There seem to me to be four fundamental realities.

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*First:* In terms of resources and technical skill, South Africa is in a unique position to promote the peace and progress of the continent. There would be extraordinary prospects were South Africa able to achieve an accommodation with its neighbours.

*Second:* Black Africa has an immense stake in the shared enterprise of building security and prosperity in Africa: The potential value of constructive relations with its neighbour to the south should be clear. Black Africa pays an enormous price, moreover, when its countries allow themselves to be occupied by tens of thousands of non-African combat troops — irrespective of the pretext for their being there. There is no profit for Africans if the continent remains a battleground for superpower contention in its crudest form. Those in Moscow and Havana who seek to perpetuate the presence of foreign troops in Africa do not have Africa's interests in mind; they undoubtedly prefer the perpetuation of tensions and seek to prevent conditions of co-operation and mutual security among the nations of the continent.

All African states need to face up to this truth. A better alternative is available.

*Third:* South Africa is of the greatest strategic importance to the non-communist world, not only geographically but also in terms of resources, some of them nearly irreplaceable elsewhere.

*Fourth:* However this last reality has one powerful limiting condition. Even the best-disposed Americans are shaped and bound by their country's deeply held ideals of liberty. South Africans must not deceive themselves with comforting thoughts about strategic geography and resources into believing that severe moral and political differences will not override them. Nor can even the most geopolitically-oriented American statesmen fail to take into account the aspirations and convictions of the preponderant majority of the continent, as they have been impressed upon me in recent days in Zambia and Zimbabwe.

South Africans have a right to ask for some patience with respect to the special complexities of their situation. But that time is not unlimited. Those who wish South Africa well, and would like it to take its full place in international affairs, will not be able to find common ground with you as long as the system of institutionalised racial discrimination persists.

The steps that have been taken to ease petty apartheid, the measures to broaden the political rights of Coloureds and Indians and the economic conditions of Blacks — and the signs that your Government is trying to think creatively and promote change and is paying a serious political price for it — these are noted, and appreciated. But your friends would render you no service if they implied that these were anything but the first steps on a long journey.

The present policy will *not* provide the ultimate solution to the problem

of power sharing, (either in political arrangements or homeland policy.) Devising a more equitable form of federalism or confederalism — or some other just political institutions depends on the creativity and determination of all the peoples of South Africa. I can only say that a system which respects human dignity, extends due process, provides for equal individual rights and protects the principle of citizenship will garner sympathetic outside support in many quarters.

The efforts being made to improve the economic and educational status of Blacks, moreover, imply their own political logic. As the Black population rises in its skills and capabilities, it will increasingly develop its own articulate leadership and consciousness of its condition — and its potential. Thus, as so often before in history, the more genuine the material progress being made by the Black community — the more it creates the need for an appropriate political framework.

I do not pretend to know the details of the final destination. Too many outsiders have offered facile slogans drawn from the experience of homogeneous societies and different historical circumstances. Clearly South Africa will have to find its own path. South Africa's friends would eagerly extend support to any constructive solution that embodies the fundamental principles of human dignity, civil rights, and full political participation. The best advice a friend can offer now is to plead urgently for a heroic effort to take the initiative in consultation with all the peoples of this country, to devise new structures and concepts compatible with the fundamental values of other Western societies. History is kind to political leaders who use a margin of choice while it is still available; those who wait on events are usually overwhelmed by them.

The period before pressures become overwhelming should be used for an act of constructive statesmanship. The best way to keep Soviet influence out of the region is first to ameliorate and then to eliminate the conditions which facilitate its entry.

In this context I must mention the negotiations over Namibia which have now reached a critical stage. They are an essential first step. If this festering problem is resolved there is a chance for a period of calm and restraint which could give diplomacy an opportunity to ameliorate the tensions encumbering Southern Africa's future. A diplomatic settlement offers hope of containing or reducing the spiral of cross-border violence and establishing a more secure future for all the states of the region.

Ending cross-border violence by all sides clearly requires as well the withdrawal of Cuban combat forces from Angola in parallel with the withdrawal of South African troops from Namibia. Such conditions will make it possible for the US to recognise the Angolan regime.

I do not know whether Southern Africa is heading for further tragedy, or for a future of progress and reconciliation. I know only that the history

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21

THE ENERGY CRISIS
AND WORLD ORDER

Remarks by
THE HONORABLE
HENRY A. KISSINGER

before the
Annual Meeting of the
National Conference of
State Legislators

Detroit Plaza Hotel, Renaissance Center
Detroit, Michigan

Wednesday, August 3, 1977

Ladies and Gentlemen:

My subject today is the Energy Crisis — a problem that is at the intersection of the public policy concerns that you wrestle with from day to day, and the global and strategic issues with which I have been involved.

A Gallup Poll in the spring of 1977 produced the startling result that only half of the American public knew that the United States must import oil to meet its energy needs, and only 17 percent had a perception of just how great our dependence is. When such a large proportion of our population is unaware of one of our most urgent national problems, it is difficult to gain public support for a major program even when our peril is already clear and in another decade could become overwhelming. We face a massive challenge to leadership at all levels of our society. You in this audience have a major role to play. However much national and state leaders may debate about specific aspects of the energy problem, we all have a major responsibility to educate the American public about its reality, its gravity, and about the urgency of a coherent strategy.

The Energy Crisis is not just a technical problem; it is not an abstract playground for specialists. It has wide-ranging implications for our daily lives and some of our deepest values. Energy is central to our own economy. It affects our jobs, prices, and prosperity. And internationally the energy crisis has global dimensions; it is one of the most fundamental challenges to international stability in a generation. It poses a fundamental challenge to the vitality of the world economy. And for the first time in our history, a small group of nations controlling a scarce resource could over time be tempted to pressure us into foreign policy decisions not dictated by our national interest.

The question is quite simply whether energy will bring about the destruction of the system of world order we have been building slowly and painfully over the last two decades, or whether it will serve as the instrument and vital proof of our common progress. The energy crisis therefore goes beyond the technical problem of establishing a better balance between supply and demand. It is the supreme test of nations' ability to live together on this shrinking planet, to prevent this increasingly scarce resource from leading to major conflict, and, above all, to understand and act upon the mutual dependence of different nations—of producer and consumer, developed and developing nations, the wealthy and debt-ridden.

I believe that in the final analysis the interests of the nations of the world are, though different, complementary. But that complementarity is not self-evident;

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a new commitment to international cooperation will not emerge from the crisis of the last four years automatically. It is the supreme task of statesmanship for our age to create out of the elements of our mutual dependence a new dedication to positive collaboration, and in this way to turn the energy challenge into a powerful positive force for world cooperation, order, and progress.

## The Energy Challenge and its Consequences

What is the Energy Crisis?

The last three decades have been a history of our increasing dependence on imported energy. In 1959, the United States was virtually self-sufficient in oil. In 1960, our reliance on foreign oil had grown to 16 percent of our requirements. In 1973, the year of the embargo and the massive price increase, America's dependence had doubled to 35 percent. Since then our dependence has grown, not diminished; in the winter months of this year, oil imports for the first time in our history reached 50 percent of our oil consumption—a development which only two years ago was not expected until the 1980s.

When the United States was self-sufficient, or a net exporter of oil, not only were we vulnerable to embargoes but we also had some influence over the world price. We could go far toward ensuring that the world economy had available to it adequate supplies of oil at reasonable prices.

In the last two decades conditions have changed dramatically. We have become net importers of oil and on a growing scale. Western Europe's and Japan's energy needs increased rapidly. Developing countries around the world began their own efforts toward industrialization, and in consequence became for the first time major consumers of energy. Prices remained low. And so for two decades the world economic system was based on the expectation of cheap and plentiful petroleum, while supply, except in the Middle East, fell far behind the explosive energy demand.

The effect on the United States of this structural change in the world energy market was dramatic. As we grew increasingly dependent on outside oil, we became vulnerable to external manipulation of price and interruption of our supply.

It was against this background that OPEC began to make its influence felt. Forged into an effective mechanism for agreement on prices and production among the few nations in the world that were oil exporters, OPEC embarked on what in 1973 became a successful effort to quadruple the world price of oil. In the same year, in an added demonstration of the central role of petroleum in the world's economy, the

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major producers cut off their exports to certain countries during the Arab-Israeli war.

These events made explicit the energy crisis which had been building for decades. They caused an immediate economic crisis both in this country and around the world. A drop of only ten percent of our imported oil, lasting less than half a year, cost Americans half a million jobs and over ten billion dollars of national output. The massive price increases of 1973 added at least five percentage points to the price index, contributing to our worst inflation since World War II. It set the stage for a serious recession, in this country and worldwide, from which we are only now recovering.

Internationally, the energy crisis reduced the annual growth rate of the industrial countries by 1.2 percent and accelerated the average rate of inflation in the industrialized world by three percent. It has also had a massive adverse effect on the balance of payments of all the industrial nations. Since 1973, the oil-consuming countries have paid $367 billion in oil import bills to the 13 OPEC countries; this is the equivalent of a huge excise tax and constitutes one of the greatest and most sudden transfers of wealth in human history. Today, each 10 percent price increase adds an additional $14 billion to the OPEC balances. For the United States, the quadrupled oil price worsened our balance of payments by $36.4 billion in 1976 alone. To put it another way: President Carter has stated that this year our balance of payments deficit is running at a rate of $25 billion a year; without oil imports, we would be running a surplus of $20 billion a year. Oil imports mark a $45 billion difference, which over time could spell an economic disaster.

The enormous surplus earnings of the oil producers overhang the world economy. They are a factor of instability even if not manipulated for political motives. In another Middle East crisis the vast accumulated petrodollars could become a weapon against the world monetary and financial system.

Since the dramatic events of 1973, America's dependence on imported oil has increased by nearly 50 percent despite the efforts of three Presidents to mobilize an effective national response to the energy challenge. This growing dependence is intolerable. Even when the oil producers behave responsibly and seek to be moderate — as they have in recent years — their decisions are determined by *their* conception of their interests, priorities, and political choices, and not by ours. Our ability to conduct a fair and responsible foreign policy according to *our* values and *our* choices is constrained. Our country's freedom of action in foreign policy is to that degree circumscribed.

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If the economic and political consequences of the energy crisis are severe for the United States, the impact on other countries more dependent on imported oil is correspondingly greater. Simultaneous recession and inflation — stagflation — has created severe problems in many countries, including many of our allies in Europe. Political and social difficulties that were already at the margin of governments' ability to manage, threaten in some cases to get out of control. Economic crisis was a rude shock to large numbers of ordinary people in Western Europe whose aspirations had been raised so dramatically in the years since the war.

Thus, too much of Western Europe of the seventies has become fertile ground for social friction and political turmoil within nations, and for economic conflict between them. The energy crisis has hampered the progress of European unity. It has strengthened the hand of opponents of democracy as democratic governments and moderate leaders have come under severe attack for failing to solve their economic problems, to a degree not experienced since the twenties and thirties. If Communist Parties come to power in Western Europe, it will mark a tragic watershed in America's relationship to its alliances, transforming the North Atlantic Alliance as well as the purposes and practices of European integration. The irony is that some of the most conservative and anti-Communist governments in the world will have contributed to this state of affairs.

Even short of this prospect, the consequences for the cohesion of the Western alliance are grave. Nations in economic travail are inevitably tempted to resort to protectionism in a desperate effort to keep jobs and markets at home. The result can be a vicious spiral of shrinking trade and further economic deterioration for all nations. Today even while the industrial democracies are embarked on the difficult process of recovery, protectionist pressures are high and still mounting. This is because the recovery is uneven, and unemployment remains a problem almost everywhere.

Nor is the impact of the oil crisis confined to the industrial nations. In fact, it is the nations of the developing world that suffer most from the massive balance of payments deficits caused by the oil price rises. Indeed, the severest blow to the economic development of new nations has come not from the "imperialist exploitation" so loudly assailed in international forums but from an arbitrary price increase by their Third World brethren. The developing countries do not have the means, as the industrial nations have, to pass on the price rises to some extent to other nations in exports of manufactures. If they are to be able even

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to feed themselves they must achieve agricultural modernization, which depends on chemical fertilizers which are petroleum-based. The higher energy costs are to the developing nations permanent, chronic, and massive. The increase in their energy costs now in fact equals the total flow of external economic aid they receive. The entire world's assistance thus barely enables them to stand still.

In short, the energy crisis has placed at risk the entire range of our foreign policy. It mortgages the prospects of our own economy; it weakens the industrial democracies economically and potentially militarily; it undermines the world economy, and it frustrates the hope for progress of most of the new nations.

## Responding to the Energy Challenge

Many of the challenges this country faces in international affairs are unavoidable, as other nations grow inevitably in strength and as the specter of nuclear warfare overshadows the planet. But the threat that oil, and its price and supply, pose to the national interest and world order can be significantly reduced by determined action — at home and in cooperation with others. The failure to do so will be a blow to all our national purposes. To be sure, the crisis will evolve slowly, almost imperceptibly, and its full consequences may not be apparent for a decade. But when our vulnerability threatens our standard of well-being and when our destiny and that of our allies has become hostage to unpredictable decisions, shall we then tell our people that, knowing our peril, we absorbed ourselves in sterile domestic debate and were afraid to put before them the relatively minor sacrifices and inconveniences that could have avoided a calamity?

The United States is in a unique and fortunate position which imposes on us, for that very reason, a responsibility of leadership and a duty to be resolute. Our allies cannot aspire to reduce their dependence significantly by their own efforts. We can — and in so doing we are in a position to affect the condition of all nations psychologically as well as materially. The United States has the opportunity to create a new unity of purpose among the democracies on an issue of vital common concern; to give direction to the world's tentative steps toward wider patterns of fruitful cooperation.

The United States needs, most of all, an energy strategy. First, there must be recognition of the severity of our present circumstances — by leaders, legislatures, and public. The steps that are taken must not be random responses but elements of a coherent

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strategy that links both domestic and foreign concerns. Such a strategy requires above all a determined national energy program for the United States. It must mobilize the solidarity of the industrial democracies. It must address the international financial implications of the crisis. It must accommodate the needs of the developing nations. And it must engage the oil-producing nations as constructive participants and partners in a thriving global economic system.

In the absence of such a program, diplomatic attempts to persuade the cartel to be moderate in pricing policy are at best a stop-gap measure. "International jaw-boning," as it were, is a weak reed on which to rest the future of the world economy and the autonomy of our foreign policy. It puts us in danger of being supplicants instead of equal partners in constructing a world order based on equity. It adds to the temptations to set the price on political grounds and to ask a political price in return. The price of oil will be restrained only by objective market conditions; energy crises can be averted only if the industrial nations' dependence on imported oil is diminished by determined national programs.

Thus we in this country should set ourselves a clear goal: we should seek to reduce our oil imports, within a reasonable period of time, to a point where our lessened vulnerability to supply interruption and our reduced balance of payments drain restore balance to the international energy dialogue.

## Elements of an Energy Strategy

An effective national energy strategy to bring about this result must include the following elements:

- conservation,

- development of new supply,

- collaboration among the consumer nations, including safeguarding the world financial system, and

- shaping a reliable long-term relationship between the consumers and producers.

President Carter in a series of public appearances in April called attention to the urgency of the energy challenge. He also vigorously advocated a determined program for energy conservation. Whatever the merit of specific elements of the program, the President's objective deserves the support of all Americans. To discover new sources of oil and to develop alternative supplies of energy will take years. In the near-term future, only conservation will enable us both to absorb the present burden of energy costs and to begin to restore balance between supply and demand.

President Carter's conservation aim is to reduce the annual growth of national energy demand to less

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than 2 percent by 1985, from the present 4.6 percent; to limit gasoline consumption to 10 percent below its present level by 1985; to reduce oil imports from a potential level of 16 million barrels per day to 6 million; to establish a Strategic Petroleum Reserve of 1 billion barrels as insurance against emergencies; to increase coal production by two-thirds to more than 1 billion tons annually; to insulate 90 percent of existing homes and all new buildings, and to install solar energy in more than 2.5 million homes.

The United States is theoretically capable of reducing its energy consumption by as much as 30 percent *without* affecting the rate of growth of our GNP or our standard of living. In 1975, Americans *wasted* more fossil fuel than was *used* by two thirds of the world's population. Energy is wasted whenever energy expenditure can be reduced without higher economic or social costs. To give but one example: in the past two decades architects have more and more tended towards sealed constructions, that is to say, buildings whose windows cannot be opened — especially office constructions. But in most cities of America, temperatures for many months each year are comfortable. Thus, in sealed buildings a great deal of energy is wasted in achieving a temperature that already exists outside and that would be available for free if windows could be opened. This simple conservation measure would obviously impose no hardship and could be rapidly achieved by changing building codes.

Given the high cost of energy, conservation is in the clear self-interest of every hard-headed businessman or every cost-conscious homeowner. It is a classic example of how the national interest can be exactly consistent with self-interest. Conservation is not a new burden to be imposed on our pocket books; it is the discipline and effort required to *ease* the burden of energy costs on the national economy and on individual families.

Conservation requires above all the more efficient use of the energy now available. It means getting 30 to 40 miles to the gallon instead of seven; better insulated houses with more efficient heating systems; a national commitment to eliminate waste by turning out unneeded lights, television sets, and air conditioning, and the greatest possible use of public transit.

If we fail to take these relatively simple measures, we doom ourselves to 50 percent or even greater dependency on imported energy. We will have delegated crucial decisions to foreign countries to whom our prosperity is not in all circumstances an overriding objective and who cannot be expected to show a greater concern for our well-being than we do.

It is imperative that Congress and the President

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reach agreement on a comprehensive, far-reaching conservation plan. If we are to restore balance to the world energy market, an effective conservation program *must* be enacted and soon.

The second essential element of an energy strategy is *development of new and alternative energy supplies*. Conservation alone, crucial as it is, cannot permanently reduce our dependence on OPEC oil. Even the most ambitious conservation plan could not expect to do more than reduce our dependence on imported oil to the level of 1973 — when an embargo caused the most serious recession since the 1930s.

The Administration has, frankly, been much less energetic in pressing for new sources of energy and in fostering cooperation with the industrial democracies than in stressing conservation. We should urgently complete a coherent national energy program.

Much more can and must be done to develop new sources of oil. We should provide every incentive to maximize domestic production. We should also pursue a conscious policy of diversification of foreign sources. Any new source of oil is additional insurance against an embargo and a contribution to equilibrium in the international energy dialogue.

It is clearly in the interest of the United States and all the industrial democracies to diversify technologically as well as geographically. It has been said that the United States is the Saudi Arabia of coal, so vast are our deposits. Moreover, the industrial democracies have the technical skill and resources to create fuels from shale oil, tar sands, and coal gasification and liquefaction. And much progress has been made — and more can be made — on advanced methods such as nuclear power, fusion, and solar power.

It is important to face the fact that nuclear power represents one of the best hopes to close the gap between supply and demand, especially for some of our allies in Western Europe and Japan. They are committed to civilian nuclear power as a matter of urgent national policy, and they will not be easily dissuaded. It is time to end the disputes triggered by our very legitimate worries about the proliferation of nuclear weapons and to work with the industrial democracies on a coherent nuclear energy policy. If the United States uses its ability to supply nuclear fuels as a form of pressure, it may only accelerate the temptations to develop autonomous national nuclear programs.

The investment required to develop new and alternative sources in the near-term future is as massive as it is essential. A serious review of the incentives and disincentives for energy development provided by our tax system and environmental policies is therefore in order. Such a review should also address the

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question whether existing incentives can work rapidly enough to produce the alternative energy sources in the time available. If the answer is in the negative, government-guaranteed financing should be considered.

## The Coherence of the Industrial Democracies

Our own national effort must be part of an international strategy which has these additional elements:

- a coordinated program among the industrial democracies that are the major market for international oil production, including measures to protect and strengthen the international financial system;

- assisting the non-oil-producing developing countries whose development plans are shattered by exorbitant energy costs;

- and for the long-term, shaping a productive relationship of economic cooperation in which the oil producers become ready partners, with a shared stake in a common global effort.

First, as to the nations bordering the North Atlantic and Japan, cooperation among all the industrial democracies is required to influence world energy markets decisively. We cannot do the job alone, but we are the crucial element since we consume half the oil of the industrialized world.

We, who are blessed with greater resources than any of our allies, who are less vulnerable to outside pressures, have a responsibility to take the initiative to organize the collective effort by our example and by our leadership. With a major American effort, the field of energy can in the seventies give a new impetus to the unity among the democracies that in the immediate postwar period spurred common defense, diplomatic cooperation, and progress towards European integration.

For these reasons, the United States took the initiative in 1974 first to organize the Washington Energy Conference and then to help bring about the International Energy Agency. This body, the IEA, has been in operation for three years now. It is the principal institution of energy cooperation among the 19 leading industrial nations of the democratic world. It is a firm foundation on which to build the future common effort of the industrial democracies.

The IEA has set conservation targets for its members to encourage and coordinate national conservation programs. The goal for 1977 is to hold collective oil consumption to 35 million barrels per day or 3 percent above 1973 levels. Additional goals will be set for 1980 and 1985. A successful joint effort can mark a major

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step toward reducing the vulnerability of the industrialized world.

IEA programs, secondly, call for joint projects drawing on capital, technology, and manpower from IEA members to develop new energy sources. Priority areas have been chosen for research and development. Pooling the research efforts of the most advanced industrial nations will multiply the prospects for breakthroughs in technology and exploration.

The capacities of the industrial countries to develop new energy sources vary widely. Some have rich untapped deposits of fossil fuels; some have industrial skills and advanced technology; some have considerable capital available for investment. Few have all three. Nothing would do more to encourage a sense of common purpose among the industrial democracies than to find ways to undertake joint energy development programs.

Thirdly, an emergency program has been approved by all IEA members to maintain reserve stocks and to share supplies during any future oil embargo. The significance of this program cannot be exaggerated. It greatly reduces the impact of selective embargoes against individual countries. And it eases even the impact of a general embargo, which, in any event, involves such political risks that it could be invoked only in the most extraordinary circumstances. The emergency sharing program thus serves as both insurance and deterrent against any new embargo.

The IEA represents a collective response to one of the most serious challenges the West has faced in a generation. It demonstrates the recognition by the democracies that their destiny is shared, and that their best hope of a solution is through unity and common effort. It is of major political importance because it enables the new Administration to make energy conservation a further stimulus to the strength and cooperation of the democracies.

At the same time, our international energy strategy must include measures to safeguard the global financial system against disruption.

There are two enduring consequences of the oil crisis: the creation of massive petrodollar surpluses in the OPEC countries, and the need of consumers, both rich and poor, to overcome the grave balance of payments difficulties created by the high price of oil. It is essential that we guard against the possibility of instability, arising either from the inability of one or several consumer countries to meet their balance of payments needs, or from manipulation of petrodollar surpluses by the producers.

Two measures have been explored in recent years to meet that need. One was a $25 billion Financial Sup-

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port Fund, negotiated in 1975 by the industrial democracies for mutual assistance in an oil payments crisis. The failure of the United States Congress to ratify the Fund — the only legislature among the industrialized countries to do so — was unfortunate. But the negotiation for the Fund served an important purpose in giving the world assurance that as a last resort the industrial democracies had the resources to defend the financial system.

Within the next few days, the major financial powers are meeting in Paris to discuss a new facility within the International Monetary Fund, which would provide additional resources to countries that suffer balance of payments emergencies. It would draw on important contributions from OPEC members, and be available to borrowers if they were making satisfactory efforts at home to curb inflation and to reduce imports.

Provided its funds are available without conditions dependent on the solution of regional conflicts, the new facility in the IMF will serve an important function and should be implemented rapidly. It is an important first step. Early consideration should be given to arranging a second tranche, perhaps with less rigid dependence on OPEC funds than the presently discussed 50 percent. If this should prove difficult, or if burdensome political conditions are attached by the oil producers, new and urgent consideration should be given to resurrecting the Financial Support Fund of the democracies which was designed to safeguard their economies independently of OPEC.

## The Role of the Developing Countries

If international order is to be made secure against instabilities caused by energy, the needs of the developing countries which are not blessed with oil must be addressed by the world community.

These developing countries were caught in the middle by the 1973 oil crisis. Because of the energy-induced recession in the industrialized countries, their oil import bill shot up, and their export prospects sharply declined. They seek desperately to resume their advance toward a more hopeful future, but they do so now under less hopeful circumstances. From 1973 to 1975, the foreign debt of those countries nearly doubled, from $67 billion to $117 billion. They need relief from the enormous blight of high energy costs on their development hopes and plans. Relief for the poorer developing countries is an appropriate task for the joint efforts of newly-rich oil producers and the industrial democracies. Specifically:

- We should rapidly expand all forms of assistance, capital and technical, to aid developing countries

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to expand their own domestic energy production. Many developing countries possess considerable promise for oil, coal, and other forms of energy. They have been unable to exploit them for lack of the capital and technical know-how which modern energy development demands.

- The world financial system has performed remarkably well in channeling some of the petro-dollar surpluses to the needy developing countries. Now, however, is the time to consolidate their debt structures and expand the flow of official, longer-term capital. The development assistance resources of the World Bank and other international financial institutions must be expanded.

- In the final analysis, the long-term solution to the developing countries' payments problems is trade. We must stem the retreat to protectionism, and complete the Tokyo Round of trade negotiations, if we hope to offer any permanent prospects of development to the poorer nations of the world.

## The Role of the Oil Producers

Every one of the tasks enumerated here calls for a joint effort by the oil producers and the industrial democracies. This brings me to the fourth, but perhaps most challenging, element of any international energy strategy: the role of the oil producers in the emerging world energy order.

Clearly, the democracies must safeguard their economies against the hazard of conflict. But, in doing all we can to reduce our vulnerability to pressure and threat, we must take care not to make it inevitable. On the contrary, the basic reality of the present situation is the economic and political interdependence between the energy producing nations and the energy consumers. The challenge to creative diplomacy in the years ahead is to mold this mutuality of interest into a stable and positive long-term relationship.

What are these mutual interests?

First of all, obviously, the producers need markets for their oil. Disruption of the economies of the industrial democracies reduces world growth and world demand for energy. In 1975, as the result of the recession in the industrial democracies, market conditions were depressed to the point where some producers committed to ambitious development programs found themselves in difficulty and were looking for means to sell their oil surpluses despite the production restrictions of OPEC.

Secondly, the producers have a stake in the financial stability of the industrial democracies which are, after

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all, the only places where they can productively invest their payments surpluses. The global economy cannot be disrupted as it was in 1973 without severe damage to the interests of the oil-producing countries themselves. Under present conditions, a world economic crisis would have a massive impact on the oil producers because their overseas investments would be in severe jeopardy.

Thirdly, the industrialized world is the only source of the technology, capital goods, training, and management skills which the oil producers require to develop their economies. In a climate of confrontation, the governments and publics of the industrialized world have little incentive to support such programs.

Fourth, many of the oil producers are concerned about their own stability and safety. A cooperative relationship with the West enhances their security. They cannot be eager to shatter ties which might expose them to the designs of avaricious and hostile countries; they have a major political interest, therefore, in the friendship of the industrial democracies.

Thus, most of the oil producers can have no interest in confrontation; indeed, if they understand their interests, they have an important stake in the ability of the industrial democracies to solve their energy problems. Some of the more enlightened OPEC countries are therefore, paradoxically, leading advocates of energy conservation. They know theirs is a depleting resource and they are eager to extend its life over the longest period of time. They want to use their oil revenues to develop and diversify their economies. Some of them also believe that the world's oil reserves are too valuable to be used up for fuel; they are seeking to switch their own oil resources into new petrochemical industries for their own economic advance.

Thus, energy conservation and the reduction of the West's oil import requirements are as much in the producers' long-term interest as they are in our own. This reflects the basic reality that the ultimate "solution" to the world's energy problem is a thriving interdependent global economy which promotes economic advance in every region through the free flow of trade and know-how and international cooperation.

In building such a world, the industrial nations have an obligation to take serious account of the developing countries' and oil producers' legitimate aspiration for long-term income security and economic growth. The developing countries and producers, in their turn, must recognize that pressure or blackmail will in time backfire on those who use such tactics. The United States, as the world's strongest economy, would be injured less than others in an environment of economic warfare. But this would be incompatible with

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the open economic system that has nourished the world's prosperity and our own. And it would be inconsistent with basic American values and the American people's hopes for a world of peace, compassion, economic progress, and justice.

A cooperative solution for energy thus merges with the problem of world order. The United States has no more important task than to contribute its creativity to building an international system that all nations have a stake in preserving because they participate in its construction and share in its benefits. In a world of 150 sovereign states, there simply is no peaceful alternative to a cooperative international system.

Consumers, producers, and developing countries should learn from the energy crisis both the dangers of economic warfare and a more hopeful recognition of their common stake in a flourishing and just world order.

For the United States particularly, this is an extraordinary moment. For a generation we have carried out our responsibility to maintain the world balance of power and to lead the alliances of the free nations. We have behind us an era of great accomplishment. The energy crisis is the challenge of a new era. Republicans and Democrats, Congress and the Executive, the private sector and government — can work together in the great common enterprise of meeting a challenge that faces us not as partisans but as a nation.

The combination of technical genius and moral ideals is the extraordinary quality of the American people. We have the potential to turn energy from a crisis into a new advance toward our traditional goals of peace and cooperation, justice and progress, toward a future in which all nations and peoples come to participate in the freedom and well-being with which we have been blessed.

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This thoughtful address by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger inaugurated the new program of the Center for Strategic and International Studies on the "Future of Business." The address was delivered June 28, 1977, to an audience of distinguished leaders of business, government, and academia assembled at the Kennedy Center.

This marks the beginning of a major effort by the Georgetown Center to raise the level of public policy discussion of opportunities and problems facing business both externally and internally, within the coming decades. To implement this ambitious undertaking, we are assembling an International Council on the Future of Business, comprising distinguished corporate leaders from Europe, Japan, North America, and the Third World. The program will include a series of forums, discussions, and public events—for the most part in Washington—paralleled by a series of papers and essays under the editorial direction of former Fortune Editorial Board member, Max Ways.

The Center has entered this field of public policy out of deep concern about the future underpinnings of the industrial democracies. The 1977 inaugural year of this important program was made possible by a grant to Georgetown University from Mobil Corporation.

DAVID M. ABSHIRE
Chairman

Ladies and Gentlemen:

No issue is more important to the future vision of international order than the ways in which the world will manage the output and distribution of goods and services. International economics has become a crucial foreign policy challenge. Central to this issue will be the relationship of business to the management of public affairs. I want to thank the Center for Strategic and International Studies for inviting me to inaugurate its Future of Business program.

A generation ago, in the period from the Great Depression to the Marshall Plan, economic concerns were at the heart of international order. The issues which we will face in the decades ahead are at least as urgent and far more subtle and complex. And the most decisive of these issues are at the intersection of economics and politics, of national and international policies, of the public and private sectors. It is essential that both policymakers and businessmen understand these important new interrelationships.

We have come a long way, and very rapidly, to the proposition now axiomatic that international business depends decisively on international politics. We have come a long way, that is to say, from the day when Adam Smith could suggest that government should content itself with the modest responsibility of the maintenance of justice and the construction of good roads and otherwise serve mankind by remitting the management of the wealth of nations to the unseen hand of private decision. We have come a long way from the 19th century when the United States accounted for very little in the scale of world economics.

We have come a long way even from the decades between the wars, when we strode big on the world

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economic scene, participated actively in world economics issues, and yet stolidly maintained an isolationist foreign policy in all other respects. We shall never forget the paradox of Cordell Hull championing free trade at the same time that the Congress insisted that we ignore the darkening clouds across the Atlantic.

Our generation has learned that America's neglect of the requirements of political stability was a major contributor to the disasters of the 1940s which shattered the economic as well as the political order. We have understood that a strong American role—political, military, and economic—in world affairs is indispensable to peace, security, and prosperity. Enlightened American leadership in international diplomacy is equally vital to world order and to the flourishing of the world economy. A coherent public policy must address with equal insight the requirements of security and the management of the economic system. Thus the future of American business will require the highest degree of sensitivity to the political framework in which it functions and to the great coming changes in the world political process.

The map of the world's economy has changed as radically as the world political map. A generation ago, 51 countries joined to form the United Nations; today the world community numbers nearly 150 nations. Each country is, or attempts to be, a discrete economic unit, each with its balance of payments problems, its trade policies, its attitude to investment and its hopes and aspirations for a better life for its people. The global economic system has grown massively in scale and complexity.

A generation ago, only one major nation, the United States, had merged from World War II with its economy intact and flourishing; today, Western Europe and Japan have joined us as major producers of the world's manufactured products and as centers of finance. The Bretton Woods conference established the institutions of an international monetary system after World War II. Today, the colossal expansion of world trade and the dispersal of economic power have compelled major restructuring of that system. Where George Kennan thirty years ago in his seminal "Containment" article could suggest that

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there were only five small pockets of significant economic activity in the world, today the oil producers have become major contenders in the economic arena, the Communist nations are factors in the world economy, and aspiring economic powers like Mexico, Brazil, and Korea are gaining new importance in world affairs.

Thirty years ago, the Marshall Plan was launched with American resources and European effort. Today, the experience of the Marshall Plan is clearly inadequate for the vast enterprise of economic development in scores of new nations. In Europe and Japan, the social forms and technical skills of a modern economy were already present, and only capital had to be replaced. Political stability was threatened above all by the gap between expectation and reality. It is now clear that in the less developed parts of the world supplying capital is not enough; there is a desperate need for technology and trained manpower. And the relationship between economic progress and political stability has emerged as anything but automatic.

We are in the midst of a revolution that we have only begun to perceive. The distinguished sociologist Daniel Bell has recently observed that forty years ago the response in every country to the Great Depression was to strengthen the nation state; national government came into its own as the manager of economic and social policy. Today we see citizens in many societies losing faith in the relevance of government to their personal or ethnic concerns and there are tendencies of fragmentation; at the same time economic problems such as inflation surge across national boundaries and are at the margin of governments' ability to control. Bell observes that the nation state has become too small for the big problems in life, and too big for the small problems. We face a pervasive challenge to the adequacy of the institutions and principles by which we have governed ourselves.

The next decade will determine whether the industrial democracies will be able to manage their economic policies and keep social peace in the face of a probably lower long-term growth rate in the 1980s; whether and in what fashion the develop-

3

ing countries will advance their economic, social, and political well-being, and on what terms of confrontation or cooperation with the West. It is not yet clear what long-term role the Soviet Union, East Europe, and China will play in the world economic system. The full implications of the looming energy crisis have yet to work themselves out. We cannot know perfectly how any of these developments will affect political circumstances.

But we can be certain that economics and politics will be closely related, and that American decisions and American leadership, for better or worse, will shape the response of the industrial democracies and thereby of the rest of the world.

Without us there can be no progress; if we fail, we risk recession, confrontation, and chaos.

Modern economic history also suggests that the contribution and creativity of the free enterprise system will be central to that response. Wherever countries of comparable resources have run the race together—Austria and Czechoslovakia, West and East Germany, Greece and Bulgaria, South and North Korea—the economy with a significant private sector has clearly done more in fulfilling the aspirations of its people than its socialist counterpart. The world community cannot ignore the affairs of business if it is successfully to shape a new political structure that serves peace and the well-being of mankind. Conversely, the private sector can no longer ignore the political environment if it is to make its contribution to an expanding world economy in which it can flourish.

I would like to discuss a number of current economic issues, drawing attention to their political significance, the imperative of international cooperation, and the role of business in helping to solve them. Specifically:

* the economic problems of the industrial democracies;

* the emerging relationship with the developing countries; and

* the beginnings of interaction between the industrial democracies and the non-market economies of the Communist world.

4

The Future of Business and the
Industrial Democracies

The future of business is inseparable from the fu-
ture of industrial democracy. Western Europe, North
America, and Japan produce 65 percent of all the
goods and services generated in the world. They
account for 75 percent of its trade. Their economic
performance drives international commerce and fi-
nance; their investment, technology, managerial
genius, and agricultural productivity are the dynamic
forces of prosperity everywhere. They are the world's
bankers and the world's inventors. Critics of the
West, in the Communist world and elsewhere, have
disparaged this system for decades, but they have not
solved any of their own problems. Ironically they now
turn to the industrial democracies for the technology,
the techniques of analysis, planning and management,
the industrial systems, and the marketing skills which
their own system seems incapable of generating.

But this relative success story is no guarantee for
the future. Realism impels us to note the signs of
strain. The political future in several nations of
the West may well be closed by shortfalls in the
output of goods and services or breakdowns of the
financial system. In too many countries, demands for
real increases in wages, coupled with the insistent
pressures to expand public services and public sector
expenditures, have generated increasingly complicated
inflationary pressures at the very moment when the
increase in the cost of imported energy has added its
own impetus to both inflation and recession. These
demands cannot possibly all be met simultaneously.
An attempt to do so is bound to disrupt and ulti-
mately to demoralize the political system. There is
a grave danger of an erosion of the legitimacy of
government and a prospect of basic changes in the
domestic structure in Europe and perhaps even in
Japan.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility that one
or more of the Communist parties of Western
Europe will gain entry into national governments—
an event which would mark a watershed in post-war
relationships. It is not beyond imagination either,
that some nations will find the discipline required
to establish priorities among levels of demand too

ξ

burdensome to permit their continued adherence to the liberal trading system, and that they will instead revert to protectionism and isolationism. Finally, it could happen that because of disparities of growth rates, balances of payments positions, and international competitiveness, the momentum of European unification will further decelerate and that the political cohesion of the West in international negotiations and institutions would break down.

The consequences for business would, of course, be ominous.

The future of the world economy and indeed of Western political cohesion will depend on the capacity of the industrial democracies to meet these challenges. No one country can hope to address its problems alone. The unity of the democracies, demonstrated in substantive cooperation on concrete issues, is one way—perhaps the only way—to restore the self-assurance of Western societies and their confidence that they are the masters of their destiny. This must therefore be one of the fundamental priorities in our foreign policy, which has been eloquently stated by President Carter at the London summit a few weeks ago.

The United States cannot possibly carry all the burdens, devise all the programs, or provide all the resources, either for international security or for economic development. But the other industrial democracies, who are also our major trading partners, have grown in strength to the point where a sharing of leadership and responsibility becomes both necessary and desirable. American policy in every Administration of both parties for over thirty years has therefore been to encourage Europe's strength and economic and political unity as well as a close relationship with Japan. This solidarity, which began with collective defense, has deepened in recent years to embrace, in addition, common problems of economic policy, arms control, diplomacy to reduce tensions with the East, and initiatives in the dialogue with the Third World.

This cohesion rests not only on pragmatic grounds but on a common moral foundation. It is no accident that our closest partners and interlocutors on every international issue are the countries that share our most fundamental values.

6

One of the central tasks on the agenda of the industrial democracies must continue to be the vitality of the global economy and the harmonization of growth policies among the economies of the West. Consistent expansion without inflation requires not only sound national policy but an increasing cooperation among the nations in the industrial world. We must learn more effectively to synchronize our national decision-making so that national policies can complement and reinforce each other, and not be at cross purposes.

This was the purpose of the economic summit meetings at Rambouillet in 1975, in Puerto Rico in 1976, and most recently in London. This was the task which Secretary Vance pursued last week in the ministerial meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the permanent economic grouping of the industrial democracies. These were not mere ceremonial exercises. They represented the beginnings of systematic consultation among the economic powers of the free world. We must now consider how we can move beyond consultation to real coordination of growth strategies and of other basic economic policies.

For it is important to face the fact that the industrial democracies have been more effective in devising the procedure than the reality of coordination. They have been torn between the knowledge of interdependence and the temptations of shifting their problems to their partners. They have invoked the rhetoric of cooperation but they have been unwilling to subject what have traditionally been domestic decisions to international agreement. As a result, they have not been able to mount with full effectiveness the coordinated attack on the twin pressures of demand and inflation that must succeed if democracy is to survive. To achieve a true coordination must be a major goal of our foreign policy.

## The North-South Dialogue and the Future of Business

In the last several years, the poorer nations, in a variety of forums and with varying levels of stridency, have stated their demands for the renovation of international economic relations. They claim a greater voice in the decisions that affect

7

them and a more just share of the global prosperity. The industrial nations, in response, have reiterated their continued commitment to the open system of world trade and investment. As the final ministerial meeting of the Conference on International Economic Cooperation in Paris made clear, the North-South dialogue has so far failed to establish an agreed frame of reference. And it is plain enough that if it deteriorates to a level of confrontation and conflict, the gulf between the rich and the poor will widen ominously.

This prospect would be unfortunate for all. The United States, as the world's strongest economy, would be injured less than others by an environment of hostility and autarchy. But the outbreak of economic warfare between North and South would damage even our well-being. It would be a long-term threat to the open economic system which has nurtured our prosperity and that of the world for a generation. And it would be, as well, incompatible with basic American values and the fundamental American instinct for a world of peace and cooperation.

Although the developing countries would suffer the most, it is their stale rhetoric of confrontation, their adherence to Marxist doctrines that have never worked in countries where they have been implemented, and their insistence on bloc tactics, that are at the heart of the problem.

At the same time, we must be careful to avoid the conclusion that because the developing world is given to overstatement, all its concerns are unfounded. The developing nations do have legitimate demands for equity, for a greater voice, and increased opportunity. But they cannot escape the reality that their future depends on the vitality of the world economic system. Attempts to wield bloc economic power, and to frame the issue as one of guilt and retribution, will undermine both the receptivity of governments and the public support which are essential if the industrial democracies are to respond creatively and compassionately to the legitimate aspirations of the developing world.

Overestimation by developing countries of their ability to manipulate raw material prices, following the model of the oil cartel, has been one of the

8

causes of the recent failure of the North-South dialogue. But oil is a special case. It is unlikely that even the most imaginative schemes could alter the long-term market prospects for any other commodity. One basic reason is that the industrialized countries, particularly the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Soviet Union, are themselves major producers of commodities like iron ore, nickel, copper, cotton, and sugar. In addition, there are technological possibilities for substitution which make it difficult to assert in other commodities the kind of control over supply and price which the oil cartel enjoys.

Thus, it is high time to face the fact that the issue of new market schemes for raw materials will not be determined primarily through economic pressure from developing countries. It will also depend on what happens in the industrialized countries—how private producers or brokers or investors in those commodities react; whether governments on political and moral grounds are prepared to take account of the inequity of excessive fluctuations in prices for countries dependent on a single commodity; and whether the developed nations perceive that they have an interest in proposals which would stabilize prices around a market trend, avoid artificial limits on supply, and increase new productive investment. Tactics of confrontation are likely to be counter-productive; both developed and developing countries have a major interest in improving the atmosphere of the dialogue, as well as the system itself. It remains to be seen whether their domestic imperatives permit them to do so.

The business corporation which functions across national borders has been at the very heart of the North-South debate. In many developing nations, it is charged with basing production and export decisions on global strategies rather than on individual national interests; it is accused of corrupting life styles toward the wasteful and conspicuous habits of more wealthy societies, of manipulating profits by artificial transfer pricing between subsidiaries, and of suffocating local competitors.

It would be wrong to pretend that some of the criticism has no basis in fact. But many of the critics do so out of a philosophical bias that makes

9

the facts of individual cases superfluous or irrelevant. The distinguished Brazilian economist, Roberto Campos, has called the inflamed rhetoric "escapism and demonology"—escapism, as an effort to externalize the responsibility for poverty; demonology, to lay the blame on the multinational corporation. It is irrational to fear the multinationals for their vast supposed powers of manipulation, when those corporations are far less inclined to such adventures than are governments; with all due respect, they are institutionally and conceptually incapable of managing such efforts consistently or effectively.

Nor have we in our own country settled on a balanced view of how to deal with international business. The revelation two years ago that some firms had made illicit payments sparked a regulatory race between several public agencies to assert jurisdiction and capture public attention. The destabilizing effects in Japan and elsewhere are matters of historical record. One need not condone bribery or ignore the need to improve international business ethics to prefer a system of domestic business regulation which avoids such assaults on the interests and domestic structures of our closest allies.

The multinational enterprise as we know it today is, in fact, an effective vehicle for the development of science and technology, for the application of new knowledge to the world's resources, for the management of the international capital markets, and for the promotion of trade and commerce among nations. No foreseeable increase in public assistance can come close to meeting the needs of the developing countries. Private capital alone can close the gap without many of the conditions and restrictions that governments are likely to attach. Moreover, no government or group of governments can possibly deal with *all* of the developing countries. But *many* developing countries by their own initiative can create conditions to attract private capital whether or not donor governments look with favor on every aspect of their national policy.

Public assistance to development will continue to be important. The flow of resources through the international financial institutions such as the World Bank and IDA, as well as bilateral aid, can and should

10

be increased. The United States has a responsibility to raise its inadequate levels of official development assistance and to remove the encumbrances that successive Congresses multiply.

But it is increasingly plain also that public aid cannot be expected to do the whole job. The developing countries must look increasingly to private investment for the capital resources they need for growth. Latin America, for example, has progressed further and faster in the last decade than any other region of the developing world. It has done so while shifting from public to private sources of external capital, and probably for that reason. In the era of the Alliance for Progress in the early Sixties, most of Latin America's external capital was public; today, more than 80 percent of it is from the private sector.

To suggest that the nation state lacks the capability to discipline the multinational corporation, by either negotiation, persuasion, or compulsion, is a counsel of despair and runs counter to all experience. All developing countries have the power to insure that private business, including foreign private business, comports itself in accord with public priorities. Yet no country can hope for real, long-term growth if it isolates itself from or systematically attacks an instrument so well suited to deal with the commercial, financial, and technological tasks of the modern world.

In fact, the conflict over the role of the private business firm in the developing world threatens to turn into a vicious circle. Excessive suspicions of the purposes and politics of the foreign firms treat business as an enemy rather than a collaborator. Managers of transnational enterprises are thereby given an incentive to maximize short term profits and bury income by fictitious transfer pricing.

A serious responsibility thus falls first on business firms and secondly on governments. Business must show sensitivity to the social purposes and political goals of the countries in which it is established. It must represent what is best in America; it must not lend itself to discriminatory practices based on race or religion; its conduct must reflect this country's standards of fair play, honest dealing, and goodwill. It must make a serious contribution

11

not only to the economic but also to the social de-
velopment of the host country. The few notorious
cases of illicit payments have stirred apprehension
and undermined support for international business
both at home and abroad; they cast a cloud over the
vast majority of firms whose conduct is beyond
reproach.

At the same time, it is one of the urgent tasks of
governments to make clear, on an agreed basis, the
ground rules for foreign investment. Developing
countries have a right to ensure that private capital
is admitted in areas or ways consistent with the na-
tional priorities and legitimate regulations of a
sovereign government. But investors and the in-
dustrial nations have a right to know in advance what
the ground rules are, and not to have them altered
arbitrarily and capriciously in the middle of the game.
Both sides clearly have obligations; both sides can
benefit from agreed principles cooperatively achieved.

These agreed principles should focus on the in-
struments of public policy which can minimize the
the temptation to collusive market practices. They
should strengthen the incentives for multiple firm
markets, effective competition, local entrepreneur-
ship, and domestic financial institutions, and lay
down clear and predictable guidelines and rules of
the road. By turning to these practical steps, we can
open up new and important opportunities for trans-
national enterprises to serve what have become the
two commanding concerns of the developing coun-
tries—access to capital resources and the transfer of
technology.

To an increasing degree, it will be the private
firm which will be the vehicle for the technology
transfer which the developing world requires and
demands. This concept—the *quality* of capital in-
vestment—is a major concern of those developing
nations that have already made significant progress
and have become important actors on the world
economic scene. Most of the new knowledge, skills
and techniques that will be needed by developing
countries in the years to come are in the inventory
of private industry. The bulk of that technology
is in the West. Thus, it is in the interest of the
industrial democracies as well as the interest of the

12

developing countries to enhance the incentive of
our private sector to adapt its storehouse of know-
how and skills to opportunities in the developing
world.

It is clear that the solution to technology transfer
will not be found exclusively in the relationship of
the private firm to the host country. Governments
of the industrial nations must assume a major re-
sponsibility. New agreed practices of international
cooperation, and new institutions which have the
confidence of all parties, are needed to provide a
framework of public commitment and private in-
centive within which the multinational corporation
can make a constructive contribution to develop-
ment in the decade ahead.

There will be ample room for creative thinking.
If I may refer again to the question of raw materials,
the dependence of most developing countries on
commodity export earnings is painfully obvious. And
yet, because of the tensions and uncertainties which
attend the question of private foreign investment in
new commodity projects, the vast bulk of mineral
investments today are being made, not in the poor
countries of the world, but in the industrial
democracies. If the trend continues over the long
term, commodity earnings for the less developed
countries will be far below what they might be,
and prices will be higher for everyone. We need,
not stagnation of investment but policy initiatives
to assist the developing countries to mobilize the
capital, technology, and management skills to pro-
duce the commodity resources they have in such
abundance.

At the Nairobi meeting of UNCTAD last year I
suggested an International Resources Bank, which
could act as intermediary or partner with the host
countries and foreign investors; there is some interest
now in exploring ways in which the World Bank
might play that role in a similar pattern of tri-
angular relationships. Whatever the institution, it
is important that we search for new ways to reduce
the non-commercial risks for resource investment,
and thus promote greater flows of investment capital
for worthy projects on reasonable terms, in the in-
terests of both producers and consumers.

13

In this, and in a host of other areas, it is time the world community accepted the legitimacy of private capital flows. Business has an immense future, of opportunity and responsibility, in helping to meet the development challenge. There is no more serious issue for the prospects of private commerce than its role in the relationship between rich and poor in the years to come.

## Business and Our Future Economic Relations with The East

New trade and financial relationships with the nations of East Europe, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China will also transform the landscape for business in the next several decades. In recent years the Communist countries to a greater or lesser degree have abandoned their traditional insistence on autarchy and begun to move towards greater economic interchange with the industrial democracies. As their economies have become more sophisticated, their demand for consumer goods, high technology, food grains, and a variety of other products has grown comparably.

A rapid and sudden expansion of East-West trade has come about—and a consequent explosion of Western lending to finance that trade. Estimates of the total new debt, public and private, to finance the flow from the West to the East have ranged from $27 to $45 billion.

The desirability of East-West trade and its impact on overall East-West relations have been the subject of intense debate. One school of thought holds that trade and finance automatically serve to restrain Soviet policy. Hence the more intense the mutual interaction between the industrial democracies and the Communist nations, the more likely will the Soviet Union show a sense of responsibility in international affairs. The opposing view argues that *any* trade will inevitably strengthen the Communist economy and ultimately its military potential. Therefore it should be tied to specific conditions, especially the humane evolution of the Soviet domestic system. This was the basis for Congressional action linking Most Favored Nation status to Soviet emigration practices.

14

I believe *both* approaches to be one-sided. The relation between increased trade and a responsible foreign policy is *not* automatic. After all, World War I broke out under conditions of nearly free trade. Only if the balance of power is maintained and Soviet adventurism is resisted can economic relations be expected to have an impact on Soviet conduct. At great deal depends, moreover, on what the trade consists of, what long-term domestic commitments it implies, how open-ended the nature of the credit, and whether the industrial democracies or the Communist nations would suffer more from its interruption.

Many opponents of increased East-West trade also vastly oversimplify the problem. There is no question that because of the many possibilities of the diversion of resources inherent in the modern economy, almost any kind of trade can indirectly benefit military potential. But this must be weighed against the fact that a carefully and prudently designed trade and credit policy is bound to create vested interests that can act as an incentive for responsible conduct. The balance can best be struck if projects are approved on an individual basis, rather than through open-ended credits, through long-term projects whose possible termination involves a serious cost rather than through the delivery of integrated plants in a very brief period of time.

There is no question that Communist nations are prepared to pay *some* price for increased trade. But it is important to understand what this price is and not to act as if it could be exacted mechanically in every field by unilateral demand. As a general proposition public concessions are more likely to be obtainable in the field of international conduct, with respect to which foreign countries have a defined and legal standing, than with respect to matters traditionally considered the subject of domestic policy.

The following principles should, in my view, guide East-West trade:

1. East-West trade cannot be "free." It must be subject to some political control and some political conditions. All of the industrial democracies have

15

agreed to this principle, though they have applied it
with varying degrees of conviction.

2. It is the responsibility of governments to make
certain that these controls make sense, that they
promote clearcut and attainable objectives both in
what they prohibit and what they permit.

3. Uniform standards must be applied by the in-
dustrial democracies so that self-restraint in some
area by one country does not turn into a windfall
economic opportunity for another to the detriment
of both.

4. Credits should not be open-ended but tied to
specific projects.

5. Projects should be sufficiently long-term so that there is a serious penalty in their termination and they should be decided on the basis of whether their termination is a greater penalty to the industrial democracies or to the Communist side.

6. Conditions should be related in general to
foreign policy actions and not to demands that
sovereign nations will never accept as a result of
public pressure from foreigners.

Such a strategy requires a high degree of discipline
and public understanding. American business must
reflect these qualities, which I am frank to say it has
not always done. On the one hand many businessmen
encourage a rhetorical anti-Communism that seems
more concerned with liturgical obeisance than practi-
cal achievement. On the other hand they tend to re-
sist—in the name of free enterprise—any attempt
to control the level of trade or the rate of credits or
to relate them to concrete foreign policy develop-
ments. I remember with a well-suppressed nostalgia
how the Administration of which I was part, after
years of being attacked for "selling out" on the grain
deals of 1972, was castigated unmercifully in 1976
for injecting itself into grain sales when it did so
for the purposes of bringing about a long-term agree-
ment rather than a one-time sale, and also responsi-
ble Soviet conduct in trouble spots such as the Middle
East. I hope a more sophisticated approach will be
possible in the years ahead.

Equally important is a unified strategy on the part
of the industrial democracies. When the restraint

16

of one becomes the windfall of another, it encourages not Communist responsibility but a strategy that divides the industrial democracies and uses their shortsighted obsession with immediate gains to undermine their long-term security. For years there was an intense debate in the United States about extending credits to the Soviet Union, which were never planned to exceed one billion dollars and would have been tied to specific projects and conditions of international restraint. Within two years of the enactment of the Stevenson and Jackson amendments, other industrial democracies had extended open-ended credits exceeding $10 billion.

The need for a conscious and deliberate strategy among the industrial democracies for East-West trade will become ever more urgent as the scale of East-West trade grows. It was to the end of developing a common strategy that in 1976 the United States suggested to the OECD a comprehensive study of the entire East-West economic relationship and its implications. One result was the agreement that the OECD nations would restrain for one year their temptation to compete on export credit terms. Another result was an OECD study to look into both the economic and political implications of the new trade relationships.

These are questions which require an urgent answer: What are the real sources of financing for East-West trade? To what extent does the increased debt of the East to the West mask payment risks? How do we insure economic reciprocity? How do we prevent dumping and other unfair trade practices? How should Communist countries relate to international economic institutions? Are we now effectively coordinating export policies or are some nations evading the gentleman's agreement? At what point does the West become vulnerable to demands that it extend special favors to East European exports? Will the East European nations argue that they require favored treatment if they are to repay their debts? What are the consequences to the sensitive political relationship between the industrial democracies and the Soviet Union?

The economic strength of the industrial democracies is one of our greatest assets in relations with the

17

Communist countries. It underpins our military strength as well as the cohesion of the democratic nations. If managed with wisdom and prudence, it also offers prospects for affecting Communist conduct in a constructive way. But it can also hasten moralization and confusion if driven by short-term considerations of domestic or national advantage rather than a clearcut strategy. Trade with the Communist countries may be a matter of business, but it also involves international issues of the gravest consequences. How the governments of the industrial democracies deal with this challenge will determine the international environment in which foreign policy as well as private business is conducted for years to come.

## Conclusion

America's economic vitality is our greatest asset. It is the product of the creative spirit of a free and industrious people and of an economic system that gives opportunity to private incentive. It is the foundation of our prosperity, our military strength, and constructive relationships in a world of peace.

I have discussed some of our foreign policy concerns—the great importance of our economic cooperation with the other industrial democracies, the role of private enterprise in economic development, and the implications of doing business with Communist countries. In every area, political and economic objectives intersect. In every area, private enterprise, with sensitivity to the broad national framework, and by doing what business is good at, can make a vast contribution to the world's welfare and to international peace. It is more essential than ever that American private enterprise understand the political context—not only the political conditions in the host country where it does business, but also the overall framework of America's international responsibilities.

As a nation we must understand that we can neither dominate the world nor escape from it. For the first time in our history we are permanently involved in international affairs.

This is a heavy responsibility, but also a historic opportunity. Our fellow democracies look to us for

18

leadership. Our adversaries watch for weakness or
a flagging will, which to them spells opportunity.
The developing world needs our assistance, our ad-
vice, our understanding, and our compassion. This
is a challenge that summons the best qualities of
Americans—ingenuity, dedication, pride, confidence,
and moral stamina.

Much of the world now bears the imprint of the
creative American spirit. We have achieved great
things, and even greater achievement is needed to
master the future. In a world of new complexities
and high hopes, Americans can show once again
that we will meet our challenges.

Thank you.

19

The ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER, established in 1976, conducts a program of research, writing, publications, and conferences to encourage debate on domestic and foreign policy issues among religious, educational, academic, business, political, and other leaders. A non-partisan effort, the Center is supported by contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. The authors alone are responsible for the views expressed in Center publications.

Like original Center studies, the essays selected for the Center's reprint series are written by authors who recognize the validity of fundamental Western values and who attempt to combine moral reasoning with empirical analysis.

* * * * *

This article is reprinted by permission from *The Washington Quarterly*, Summer 1982 (© 1982 by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University). Copies of the reprint are available at $1 each from the address below.

Henry A. Kissinger has been a professor at Harvard and was secretary of state under presidents Nixon and Ford.

Ernest W. Lefever, President
ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY CENTER
1666 Connecticut Avenue N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20009
(202) 328-7400

ISBN 0-89633-067-2

Foreword

THIS ESSAY BY FORMER Secretary of State Henry Kissinger combines in a remarkable way strategic analysis, a grasp of political and military realities, and moral reasoning. With wisdom illuminated by experience, Dr. Kissinger addresses all major facets of the nuclear arms debate, including arguments for a no-first-use pledge by NATO, demands for a freeze on nuclear weapons, plans for counter-ing Soviet intermediate-range missiles targeted against Europe, the status and utility of the unratified SALT II Treaty, and current U.S. arms control proposals.

Against the backdrop of political and military developments since 1945, he argues that a no-first-use pledge and a nuclear freeze would both play into the hands of the Soviet Union and would make a conventional or nuclear attack by Moscow more likely, rather than less. "The democracies' desire for peace," he says, "must not be allowed to turn into a weapon of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless," adding that the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Western Europe is designed to "reduce the possibility of selective Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe alone, and to link the nuclear defense of Europe indis solubly to the strategic deterrent of the United States."

If the demands of the "peace movement" became U.S. policy, Kissinger says, we would "in effect have disarmed ourselves unilaterally while sitting on the most destructive stockpile of weapons the world has seen." To be effective, he says,

arms control must be an integral "component of security policy. Experience shows that it can ratify or stabilize a military balance, not serve as a substitute for it. ... The premise of arms control must be that security can be enhanced if the balance is maintained at lower, agreed, and verifiable levels."

Dr. Kissinger concludes with a critique of utopians who fail to understand the requirements of statesmanship: "Demagogues have no great difficulty attacking any step by comparing it with some conjectural utopia. ... It is a disservice to serious moral concerns to pretend that there is no practical dimension, just as it falsifies practical solutions to separate them from their moral content."

This perceptive essay augments other publications of the Ethics and Public Policy Center that address the nuclear dilemma, notably *The Apocalyptic Premise: Nuclear Arms Debated* edited by Ernest W. Lefever and E. Stephen Hunt (published in December 1982), *Why Arms Control Has Failed* by Edward Luttwak, and *What It Means to Be Number Two* by Fred Charles Iklé.

This essay, like all Center publications, is presented as a service to the interested public. The selection of the facts and the views expressed are the responsibility of the author.

ERNEST W. LEFEVER, President
Ethics and Public Policy Center

December 1982

Henry A. Kissinger

> Moral concern about nuclear weapons touches upon a problem vital to mankind's future. Nuclear issues must be addressed with a concreteness and seriousness that do justice to the dangers.

# Nuclear Weapons and the Peace Movement

That nuclear weapons have added a new dimension to warfare and indeed human existence, that they make obsolete traditional concepts of military victory, that they stake civilized life and perhaps humanity itself, is not a new discovery. Some of us have been warning for over two decades that excessive reliance on nuclear weapons would sooner or later lead to the psychological paralysis of Western defense strategy. Where we differed from much of the current agitation is in our rejection of unilateralism. We drew the conclusion that reducing dependence on nuclear weapons obliged us to seek alternative means of defense, especially a buildup of conventional forces. The democracies' desire for peace must not be allowed to turn into a weapon of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless.

In too many North Atlantic Treaty Organi-

zation (NATO) countries, protests and mass demonstrations against nuclear weapons tend inevitably toward a unilateral psychological, and even physical, disarmament with respect to the very weapons upon which Western security has in fact depended. The impression is created that it is the alliance's possession of nuclear arms-weapons that it did not use when it had an atomic monopoly and overwhelming superiority-that threatens the peace and which must be resisted. Little attention is paid to a whole series of aggressive or intransigent Soviet actions, from the dispatch of Cuban troops to Africa through the occupation of Afghanistan to the repression of freedom in Poland, which not only threatened the global equilibrium but are the proximate cause of the breakdown of strategic arms control negotiations in the 1970s.

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facts of postwar history: that but for Soviet pressures in the immediate postwar period American troops would have been withdrawn from Europe in the forties, as indeed they were from Korea; that but for the Korean war the U.S. military budget would have shrunk to derisory levels; that it was the threat to the freedom of Berlin in the late fifties which accelerated the American military buildup; that the Soviet strategic arsenal has grown and been modernized relentlessly since the Cuban missile crisis 20 years ago; that for a variety of reasons the United States stopped its numerical buildup in the late sixties and slowed its modernization for the better part of the seventies; and that all wars in the postwar period have occurred where there were no American forces and no nuclear weapons, while Europe under American nuclear protection has enjoyed the longest period of peace in its history.

For all these reasons, the clamor for peace in much of the West is in most respects addressed to the wrong governments. Unmatched as it is by comparable agitation in the East, it poses the danger that a psychological imbalance, indeed a form of unilateral disarmament, will compound the regional military imbalances, which have already produced such a sense of insecurity in almost all countries around the periphery of the Soviet Union.

And yet the moral concern about nuclear weapons touches upon an issue crucial to our future: Mankind's new-found ability to exterminate itself makes new modes of thinking imperative. But they do not require a flight from concreteness; hysteria is a poor guide to policy. Moral concern must be coupled with a willingness to think through the central issues with a seriousness and in a detail that do justice to dangers as complex as they are enormous.

All consideration of the nuclear question must begin with this reality: Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons have been produced by the superpowers; hundreds by medium-sized countries; and dozens by recent and possibly new entrants into the nuclear club. No scheme of disarmament could ac-

count for all these weapons. Nations would insist on residual forces to protect themselves against cheating, or against the fact that the factories that produced the weapons would remain, or, should by some improbable chance these too be destroyed, against the knowledge in the minds of men from which these factories and weapons sprang in the first place. Mankind cannot unlearn the secret of the atom. In other words, we are doomed to some kind of deterrence, equilibrium, or balance at some level and in some form.

For the immediate future—even assuming foreseeable reductions—that level will be quite high; the real issue before us will be the nature of deterrence, and its components. That problem is neither new nor the exclusive discovery of newly concerned groups in all our countries. Technology would have imposed a reconsideration of existing strategy in any event; the destructiveness of weapons was bound sooner or later to break the cocoon in which we suppressed the consciousness of our Promethean power. But the public outcry has had the healthy result of forcing governments into considerations that they should in fact have initiated; into coming to grips with the awesomeness of the choices into which they have slid because of their reluctance to face, and tell their publics, the implications of their own design.

Our current dilemmas are the result of the decision of all our postwar leaders to base security on technology—to compensate for an assumed Soviet superiority in manpower and conventional weapons by reliance on our nuclear arsenal. Stalin's aggressiveness was real enough. But from the perspective of a generation, it is possible to argue that the West was too ready to attribute a military edge to an adversary only recently devastated by war and 20 million casualties; that the NATO nations underestimated the significance of their own industrial potential and forgot—conveniently—that in fact NATO's manpower is greater than that of the East. All these reflections are now academic. For the immediate future, the West is locked into the decisions of a generation; whatever conclu-

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sions we draw from the current realities and the concerns they generate, for at least a transitional period it will be nuclear weapons that inhibit aggression in Europe. The evasions of three decades cannot be remedied by proclamations but by hard and dedicated effort.

The principal evasion was the refusal to face the fact that strategic nuclear weapons could continue to counterbalance local Soviet advantages only if the U.S. strategic arsenal was clearly superior to that of the Soviet Union—superiority being defined as the ability to destroy the opposing nuclear capability at acceptable cost. That condition began to disappear in the sixties. Technology tended toward equality, and to levels beyond which additional increments of destructive ness lose all relationship to the objectives likely to be in dispute. Under current condi-

suicide. But governments continued the existing strategy, seeking to compensate by emphatic reiterations of all-out nuclear defense for the implausibility of their professions.

I made these points in a speech in Brussels in the fall of 1979¹ and was roundly criticized for allegedly undermining the credibility of NATO strategy. Unfortunately, what I said was true and has now come to pass. For more than two decades it was obvious that U.S.-Soviet nuclear weapons programs were tending toward parity at best and that this would make resort to general war absurd and the threat of it incredible. And for more than two decades, the West has hid its head in the sand and ignored the inevitable.

There was an occasional flirtation with a doctrine of limited nuclear war to restore some relationship between policy and mili-

> "The democracies' desire for peace must not be allowed to turn into a weapon of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless."

tions superiority, to be meaningful, would require an edge so large that no opponent would tolerate it and calculations so esoteric that few leaders will understand them or stake survival on them. Arms-control theory and practice, with their formal emphasis on equality, only accelerated and legitimized this trend.

While all these changes were taking place Western governments and societies preferred to ignore the consequences of their own decisions. Logically, once the Soviet Union acquired the capacity to threaten the United States with direct nuclear retaliation, the American pledge to launch an all-out nuclear war on behalf of Europe was bound increasingly to lose its credibility and public acceptance, if not its sense—and so would the alliance's defense strategy. For the strategy now rested on the threat to initiate mutual

tary power. In my early writings on the subject in the 1950s, I, too, was tempted by that theory. The effort never got very far. Part of the reason was that from the European perspective, the distinction between limited and general nuclear war was not as clearcut as on the American side of the Atlantic; a relatively few nuclear weapons could produce catastrophe and chaos difficult to distinguish from what only total war could do to America. Another cause was the polarization within the community of civilian experts between those who wanted to make nuclear weapons "conventional" and those who feared that governments could be kept from initiating a nuclear holocaust only by guaranteeing that a nuclear war would be as gruesome as possible. Ironically, those circles usually advocating humane and progressive domestic policies generally insisted that nu-

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clear strategy be aimed primarily at the mass extermination of civilians.

I continue to believe that in practice governments will be more careful than in their concepts. Indeed it is reckless in a nuclear world to pretend that any accident must automatically escalate into Armageddon. I hope that if the worst happens, governments *will* seek limits to the use of nuclear weapons—they will almost surely find them. Still, in all likelihood, the problem of limiting the use of weapons whose power has no operationally definable limit will find no acceptable theoretical formulation in advance; as a practical matter, failure to achieve a consensus over a period of thirty years is a pretty good working definition of the impossibility of developing in the abstract a strategy of limited nuclear war.

Unfortunately, many who opposed theories of limited nuclear war recoiled as well before the conventional military buildup, which could have at least reduced or perhaps avoided altogether the local and regional Soviet superiority that gave rise to the reliance on nuclear weapons in the first place. The legacy we are left with is a precarious combination of a NATO reliance on nuclear defense, trends toward nuclear stalemate, growing nuclear pacifism, and continued deficiencies in conventional forces. If we are reluctant to resort to nuclear weapons, and if we continue to evade the necessity for conventional forces, the Western alliance is left with no defense policy at all, and we are risking the collapse of the military balance in Europe that has made possible 35 years of European security, prosperity, and democracy. We will in effect have disarmed ourselves unilaterally while sitting on the most destructive stockpile of weapons that the world has seen.

## Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces in Europe (INF)

The debate over deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe exemplifies the current confusion. Too often it has been portrayed as an American

attempt to shift the risks of nuclear war to Europe or to use Europe as a forward base for strictly American purposes. This is absurd. To the extent that intermediate-range weapons are needed for American nuclear strategy at all—and this depends on the resolution of our own internal debate over the utility of a counterforce capability²—they can be deployed in various modes at sea. The real argument for placing intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the soil of the continent has always been twofold: to reduce the possibility of selective Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe alone, and to link the nuclear defense of Europe indissolubly to the strategic deterrent of the United States. Given the diminishing credibility of the threat of strategic war initiated from the United States, the argument is plausible that the Soviet Union might be tempted to exploit its preponderance of intermediate-range missiles for blackmail against Europe—reasoning that no American response with strategic weapons could alter the outcome. That danger is clearly diminished by the proposed deployment of intermediate-range weapons which would create the imperative of a certain automaticity in the response.

By the same token, the Soviet Union could not risk attacking Europe with conventional weapons without destroying our intermediate-range missiles also, lest they devastate Soviet command centers in a retaliatory blow. And it could not seek to destroy the missiles in Europe while leaving our strategic arsenal in America unimpaired for a possible strike against Soviet intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). Far from giving us the possibility of separating the nuclear defense of Europe from that of the United States, intermediate-range missiles in Europe indissolubly link the two. They increase the risk to America, not to Europe; logically the public demonstrations against them should be on the American side of the Atlantic.

If our European allies are not persuaded by arguments such as these, however, it would be wrong for us to insist on them—especially since, as I have said, we can deploy at sea the intermediate-range weapons we need for

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Kissinger

a purely American strategy. I believe that our allies should now decide that aspect of the requirements of their defense without further American hectoring. By the same token, our proposals in the INF talks should be made on their merits, independent of considerations of shoring up the domestic support for our deployment in various European countries. Such a course would restore balance to the transatlantic dialogue and, frankly, a sense of proportion to the domestic deliberations of our allies.

Renouncing the First Use of Nuclear
Weapons

The issue of the intermediate-range missiles is a symptom, not a cause, of the current malaise over strategy. The real issue remains the need to gear our defense policies to the twin realities of strategic parity and mounting public concern over nuclear weapons. Recently, a serious proposal to that end was made by a group of eminent Americans: Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, and Gerard Smith, all of whom have held high office. Among other things, the views of these outstanding public servants should serve as a reminder to our European friends that if frustration reaches a certain point, American policy could shift drastically away from the now dominant trend.

I greatly respect these men, who advanced the thesis that NATO should renounce the first use of nuclear weapons and rely exclusively on conventional weapons for the defense of Europe—and *a fortiori* of other threatened areas. I share their objective that the West must disenthrall itself of the notion that it can substitute technology for sacrifice and destructiveness for effort. I cannot, however, agree with their declaratory policy, for four principal reasons:

A statement of no first use would leave us psychologically naked for a period that would surely extend over at least five years, even if our own government and all our NATO allies were prepared to make immediate, serious, and sustained efforts to re-

dress the imbalance in conventional weapons. Of course, if the reaction of our allies were less forthcoming about conventional rearmament than anticipated by the authors, the psychological and military vulnerability of NATO would be magnified even more. Our leaders have an obligation to reduce their reliance on nuclear weapons; they must not do so, however, at the price of accelerating a trend of pacifism and panic that may invite Soviet nuclear blackmail. Much of the antinuclear agitation is, after all, directed against the West's nonnuclear weapons as well.

A formal pledge of no first use may well create, in addition, two seemingly contradictory dangers which increase the risk of war. If the Soviets should become convinced that the West fears nuclear war above all else, we may trigger one of the not infrequent reversals of Soviet strategic doctrine, from hints of abjuring first use to the reassertion that a war in Europe could never be limited to conventional weapons. All wars, it would then be argued (as at times it has in the past) will be nuclear—facing the West with the choice of surrender or the kind of war of which our countries will then be incapable as a result of years of renouncing and stigmatizing nuclear weapons.

Nor can we afford to create the impression that we would prefer a conventional defeat in Europe to the first use of nuclear weapons. The history of conventional warfare is filled with examples of battles in which numbers and equipment were roughly equal and yet victory was achieved by such unquantifiable factors as superior tactics, superior strategy, or superior leadership. For centuries wars have started between seemingly evenly matched forces. There is no blinking the fact that deterrence, when only conventional weapons were involved, has frequently broken down. And we probably could then not guarantee that we would live up to our no-first-use declaration. Faced with the collapse of Europe we might well reverse our proclaimed doctrine, thereby bringing about the worst of all possible outcomes: a failure of conventional deterrence *and* a nuclear war.

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Finally, a no-first-use declaration would likely demoralize allies in other regions of the world or other friendly countries, large and small, not embraced by formal alliances and yet as dependent on American strength as they are vital to Western security.

With all these caveats, the authors of the no-first-use proposal have rendered an important service. While I cannot accept their prescription, they have correctly grasped the key challenge: As they point out, the West has no choice but to give greater priority to its conventional defense. As a practical matter, it *must* be our policy to reduce reliance on nuclear war to the greatest extent possible, by creating other means to resist aggression.

This requires more than exhortations, however. The United States has abolished the draft; most of our allies have reduced their terms of compulsory military service; everywhere military budgets are under pressure from increasingly insistent social demands. If we are serious about seeking to reduce the danger of nuclear weapons, we must be serious as well about military efforts in the conventional field, and must face up to the question of the adequacy of our military budgets and volunteer armies.

## Strategic Arms Limitation and Reduction

It has been NATO policy since at least the Harmel Report of 1967 that the Atlantic alliance has two main functions: to maintain the collective defense, and to seek a more stable relationship with the East by willingness to resolve political problems through negotiations. Arms control has had a crucial role in this effort. Public support for defense and for resistance to Soviet challenges can be sustained in the democracies only by demonstrating that the West is not the cause of confrontations. We have seen in recent years that failure to observe this maxim generates massive pressure groups that then exact perhaps excessive concessions from governments belatedly recognizing their impact and suddenly eager to placate them.

To be effective, arms control must be seen as a component of security policy. Experience shows that it can ratify or stabilize a military balance, not serve as a substitute for it. Indeed, it is the stable military balance in Europe that has made possible several decades of efforts to ease tensions with the Soviet Union. If arms control comes to be perceived primarily as an exercise in moral virtue—either because advocates turn demagogic or governments self-indulgent—it becomes a form of self-paralysis. The premise of arms control must be that security can be enhanced if the balance is maintained at lower, agreed, and verifiable levels of forces.

This is why so much hope—perhaps too much hope—has been attached for over a decade to U.S.-Soviet talks on strategic arms control. That is why President Reagan has reaffirmed the commitment of all of his predecessors to limiting these weapons of mass destruction, giving special emphasis to reductions. And that is why there have emerged the various freeze proposals now under active discussion in the United States.

President Reagan's commitment to strategic arms talks marks a watershed in the American domestic debate. For nearly a decade, disputes over strategic weapons limitation have torn our domestic consensus, becoming symbolic surrogates for larger controversies over policy towards the Soviet Union. Arms-control negotiations over the years have been buffeted by debates between competing philosophies sometimes only indirectly touching upon the details being negotiated. Advocates have made exorbitant claims and insisted on separating arms control from all other aspects of policy; opponents saw in them a serious weakening of Western will power and concentrated on portraying the inherent balancing of relative advantages as unilateral concessions. President Reagan, by proposing and entering a negotiation over strategic arms reduction, has liberated our domestic debate and permitted a serious public discussion of the real issues of arms control. The delay in starting the talks, legitimately needed for prepara-

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tion, is a small price to pay for opening up
prospects of a successful conclusion that
were not available to either of his two imme-
diate predecessors.

There exists, then, an unprecedented op-
portunity, for President Reagan's Eureka
speech has put forth a new approach based
on substantial reductions. This takes account
of the concerns of many about the scale of
nuclear arsenals. And it deals as well with
what is the real heart of the matter, namely
crisis stability, or diminishing the danger of
the outbreak of nuclear war. For if the re-
ductions are confined to launchers, without
concern for the composition and nature of
strategic forces, they could increase instabil-
ity rather than ease it. After all, the over-
whelming new problem in the strategic field
is the existence of multiple warheads on
strategic missiles. Even if the launchers on

tion Talks) negotiations to agree on numeri-
cal limits on launchers; the negotiations now
envisaged are infinitely more complex.

A policy is needed to bridge this gap lest
careless "quick-fix" solutions dominate the
debate. The desire for a dramatic break-
through has produced various proposals for
nuclear freezes. Experience has shown,
however, that it is easy to formulate general
objectives in arms control negotiations; it is
much more difficult to negotiate a meaning-
ful outcome whatever principle is finally
adopted. We have, after all, the experience
of the two SALT agreements which were
both essentially a kind of numerical freeze.
Complex negotiations went on for years over
what weapons to count; how to relate multi-
ple warheads to individual delivery vehicles;
and how to relate either to airborne weapons
of mass destruction. Attempting a freeze

"If arms control comes to be perceived
primarily as an exercise in moral virtue . . . it
becomes a form of self-paralysis."

both sides are exactly equal, the disproport-
tion between the number of attacking war-
heads and the number of launcher/targets
represents a standing temptation to strike
first. Reductions of launchers do not auto-
matically change the disproportion. In fact,
at some levels reducing the number of deliv-
ery vehicles without changing the proportion
of warheads to missiles increases the vulner-
ability of the missiles attacked; a first strike
is simplified. The Reagan administration is
surely on the right track in striving for a pro-
posal that combines reductions with restric-
tions on other characteristics of weapons to
inhibit, rather than ease, a surprise attack.

But it is also true that such a process is
enormously time-consuming, not only in
elaborating our own position but in negoti-
ating an agreement with the Soviet Union. It
took years of SALT (Strategic Arms Limita-

now would encounter all the old SALT di-
lemmas—for example, of where to draw the
dividing line between “modernized” and
“new” systems. Who can forget the Soviets’
attempt to define all of their replacement
-weapons as only “modernized” and hence
permitted, while all of ours were said to be
“new” and hence proscribed? In short, a
freeze requires a baseline; by itself it is no
advance over the results of the SALT process
which already exists.

In my view, the existing SALT framework
may be useful in providing the baselines and
the definitions from which to negotiate over
the complex reductions that the administra-
tion is in the process of developing. At the
same time, we must take seriously the con-
cerns expressed in the Senate debate on rati-
fication of SALT II. On that occasion, I sup-
ported ratification if three conditions were

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fulfilled: first, if a major defense buildup were undertaken to restore the military balance; second, if certain amendments were made and if specific ambiguities, particularly in the accompanying three-year Protocol, were cleared up; and third, if the United States made clear the linkage between SALT and Soviet geopolitical conduct. Some senators, led by the then minority leader Howard Baker (R-Tenn.), stressed the importance of maintaining the American right to build heavy ICBMs such as the Soviet Union already possessed in large numbers.

These are valid concerns, and I believe that we are at a stage where they can be met. The Reagan administration's rearmament effort will in time balance the Soviet buildup; it is urgently needed—but in any case, the administration has voluntarily kept it within SALT II limits. The Protocol has lapsed. We could therefore proceed to an interim agreement using the SALT framework or, as some former opponents of the treaty such as Senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) have indicated, ratify the SALT II treaty. I would lean to that course, although whether the limits are formalized by ratification, congressional resolution or by other bilateral or unilateral means is a secondary issue. In any case I would urge the following additions to the existing SALT framework:

* First, spelling out an American right to build heavy ICBMs equivalent to the Soviets'. My impression is that the MX, which is permitted under the treaty, meets all current American objectives (and also that it raises enough problems of deployment in its own right). It is therefore unlikely that we would build an even heavier missile. Still, a treaty that deprives the United States of the formal right to aim for equivalence with the Soviets raises serious problems of equity. Alternatively, we could offer to trade reductions or even elimination of the MX for similar restraints on the Soviet heavy missile, the SS-18.

* Second, lowering the ceilings below the limits established by SALT II to

around 2,000-2,100 strategic delivery vehicles. This would symbolize a commitment to reductions.

* Third, extending the agreement's duration to 1987, instead of 1985—to be superseded by a reduction agreement, of course, if concluded earlier. This would provide time for the agreement to be reflected in the weapons decisions of the parties and a sense of security for the comprehensive reductions and qualitative restrictions our administration is properly seeking.

Reverting to the framework of SALT II as a point of departure for an interim period may seem to some to reopen partisan wounds. The argument is made that it would freeze existing Soviet advantages in throwweight. But we should remember that those advantages reflect American unilateral weapons decisions, not agreements. They have always been in our power to reverse—for example, by deploying the MX. We have not done so, by our own choice. The administration has repeatedly proclaimed that it will observe the numerical limits agreed in SALT II. I have great difficulty understanding why it is safe to adhere to a nonratified agreement while it is unsafe formally to ratify or to accept what one is already observing. The Soviets may in fact prefer such a posture, all the more so as nonratification gives them at least 250 extra delivery vehicles which they would be obliged to destroy by the terms of the treaty, once ratified.

But no step forward toward arms control will advance us decisively toward a stable peace unless we are willing to confront two corollaries. First, we must always keep in mind that any agreement on limiting or reducing strategic weapons will further undermine the credibility of a strategy based on their use. It thus reemphasizes the urgent need to redress the imbalance in conventional forces. Western governments must not use an agreement as an excuse to slacken their defense effort but to redirect it. Or else SALT, or START, or any other acronym, will multiply our perils. We should be pre-

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Kissinger

pared to pay the price of a further conven-
tional buildup; we must not pretend that there
is no price.

Second, important as arms control is,
commitment to it must not obscure the basic
reality: as a general principle arms do not
cause political tensions; they reflect them. It
cannot be in the interest of the West to permit
the Soviet Union to use arms-control talks as a
safety valve to avoid the consequences of ag-
gressive behavior. In the past decade, almost
every Soviet aggressive move has been fol-
lowed by an offer to accelerate arms talks. In
the long run, the Soviets may be misled into
believing that they can safely challenge the
global balance and escape the consequences
by conciliatory rhetoric. Even as we insulate
arms talks to some degree from political dis-
cussions, we must never forget that the cause
of tensions is the political conflict between
East and West, the clash of philosophies and
the Soviet effort to expand its power and its
sphere. Sooner or later there must be a settle-
ment of this political conflict or all subsidiary
negotiations will ultimately become irrele-
vancies.

Thus, the deeper challenge to Western
leaders is whether they are willing to face
complexity; whether they can educate their
peoples to the knowledge that passion can
give an impetus but only analysis can pro-
duce results, that arms control cannot survive
in conditions of permanent geopolitical
challenge: whether, in short, the democ-
racies can muster the discipline and the cohe-
sion for facing their perils with a sense of

purpose instead of running from them in
confusion and division.

Conclusion

If our problems were simple, they would
long since have been solved. The statesman
always faces the dilemma that he must ap-
proach his goal in stages; he is responsible
not only for the best that can happen but also
for the worst. Perfection will therefore elude
him at each stage; demagogues have no great
difficulty attacking any step by comparing it
with some conjectural utopia. But democ-
racy cannot survive if debates are driven by
such attitudes. It is a disservice to serious
moral concerns to pretend that there is no
practical dimension, just as it falsifies practi-
cal solutions to separate them from their
moral content. There is no room for self-
righteousness on either side of the Atlantic or
within any of our countries. Any real prog-
ress, therefore, must begin within our-
selves.

TWO

Notes

1. See Henry A. Kissinger, "The Future of NATO,"
*The Washington Quarterly*, Autumn 1979, vol. 2, no.
4, p. 12.

2. How much counterforce we seek depends on how much we wish to insure that we have options other than the mass extermination of civilians. Abjuring counterforce has a price: The more we emphasize frightfulness in our strategy, the more we diminish its credibility in the circumstances most likely to arise and the less hedge we have against unexpected catastrophe.

39

Summer 1982

ETHICS AND PUBLIC POLICY STUDIES

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Thirty-one selections that reflect a wide range of views on nuclear arms policy held by political leaders, religious authorities, scholars, policy experts, journalists, and political activists from both the United States and Europe.

Christianity and Politics: Catholic and Protestant Perspectives

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Essays by Richard John Neuhaus, James V. Schall, S.J., David Little, Michael Novak, Whittle Johnston, and Timothy L. Smith on the relation of the Christian ethic to various aspects of the political and cultural order, including foreign policy, education, capitalism, and social legislation.

The Oil Muddle: Control vs. Competition

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America's Stake in the Pacific

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An analysis of the significant political and economic ties between the United States and Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and other East Asian countries. Proposes a Pacific security community in which these states would play a greater role in their own defense.

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A meticulously researched study that compares the political and military facts of the highly controversial Christmas Bombing with reporting and comment on it by the New York Times, the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, and CBS Evening News—and finds some startling and pervasive discrepancies.

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Lively responses to Kennan's views of Western decadence, nuclear arms, and Soviet leadership by George Urban, Hugh Seton-Watson, Richard Pipes, Michael Novak, Seymour Weiss, Eugene Rostow, Edward Luttwak, John Lewis Gaddis, and Eduard Mark. Includes excerpts from Kennan's writing.

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A political strategy for economic relations.

# TRADING WITH THE RUSSIANS

BY HENRY A. KISSINGER

IN THE WAKE of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and then of the suppression of liberty in Poland, two successive American Administrations vainly sought European support to restrict East-West trade. The resulting disagreements have left an unfortunate residue. In America, many believe that Europe subordinates long-term strategy and even security to short-term domestic politics; in Europe, many argue that America seeks to play for geopolitical stakes with European chips, risking the domestic cohesion of friendly countries without ourselves making equivalent sacrifices, as the lifting of the grain embargo suggests.

Pressures for East-West trade grew in the late 1960s and early 1970s—ironically, following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It was argued in some quarters that despite occasional Soviet transgressions, increased trade would moderate Soviet behavior by making the U.S.S.R. increasingly dependent on the technology and grain of the industrial democracies. The American Administration then in office, in which I served, held from the first that trade should *follow* prior demonstrations of Soviet commitment to a more peaceful course and should be linked to Soviet international behavior. When the Soviet Union entered into serious negotiations on Berlin, SALT, mutual force reductions, and other matters, the United States gradually lifted restrictions, on a case-by-case basis and tied to specific projects. Our European allies followed, and far surpassed us in both the scale of their trade and credit and the ease with which they made it available.

Whatever the merit of the original theories, it is now clear that trade and credits can moderate Soviet conduct only if the Kremlin fears that intransigence will cost it the economic benefits it seeks. Yet that is what is most insistently rejected by the domestic interest groups in all countries that gain from East-West trade and by the Western governments that they influence. More and more, the governments of the industrial democracies act on the premise that the immediate gains in employment outweigh the political risks of strengthening a hostile and aggressive political system.

This is all the more shortsighted, since a mounting tide of radicalism and insecurity in the world—inevitably encouraged or abetted by a growth of Soviet power unrestrained by some agreed code of conduct—will sooner or later compound all economic difficulties as well.

There is little doubt that the negotiating balance in East-West trade has been reversed over the past decade. In every crisis, the West invents new excuses for declining to interrupt economic relations. Indeed, economic relations have done much more to induce Western restraint in the face of Soviet misconduct than to encourage Soviet restraint in international behavior.

The inequality in bargaining positions is almost entirely the result of the disunity of the democracies. The West is divided into competing units that are sometimes prevented by antitrust legislation from acting together, and often encouraged by governments that seek special benefits for their national industries by concessional credits. Loans have been offered or encouraged with little or no consideration of Soviet or East European ability to use or repay the funds. Default is avoided by "rescheduling," that is, lending more money to pay interest on what are in effect bad loans—protecting the lenders' balance sheet. In these circumstances it is easy for the Kremlin to play Western countries, and even industries, against each other, obtaining benefits not justified by the economic balance of advantage, much less by political circumstances.

The result has been an anomaly. By any objective analysis, the Soviet Union and its satellites are infinitely more dependent on East-West trade than their trading partners, the industrial democracies. The Soviet Union cannot feed itself without the non-Communist world's grain; it desperately needs Western technology. The inequality in benefits would long since have reduced trade to a trickle had not Western governments stepped in with direct or hidden credits, which now amount to nearly $90 billion for the Communist world. In addition, many export prices are subsidized by governments directly or indirectly. The Communist countries thus are not only gaining a relative advantage in trade, but are also being financed by the nations against whom they are simultaneously

Henry A. Kissinger's latest book is *Years of Upheaval* (Little, Brown).

14

THE NEW REPUBLIC, June 2, 1982

conducting a geopolitical offensive. Lenin's legendary
dictum that capitalists would compete to sell the rope
with which they would be hanged is coming true with a
vengeance—for Lenin never guessed that Western
governments would provide the money to buy the
rope and subsidize the price to facilitate the purchase.

It is unthinkable that the West should continue to
use its overwhelming share of the world's economic
power so frivolously. We are on the defensive not
because we lack resources but because we have failed
to muster the will or the leadership to organize a
coherent response. We have tried stop-and-go sanc-
tions. They have failed because they affected various
countries and different sectors of the economy un-
equally. They have turned into pinpricks dramatizing
the West's weakness rather than its mastery of the
situation.

The issue has further been clouded by the extreme
manner in which the choices have been stated. Some
opponents of East-West trade seem to hope that a total
denial of economic benefits would force the collapse of
the Soviet system. This theory is disproved by history.
The Soviet system survived several decades of eco-
nomic isolation and did not crumble. And it runs
counter to the domestic pressures for seeking negotia-
tions on a broad front. The last eighteen months show
that the alliance will not sustain a policy of confronta-
tion for its own sake, unrelieved by any hope of
diplomatic progress.

But the opposite theory, of the automatic mellowing
effect of trade, has also been demonstrated to be falla-
cious. Soviet behavior in recent years has given the lie
to the argument that trade and credits by themselves
will bring about a benign evolution of the Soviet
system. Soviet-Cuban intervention in Angola, in Ethi-
opia, and in South Yemen; the invasion of Afghani-
stan; the suppression of Solidarity in Poland; and the
use of toxic chemical and biological warfare in Af-
ghanistan and Southeast Asia have all occurred in
precisely the period of expanded East-West economic
cooperation.

IF THE DEMOCRACIES continue to make available
their hard-earned resources for an assault on the
geopolitical balance, they must not be surprised at the
inevitable decline in their security and prosperity. So
long as the Soviet Union asks us for help in solving its
economic problems by what amounts to Western aid,
the industrial democracies have the right, and indeed
the duty, to insist on restraint and stability in interna-
tional conduct in return.

The industrial democracies are in a position to use
their economic strength positively and creatively.
There exists a sensible rationale for East-West trade
which is neither unrestricted economic warfare nor
uncontrolled Soviet access to Western trade, credit,
and technology. If the democracies cannot concert
unified political criteria, they should at least be able to

agree on letting market conditions determine the level
of East-West trade and credit. If government-guaran-
teed credits and subsidies were to end, East-West trade
would be reduced to the level of reciprocal economic
benefit—or a small fraction of what now exists. If the
Soviets want to go beyond this—if they seek further
credits or subsidized prices—the West should insist on
a political quid pro quo.

TO THIS END, the industrial democracies should
jointly take the position that they are prepared
over the long term to engage in economic cooperation,
even on an augmented scale—but only if there is in
return a comprehensive political understanding pro-
viding for settlement of the most serious outstanding
problems, specific restraint in superpower conduct,
and major steps toward arms reduction. The conditions
should not be pious platitudes and should be spelled
out in concrete detail. Nor should we delude our-
selves: this cannot be achieved without a period, per-
haps of some years, of disciplined coordination and
restraint among the democracies to convince the Sovi-
ets that we are serious.

Specifically, the democracies should start by specify-
ing their objectives in the political area to provide
clear-cut criteria for progress. The most important
message would be that the industrial democracies pro-
pose to speak with the East with one voice.

Second, there should be an urgent updating of the
list of prohibited strategic exports and a determination
to stick to it.

Third, the democracies should examine at the high-
est level on what political terms the Soviet Union and
the nations in its system will enjoy governmentally
supported access to Western trade and financial re-
sources. Policies on export credits and financial guar-
antees should be reviewed periodically, based on a
commitment to establish a common and noncompeti-
tive policy among all members of the Organization for
Economic Cooperation and Development.

Fourth, the democracies should agree to end pro-
gressively all government subsidies and guarantees for
private bank credits to Eastern Europe. Given the
nearly catastrophic performance of Communist econo-
mies, the marketplace would determine the proper
flow of private credit, probably to restrict if not elimi-
nate it. The same principle should apply to subsidized
prices. Concurrently, there should be an agreement
that rescheduling of existing debts will be heavily
influenced by behavior of the countries concerned,
especially in the field of foreign policy but including
an end of martial law in Poland.

Fifth, there should be an urgent review of the grain
export policy of the major grain-producing nations to
determine how it can serve the strategy sketched here
without undue hardship to the farmers in all our
countries.

Finally, there must be a consensus among the de-

JUNE 2, 1982 15

mocracies about what form of expanded economic cooperation we are prepared to undertake with the Communist world if this strategy of Western economic coordination leads to a broad East-West political understanding. The Versailles summit would seem to provide a useful forum to begin such a process.

What these measures suggest is in the long-term interest of both East and West. It discourages Soviet adventurism grounded in the belief that the West is too weak, too selfish, or too divided to defend its interests with its best weapons. It thus forces the Soviets to make real choices at a time when their succession struggle will inevitably involve an internal debate over priorities and a possible desire to ease outside pressures. If it leads to the sort of political settlement that precludes later reversal, trade and credit can safely be expanded. If such a settlement is unattainable, continuing our present trade and credit practices will in effect accelerate our crisis. In that case, future generations will not be able to explain what possessed their predecessors to engineer their own decline by lassitude, greed, or lack of leadership.

If the industrial democracies wish to subsidize their

exports by easy credit or pricing policies, the creative area for such efforts is not in the Communist countries but in the third world—especially among its moderate, market-oriented governments.

The Soviet Union is a system with no legitimate method of succession, a stagnant economy, a demographic challenge in the growth of its non-Russian population, and ideological claims whose bankruptcy is being proven by the working class of Poland in the streets of Polish cities. The joke of recent history is that the only spontaneous revolutions in industrialized countries have been against Communist governments. A system that feels so threatened by even the most elementary liberties, a system so structurally unsound and so patently contrary to the human spirit, can prevail only by our inadequacies, not by its own efforts. The West, which over centuries has shaped a great civilization—of culture, philosophy, inventiveness, and well-being—must not now abdicate control of its own destiny to short-term calculations. Democracy requires above all clarity of thought, fortitude, and leaders willing to present the facts to their people and prepared to deal with complexity.

CONTENTS

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>Page</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>The Problem of Nuclear Weapons</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces in Europe (INF)</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>Renouncing the First Use of Nuclear Weapons</td><td>7</td></tr><tr><td>Strategic Arms Limitation and Reduction</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>Economic Relations with the Soviet Union</td><td>14</td></tr><tr><td>Conclusion</td><td>19</td></tr></tbody></table>

It is an honor to deliver the first Geri Joseph Lecture, and particularly to do so before so distinguished an audience.

The moment is appropriate for dialogue because the alli-
ance of the democracies is in grave difficulty. A new genera-
tion on both sides of the Atlantic has no personal memory of
the crises and dangers which gave birth to that alliance. It
takes for granted the achievements which have produced nearly
four decades of peace in Europe and, despite all current diffi-
culties, unprecedented prosperity. That tradition of unity must
be nurtured. If the democracies fail to stand together in a
world increasingly inhospitable to democracy and liberty, they
will first lose the coherence of their policies and ultimately
their freedom.

The Atlantic Alliance has unfortunately been living off
capital for too long. Alliance obligations have never required
unanimity; up to a point, free peoples should be able to trans-
late diversity into creativity. But we are no longer dealing
with only occasional disagreements. There is almost no issue
on which the allies are in accord--whether it is nuclear strategy,
political and economic relations with the Soviet Union, Central
America, or the Middle East. That situation cannot continue
without impairing the security relationship which has maintained
the peace in Europe and the world for a generation.

I am not here as a spokesman for the American Administration
or for any of its particular policies. To be sure, many of its
members are friends and former colleagues and I speak with some
understanding of their dilemmas and considerable sympathy for
their aspirations. I am here as a private citizen who has al-
ways believed passionately in the political and moral importance
of the alliance of the democracies. In this spirit, I want to
discuss two of the key problems in the European-American debate:
nuclear weapons, and economic relations with the Soviet Union.

The Problem of Nuclear Weapons

That nuclear weapons have added a new dimension to war-
fare and indeed human existence, that they make obsolete
traditional concepts of military victory, that they stake
civilized life and perhaps humanity itself, is not a new
discovery. Some of us have been warning for over two decades
that excessive reliance on nuclear weapons would sooner
or later lead to the psychological paralysis of Western
defense strategy. Where we differed from much of the current
agitation is in our rejection of unilateralism. We drew
the conclusion that reducing dependence on nuclear weapons

2

obliged us to seek alternative means of defense, especially
a build-up of conventional forces. The democracies' desire
for peace must not be allowed to turn into a weapon of blackmail
in the hands of the most ruthless.

In too many NATO countries, protests and mass demon-
strations against nuclear weapons tend inevitably toward
a unilateral psychological, and even physical, disarmament
with respect to the very weapons upon which Western security
has in fact depended. The impression is created that it
is the Alliance's possession of nuclear arms---weapons which
it did not use when it had an atomic monopoly and overwhelming
superiority--which threatens the peace and which must be
resisted. Little attention is paid to a whole series of
aggressive or intransigent Soviet actions, from the dispatch
of Cuban troops to Africa through the occupation of Afghanistan
to the repression of freedom in Poland, which not only threatened
the global equilibrium but are the proximate cause of the
breakdown of strategic arms control negotiations in the
1970s.

Even less attention is paid to some basic facts of
postwar history: that but for Soviet pressures in the immediately
postwar period American troops would have been withdrawn
from Europe in the Forties, as indeed they were from Korea;
that but for the Korean war the US military budget would
have shrunk to derisory levels; that it was the threat to
the freedom of Berlin in the late Fifties which accelerated
the American military build-up; that the Soviet strategic
arsenal has grown and been modernized relentlessly since
the Cuban missile crisis twenty years ago; that for a variety
of reasons the United States stopped its numerical build-
up in the late Sixties and slowed its modernization for
the better part of the Seventies; and that all wars in the
postwar period have occurred where there were no American
forces and no nuclear weapons, while Europe under American
nuclear protection has enjoyed the longest period of peace
in its history.

For all these reasons, the clamor for peace in much
of the West is in most respects addressed to the wrong governments.
Unmatched as it is by comparable agitation in the East,
it poses the danger that a psychological imbalance, indeed
a form of unilateral disarmament, will compound the regional
military imbalances which have already produced such a sense
of insecurity in almost all countries around the periphery
of the Soviet Union.

3

And yet the moral concern about nuclear weapons touches
upon an issue crucial to our future: Mankind's newfound
ability to exterminate itself makes new modes of thinking
imperative. But they do not require a flight from concreteness;
hysteria is a poor guide to policy. Moral concern must be
coupled with a willingness to think through the central
issues with a seriousness and in a detail that do justice
to dangers as complex as they are enormous.

All consideration of the nuclear question must begin
with this reality: Tens of thousands of nuclear weapons
have been produced by the superpowers; hundreds by medium-
sized countries; dozens by recent and possibly new entrants
into the nuclear club. No scheme of disarmament could account
for all these weapons. Nations would insist on residual
forces to protect themselves against cheating, or against
the fact that the factories that produced the weapons would
remain, or, should by some improbable chance these too be
destroyed, against the knowledge in the minds of men from
which these factories and weapons sprang in the first place.
Mankind cannot unlearn the secret of the atom. In other
words, we are doomed to some kind of deterrence, equilibrium,
or balance at some level and in some form.

For the immediate future--even assuming foreseeable
reductions--that level will be quite high; the real issue
before us will be the nature of deterrence, and its components.
That problem is neither new nor the exclusive discovery
of newly concerned groups in all our countries. Technology
would have imposed a reconsideration of existing strategy
in any event; the destructiveness of weapons was bound sooner
or later to break the cocoon in which we suppressed the
consciousness of our Promethean power. But the public outcry
has had the healthy result of forcing governments into considera-
tions that they should in fact have initiated; of coming
to grips with the awesomeness of the choices into which
they have slid because of their reluctance to face, and
tell their publics, the implications of their own design.

Our current dilemmas are the result of the decision
of all our postwar leaders to base security on technology--
to compensate for an assumed Soviet superiority in manpower
and conventional weapons by reliance on our nuclear arsenal.
Stalin's aggressiveness was real enough. But from the perspective
of a generation, it is possible to argue that the West was
too ready to attribute a military edge to an adversary only
recently devastated by war and 20 million casualties; that
the NATO nations underestimated the significance of their
own industrial potential and forgot--conveniently--that

4

in fact NATO's manpower is greater than that of the East. All these reflections are now academic. For the immediate future, the West is locked into the decisions of a generation; whatever conclusions we draw from the current realities and the concerns they generate, for at least a transitional period it will be nuclear weapons which inhibit aggression in Europe. The evasions of three decades cannot be remedied by proclamations but only by hard and dedicated effort.

The principal evasion was the refusal to face the fact that strategic nuclear weapons could continue to counterbalance local Soviet advantages only if the US strategic arsenal was clearly superior to that of the Soviet Union--superiority being defined as the ability to destroy the opposing nuclear capability at acceptable cost. That condition began to disappear in the Sixties. Technology tended toward equality, and to levels beyond which additional increments of destructiveness lose all relationship to the objectives likely to be in dispute. Under current conditions superiority to be meaningful would require an edge so large that no opponent would tolerate it and calculations so esoteric that few leaders will understand them or stake survival on them. Arms control theory and practice, with their formal emphasis on equality, only accelerated and legitimized this trend.

While all these changes were taking place Western governments and societies preferred to ignore the consequences of their own decisions. Logically, once the Soviet Union acquired the capacity to threaten the United States with direct nuclear retaliation, the American pledge to launch an all-out nuclear war on behalf of Europe was bound increasingly to lose its credibility and public acceptance, if not its sense--and so would the Alliance's defense strategy. For the strategy now rested on the threat to initiate mutual suicide. But governments continued the existing strategy, seeking to compensate by emphatic reiterations of all-out nuclear defense for the implausibility of their professions.

I made these points in a speech in Brussels in the fall of 1979; I was roundly criticized for allegedly undermining the credibility of NATO strategy. Unfortunately, what I said was true and has now come to pass. For more than two decades it was obvious that US-Soviet nuclear parity would lead us--sooner or later--to this point. And for more than two decades, the West has hid its head in the sand and ignored the inevitable.

5

policy and military power. In my early writings on the
subject in the 1950s, I, too, was briefly tempted by that
theory. The effort never got very far. Part of the reason
was that from the European perspective, the distinction
between limited and general nuclear war was not as clear-
cut as on the American side of the Atlantic; a relatively
few nuclear weapons could produce catastrophe and chaos
difficult to distinguish from what only total war could
do to America. Another cause was the polarization within
the community of civilian experts between those who wanted
to make nuclear weapons "conventional" and those who feared
that governments could be kept from initiating a nuclear
holocaust only by guaranteeing that nuclear war would be
as gruesome as possible. Ironically, those circles usually
advocating humane and progressive domestic policies generally
insisted that nuclear strategy be aimed primarily at the
mass extermination of civilians.

I continue to believe that in practice governments
will be more careful than in their concepts. Indeed it
is reckless in a nuclear world to pretend that any accident
must automatically escalate into Armageddon. I hope that
if the worst happens, governments will seek limits to the
use of nuclear weapons--they will almost surely find them.
Still, in all likelihood, the problem of limiting the use
of weapons whose power has no operationally definable limit
will find no acceptable consensus in advance; as a practical
matter, failure to achieve a consensus over a period of
thirty years is a pretty good working definition of the
impossibility of developing in the abstract a strategy of
limited nuclear war.

Unfortunately, many who opposed theories of limited
nuclear war recoiled as well before the conventional military
build-up which could have at least reduced or perhaps avoided
altogether the local and regional Soviet superiority that
gave rise to the reliance on nuclear weapons in the first
place. The legacy we are left with is a precarious combination
of a NATO reliance on nuclear defense, trends toward nuclear
stalemate, growing nuclear pacifism, and continued deficiencies
in conventional forces. If we are reluctant to resort to
nuclear weapons, and if we continue to evade the necessity
for conventional forces, the Western Alliance is left with
no defense policy at all, and we are risking the collapse
of the military balance in Europe that has made possible
thirty-five years of European security, prosperity, and
democracy. We will in effect have disarmed ourselves uni-
laterally while sitting on the most destructive stockpile
of weapons that the world has seen.

6

The debate over deployment of American intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe exemplifies the current confusion. Too often it has been portrayed as an American attempt to shift the risks of nuclear war to Europe or to use Europe as a forward base for strictly American purposes. This is absurd. To the extent that intermediate-range weapons are needed for American nuclear strategy at all--and this depends on the resolution of our own internal debate over the utility of a counterforce capability*--they can be deployed in various modes at sea. The real argument for placing intermediate-range nuclear weapons on the soil of the continent has always been two-fold: to reduce the possibility of selective Soviet nuclear blackmail against Europe alone, and to link the nuclear defense of Europe indissolubly to the strategic deterrent of the United States. Given the diminishing credibility of the threat of strategic war initiated from the United States, the argument is plausible that the Soviet Union might be tempted to exploit its preponderance of intermediate-range missiles for blackmail against Europe--reasoning that no American response with strategic weapons could alter the outcome. That danger is clearly diminished by the proposed deployment of intermediate-range weapons which would create the imperative of a certain automaticity in the response.

By the same token, the Soviet Union could not risk attacking Europe with conventional weapons without destroying our intermediate-range missiles also, lest they devastate Soviet command centers in a retaliatory blow. And it could not seek to destroy the missiles in Europe while leaving our strategic arsenal in America unimpaired for a possible strike against Soviet ICBMs. Far from giving us the possibility of separating the nuclear defense of Europe from that of the United States, intermediate-range missiles in Europe indissolubly link the two. They increase the risk to America, not to Europe; logically the public demonstrations against them should be on the American side of the Atlantic.

* How much counterforce we seek depends on how much we wish to insure that we have an option other than the mass extermination of civilians. Abjuring counter-force has a price: The more we emphasize frightfulness in our strategy, the more we diminish its credibility in the circumstances most likely to arise and the less hedge we have against unexpected catastrophe.

7

If our European allies are not persuaded by arguments such as these, however, it would be wrong for us to insist on them--especially since, as I have said, we can deploy at sea the intermediate-range weapons we need for a purely American strategy. I believe that our allies should now decide that aspect of the requirements of their defense without further American hectoring. By the same token, our proposals in the INF talks should be made on their merits, independent of considerations of shoring up the domestic support for our deployment in various European countries. Such a course would restore balance to the transatlantic dialogue and, frankly, a sense of proportion to the domestic deliberations of our allies.

The issue of the intermediate-range missiles is a symptom, not a cause, of the current malaise over strategy. The real issue remains the need to gear our defense policies to the twin realities of strategic parity and mounting public concern over nuclear weapons. Recently a serious proposal to that end was made by a group of eminent Americans: Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, George Kennan, and Gerard Smith, all of whom have held high office. Among other things, the views of these outstanding public servants should serve as a reminder to our European friends that if frustration reaches a certain point, American policy could shift drastically away from the now dominant trend.

I greatly respect these men, who advanced the thesis that NATO should renounce the first use of nuclear weapons and rely exclusively on conventional weapons for the defense of Europe--and a fortiori of other threatened areas. I share their objective that the West must disenthrall itself of the notion that it can substitute technology for sacrifice and destructiveness for effort. I cannot, however, agree with their declaratory policy, for four principal reasons:

A statement of no first use would leave us psychologically naked in the intermediate period that would surely extend over at least five years, even if our own government and all our NATO allies were prepared to make immediate, serious, and sustained efforts to redress the imbalance in conventional weapons. Of course, if the reaction of our allies were less enthusiastic about conventional rearmament than anticipated

8

by the authors, the psychological and military vulnerability
of NATO would be magnified even more. Our leaders have an
obligation to reduce their reliance on nuclear weapons; they
must not do so, however, at the price of accelerating a trend
of pacifism and panic that may invite Soviet nuclear black-
mail. Much of the anti-nuclear agitation is, after all,
directed against the West's non-nuclear weapons as well.

A formal pledge of no first use may well create, in addition, two seemingly contradictory dangers which increase the risk of war. If the Soviets should become convinced that the West fears nuclear war above all else, we may trigger one of the not infrequent reversals of Soviet strategic doctrine, from hints of abjuring first use to the reassertion that a war in Europe could never be limited to conventional weapons. All wars, it would then be argued (as at times it has in the past) will be nuclear-facing the West with the choice of surrender or the kind of war of which our countries will then be incapable as a result of years of renouncing and stigmatizing nuclear weapons.

Nor can we afford to create the impression that we would
prefer a conventional defeat in Europe to the first use of
nuclear weapons. The history of conventional warfare is
filled with examples of battles in which numbers and equipment
were roughly equal and yet victory was achieved by such un-
quantifiable factors as superior tactics, superior strategy,
or superior leadership. For centuries wars have started be-
tween seemingly evenly matched forces. There is no blinking
the fact that deterrence, when only conventional weapons were
involved, has frequently broken down. And we probably could
then not guarantee that we would live up to our no-first-use
declaration. Faced with the collapse of Europe we might well
reverse our proclaimed doctrine, thereby bringing about the
worst of all possible outcomes: a failure of conventional
deterrence and a nuclear war.