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# The Doctor's Prognosis on Detente 2

**SUMMARY:** U.S. foreign policy just hasn't been the same since the heyday of Henry Kissinger. The wit, educator and showman has remained in the limelight, however, and his consulting service is a hot business. He has moved steadily to the right since he left the State Department, and he does not hide his dismay over the White House's recent chumminess with the Moscow leadership — behavior that he clearly believes has greatly undermined the Western alliance.

When Henry A. Kissinger was promoted from national security adviser to secretary of state in 1973, he was asked by a reporter how he would like to be addressed in his new capacity. "Would you prefer being called 'Mr. Secretary' or 'Dr. Secretary'?" "I don't stand on protocol," Kissinger obligingly replied. "If you will just call me 'Excellency' it will be OK."

It has been said of Kissinger that he is the only secretary of state to have had two presidents serve under him. An educator, a showman and a wit, Kissinger — mit dem growling German accent — has been a tough act to follow. Subsequent secretaries of state have tended to pale in comparison: the timid Cyrus R. Vance, the lachrymose Edmund S. Muskie, the mercurial Alexander M. Haig Jr. and the plodding George P. Shultz, whose chief claim to originality is the alleged tattoo of a tiger on his bottom.

Even more impressive, perhaps, is Kissinger's continued ability to keep a place in the limelight in a country that pays little attention to its former public servants. American leaders often fade after they leave high office: The main function of former secretaries of state seems to be to haunt the funerals of foreign statesmen.

"I think the interesting thing about Kissinger is how he has managed after so many years out of office to remain so important a figure," says Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine. "I don't think there is any precedent for it. Not even Dean

Acheson [secretary of state during the Truman administration] had the kind of standing he continues to have. It is a tribute to his powers as a mind and as a personality."

Out of office for 12 years, Kissinger now runs a consulting firm, Kissinger Associates Inc. — his private "shadow State Department," it has been called — out of a swank New York office 26 floors above Park Avenue. It provides political analyses,

reportedly at astronomical prices. One person close to him says that 25 major corporations each pay $250,000 a year as a retainer. The associates are trusted colleagues like former Under Secretary of State Lawrence S. Eagleburger and former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. In addition, Kissinger writes a widely syndicated newspaper column and occasionally weighs in with a more substantial offering in one of the low-circulation but high-influence foreign policy journals. His Capitol Hill testimony on matters of import always makes the nightly news, and he is the "Nightline" guest par excellence for Ted Koppel.

Journalists and lesser political potentiates might kill for the contents of his Rolodex — and for his access to the great and powerful. It has been said that he is the one man in the United States, with the possible exception of the president, who can get anyone in the world on the phone.

Why? The fact is that whatever people may think about one or another of his foreign policy views, Kissinger's pronouncements have always been recognized as rooted in a larger system — a worldview, a framework that makes the whole more than the sum of the parts. He is a major figure in the realm of foreign affairs and strategy, and observers see few competitors and few potential successors.

"It is one of the great ironies of the Reagan administration that this — at least in the beginning — most ideological of administrations never found its conceptualizers as far as foreign policy was concerned, and it went out of its way not to employ such people in its upper reaches," says Owen Harries, coeditor of The Nation-

The brains behind Kissinger Associates

BRIAN FELL / OUTURE

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al Interest, on whose board Kissinger sits. "Certainly, it needed them more than most. The more you are concerned with walking tall and being activist, the more you need coherence conceptually." In this environment, Kissinger's shadow looms large.

In fact, according to Harries, there has been a reversal of roles: Long a favorite target of the populist right — "a master of the camouflaged retreat, a historical pessimist more at home in the court of Franz Joseph than in the White House of Ronald Reagan," columnist Patrick Buchanan described Kissinger when he was picked to head the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America in 1983 — and one of the reasons Ronald Reagan decided to challenge Gerald Ford in 1976, Kissinger has moved steadily to the right since leaving the State Department.

At the same time, the Reagan administration has moved away from some of its original positions. No longer is the Soviet Union an "evil empire," not to be trusted. These days the stress is on the personal friendship between the leaders of the two countries, while the ills of the Soviet Union are blamed on bureaucratic inertia.

Wicked gossip has it that Kissinger never negotiated an agreement he did not like and never liked an agreement he did not negotiate. However, his criticism of the recent handling of relations with the Soviets goes much deeper than that: it has been constant but constructive, as befits a loyal Republican (after all, it was Kissinger who wrote in his memoirs that Shultz was a man to whom he would not hesitate to entrust the fate of the nation in a crisis). But he has clearly been appalled at what he sees

as the lack of direction and coordination. Says Kissinger plaintively, "They don't think in geopolitical or historical terms."

In his view, the cardinal strategic mistake of the administration has been the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Reagan. The pact removes a whole class of missiles from Europe. With it has come the administration's "stigmatization" of atomic weapons — the weapons that form the backbone of Western defense. "Operationally, the conservatives have done as much damage to the cohesion of the alliance, maybe more, than the liberals would have."

He regards the agreement as a turning point in American-European relations. His chief worry is the effect it will have on West Germany, the key country for the defense of Western Europe, without which NATO would not be viable. The missiles were installed at the request of the Europeans themselves, in order to join more closely the defense of Europe and the United States. Some fear their removal will cause a decoupling of the two.

According to Kissinger, contrary to the impression the administration wants to give, the West Germans were subjected to intense pressure not only to accept the withdrawal of the U.S. missiles on their soil but also to give up their own Pershing 1As. Why no protest from Bonn? The idea that the West German chancellor could simply have objected to the removal of the missiles is mistaken, Kissinger has said. No Ger-

After taking over State, Kissinger (left) was a tough act to follow for (from top) Vance, Muskie, Haig or Shultz.

man chancellor can afford to be seen as standing in the way of an arms agreement.

Thus, as he sees it, the United States has gravely weakened the traditional pro-Americans in West Germany — men like Chancellor Helmut Kohl and Alfred Dregger, the conservative coalition floor leader in the Bundestag, who have based their political careers on the bond between the two nations. Instead, the hand of those who want to be more accommodating to the Soviets — such as Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher of the Free Democratic Party — has been strengthened.

As Kissinger noted in an interview with the Daily Telegraph of London, "The tragedy is this: The antideployment movement, having lost the battle on the cruise and Pershing, has won the war of strategic theory — all under the leadership of American hard-liners." Thus it can be argued that the Reagan administration has done more long-term damage to a key component in the Atlantic relationship than anything the Carter administration did.

What makes matters worse is the fact that in Germany a pro-Western orientation has not been a national tradition. Therefore, the deal strengthens West German neutralism and nationalism, which according to Kissinger are parallel phenomena: In some quarters, especially in the Social Democratic Party, it is hoped that a weakening of the bonds to the West might bring about eventual German unification. For centuries, the trouble with Germany has been that it has either been too weak or too strong. Whatever happens to West Germany will affect other NATO nations.

In Kissinger's view, it is going to be very difficult to put the broken pieces together again. The United States will now have to support European integration and a greater European sense of identity in defense matters — and hope that integration will move fast enough to prevent German neutralism from getting out of hand.

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The INF pact, in Kissinger's view, aids accommodationists like Genscher (right).

Kissinger has also attacked the administration's argument that the 300,000 U.S. troops in Europe are still being protected by battlefield nuclear weapons. This argument, he has written, ignores the suspicion of the West Germans that the United States would like to confine a possible nuclear war to European soil and their concern that battlefield nuclear weapons in fact only have the range to kill other Germans. No Bonn government could long sustain public support for such a policy.

Similarly, strategic weapons cannot be expected to do the job. Their use has become increasingly less credible since nuclear parity in the strategic field came about. In the classic phrase, would a U.S. president be willing to sacrifice New York for Paris? Without the return of the so-called Nixon madman theory — the impression the former president sought to create that he might be crazy enough to open fire in the case of aggression, and damn the consequences — it seems unlikely. The reason for placing intermediate nuclear missiles in Europe in the first place was precisely to expand the available options.

Kissinger has also warned of allies' fears of the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks — that Britain and France might be subject to the same kind of pressures on their independent nuclear deterrents that West Germany faced over its Pershing 1As. He has advised that no further nuclear cuts take place before the problems of conventional forces have been tackled.

And in the current preoccupation — Kissinger has used the word "obsession" — with cutting nuclear arms, he has repeatedly reminded his audience of the unreliability of conventional deterrence, of the fact that there may be no great attraction to

re-creating a world reliant for its defenses on huge conventional armies. He has noted that even with equality in numbers, there is no guarantee that war will not start. As the lessons of history have shown, wars have often broken out between equally strong opponents. It is the ability to concentrate forces on a particular point that matters.

Overall, he says, the differences between Detente 1, the version practiced by the Nixon administration, and Detente 2, as practiced by the Reagan administration, are many. In his day, the United States had a weak hand: There were riots in the streets, defeat was coming in Vietnam, Congress was cutting the defense budget and the president could not mobilize public opinion. The government had no choice except to appeal to some elements of the peace movement or lose its defense program. Reagan, on the other hand, has had the wind at his back, enjoying peace, prosperity and enormous popularity.

Detente 2, Kissinger says, seems to be founded on some seriously mistaken assumptions about the Soviets. "Nobody in the Nixon administration ever spoke of the conversion of Brezhnev. Nobody in the Nixon administration said that some low-level bureaucrats are thwarting the humane desires of the Soviet leaders. There may have been some exuberant statements of Nixon's, but you could not imagine Nixon putting his arm around the Soviet leader and talk of personal friendship."

(Actually, at the 1974 summit in Moscow, the politically crippled Nixon in a speech at a Kremlin dinner did stress his "personal relationship" with Leonid Brezhnev. Perhaps knowing a dead man when they saw one, the Soviets omitted the word "personal" from the official Russian translation of the speech.)

Kissinger says Nixon had no illusions about the motives of Brezhnev (right).

In dealing with the Soviets, Kissinger advises caution, urging restraint on those who would rush to reward Gorbachev for his reform efforts. Already, many in the European Community are eager for far-reaching economic agreements with the Soviets. He insists that Western initiatives be dictated by Moscow's foreign policy, not its domestic policy. "I think that is his problem," says Kissinger. "Our problem is foreign politics, not domestic politics. We don't even understand what 'help them' means. How do we help them? We should make agreements that are in our mutual interest, but I don't see that we should make agreements with Gorbachev that we would not make with some other Soviet leader."

He has also pointed out that reform in the Soviet Union does not necessarily guarantee a more benign foreign policy. After all, Nikita Khrushchev's reform-mindedness did not stop him from conducting a highly opportunistic foreign policy.

Gorbachev's skills as a manipulator of public opinion, Kissinger stresses, make it more imperative than ever for the West to formulate a consistent and durable long-term strategy toward the Soviet bloc. What would it consist of? For one thing, according to Kissinger, there must be a correct assessment of the overall balance of forces. The balance now might well be favorable to the West, provided that the current obsession with Gorbachev subsides. After all, the Soviet leader faces far greater problems and challenges than any Western leader.

In a recent Foreign Affairs piece written with Cyrus Vance, Kissinger expresses the hope that the next president will appreciate the value of continuity in U.S. foreign policy. The two are convinced that the national purpose must at some point be set: "If it is redefined . . . with every change of administration, the United States risks becoming a factor of inconstancy in the world."

— Henrik Bering-Jensen

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