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## Between the Old Left and the New Right

of us who had been mauled by the Vietnam protests were deeply concerned, perhapsobsessed, with avoiding a repetition of this paralysis. We therefore searched for a more sober approach to American foreign policy that would—as we repeatedly stated—avoid the oscillations between abdication and overextension that had marked the previous period.

## THE NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE
### UNDERGOING THE NEOCONS

THE NEOCONSERVATIVES insisted that such an approach did not do justice to the moral dynamism of a society that had turned its back on the callous calculations of the Old World. In the process, they put forward not so much a new dispensation—as they claimed—but a return to a militant, muscular Wilsonianism. The fundamental aim of foreign policy as they saw it was the eradication of the evil represented by the Soviet Union without confusing the issue with geopolitics.

Where Nixon (and I) saw the greatest danger in creeping Soviet expansionism abetted by Soviet superiority in conventional forces, interior lines of communication, and the umbrella of a vast and growing strategic nuclear force, the neoconservatives' stated nightmare was some apocalyptic showdown over world domination. The Nixon team viewed the conflict with Moscow as a long-term geopolitical contest in which, together with our allies, we would wear down the Soviet system. The neoconservatives argued that it was possible to overcome communism with a burst of ideological élan.

This difference in emphasis was overshadowed and confused by a bitter debate that broke out in 1972 over the first agreement to limit strategic arms, which froze the offensive deployments of the two sides for a period of five years. Though these force levels had been chosen by the Pentagon without any reference to arms control, our critics insisted that they left America vulnerable and invented complex scenarios whereby a Soviet attack might reduce our warheads to a "mere" 4,000 while the Soviets would retain three times that number.

It was a symptom of the mood of the period that presidents like Nixon and Ford, who had been defense hawks all their lives, could be accused of sanctioning strategic inequality. We took the strategic arms race seriously but we did not believe that the aged leaders of a

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6,100 words

Henry A. Kissinger

IN DEFENSE OF DÉTENTE

BY THE summer of 1974 when Gerald R. Ford took over as president, Richard M. Nixon's foreign policy had become controversial. Liberals chastised him for inadequate attention to human rights. Conservatives depicted his administration as overeager for accommodation with the Soviet Union in the name of détente, which, in their view, compounded bad policy with French terminology.

Each of these criticisms owed something to the discomfort evoked by Nixon's ambiguous personality, but the overriding cause of the complaints was that his foreign policy raised two fundamental philosophical challenges. Nixon sought to extricate the United States from Vietnam on terms he defined as honorable at a time when most of the intellectual and much of the political community wanted to get out of Indochina essentially unconditionally.

Even more important was Nixon's effort to guide the transition of America's role in the world from hegemony to leadership. For much of the postwar period, the United States was preeminent because of its nuclear predominance and economic strength. By the time Nixon took office, our nuclear monopoly was dwindling, Europe was regaining vitality, Asia was entering the international arena, and Africa was being swept by independence movements. Dominance reflects

HENRY A. KISSINGER was Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations and National Security Adviser to President Nixon. His books include *A World Restored, Diplomacy*. This essay is adapted from the recently published third volume of his memoirs, *Years of Renewal*.

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power; leadership requires building consensus. But the attempts, inseparable from consensus-building, to balance the rewards and penalties ran counter to the prevailing philosophy of Wilsonianism, which tried to bring about a global moral order through the direct application of America's political values undiluted by compromises with "realism."

Over two decades later, as these lines are being written, many of the themes of the debates of the 1970s have reappeared in the contemporary argument over America's role in the post-Cold War world.

ENTER DÉTENTE

A NATION'S foreign policy inevitably reflects an amalgam of the convictions of its leaders and the pressures of its environment. To understand the Nixon administration's approach to East-West relations—and the controversy that Ford inherited—it is necessary to describe the situation which Nixon inherited.

Richard Nixon took office in the midst of one of the gravest foreign policy crises in American history. Over 540,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam, and the country was tearing itself apart over what Walter A. McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania has brilliantly described as America's first "Great Society war." By this he meant that Vietnam was the first American war fought for no definable military objective. Rather, the strategic goal was not to lose, thereby giving South Vietnam time to create democratic institutions and social programs that would win the war for the hearts and minds of the population. Such a goal for a divided country independent for only a decade, in a society governed by colonialism for a century, required a time span of stalemated war beyond the psychological endurance of the American public.

The Nixon administration was prepared to assume the responsibility for extricating the United States and never blamed our predecessors for the debacle. We would not, however, leave the country for which nearly 40,000 Americans had already died by turning over to communist rule tens of millions who had staked their lives on our word. The strategy adopted by the Nixon administration to extricate

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America was foreshadowed in an article I had written for *Foreign Affairs* while still a professor at Harvard. In it, I had urged that the military and political issues be treated separately. The military issues would be negotiated between the United States and the Vietnamese parties, leading to a ceasefire, withdrawal of American troops, exchange of prisoners, and a limitation of armaments. The Vietnamese parties would then negotiate a political process by which the peoples of Indochina would be able to decide the future of their countries.

The so-called peace movement insisted that there was only one ethical issue, which was peace on whatever terms were available, and that the fate of the population was irrelevant to that goal (or, in the argument's more sophisticated version, that the peoples of Indochina would be better off if we abandoned them). In pursuit of what amounted to unconditional and unilateral withdrawal, the protesters sought to impose their views by mass demonstrations designed to paralyze the government. The protesters considered the very terms *honor* and *credibility* abominations, the empty slogans of a flawed society that would repeat its errors over and over again until it was made to taste the bitter dregs of futility and humiliation. In its view, American presumption and vainglory had caused the tragedy in Indochina. It rejected the invocation of America's role in preserving the global equilibrium as a symptom of a national obsession with power, and it denied Nixon's moral right to invoke the term "honor." Its challenge was not to specific policies but to America's worthiness to conduct any foreign policy at all.

To be sure, Establishment figures never went quite this far. Paralyzed by the futility of what they had wrought, they simply wished to extirpate the Vietnam War from their consciousness and to submerge their mistakes in collective amnesia. The practical result of their emotional abdication was that they would not support any American negotiating position rejected by Hanoi, thereby depriving the American negotiators of a floor on which to stand and, in effect, urging abdication.

Pressures from abroad paralleled the domestic ones. Most of America's North Atlantic allies were extremely skeptical about the war in Indochina. By the time Nixon took office, they had begun to question whether America's alleged bellicosity might not threaten,

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rather than safeguard, their own security overall. A number of European leaders felt quite free to present themselves to their publics as apostles of peace whose primary mission was to moderate American intransigence in the conduct of the Cold War.

All this was happening less than a year after the Soviet Union had occupied Czechoslovakia in order to overthrow a communist regime aspiring to a measure of autonomy from Moscow. Leonid Brezhnev

had proclaimed a doctrine (bearing his name) that asserted Moscow's right to impose ideological orthodoxy on the communist world. Backed by a rapidly growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, the Kremlin was projecting an image of ideological militancy and military strength.

Launching an anti-Soviet crusade would have driven domestic crises out of control.

Such was the context of stalemate, tension, and frustration inherited by Nixon. When he took office, the American public was drained by 20 years of Cold War exertions and the increasing frustrations with Vietnam. It had lived through two Berlin crises, the Korean War, Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the Cuban missile crisis, and it had already sustained over 35,000 casualties in Indochina. For us to have launched the grandiloquent anti-Soviet crusade that our critics later (though not at the time) chastised us for not undertaking would have driven our domestic crisis out of control and jeopardized our alliances.

Throughout his career, Nixon's critics had portrayed him as an unregenerate Cold Warrior. But now that he was president, both the liberals who dominated Congress and the media urged him to end the Cold War as if he were one of their own. A widespread and vocal consensus, which had many supporters within the bureaucracy, pressed the new administration to initiate immediate negotiations with Moscow on trade, cultural and scientific exchanges, and, above all, arms control. The conservatives remained sullenly silent. Shellshocked by Vietnam and the domestic upheaval, they provided no counterweight to the liberal onslaught. In the absence of such a counterweight to the liberal consensus, the dominant theme of the public discourse was peace: how to achieve it in Vietnam, how to preserve it in the world at large through immediate East-West negotiations, and

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how to protect it at home from the Nixon administration's alleged
hard-line proclivities. At that time, of course, the neoconservatives
who would later accuse us of softness on communism were still on the
radical side of the dividing line, adding their voice to the clamor for
accommodation.

Wilsonianism had involved the United States in Indochina by
means of universalist maxims that had proved successful in Europe
and were now applied literally in Asia. Wilsonianism rejects peace
through balance of power in favor of peace through moral consensus.
It sees foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil, in each
phase of which it is America's mission to defeat totally the evil foes
challenging a peaceful order. I having prevailed, the United States can
then devote itself to fostering the underlying harmony (in the inter-
nationalist version) or cultivate its own virtues (in the isolationist ver-
sion) until the next discrete crisis arises—perceived not as a distur-
bance of the equilibrium but as a deviation from the moral order.
Such a foreign policy tends to be segmented into a series of episodes
and not perceived as a continuum requiring constant attention and
adjustment, a quest for absolutes rather than the shaping of reality by
means of nuances.

The Nixon administration strove for a more differentiated approach. Though he admired Woodrow Wilson, nothing in Nixon's personal experience led him to share the conviction that great ideas could be realized in one grand assault. Nixon and I enlisted our firm anticommunist convictions in the service of a complex strategy destined to achieve our objective in stages, each of which by definition was bound to fall short of the ultimate ideal and could therefore be castigated as insufficiently moral. We viewed foreign policy as a continuing process with no terminal point, unlike the dominant view seeking a series of climaxes, each of which would culminate its particular phase.

The Nixon strategy had the following six components: to extricate
the United States from Vietnam under honorable conditions; to
confine the dissent of the protest movement to Indochina; to seize
the high ground of the peace issue by a strategy that demonstrated to
the American public that, even while pursuing the Cold War, the ad-
ministration would do its utmost to control its dangers and gradually

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to overcome it; to broaden the diplomatic chessboard by including
China in the international system; to strengthen our alliances; and,
from that platform, to go on the diplomatic offensive, especially in
the Middle East.

Détente was one aspect of the overall strategy. An unfortunate
label implying European antecedents, détente was designed to con-
trol a relationship conceived as adversarial, not to conjure up a nir-
vana from which all tensions had automatically been removed, as later
caricatures of it implied. Throughout, Nixon and I considered the
Soviet Union ideologically hostile and militarily threatening. At once
an empire and a cause, it was the only power capable of intervention
globally, the source of most postwar international crises, and the sole
country capable of attacking the United States. We strove for a strat-
egy that calibrated the benefits of restraint and the penalties of reck-
lessness to keep Soviet leaders from mounting a challenge during the
period of our national turmoil. And if the calibration failed, the very
effort would at least have demonstrated to the American people that
the resulting crisis was caused by the Soviet Union—thereby bolster-
ing support for a strong response. In short, we treated America's tra-
vail over Vietnam as a temporary weakness that, once overcome,
would enable us to prevail over the Soviet system when geopolitical
isolation and a stagnant economy had exhausted the Kremlin's ideo-
logical zeal.

We judged the Soviet Union, seemingly so monolithic and so
eager to demonstrate its military power, as in fact being rent by vast
systemic upheavals. Such astute observers as Andrei Amalrik (one of
whose articles I gave to Nixon to read) were already calling attention
to the fact that the Soviet empire was facing profound and congeni-
tal vulnerabilities. In the more than 50 years of its history, the Soviet
leadership had never managed a legitimate succession. Leaders had
either died in office (like Lenin and Stalin) or had been replaced by
coup-like procedures (like Khrushchev). In each case, succession was
followed by a purge. And the growth of Soviet military potential was
draining the economy and driving it into stagnation. This is why, in
the Alastair Buchan Lecture in June 1976, I said: "We have nothing
to fear from competition: . . . if there is an economic competition, we
won it long ago . . . If performance is any criterion, the contest be-

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tween freedom and communism, of which so much was made three
decades ago, has been won by the industrial democracies."

In the process, the Soviet international position was growing more complicated. Tensions between Moscow and Beijing were escalating. Within weeks of Nixon's inauguration, we learned of military clashes along the Ussuri River, which demarcates the boundary between China and the Soviet Union's maritime provinces at the edge of Siberia. Upheavals in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and a near-revolution in Poland in 1970 dramatized the tenuousness of the Soviet hold over its satellites.

In the Middle East, the Soviet Union had been arming its Arab allies for a war it was well within our capacity to prevent them from winning. Therefore, our strategy in the Middle East sought to thwart an Arab military option in order to oblige the Soviet Union and its radical Arab allies to dissociate from each other. Far from conducting détente from a perception of weakness, the Nixon administration was convinced that it had little to fear and much to gain from a flexible diplomacy in which the rigid Soviet system was bound to find itself increasingly at a disadvantage. In light of its vulnerable economy and geopolitical isolation, we intended to maneuver the Soviet colossus into transforming itself from a cause into a state capable of being influenced by traditional calculations of reward and punishment, thereby first easing the Cold War and ultimately transcending it.

To be effective, a strategic assessment needs to be translated into an operating policy. The then-dominant liberal group viewed negotiation as an end in itself, regardless of content. The very act of dialogue, it argued, "eased the atmosphere"; each agreement facilitated the path for further progress until a spirit of reconciliation had supplant ed the suspicions of the Cold War and made some of the issues that had dominated it less central.

The Nixon administration rejected this approach. We were pre-
pared for an intense period of negotiation, but we were not willing to
let our adversaries choose the agenda or the conditions. Progress on
issues of concern to Moscow had to coincide with progress in areas

We treated America's
travail over Vietnam as
a temporary weakness
to be overcome.

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gotiations on trade or arms control take place in an atmosphere of So-
viet political restraint, especially with regard to such long-standing
trouble spots as Berlin, the Middle East, and Indochina. Unlike the
liberals, the Nixon administration did not justify its East-West diplo-
macy by a presumed change in Soviet motivations. But unlike the
conservatives, who feared that agreements might weaken American
vigilance, we argued that the Soviet Union was more vulnerable than
the free world to a long period of peace and more likely to face fun-
damental changes as a result of it.

By the end of Nixon's first term, we had vindicated the strategy of
moving forward on a broad front. The Soviet Union was being con-
strained from geopolitical adventures by the stick of our opening to
China and the carrot of prospects of increased trade. In 1971, we
helped channel West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik
into a direction compatible with allied cohesion by linking West Ger-
man recognition of the East German communist regime to a guar-
antee of free access to Berlin, thereby ending for the rest of the Cold
War Soviet harassment of the city's access routes. In 1972, we were
able to step up military pressure on Hanoi without Soviet interfer-
ence. The Soviets went ahead with the planned superpower summit
despite the mining of Vietnamese harbors and the renewal of bomb-
ing of North Vietnam because they prized the benefits of a visit by
Nixon more than ideological ties with Hanoi. It was also in 1972 that
Soviet military forces were expelled from Egypt—as we had pre-
dicted in 1970. By the end of 1973, the United States was dominating
Middle East diplomacy. A strategic arms agreement freezing the So-
viet numerical missile buildup without modifying any established
American program had been negotiated. Linkage had prevailed.

A REVERSAL FROM THE LEFT

AT THIS high point of Nixon's foreign policy, the national consen-
sus broke down. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for the remainder
of Nixon's term, an increasingly acerbic domestic debate over the na-
ture and the priorities of American foreign policy broke out. With
brief interruptions, it has continued to this writing.

Many factors combined to produce this state of affairs. Perhaps the

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Many factors combined to produce this state of affairs. Perhaps the most fundamental was that Nixon and I underestimated the impact on the public of the sharp difference between our approach to foreign policy and the Wilsonianism that had become dominant in the twentieth century. For his part, Nixon embittered the emerging debate by stressing in his public speeches (though not in our annual reports to Congress) domestic and political rather than conceptual explanations for his foreign policy. Convinced that the best way to isolate his liberal opponents was, in effect, to steal their program, Nixon could not resist rubbing it in that it was he—the despised, ostensibly reactionary Cold Warrior—who had, in fact, fulfilled much of the liberal agenda on negotiating with the adversary and that he had done so on the basis of a strong national defense.

This tactic infuriated the liberals, who moved ever further away from Nixon by searching for more sweeping arms control proposals and such moral causes as human rights where they thought Nixon could not follow them. And it lost him the support of the traditional conservatives who might well have gone along with a justification of our policy for what it was—a hardheaded strategy for managing the Cold War—but who viewed co-opting liberal slogans as opportunism.

The liberals, having advocated greater East-West contacts, arms control, and increased trade for at least a decade, would have been normally supportive of these policies now that they were actually being implemented. And under the leadership of any president other than Richard Nixon, they might well have eventually endorsed the substance of our policies even while differing with the geopolitical approach on which they were based. But Nixon had been anathema to the liberal community for more than two decades; the blood feud ran too deep.

The liberals' first line of defense was to invoke all their standard critiques. Nixon's policy, they argued, was not going far enough; indeed, it was a subterfuge for continuing the Cold War. But given the broad front on which Nixon was proceeding, this argument held little attraction for any but confirmed Nixon-haters.

So it happened that, in the course of 1972, the liberals' attack veered in an entirely new direction that let them maintain their tra-

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ditional moral critique. Though they had hitherto insisted that East-West trade, arms control, and cultural exchanges were vital to ameliorating the superpower conflict and therefore needed to be pursued in their own right, the liberals now declared war on the Soviet internal system. Unembarrassed by their previous rejection of the concept of linkage of *foreign* policy issues to each other, they now resurrected linkage with a vengeance by insisting that all agreements be linked to changes in Soviet *domestic* practices.

Shifts in the editorial position of *The New York Times* mirrored this metamorphosis. Over the course of a few months in the fall of 1972, the newspaper moved from unconditional advocacy of East-West trade and arms control—and attacks on linkage—to stern criticism of any agreement that did not dismantle the Soviet domestic structure. On September 13, 1972, for instance, the *Times* espoused its traditional liberal view that expanded trade “is sufficiently beneficial to both sides that it ought to be considered . . . on its own merits, independent of particular secondary disputes in other areas.” Within two months, on November 25, 1972, in a complete reversal, the *Times* was cautioning its readers that “it will be a serious mistake if American business, the Nixon Administration, or, for that matter, Soviet officials, become so eager to expand Soviet-American trade as to forget the continuing sensitivity of the American people—and of Congress—to Soviet political behavior both inside and outside the USSR’s borders.”

AN ECHO FROM THE RIGHT

THE LIBERALS' reversal of position was soon being echoed by various conservative groups. Convinced that the Cold War was a life-and-death ideological struggle, conservatives had never been comfortable with a wide-ranging negotiation with the Soviet Union because the mere fact of it implied some degree of common interest with the adversary. In their view, so long as communism retained its grip, any hope for restraint in Soviet conduct was chimerical. The conservatives would have been most comfortable with some variation of the original Acheson-Dulles containment posture of waiting behind "positions of strength" for the eventual collapse of communism

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The conservatives' split from Nixon was a pity because we did not differ with their analysis of the nature of the Soviet system. Where we disagreed was in assessing its implications for American foreign policy. Nixon and I believed that refusing to negotiate with the Kremlin would spread the virulence of the anti-Vietnam protest movement into every aspect of American foreign policy and deeply, perhaps finally, divide our alliances. Far better, we thought, to seize the initiative and control the diplomatic process. In the meantime, we would keep open the possibility that what on the Soviet side had begun as tactics might evolve into a more reliable pattern of coexistence.

What drove conservative disquiet into outright opposition was the emergence of the so-called neoconservatives. That they claimed even part of the conservative label for themselves was something of an anomaly, since, nearly without exception, their leading representatives had started out on the liberal side, most of them on its radical wing. They had disdained Nixon, passionately opposed the Vietnam War, objected to our military budgets as too Cold War-oriented, and pressed for a more conciliatory approach toward the Soviet Union.

Starting in the summer of 1972 and extending over the period of a year, this group grew disillusioned with the turn American liberalism was taking. They found distasteful the radicalism and lifestyles of the Democratic presidential convention that had nominated George McGovern in 1972. And ever since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, they had become increasingly disenchanted with the prospect of accommodation with the Soviet Union. The 1973 Middle East war completed their conversion to geopolitical realities. They interpreted that war as a Soviet-Arab conspiracy against Israel and the industrial democracies and concluded that the challenge was best resisted in the name of opposition to détente.

Many of the neoconservatives were (or have become) personal friends. And however painful their critiques might occasionally have proved when I was in office, they made significant contributions to American thinking on foreign policy. They brought a much-needed intellectual rigor and energy to the debate, which helped to overcome the dominance of liberal conventional wisdom. Once they reached office in the Reagan administration, they conducted a strong and successful national strategy which I supported.

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But there was also a reverse side to the single-mindedness with which they pursued their newfound convictions. When the neoconservatives first appeared on the scene, their defining experience was their own ideological conversion to the pursuit of the Cold War. Tactics bored them; they discerned no worthy goals for American foreign policy short of total victory. Their historical memory did not include the battles they had refused to join or the domestic traumas to which they had so often contributed from the radical left. When the neoconservatives moved to the radical right, they packed in their bags their visceral dislike of Nixon, even though technically they were now on the same side. And they distorted the subsequent debate with a touch of amnesia about their own role in the seminal battles of which Vietnam was a symbol, if not a cause.

Vietnam accelerated the phenomenon that the United States would have experienced in any event, albeit more gradually: that power in the world was becoming more diffused and isolation for America increasingly impossible. As the 21st century approached, the United States would have to exercise its influence as the single most important and coherent part of an international system, but no longer as the predominant country it had been at the beginning of the Cold War. The great initiatives of the early Cold War had been presented as "solutions" to the challenge they were addressing, often with a terminal date. Henceforth what was needed was a permanent American participation depending more on the ability to accumulate nuances than on engineering final outcomes in a brief period.

The realization was dawning that idealism could lead to overex-
tension as easily as miscalculation. But traditional American Wilso-
nianism rebelled against the verity that great goals in foreign policy
must generally be approached in imperfect stages. The radical oppo-
nents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina to
moral defects and had preached the cure of abdication to enable the
United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neoconserv-
atives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to
reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise,
but we also believed that the Wilsonianism of the early 1960s had
lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of cri-
teria to define the essential elements of our national purpose. Those

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of us who had been mauled by the Vietnam protests were deeply concerned, perhaps obsessed, with avoiding a repetition of this paralysis. We therefore searched for a more sober approach to American foreign policy that would—as we repeatedly stated—avoid the oscillations between abdication and overextension that had marked the previous period.

THE NEOCONSERVATIVE CRITIQUE
---
UNDERCUT BY THE NEOCONS

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moribund society were prepared to stake the survival of their society and political system on a number of wild gambles: that they were technically able to launch hundreds of missiles simultaneously even though they had never test-fired more than three at a time and these only from test sites, never from operational silos; American missiles would not be launched on warning even though there might be a 30 to 45 minute interval in which to determine that an all-out attack was

The neocons undercut our real foreign policy debate with the liberals.

underway; Soviet operational missiles had the same accuracy as test missiles; an American president would refrain from using the thousands of warheads which, even under the most pessimistic scenario, would survive a surprise attack. Finally, none of these hy-

pothetical disaster scenarios would be available even to the most de-mented Soviet leader until about a decade *after* SALT I expired, or more than enough time in which to take countermeasures.

To protect against these contingencies, the Nixon and Ford administrations vigorously modernized our strategic forces. In fact the backbone of the strategic arsenal at this writing is composed of weapons developed and put before Congress in the Nixon and Ford administrations: the Minuteman III, the MX, the rebuilt B-52, the B-1 and B-2 airplanes, and the Trident submarine.

All subsequent administrations, including Reagan's, adhered to the SALT I limits even after the agreement had lapsed. In fact, the total of our strategic forces at the end of the Reagan period ten years later was slightly lower than when SALT I was signed.

The real issue in our national debate was not the numbers game of arms control discussions. It had to do with the perception of the challenge. Nixon and Ford judged the challenge to be in the nature of a marathon race, and they would not dissipate our strength in a series of sprints designed for the gallery. And they were reinforced in this attitude because Congress was annually legislating cuts in the defense budget over our opposition. Nixon and Ford thought it essential to prove to the American people that crisis and confrontation were a last resort, not an everyday means of conducting foreign policy. Both were convinced that we stood to win the marathon for which we were girding. With its creaky economy, the Soviet Union would, in the end,

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not be able to compete with the coalition we were assembling of all
the industrial democracies cooperating with China, the world's most
populous country. And that is essentially what happened.

Nixon and Ford were right from the perspective of their time, as was Reagan from the perspective of the 1980s. Unfortunately, the bitter feud between two sides that should have been allies produced both a standoff and diplomatic near-paralysis.

The neoconservatives saw far less value in defeating Soviet geopolitical encroachments on distant battlefields, such as Angola or In-dochina, than in facing down the Soviet idcological or nuclear threat in some kind of definitive confrontation. This is why most neoconservatives failed to support the Ford administration when liberals in Congress cut off aid to the desperate peoples of South Vietnam and Cambodia and to the African forces resisting the Soviet/Cuban intervention in Angola.

The neoconservatives' need to break with their past made them oblivious to the context in which their prescriptions had to be carried out and made it impossible to incorporate the real lessons of Vietnam into the national consciousness. Even granting the validity of the neoconservative argument on behalf of the need for moral revival, the United States—just emerging from Vietnam, in the midst of Water-gate, and later led by a nonclected president—was not in a position to conduct a crusade; in fact, the attempt to do so would have torn the country apart even further. By depicting the diplomatic strategy of the Nixon and Ford administrations as a form of appeasement and our resistance to communist expansion in various theaters as a diversion from the main struggle, the neoconservatives undercut the real foreign policy debate, which was not with them but with the liberals.

Until well into Ford's term in office, congressional and media pressures came predominantly from the liberal side of the political spectrum. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield periodically led drinks to pull American troops out of Europe; Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright challenged the alleged militarization of American foreign policy; Senators Frank Church and Walter Mondale attacked the intelligence community. Some liberal senators, such as Jacob Javits, John Sherman Cooper, and Hubert Humphrey, endorsed our arms control policies but shrank from

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the defense programs necessary to give us leverage in the negotiations.

In the early 1970s, the option of what later became the highly effective Reagan policy did not exist. The obstacle to such a policy was not the Nixon or the Ford administration but the liberal Congress and media. By training their fire first on Nixon and then Ford, the neoconservatives provided an alibi to those whose pressures had complicated the extrication from Indochina and whose legislation then

caused its collapse and who mandated an end to the Soviet/Cuban onslaught in Angola. The focal point of the foreign policy debate for the neoconservatives had been the moment at which they appeared on the scene, and they have so concentrated on largely tactical disagreements with fellow

conservatives that they have made it difficult to come to grips with the real lessons of the Vietnam tragedy.

Even after the neoconservatives had achieved dominance with the Reagan ascendancy, they continued their assault by insisting on a version of history that lures the United States away from the need to face complexity. According to this version of history, a group of accommodation-prone, European-influenced leaders was overcome by the knights-errant who suddenly appeared on the scene and prevailed in short order by proclaiming the distinction between good and evil and the revolutionary role of democratic principles.

Reality was more complex then and has become even more so at this writing. Ronald Reagan and his associates deserve vast credit for the denouement of the Cold War. But the United States will not harvest the intellectual lessons of their success if it ascribes its victory in the Cold War to rhetorical posturing. Reagan's policy was, in fact, a canny conservation of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford administrations combined with the rhetoric of Wilsonianism—a quintessentially American combination of pragmatism and idealism. In an important sense, the victories of the 1980s derived from a Reaganite elaboration—not a rejection—of the strategies of the 1970s.

However different their tactics, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan conducted policies that sought simultaneously to contain the Soviet

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*Between the Old Left and the New Right*

Union, shrink its influence, and work with it as this process unfolded. But whereas Nixon had sought to legitimize these policies by their practical success, Reagan proved to have a better instinct for America's emotions. He justified his course by an appeal to American idealism. Nixon attempted to *preach* the virtues of the national interest by evoking what he called a "structure of peace"; Reagan understood that the American people are moved more by appeals to purpose rather than structure, and his policy declarations resonated with classic democratic virtue. As a result, he won broader support for high defense budgets and geopolitical reengagement than Nixon was able to achieve—or could have achieved in his time with the same appeal. (Reagan, of course, led a nation that had largely recovered from the Vietnam trauma and had grown disgusted with the humilliations of the Iran hostage crisis.)

Absent Watergate, a successful Nixon presidency might well have been able to use the high-wire acts of his first term to amalgamate the ideological convictions of the neoconservatives with the geopolitical insights of his own approach. As it was, this necessary reconciliation was prevented by our domestic crisis.

The fact is that both Reagan's inspirational approach and Nixon's geopolitical perspicacity are needed to conduct a long-range foreign policy in the 21st century. Nixon, under the pressure of circumstances and perhaps of his personality, overemphasized the tactical element. But Reagan's disciples today, neglecting the facts that Reagan inherited a psychologically recovered American people ready for a stronger course as well as a Soviet Union weakened by overextension and by Nixon's foreign policy legacy, seek to telescope a historical process into one climactic presidency. They thereby postpone both the synthesis without which we will never fully grasp our challenge and the consensus, now more necessary than ever, that would be theirs if they could only leaven their righteousness with an understanding that history did not begin on the date of their conversion. ❧

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## Henry A. Kissinger

### IN DEFENSE OF DÉTENTE

HENRY A. KISSINGER was Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations and National Security Adviser to President Nixon. His books include *A World Restored* and *Diplomacy*. This essay is adapted from the recently published third volume of his memoirs, *Years of Renewal*.

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The so-called peace movement insisted that there was only one ethical issue, which was peace on whatever terms were available, and that the fate of the population was irrelevant to that goal (or, in the argument's more sophisticated version, that the peoples of Indochina would be better off if we abandoned them). In pursuit of what amounted to unconditional and unilateral withdrawal, the protesters sought to impose their views by mass demonstrations designed to paralyze the government. The protesters considered the very terms *honor* and *credibility* abominations, the empty slogans of a flawed society that would repeat its errors over and over again until it was made to taste the bitter dregs of futility and humiliation. In its view, American presumption and *rainglory* had caused the tragedy in Indochina. It rejected the invocation of America's role in preserving the global equilibrium as a symptom of a national obsession with power, and it denied Nixon's moral right to invoke the term "honor." Its challenge was not to specific policies but to America's worthiness to conduct any foreign policy at all.

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Throughout his career, Nixon's critics had portrayed him as an unregenerate Cold Warrior. But now that he was president, both the liberals who dominated Congress and the media urged him to end the Cold War as if he were one of their own. A widespread and vocal consensus, which had many supporters within the bureaucracy, pressed the new administration to initiate immediate negotiations with Moscow on trade, cultural and scientific exchanges, and, above all, arms control. The conservatives remained sullenly silent. Shellshocked by Vietnam and the domestic upheaval, they provided no counterweight to the liberal onslaught. In the absence of such a counterweight the dominant theme of the public discourse was peace: how to achieve it in Vietnam, how to preserve it in the world at large through immediate East-West negotiations, and how to protect it at

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Wilsonianism had involved the United States in Indochina by means of universalist maxims that had proved successful in Europe and were now applied literally in Asia. Wilsonianism rejects peace through balance of power in favor of peace through moral consensus. It sees foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil, in each phase of which it is America's mission to defeat totally the evil foes challenging a peaceful order. Having prevailed, the United States can then devote itself to fostering the underlying harmony (in the internationalist version) or cultivate its own virtues (in the isolationist version) until the next discrete crisis arises—perceived not as a disturbance of the equilibrium but as a deviation from the moral order. Such a foreign policy tends to be segmented into a series of episodes and not perceived as a continuum requiring constant attention and adjustment, a quest for absolutes rather than the shaping of reality by means of nuances.

The Nixon strategy had the following six components: to extricate the United States from Vietnam under honorable conditions; to confine the dissent of the protest movement to Indochina; to seize the high ground of the peace issue by a strategy that demonstrated to the American public that, even while pursuing the Cold War, the administration would do its utmost to control its dangers and gradually to overcome it; to broaden the diplomatic chessboard by including

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Detente was one aspect of the overall strategy. An unfortunate label implying European antecedents, détente was designed to control a relationship conceived as adversarial, not to conjure up a nirvana from which all tensions had automatically been removed, as later caricatures of it implied. Throughout, Nixon and I considered the Soviet Union ideologically hostile and militarily threatening. At once an empire and a cause, it was the only power capable of intervention globally, the source of most postwar international crises, and the sole country capable of attacking the United States. We strove for a strategy that calibrated the benefits of restraint and the penalties of recklessness to keep Soviet leaders from mounting a challenge during the period of our national turmoil. And if the calibration failed, the very effort would at least have demonstrated to the American people that the resulting crisis was caused by the Soviet Union—thereby bolstering support for a strong response. In short, we treated America's travail over Vietnam as a temporary weakness that, once overcome, would enable us to prevail over the Soviet system when geopolitical isolation and a stagnant economy had exhausted the Kremlin's ideological zeal.

We judged the Soviet Union, seemingly so monolithic and so eager to demonstrate its military power, as in fact being rent by vast systemic upheavals. Such astute observers as Andrei Amalrik (one of whose articles I gave to Nixon to read) were already calling attention to the fact that the Soviet empire was facing profound and congenital vulnerabilities. In the more than 50 years of its history, the Soviet leadership had never managed a legitimate succession. Leaders had either died in office (like Lenin and Stalin) or had been replaced by coup-like procedures (like Khrushchev). In each case, succession was followed by a purge. And the growth of Soviet military potential was draining the economy and driving it into stagnation. This is why, in the Alastair Buchan Lecture in June 1976, I said: "We have nothing to fear from competition: . . . if there is an economic competition, we won it long ago . . . If performance is any criterion, the contest between freedom and communism, of which so much was made three

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In the Middle East, the Soviet Union had been arming its Arab allies for a war it was well within our capacity to prevent them from winning. Therefore, our strategy in the Middle East sought to thwart an Arab military option in order to oblige the Soviet Union and its radical Arab allies to dissociate from each other. Far from conducting détente from a perception of weakness, the Nixon administration was convinced that it had little to fear and much to gain from a flexible diplomacy in which the rigid Soviet system was bound to find itself increasingly at a disadvantage. In light of its vulnerable economy and geopolitical isolation, we intended to maneuver the Soviet colossus into transforming itself from a cause into a state capable of being influenced by traditional calculations of reward and punishment, thereby first causing the Cold War and ultimately transcending it.

To be effective, a strategic assessment needs to be translated into an operating policy. The then-dominant liberal group viewed negotiation as an end in itself, regardless of content. The very act of dialogue, it argued, "eased the atmosphere"; each agreement facilitated the path for further progress until a spirit of reconciliation had supplanted the suspicions of the Cold War and made some of the issues that had dominated it less central.

The Nixon administration rejected this approach. We were prepared for an intense period of negotiation, but we were not willing to let our adversaries choose the agenda or the conditions. Progress on issues of concern to Moscow had to coincide with progress in areas of concern to Washington. Therefore we insisted that individual ne-

> We treated America's travail over Vietnam as a temporary weakness to be overcome.

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A REVERSAL FROM THE LEFT

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most fundamental was that Nixon and I underestimated the impact on the public of the sharp difference between our approach to foreign policy and the Wilsonianism that had become dominant in the twentieth century. For his part, Nixon embittered the emerging debate by stressing in his public speeches (though not in our annual reports to Congress) domestic and political rather than conceptual explanations for his foreign policy. Convinced that the best way to isolate his liberal opponents was, in effect, to steal their program, Nixon could not resist dubbing it in that it was he—the despised, ostensibly reactionary Cold Warrior—who had, in fact, fulfilled much of the liberal agenda on negotiating with the adversary and that he had done so on the basis of a strong national defense.

So it happened that, in the course of 1972, the liberals' attack veered in an entirely new direction that let them maintain their traditional moral critique. Though they had hitherto insisted that East-

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West trade, arms control, and cultural exchanges were vital to ameliorating the superpower conflict and therefore needed to be pursued in their own right, the liberals now declared war on the Soviet internal system. Unembarrassed by their previous rejection of the concept of linkage of foreign policy issues to each other, they now resurrected linkage with a vengeance by insisting that all agreements be linked to changes in Soviet domestic practices.

Shifts in the editorial position of *The New York Times* mirrored this metamorphosis. Over the course of a few months in the fall of 1972, the newspaper moved from unconditional advocacy of East-West trade and arms control—and attacks on linkage—to stern criticism of any agreement that did not dismantle the Soviet domestic structure. On September 13, 1972, for instance, the *Times* espoused its traditional liberal view that expanded trade "is sufficiently beneficial to both sides that it ought to be considered . . . on its own merits, independent of particular secondary disputes in other areas." Within two months, on November 25, 1972, in a complete reversal, the *Times* was cautioning its readers that "it will be a serious mistake if American business, the Nixon Administration, or, for that matter, Soviet officials, become so eager to expand Soviet-American trade as to forget the continuing sensitivity of the American people—and of Congress—to Soviet political behavior both inside and outside the USSR's borders."

AN ECHO FROM THE RIGHT

THE LIBERALS' reversal of position was soon being echoed by various conservative groups. Convinced that the Cold War was a life-and-death ideological struggle, conservatives had never been comfortable with a wide-ranging negotiation with the Soviet Union because the mere fact of it implied some degree of common interest with the adversary. In their view, so long as communism retained its grip, any hope for restraint in Soviet conduct was chimerical. The conservatives would have been most comfortable with some variation of the original Acheson-Dulles containment posture of waiting behind "positions of st. length" for the eventual collapse of communism within the Soviet Union and preferably in China as well.

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The conservatives' split from Nixon was a pity because we did not differ with their analysis of the nature of the Soviet system. Where we disagreed was in assessing its implications for American foreign policy. Nixon and I believed that refusing to negotiate with the Kremlin would spread the virulence of the anti-Vietnam protest movement into every aspect of American foreign policy and deeply, perhaps fairly, divide our alliances. Far better, we thought, to seize the initiative and control the diplomatic process. In the meantime, we would keep open the possibility that what on the Soviet side had begun as tactics might evolve into a more reliable pattern of coexistence.

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Vietnam accelerated the phenomenon that the United States would have experienced in any event, albeit more gradually: that power in the world was becoming more diffused and isolation for America increasingly impossible. As the 21st century approached, the United States would have to exercise its influence as the single most important and coherent part of an international system, but no longer as the predominant country; it had been at the beginning of the Cold War. The great initiatives of the early Cold War had been presented as "solutions" to the challenge they were addressing, often with a terminal date. Henceforth what was needed was a permanent American participation depending more on the ability to accumulate nuances than on engineering final outcomes in a brief period.

The realization was dawning that idealism could lead to overexten-
sion as easily as miscalculation. But traditional American Wilsonianism rebelled against the verity that great goals in foreign policy must generally be approached in imperfect stages. The radical opponents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina to moral defects and had preached the cure of abdication to enable the United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neoconservatives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise, but we also believed that the Wilsonianism of the early 1960s had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of criteria to define the essential elements of our national purpose. Those

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of us who had been mauled by the Vietnam protests were deeply concerned—perhaps obsessed—with avoiding a repetition of this paralysis. We therefore searched for a more sober approach to American foreign policy that would—as we repeatedly stated—avoid the oscillations between abdication and overextension that had marked the previous period.

UNDERCUT BY THE NEOCONs

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morbund society were prepared to stake the survival of their society and political system on a number of wild gambles: that they were technically able to launch hundreds of missiles simultaneously even though they had never test-fired more than three at a time and these only from test sites, never from operational silos; American missiles would not be launched on warning even though there might be a 30 to 45 minute interval in which to determine that an all-out attack was

underway. Soviet operational missiles had the same accuracy as test missiles; an American president would refrain from using the thousands of warheads which, even under the most pessimistic scenario, would survive a surprise attack. Finally, none of these hy-

pothetical disaster scenarios would be available even to the most de-
mented Soviet leader until about a decade *after* SALT I expired, or
more than enough time in which to take countermeasures.

Theidocons undercut
our real foreign policy
debate with the liberals.

To protect against these contingencies, the Nixon and Ford ad-
ministrations vigorously modernized our strategic forces. In fact the
backbone of the strategic arsenal at this writing is composed of
weapons developed and put before Congress in the Nixon and Ford
administrations: the Minuteman III, the MX, the rebuilt B-52, the B-
1 and B-2 airplanes, and the Trident submarine.

The real issue in our national debate was not the numbers game of
arms control discussions. It had to do with the perception of the chal-
lenge. Nixon and Ford judged the challenge to be in the nature of a
marathon race, and they would not dissipate our strength in a series
of sprints designed for the gallery. And they were reinforced in this
attitude because Congress was annually legislating cuts in the defense
budget over our opposition. Nixon and Ford thought it essential to
prove to the American people that crisis and confrontation were a last
resort, not an everyday means of conducting foreign policy. Both were
convinced that we stood to win the marathon for which we were gird-
ing. With its creaky economy, the Soviet Union would, in the end,

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Nixon and Ford were right from the perspective of their time, as
was Reagan from the perspective of the 1980s. Unfortunately, the bit-
terfeld between two sides that should have been allies produced both
a standoff and diplomatic near-paralysis.

The neoconservatives saw far less value in defeating Soviet geopo-
litical encroachments on distant battlefields, such as Angola or In-
dochina, than in facing down the Soviet ideological or nuclear threat
in some kind of definitive confrontation. This is why most neocon-
servatives failed to support the Ford administration when liberals in
Congress cut off aid to the desperate peoples of South Vietnam and
Cambodia and to the African forces resisting the Soviet/Cuban in-
tervention in Angola.

The neoconservatives' need to break with their past made them
oblivious to the context in which their prescriptions had to be carried
out and made it impossible to incorporate the real lessons of Vietnam
into the national consciousness. Even granting the validity of the
neoconservative argument on behalf of the need for moral revival, the
United States—just emerging from Vietnam, in the midst of Water-
gate, and later led by a nonclected president—was not in a position
to conduct a crusade; in fact, the attempt to do so would have torn
the country apart even further. By depicting the diplomatic strategy
of the Nixon and Ford administrations as a form of appeasement and
our resistance to communist expansion in various theaters as a diver-
sion from the main struggle, the neoconservatives undercut the real
foreign policy debate, which was not with them but with the liberals.

Until well into Ford's term in office, congressional and media pres-
sures came predominantly from the liberal side of the political spec-
trum. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield periodically led dri-es to pull American troops out of Europe; Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright challenged the alleged
militarization of American foreign policy; Senators Frank Church
and Walter Mondale attacked the intelligence community. Some lib-
eral senators, such as Jacob Javits, John Sherman Cooper, and Hu-
bert Humphrey, endorsed our arms control policies but shrank from

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the defense programs necessary to give us leverage in the negotia-
tions.

In the early 1970s, the option of what later became the highly effec-
tive Reagan policy did not exist. The obstacle to such a policy was not
the Nixon or the Ford administration but the liberal Congress and
media. By training their fire first on Nixon and then Ford, the neo-
conservatives provided an alibi to those whose pressures had compli-
cated the extrication from Indochina - and whose legislation then

Reagan cannily clothed
Nixon's strategies in the
gut of Wilsonianism.

caused its collapse and who mandated an
end to the Soviet/Cuban onslaught in An-
gola. The focal point of the foreign policy
debate for the neoconservatives had been the
moment at which they appeared on the
scene, and they have so concentrated on
largely tactical disagreements with fellow

Even after the neoconservatives had achieved dominance with the
Reagan ascendancy, they continued their assault by insisting on a ver-
sion of history that lures the United States away from the need to face
complexity. According to this version of history, a group of accom-
modation-prone, European-influenced leaders was overcome by the
knights-errant who suddenly appeared on the scene and prevailed in
short order by proclaiming the distinction between good and evil and
the revolutionary role of democratic principles.

Reality was more complex then and has become even more so at
this writing. Ronald Reagan and his associates deserve vast credit for
the denouement of the Cold War. But the United States will not har-
vest the intellectual lessons of their success if it ascribes its victory in
the Cold War to rhetorical posturing. Reagan's policy was, in fact, a
cannily reassertion of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford
administrations combined with the rhetoric of Wilsonianism—a
quintessentially American combination of pragmatism and idealism.
In an important sense, the victories of the 1980s derived from a Rea-
ganite elaboration—not a rejection—of the strategies of the 1970s.

However different their tactics, Nixon, Ford, and Reagan con-
ducted policies that sought simultaneously to contain the Soviet

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Union, shrink its influence, and work with it as this process unfolded. But whereas Nixon had sought to legitimize these policies by their practical success, Reagan proved to have a better instinct for America's emotions. He justified his course by an appeal to American idealism. Nixon attempted to *reacail* the virtues of the national interest by evoking what he called a "structure of peace"; Reagan understood that the American people are moved more by appeals to purpose rather than structure, and his policy declarations resonated with classic democratic virtue. As a result, he won broader support for high defense budgets and geopolitical reengagement than Nixon was able to achieve—or could have achieved in his time with the same appeal. (Reagan, of course, led a nation that had largely recovered from the Vietnam trauma and had grown disgusted with the humiliations of the Iran hostage crisis.)

The fact is that both Reagan's inspirational approach and Nixon's geopolitical perspicacity are needed to conduct a long-range foreign policy in the 21st century. Nixon, under the pressure of circumstances and perhaps of his personality, overemphasized the tactical element. But Reagan's disciples today, neglecting the facts that Reagan inherited a psychologically recovered American people ready for a stronger course as well as a Soviet Union weakened by overextension and by Nixon's foreign policy legacy, seek to telescope a historical process into one climactic presidency. They thereby postpone both the synthesis without which we will never fully grasp our challenge and the consensus, now more necessary than ever, that would be theirs if they could only leaven their righteousness with an understanding that history did not begin on the date of their conversion.®

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Henry A. Kissinger

IN DEFENSE OF DÉTENTE

HENRY A. KISSINGER was Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations and National Security Adviser to President Nixon. His books include *A World Restored. Diplomacy*. This essay is adapted from the recently published third volume of his memoirs, *Years of Renewal*.

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power; leadership requires building consensus. But the attempts, inseparable from consensus-building, to balance the rewards and penalties, ran counter to the prevailing philosophy of Wilsonianism, which tried to bring about a global moral order through the direct application of America's political values undiluted by compromises with "realism."

ENTER DÉTENTE

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All this was happening less than a year after the Soviet Union had occupied Czechoslovakia in order to overthrow a *communist* regime aspiring to a measure of autonomy from Moscow. Leonid Brezhnev

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The Nixon administration strove for a more differentiated approach. Though he admired Woodrow Wilson, nothing in Nixon's personal experience led him to share the conviction that great ideas could be realized in one grand assault. Nixon and I enlisted our firm anticommunist convictions in the service of a complex strategy designed to achieve our objective in stages, each of which by definition was bound to fall short of the ultimate ideal and could therefore be castigated as insufficiently moral. We viewed foreign policy as a continuing process with no terminal point, unlike the dominant view seeking a series of climaxes, each of which would culminate its particular phase.

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of concern to Washington. Therefore we insisted that individual negotiations on trade or arms control take place in an atmosphere of Soviet political restraint, especially with regard to such long-standing trouble spots as Berlin, the Middle East, and Indochina. Unlike the liberals, the Nixon administration did not justify its East-West diplomacy by a presumed change in Soviet motivations. But unlike the conservatives, who feared that agreements might weaken American vigilance, we argued that the Soviet Union was more vulnerable than the free world to a long period of peace and more likely to face fundamental changes as a result of it.

By the end of Nixon's first term, we had vindicated the strategy of moving forward on a broad front. The Soviet Union was being constrained from geopolitical adventures by the stick of our opening to China and the carrot of prospects of increased trade. In 1971, we helped channel West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik into a direction compatible with allied cohesion by linking West German recognition of the East German communist regime to a guarantee of free access to Berlin, thereby ending for the rest of the Cold War Soviet harassment of the city's access routes. In 1972, we were able to step up military pressure on Hanoi without Soviet interference. The Soviets went ahead with the planned superpower summit despite the mining of Vietnamese harbors and the renewal of bombing of North Vietnam because they prized the benefits of a visit by Nixon more than ideological ties with Hanoi. It was also in 1972 that Soviet military forces were expelled from Egypt—as we had predicted in 1970. By the end of 1973, the United States was dominating Middle East diplomacy. A strategic arms agreement freezing the Soviet numerical missile buildup without modifying any established American program had been negotiated. Linkage had prevailed.

## A REVERSAL FROM THE LEFT

At this high point of Nixon's foreign policy, the national consensus broke down. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for the remainder of Nixon's term, an increasingly acerbic domestic debate over the nature and the priorities of American foreign policy broke out. With brief interruptions, it has continued to this writing.

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Many of the neoconservatives were (or have become) personal friends. And however painful their critiques might occasionally have proved when I was in office, they made significant contributions to American thinking on foreign policy. They brought a much-needed intellectual rigor and energy to the debate, which helped to overcome the dominance of liberal conventional wisdom. Once they reached office in the Reagan administration, they conducted a strong and suc-

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The realization was dawning that idealism could lead to overexten-
sion as easily as miscalculation. But traditional American Wilsonianism rebelled against the verity that great goals in foreign policy must generally be approached in imperfect stages. The radical opponents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina to moral defects and had preached the cure of abdication to enable the United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neoconservatives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise, but we also believed that the Wilsonianism of the early 1960s had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of eri-

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teria to define the essential elements of our national purpose. Those of us who had been mauled by the Vietnam protests were deeply concerned—perhaps obsessed—with avoiding a repetition of this paralysis. We therefore searched for a more sober approach to American foreign policy that would—as we repeatedly stated—avoid the oscillations between abdication and overextension that had marked the previous period.

UNDERCUT BY THE NEOCONS

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arms race seriously but we did not believe that the aged leaders of a
moribund society were prepared to stake the survival of their society
and political system on a number of wild gambles that they were tech-
nically able to launch hundreds of missiles simultaneously even
though they had never test-fired more than three at a time and these
only from test sites, never from operational silos; American missiles
would not be launched on warning even though there might be a 30

to 45 minute interval in which to determine
that an all-out attack was underway; Soviet
operational missiles had the same accuracy
as test missiles; an American president
would refrain from using the thousands of
warheads which, even under the most pes-

simistic scenario, would survive a surprise attack. Finally, none of
these hypothetical disaster scenarios would be available even to the
most demented Soviet leader until about a decade *after* SALT I expired,
or more than enough time in which to take countermeasures.

To protect against these contingencies, the Nixon and Ford ad-
ministrations vigorously modernized our strategic forces. In fact the
backbone of the strategic arsenal at this writing is composed of
weapons developed and put before Congress in the Nixon and Ford
administrations: the Minuteman III, the MX, the rebuilt B-52, the B-
I and B-2 airplanes, and the Trident submarine.

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ing. With its creaky economy, the Soviet Union would, in the end, not be able to compete with the coalition we were assembling of all the industrial democracies cooperating with China, the world's most populous country. And that is essentially what happened.

The neoconservatives saw far less value in defeating Soviet geopolitical encroachments on distant battlefields, such as Angola or In-dochina, than in facing down the Soviet ideological or nuclear threat in some kind of definitive confrontation. This is why most neoconservatives failed to support the Ford administration when liberals in Congress cut off aid to the desperate peoples of South Vietnam and Cambodia and to the African forces resisting the Soviet/Cuban intervention in Angola.

The neoconservatives' need to break with their past made them oblivious to the context in which their prescriptions had to be carried out and made it impossible to incorporate the real lessons of Vietnam into the national consciousness. Even granting the validity of the neoconservative argument on behalf of the need for moral revival, the United States—just emerging from Vietnam, in the midst of Water-gate, and later led by a nonelected president—was not in a position to conduct a crusade; in fact, the attempt to do so would have torn the country apart even further. By depicting the diplomatic strategy of the Nixon and Ford administrations as a form of appeasement and our resistance to communist expansion in various theaters as a diversion from the main struggle, the neoconservatives undercut the real foreign policy debate, which was not with them but with the liberals.

Until well into Ford's term in office, congressional and media pressures came predominantly from the liberal side of the political spectrum. Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield periodically led drives to pull American troops out of Europe; Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright challenged the alleged militarization of American foreign policy; Senators Frank Church and Walter Mondale attacked the intelligence community. Some liberal senators, such as Jacob Javits, John Sherman Cooper, and Hu-

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bert Humphrey, endorsed our arms control policies but shrank from
the defense programs necessary to give us leverage in the negotia-
tions.

In the early 1970s, the option of what later became the highly effec-
tive Reagan policy did not exist. The obstacle to such a policy was nor
the Nixon or the Ford administration but the liberal Congress and
media. By training their fire first on Nixon and then Ford, the neo-
conservatives provided an alibi to those whose pressures had compli-

they have so concentrated on largely tactical disagreements with fel-
low conservatives that they have made it difficult to come to grips
with the real lessons of the Vietnam tragedy.

Reality was more complex then and has become even more so at
this writing. Ronald Reagan and his associates deserve vast credit for
the denouement of the Cold War. But the United States will not har-
vest the intellectual lessons of their success if it ascribes its victory in
the Cold War to rhetorical posturing. Reagan's policy was, in fact, a
canny reassertion of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford
administrations combined with the rhetoric of Wilsonianism—a
quintessentially American combination of pragmatism and idealism.
In an important sense, the victories of the 1980s derived from a Rea-
ganite elaboration—not a rejection—of the strategies of the 1970s.

Reagan cannily clothed
Nixon's strategies in the
garb of Wilsonianism.

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ducted policies that sought simultaneously to contain the Soviet Union, shrink its influence, and work with it as this process unfolded. But whereas Nixon had sought to legitimize these policies by their practical success, Reagan proved to have a better instinct for America's emotions. He justified his course by an appeal to American idealism. Nixon attempted to reach the virtues of the national interest by evoking what he called a "structure of peace"; Reagan understood that the American people are moved more by appeals to purpose rather than structure, and his policy declarations resonated with classic democratic virtue. As a result, he won broader support for high defense budgets and geopolitical reengagement than Nixon was able to achieve—or could have achieved in his time with the same appeal. (Reagan, of course, led a nation that had largely recovered from the Vietnam trauma and had grown disgusted with the humiliations of the Iran hostage crisis.)

The fact is that both Reagan's inspirational approach and Nixon's geopolitical perspicacity are needed to conduct a long-range foreign policy in the 21st century. Nixon, under the pressure of circumstances and perhaps of his personality, overemphasized the tactical element. But Reagan's disciples today, neglecting the facts that Reagan inherited a psychologically recovered American people ready for a stronger course as well as a Soviet Union weakened by overextension and by Nixon's foreign policy legacy, seek to telescope a historical process into one climactic presidency. They thereby postpone both the synthesis without which we will never fully grasp our challenge and the consensus, now more necessary than ever, that would be theirs if they could only leaven their righteousness with an understanding that history did not begin on the date of their conversion. ♃

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## Henry A. Kissinger

### IN DEFENSE OF DÉTENTE

BY THE summer of 1974 when Gerald R. Ford took over as president, Richard M. Nixon's foreign policy had become nearly as controversial as his personality. Liberals chastised President Nixon and me for inadequate attention to human rights. Conservatives depicted his administration as overeager for accommodation with the Soviet Union in the name of détente, which, in their view, compounded bad policy with French terminology.

Each of these criticisms owed something to the discomfort evoked by Nixon's ambiguous personality, but the overriding cause of the complaints was that his foreign policy raised two fundamental philosophical challenges. Nixon sought to extricate the United States from Vietnam on terms he defined as honorable at a time when most of the intellectual and much of the political community wanted to get out of Indochina essentially unconditionally. Simultaneously, the radical protesters preferred humiliation to honor or, more precisely, equated humiliation with honor.

Even more important was the insight that he was pre-
sideing over the transition of America's role in the world from
domination to leadership. For much of the postwar period, the United
States was preeminent because of its nuclear predominance and eco-

HENRY A. KISSINGER was Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations and National Security Adviser to President Nixon. His books include *A World Restored, Diplomacy*, and the recently published third volume of his memoirs, *Years of Renewal*.

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## Henry A. Kissinger

nomic strength. By the time Nixon took office, our nuclear monopoly was dwindling, Europe was regaining vitality, Asia was entering the international arena, and Africa was being swept by independence movements. Dominance can be based on power; leadership requires a reflects building consensus. But an attempt to balance the rewards and penalties (inseparable from consensus-building) an counter to the prevailing philosophy of Wilsonianism, which tried to bring about a global moral order through the direct application of America's political values undiluted by compromises with "realism."

Over two decades later, as these lines are being written, many of the themes of the debates of the 1970s have reappeared in the contemporary argument over America's role in the world, and especially its China policy. In this sense, the controversy over dèteme with the Soviet Union that blighted the Ford presidency was the forerunner of the contemporary post-Cold War debate over the direction of American foreign policy.

## ENTER DÉTENTE

A NATION'S foreign policy inevitably reflects an amalgam of the convictions of its leaders and the pressures of its environment. To understand the Nixon administration's approach to East-West relations—and the controversy that Ford inherited—it is necessary to describe the situation in which Nixon found himself. A inherited O

Richard Nixon took office in the midst of one of the gravest foreign policy crises in American history. Over 540,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam, and our country was tearing itself apart over what Walter A. McDougal of the University of Pennsylvania has brilliantly described as America's first "Great Society war." By this he meant that Vietnam was the first American war fought for no military objective. Rather, the strategic goal was not to lose, thereby giving South Vietnam time to create democratic institutions and social programs that would win the war for the hearts and minds of the population. Such a goal for a divided country independent for only a decade, in a society governed by colonialism for a century, was a prohibitive challenge in itself. The process required a time span of stalemated war beyond the psychological endurance of the American

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public.

The so-called peace movement, wrapping itself in the cloak of morality, insisted that there was only one ethical issue, which was peace on whatever terms could be gotten, and that the fate of the population was irrelevant to that goal (or, in the argument's more sophisticated version, that the peoples of Indochina would be better off if we abandoned them). In pursuit of what amounted to unconditional and unilateral withdrawal, the protesters sought to impose their views by mass demonstrations designed to paralyze the government. The protesters considered the very terms *honor* and *credibility* abominations, the empty slogans of a flawed society that would repeat its errors over and over again until it was made to taste the bitter drags of futility and humiliation. An "honorable" peace to unite the United States was precisely the outcome the protest movement sought to prevent. In its view, American presumption and vainglory had caused the tragedy in Indochina. It rejected the invocation of America's role in preserving the global equilibrium as a symptom of a national obsession with power, and it denied Nixon's moral right to invoke the term "honor."

were
available

To be sure, Establishment figures never went quite this far. Paralyzed by the futility of what they had wrought, they simply wished to extirpate the Vietnam War from their consciousness and to submerge their mistakes in collective amnesia. The practical result of their emotional abdication was that they would not support any American negotiating position rejected by Hanoi, thereby depriving the American negotiators of a floor on which to stand, and, in effect, urging abdication.

Pressures from abroad paralleled the domestic ones. Most of America's North Atlantic allies were extremely skeptical about the war in Indochina. By the time Nixon took office, they had begun to question whether America's alleged bellicosity might not threaten, rather than safeguard, their own security. A number of European leaders felt quite free to present themselves to their publics as advocates of peace whose primary mission was to moderate American intransigence in the conduct of the Cold War.

▲ overall

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The Man and the Organization

51

sign of sympathy for its point of view and as proof that I was being overruled by a bellicose, unbalanced President. When it gradually realized that I was basically on Nixon's side, many liberal intellectuals began to treat me as an opportunistic traitor to their cause.

So it happened that, by the end of the Nixon Administration, the President and I found ourselves being harassed by what had originally been our normal constituencies. Liberals accused me of abandoning them in quest of power; conservatives thought that Nixon had been seduced by visions of Establishment legitimacy.

In this atmosphere, the extrication from Vietnam took on the character of a civil war. Nixon had inherited the war in Southeast Asia. Over 540,000 American troops had been sent to a part of the world as geographically and culturally remote from the United States as it is possible to be on this globe. When Nixon took office, their numbers were still being increased according to a schedule established in the Johnson Administration. We found no plans for withdrawal nor a White House-approved negotiating strategy.

As it turned out, we prepared to assume the responsibility for extricating the United States from this debacle and never blamed our predecessors for the mess. We would not, however, leave the country for which nearly forty thousand Americans had already died by turning over to Communist rule tens of millions who had staked their lives on our word, but that for four years remained the ineradicable North Vietnamese precondition to any cease-fire.

Yet as soon as they left office, the very people who had saddled Nixon with these tragic dilemmas either acted as if they were innocent bystanders or, more frequently, began harassing the Nixon Administration for failing to achieve in four months what they had never endeavored to accomplish in four years. High officials of the Johnson Administration participated in protest demonstrations as if the obstacle to peace was the White House rather than the intransigence of the North Vietnamese—something they, better than anyone, should have known to be the underlying cause of the deadlock. Within a year, they were pressing us for concessions never even hinted at while they were in office. In 1968, the Democratic convention split over the so-called Peace Platform and fought out this division in the streets of Chicago. By the fall of 1969, Nixon had accepted and offered the key elements of this platform. Yet that was the time of the most massive antiwar demonstrations.

The irony is that the self-righteous demonstrators were, in effect,

4

Indochina Tragedy—The Beginning of the End

467

name of national security and honor, was, for this group, nothing less
than a desirable national catharsis.

I had been introduced to Vietnam in the fall of 1965 when Am-
bassador Henry Cabot Lodge invited me to serve as a consultant
to him. Though a confirmed Cold Warrior, I became convinced af-
ter a few weeks in the country that this war could not be won by
rules of engagement permitting the guerrillas to choose the battle-
field and determine the intensity of combat.³ Since there were no
front lines within South Vietnam and since the Johnson Adminis-
tration refused to pursue the guerrillas into the sanctuaries just
across the border in Laos and Cambodia, I advocated a negotiated
outcome.

In late 1967, President Johnson entrusted me with an exploratory diplomatic mission, using as an intermediary a French acquaintance in whose house Ho Chi Minh had stayed in 1946 when negotiating with France. It ended as all American diplomatic initiatives toward the single-minded warriors from Hanoi were destined to end. Raymond Aubrac did go to Hanoi and was received by Ho Chi Minh, who made a few Delphic utterances interpreted in Washington as hints of a desire to negotiate but which we now know were designed to lull the United States prior to the Tet Offensive a few months later.

The strategy adopted by the Nixon Administration was foreshadowed in an article I had written for *Foreign Affairs* while still a professor at Harvard but which, owing to long lead time, was not published until shortly after my appointment as National Security Adviser. In it, I had urged that the military and political issues be treated separately. The military issues would be negotiated between the United States and the Vietnamese parties, leading to a cease-fire, withdrawal of American troops, exchange of prisoners, and a limitation of armaments. The Vietnamese parties would then negotiate a political process by which the peoples of Indochina would be able to decide the future of their countries.

Nixon adopted this approach, and it became the basis for the eventual settlement. For four painful years, however, Hanoi flatly rejected any outcome that did notforcordain a Communist victory. Until October 8, 1972, when the breakthrough finally occurred, Hanoi's terms never changed, no matter how much we might modify ours and while Hanoi kept pretending to gullible Americans that only a bloodthirsty American administration stood in the way of an easily

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had proclaimed the doctrine (bearing his name) that asserted Moscow's right to impose ideological orthodoxy on the communist world. Backed by a rapidly growing arsenal of nuclear weapons, the Kremlin was projecting an image of ideological militancy and military strength.

For us to have launched the grandiloquent anti-Soviet crusade that our critics later (though not at the time) chastised us for not undertaking would already have driven our domestic crisis out of control. When Nixon took office, the American public was drained by 20 years of Cold War exertions and the increasing frustrations with Vietnam. It had lived through two Berlin crises, the Korean War, Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the Cuban missile crisis, and it had already sustained over 35,000 casualties in Indochina. Americans were growing tired of defending distant frontiers against a seemingly unreconcilable ideological opponent in a protracted conflict with no end in sight.

Throughout his career, Nixon's critics had portrayed him as an unregenerate Cold Warrior. But now that he was president, both the liberals who dominated Congress and the media urged him to end the Cold War as if he were one of their own. A widespread and vocal consensus, which had many supporters within the bureaucracy, pressed the new administration to initiate immediate negotiations with Moscow on trade, cultural and scientific exchanges, and, above all, arms control. The conservatives remained sullenly silent. Shell shocked by Vietnam and the domestic upheaval, they provided no counterweight to the liberal onslaught. In the absence of a counterweight to the liberal consensus, the dominant theme of the public discourse was peace: how to achieve it in Vietnam, how to preserve it in the world at large through immediate East-West negotiations, and how to protect it at home from the Nixon administration's alleged hard-line proclivities. At that time, of course, the neoconservatives who would later accuse us of softness on communism were still on the radical side of the dividing line, adding their voice to the clamor for

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accommodation.

Wilsonianism had involved the United States in Indochina by means of universalist maxims that had proved successful in Europe and were now applied literally in Asia. These were that the building of democracy could take place in the same time frame as the conduct of a guerrilla war, and that, indeed, the war need not be won and only needed to be kept from being lost—drawing us into a conflict that could have no military end. The traditional conservative version of Wilsonianism supplied no philosophical counterweight. Its vision of some apocalyptic showdown with the Soviet Union left us muscle-bound in the face of the actual Cold War challenges that our adversaries were careful to keep below the threshold of all-out confrontation.

No II

Wilsonianism rejects peace through balance of power in favor of peace through moral consensus. It sees foreign policy as a struggle between good and evil, in each phase of which it is America's mission to help defeat the evil foes challenging a peaceful order. Having prevailed, the United States can then devote itself to fostering the underlying harmony (in the internationalist version) or cultivate its own virtues (in the isolationist version) until the next discrete crisis arises—perceived not as a disturbance of the equilibrium but as a deviation from the moral order. Such a foreign policy tends to be segmented into a series of episodes and not perceived as a continuum requiring constant attention and adjustment, a quest for absolutes rather than the shaping of reality by means of nuances.

The Nixon administration strove for a more differentiated approach. Though he admired Woodrow Wilson, nothing in Nixon's personal experience led him to share the conviction that great ideas could be realized in one grand ideological assault. Both Nixon and I enlisted our firm anticommunist convictions in the service of a complex strategy destined to achieve our objective in stages, each of which by definition was bound to fall short of the ultimate ideal and could therefore be castigated as emotional. We viewed foreign policy as a continuing process with no terminal point, unlike the dominant view among liberals and conservatives, who were seeking a series of campaigns, each of which would culminate its particular phase and obviate the need for continuing exertion.

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Henry A. Kissinger

The Nixonian strategy had the following six components: to extricate the United States from Vietnam under honorable conditions; to confine the dissent of the protest movement to Indochina; to seize the high ground of the peace issue by a strategy that demonstrated to the American public that, even while pursuing the Cold War, the administration would do its utmost to control its dangers and gradually to overcome it; to broaden the diplomatic chessboard by including China in the international system; to strengthen our alliances; and, from that platform, to go on the diplomatic offensive, especially in the Middle East.

Détente was one aspect of the overall strategy. An unfortunate label implying European antecedents, détente was designed to control a relationship conceived as adversarial, not to conjure up a nirvana from which all tensions had automatically been removed, as later caricatures of it implied. Throughout, Nixon and I considered the Soviet Union ideologically hostile and militarily threatening. At once an empire and a cause, it was the only power capable of intervention globally, the source of most postwar international crises, and the sole country capable of attacking the United States. We strove for a strategy that calibrated the benefits of restraint and the penalties of recklessness to keep Soviet leaders from mounting a challenge during the period of national turmoil. And if the calibration failed, the very effort would at least have demonstrated to the American people that the resulting crisis was caused by the Soviet Union—thereby bolstering support for a strong response. In short, we treated America's travail over Vietnam as a temporary weakness that, once overcome, would enable us to prevail over the Soviet system when geopolitical isolation and a stagnant economy had exhausted the Kremlin's ideological zeal.

To be effective, a strategic assessment needs to be translated into an operating policy. This effort was against the perennial American controversy regarding the purpose of diplomacy. The then-dominant liberal group viewed negotiation as an end in itself, regardless of content. The very act of dialogue, it argued, “eased the atmosphere”; each agreement facilitated the path for further progress until a spirit of reconciliation had supplanted the suspicions of the Cold War and made some of the issues that had dominated it less central.

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YEARS OF RENEWAL

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with us as the main capitalist country and of the ultimate advantages that will accrue to the USSR in this conflict. Brezhnev's gamble is that as these policies gather momentum and longevity, their effects will not undermine the very system from which Brezhnev draws his power and legitimacy. Our goal on the other hand is to achieve precisely such effects over the long run. [emphasis added]⁶

We judged the Soviet Union, seemingly so monolithic and so eager to demonstrate its military power, as in fact being rent by vast systemic upheavals. Such astute observers as Andrei Amalrik (whose article I gave to Nixon to read) were already calling attention to the fact that the Soviet empire was facing profound and congenital vulnerabilities.⁷ In the more than fifty years of its history, the Soviet leadership had never managed a legitimate succession. Leaders had either died in office (like Lenin and Stalin) or had been replaced by coup-like procedures (like Khrushchev). In each case, succession was followed by a purge. And the growth of Soviet military potential was draining the economy and driving it into stagnation. This is why, in the Alastair Buchan Lecture in June 1976, I said: "We have nothing to fear from competition: . . . if there is an economic competition, we won it long ago . . . In no part of the world and under no other system do men live so well and in so much freedom. If performance is any criterion, the contest between freedom and Communism, of which so much was made three decades ago, has been won by the industrial democracies."⁸

In the process, the Soviet international position was growing more complicated. Tensions between Moscow and Beijing were escalating. Within weeks of Nixon's inauguration, we learned of military clashes along the Ussuri River, which demarcates the boundary between China and the Soviet Union's maritime provinces at the edge of Siberia. Soviet military forces all along the four thousand-mile frontier with China were being reinforced. Even before we established contact with Beijing, we had calculated that the fear of a two-front war would impose growing restraints on the Soviet Union's pressures on Europe as well as provide new diplomatic opportunities for the United States—as intended it did.⁹

(Upheavals in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and a near-revolution in Poland in 1970 dramatized the tenuousness of the Soviet hold over its satellites. It had become popular to joke that the Soviet Union was the only nation entirely surrounded by hostile Communist countries.)

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9

Far from conducting détente from a perception of weakness, the Nixon Administration was convinced that it had little to fear and much to gain from a flexible diplomacy in which the rigid Soviet system was bound to find itself increasingly at a disadvantage. Deprived of its ideological card, the Soviets' creaky economy, aging leadership, and dearth of true allies cast it in the role of simply another power player and not a very effective one at that.

This view was put forward publicly in the very first annual presidential report to Congress on foreign policy on February 19, 1970:

> [T]he lessons of the last two decades must have left their imprint on the leadership in the Kremlin—in the recognition that Marxist ideology is not the surest guide to the problems of a changing industrial society, the worldwide decline in the appeal of ideology, and most of all in the foreign policy dilemmas repeatedly posed by the spread of Communism to states which refuse to endure permanent submission to Soviet authority—a development illustrated vividly by the Soviet schism with China.⁹

To be effective, a strategic assessment needs to be translated into an operating policy. This effort ran up against the perennial American controversy regarding the purpose of diplomacy. The then-dominant liberal group viewed negotiations as an end in itself almost regardless of content. The very act of dialogue, it argued, “eased the atmosphere”; each agreement facilitated the path for further progress until a spirit of reconciliation had supplanted the suspicions of the Cold War and made some of the issues that had dominated it less central.

The Nixon Administration rejected this approach. We were prepared for an intense period of negotiation, but we were not willing to let our adversaries choose the agenda or the conditions. Progress on issues of concern to Moscow had to coincide with progress in areas of concern to us. Therefore we insisted that individual negotiations, as on trade or arms control, take place in an atmosphere of Soviet political restraint, especially with regard to such long-standing trouble spots as Berlin, the Middle East, and Indochina. Two weeks after his inauguration,

11/02/1999 6:26 PM Page 7

The Nixon administration rejected this approach. We were pre-
pared for an intense period of negotiation, but we were not willing to
let our adversaries choose the agenda or the conditions. Progress on
issues of concern to Moscow had to coincide with progress in areas
of concern to Washington. Therefore we insisted that individual ne-

gotiations on such issues as trade or arms
control take place in an atmosphere of So-
viet political restraint, especially with re-
gard to such long-standing trouble spots as
Berlin, the Middle East, and Indochina.
Unlike the liberals, the Nixon administra-
tion did not justify its East-West diplomacy
by a presumed change in Soviet motiva-

tions. But unlike the conservatives, who feared that agreements
might weaken American vigilance, we argued that the Soviet Union
was more vulnerable than the free world to a long period of peace and
more likely to face fundamental changes as a result of it.

We did not view the Soviet Union as a monolith but as an arm-
gam of ideological, nationalist, and imperialistic tendencies. It had
been placed on the defensive by the combination of Khrushchev's
revelations of Stalin's crimes and the Soviet repression of upheavals
in Eastern Europe. [In light of its vulnerable economy and geopoliti-
cal isolation, we intended to]弱 the Soviet colossus into trans-
forming itself from a cause into a state capable of being influenced by
traditional calculations of reward and punishment, thereby first eas-
ing the Cold War and ultimately transcending it.

By the end of Nixon's first term, we had vindicated the strategy of
moving forward on a broad front. The Soviet Union was being con-
strained from geopolitical adventures by the stick of our opening to
China and the carrot of prospects of increased trade. In 1971, we
helped channel West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik
into a direction compatible with allied cohesion by using back chan-
nels to help negotiate linking West German recognition of the East
German communist regime to a guarantee of free access to Berlin,
thereby ending for the rest of the Cold War Soviet harassment of the
city's access routes. In 1972, we were able to step up military pressure
on Hanoi without Soviet interference. The Soviets went ahead with

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the planned superpower summit despite the mining of Vietnamese harbors and the renewal of bombing of North Vietnam because they prized the benefits of a visit by Nixon more than ideological ties with Hanoi. That restraint was reinforced by the Soviet knowledge that, in conditions of American-Soviet confrontation, the German parliament would never ratify the treaties with the U.S.S.R. accepting the postwar frontiers. It was also in 1972 that Soviet military forces were expelled from Egypt—as we had predicted in 1970. By the end of 1973, the United States was dominating Middle East diplomacy. A strategic arms agreement freezing the Soviet numerical missile buildup without modifying any established American program had been negotiated. Linkage had prevailed.

A REVERSAL FROM THE LEFT

AT THIS high point of Nixon's and perhaps of American postwar foreign policy, the national consensus broke down. Beginning in 1972 and continuing for the remainder of Nixon's term, a monumental domestic debate over the nature and the priorities of American foreign policy broke out. With brief interruptions, it has continued to this writing.

Many factors combined to produce this totally unexpected state of affairs. Perhaps the most fundamental was that Nixon and I underestimated the impact on the public mente of the sharp difference between our approach to foreign policy and the Wilsonianism that had become dominant in the twentieth century. For his part, Nixon embittered the emerging debate by stressing in his public speeches (though not in our annual reports to Congress) domestic and political rather than conceptual explanations for his foreign policy. Convinced that the best way to isolate his liberal opponents was, in effect, to steal their program, Nixon could not resist rubbing it in that it was he—the despised, ostensibly reactionary Cold Warrior—who had, in fact, fulfilled much of the liberal agenda on negotiating with the adversary, and that he had done so on the basis of a strong national defense.

[y]

could not follow them. And it lost him the support of the traditional
conservatives who might well have gone along with a justification of
our policy for what it was—a way of managing the Cold War— but a
who viewed co-opting liberal slogans as opportunism. They began to
look elsewhere for heros.

The liberals, having advocated greater East-West contacts, arms control, and increased trade for at least a decade, would have been normally supportive of these policies now that they were actually being implemented. And under the leadership of any president other than Richard Nixon, they probably would have eventually endorsed the substance of our policies even while differing with the geopolitical approach with which we justified them. But Nixon had been anathema to the liberal community for more than two decades; the blood feud ran too deep.

The liberals' first line of defense was to invoke all their standard
critiques. Nixon's policy, they argued, was not going far enough; in-
deed, it was a subterfuge for continuing the Cold War. But given the
broad front on which Nixon was proceeding, this argument held lit-
tle attraction for any but confirmed Nixon-haters.

So it happened that, in the course of 1972, the liberals' attack
veered in an entirely new direction that let them maintain their tra-
ditional moral critique. Though they had hitherto insisted that East-
West trade, arms control, and cultural exchanges were vital to ame-
liorating the superpower conflict and therefore needed to be pursued
in their own right, the liberals now declared war on the Soviet inter-
nal system. Unembarrassed by their previous rejection of the concept
of linkage of foreign policy issues to each other, they now resurrected
linkage with a vengeance by insisting that all agreements be linked to
changes in Soviet domestic practices.

Shifts in the editorial position of *The New York Times* mirrored this
metamorphosis. Over the course of a few months in the fall of 1972,
the newspaper moved from unconditional advocacy of East-West
trade and arms control—and attacks on linkage—to stern criticism
of any agreement that did not dismantle the Soviet domestic struc-
ture. On September 13, 1972, for instance, the *Times* espoused its tra-
ditional liberal view that expanded trade "is sufficiently beneficial to
both sides that it ought to be considered . . . on its own merits, inde-

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[4]

Henry A. Kissinger

AN ECHO FROM THE RIGHT

THE LIBERALS' reversal of position was soon being echoed by various conservative groups. Convinced that the Cold War was a life-and-death ideological struggle, conservatives had never been comfortable with a wide-ranging negotiation with the Soviet Union because the mere fact of it implied some degree of common interest with the *communist* adversary. In their view, so long as communism retained its grip, any hope for restraint in Soviet conduct was chimerical. The conservatives would have been most comfortable with some variation of the original Acheson-Dulles containment posture of waiting behind "positions of strength" for the eventual collapse of communism within the Soviet Union and preferably in China as well.

The conservatives' split from Nixon was a pity because we did not differ with their analysis of the nature of the Soviet system. Where we disagreed was in assessing its implications for American foreign policy. Nixon and I believed that refusing to negotiate with the Kremlin would spread the virulence of the anti-Vietnam protest movement into every aspect of American foreign policy and deeply, perhaps finally, divide our alliances. Far better, we thought, to seize the initiative and control the diplomatic process. In the meantime, we would keep open the possibility that what had begun as tactics might evolve into a more reliable pattern of coexistence.

What drove conservative disquiet into outright opposition was the emergence of the so-called neoconservatives. That they claimed even part of the conservative label for themselves was something of an anomaly, since, nearly without exception, their leading representa-

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YEARS OF RENEWAL

16

might well have been reconciled if Nixon had elaborated his strategic
design to his traditional supporters—as he surely would have in an
undamaged second term.

What drove conservative disquiet into outright opposition was the
ergence of the so-called neoconservatives. That they claimed even
part of the conservative label for themselves was something of an
anomaly, since, nearly without exception, their leading representatives
had started out on the liberal side, most of them on its radical wing.
They had disdained Nixon, passionately opposed the Vietnam War,
objected to our military budget as too Cold War-oriented, and pressed
for a more conciliatory approach toward the Soviet Union.¹⁶

Starting in the summer of 1972 and extending over the period of a
year, this group grew disillusioned with the turn American liberalism
was taking. They found distasteful the radicalism and lifestyles of the
Democratic convention that had nominated George McGovern in
1972. And ever since the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, they had
become increasingly disenchanted with the Soviet Union. The 1973
Middle East War completed their conversion to geopolitical realities.
They interpreted that war as a Soviet-Arab conspiracy against Israel
and the industrial democracies and concluded that the challenge was
best resisted in the name of opposition to détente.

Once they changed sides, their anti-Communism was intense,
often eloquent. And they demonstrated a considerable affinity for
strategy honed by years of ideological warfare on the left side of the
barricades.

Many of the neoconservatives were (or have become) personal
friends. I respect Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and Irving Kristol
for their important intellectual and moral contributions, and I like
them enormously on a personal level. I had long been an admirer
also of Daniel Patrick “Pat” Moynihan—even though his label as a
“conservative” proved to be somewhat temporary. When I was ap-
pointed Secretary of State, I offered him the position of counselor
in the State Department. I had recommended him to Nixon for the
ambassadorship to India and to Ford as ambassador to the United
Nations. From this last position, Moynihan went on to launch his
political career, partly on the basis of opposition to my alleged views
on East-West relations or at least in his idiosyncratic interpretation of
them. And

However painful their critiques might occasionally have proved
when I was in office, the individuals and their colleagues made sig-

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Controversy over Détente

107

nificant contributions to American thinking on foreign policy. They brought a much needed intellectual rigor and energy to the debate, which helped to overcome the dominance of liberal conventional wisdom. Once they reached office in the Reagan Administration, they conducted a strong and successful national strategy, which was supported.

But there was also a reverse side to the single-mindedness with which they pursued their newfound convictions. When the neoconservatives first appeared on the scene, their defining experience was their own ideological conversion to the pursuit of the Cold War Tactics bored them; they discerned no worthy goals for American foreign policy short of total and immediate victory. Their historical memory did not include the battles they had refused to join or the domestic traumas to which they had so often contributed from the radical left side of the barricades. When the neoconservatives moved to the radical right, they packed in their bags their visceral dislike of Nixon even though technically they were now on the same side. And they distorted the subsequent debate by a touch of amnesia about their own role in the seminal battles of which Vietnam was a symbol, if not a cause.

Vietnam accelerated what the United States would have experienced in any event—albeit more gradually: that power in the world was becoming more diffused and isolation for America increasingly impossible. As the twenty-first century approached, the United States would have to exercise its influence as the single most important and coherent part of an international system but no longer as the dominant country it had been at the beginning of the Cold War. The great initiatives of the early Cold War had been presented as “solutions” to the challenge they were addressing, often with a terminal date. Henceforth what was needed was a permanent American participation depending more on the ability to accumulate nuances than on engineering final outcomes in a brief period.

The realization was dawning that idealism could lead to overextension as much as bad calculation. Yet traditional American Wilsonianism rebelled against the verity that great goals in foreign policy generally must be approached in imperfect stages. And the frustrations of Vietnam compounded the disillusionment. The radical opponents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina to a moral defect and had preached the cure of abdication to enable the United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neoconservatives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise, but we

17

Henry A. Kissinger

The realization was dawning that idealism could lead to overexten-
sion as easily as miscalculation, could. But traditional American
Wilsonianism rebelled against the verity that great goals in foreign
policy must generally be approached in imperfect stages. The frus-
tations of Vietnam compounded the disillusionment. The radical
opponents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina
to moral defects and had preached the cure of abdication to enable
the United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neocon-
servatives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to
reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise,
but we also believed that the simple Wilsonianism of the early 1960s
had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of
criteria to define the essential elements of our national purpose.
Those of us who had been mauled by the Vietnam protests were
deeply concerned—perhaps obsessed—with avoiding a repetition of
this paralysis. We therefore searched for a more sober approach to
American foreign policy that would—as we repeatedly stated—avoid
the oscillations between abdication and overextension that had
marked the previous period.

UNDERCUT BY THE NEOCONS

by the Soviet Union without confusing the issue with tactics.

Where Nixon (and I) saw the greatest danger in creeping Soviet expansionism abetted by Soviet superiority in conventional forces, interior lines of communication, and the umbrella of a vast and growing strategic nuclear force, the neoconservatives' stated nightmare was some apocalyptic showdown—perhaps a nuclear one—over world domination. The Nixon team viewed the conflict with Moscow as a long-term geopolitical contest in which, together with our allies, we would wear down the Soviet system. The neoconservatives argued that it was possible to overcome communism with a burst of ideological élan.

—Since many of the neoconservatives considered even the NATO alliance as more of an impediment to than an enhancement of American power, they saw far less value in defeating Soviet geopolitical encroachments on distant battlefields, such as Angola or Indochina, than in facing down the Soviet ideological or nuclear threat in some kind of definitive confrontation. This is why most neoconservatives failed to support the Ford administration when Congress cut off aid to the desperate peoples of South Vietnam and Cambodia and to the African forces resisting the Soviet/Cuban intervention in Angola.

The neoconservatives' inward-looking need to break with their past made them oblivious to the context in which their prescriptions had to be carried out and made it impossible to incorporate the real lessons of Vietnam into the national consciousness. Whatever the theoretical validity of the neoconservative argument, the United States—just emerging from Vietnam, in the midst of Watergate, and later led by a nonelected president—was not in a position to conduct a crusade; in fact, the attempt to do so would have torn the country apart even further. By depicting the diplomatic strategy of the Nixon and Ford administrations as a form of appeasement and our resistance to communist expansion in various theaters as a diversion from the main struggle, the neoconservatives undercut the real foreign policy debate, which was not with them but with the liberals.

Insert #6

This difference in emphasis was overshadowed and confused by a bitter debate that broke out over the first agreement to limit strategic arms in 1972 which froze the offensive deployments of the two sides for a period of five years. Though these force levels had been chosen by the Pentagon without any reference to arms control, our critics insisted that they left America vulnerable and invented complex scenarios whereby a Soviet attack might reduce our warheads to a "mere" four thousand while the Soviets would retain three times that number.

It was a symptom of the mood of the period that Presidents like Nixon and Ford, who had been defense hawks all their lives, could be accused of sanctioning strategic inequality. We took the strategic arms race seriously but we did not believe that the aged leaders of a moribund society were prepared to stake the survival of their society and political system on a number of wild gambles:

* that they were technically able to launch hundreds of missiles simultaneously even though they had never test-fired more than three at a time and these only from test sites, never from operational silos.

* that American missiles would not be launched on warning even though there might be a thirty- to forty-five-minute interval in which to determine that an all-out attack was under way.

* that Soviet operational missiles had the same accuracy as test missiles.

* that an American President would refrain from using the thousands of warheads which, even under the most pessimistic scenario, would survive a surprise attack.

Finally, none of these hypothetical disaster scenarios would be available even to the most demented Soviet leader until about a decade *after* SALT I expired, or more than enough time in which to take counter-measures.

To protect against these contingencies, the Nixon and Ford administrations vigorously modernized our strategic forces. In fact the backbone of the strategic arsenal at this writing is composed of weapons developed and put before Congress in the Nixon and Ford administrations: the Minuteman III, the MX, the rebuilt B-52, the B-1 and B-2 and the Trident submarine.

Page 2
Insert #6

All subsequent administrations including Reagan's
adhered to the SALT I limits even after the agreement had
lapsed. In fact, the total of our strategic forces at the
end of the Reagan period ten years later were slightly lower
than when SALT I was signed.

The real issue in our national debate was not the
numbers game of arms control discussions. It had to do with
the perception of the challenge. Nixon and Ford judged the
challenge to be in the nature of a marathon race, and they
would not dissipate our strength in a series of sprints
designed for the gallery. And they were reinforced in this
attitude because Congress was annually legislating cuts in
the defense budget over our opposition. Nixon and Ford
thought it essential to prove to the American people that
crisis and confrontation were a last resort, not an everyday
means of conducting foreign policy. Both were convinced
that we stood to win the marathon for which we were girding.
With its creaky economy, the Soviet Union would, in the end,
not be able to compete with a coalition we were assembling
of all the industrial democracies cooperating with China,
the world's most populous country. And that is essentially
what happened.

Nixon and Ford were right from the perspective of their time as was Reagan from the perspective of the Eighties. Unfortunately, the bitter feud between two sides that should have been allies produced both a stand-off and near diplomatic paralysis.

Henry A. Kissinger

Committee Chairman J. William Fulbright challenged the alleged militarization of American foreign policy; Senators Frank Church and Walter Mondale attacked the intelligence community. Some liberal senators, such as Republicans Jacob Javits and John Sherman Cooper and the Democrat Hubert Humphrey, endorsed our arms control policies but shrank from the defense programs necessary to give us leverage in the negotiations.

In the early 1970s, the option of what later became the Reagan policy did not exist. The obstacle to such a policy was not the Nixon or the Ford administration but the liberal Congress and media. By training their fire first on Nixon and then Ford, the neoconservatives provided an alibi to those whose pressures had prevented a more favorable outcome in Indochina and whose legislation then caused its collapse and mandated an end to the Soviet/Cuban onslaught in Angola. The focal point of the foreign policy debate for the neoconservatives had been the moment at which they appeared on the scene, and they have so concentrated on largely tactical disagreements with fellow conservatives that they have made it difficult to come to grips with the real lessons of the Vietnam tragedy.

Even after the neoconservatives had achieved major influence with the Reagan ascendancy, they continued their assault by insisting on a version of history that lures the United States away from the need to face complexity. According to this version of history, a group of accommodation-prone, European influenced leaders was overcome by the knights-errant who suddenly appeared on the scene and prevailed in short order by proclaiming the distinction between good and evil and the revolutionary role of democratic principles.

Reality was more complex then and has become even more so at this writing. Ronald Reagan and his associates deserve credit for the denouement of the Cold War. But the United States will not harvest the intellectual lessons of their success if it ascribes its victory in the Cold War to rhetorical posturing. Reagan's policy was, in fact, a canny reassertion of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford administrations, clothed in the rhetoric of Wilsonianism—a quintessentially American combination of pragmatism and idealism.

[14] FOREIGN AFFAIRS · Volume 78 No. 3

In an important sense, the victories of the 1980s derived from a Republican —not a rejection—of the strategies of the 1970s.

The Reagan administration did not pursue practical arrangements; for example, it signed a communiqué with China in which it accepted limitations on arms supplies to Taiwan. And, at Reykjavik, Reagan came within a hair of agreeing to the abandonment of all nuclear arsenals—a gamble on arms control that Nixon would never have considered. In its operating policies in the Middle East, Southern Africa, and Central America and on missile defense, the Reagan administration followed a course to a great extent charted by Nixon or Ford, which is why I and all former members of the national security team of both the Nixon and Ford administrations supported the key elements of the Reagan foreign policy.

Nixon, Ford, and Reagan conducted policies that sought simultaneously to contain the Soviet Union, shrink its influence, and work with it as this process unfolded. But whereas Nixon had sought to liberalize these policies by their practical success, Reagan proved to have a better instinct for America's emotions. He justified his course in the name of American idealism. Nixon attempted to reach the virtues of the national interest by evoking what he called a "structure of peace"; Reagan understood that the American people are moved more by purpose than structure, and his policy declarations resonated with classic Wilsonianism based on democratic virtue. As a result, he won broader support for high defense budgets and geopolitical reengagement than Nixon was able to achieve—or could have achieved in his time with the same appeal. (Reagan, of course, led a nation that had largely recovered from the Vietnam trauma and had grown disgusted with the humillations of the Iran hostage crisis.)

As the Nixon administration was ending, neither the president nor I understood the depth of the neoconservative challenge. We considered ourselves philosophically close to the neoconservatives and divided from them primarily by a tactical difference. The divide arose, in our view, from a differing strategic perspective, not from a debate over "tough" versus "soft" options, as the neoconservatives claimed. [AU: The last sentence implies that the dispute was strategic; the one before calls it merely tactical. Can we resolve the ambiguity?]

As time went on, however, it became increasingly clear that the

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Henry A. Kissinger

differences went deeper. On one level was an element of personal ri-
valry inseparable from politics. Many of the converts to conservatism
had been activists in Democratic Party politics, which meant that
they sought not only to develop ideas but aspired to implement them
in the political world: Newly arrived in the conservative camp, they
needed space for that ambition. Nothing was more natural for them
than to elevate tactical differences into a matter of principle, thereby
necessitating the replacement of the group shaping existing Repub-
lican foreign policy.

But there was, in fact, a philosophical difference—though it took
me over a decade to understand it. Our clash with the neoconserva-
tives was not over the nature of communism, on which we were very
close, but over the relationship of moral values to the conduct of in-
ternational politics. I thought moral goals important, even decisive,
in finding the fortitude to navigate a series of difficult choices, in any
one of which the pros and cons were evenly balanced and the out-
come likely to be imperfect. The neoconservatives, however, believed
that values could be translated directly into operating programs.

The fact is that both Reagan's inspirational approach and Nixon's
geopolitical perspicacity are needed to conduct a long-range foreign
policy in the 21st century. Nixon, under the pressure of circumstances
and perhaps of his personality, probably overemphasized the tactical
clement. But Reagan's disciples today, neglecting the facts that Rea-
gan inherited a psychologically recovered American people ready for
a stronger course as well as a Soviet Union weakened by overexten-
sion and by Nixon's foreign policy legacy, seek to telescope a histori-
cal process into one climactic presidency. They thereby postpone
both the synthesis without which we will never fully grasp our chal-
lenge and the consensus that would be theirs if they could only leaven
their righteousness with an understanding that history did not begin
on the date of their conversion.②

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## Henry A. Kissinger

### IN DEFENSE OF DÉTENTE

Each of these criticisms owed something to the discomfort evoked by Nixon's ambiguous personality, but the overriding cause of the complaints was that his foreign policy raised two fundamental philosophical challenges. Nixon sought to extricate the United States from Vietnam on terms he defined as honorable at a time when most of the intellectual and much of the political community wanted to get out of Indochina essentially unconditionally. (Simultaneously, the radical protesters preferred humiliation to honor or, more precisely, equated humiliation with honor.)

Even more important for Nixon was the insight that he was pre-
siding over the transition of America's role in the world from demi-
nation to leadership. For much of the postwar period, the United
States was preeminent because of its nuclear predominance and eco-

HENRY A. KISSINGER was Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford ad-
ministrations and National Security Adviser to President Nixon. His
books include *A World Restored, Diplomacy*, and the recently published
third volume of his memoirs, *Years of Renewal*.

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nomic strength. By the time Nixon took office, our nuclear monop-
oly was dwindling. Europe was regaining vitality, Asia was entering
the international arena, and Africa was being swept by independence
movements. Dominance can be based on power; leadership requires
building consensus. But an attempt to balance the rewards and penal-
ties inseparable from consensus-building ran counter to the prevail-
ing philosophy of Wilsonianism, which tried to bring about a global
moral order through the direct application of America's political val-
ues undiluted by compromises with "realism."

Over two decades later, as these lines are being written, many of
the themes of the debates of the 1970s have reappeared in the con-
temporary argument over America's role in the world and especially
its China policy. In this sense, the controversy over defentee with the
Soviet Union that blighted the Ford presidency was the forerunner of
the contemporary post-Cold War debate over the direction of Amer-
ican foreign policy.

ENTER DÉTENTE

A NATION'S foreign policy inevitably reflects an amalgam of the
convictions of its leaders and the pressures of its environment. To un-
derstand the Nixon administration's approach to East-West rela-
tions—and the controversy that Ford inherited—it is necessary to de-
scribe the situation in which Nixon found himself.

Richard Nixon took office in the midst of one of the gravest for-
eign policy crises in American history. Over 540,000 American
troops were fighting in Vietnam, and our country was tearing itself
apart over what Walter A. McDougal of the University of Pennsyl-
vania has brilliantly described as America's first "Great Society war."
By this he meant that Vietnam was the first American war fought for
no military objective. Rather, the strategic goal was not to lose,
thereby giving South Vietnam time to create democratic institutions
and social programs that would win the war for the hearts and minds
of the population. Such a goal for a divided country independent for
only a decade, in a society governed by colonialism for a century, was
a prodigious challenge in itself. The war required a time span of
staleminated war beyond the psychological endurance of the American

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public.

The so-called peace movement, wrapping itself in the cloak of morality, insisted that there was only one ethical issue, which was more available peace on whatever terms could be gotten, and that the fate of the population was irrelevant to that goal (or, in the argument's more sophisticated version, that the peoples of Indochina would be better off if we abandoned them). In pursuit of what amounted to unconditional and unilateral withdrawal, the protesters sought to impose their views by mass demonstrations designed to paralyze the government. The protesters considered the very terms *honor* and *credibility* abominations, the empty slogans of a flawed society that would repeat its errors over and over again until it was made to taste the bitter dregs of futility and humiliation. An "honorable" peace to unite the United States was precisely the outcome the protest movement sought to prevent. In its view, American presumption and vainglory had caused the tragedy in Indochina. It rejected the invocation of America's role in preserving the global equilibrium as a symptom of a national obsession with power, and it denied Nixon's moral right to invoke the term "honor."

To be sure, Establishment figures never went quite this far. Paralyzed by the futility of what they had wrought, they simply wished to extirpate the Vietnam War from their consciousness and to submerge their mistakes in collective amnesia. The practical result of their emotional abdication was that they would not support any American negotiating position rejected by I lanoi, thereby depriving the American negotiators of a floor on which to stand.

Pressures from abroad paralleled the domestic ones. Most of America's North Atlantic allies were extremely skeptical about the war in Indochina. By the time Nixon took office, they had begun to question whether America's alleged bellicosity might not threaten, rather than safeguard, their own security. A number of European leaders felt quite free to present themselves to their publics as apostles of peace whose primary mission was to moderate American intransigence in the conduct of the Cold War.

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Henry A. Kissinger

For us to have launched the grandiloquent anti-Soviet crusade that our critics later (though not at the time) chastised us for not undertaking would only have driven our domestic crisis out of control. When Nixon took office, The American public was drained by 20 years of Cold War exertions and the increasing frustrations with Vietnam. It had lived through two Berlin crises, the Korean War, Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the Cuban missile crisis, and it had already sustained over 35,000 casualties in Indochina. Americans were growing tired of defending distant frontiers against a seemingly irreconcilable ideological opponent in a protracted conflict with no end in sight.

Throughout his career, Nixon's critics had portrayed him as an unregenerate Cold Warrior. But now that he was president, both the liberals who dominated Congress and the media urged him to end the Cold War as if he were one of their own. A widespread and vocal consensus, which had many supporters within the bureaucracy, pressed the new administration to initiate immediate negotiations with Moscow on trade, cultural and scientific exchanges, and, above all, arms control. The conservatives remained sullenly silent. Shell-shocked by Vietnam and the domestic upheaval, they provided no counterweight to the liberal onslaught. In the absence of a counterweight to the liberal consensus, the dominant theme of the public discourse was peace: how to achieve it in Vietnam, how to preserve it in the world at large through immediate East-West negotiations, and how to protect it at home from the Nixon administration's alleged hard-line proclivities. At that time, of course, the neoconservatives who would later accuse us of softness on communism were still on the radical side of the dividing line, adding their voice to the clamor for

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accommodation.

Wilsonianism had involved the United States in Indochina by means of universalist maxims that had proved successful in Europe and were now applied literally in Asia. These were that the building of democracy could take place in the same time frame as the conduct of a guerrilla war, and that, indeed, the war need not be won and only needed to be kept from being lost—drawing us into a conflict that could have no military end. The traditional conservative version of Wilsonianism supplied no philosophical counterweight. Its vision of some apocryptic showdown with the Soviet Union left us music-bound in the face of the actual Cold War challenges that our adversaries were careful to keep below the threshold of all-out confrontation.

The Nixon administration strove for a more differentiated approach. Though he admired Woodrow Wilson, nothing in Nixon's personal experience led him to share the conviction that great ideas could be realized in one grand ideological assault. Both Nixon and I enlisted our firm anticommunist convictions in the service of a complex strategy destined to achieve our objective in stages, each of which by definition was bound to fall short of the ultimate ideal and could therefore be castigated as amoral. We viewed foreign policy as a continuing process with no terminal point, unlike the dominant view among liberals and conservatives, who were seeking a series of cliques, each of which would culminate its particular phase, and obviate the need for continuing exertion.

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The Nixon strategy had the following six components: to expedite the United States from Vietnam under honorable conditions; to confine the dissent of the protest movement to Indochina; to seize the high ground of the peace issue by a strategy that demonstrated to the American public that, even while pursuing the Cold War, the administration would do our utmost to control its dangers and gradually to overcome it; to broaden the diplomatic chessboard by including China in the international system; to strengthen our alliances; and, from that platform, to go on the diplomatic offensive, especially in the Middle East.

Détente was one aspect of the overall strategy. An unfortunate label implying European antecedents, détente was designed to control a relationship conceived as adversarial, not to conjure up a nirvana from which all tensions had automatically been removed, as later caricatures of it implied. Throughout, Nixon and I considered the Soviet Union ideologically hostile and militarily threatening. At once an empire and a cause, it was the only power capable of intervention globally, the source of most postwar international crises, and the sole country capable of attacking the United States. We strove for a strategy that calibrated the benefits of restraint and the penalties of recklessness to keep Soviet leaders from mounting a challenge during our period of national turmoil. And if the calibration failed, the very effort would at least have demonstrated to the American people that the resulting crisis was caused by the Soviet Union—thereby bolstering support for a strong response. In short, we treated America's travail over Vietnam as a temporary weakness that, once overcome, would enable us to prevail over the Soviet system when geopolitical isolation and a stagnant economy had exhausted the Kremlin's ideological zeal.

To be effective, a strategic assessment needs to be translated into an operating policy. This effort ran up against the perennial American controversy regarding the purpose of diplomacy. The then-dominant liberal group viewed negotiation as an end in itself, regardless of content. The very act of dialogue, it argued, "eased the atmosphere"; each agreement facilitated the path for further progress until a spirit of reconciliation had supplanted the suspicions of the Cold War and made some of the issues that had dominated it less central.

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The Nixon administration rejected this approach. We were pre-
pared for an intense period of negotiation, but we were not willing to
let our adversaries choose the agenda or the conditions. Progress on
issues of concern to Moscow had to coincide with progress in areas
of concern to Washington. Therefore we insisted that individual ne-
gotiations on such areas as trade or arms
control take place in an atmosphere of So-
viet political restraint, especially with re-
gard to such long-standing trouble spots as
Berlin, the Middle East, and Indochina.
Unlike the liberals, the Nixon administra-
tion did not justify its East-West diplomacy
by a presumed change in Soviet moriva-

We did not view the Soviet Union as a monolith but as an amal-
gam of ideological, nationalist, and imperialistic tendencies. It had
been placed on the defensive by the combination of Khrushchev's
revelations of Stalin's errors and the Soviet repression of upheavals
in Eastern Europe. In light of its vulnerable economy and geopoliti-
cal isolation, we intended to rudge the Soviet colossus into trans-
forming itself from a cause into a state capable of being influenced by
traditional calculations of reward and punishment, thereby first eas-
ing the Cold War and ultimately transcending it.

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Henry A. Kissinger

A REVERSAL FROM THE LEFT.

Many factors combined to produce this totally unexpected state of affairs. Perhaps the most fundamental was that Nixon and I underestimated the impact on the public psyche of the sharp difference between our approach to foreign policy and the Wilsonianism that had become dominant in the twentieth century. For his part, Nixon embittered the emerging debate by stressing in his public speeches (though not in our annual reports to Congress) domestic and political rather than conceptual explanations for his foreign policy. Convinced that the best way to isolate his liberal opponents was, in effect, to steal their program, Nixon could not resist rubbing it in that it was he—the despised, ostensibly reactionary Cold Warrior—who had, in fact, fulfilled much of the liberal agenda on negotiating with the adversary.

This tactic infuriated the liberals, who moved ever further away from Nixon by searching for more sweeping arms control proposals and such "moral" causes as human rights where they thought Nixon

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could not follow them. And it lost him the support of the traditional conservatives who might well have gone along with a justification of our policy for what it was—a way of managing the Cold War—but who viewed co-opting liberal slogans as opportunism. They began to look elsewhere for heroes.

The liberals, having advocated greater East-West contacts, arms control, and increased trade for at least a decade, would have been normally supportive of these policies now that they were actually being implemented. And under the leadership of any president other than Richard Nixon, they probably would have eventually endorsed the substance of our policies even while differing with the geopolitical approach, with which we justified them. But Nixon had been anathema to the liberal community for more than two decades; the blood feud ran too deep.

So it happened that, in the course of 1972, the liberals' attack veered in an entirely new direction that let them maintain their traditional moral critique. Though they had hitherto insisted that East-West trade, arms control, and cultural exchanges were vital to améliorating the superpower conflict and therefore needed to be pursued in their own right, the liberals now declared war on the Soviet internal system. Unembarrassed by their previous rejection of the concept of linkage of foreign policy issues to each other, they now resurrected linkage with a vengeance by insisting that all agreements be linked to changes in Soviet domestic practices.

Shifts in the editorial position of *The New York Times* mirrored this metamorphosis. Over the course of a few months in the fall of 1972, the newspaper moved from unconditional advocacy of East-West trade and arms control—and attacks on linkage—to stern criticism of any agreement that did not dismantle the Soviet domestic structure. On September 13, 1972, for instance, the *Times* espoused its traditional liberal view that expanded trade "is sufficiently beneficial to both sides that it ought to be considered . . . on its own merits, inde-

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## AN ECHO FROM THE RIGHT

The conservatives' split from Nixon was a pity because we did not differ with their analysis of the nature of the Soviet system. Where we disagreed was in assessing its implications for American foreign policy. Nixon and I believed that refusing to negotiate with the Kremlin would spread the virulence of the anti-Vietnam protest movement into every aspect of American foreign policy and deeply, perhaps fairly, divide our alliances. Far better, we thought, to seize the initiative and control the diplomatic process. In the meantime, we would keep open the possibility that what had begun as tactics might evolve into a more reliable pattern of coexistence.

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Democratic presidential convention that
had nominated George McGovern in 1972.
And ever since the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia, they had become increas-
ingly disenchanted with the Soviet Union.
The 1973 Middle East war completed their
conversion to geopolitical realities. They
interpreted that war as a Soviet-Arab con-

spiracy against Israel and the industrial democracies and concluded
that the challenge was best resisted in the name of opposition to dé-
tente.

When the neocons
moved to the radical
right, they took their
dislike of Nixon along.

Once they changed sides, their anticommunism was intense, often
cloquent. And they demonstrated a considerable affinity for strategy
honed by years of ideological warfare on the left side of theaxis of
class.
But there was also a reverse side to the single-mindedness with which
they pursued their newfound convictions. When the neoconserva-
tives first appeared on the scene, their defining experience was their
own ideological conversion to the pursuit of the Cold War. Tactic-
bored them; they discerned no worthy goals for American foreign-
policy short of total victory. Their historical memory did not include
the battles they had refused to join or the domestic traumas to which
they had so often contributed from the radical left. When the neo-
conservatives moved to the radical right, they packed in their bags
their visceral dislike of Nixon, even though technically they were now
on the same side. And they distorted the subsequent debate with a
touch of amnesia about their own role in the seminal battles of which
Vietnam was a symbol, if not a cause.

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Henry A. Kissinger

The realization was dawning that idealism could lead to overexten-
sion as easily as miscalculation could. But traditional American
Wilsonianism rebelled against the verity that great goals in foreign
policy must generally be approached in imperfect stages. The frus-
tations of Vietnam compounded the disillusionment. The radical
opponents of the Vietnam War had ascribed the failures in Indochina
to moral defects and had preached the cure of abdication to enable
the United States to concentrate on self-improvement. The neocon-
servatives reversed the lesson, seeing in moral regeneration the key to
reengagement. Nixon and I agreed with the neoconservative premise,
but we also believed that the simple Wilsonianism of the early 1960s
had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of
criteria to define the essential elements of our national purpose.
Those of us who had been mauled by the Vietnam protests were
deeply concerned—perhaps obsessed—with avoiding a repetition of
this paralysis. We therefore searched for a more sober approach to
American foreign policy that would—as we repeatedly stated—avoid
the oscillations between abdication and overextension that had
marked the previous period.

UNDERCUT BY THE NEOCONS

THE NEOCONSERVATIVES insisted that such an approach did not do
justice to the moral dynamism of a society that had turned its back
on the callous calculations of the Old World. In the process, they put
forward not so much a new dispensation—as they claimed—but a re-
turn to a militant, muscular Wilsonianism. The fundamental aim of
foreign policy as they saw it was the eradication of the evil represented

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Since many of the neoconservatives considered even the NATO alliance as more of an impediment to than an enhancement of American power, they saw far less value in defeating Soviet geopolitical enroachments on distant battlefields, such as Angola or Indochina, than in facing down the Soviet ideological or nuclear threat in some kind of definitive confrontation. This is why most neoconservatives failed to support the Ford administration when Congress cut off aid to the desperate peoples of South Vietnam and Cambodia and to the African forces resisting the Soviet/Cuban intervention in Angola.

The neoconservatives' inward-looking need to break with their past made them oblivious to the context in which their prescriptions had to be carried out and made it impossible to incorporate the real lessons of Vietnam into the national consciousness. Whatever the theoretical validity of the neoconservative argument, the United States—just emerging from Vietnam, in the midst of Watergate, and later led by a nonelected president—was not in a position to conduct a crusade; in fact, the attempt to do so would have torn the country apart even further. By depicting the diplomatic strategy of the Nixon and Ford administrations as a form of appeasement and our resistance to communist expansion in various theaters as a diversion from the main struggle, the neoconservatives undercut the real foreign policy debate, which was not limited to, but with the same arguments as, the liberal press.

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The second charge against the arms control policies of the Nixon Administration—that it tempted a Soviet surprise attack—was even more out of touch with reality.

The surprise attack scenario went as follows. By placing ten warheads on its 300 heavy missiles, the Soviet Union would be able to destroy all of America's 1,000 land-based missiles and perhaps a third of our missile-carrying submarines in port at any one time. The United States would then be left with only some 450 submarine-launched warheads and the surviving bomber force with a total of perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 warheads, while the Soviet residual force might approach four times that number. Under these conditions, it was claimed that the American President could be intimidated into holding back his remaining retaliatory force and into accepting Soviet terms.³

The scenario substituted overwrought precision for plausibility. In the various disaster scenarios assumed that Soviet leaders were prepared to stake the survival of their society and political system on a number of wild gambles:

* that the Soviets were technically able to launch several hundred missiles simultaneously even though they had never test-fired more than three at a time and these only from test sites, never from operational silos. (Some of the more dramatic scenarios even predicted that the Soviets would first evacuate their cities to blunt our counterblow while the United States remained passive.)

* that American missiles would not be launched on warning even though there might be a thirty- to forty-five-minute interval in which to determine whether an all-out attack was under way.

* that Soviet operational missiles had the same accuracy as test missiles—a risky assumption in light of the fact that, in a surprise attack, they would need to be fired in a north-south direction, whereas all test missiles (of both sides) had been fired in an east-west direction to avoid creating the impression of a surprise attack thereby triggering retaliation. (This was, of course, a vivid demonstration of the precariousness of counting on surprise.)

* that the aged leaders of a moribund society would have enough confidence to gamble that an American President would refrain from using the thousands of warheads which, even under the most pessimistic scenario, would survive a surprise attack.

Finally, none of these hypothetical scenarios would be available even to the most demented Soviet leader until about a decade after

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127

SALT I expired, or more than enough time in which to take countermeasures. These could involve increasing the survivable United States forces by putting more warheads on existing missiles, developing a larger missile with more warheads and greater explosive power, or building new weapons with altogether different characteristics not limited by SALT I, such as cruise missiles. And there was always the option of missile defense. With the exception of missile defense, which was emasculated by Congress, all of these steps were, in fact, either taken or initiated in the Nixon Administration and were continued by Ford before SALT I expired.

No wonder the professional military never endorsed any of these frantic scenarios. What they thought of the strategic balance was expressed in a letter from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General George Brown, to Senator William Proxmire in 1977 shortly after Ford had left office:

> The Joint Chiefs of Staff do not agree that the Soviet Union has achieved military superiority over the United States. . . . [U.S. strategic forces] are considered sufficient to achieve US objectives today. ⁴

By fixating on a single and remote danger, Henry Jackson and his neoconservative allies managed to deflect the domestic debate from America's real security problem in the 1970s, which was, not as already suggested, an all-out nuclear attack on the United States; it was rather that an emerging strategic stalemate might tempt the Soviet Union into exploiting its superiority in *conventional* weapons for geopolitical encroachment or blackmail. Strategic arms control should have been treated as a component of overall national strategy. Yet the liberals clung to arms control as their panacea, and the conservatives imagined SALT I to be the cause, not the result, of our own unilateral procurement decisions made for more than a decade.

The actual strategic equation, in fact, gave the United States a much greater capacity than the Soviet Union to carry out doomsday scenarios. For even under SALT I conditions, the Soviet strategic forces were far more vulnerable to an American first strike than their American counterparts. That was because only about 30 percent of America's strategic forces were land-based, as compared to 90 percent of the Soviet Union's. And American submarine-launched missiles were far more efficient and accurate than those of the Soviets. With the right mix of MXs and Minuteman IIs, the United States could have made

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A Ford, Not a Lincoln

in servicing the committees and in agreeing on how to deal with
classified documents.

In this new atmosphere, Congress felt more free to legislate specific policies than it ever had before. However virulent congressional opposition had been to the Vietnam War, Congress had confined its critique to "sense of the Congress" resolutions, which are not obligatory. But in the twenty-nine months of the Ford Administration, Congress legislated an arms embargo on Turkey, cut off aid to Cambodia and eviscerated it for Vietnam, and legislated a prohibition against any military role in Angola. The micromanagement went so far that, at one point, Congress voted antiaircraft missiles for Jordan only on the condition that they be in fixed positions. (The refusal of wheels was more humiliating than meaningful because, as King Hussein pointed out at the time, it was an easy matter to acquire such wheels in the markets of the Arab world.)

Ford and the National Interest

Ford reacted to the seemingly inexhaustible volume of challenges without either self-pity or doubt about the good faith of his political adversaries. Liberal critics were urging confrontations on human rights, and neoconservatives were celebrating their recent conversion by urging a new, nonelected President to precipitate a series of show-downs with the Soviet Union at a moment when Soviet policy was still relatively restrained and Congress was gutting the defense budget.

Ford viewed his role not unlike that of a doctor ministering to a patient just recovering from a debilitating illness. He therefore resisted demands for heroic posturing and prescribed a regimen of building and conserving strength. He judged the patient's challenge to be in the nature of a marathon race, and he would not allow him to dissipate this strength in a series of sprints designed for the gallery. And he was reinforced in this attitude because Congress had just legislated cuts in the 1975 defense budget, necessitating a reduction of ready Air Force wings and causing a deterioration of naval readiness. The Army had been cut by five divisions from its peak in the Vietnam period.

Ford thought it essential to prove to the American people that crisis and confrontation were a last resort, not an everyday means of conducting foreign policy. Both of us were convinced that we stood to win the marathon for which we were girding. With its creaky economy,

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YEARS OF RENEWAL

the Soviet Union would, in the end, not be able to compete with a
coalition we were assembling of all the industrial democracies cooper-
ating with China, the world's most populous country. And that is
essentially what happened.

Dedicated to the proposition that his presidency should be a time
of healing (as he would entitle his memoirs),⁸ Ford displayed personal
goodwill to friend and foe alike. At times, I thought his apparent
equanimity excessive, especially when his reluctance to impose penal-
ties made resistance to presidential authority appear free of risk. In
retrospect, I have come to appreciate Ford's self-restraint, for it gradu-
ally drained the American political system of its accumulated poison
and created the conditions for the restoration of faith in American
institutions. In the end, societies thrive not on the victories of factions
but on their reconciliations.

That Ford had courage and leadership ability was demonstrated
by a series of actions during the first month of his presidency. On his
second day in office, Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger and I
called on him for a decision that could not be delayed. In the far
reaches of the northern Pacific, a Soviet submarine had sunk at a
depth of sixteen thousand feet several years earlier. In pursuit of an
intelligence coup, the CIA had commissioned the building of the Glo-
mar Explorer, which presented itself to the world as an oceanic re-
search vessel but was in fact equipped with a device that lowered steel
claws to the ocean floor, capable of lifting the submarine into the ship's
body. The Glomar Explorer was in place and all set to lift the subma-
rine on the day Ford took the oath of office. A Soviet trawler was
hovering nearby, raising a number of issues: Did the new President
want to risk relations with the Soviet Union for the sake of an intelli-
gence coup? Was there a danger that the trawler would interfere with
the operation, inviting a clash though the Glomar Explorer was unde-
fended? Ford asked how long the Soviet trawler had been there. When
told that it had been on station for weeks, he ordered the salvage to
begin because, he argued, conditions would be no more propitious a
week later. Unfortunately, on raising the submarine, one claw broke,
and part of the submarine was lost.

That Ford would march to his own drummer and not to the advice
of his experts became evident five days after his inauguration when
the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin—having hurriedly returned
from home leave—presented himself at the Oval Office. To the amaze-
ment of both State Department experts and the NSC staff, Ford used

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Henry A. Kissinger

Reality was more complex then and has become even more so at this writing. Ronald Reagan and his associates deserve much credit for the denouement of the Cold War. But the United States will not harvest the intellectual lessons of their success if it ascribes its victory in the Cold War to rhetorical posturing. Reagan's policy was, in fact, a canny reassertion of the geopolitical strategies of the Nixon and Ford administrations clothed in the rhetoric of Wilsonianism—a quintessentially American combination of pragmatism and idealism.

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In an important sense, the victories of the 1980s derived from a Reaganite variant—not a rejection—of the strategies of the 1970s.

The Reagan administration did not abjure practical arrangements; for example, it signed a communique with China in which it accepted limitations on arms supplies to Taiwan. And, at Reykjavik, Reagan came within a hair of agreeing to the abandonment of all nuclear arsenals—a gamble on arms control that Nixon would never have considered. In its operating policies in the Middle East, Southern Africa, and Central America and on missile defense, the Reagan administration followed a course to a great extent charted by Nixon or Ford, which is why I and all former members of the national security team of both the Nixon and Ford administrations supported the key elements of the Reagan foreign policy.

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Henry A. Kissinger

differences went deeper. On one level was an element of personal ri-
valry inseparable from politics. Many of the converts to conservatism
had been activists in Democratic Party politics, which meant that
they sought not only to develop ideas but aspired to implement them
in the political world. Newly arrived in the conservative camp, they
needed space for that ambition. Nothing was more natural for them
than to elevate tactical differences into a matter of principle, thereby
necessitating the replacement of the group shaping existing Repub-
lican foreign policy.

Absent Watergate, a successful Nixon presidency might well have
been able to use the high-wire acts of his first term to amalgamate the
ideological convictions of the neoconservatives with the geopolitical
insights of his own approach. As it was, their reconciliation

The fact is that both Reagan's inspirational approach and Nixon's
geopolitical perspicacity are needed to conduct a long-range foreign
policy in the 21st century. Nixon, under the pressure of circumstances
and perhaps of his personality, probably overemphasized the tactical
clement. But Reagan's disciples today, neglecting the facts that Rea-
gan inherited a psychologically recovered American people ready for
a stronger course as well as a Soviet Union weakened by overexten-
sion and by Nixon's foreign policy legacy, seek to telescope a histori-
cal process into one climactic presidency. They thereby postpone
both the synthesis without which we will never fully grasp our chal-
lenge and the consensus that would be theirs if they could only leaven
their righteousness with an understanding that history did not begin
on the date of their conversion. ❙

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467

Nixon adopted this approach, and it became the basis for the
eventual settlement. For four painful years, however, Hanoi flatly re-
jected any outcome that did not foreordain a Communist victory. Un-
til October 8, 1972, when the breakthrough finally occurred, Hanoi's
terms never changed, no matter how much we might modify ours
and while Hanoi kept pretending to gullible Americans that only a
bloodthirsty American administration stood in the way of an easily

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public.

The so-called peace movement, wrapping itself in the cloak of morality, insisted that there was only one ethical issue, which was peace on whatever terms could be gotten, and that the fate of the population was irrelevant to that goal (or, in the argument's more sophisticated version, that the peoples of Indochina would be better off if we abandoned them). In pursuit of what amounted to unconditional and unilateral withdrawal, the protesters sought to impose their views by mass demonstrations designed to paralyze the government. The protesters considered the very terms *honor* and *credibility* abominations, the empty slogans of a flawed society that would repeat its errors over and over again until it was made to taste the bitter drops of futility and humiliation. An "honorable" peace to unite the United States was precisely the outcome the protest movement sought to prevent. In its view, American presumption and vainglory had caused the tragedy in Indochina. It rejected the invocation of America's role in preserving the global equilibrium as a symptom of a national obsession with power, and it denied Nixon's moral right to invoke the term "honor."

To be sure, Establishment figures never went quite this far. Paralyzed by the futility of what they had wrought, they simply wished to extirpate the Vietnam War from their consciousness and to submerge their mistakes in collective amnesia. The practical result of their emotional abdication was that they would not support any American negotiating position rejected by I Hanoi, thereby depriving the American negotiators of a floor on which to stand.

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Henry A. Kissinger

Such was the context of stalemate, tension, and frustration inherited by Nixon. For us to have launched the grandiloquent anti-Soviet

crusade that our critics later (though not at the time) chastised us for not undertaking would only have driven our domestic crisis out of control. When Nixon took office, the

American public was drained by 20 years of Cold War exertions and the increasing frustrations with Vietnam. It had lived through two Berlin crises, the Korcan War, Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and the Cuban missile crisis, and it had already sustained over 35,000 casualties in Indochina.

Americans were growing tired of defending distant frontiers against a seemingly irreconcilable ideological opponent in a protracted conflict with no end in sight.

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Henry A. Kissinger

The Nixonian strategy had the following six components: to expedite the United States from Vietnam under honorable conditions; to confine the dissent of the protest movement to Indochina; to seize the high ground of the peace issue by a strategy that demonstrated to the American public that, even while pursuing the Cold War, the administration would do our utmost to control its dangers and gradually to overcome it; to broaden the diplomatic chessboard by including China in the international system; to strengthen our alliances; and, from that platform, to go on the diplomatic offensive, especially in the Middle East.

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The Nixon administration rejected this approach. We were pre-
pared for an intense period of negotiation, but we were not willing to
let our adversaries choose the agenda or the conditions. Progress on
issues of concern to Moscow had to coincide with progress in areas
of concern to Washington. Therefore we insisted that individual ne-
gotiations on such areas as trade or arms
control take place in an atmosphere of So-
viet political restraint, especially with re-
gard to such long-standing trouble spots as
Berlin, the Middle East, and Indochina.
Unlike the liberals, the Nixon administra-
tion did not justify its East-West diplomacy
by a presumed change in Soviet motiva-
tions. But unlike the conservatives, who feared that agreements
might weaken American vigilance, we argued that the Soviet Union
was more vulnerable than the free world to a long period of peace and
more likely to face fundamental changes as a result of it.

We did not view the Soviet Union as a monolith but as an amal-
gam of ideological, nationalist, and imperialistic tendencies. It had
been placed on the defensive by the combination of Khrushchev's
revelations of Stalin's crimes and the Soviet repression of upheavals
in Eastern Europe. In light of its vulnerable economy and geopoliti-
cal isolation, we intended to nudge the Soviet colossus into trans-
forming itself from a cause into a state capable of being influenced by
traditional calculations of reward and punishment, thereby first eas-
ing the Cold War and ultimately transcending it.

By the end of Nixon's first term, we had vindicated the strategy of
moving forward on a broad front. The Soviet Union was being con-
strained from geopolitical adventures by the stick of our opening to
China and the carrot of prospects of increased trade. In 1971, we
helped channel West German Chancellor Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik
into a direction compatible with allied cohesion by weing back chan-
nels to help negotiate linking West German recognition of the East
German communist regime to a guarantee of free access to Berlin,
thereby ending for the rest of the Cold War Soviet harassment of the
city's access routes. In 1972, we were able to step up military pressure
on Hanoi without Soviet interference. The Soviets went ahead with

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