Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Nineteen seventy-three is the year of Europe because the era that was shaped by decisions of a generation ago is ending. The success of those policies has produced new realities that require new approaches:

  — The revival of Western Europe is an established fact, as is the historic success of its movement toward economic unification.

  — The East-West strategic military balance has shifted from American preponderance to near-equality, bringing with it the necessity for a new understanding of the requirements of our common security.

  — Other areas of the world have grown in importance. Japan has emerged as a major power center. In many fields, “Atlantic” solutions to be viable must include Japan.

  — We are in a period of relaxation of tensions. But as the rigid divisions of the past two decades diminish, new assertions of national identity and national rivalry emerge.

  — Problems have arisen, unforeseen a generation ago, which require new types of cooperative action. Insuring the supply of energy for industrialized nations is an example.

  These factors have produced a dramatic transformation of the psychological climate in the West — a change which is the most profound current challenge to Western statesmanship. In Europe, a new generation to whom war and its dislocations are not personal experiences takes stability for granted. But it is less committed to the unity that made peace possible and to the effort required to maintain it. In the United States, decades of global burdens have fostered, and the frustrations of the war in Southeast Asia have accentuated, a reluctance to sustain global involvements on the basis of preponderant American responsibility.

  So firmly had a Presidential trip to Europe later in the year entered official — and probably even public — consciousness that I treated it as a given to which a program could be geared. By the time the President traveled to Europe toward the end of the year, I said, we and our allies should work out a “new Atlantic Charter,” or declaration of common purpose. The agenda that we faced in common — defense, trade, and East-West relations — required coordination of our national approaches. I then used a formulation to describe those differing perspectives that I soon came to regret:

  Diplomacy is the subject of frequent consultations but is essentially being conducted by traditional nation-states. The United States has global interests and responsibilities. Our European allies have regional interests. These are not necessarily in conflict, but in the new era neither are they automatically identical.

  The purpose of my speech was to set forth how the United States was prepared to contribute to reinvigorating the Alliance, and what we hoped for from Europe. And (months before the Arab oil embargo and the OPEC price explosion) I highlighted energy as a key topic for cooperation:

  We will continue to support European unity. Based on the principles of partnership, we will make concessions to its further growth. We will expect to be met in a spirit of reciprocity.

  We will not disengage from our solemn commitments to our allies. We will maintain our forces and not withdraw from Europe unilaterally. In turn, we expect from each ally a fair share of the common effort for the common defense.

  We shall continue to pursue the relaxation of tensions with our adversaries on the basis of concrete negotiations in the common interest. We welcome the participation of our friends in a constructive East-West dialogue.

  We will never consciously injure the interests of our friends in Europe or in Asia. We expect in return that their policies will take seriously our interests and our responsibilities.

  We are prepared to work cooperatively on new common problems we face. Energy, for example, raises the challenging issues of assurance of supply, impact of oil revenues on international currency stability, the nature of common political and strategic interests, and long-range relations of oil-consuming to oil-producing countries. This could be an area of competition; it should be an area of collaboration.

  We had conceived the speech as a summons to a new period of creativity among the industrial democracies. At home we hoped to overcome the self-destructive legacy of Vietnam; abroad, we sought to surmount irritating economic and other disputes by rallying our allies to a new vision of the future. But the timing of the speech — established over a month earlier — proved disastrous.

  At home, Watergate muffled the thrust of our initiative. The resignations of Ehrlichman and Haldeman were just a week away. So strong was the preoccupation with the scandal that, as described in Chapter IV, the Washington Post devoted most of its news coverage not to my speech but to my few remarks on Watergate, elicited in the question period, that called for compassion for some of the accused. There were, to be sure, several strongly supportive editorials in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Star, but the Washington Post doubted whether the initiative could remain unaffected by Watergate: “The damage will continue until the President, by his own remedial actions, can assure the world that his capacity to govern has not been undermined.”4 The Post turned out to be right. Even those sympathetic to the concept felt an understandable disinclination to rally around a reaffirmation of the moral unity of the West put forward by the tarnished Nixon Administration.

  The response of our allies was as ambiguous as it had been during the prior consultations. There was no rush to get on the bandwagon, in sharp contrast to the memorable days of the Marshall Plan, when British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had taken the lead in organizing a positive European reply. Following an April 26 meeting of the French cabinet, a French spokesman noted my speech “with interest” and said that our proposals deserved attentive study, which would be undertaken by France “in the spirit which had always been ours, that of faithfulness to the Alliance in the context of respect for our independence.” This could mean anything.

  The same day I reminded the French Ambassador that our proposals reflected Pompidou’s observations of the previous December. I had outlined them in detail to Kosciusko-Morizet in March and April. Kosciusko did not deny this. He mumbled something about the unacceptability of confining Europe to a “regional role” as my speech implied. I answered: “We have no objection if Europe wants to play a global role. But until now we have not found any desire on their part to do so.” Then Kosciusko got to the heart of the problem. It would be hard for Europe to respond with one voice to so vast an agenda, he said. We were forcing a major task on Europe in the very year of the Community’s first fumbling attempts at political unity. This might prove to be too much. The attempt to foster Atlantic unity might wreck the tentative movement toward European community.

  On April 24, the British Foreign Office made a warm comment that I had made “clearly an important speech, with a constructive intent,” but that Britain planned to “study [it] closely with our European allies.” Britain was essentially deferring to France. Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home, whom we revered for his integrity and his devotion to the American relationship, added a friendly — but noncommittal — observation on April 27:

  The central theme of Dr. Kissinger’s speech, and of recent statements by the American Secretary of State, is the need for continued trust and cooperation between the new and expanded Europe and the United States of America. The horizons of this cooperation must, he argues, be extended to include Japan and Canada. I agree with him. For although this adds to the complexity of negotiation nothing less is adequate to secure prosperity in a climate of security.

  The West German government welcomed my support for European unity, but avoided further response on the ground that Chancellor Willy Brandt was scheduled to meet with Nixon on a long-planned visit to Washington in less than a week. Italy expressed itself as favorable, if skeptical about Japan’s participation — thus covering all bases. The smaller European countries postponed a position until the ministers of the European Community would meet in several weeks’ time. Japan was understandably puzzled as to why it should be included in an Atlantic Charter at all. It was spared the necessity of immediate commen
t by the fact that its Foreign Minister was traveling to Europe. When he arrived in Paris, he remarked opaquely that he supported the plan for a new Atlantic Charter and considered the idea fully understandable. This left Japan’s response wide open; it did not even imply that Japan would participate. Tokyo was not about to enmesh itself through an excess of explicitness.

  It was hard to avoid the conclusion that all of our major partners had found excuses to postpone a response to a major American initiative involving them. This became even clearer when Willy Brandt arrived in Washington on May 1 for an official visit. It was a pity that Nixon’s first European interlocutor on the Year of Europe should have been the European statesman whose policy made him most uneasy and whose personality was perhaps most incompatible with his own. Nixon’s attitude was best summed up in his reaction to a letter he had received, before Brandt’s visit, from the American-Hungarian novelist Hans Habe. Habe accused Brandt of deliberately undermining the Western Alliance and of being motivated by an anti-American bias. The White House procedure at this time was that letters to the President dealing with foreign policy passed through my office, where a summary or covering memorandum was often attached. I sent such a memorandum forward with Habe’s letter on March 15. Nixon returned it with a note: “K — a very perceptive and very disturbing analysis. I think he is too close to the truth.”

  Brandt reciprocated Nixon’s wariness. He was punctiliously correct but the very meticulousness of his conduct suggested that it would take an enormous effort of self-discipline to overcome his doubts, bordering on aversion, about the American President. Mutual suspicions were dwarfed, however, by our domestic upheavals. Nixon’s speech announcing the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman had occurred the evening before the first meeting of the two leaders. Nixon was more shaken by this decision than by any other until his own resignation a little more than fifteen months later. That Nixon managed to get through the Brandt visit without any show of emotion was a spectacular feat of will.

  Instead, in his disciplined manner, Nixon conducted a thoughtful dialogue with the Chancellor. One had to know him well to note that while Brandt was speaking, Nixon’s mind was elsewhere. If one watched carefully one could detect the glassy, melancholy look and the waxen expression that, as Watergate proceeded, became increasingly obvious signs of Nixon’s inner torment; Nixon’s thoughts were far away in some stark, remote universe that would more and more claim his energies and attention. He gave no other sign of his distress. His sole reference to Watergate was wistful; like a little boy giving himself courage by talking loudly in the dark, he expressed his certainty that our domestic controversies would not affect our foreign policy. He was too experienced for illusions, but he knew also that he could make no other statement.

  I could not tell whether Brandt was aware of Nixon’s distress; he could not avoid sensing some of it. How else to explain the change in Brandt’s demeanor? It was only a nuance, but of the stuff that alters human relationships irrevocably. Whether he intended it or not, Brandt became a shade less deferential; he was uncharacteristically crisp and businesslike. There was neither the bonhomie of former times nor the long pauses with which Brandt had punctuated his earlier conversations and which had contributed no little to Nixon’s restlessness. A little more than two years before, the President had salvaged Brandt’s Ostpolitik by authorizing me to backstop the Berlin negotiations with Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. This time, though, Brandt was in no mood to reciprocate. The briskness with which he went through the agenda reflected his strategy — to settle nothing.

  The Chancellor pretended to welcome our initiative, but abstract expressions of goodwill were not what was needed and Brandt made no concrete proposal on how to carry out what he said he favored. He saw merit in a comprehensive Atlantic dialogue on economic, political, and security issues. But he did not suggest a mechanism for accomplishing it, nor did he really consider it urgent to negotiate all topics simultaneously. Failure to agree on one subject should not block progress on the others, Brandt averred, thus taking away with one hand what he had given with the other. Indeed, his argument that there was no need to move forward on a broad agenda came close to turning our proposal into a platitude, for no one had ever questioned that controversial issues should be discussed individually.

  Brandt expressed the hope that the negotiators on economic subjects be given political direction, but he was silent about the nature of the political purposes that were supposed to be achieved or the means by which they were to be articulated. He welcomed a Presidential visit to Europe. He put forward the idea that the President meet the allied heads of government at a large summit in the context of NATO. But there, too, Brandt built in a hedge. For a NATO summit — apart from the likelihood of a French objection — would make it procedurally impossible to discuss America’s relationship with the European Community, since some of its members did not belong to NATO, while not all members of NATO belonged to the Community.

  To deal with the newly enlarged European Community, Brandt suggested a meeting of the President with the foreign ministers while he was in Brussels. But one could scarcely ask the President to meet with the foreign ministers of the members of the European Community when the heads of government were in town for the NATO meeting. Such a gathering could not possibly reach any decisions if only because of the differences in rank. Brandt made no reference to our proposal for an Atlantic Charter. And he used his toast at the State dinner that evening to qualify even the astonishingly thin response he had made. He was not in a position, he now said, to make ultimate commitments on even the scant matters he had agreed to discuss:

  None of us [meaning the European heads of government who had visited Washington] meets you any longer solely as the representative of his own country but at the same time already, to a certain degree, as a representative of the European Community as well.

  So, I, too, am here not as the spokesman of Europe, but definitely as a spokesman for Europe.

  We would happily have endorsed this as a theory for the relations between the European Community and the United States. The problem was to give them practical meaning in the gestation period of European unity. Since no European political institution yet existed, there was no focal point for contact with Europe. Brandt in fact faced us with a Catch-22 dilemma: If every European leader was a spokesman for Europe but could not represent it, and those who represented Europe were civil servants with no authority to negotiate, who then could act authoritatively?

  Any doubt that Brandt had come to Washington to stall was removed by the way the German party handled their press briefings. To our astonishment we learned — it was all over the German media — that our final joint statement’s reference to a “balanced partnership” was an indirect rejection of any attempt by us to dominate — an ambition of which we were unaware. The omission of the words “Atlantic Charter” from the communiqué was hailed as a success, as if avoiding an American offer to tie our destiny formally to Europe was a test of statesmanship. Nor could the briefers resist seeing in Watergate an opportunity to squeeze the United States: “Brandt’s success,” opined one of the leading dailies, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,

  is also due to the fact that in view of the tremors created by the Watergate scandal, Nixon needs reaffirmation of the world-wide significance of U.S. Presidential action in foreign policy. Brandt’s presence, reflected in his reception by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the National Press Club, came in handy for Nixon and made him amenable to concessions.

  Western Europe, 1973: The North Atlantic Alliance, the European Community and the OECD

  The new German Ambassador, the reliable Berndt von Staden, who later became a good friend, therefore started his mission in highly inauspicious circumstances. He had arrived some weeks earlier, but diplomatic custom prevents ambassadors from performing their function until they have presented their credentials. The protocol office of the State Department usually waits some weeks until severa
l new ambassadors can be introduced to the President together. Von Staden was given the opportunity to present his credentials alone on the day of Brandt’s arrival; this was done as a special courtesy to permit him to participate in the talks. Now, after his Chancellor’s departure, he bore the brunt of our displeasure, which was hardly softened by the nervous strain of Watergate. Von Staden, unruffled and soothing as always, assured us that neither Brandt nor Foreign Minister Walter Scheel had made any such insinuation to the press. Von Staden was too honorable to lie. We assumed, therefore, someone else close to the top had done the briefing — probably the official spokesman. When all leading German newspapers reported essentially the same story, they must have had the benefit of some official guidance.

  The next symptom of what still seemed to us nearly inexplicable European reserve was the reaction to the President’s annual Foreign Policy Report published on May 3. It was the fourth such document issued in Nixon’s term of office — a unique attempt by a President to give a comprehensive yearly account of his stewardship in foreign affairs. It was deliberately conceptual in approach, with major events used as illustrations rather than listed in a bureaucratic catalogue. The purpose was to give the Congress, the public, the media, and foreign leaders an insight into our thinking, something our secretive procedures, which often excluded the bureaucracy, made essential. It was the most concise guidance available to officials eager to carry out established policy but not always privy to its formulation. On occasion we used the Foreign Policy Report to indicate or hint at important changes of policy. Every year key members of my staff — Winston Lord, Peter W. Rodman, William G. Hyland, Richard T. Kennedy, Marshall Wright, and others — spent weeks producing essays that we hoped would be at once thorough, illuminating, and readable. I was general editor. To this end I would free two weeks to do nothing else.