2

that our involvement in world politics was purely a
matter of choice. Americans imagined the entire Western
hemisphere a special case, safely insulated from the rest
of the world. That geography gave us this luxury was
only evidence of God's blessing upon us; we owed Him the
quid pro quo of an assumption of moral superiority.

The competitive, sometimes cynical, and always relativistic
style of European power politics was viewed in America as
an unsavory example of what to avoid and as further evidence
of our moral superiority.

In American discussion of foreign policy, even through
much of the twentieth century, the phrase "balance of power"
was hardly ever written or spoken without a pejorative adjective
in front of it--the "outmoded" balance of power, the

3

"discredited" balance of power. When Woodrow Wilson took America into the First World War, it was in the expectation that under American influence the postwar settlement would be governed by a "new and more wholesome diplomacy," transcending the wheeling and dealing, secrecy, and undemocratic practices that were thought to have produced the Great War. Franklin Roosevelt, on his return from the Crimean Conference in 1945, told the Congress on March 1 of his hope that the postwar era would "spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries--and have always failed."

Both Wilson and Roosevelt put their faith in a universal organization of collective security in which the peace-loving nations would combine to deter, or combat, the aggressors.

It was assumed that all nations would come to the same conclusions regarding what constituted aggression and be

C.Y.J

4

equally willing to resist it, no matter where it occurred,
regardless of how far from their borders, irrespective
of the national interest involved.

In the American view, nations were either inherently
peaceful or inherently warlike. Hence, after World War
II the "peace-loving" United States, Britain, and USSR
had together to police the world against Germany and Japan
even though the former enemies had been rendered impotent
by unconditional surrender. If there were doubts about
the peace-loving virtue of our wartime allies, they seemed
to many American leaders to apply as much to Britain as to
the USSR: Roosevelt toyed with the idea of non-alignment
between a balance-of-power oriented, colonialist Britain and
an ideologically obstreperous Soviet Union. Even Truman took
care not to meet with Churchill in advance of the Potsdam
Conference; he did not want to appear to be "lining up" with
Britain against the USSR. The secret dream of American

5

leaders, if great-power conflict proved unavoidable,
was to arrogate to themselves the role to which the non-aligned
and some Europeans later aspired: that of moral arbiter, hurling
condescending judgments down at all those engaged in the
dirty game of international diplomacy.

American attitudes until the last ten years have
embodied a faith that historical experience can be
transcended, that problems can be solved permanently, that
harmony can be the natural state of mankind. Thus our
diplomacy has often stressed the concepts of international
law, with its procedures of arbitration and peaceful
settlement, as if all political disputes were legal issues,
on the premise that reasonable men and women could always
find agreement on some equitable basis. There is also a
perennial American assumption that economic well-being
automatically ensures political stability, a belief which

has animated American policies from Herbert Hoover's relief
efforts after World War I to the Marshall Plan to the recent
Caribbean initiative--never mind that, in many parts of the
world, the time frames for economic progress and the
achievement of political stability may be seriously out of phase.
In our participation in the two world wars of this century,
and afterward, our bursts of energy were coupled with the
conviction that our exertions had a terminal date, after
which the natural harmony among nations would be either
restored or instituted.

Even when the United States finally entered the world
stage of permanent peacetime diplomacy after 1945, it did
so under conditions that seemed to confirm our historical
expectations. For several decades we had the overwhelming
resources to give effect to our prescriptions, and thus
conducted foreign policy by analogy with the great formative
experiences of the 1930s and 1940s: the New Deal translated

7

into the Marshall Plan; resistance to Nazi aggression
translated into the Korean "police action" and the policy
of "containment." We tended to attribute our dominance
in the Western Alliance to the virtue of our motives rather
than to the preponderance of our power. In fact, the
United States enjoyed nearly half the world's Gross National
Product and an atomic monopoly; our NATO allies, given
their dependence, conducted themselves less as sovereign
nations than as lobbyists in Washington decision-making.

It was therefore a rude awakening when in the 1960s
and 1970s the United States became conscious of the limits
of even its vast resources. Now with a little over a fifth of
the world's GNP, America was powerful but no longer dominant.
Vietnam was the trauma and the catharsis, but the recognition
was bound to come in any event. Starting in the 1970s,
for the first time, the United States has had to conduct
a foreign policy in the sense with which Europeans have always

9

Acheson wrote, "the rebirth of Europe, which, as an entity, had been in eclipse since the Reformation."

Despite the idealism of our commitment, tensions between America and a unified Europe were inherent in the logic of what we were so enthusiastically endorsing.

We had grown accustomed to the devastated, temporarily impotent Europe of the postwar period; we forgot the Europe that had launched the industrial revolution, that had invented the concept of national sovereignty, and that had operated a complex balance of power for three centuries.

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

10

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

## The Problem of Nuclear Weapons

One of the key issues is that of security. That nuclear weapons have added a new dimension to warfare and indeed human existence, that they make obsolete traditional

11

concepts of military victory, that they stake civilized life
and perhaps humanity itself, is not a new discovery. Some
of us have been warning for over two decades that excessive
reliance on nuclear weapons would sooner or later lead to
the psychological paralysis of Western defense strategy.

We drew the conclusion that reducing dependence on nuclear
weapons obliged us to seek alternative means of defense,
especially a buildup of conventional forces. The democracies'
desire for peace must not be allowed to turn into a weapon
of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless.

In too many NATO countries, protests against nuclear
weapons tend inevitably toward a unilateral psychological, and
even physical, disarmament with respect to the very weapons upon
which Western security has in fact depended. The impression is
created that it is the Alliance's possession of nuclear
arms---weapons which it did not use when it had an atomic
monopoly and overwhelming superiority--which threatens

12

the peace and which must be resisted. Little attention
is paid to a whole series of aggressive or intransigent
Soviet actions, from the dispatch of Cuban troops to Africa
through the occupation of Afghanistan to the repression of
freedom in Poland, which not only threatened the global
equilibrium but were the proximate cause of the breakdown
of strategic arms control negotiations in the 1970s.

Even less attention is paid to some basic facts of
postwar history: that but for Soviet pressures in the
immediate postwar period American troops would have been
withdrawn from Europe in the forties, as indeed they were
from Korea; that but for the Korean war the US military
budget would have shrunk to derisory levels; that it
was the threat to the freedom of Berlin in the late
fifties which accelerated the American military buildup;
that the Soviet strategic arsenal has grown and been

14

And yet the moral concern about nuclear weapons touches
upon an issue crucial to our future: mankind's newfound
ability to exterminate itself makes new modes of thinking
imperative. But they require that moral concern be coupled
with a willingness to think through the central issues
with a seriousness and in a detail that do justice to
dangers as complex as they are enormous.

All consideration of the nuclear question must begin
with this reality: tens of thousands of nuclear weapons
have been produced by the superpowers; hundreds by medium-
sized countries; dozens by recent and possibly new entrants
into the nuclear club. No scheme of disarmament could
account for all these weapons. Nations would insist on
residual forces to protect themselves against cheating,
or against the fact that the factories that produced the weapons
would remain, or, should by some improbable chance these

15

too be destroyed, against the knowledge in the minds of men
from which these factories and weapons sprang in the first
place. Mankind cannot unlearn the secret of the atom. In
other words, we are doomed to some kind of deterrence,
equilibrium, or balance at some level and in some form.

For the immediate future--even assuming foreseeable
reductions--that level will be quite high; the real issue
before us will be the nature of deterrence, and its components.

Technology would have imposed a reconsideration of existing
strategy in any event; the destructiveness of weapons was
bound sooner or later to break the cocoon in which we
suppressed the consciousness of our Promethean power. But
the public outcry has had the healthy result of forcing
governments into considerations that they should in fact have
initiated; of coming to grips with the awesomeness of the

16

choices into which they have slid because of their reluctance
to face, and tell their publics, the implications of their
own design.

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

17

we draw from the current realities and the concerns they generate, for at least a transitional period it will be nuclear weapons which inhibit aggression in Europe.

The evasions of three decades cannot be remedied by proclamations; but only by hard and dedicated effort.

The principal evasion was the refusal to face the fact that strategic nuclear weapons could continue to counterbalance local Soviet advantages only if the US strategic arsenal was clearly superior to that of the Soviet Union--superiority being defined as the ability to destroy the opposing nuclear capability at acceptable cost. That condition began to disappear in the sixties.

Technology tended toward equality, and to levels beyond which additional increments of destructiveness lose all relationship to the objectives likely to be in dispute.

Under current conditions superiority to be meaningful

18

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

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

19

of their professions. Ironically, those circles usually
advocating humane and progressive domestic policies generally
insisted that nuclear strategy be aimed primarily at the
mass extermination of civilians.

I continue to believe that in practice governments will
be more careful than in their concepts. Indeed, it is reckless
in a nuclear world to pretend that any accident must automatically
escalate into Armageddon. I hope that if the worst happens,
governments will seek limits to the use of nuclear weapons--
they will almost surely find them. Still, in all likelihood,
the problem of limiting the use of weapons whose power
has no operationally definable limit will find no acceptable

(Cont'd on next page)

20

consensus in advance; as a practical matter, failure to
achieve a consensus over a period of thirty years is a
pretty good working definition of the impossibility of
developing in the abstract a strategy of limited nuclear
war.

Unfortunately, many who opposed theories of limited
nuclear war recoiled as well before the conventional military
buildup which could have at least reduced or perhaps avoided
altogether the local and regional Soviet superiority that
gave rise to the reliance on nuclear weapons in the first
place. The legacy we are left with is a precarious combination
of a NATO reliance on nuclear defense, trends toward nuclear
stalemate, growing nuclear pacifism, and continued deficiencies
in conventional forces. If we are reluctant to resort to
nuclear weapons, and if we continue to evade the necessity
for conventional forces, the Western Alliance is left with
no defense policy at all, and we are risking the collapse

[Y]

21

of the military balance in Europe that has made possible
thirty-five years of European security, prosperity, and
democracy. We will in effect have disarmed ourselves
unilaterally while sitting on the most destructive stockpile
of weapons that the world has seen.

22

East West Relations

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

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

23

The Soviets did not manage this degree of subtlety.

Instead, Moscow went out of its way to estrange and alienate, where it could have softened through a little courtship, however, heavy-handed. The outright Soviet rejection of the Marshall Plan was an egregious blunder; a mild expression of interest, however disingenuous, could have caused untold disruption and delay in the Western camp.

Acceptance would have changed the fact of postwar politics.

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

24

[YJ]

But America had only begun to scratch the surface of the long-term problem of US-Soviet relations in the nuclear age, which would soon produce more ambiguous challenges. The problem was, at bottom, conceptual. Americans were uncomfortable with the notion of a cold war. They tended to treat war and peace as two distinct phases of policy. Total victory was the only legitimate goal for war; conciliation the appropriate method for peace. In this sense the post-war period fulfilled neither of America's conceptual expectations. If in wartime we lacked a sense of political strategy, in peacetime we had difficulty forming an understanding of the permanent relation between power and diplomacy. The policy of containment, and its variant called "negotiation from strength," was based on the experience with the anti-Hitler coalition. It focused on the buildup of military strength toward some hypothetical day of military advantage; it aimed at eventual negotiation of some kind with the Soviet Union

25

but offered no clue as to either its timing or its content,
nor even a clear definition of the nature of the relevant
military strength. Dean Acheson, in Senate hearings in 1951, spoke
of building "situations of strength" which, somewhere down
the road, would induce the Kremlin "to recognize the facts."
But how precisely this negotiation would emerge or to what
end it would be conducted was left vague.

The flaw in containment was the failure to grasp that the
West in the immediate postwar period was precisely at the apex
of its relative strength. Containment thus deferred the
moment for diplomatic encounter with the Soviet Union to
a later time by which Soviet power could only have grown.

In 1945 the United States had an atomic monopoly and
the Soviet Union was devastated by 20 million casualties.

Our policy paradoxically gave the Kremlin time to consolidate
its conquests and to redress the nuclear imbalance. The

[YD]

26

West's military and diplomatic position relative to the USSR was never more favorable than at the very beginning of the containment policy in the late forties. That was the time to attempt a serious discussion on the future of Europe and a peaceful world.

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

In the nuclear age, peace became a moral imperative. And it imposed a new dilemma: the desire for peace is

27

the mark of all civilized men and women. yet the
democracies' desire for peace, if divorced from a
commitment to defend freedom, could turn into a weapon
of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless. Nuclear
blackmail is thereby encouraged. To develop a strategy that
relates ends to means, to build military forces that avoid
the choice between Armageddon and surrender, is a preeminent
moral as well as political problem for our period. Of at
least equal importance is to develop an Allied consensus behind
proposals of arms control based on analysis, not panic, and
freed of either the quest for confrontation or the tendency
toward abdication. The minimum requirement is that both sides
understand each other's thought processes so that crises do
not escalate by inadvertence.

For crises are almost inherent in the current structure
of international politics. Both superpowers are associated
with countries more concerned with their local rivalries
than with the global equilibrium, much less with global peace.

28

Our period should not be compared with the period preceding
World War II when an aggressor launched himself into a
quest for world domination -- nuclear weapons are likely
to inspire great hesitation, even among the reckless.

Rather, the appropriate model is the period prior to World
War I when client states pursuing regional rivalries drew
their protectors into a holocaust by gradual increments,
the full significance of which was not understood until it
was too late. Which of the statesmen who entered war in
1914 thinking that the issue would be settled quickly
would not have recoiled in horror had he had an inkling
of the shape of the world in 1917?

Theoretically there are as well what the Soviets would
call "objective reasons" for a constructive dialogue. The
Soviet system is in trouble. It must deal with a leadership
in transition, a decrepit economy, and restive allies. By
any rational calculation the Soviet Union should seek a

29

[Y]

respite. It should know that a continuation of its present
course runs a large risk of confrontation. Its leaders
cannot be so encapsuled in their prejudices as to believe
that they can defeat America without our noticing it sooner
or later. The longer the process lasts, the more
"successful," as it were, current Soviet strategy, the
greater is the risk of some escalation.

It is, of course, also possible that the Soviet leaders are under
domestic pressures which prevent any policy adaptation or
any farsighted policy for that matter. Before we yield to
this proposition, however, we must test the possibilities of
a dialogue systematically and persistently.

(Cont'd on next page)

30

A number of principles ought to govern Western approaches.

1. Democracies have no reason to fear negotiations with a stagnant and brittle dictatorship. But neither should talk become an end in itself. The importance of a dialogue should therefore not be the subject of debate either within the countries of the Alliance or between them. The debate should concern the subjects appropriate to an East-West dialogue, not the fact of it.

2. There is need for calm in the domestic discourse of the various allies. There is a tendency to adjust the assessment of Soviet strength to preconceived notions of the Soviet Union rather than the other way around. The Soviets are neither as powerful or cunning as the opponents of detente claimed; nor are they as close to disintegration as some self-proclaimed apostles of peace allege. History will not do our work for us; but neither will liturgical rhetoric.

31

3. If we want to avoid the East-West dialogue's dividing the Alliance or becoming an end in itself, the United States and its allies must agree on a long-term East-West strategy. This will have to include the whole gamut of East-West relations, including East-West trade in its opportunities as well as its perils.

4. For arms control cannot possibly carry the entire or even the principal burden of the East-West dialogue. If too much weight is put on arms control, it is more likely to expose the raw nuclear nerve of the Alliance than to resolve it. It will lead to a prolonged technical haggle; the subject is simply too difficult to permit a rapid resolution. And the best foreseeable outcome would be primarily symbolic. Some twenty thousand strategic warheads are in the arsenals of both sides. Even were the Soviets to accept our proposal to cut this total in half, the remaining warheads would be more than sufficient for catastrophe.

32

In short, arms control separated from a political dialogue
cannot end the current tensions or even significantly ease
them. Indeed, if the quest for arms control becomes too
frantic, it will turn into a weapon of Soviet political
warfare. Or else it will become a safety valve which the
Soviets turn off to increase Western nervousness and on
to reduce the impact of a new act of aggression.

5. The urgent need is for a serious political dialogue at the highest levels. The so-called confidence-building measures so beloved by professional diplomats cannot advance us very far. The opening of consulates or cultural exchange programs -- even the prenotification of maneuvers -- have at best a peripheral significance.

past
In / experience every real breakthrough occurred by way
of principals or their key aides who then gave marching
orders to subordinates.

33

The problem is how to define the highest level. A premature summit meeting would involve exorbitant risks -- and any summit meeting has sharply defined limits.

Heads of state cannot talk freely at the summit; their constituencies are always with them mentally; sometimes they are even in the room. Summit meetings, moreover, leave little time for real discussion. There is an inevitable time limit imposed by the schedules of the principals; there is an unavoidable protocol; there is the time wasted on translation. The possibilities of a breakthrough are usually outweighed by the penalties of failure. When heads of state disagree, there is no appeal to a higher authority; they would hardly have reached their eminence without a strong ego; abandoning a firmly held position would run counter to psychological as well as political imperatives. Summits can put the finishing touches on agreements reached previously; they are not well suited to break the ice.

34

One way to avoid this dilemma would be for each side to designate a special representative enjoying the full confidence of its head of government and foreign minister. He should be authorized to conduct private, exploratory conversations on their behalf, preferably without publicity. Each of these special representatives should have access to the head of state of the other side. Both parties would commit themselves to a global review of their entire relationship.

As soon as the conversation between the special representatives demonstrates hope for progress, preparations would begin for a summit meeting which would then approve a full-scale work program for coexistence. But the method is less important -- there are several approaches possible -- than a decision on the direction.

6. So far, attempts to discuss political problems systematically have been dismissed as "linkage" and linkage is supposed to be bad because it is alleged to be an obstacle

35

to arms control. By now we should have learned that the opposite is true. Arms control separated from any political context, is likely to run into a dead end. The danger of war, after all, resides less in the existence of the weapons of mass destruction than in the minds of the men who are in a position to order their use. And such men will be driven by political conflicts, not systems analyses.

A serious dialogue must come to grips with how coexistence is to be defined. Abstract though this may sound, it is at the heart of the problem. No detente can be sustained if all it does is to give rise to a political offensive designed to unhinge the global balance of power. One can cite several Western failures of omission and commission. But no spurious objectivity, no effort to find both sides equally guilty can overlook the provocations that accelerated the hardening of American attitudes. The dispatch of proxy troops to Angola and Ethiopia; the revolutions in Aden and Afghanistan followed by the occupation of Afghanistan; the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia; the encouragement

37

it exhausts itself in tactical agreement. Too rarely --
if ever -- is there a real attempt to project a strategy
for the rest of this century.

And yet that is the single most important problem
before the Alliance. I do not believe the present structure
of NATO lends itself easily to such an effort. And I do
not have much confidence in "wise men" exercises. Still
a way must be found to deal with the unsolved issues before
us. Nothing is possible unless we reexamine strategic
doctrine without blinking. An approach to arms control
must logically parallel this effort. It will be time also
to look at the question whether every NATO deployment decided
a generation ago must be sacrosanct for all eternity.

East-West relations in all their manifold aspects need a
sense of direction. The Reagan Administration has in practice
abandoned its confrontational style. Our allies need now
to avoid using the past as an alibi to avoid difficult
choices.

38

The process is overdue and since it depends on the members
of a democratic Alliance it provides no excuse for failure.

The greatest encouragement to Soviet foreign policy in
the West is the lack of clarity of the Alliance about its
purposes. But that problem, being self-made, can be
undone by our own efforts. Since the democracies have
this possibility, it is also their duty.

June 17, 1985

European - Atlantic Relations

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of European-American
relations is the difference in the approach to foreign
policy of the two sides of the Atlantic.

Europeans historically have believed that foreign
policy is a historical process requiring constant tending
to keep moving in the right direction. Wars in the eyes
of most Europeans were caused not so much by the moral
propensity of leaders as by the collapse of the balance of
power.

American foreign policy is the product of a very
different tradition. The founding fathers, to be sure,
were sophisticated men who understood the European balance of
power and skillfully manipulated it to win independence.
But for a century and more after that, America, comfortably
protected by two oceans developed the idiosyncratic notion
that a fortunate accident was a natural state of affairs,

[Y]

2

that our involvement in world politics was purely a
matter of choice. Americans imagined the entire Western
hemisphere a special case, safely insulated from the rest
of the world. We had created a nation consciously
dedicated to "self-evident" truths, and it was taken for
granted in most American public discourse that our
participation (or non-participation) in the world could be
guided exclusively by moral precepts. That geography gave us
this luxury was only evidence of God's blessing upon us;
we owed Him that quid pro quo. The competitive, sometimes
cynical, and always relativistic style of European power
politics was viewed in America as an unsavory example of what
to avoid and as further evidence of our moral superiority.

3

4

CJA

As late as 1949, the Department of State submitted to the
Senate Foreign Relations Committee a memorandum that strove
mightily to distinguish the new North Atlantic Treaty
from traditional military alliances and above all from any
relationship to the very balance of power it was supposed to
establish. The treaty, the memorandum said,

> is directed against no one; it is directed solely
> against aggression. It seeks not to influence any
> shifting "balance of power" but to strengthen the
> "balance of principle."

> American attitudes until the last ten years have
> embodied a faith that historical experience can be
> transcended, that problems can be solved permanently, that

6

[y]

7

restored or instituted.

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

8

It was therefore a rude awakening when in the 1960s
and 1970s the United States became conscious of the limits
of even its resources. Now with a little over a fifth of
the world's GNP, America was powerful but no longer dominant.
Vietnam was the trauma and the catharsis, but the recognition
was bound to come in any event. Starting in the 1970s,
for the first time, the United States has had to conduct
a foreign policy in the sense with which Europeans have always

CYS

9

been familiar: as one country among many, unable either
to dominate the world or escape from it, with the
necessity of accommodation, maneuver, a sensitivity to
marginal shifts in the balance of power, an awareness
of continuity and of the interconnections between events.

After the war, American leaders applied a heavy dose
of our usual missionary zeal and the full rigor of our
"problem-solving" energy to the task of promoting European
integration. Federalism, of course, was a hallowed American
principle. Shortly after the Philadelphia Convention, Benjamin
Franklin was urging on the French the attractions of a federal
Europe. A similar evangelism, in a more practical form
shone through the Marshall Plan. Even Acheson, not usually
seen as a moralist, was carried away by the European idea;
he recalled listening to Robert Schuman outlining his plan
for a European Coal and Steel Community. "As he talked, we
caught his enthusiasm and the breadth of his thought,"

LYJ

10

Thus, later American disillusionments were inherent in our goals. It was naive for Americans to take for

11

granted that a federal Europe would be more like us, that
a united Europe would automatically help carry our burdens,
and that it would continue to follow American global
prescriptions as it had in the early postwar years of
European recovery--and dependency. That cannot be so.

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

12

EYD

perspectives--provided we found a way toward creative
unity on fundamentals.

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

[Y]

13

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

14

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

CJD

15

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

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

CJD

16

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

For the immediate future--even assuming foreseeable
reductions--that level will be quite high; the real issue
before us will be the nature of deterrence, and its
components. That problem is neither new nor the exclusive

[Y]

17

discovery of newly concerned groups in all our countries.

Technology would have imposed a reconsideration of existing strategy in any event; the destructiveness of weapons was bound sooner or later to break the cocoon in which we suppressed the consciousness of our Promethean power. But the public outcry has had the healthy result of forcing governments into considerations that they should in fact have initiated; of coming to grips with the awesomeness of the choices into which they have slid because of their reluctance to face, and tell their publics, the implications of their own design.

C.Y.J

18

the West was too ready to attribute a military edge to an adversary only recently devastated by war and 20 million casualties; that the NATO nations underestimated the significance of their own industrial potential and forgot --conveniently--that in fact NATO's manpower is greater than that of the East. All these reflections are now academic. For the immediate future, the West is locked into the decisions of a generation; whatever conclusions we draw from the current realities and the concerns they generate, for at least a transitional period it will be nuclear weapons which inhibit aggression in Europe.

CJD

19

Soviet Union--superiority being defined as the ability to destroy the opposing nuclear capability at acceptable cost. That condition began to disappear in the sixties. Technology tended toward equality, and to levels beyond which additional increments of destructiveness lose all relationship to the objectives likely to be in dispute. Under current conditions superiority to be meaningful would require an edge so large that no opponent would tolerate it and calculations so esoteric that few leaders will understand them or stake survival on them. Arms control theory and practice, with their formal emphasis on equality, only accelerated and legitimized this trend.

20

an all-out nuclear war on behalf of Europe was bound
increasingly to lose its credibility and public acceptance,
if not its sense--and so would the Alliance's defense
strategy. For the strategy now rested on the threat to
initiate mutual suicide. But governments continued the
existing strategy, seeking to compensate by emphatic
reiterations of all-out nuclear defense for the implausibility
of their professions.

There was an occasional flirtation with a doctrine
of limited nuclear war to restore some relationship between
policy and military power. In my early writings on the subject
in the 1950s, I, too, was briefly tempted by that theory.
The effort never got very far. Part of the reason was that
from the European perspective, the distinction between
limited and general nuclear war was not as clear-cut as on
the American side of the Atlantic; a relatively few nuclear weapons
could produce catastrophe and chaos difficult to distinguish

C Y J

21

from what only total war could do to America. Another
cause was the polarization within the community of
civilian experts between those who wanted to make nuclear
weapons "conventional" and those who feared that governments
could be kept from initiating a nuclear holocaust only by
guaranteeing that nuclear war would be as gruesome as
possible. Ironically, those circles usually advocating
humane and progressive domestic policies generally insisted
that nuclear strategy be aimed primarily at the mass
extermination of civilians.

CJD

22

CJA

23

24

## East West Relations

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

C/3

25

Instead, Moscow went out of its way to estrange and alienate, where it could have softened through a little courtship, however, heavy-handed. The Russians declined Britain's invitation to send a Soviet contingent to a victory parade, and Stalin sidestepped an offer from Attlee to renew the wartime alliance. Every door that Ernest Bevin, mindful of the influential left wing of his party, was careful to keep open was resoundingly slammed and loudly bolted. As was soon to be shown in the persecution of social democrats in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union countenanced only one form of "socialism" and fought other, democratic versions even more bitterly than capitalists. The outright Soviet rejection of the Marshall Plan was an egregious blunder; a mild expression of interest, however disingenuous, could have caused untold disruption and delay in the Western camp.

C]D

26

But we in America had only begun to scratch the surface of the long-term problem of US-Soviet relations in the nuclear age, which would soon produce more ambiguous challenges. The problem was, at bottom, conceptual. Americans were uncomfortable with the notion of a cold war. They tended to treat war and peace as two distinct phases of policy. Total victory was the only legitimate goal for war; conciliation the appropriate method for peace. In this

27

sense the post-war period fulfilled neither of America's
conceptual expectations. If in wartime we lacked a sense
of political strategy, in peacetime we had difficulty
forming an understanding of the permanent relation
between power and diplomacy. The policy of containment,
and its variant called "negotiation from strength," was
based on the experience with the anti-Hitler coalition.
It focused on the buildup of military strength toward
some hypothetical day of greater parity; it aimed at
eventual negotiation of some kind with the Soviet Union
but offered no clue as to either its timing or its content,
nor even a clear definition of the nature of the
relevant military strength. George Kennan's famous "X"
article in Foreign Affairs in 1947 looked vaguely to the
eventual "mellowing" of the Soviet system; Dean Acheson,
in Senate hearings in 1951, spoke of building "situations
of strength" which, somewhere down the road, would induce

28

The flow in containment was not only, as the cliche has
it today, that it was overly preoccupied with military
counterforce but that it misunderstood that the West in
the immediate postwar period was precisely at the apex
of its relative strength. Containment thus deferred the
moment for diplomatic encounter with the Soviet Union to
a later time by which Soviet power could only have grown.

Our policy paradoxically gave the Kremlin time to consolidate
its conquests and to redress the nuclear imbalance. The
West's military and diplomatic position relative to the
USSR was never more favorable than at the very beginning
of the containment policy in the late forties. That was
the time to attempt a serious discussion on the future of
Europe and a peaceful world.

LYJ

29

As so often, Winston Churchill understood it best. In a much-neglected speech at Llandudno on October 9, 1948, out of office, he said:

> The question is asked: What will happen when they get the atomic bomb themselves and have accumulated a large store? You can judge yourselves what will happen then by what is happening now.
> 
> If these things are done in the green wood, what will be done in the dry? If they can continue month after month disturbing and tormenting the world, trusting to our Christian and altruistic inhibitions against using this strange new power against them, what will they do when they themselves have huge quantities of atomic bombs? ...No one in his senses can believe that we have a limitless period of time before us. We ought to bring matters to a head and make a final settlement. We ought not

LYD

30

to go jogging along improvident, incompetent,
waiting for something to turn up, by which I mean
waiting for something bad for us to turn up.

The Western Nations will be far more likely to reach
a lasting settlement, without bloodshed, if they
formulate their just demands while they have the
atomic power and before the Russian Communists
have got it too.

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

CYJ

31

In the nuclear age, peace became a moral imperative.
And it imposed a new dilemma: the desire for peace is
the mark of all civilized men and women. Yet the
democracies' desire for peace, if divorced from a
commitment to defend freedom, could turn into a weapon
of blackmail in the hands of the most ruthless; if the
desire to avoid nuclear war turns into undifferentiated
hysteria, nuclear blackmail may well be encouraged. The
problem of the relationship of power to peace, the balance
between ends and means, has been evaded for a generation
by an abdication to technology. But history tolerates no
evasions. To develop a strategy that relates ends to
means, to build military forces that avoid the choice
between Armageddon and surrender, is a preeminent moral
as well as political problem for our period. Of at least

32

European critics should remember that the wider the gulf
between Europe and the United States the more difficult
an East-West dialogue becomes. And the East-West dialogue
urgently needs a fresh impetus. In a world of thousands
of nuclear weapons the two sides cannot risk staring each
other down or seeking to drown each other's proposals
in invective or propaganda. The minimum requirement is
that both sides understand each other's thought processes
so that crises do not escalate by inadvertence.

t y j

33

34

respite. It should know that a continuation of its present
course runs a large risk of confrontation. Its leaders
cannot be so encapsuled in their prejudices as to believe
that they can defeat America without our noticing it sooner
or later. The longer the process lasts, the more
"successful," as it were, current Soviet strategy, the
greater is the risk of some escalation. It is even possible
that, whatever the current invective, Soviet leaders, when
convinced that the current Administration is likely to be
reelected, may well make some agreement by the summer. A
reelected Administration, hence unconstrained, may be a
prospect they would prefer to avoid.

But it is also possible that the Soviet leaders are under
domestic pressures which prevent any policy adaptation or
any farsighted policy for that matter. Before we yield to
this proposition, however, we must test the possibilities of
a dialogue systematically and persistently.

35

1. Democracies have no reason to feat negotiations with a stagnant and brittle dictatorship. But neither should talk become an end in itself. The importance of a dialogue should therefore not be the subject of debate either within the countries of the Alliance or between them. The debate should concern the subjects appropriate to an East-West dialogue, not the fact of it.

36

37

In my experience every real breakthrough occurred by way of principals or their key aides who then gave marching orders to subordinates.

CJD

38

The problem is how to define the highest level. A premature summit meeting would involve exorbitant risks -- though Andropov's health almost surely excludes it in any event. Heads of state cannot talk freely at the summit; their constituencies are always with them mentally; sometimes they are even in the room. Summit meetings, moreover, leave little time for real discussion. There is an inevitable time limit imposed by the schedules of the principals; there is an unavoidable protocol; there is the time wasted on translation. The possibilities of a breakthrough are usually outweighed by the penalties of failure. When heads of state disagree, there is no appeal to a higher authority; they would hardly have reached their eminence without a strong ego; abandoning a firmly held position would run counter to psychological as well as political imperatives. Summits can put the finishing touches on agreements reached previously; they are not well suited to break the ice.