Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Try as we might, we never succeeded in our principal objective of using the Foreign Policy Reports to spark a thoughtful public discussion. Part of the reason was the media’s insatiable hunger for the new; concepts and goals are too abstract to be newsworthy. Part of the reason was the burgeoning length of the product (the first was 160 printed pages, the fourth, 234), which made it difficult even for journalists with the best of intentions to do justice to it. Perhaps we never briefed the press on it properly — though as the principal briefer I would hate to think so. Whatever the reason, the only chapter that generally received attention by the American media — to the chagrin of the drafters and their families, who had been deprived of their company for weeks — was the one dealing with Indochina. In retrospect, this was inevitable, given the national obsession with Vietnam, though careful study would have picked up important clues to our unfolding policy toward China and the Soviet Union. But the rest of the report was read attentively in foreign chancelleries and by thoughtful journalists and columnists who understood that it provided an unusual insight into high-level thinking.

  In 1973 we thought we had found a way to blunt the obsession with Vietnam: We postponed the report until the subject had largely disappeared from the front pages. Nixon himself introduced the fourth reportII in a radio speech on May 3, a stratagem devised by the ingenious William Safire in 1968 as a means to get Candidate Nixon on record: Radio, in Safire’s view, was a safe medium for establishing a reputation for thoughtfulness without risking a dispute over substance.

  There was in the report a ringing affirmation of America’s commitment to the Atlantic Alliance and an urgent appeal for a new dedication to common purposes:

  As the relaxation of East-West tensions became more pronounced, some of our allies questioned whether the United States would remain committed to Europe or would instead pursue a new balance of power in which the older alignments would be diluted and distinctions between allies and adversaries would disappear.

  But the United States will never compromise the security of Europe or the interests of our allies. The best reassurance of our unity, however, lies not in verbal pledges but in the knowledge of agreed purposes and common policies. For almost a decade the Alliance has debated questions of defense and détente — some urging one course, others a different priority. Now the debates should end. We must close ranks and chart our course together for the decade ahead.

  For once we succeeded in banishing Vietnam from the headlines, though hardly in the way we had planned it. This time we were totally drowned out by the uproar following the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman that had occurred three days earlier.

  European heads of government once again avoided a response to Nixon’s offer to revitalize the partnership. They hid behind their experts and the experts procrastinated in glacial procedures. This left the field open to the media, which, briefed by the second level of the government, rallied the European public to resist American “blackmail” and pressure tactics. German newspapers were still celebrating Brandt’s success in removing the term “Atlantic Charter” from the final communiqué of his visit. The French press reaction was hardly more charitable. It warned against the attempt to link the various issues to each other; it saw a threat to European autonomy; it welcomed a dialogue but seemed to prefer to drain it of all content. The influential Le Monde editorialized on May 1:

  In proposing a global negotiation on relations among the U. S., Europe and Japan, President Nixon makes light of the existing European institutions, none of which encompasses all aspects of the problem. . . .

  It remains to be seen whether Europe can best find its own individuality through opposition to the U. S., as Paris still appears to believe, or by continuing to go along with the U. S., as Bonn believes.

  My reference to Europe’s regional role in the Year of Europe speech was endlessly replayed and castigated, no one bothering to point out that I was describing a condition that we deplored. I was noting an observable fact that European conduct, both earlier and later, amply underlined. Europe had been shedding its overseas responsibilities throughout the postwar period. It had shown no shred of willingness to take on new ones. Despite our misgivings Britain had just withdrawn from the Persian Gulf. We had difficulty persuading our allies to strengthen their NATO defenses. It may not have been wise to make reality explicit, but European carping over the phraseology represented a mixture of hypocrisy and subterfuge. Before the year was over, many European nations played back the same phrases during the Middle East war and later in the decade in the crises over Iran and Afghanistan — as a means to evade American appeals for joint action.

  The only papers that seemed to grasp what the Administration was really after were British. The Times of London described the report as “a broad and thoughtful review which must now be taken as the basic text on American thinking.” For Europe, the paper said,

  the most important point is that although he links trade and defense, he does not suggest that the American commitment to Europe will be bargained against the trade policies of the European Community or against political concessions from the Soviet Union. This is clearly right.

  But even this sympathetic journal could not avoid the remark that the West Germans were “wonder[ing], like everyone else, how President Nixon’s domestic disasters will affect his foreign policy.”

  The conservative Daily Telegraph found “some of the sharpest and most analytical passages” of the President’s report in the section on Europe and the Atlantic Alliance:

  At the present stage of the debate . . . it rather looks like a case of everyone telling everyone else that something ought to be done and then waiting for the other chaps to do it or suggest it. That is probably inevitable in a period when so many important developments are proceeding together, some in parallel, others apparently on collision courses. But it is the duty of statesmen to think ahead. European leaders, take note.

  This, in our view, was the essence of the problem. A purely pragmatic approach could not solve even the technical issues. Above all, it would fail to inspire the generation that had grown up since the last great acts of Western creativity.

  Jobert Leads Us a Dance

  BY May the demonstrations of European indifference should probably have caused us to postpone our initiative. After all, in any realistic assessment, our allies should have had at least as much to gain from a new impetus to Atlantic relations as we. But Watergate made us more persistent than prudent. Nixon knew that the very critics who charged him with putting forward the Year of Europe as a diversion would allege that its failure was due to his domestic difficulties. Since he pretended that his authority had been unaffected — and indeed could preserve its remnants in no other way — he became rigid in persevering on enterprises once launched. Moreover, he deeply believed in a strengthened Atlantic relationship; it was one of the legacies he was most determined to leave to his successor. Watergate thus became both a major cause of deadlock and the obstacle to its resolution. We soldiered on, winding up in the absurd position of appearing more eager to reaffirm and strengthen our commitment to Atlantic relations than Europe to accept it.

  I pursued our elusive goals next in London. On May 10 I stopped there to brief the British leaders on the talks I had just had in the Soviet Union with Brezhnev (see Chapter VII). Whitehall could not have been more understanding or more noncommittal. The various ministers and officials, in their skillfully insinuating manner, steered the talks toward procedure, elegantly avoiding any discussions of the substance of our proposal. They were more than willing to explore forums for allied consultation as long as it did not involve a summit or a firm British obligation to any particular arrangements.

  All sorts of ingenious ideas emerged. Heath proposed a steering group of four (France, Britain, West Germany, and the United States), either officially designated by NATO or meeting informally. We accepted. Sir Denis Greenhill, then permanent head of the Foreign Office, said that this might be suppleme
nted by ad hoc groups to address specific topics. We agreed. Someone else advanced the idea of a meeting of deputy foreign ministers of NATO further down the road. This too passed muster. The only trouble was that every British scheme left it to us to gain the approval of the other allies and kept open just exactly what would be discussed or, for that matter, what Britain would do should the other allies balk. Britain could not be counted on to take the lead in forming a European response to our initiative or, as it turned out, even to support its own ideas if we put them forward and France objected.

  No clearer demonstration could be given of the new priority Heath attached to European over Atlantic relations than the British obsession with French attitudes. The British officials solicitously, and puzzlingly, inquired into France’s point of view. They seemed vastly relieved when I informed them that I was planning to see Jobert and Pompidou a week later, as if the telephone circuits between London and Paris were out of order. Though it was not yet obvious to us, all the evidence was that Britain would supply goodwill and advice but in the final analysis it would follow the French lead.

  Thus Paris wound up as the key to unlock the Year of Europe, and on May 17 I had my first encounter with the master locksmith in his new capacity as Foreign Minister — Michel Jobert, until a month earlier my opposite number as assistant to the French President. I had known Jobert as a discreet, anonymous figure of ability and cooperativeness. He had handled the French end of the technical arrangements for my secret Paris meetings with Le Duc Tho with unfailing tact. He was the man we had approached for solutions to delicate problems that occasionally arose in Franco-American relations during Nixon’s first term. He had never failed us.

  For that reason and for the warm relations cultivated in Nixon’s first term, we expected nothing so little as confrontation with France. We were quite prepared to come to a prior understanding with the French leaders about the Year of Europe; in fact, we preferred it that way. We were convinced that France’s unsentimental conception of the national interest would lead it to the same conclusion that we had reached: that Western solidarity was crucial to European security and freedom.

  The assessment turned out to be badly mistaken. Before the year was out, we found ourselves embroiled with France in the same sort of nasty confrontation for which we had criticized our predecessors. The reasons for it are not fully clear to me even today. We were prepared to defer to France on procedures; we believed we were implementing ideas originally put forth by Pompidou. We did not mind if France used our initiative to enhance its role in Europe. We were quite willing to see Monnet’s legacy implemented by French statesmen. The principal cause of our disappointment, in my view, was the ascendancy of Michel Jobert, coinciding with the physical decline of Pompidou and the political collapse of Nixon at home.

  For about four weeks Jobert and I worked in harmony, or at least so he made me believe. He even offered to help draft the new “Atlantic Charter.” And indeed major portions of the joint declaration ultimately signed in Brussels in June 1974 were written under Jobert’s aegis by the thoughtful French Ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, François de Rose. But by then it had been drained of significance by Jobert’s tactics. As the months passed, he worked to thwart our policies with demonic skill. This does not affect my view that no foreign minister I met surpassed Jobert in intelligence and very few equaled him. And strange as it may seem, I liked him enormously through all our conflicts, and a kind of friendship — tinged with exasperation — grew up between us. He was a cultured, charming man with whom it was a pleasure to exchange ideas. Slight, sardonic, with a sensitive face dominated by luminous eyes, Jobert was a formidable intellect and a fierce debater. As befits a nation where rhetoric is still an art form, his aphorisms were often as apt as they could be biting.

  What Michel Jobert lacked was neither intelligence nor analytic ability but a sense of proportion. I do not believe that he started out seeking a confrontation with the United States. His initial aim was the traditional goal of French diplomacy in the Gaullist Fifth Republic: to create at least the appearance that France had shaped whatever it was that was happening. In a later conversation Jobert told me that it would not do for him simply to accept an American proposal. France needed “a certain space for maneuver,” and he did not mind if journalists invented stories of confrontation; it would in fact facilitate agreement:

  There will be incidents, happenings, progress, uncertainties — this may help your project because it will make it more important. Otherwise, it would be too simple; people would lose interest. Therefore we should maintain an appearance of a difficult dialogue.

  Jobert left me with the impression that in the end he would not only go along but take the lead in shaping an outcome consonant with our objectives. All he asked was that he be permitted to play the leading role, and that we not use the Year of Europe to isolate France within the European Community. He inquired whether we already had prepared a draft Atlantic Declaration. He seemed skeptical when I said we had not. In fact, we had hesitated to put pen to paper before we had an agreement with our key allies lest they unite in nitpicking it to death. Jobert urged us to give him a draft as soon as possible. If he agreed with it, he would present our case to Europe, he argued. But we should not attempt to wield our undoubted influence to outvote France in the Community or invoke the Atlantic partnership to slow down the emergence of a European identity.

  Given the eagerness of Britain and Germany to stay in step with France, I had no difficulty conceding Paris a leadership role. I readily accepted and stressed that we would not work within the European institutions to isolate France. Thus for the first weeks of the Year of Europe, we cold-shouldered the European Community — at France’s request! The wily Jobert had confronted us with a Catch-22 even more impenetrable than Brandt’s. To show our dedication to European unity we were asked to bypass European institutions, leaving it to France to shape the consensus through its relations with the other national capitals. The initiative had slipped from our hands.

  It is always a mistake to give one’s proxy to another sovereign state. It soon transpired that whether he had planned it or not, Jobert knew how to use opportunity when it came his way. Ruthlessly exploiting our aloofness toward the European Community, which he had encouraged, he organized its ministers and officials — a touchy group in the best of circumstances — against us, and made himself their spokesman. An American initiative enabled Jobert to pursue the old Gaullist dream of building Europe on an anti-American basis.

  I cannot judge whether Jobert was playing a deep game from the beginning, or whether he gradually slid into a position beyond his intentions simply because the opportunity presented itself. I tend to lean toward the second alternative, partly because France had nothing to gain from the confrontation that Jobert’s tactics made inevitable. Once the issue was joined and European nations were forced to choose between the United States and France, their dependence on our protection could leave no doubt about the outcome. Before it came to that, Pompidou’s death removed Jobert from the Foreign Ministry, and for the rest of the decade Franco-American quarrels vanished like a puff of smoke.

  What seems to have diverted Jobert on the way to cooperation with us was the heady wine of publicity distilled from the grape of Franco-American conflict. Like a character in a Pirandello play, Jobert became what he had started out pretending to be. When I first met him he thought my admiration for de Gaulle excessive. Gaullism, he said, was immobilism leavened by rhetoric. By the time he was through he had carried Gaullism to lengths unimagined by the great general, who was too much of an historian to give any quarrel a personal cast and who never would have stepped over the line that risked the global equilibrium. Having started in an adversary role to lay the psychological basis for cooperation later — or so he professed — Jobert became so intoxicated with it that he never again could find the language of cooperation. He forgot that disputes are not ends in themselves; they have value only as a stage toward a sett
lement, even between adversaries. I suspect — and I know some of Pompidou’s entourage share this view — that what finally drove Jobert into obsessive exaltation was the heretofore inconceivable idea that he might be the successor to his mortally ill President if he could capture the public imagination as a strident defender of French nationalism.

  The impasse was made worse by Jobert’s passionate nature, which masqueraded as cynical nonchalance. The wheels of diplomacy are oiled by conciliatory forms that distinguish disagreements over policy from personal animosity. The elegant protocol rituals symbolize that the diplomat, however much he may differ with his interlocutor, pursues a cause, a principle, an interest, but never a personal vendetta. Jobert refused to act in this manner. Once launched on a confrontation, he quickly turned it into a personal assault. Though our private meetings remained pleasant and were cordial, he never missed an opportunity for the most cutting formulation in the presence of others. Nor did he confine his acid comments to Americans. At the Washington Energy Conference in February 1974, he attacked Helmut Schmidt, then German Finance Minister, with a personal animus impossible to reconcile with any rational French national objective.

  Jobert was a great talent, who might have thrived had his President not been stricken just when he reached prominence. Pompidou was essentially measured, careful, and balanced. I cannot believe that he would have let matters slide so completely out of control had he been healthy. But Jobert, left without the guidance of his President, suddenly seized with visions of eminence unimaginable in his previous anonymity, turned into a meteor that briefly and brilliantly illuminated the firmament of diplomacy only to recede as quickly into obscurity.III It was a great pity.

  At our first meeting on May 17, 1973, there was not a hint of the conflicts to come. Most of our talk concerned how Presidents Pompidou and Nixon could jointly advance the Year of Europe at their forthcoming summit meeting in Iceland. Jobert said he agreed with the objective. He counseled patience and hard work, in which he would cooperate. He thought my talk with Pompidou the next day would be productive.