Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  But that was unlikely. Jobert’s presentation was bound to reflect Pompidou’s views, even if the acerbic formulations were no doubt his own, and it was impossible to tell to what extent he had influenced Pompidou’s thinking. According to Jobert, the timing of our initiative was significant primarily from the point of view of US-Soviet, not Atlantic, relations. He presumed that it was an attempt by the United States to get the largest number of cards into its hands for the forthcoming Brezhnev visit to the United States. We wanted to face Brezhnev as the spokesman not of our own interests but of all Atlantic nations. At any rate, Jobert strongly implied that it was in France’s interest to drag its feet until the Brezhnev-Nixon summit was past, and we could not use Atlantic cooperation to exact concessions to our own benefit.

  Not content with this ingeniously perverse rationale, he added further objections: Granting my denial that our motive for proposing the Atlantic Declaration was leverage on Moscow, then it must have been designed to pressure Europe in the forthcoming trade negotiations. And even if we had no ulterior motives our initiative would still damage French interests because it had led to a procedural tangle in the European Community. If we were planning to work through NATO, the Year of Europe might turn into a device to pressure France to resume full participation; if the European Community was to be our counterpart, the practical consequence would be an American attempt to lobby the other members, hence diluting (if not worse) the leadership role of France. Or were we perchance thinking of an entirely new organization that would merge all existing institutions in some supra-Atlantic concert?

  France, according to Jobert, did not favor the European-American summit that he claimed we had encouraged Brandt to propose on his visit to Washington. (In fact, Pompidou had proposed it in his interview with Reston, and Brandt had surprised us by seconding it.) The sole purpose could be to isolate or to diminish France. And when were we going to float the draft of a Declaration that he was sure I had in my hip pocket? When would he be able to see it? He could not believe that no such draft existed. Lest we suffer from the illusion that we might do something right, Jobert added that our monetary policies disorganized the world. Either the United States did not know what it was doing or else we were deliberately seeking financial dominance by flooding the world with cheap and inconvertible dollars. And our insistence on a reappraisal of strategy was a subterfuge to obscure the fact that under conditions of nuclear parity we would run no real risks for the defense of Europe.

  Jobert was turning the Year of Europe into a wrestling match. Whatever contingency he discussed became an attack on our purposes or a reason for stalling. He ascribed to us motives of nearly paranoid deviousness, the very articulation of which destroyed the significance of any reply: If we were capable of what Jobert was accusing us of, he was beyond reassurance.

  I somewhat wearily recited our by-now conventional position. We sought a rededication to the moral and political purposes of the West, not a bargaining chip for an encounter with a Soviet leader or upcoming trade negotiations. We had put forward the Year of Europe precisely to transcend the obsession with East-West relations. We were convinced that without such an effort the democracies would lose their sense of direction and cohesion. As for the procedural points, we were here to settle them; we would not proceed except in cooperation with France. The economic issues could best be dealt with if Pompidou provided a detailed critique of our approach, perhaps together with suggestions for a solution. We would resolve the matter in the same spirit as at the Azores eighteen months earlier. The dilemmas of defense resulted from evolving technology, not our preference or design. We needed a sensible doctrine for the defense of Europe lest the contingencies now clearly foreseeable would someday produce the impossible choice between suicide and surrender that he too seemed to fear.

  Jobert changed his approach; he suddenly was as sympathetic as his tense nature permitted. He indicated that he was putting forward Pompidou’s ideas, while his own were more benign. (This is an old trick of Presidential confidants, designed to deprive themselves of negotiating flexibility without turning matters into a personality clash. I, too, used it on occasion.) He suggested that Nixon’s presentation to Pompidou the next morning would be of crucial importance — though how any presentation would change suspicions so deeply ingrained Jobert did not tell us. The best construction one could put on the conversations was that Jobert had placed Nixon in the position of a graduate student who would be examined by a stern and testy professor.

  I returned to the hotel in a far from buoyant mood. It was clear that the meeting of the leaders of government would get nowhere. We would be hard put to avoid a stalemate. But this was not the theory of the accompanying White House press corps prowling the halls for some stray intelligence. They bearded me with cynical questions that assumed we were on the verge of some coup to blunt the edge of Watergate. Was the meeting necessary? Had we not already agreed to the outline of an Atlantic Declaration, turning Reykjavik into a charade to give Nixon the credit and to pull the teeth of Congressional hearings? Would we, in short, have the temerity to deflect the public attention from the spectacle of a besieged Presidency by presuming to govern in the national interest?

  The next morning Nixon proceeded to the museum that served as the meeting place with Pompidou. Two additional separate sets of meetings had been arranged: on foreign policy between the foreign ministers and their assistants, on economic issues between the economic ministers and their staffs. This gave Nixon a pretext for excluding Bill Rogers and Pompidou for doing without Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. At Nixon’s request, I joined the two Presidents as note-taker. No doubt this added to Jobert’s resentment. Having been “elevated” to Foreign Minister, he now found himself relegated to a secondary forum. Pompidou revealed the peevishness produced by his illness when he allowed a French spokesman to leak the point that their President, for one, could conduct a dialogue without the assistance of aides — a petty and unfair comment, especially since I had attended in the same role in the Azores.

  Nixon was less sure of himself than usual, since Watergate had been taking a toll of his time and nervous energy. The change in Pompidou even in the two weeks since I had seen him last was likewise striking — or perhaps the monarchical environment of the Elysée Palace had obscured it. He was bloated from cortisone. Though his courtesy never flagged, it seemed to require a massive effort to maintain it. He had that withdrawn appearance of cancer patients, as if the private battle in which he was engaged made irrelevant the matters at hand. No doubt Pompidou’s suffering contributed to the increasing irritability of French policy. It was a tall order to ask him to be a partner in launching a new initiative of undefined duration when he was contemplating his own demise. In normal times Pompidou might have assumed for himself the role of balance wheel to what he considered our impetuosity and inadequate understanding of European sophistication. And he might well have participated in our shaping a larger vision of our future. But now his lack of confidence in potential successors — congenital in heads of government, most of whom require the psychological reassurance of their indispensability — compounded Pompidou’s native skepticism and caused him to avoid new courses that in other hands might lead to unpredictable and perhaps deleterious results. At the end of his life he returned to the Gaullist orthodoxy that had spawned him. He had no stomach for battle with the paladins of his predecessor whom he had ignored when the future still stretched as if infinite before him.

  So the encounter at Reykjavik was dominated by a difference of perspectives. Nixon, though sorely beset, still thought of himself as a functioning Chief Executive planning early in his term a long-range program. Pompidou was suspended between the momentary, which he knew only too well, and the eternal, which he was afraid to get to know. And on this incommensurability the dialogue ultimately foundered.

  Nixon, aware of Jobert’s challenge, made one of his best presentations. After expressing his admiration for de Gaulle, he eloquently stated the rati
onale for our initiative. He took care to rebut Jobert’s arguments of the previous night, sidestepping a confrontation by the clever device of ascribing Jobert’s views to unnamed French journalists:

  First of all, the timing of our initiative for Europe has nothing to do with the Russian summit or with U.S. political institutions. If we proclaim this year of 1973 the Year of Europe, it is because I feel that during this year of so-called détente with Russia, in this year when Europe is flexing its muscles, we would face a very great danger if Europe were to begin to disintegrate politically. It is wrong to go on saying the U.S. can just sit down with the Russians and Chinese because this downgrades the importance and concern we have for our real friends. When I meet with the Russians I have no more illusions than you do about what they want. But I do not complain.

  What I see if we do not seize this moment is a race to Moscow — each country in the West and in Europe going to Moscow to negotiate and make deals. Of course there must be individual meetings, but there must be some underlying philosophy that animates all of us. Otherwise, those shrewd and determined men in the Kremlin will eat us one by one. They cannot digest us all together but they can pick at us one by one. That is why it is so important that we maintain the Atlantic Community — I think at the highest level, first of all, the Big Four, Heath, Brandt, Pompidou and the U.S., for some very frank talks about where we are going from here. . . .

  I do not have a blueprint for the future; the future must come from all of us. In spite of what I read in the French press, I am very far from wanting to force France back into NATO or other institutions which France does not consider in its interest to return to. . . .

  Despite its occasionally complicated grammar, this was a generous statement and a correct one. There was the danger of neo-isolationism in America and parochialism in Europe. Technology imposed the need for a new approach to defense; it was not an American policy preference but a recognition of reality. The Soviets surely were trying to create in Europe the impression that we and they were about to arrange a condominium. Something needed to be done to resolve Europe’s ambivalence between indivisible defense and political autonomy. As I said later to Jobert on June 8, when he accused us once again of pursuing selfish motives in the Year of Europe: “We do it for a larger selfishness. In eight years, if Europe becomes obsessed with a sense of impotence because of isolation from us, both sides will have lost.” That prediction, in fact, came true with a vengeance.

  Pompidou replied in a lapidary manner that submerged the essence of the problem in elegant paradoxes. He began with an analysis of the international situation. It was acute but lacked his customary relevance. He simply would not bring it to a point; whatever aspect he considered was shrouded in complexity. The United States had accepted military, hence diplomatic parity, he said. Yet “how could you do otherwise unless you spent fabulous sums?” The United States sought to enmesh the Soviet Union, to freeze the status quo “by use of texts, agreements, treaties. . . .” Still, détente or not, the Soviets were pushing their pawns everywhere. And there were weak links, such as Yugoslavia because Tito was an old man. Where would all this lead? The new American relationship with China was an important factor. But could it survive the deaths of Zhou and Mao? Then there was the emergence of Japan, which was caught in a difficult position between China, the Soviet Union, and the United States, and “which has temporarily said it will be tied to the United States [emphasis added].”

  In this elusive environment Pompidou was not optimistic about Europe. He did not believe that 1973 would be marked by the “advent of Europe”; there was therefore no clear-cut partner for our transatlantic dialogue. The best he foresaw was that Europe would become a major commercial power capable of resolving economic problems. In Britain, Heath was the only European; Pompidou had not met any other. Pompidou shared Nixon’s worry about West Germany, which was, the Frenchman said, “beginning to talk of its two options and proclaims its attachment to the West as it is being pulled into the specific German problem which turns it to the East.” And a little later again; “Germany tries to look both ways simultaneously.” The Italians were worried — ready to agree to any American proposal but not to a prior arrangement between the United States and other European countries in which they did not participate. The same was true of Holland. As for the European Community, it was fighting over the prices of carrots and wheat. “Things come out but they come out poorly. It is a poor system but right now there is no will to pull out of it.”

  All of this was true enough. Yet Pompidou offered no solution to the perplexities he had delineated, no vision of a common future. For his view finally came down to the proposition that nothing would work in any forum. Only Americans, he said sardonically, could invoke a Year of Europe; for France every year was the Year of Europe. But Europe at the moment was moribund. On the other hand the concept of an Atlantic Declaration was very vague:

  Who says what? If the Alliance, then it must come out of the Atlantic Council. Is it the U.S. plus one European country? Is it the U.S. and the European Community? This is difficult since the Community has no political reality, only an economic reality.

  Pompidou had a point. The memberships of NATO and of the Community only partly overlapped. The functions of the two institutions were different. Yet this quibble was not the essence of Pompidou’s problem. If the Atlantic Declaration was issued by NATO, which after all contained the relevant nations save Ireland, it would give political stature to an organization that France was seeking to confine to military functions. But if it emerged in the European Community, it would make the United States a partner in that organization’s deliberations and thereby frustrate France’s ambition to preeminence. France wanted to curtail neither its independence in the Alliance nor its claim to the leadership of Europe. On this rock an aspiration to greater Atlantic coherence was bound to run aground.

  Pompidou made procedural sense, but it is the responsibility of a statesman to resolve dilemmas, not to contemplate them. Pompidou’s presentation amounted either to a permanent perplexity or to the deliberate thwarting of a major initiative to give a sense of direction to the democracies — exposing them to the risk of consuming their substance over tactics while drifting gradually into a pervasive sense of impotence that would weaken domestic structures and create mounting foreign danger.

  Nixon lamely brought the morning to a close by proposing an informal working group of individuals possessing the personal confidence of the heads of government of Britain, France, Germany, and the United States. Heath had advanced that idea to us earlier in May; it had been the concept of a directoire put forward by de Gaulle in 1958; we had included it in our memorandum to Jobert of May 26. Pompidou seemed at first to accept the idea, not unnaturally since it reflected a long-standing French proposal. At least we interpreted in that sense some ambiguous remarks made just before the luncheon break.

  When Pompidou returned for the afternoon session he had thought better of it, or perhaps had been talked out of it by Jobert. Conceivably, though unlikely, we had misunderstood him in the first place. What Pompidou had in mind, it transpired, were consultations among the Big Four on a bilateral basis. France would participate in no new forum on the Atlantic Declaration. It would consult only in established forums or bilaterally. If I wanted to meet British and German representatives jointly, Pompidou would not object, though France would not participate. (Pompidou knew very well that this killed the prospect because neither Heath nor Brandt would agree to such consultations.) The only “concession” Pompidou offered was that the deputy foreign ministers could meet as part of the North Atlantic Council provided that sufficient progress was made in other forums, where, of course, France had a veto. To sugarcoat the pill, he suggested that Jobert and I could meet in Paris on the occasion of another round of my talks with Le Duc Tho in a week. And Pompidou was also willing to send Jobert to the United States at the end of the month — a good way to waste another four weeks and to keep us from raising un
welcome projects in other forums.

  Pompidou was in fact saddling us with a procedural monstrosity. If the Four consulted bilaterally, then six negotiations on the same subject would be going on simultaneously (and if Italy joined, eight). There would be no way to agree, for everything discussed with one partner would have to be communicated to all others, with infinite potential for confusion, misunderstanding, and mischief. With no central focus and without any specific proposal, chaos was certain. But if we approached existing forums with a draft proposal — the only rational approach — we would be accused of organizing Europe against France and of seeking to dominate NATO with an American document.

  When we had put forward the Year of Europe, we had expected to elicit an organized European response that would lead to a conclusion within a few months. It never occurred to us that after six weeks there would be no interlocutor (or so many as to amount to the same thing), no forum, and no draft document.

  The remaining discussions were equally inconclusive. Pompidou made a devastating criticism of our monetary policies but, in contrast to the Azores meeting, he put forward no specific proposal to resolve the issue. In this he was probably wise. The differences between the two sides were too wide to be bridged by a directive from the chiefs of state. There was no obvious middle position between convertibility into gold (the French view) and nonconvertibility (ours).