Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  There was a complex psychological reason at the heart of our frustrations. We were so eager to liberate ourselves from the trauma of Vietnam that we failed to give sufficient weight to the fact that Europe could not possibly share this largely American imperative — at least to the same extent.

  There were other important obstacles, which I shall discuss in Chapter XVI. But the single most corrosive factor was Watergate. The Year of Europe might well have succeeded but for the way the scandal seeped into every nook and cranny of the project. A strong President at the height of his prestige, with an American consensus behind him, could have made a compelling case for the moral unity of the free nations. They would have been eager to share the limelight with him. As 1973 progressed, the opposite was the case. Association with Nixon had become dangerous; nor could the wounded President rally domestic American opinion in a manner our allies could not have ignored. Had not Nixon become a political liability to the European leaders, it is highly improbable that they would have been so insistently aloof. They had to wonder more and more about the risks to themselves of signing a solemn document with an increasingly discredited Chief Executive. Had there been immediate gains to show, they might have taken the chance. But the Atlantic Declaration highlighted the dilemma of the modern democratic leader: The time frame for a policy to bear fruit is longer than his term of office, while the down-side of the policy begins to operate immediately. Every European head of government had to calculate that for a vision of a more secure tomorrow he might share in the immediate opprobrium if he identified himself with Nixon just before Watergate engulfed him. And the issues we raised were all complex; better to bury them by ignoring them.

  Still, in the perspective of nearly a decade, I regret the callousness with which some of our allies reacted to Nixon’s loss of authority. Here was a man whose entire public life had been devoted to strengthening the Atlantic Alliance. In his first term he had gone to great lengths to win the confidence of European leaders. He had ended an ugly quarrel with France. He had overcome his predispositions and helped salvage Brandt’s Ostpolitik. He had given Heath many proofs of his admiration. Despite some serious lapses in 1971, he had made extraordinary efforts to consult regularly with his European colleagues. Yet all these leaders, without ever failing to be polite, took steps that none would have dared to risk with a functioning President enjoying even modest public support.

  When all is said and done I have to conclude that though the immediate attempt was doomed, it was right to try. For I still believe we asked the correct questions. The leaders of the industrial democracies had for too long avoided fundamental issues by using the American connection for domestic politics. During periods of international tensions the criticism was that American policy was jeopardizing Europe’s security. When we had taken our partners’ advice and eased relations with Moscow, they complained about a Soviet-American condominium. At bottom, Europe wanted America committed to its defense but hoped to deflect actual military operations from its territory. Its governments sought detailed assurances from us on every aspect of our negotiations with the Soviet Union but were not prepared to accept similar restraints on their own unilateral initiatives. These inconsistencies, if pursued long enough, would consume Western unity in a morass of conflicting policies driven by the most short-term domestic pressures. More important, the obsession with tactics deprived the politics of the democracies of moral sustenance. Without a vision of their future, publics were increasingly demoralized by technical issues beyond the ken of nonexperts. Fear, not purpose, became the dominant ingredient of the policies of too many democracies; adaptation, not taking charge of one’s destiny, defined political prudence. The causes for this state of affairs run deep and are not soluble by foreign policy initiatives alone. Yet the ideas represented by the Year of Europe could have contributed to overcoming them.

  As it was, most of the practical proposals of the Year of Europe were realized. Before Nixon’s resignation the Atlantic Declaration was signed. In the Presidency of Gerald Ford, regular consultations on a broad agenda were begun and continue at this writing. But the task of evoking a vision of an inspiring future remains, in incomparably more difficult circumstances.

  * * *

  I. Indeed, as it was, my speech on April 23 was criticized in some quarters for giving Japan too little a role in the exercise.3

  II. And also the last, because after I became Secretary of State in September 1973, I did not have the time to produce a thoughtful document. It is an interesting commentary on the nature of bureaucracy and a pity because I continue to believe that an intelligent statement of basic purpose and philosophy is important for public, bureaucratic, and foreign understanding of a President’s policies.

  III. He returned to official life in 1981 as Minister of Foreign Trade under President François Mitterand.

  VI

  The Middle East in Ferment

  Time for a New Initiative?

  STRANGELY enough, the domestic weakness produced by the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate had the least impact on our Middle East policy. No Middle East issues had yet erupted into major controversy at home; the countries in the area took less advantage than others of the growing embarrassments of our executive authority because they would all be stranded without their belief in a powerful America. Each in its own way relied on a strong American policy to achieve their widely differing purposes. Israel depended on American support for survival. The moderate Arabs counted on American influence with Israel for progress towards peace. Even the radical Arabs needed us if only as an alibi; they tended to exaggerate our malign influence as vastly as they considered it impervious to the stresses involved in Watergate.

  Nixon began his second Administration with the firm intention of launching a diplomatic initiative for peace in the Middle East, though he had not yet formulated a plan. In an interview two days before his reelection Nixon had said that the Middle East would have “a very high priority” in his second term. On November 5 Secretary of State William Rogers had added his own prediction that the United States expected soon to be “very active.”1 And with the end of the Vietnam war, public attention turned increasingly to the Middle East. In the first week of February 1973, the columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak noted “growing pressure from Arab countries friendly to the United States” to get Nixon and me involved in Middle East diplomacy. The New York Times editorialized the same week that pending visits to Washington of various Middle East leaders would give Nixon a “natural opportunity to take some new initiatives.” The Baltimore Sun stressed that such initiatives were “overdue.” And the Washington Post urged Nixon to give the Middle East his “sustained personal attention” now that Vietnam was concluded, warning that Israel’s attitude was “unacceptably shortsighted.”2

  Nevertheless, there were many reasons for caution. The first term had underlined the futility of overeager peace plans that had run aground amid the passions of the parties and the divisions in our government. An Israeli election was set for the end of October 1973; experience had taught us that no Israeli government could make the difficult decisions inherent in the peace process while its future hung in the balance. We intended to use the interval in exploratory talks between me and President Anwar el-Sadat’s national security adviser, Hafiz Ismail; to formulate a workable proposal we needed a clearer understanding of Egyptian purposes.

  Within our government, management of Middle East diplomacy was in transition. During the first term Nixon had initially left the Middle East to the State Department, partly to placate Rogers, partly because Nixon thought Middle East diplomacy was a loser from the domestic point of view and sought to deflect its risks from himself. Thus my influence on Middle East policy in Nixon’s first term was far less direct than in other spheres. I could write memoranda; I could warn; occasionally I could delay. But except in the Jordan crisis I exercised no operational control. Until mid-1972 the system of White House backchannels — secret negotiations with other gove
rnments, bypassing the State Department — never applied to the Middle East. Though I occasionally chafed under the system that should in fact be the norm, it served, in truth, the strategy I favored: a prolonged stalemate that would move the Arabs toward moderation and the Soviets to the fringes of Middle East diplomacy. Late in 1971, Nixon began shifting responsibility to me. He was afraid that the State Department’s bent for abstract theories might lead it to propose plans that would arouse opposition from all sides. My principal assignment was to make sure that no explosion occurred to complicate the 1972 election — which meant in effect that I was to stall. Necessity in the form of preoccupation with the concluding phase of the Vietnam negotiation reinforced Nixon’s instructions. All I did was to set up a secret channel to Sadat’s security adviser; little took place in the channel even after Sadat expelled Soviet military personnel from Egypt in July 1972.3

  The reason for delay was, in fact, more substantive than political. The Middle East crisis had many components, all of which were traps for the unwary and argued for caution: the Arab-Israeli conflict; the ideological struggle between Arab moderates and radicals; and the influence and rivalry of the superpowers, especially the growing Soviet military role. These ingredients had separate origins but had grown intertwined; a solution to one could not be accomplished without grappling with the others. Creation of the State of Israel with American (and at the time Soviet) support had inflamed Arab nationalism and led to war. Israel established a nation by force of arms and lived thereafter unrecognized, ostracized, and bitterly resented by its neighbors. In June 1967 Israel erupted across the armistice lines after Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser, spurred on by Soviet disinformation, declared a blockade of the Israeli port of Eilat and ominously moved its army into the demilitarized Sinai toward Israel. The war ended in six days with Israel in possession of large areas of Egypt and Syria as well as of the West Bank of the Jordan River, compounding Arab frustration with humiliation.

  Israel, never having lived within accepted frontiers, saw no essential difference between locating its boundaries in one unaccepted place and another; condemned to Arab belligerency, it sought the widest imaginable security belt. The Arab countries were torn between their philosophical objection to the existence of the Israeli state and the practical reality that they could not alter the status quo except through some form of diplomacy. Moderate Arab governments like Jordan and (under Nasser ambivalently) Egypt felt their way toward a formula that accepted Israel on its prewar (1967) borders but, pending a settlement of the status of the Arab Palestinians, would grant no more than an end to the state of belligerency — another form of armistice — rather than the full peace that Israel demanded.

  And the Palestinian issue was deadlocked by the attitude of the Arab radicals and Israel’s perception of its security needs on the West Bank. Syria refused to negotiate for any conditions; it objected to Israel’s very existence, not its borders. As late as December 1973, when I flew from Tel Aviv to visit Damascus for the first time, the controlled Syrian press reported that the American Secretary of State had arrived from “occupied territory” (that is, Israel). Iraq strenuously added its weight to that of the radicals, as did Libya and Algeria. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), whose claim to represent all Palestinians was not yet recognized by the Arab states, called for the creation of a secular state in Palestine, that is to say, the disappearance of Israel. And Israel came more and more to identify its security with its presence on the West Bank. This impasse blocked Middle East diplomacy for all the years between the wars of 1967 and 1973.

  The symbol of the deadlock was United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 of November 22, 1967. It spoke of a “just and lasting peace” within “secure and recognized boundaries” but did not define any of the adjectives. Rejected by some Arab states, interpreted by those that accepted it as well as by Israel to suit their preconceptions, it became more an expression of a stalemate than a means of its resolution. Those Arab leaders willing to negotiate at all construed it to require total Israeli withdrawal to the pre-June 1967 frontiers. Israel professed that none of its prewar borders was secure; it insisted on retaining some of the occupied territory of each of its neighbors. To make doubly sure that its interests were safeguarded, Israel put forward a demand as seemingly reasonable as it was unfulfillable: that the Arab states negotiate directly with it. In other words, Israel asked for recognition as a precondition of negotiation. The Arabs, not to be outdone, demanded acceptance of their territorial demands before they would consider diplomacy. No Arab leader, however moderate, could accede to Israel’s demands and survive in the climate of humiliation, radicalism, and Soviet influence of the period. No Israeli Prime Minister could stay in office for a day if he relinquished the claim to the occupied territories as an entrance price to negotiations. Israel chased the illusion that it could both acquire territory and achieve peace. Its Arab adversaries pursued the opposite illusion, that they could regain territory without offering peace.

  The Middle East

  Still, at the beginning of Nixon’s first term Jordan and Egypt were tentatively feeling their way toward negotiation. King Hussein of Jordan was the most ready of the Arab leaders to accept Israel as a fact of life and to negotiate with it. But it was commonly believed — and he did nothing to discourage the view — that he should follow in the train of some less vulnerable Arab nation. Already the target of the hostility of Arab radicals because he had refused to break diplomatic ties with the United States in 1967 and had expelled the PLO in 1970, the moderate, pro-Western King was thought not strong enough to bear the certain radical assault on the peacemaking process. The conventional wisdom was that Jordan should be the second Arab state to make peace.

  Thus Egypt became the key to Middle East diplomacy. Tactical necessity reinforced what Egypt had earned by its size, tradition, cultural influence, and sacrifice in a series of Arab-Israeli wars. Egypt was the most populous Arab country, the cultural hub of the area. Its teachers were the backbone of the educational system of the Arab world; its universities attracted students from all over the region. It had the longest continuing history of political organization of any nation, with the possible exception of China. And it had borne the brunt of the Arab-Israeli conflict. As both monarchy and republic, it had engaged itself in a struggle that went beyond narrow Egyptian national interests. It had sacrificed its young men to the cause of Arab unity and of Palestinian self-determination. In the process it had lost the Sinai peninsula and repeatedly risked its national cohesion. Egypt had earned the right to make peace.

  For us a first step with Egypt had particular attraction. The territorial issue seemed easier because the Sinai was neither so strategically important to Israel nor so overlaid with historical memories as the other territories, especially the West Bank.

  But so long as Nasser was President, he paralyzed Egypt by ambivalence. On the one hand, he indicated a general willingness to participate in the peace process — but his program was unfulfillable. He demanded Israel’s withdrawal to the 1967 borders in return for Egyptian nonbelligerency; peace would depend on an Israeli settlement with Palestinians even then demanding the destruction of the Jewish state. Nor would Nasser negotiate directly with Israel. Rather, we should achieve the Israeli withdrawal, in return for which Nasser would confer on us the boon of restored diplomatic relations. In the meantime Cairo Radio remained as the center of anti-American, indeed anti-Western, propaganda throughout the Middle East. In short, Nasser wanted to lead the Arab world from an anti-American position; to present whatever concessions he obtained as having been extorted by Arab militancy, backed by Soviet arms and Soviet diplomatic support. The United States had no interest in vindicating such a course. We were being given the privilege of meeting Nasser’s peremptory demands in return for diplomatic relations, which if they meant anything had to be as much in Egypt’s interest as in our own, and for a cease-fire with Israel, which already existed de facto.

  In the resulti
ng stalemate, the role of the Soviet Union oscillated between the malign and the confused. Its weapons encouraged Arab intransigence. But this achieved no more than to increase the dangers of the deadlock; it could not remove it. Moscow never managed to choose among its dilemmas. So long as it one-sidedly supported all the positions of its clients, it could not advance either the negotiating process or its own role. For we had no motive to support the program of the Arab radicals who were castigating us; in the unlikely event that we would change our view, we did not need the Soviet Union as an intermediary. In other words, Moscow could contribute effectively to a solution only by dissociating itself to some extent from Arab demands and thus jeopardizing some of its friendships in the Arab world. But if it did not do so, it risked backing objectives it could not bring about and thus earning disdain as being impotent. Moscow could stoke the embers of crisis, but once they exploded into conflagration it could use them for its own ends only by risking a great-power confrontation, something from which the Soviet Union had until then carefully shied away. Like the other parties, the Soviet Union temporized. It acted as the Arabs’ lawyer but could not advance their case; it bought time through the supply of weapons, but this only escalated the level of possible violence without changing the underlying realities.

  The Nixon Administration had confronted this impasse with divided counsel. The State Department was pressing for a diplomatic solution to reduce Arab resentment of the United States. It put forward the Rogers Plan for Israel’s return to its previous borders. But it never solved the problem of how to persuade Israel to give up all its conquests when Syria rejected any terms and Egypt refused to make peace without Syria or the Palestinians, who were determined to destroy Israel. In these circumstances, diplomatic initiatives tended to exacerbate rather than reduce tensions. Our proposals were likely to fall flat, strengthening the Soviet and radical position. And Nixon considered us too fully engaged in Indochina to throw full White House support behind proposals he considered unrealistic to begin with. A negotiation can succeed only if the minimum terms of each side can be made to coincide. During Nixon’s first term, neither side would state anything other than its maximum program — Israel unwilling to forgo wholesale alterations of frontiers, the Arabs demanding total withdrawal and reluctant to undertake significant commitments for peace or, for that matter, security.