Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  I give this account in full awareness of the brutalities of Brezhnev’s tenure, from Czechoslovakia to Afghanistan. It is quite possible that the KGB suggested these basic themes as a way to display a human bond and pretend a sincere desire for peace. But fairness compels me to say that I know of no other Soviet leader who could have made it credible. Perhaps this is a tribute to Brezhnev’s acting skill. I doubt it. As a good Communist Brezhnev was, of course, dedicated to the victory of his ideology; as a believer in objective factors he could not justify failing to take advantage of a superior position of strength that our domestic divisions increasingly presented to him. It was then — and remains — our principal responsibility to prevent such temptations from arising. But there was also in Brezhnev a clearly evident strain of the elemental Russia, of a people that has prevailed through endurance, that longs for a surcease from its travails and has never been permitted by destiny or the ambitions of its rulers to fulfill its dream.

  The mellow mood of the evening in the hunting stand proved evanescent. Once returned to Zavidovo, we were engulfed again in the routine of the negotiations and preparations for Brezhnev’s visit to the United States. And they, as well as other circumstances, soon overwhelmed this single, brief glimpse of humanity that was not repeated while I was in office.

  Détente: What Was It?

  NEGOTIATIONS with the Soviet Union have had a checkered history in the past decade. Urged on us insistently when we entered office, hailed exorbitantly as a turning point when three years later we carried it out, later blamed for all our contemporary dilemmas, détente has been more a barometer of our domestic controversies than a subject of serious analysis. For the statesman in any event, a foreign policy issue does not present itself as a theory but as a series of realities. And the realities of Nixon’s first term were stark. We had to end a war in Indochina in the midst of a virulent domestic assault on all the sinews of a strong foreign policy. It was followed by the impotence of the Presidency as a result of Watergate. Détente was not the cause of these conditions but one of the necessities for mastering them. Any discussion of it must begin with understanding this fact.

  Now in the retrospective of a decade, détente is being made to bear the burden for the consequences of America’s self-destructive domestic convulsions over Vietnam and Watergate. The former made Americans recoil before foreign involvement and thus opened an opportunity for Soviet expansionism; the latter weakened executive power to resist Soviet pressure. For the better part of a decade policymakers had to contend with a public opinion that had turned inward and a Congress that systematically reduced defense programs and the scope of executive action. To court confrontation in these circumstances was to invite a debacle. Those of us charged with the nation’s foreign policy could never forget that we were operating at the edge of a precipice.

  A collective amnesia has seized the participants in that tragedy. Liberals have been understandably reluctant to assume any responsibility for the consequences of their two great causes of the 1970s. Conservatives have fudged the issue because an Administration they considered their own fell over Watergate and because many of them were more interested in an ideological anti-Communist crusade at home than in the geopolitical contest in the distant lands where the foreign policy issues are in fact decided. Many conservatives resurrected traditional isolationism, protecting American moral purity against contamination by the tactical and expedient. And some of the “neoconservatives,” who had moved from the liberal to the conservative side after the end of the war in Vietnam, had the passion of the convert and few incentives to recall their own contributions to the collapse of international restraints. They forgot that they had assaulted as far too bellicose the same foreign policy that five years later they denounced as strategic retreat.I That the Nixon Administration manned the barricades almost alone against such critics, defending American military strength and geopolitical credibility, did not figure prominently in the later, revisionist analysis that blamed Nixon, not his opponents, for the weakening of both.2 For years we had been ferociously attacked from the left for resisting the Communist takeover in Indochina — a policy we carried out precisely because we feared the global consequences of a collapse of American credibility. Now suddenly we had to ward off assaults from some of the same people, who had joined the right, for our attempts to navigate the ship of state through the turmoil we had both predicted and opposed.

  It is therefore important to recall what détente was and what it was not.

  Richard Nixon came into office with the well-deserved reputation of a lifetime of anti-Communism. He despised liberal intellectuals who blamed the Cold War on the United States and who seemed to believe the Soviet system might be transformed through the strenuous exercise of goodwill. Nixon profoundly distrusted Soviet motives; he was a firm believer in negotiations from positions of strength; he was, in short, the classic Cold Warrior. Yet after four tumultuous years in office, it was this man, so unlike the conventional intellectual’s notion of a peacemaker, who paradoxically was negotiating with the Soviets on the broadest agenda of East-West relations in twenty-five years. And not long afterward he found himself accused of what had been a staple of his own early campaign rhetoric: of being “soft on Communism.”

  The paradox was more apparent than real. We did not consider a relaxation of tensions a concession to the Soviets. We had our own reasons for it. We were not abandoning the ideological struggle, but simply trying — tall order as it was — to discipline it by precepts of national interest. Nor was detente without its successes. There is no doubt that our better relations with the Soviet Union (and China) isolated Hanoi. In 1972 Moscow acquiesced in the mining of North Vietnamese harbors and the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong; by the end of the year Hanoi settled for terms it had contemptuously rejected for years. In Europe the knowledge that the Americans, too, could talk to the Russians reined in the temptation to blame all tensions on the United States and to seek safety in quasi-neutralism. And later on it helped us to bring about a diplomatic revolution in the Middle East.

  I also believe that the evidence proves exactly the opposite of what our critics charged: Détente helped rather than hurt the American defense effort. Before the word détente was even known in America the Congress cut $40 billion from the defense budgets of Nixon’s first term; even so dedicated a supporter of American strength as Senator Henry M. Jackson publicly advocated small defense cuts and a “prudent defense posture.”3 After the signature of SALT I, our defense budget increased and the Nixon and Ford administrations put through the strategic weapons (the MX missile, B-I bomber, cruise missiles, Trident submarines, and more advanced warheads) that even a decade later are the backbone of our defense program and that had been stymied in the Congress prior to the easing of our relations with Moscow.

  Détente did not prevent resistance to Soviet expansion; on the contrary, it fostered the only possible psychological framework for such resistance. Nixon knew where to draw the line against Soviet adventure whether it occurred directly or through proxy, as in Cienfuegos, Jordan, along the Suez Canal, and during the India-Pakistan war. He drew it with cool fortitude, and all the more credibly because there was national understanding that we were not being truculent for its own sake. If the Vietnam war had taught us anything, it was that a military confrontation could be sustained only if the American people were convinced there was no other choice.

  Any American President soon learns that he has a narrow margin for maneuver. The United States and the Soviet Union are ideological rivals. Détente cannot change that. The nuclear age compels us to coexist. Rhetorical crusades cannot change that, either.

  Our age must learn the lessons of World War II, brought about when the democracies failed to understand the designs of a totalitarian aggressor, sought foolishly to appease him, and permitted him to achieve a military superiority. This must never happen again, whatever the burdens of an adequate defense. But we must remember as well the lesson of World War I, when
Europe, despite the existence of a military balance, drifted into a war no one wanted and a catastrophe that no one could have imagined. Military planning drove decisions; bluster and posturing drove diplomacy. Leaders committed the cardinal sin of statecraft: They lost control over events.

  An American President thus has a dual responsibility: He must resist Soviet expansionism. And he must be conscious of the profound risks of global confrontation. His policy must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions. If the desire for peace turns into an avoidance of conflict at all costs, if the just disparage power and seek refuge in their moral purity, the world’s fear of war becomes a weapon of blackmail by the strong; peaceful nations, large or small, will be at the mercy of the most ruthless. Yet if we pursue the ideological conflict divorced from strategy, if confrontation turns into an end in itself, we will lose the cohesion of our alliances and ultimately the confidence of our people. That was what the Nixon Administration understood by détente.

  The Nixon Administration sought a foreign policy that eschewed both moralistic crusading and escapist isolationism, submerging them in a careful analysis of the national interest. America’s aim was to maintain the balance of power and seek to build upon it a more constructive future.4 We were entering a period when America’s responsibility was to provide a consistent, mature leadership in much more complex conditions than we had ever before faced and over a much longer period of time than we ever had had to calculate.

  The late 1960s had marked the end of the period of American predominance based on overwhelming nuclear and economic supremacy. The Soviet nuclear stockpile was inevitably approaching parity. The economic strength of Europe and Japan was bound to lead them to seek larger political influence. The new, developing nations pressed their claims to greater power and participation. The United States would have to learn to base its foreign policy on premises analogous to those by which other nations historically had conducted theirs. The percentage of the world’s Gross National Product represented by our economy was sinking by 10 percent with every decade: from 52 percent in 1950 to 40 percent in i960, to some 30 percent in 1970 (it is at this writing 22 percent). This meant that if all the rest of the world united against us or if some hostile power or group of powers achieved the hegemony Peking warned of, America’s resources would be dwarfed by its adversaries’. Still the strongest nation but no longer preeminent, we would have to take seriously the world balance of power, for it it tilted against us, it might prove irreversible. No longer able to wait for threats to become overwhelming before dealing with them, we would have to substitute concept for resources. We needed the inward strength to act on the basis of assessments unprovable when they were made.

  How to avoid nuclear war without succumbing to nuclear blackmail, how to prevent the desire for peace from turning into appeasement; how to defend liberty and maintain the peace — this is the overwhelming problem of our age. The trouble — no, the tragedy — is that the dual concept of containment and coexistence, of maintaining the balance of power while exploring a more positive future, has no automatic consensus behind it. Historically, America imagined that it did not have to concern itself with the global equilibrium because geography and a surplus of power enabled it to await events in isolation. Two schools of thought developed. The liberal approach treated foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry; the conservative approach considered it an aspect of theology. Liberals equated relations among states with human relations. They emphasized the virtues of trust and unilateral gestures of goodwill. Conservatives saw in foreign policy a version of the eternal struggle of good with evil, a conflict that recognized no middle ground and could end only with victory. Deterrence ran up against liberal ideology and its emotional evocation of peace in the abstract; coexistence grated on the liturgical anti-Communism of the right. American idealism drove both groups to challenge us from different directions. The mainstream of liberalism found anything connected with the balance of power repugnant: Through the early part of the twentieth century the United States thought of itself as standing above considerations of national interest. We would organize mankind by a consensus of moral principles or norms of international law. Regard for the purity of our ideals inspired conservatives, contrarily, to put Communism into quarantine: There could be no compromise with the devil. Liberals worried about the danger of confrontation; conservatives about funking it.

  I sought to convey a sense of the complexity of our policy toward the USSR in a speech before the Pacem in Terris Conference in Washington on October 8, 1973:

  This Administration has never had any illusions about the Soviet system. We have always insisted that progress in technical fields, such as trade, had to follow — and reflect — progress toward more stable international relations. We have maintained a strong military balance and a flexible defense posture as a buttress to stability. We have insisted that disarmament had to be mutual. We have judged movement in our relations with the Soviet Union, not by atmospherics, but by how well concrete problems are resolved and by whether there is responsible international conduct.

  Coexistence to us continues to have a very precise meaning:

  — We will oppose the attempt by any country to achieve a position of predominance either globally or regionally.

  — We will resist any attempt to exploit a policy of détente to weaken our alliances.

  — We will react if relaxation of tensions is used as a cover to exacerbate conflicts in international trouble spots.

  The Soviet Union cannot disregard these principles in any area of the world without imperiling its entire relationship with the United States.

  But our effort simultaneously to resist expansionism and to keep open the option of historical evolution — in effect, to combine the analysis and strategy of the conservatives with the tactics of the liberals — proved too ambitious in a bitter period when a domestic upheaval over Vietnam was followed immediately afterward by another upheaval over Watergate. Conservatives at least remained true to their beliefs. They wanted no truck with Communism whatever the tactical motivation. They equated negotiations with Moscow with the moral disarmament of America. They rejected our argument that if we did not take account of the global yearning for peace we would isolate ourselves internationally and divide our nation again over the same issues that had polarized America over Vietnam.

  The liberals’ position was more complex. Viscerally they opposed the balance of power theory implicit in containment. But what could they say about détente, so long championed by them and now put forward by that hated Cold Warrior Nixon? Their frustration mounted when Nixon, in stealing some of their clothes, could not resist taunting them with some of their own rhetoric. The tendency to hyperbole, unnecessary for such a sensible case, provoked liberal critics at first into attacking détente as just another version of balance of power, as not going far enough, as a tactic — almost as a Cold War tactic — rather than as policy for the genuine relaxation of tensions.

  But liberals soon left this uncomfortable position, which, however, had the merit of attacking our policy for what were, for better or worse, its premises. In early 1973, liberal critics suddenly shifted the vector of their assault. In that twilight period when Nixon was haunted by his looming perils even while his opponents were still obsessed by his seeming invulnerability, many liberals began to move in a direction that the master manipulator had considered inconceivable. They adopted the very positions that he had vacated in his march toward the center. Suddenly it was the liberal community that began to find ideological flaws in the détente that for so long it had passionately championed. The argument gained currency that Nixon had “oversold” détente; that he neglected human rights in his desire to get along with the Kremlin; that the Administration was insensitive to the moral problem of dealing with Communism. These arguments were natural from conservatives who were seriously worried lest the erosion of dividing lines sap the Western will to resist. They cam
e with less grace from those who had systematically opposed higher defense expenditures and who had decried the resistance to Soviet expansion in distant theaters that was the essence of our commitment to containment.

  The result was a dangerous contradiction. On the one hand, the lesson of Vietnam was alleged to be that we had no moral right to engage in distant enterprises. On the other hand, the Administration was now accused of amoral callousness in not insisting on the internal amelioration of all other societies, be they friendly or adversary. A new doctrine of political intervention into the domestic affairs of other states emerged, even while we were being pressed to withdraw American power from remote continents. With respect to the USSR, our liberal critics did not explain how we would handle the resulting confrontations with the Kremlin in the middle of a Watergate-inspired attack on both defense budgets and executive power.

  In the process, our policy toward the Soviets was turned by its disparate critics into a caricature of itself. We had conceived it as managing the relations among adversaries; our critics faulted it for falling short of establishing friendship. In every crisis there were cries that détente had failed to prevent it. We measured the success of our policy in the ability to achieve strategic goals even in crises, while mitigating risks — the Middle East war of 1973 is a good example. Until there is a major domestic change in Moscow, no East-West policy can abolish crises altogether. This is especially true if both the carrot and stick are removed, as occurred in the attack on executive discretion from 1973 onward. The alternative offered by our critics, moreover, was simply to needle the bear, inviting constant crises without tactical flexibility. Every evidence of Soviet ulterior motive was eagerly seized upon as if it were a new discovery. We took it for granted that the Communist superpower did not wish us well. We thought we could defeat its designs more effectively by a policy of firmness, maneuver, and positive aspiration that had a better chance of sustained public and allied support over the long-term future than simply by the mindless reiteration of truculent slogans.