Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Pompidou stated Europe’s case more tactfully. He was more receptive to European integration than de Gaulle, less insistent than de Gaulle that Europe could only be a loose grouping of national states. But he was no less adamant that Europe needed to play its own distinctive role in international affairs. On October 31, 1972, after the historic summit meeting of the European Community that decided to proceed toward full political unity, Pompidou stated his attitude toward the United States in terms of both cooperation and challenge:

  Our links with this great country, the world’s foremost economic power, with which eight of our countries are united within the Atlantic Alliance, are so close that it would be absurd to conceive of a Europe constructed in opposition to it. But the very closeness of these links requires that Europe affirm its individual personality with regard to the United States. Western Europe, liberated from armies thanks to the essential contribution of American soldiers, reconstructed with American aid, having looked for its security in alliance with America, having hitherto accepted American currency as the main element of its monetary reserves, must not and cannot sever its links with the United States. But neither must it refrain from affirming its existence as a new reality.

  The Nixon Administration had no difficulty with the concept that Europe should be free to conduct its own policy. We agreed with Pompidou’s assessment that on fundamentals our interests were likely to run parallel. At the same time, for many years no attempt had been made to define what was fundamental. Nor had any American leader been required to live with the reality of an assertive Europe; de Gaulle had been considered an aberration rather than an augury. Neither side of the Atlantic had addressed seriously the issues that would determine the West’s future: How much unity do we need? How much diversity can we stand?

  The problems that Europe and America would face together were not simply a matter of adjusting the decision-making procedures in the Alliance, but challenges of substance reflecting major changes in world conditions since the 1940s, when the Alliance was formed. One crucial problem was European defense.

  In the late 1940s and 1950s, the United States possessed overwhelming nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union. Europe’s defense therefore rested essentially on the threat of American nuclear retaliation. The Eisenhower Administration’s so-called doctrine of massive retaliation was not spelled out in precise operational terms; in practice it meant that if Europe was attacked we would strike at the Soviet Union with strategic nuclear weapons. So long as Soviet strategic forces were small and vulnerable — so long, in short, as “victory” in a general nuclear war could still be given some military significance — NATO’s military establishment could afford the luxury of not facing up to the long-range menace of the Soviet Union’s conventional predominance and geographic proximity. What concerned our allies was not the agreed strategy but the possibility that we might not be ready to employ it. Their own history gave them reason for concern; leaving allies in the lurch had not exactly been unknown in Europe’s recent past. The European solution was to encourage a large American troop deployment in Europe even while the agreed strategy was that a Soviet attack would trigger nuclear retaliation from America. The purpose was as straightforward as it was impolitic to articulate: A Soviet attack that enveloped American as well as allied ground forces would force us into a nuclear response nearly automatically.

  Since it was politically inconceivable that America would station forces abroad without at least some European contribution, each of our allies built up ground forces on the Central Front. But the result was a hodgepodge of national armies deployed in locations dating back to the occupation period, with neither standardized weapons nor agreed rates of consumption of supplies. This was not fundamentally a symptom of inefficiency; it reflected the psychological realities. European armies were not designed or expected to win a war in Europe. They were conceived as a “trip-wire” or a “nuclear threshold” — euphemisms for depriving America of choice in launching nuclear retaliation.

  The American nuclear superiority on which this strategy depended began to change in the late 1950s, when the Soviet Union developed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). For a few years the Soviets’ buildup was slow and their missiles remained vulnerable. But the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 brought home to the Soviets the penalty for strategic inferiority and they began a relentless program to remedy it. By 1971 the Soviets had caught up with us in total numbers. Instead of stopping when they reached parity with us, as the Johnson Administration expected, the Soviets continued their buildup and forged ahead in numbers of missiles (though we retained a large edge in bombers). When numbers were frozen by the first SALT agreement in May 1972, they switched energetically to qualitative improvements.

  Thus by 1973 the NATO strategy, dependent on American nuclear superiority, was in urgent need of revision. For a while, perhaps through the decade, the United States would retain a clear edge in numbers of warheads, because we were at least five years ahead in the art of multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs). But that only delayed the day of reckoning; it did not avoid it. The Atlantic Alliance faced the urgent necessity of recasting its military doctrine; pledges of American nuclear retaliation first given in the halcyon days of the 1950s and 1960s would begin to lose their credibility. As strategic parity approached, the historical Soviet advantage in ground forces in Europe would grow more ominous, especially in the light of the inexorable Soviet buildup in all other categories of weapons (including, for the first time, a navy capable of global intervention).

  But serious analysis and effective response were for too long prevented in America by the passions of the Vietnam war. Essential new weapons were decried as wasteful and dangerous, the mindless mania of the military-industrial complex. “Reordering national priorities” was the slogan of the day; it was the euphemism for cutting the defense budget. We were fortunate to rescue our troop deployments in Europe from the Congressional ax; in 1971 we barely fought off the Mansfield amendment, which would have required the withdrawal of half of our troops from Europe.2 Many who years later denounced the Nixon Administration as too “soft” were nowhere to be found in the early 1970s when the Administration was fighting these battles — or were on the opposite side. The damage went deeper than the statistics indicate: We paid a heavy price in ideas or programs never put forward because of the certainty of Congressional and media hostility. Forces suitable for local defense were especially hard hit because they ran counter to the obsession with reducing our foreign involvement.

  Europe was even less willing to confront the changed real world. Many of our allies continued to treat their own military capabilities as a token payment for the American commitment to Europe; they stopped well short of developing a realistic option for local defense. They dreaded the devastation of their territories; they were loath to leave the familiar shelter of our nuclear guarantee even as its premises were being eroded by technology. They were as reluctant to deal with the implications of the looming strategic parity as we were to raise them. They resorted to the ancient device of responding minimally to our importuning for a greater effort without, in fact, changing the basic philosophy. The Alliance continued to be held together, as was once said about the British Commonwealth, by the highest common platitude.

  Similar strains existed in economic relations, where, in contrast to the perhaps overly elaborate NATO coordinating machinery, no formal consultative mechanisms existed at all. As the economic strength of the European Community grew, its competition with the United States intensified and its distinguishing feature, a common external tariff, began to affect American products. This should not have come as a surprise. On the one hand, a revivified Europe absorbed more of our exports; on the other hand, what makes a Common Market advantageous to its members is that its arrangements favor internal industry over outsiders’. It nevertheless came as something of a shock to Americans to find themselves in serious economic rivalry with the nations they had sus
tained in the postwar period.

  The impact of the European Community’s newfound assertiveness was daily brought to the attention of the Oval Office by our economic departments. There was the complaint that the European nations maintained preferential trade arrangements with their former colonies, restricting our access to these markets. There was a growing network of special ties between the European Community and other nations in Europe and the Mediterranean littoral. There was perennial controversy over the Community’s Common Agricultural Policy. For their part, the Europeans resented the shock tactics by which we had proceeded to reform the international monetary system in 1971. There were many complaints that by abandoning the modified gold standard we were exporting our inflation and penalizing our allies for our refusal to discipline ourselves domestically.

  By the early 1970s, the liberal financial and trading system on which the West had built two decades of prosperity was at risk to competitive devaluations, currency crises, and protectionist rivalries. And beyond these immediate strains, little had been done to shape a common policy toward the developing countries and international commodity markets, not least of which was oil, the Achilles’ heel of the West. As Pompidou told James Reston in that prescient December talk, a solution could not be found on the technical level; it required some political decisions subjecting the disputes to the overriding imperative of our political and moral unity.

  The absence of agreement on political goals came to expression in the European reaction to our improving relations with the Soviet Union. It did not lack irony, for of all our policies détente had initially seemed most to reflect European wishes, even pressures. From the moment Nixon came into office, he had been treated by our allies as a confirmed Cold Warrior whose bellicose instincts needed taming by European wisdom. West European leaders presented themselves to their publics as mediators between American intransigence and Soviet aggressiveness. Visits to Moscow by Macmillan, Wilson, de Gaulle, and Brandt and the signing of declarations in favor of detente became a staple of European diplomacy. No meeting with a West European statesman during the first two years of Nixon’s Presidency was complete without subtle hints to us (or, if necessary, formal disquisitions) on the urgency of a relaxation of tensions.

  Until, that is, we took their advice and our own detente policy began to bear fruit in 1972. We had many reasons for pursuing it, among which were the need to separate the Soviet Union from its North Vietnamese ally and to gain maneuvering room at home for a strong foreign policy amid the powerful neo-isolationist and antidefense pressures from Congress and media. But we had an additional motive having to do with trends in the Atlantic Alliance. We did not want NATO to be perceived as an obstacle to peaceful coexistence. We sought to discourage the Europeans from unilateral initiatives to Moscow by demonstrating that in any competition for better relations with Moscow, America had the stronger hand. The tactic served its purpose; European pressures for concessions decreased in direct proportion as we developed our own option toward Moscow. The Alliance stopped being controversial in almost all countries of Western Europe. The irony was that as Soviet-American relations improved, some of the statesmen who had urged conciliation began to see in it the harbinger of the long-dreaded Soviet-American condominium, de Gaulle’s nightmare of a “super-Yalta” carving up the world.

  Unjustified and occasionally irritating as we considered these European suspicions, the uneasiness was yet another sign that the Atlantic nations had lost a shared sense of direction. Indeed, the reason for our passionate commitment to the new initiative lay largely in the psychological and moral realm. The democracies, we were convinced, could not continue simply to administer their patrimony. They had come this far through successive acts of faith that had enabled them to transcend the vicissitudes of history. A whole generation had grown up who knew nothing of the perils of the 1940s that had produced the Alliance or of the vision of man that had shaped their political institutions. In America their formative experience was the nasty debate of the 1960s over Vietnam. In Europe it was the boredom of the welfare state. It had been a long time since the idealism and self-confidence of the Western tradition had found expression in a rededication to major positive tasks. Every great achievement was a dream before it became a reality. We thought we were tapping the idealistic tradition of the democracies when we put forward the Year of Europe. We did not know what we were letting ourselves in for.

  The Exploratory Phase

  THE year began on a somewhat sour note. All our European allies, with the honorable exception of British Prime Minister Edward Heath, dissociated themselves in varying degrees from the last painful tremor of the Vietnam war — the Christmas bombing. Most European media swallowed the fashionable canard that we had been engaged in the massive extermination of civilians. Many European leaders made comments no less offensive for their allusive phrasing.

  Nixon was beside himself. As a passionate believer in the Atlantic Alliance — in 1947 he had been a member of the Herter Committee that had studied European reconstruction for the House of Representatives and laid the basis for the Marshall Plan — he simply could not understand how our allies could turn on us at a moment of such importance and sensitivity. Over a month after the bombing and a week after the Paris Agreement was reached, on February 1, 1973, Nixon told Heath: “What you did, did not go unnoticed and what others did, did not go unnoticed either. It is hard to understand when allies turn on you.” On February 15 Nixon made the same point to General Andrew Goodpaster, then Supreme Allied Commander in Europe. Nixon’s bitterness did not keep him from pursuing his commitment to a new initiative in Atlantic relations. Indeed, while the photographers were still in the room with Goodpaster, Nixon repeated his intention to make 1973 the “Year of Europe.”

  There was one man impervious to obstacles, impatient with petty calculation, undisturbed by latent tensions: the father of the European Community, Jean Monnet. Amidst Europe’s postwar chaos he had grasped that the traditional nation-state in Europe was finished and that the Continent, to recover from the ravages of war, needed the guiding light of a great idea: European unity. Monnet was a remarkable statesman, though ironically he had no state to represent. Great historical achievements often evolve from simple concepts, for an enterprise requiring the collaboration of multitudes rarely thrives on complexity. Monnet’s contribution to European unity was two propositions of great seeming simplicity: First, the various European states, encapsuled in their jealous sovereignty, would not, without prodding, take the leap into the future implicit in the notion of European unity. Second, the United States might well provide that prod if it did not fear that a united Europe would turn on America.

  What was most extraordinary was Monnet’s inspiration to prod governments by means of a nongovernmental group. In 1955 Monnet created the Action Committee for the United States of Europe. With unerring intuition he brought together a remarkable collection of distinguished persons likely to be influential regardless of which parties governed their countries. By itself this would have barely elevated Monnet’s efforts above those of the innumerable international study groups dedicated to worthy causes. What gave the committee impetus and conferred real power on Monnet was his unparalleled access to America’s leading personalities and his ability to influence them, indeed almost to mesmerize them. Monnet had chosen America as the deus ex machina that would propel Europe toward unity. The choice reflected a shrewd assessment of American psychology, for his program appealed to every American preconception: the obsolescence of the traditional nation-state, the pragmatic approach to problems, the importance of economic well-being in promoting political stability, and the role of a united Europe in sharing America’s burdens.

  The man who achieved this influence was an unlikely candidate for such eminence. The quintessential Frenchman, slightly built, somewhat pedantic in his manner, only the bright eyes revealing the inner fire, he would be unnoticed in any large group. He was the embodiment of one of his maxims: “Everybody is a
mbitious. The question is whether he is ambitious to be or ambitious to do.” Monnet clearly was ambitious to do. He was restless with pretentious rhetoric. He sought no glory for himself. His impact reflected anonymous dedication. Monnet was that rarest of all prophets who put people at ease; that most unusual of revolutionaries who overturned the prevailing order without alienating the upholders of existing institutions.

  In the process it was barely noticed that his premises did not differ much from those of that other eminent Frenchman, Charles de Gaulle. Like him, Monnet believed that Europe needed to be strong to be influential; that cooperation was meaningful only when there existed the capacity for independent action. Unlike him, Monnet stressed that a united Europe would collaborate with, rather than challenge, us. But this was an elusive distinction, for neither Monnet nor de Gaulle could really be sure how Europe would use the strength that would flow from unity. Monnet did not reject European assertiveness in pursuit of conflicting interests; de Gaulle did not oppose cooperation where interests coincided — witness his staunch support during the crises over Berlin in the late 1950s and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962.

  I often wondered what a conversation between Monnet and de Gaulle might be like. “You fool,” says my imaginary Monnet, “don’t you see that you frighten Americans to no purpose? You are seeking to extort what I can get them to hand to us for free. Only history will decide what we will actually do with our strength and unity.”