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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 treaty 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 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 psychology 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. Geally 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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Between the Old Left and the New Right

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.

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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pendent 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 *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 fatally, 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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tives 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 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-

spiriacy 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
eloquent. And they demonstrated a considerable affinity for strategy
honed by years of ideological warfare on the left side of the barricades.
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. Tactics
based 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.

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

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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 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 return 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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FOREIGN AFFAIRS
FOREIGN AFFAIRS

58 east 68th street—new-york—new-york 10021

58 EATON AVENUE, SUITE 400, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10017

Tel 212 434 9400 Fax 212 861 1849

FEB 12 1999

Facsimile Transmission

Date: February 12, 1999

Number of 17

Pages: Dr. Henry A. Kissinger, Kissinger Associates, Inc.

To: (incl. cover) FAX: 759-0042

From: James F. Hoge, Jr., Editor

Dear Henry,

Here is a proof of the adaptation from "Years of Renewal" that I would like to publish in the May/June *Foreign Affairs*, first copies of which become publicly available in mid-April.

Please make any changes or additions (for example, concerning neoconservatism and its advocates) on the attached copy and return to me by mail or fax.

Its a strong, interesting article which should generate a lot of comment.

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# Between the Old Left and the New Right

## 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 for Nixon was the insight that he was presiding 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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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 détente 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 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.

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. McDougall 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 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 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 Hanoi, 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.

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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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.

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 Korean War, Soviet in-

vasions 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.

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

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.

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 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 cli maxes, each of which would culminate its particular phase and obviate the need for continuing exertion.

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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 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 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 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

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

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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 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. Coolly 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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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 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 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.

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

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 the barricades.
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. 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 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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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-
trations 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
rec engagement. 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

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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 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.

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

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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.

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

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 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 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 dissatisfied with the humiliations 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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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.

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.

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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