Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  No doubt the Soviet leaders hoped to convince the democracies — abetted by Communist-sponsored front groups and the West’s own hopeful interpretation of world affairs — that what had produced the seeming relaxation of tensions was not our vigilance but a basic change in Soviet purpose. More and more Western leaders, the hard men in the Kremlin reasoned, would gear their domestic positions to a relaxation of tensions, pay a growing price for it, and seek refuge from the perils of confrontation by blaming the United States for all crises. That danger was real. But the opposite course was even more perilous. Confrontations not perceived as necessary by the public will divide each country, split our alliances, and produce a quest for peace at any price. No self-respecting democratic leader can sustain himself by treating vigilance and peace as if they were opposites. Our alliances will be sundered if they appear as obstacles to peace. To be sure, détente is dangerous if it does not include a strategy of containment. But containment is unsustainable unless coupled with a notion of peace. The remedy is not to evade the effort to define coexistence; it is to give it a content that reflects our principles and our objectives.

  The subtlest critique of our policy held that our emphasis on the national interest ran counter to American idealism and national character. Americans, on this thesis, must affirm general values or they will lack the resolution and stamina to overcome the Soviet challenge. In other words, America must commit itself to a moral opposition to Communism, not just geopolitical opposition to Soviet encroachment, or its policy will be based on quicksand.5 But while I sympathize with this point of view, a statesman must relate general theorems to concrete circumstances. Crusades rarely supply the staying power for a prolonged struggle. Obsession with ideology may translate into an unwillingness to confront seemingly marginal challenges, depicting them as unworthy because they appear not to encapsulate the ultimate showdown. This happened over Angola and Vietnam (after the Paris Agreement), and later in the Persian Gulf. In an era of growing Soviet boldness and radical quests for ascendancy, an American failure to deal with the geopolitical challenge would risk the global equilibrium as surely as a failure to preserve the military balance. And the overemphasis on ideology would create a characteristically American vulnerability: The doctrine of redemption would make us peculiarly receptive to Soviet peace offensives that seemed to imply that Soviet purposes had changed. Our moral convictions must arm us to face the ambiguity inseparable from the long haul or else they will wind up disarming us.

  Whatever policies they conduct, statesmen always gamble on their assessment of the future. Clearly, the United States and the Soviet Union each expected history to be on its side. Just prior to the summit of 1973, I analyzed Brezhnev’s motivations in a memorandum to Nixon, and there is a glimpse of his own attitude at the time in the way he underlined some portions (in italics here):

  Like all Soviet postwar leaders, Brezhnev sees the US at once as rival, mortal threat, model, source of assistance and partner in physical survival. These conflicting impulses make the motivations of Brezhnev’s policy toward us ambivalent. On the one hand, he no doubt wants to go down in history as the leader who brought peace and a better life to Russia. This requires conciliatory and cooperative policies toward us. Yet, he remains a convinced Communist who sees politics as a struggle with an ultimate winner; he intends the Soviet Union to be that winner. His recurrent efforts to draw us into condominium-type arrangements — most notably his proposal for a nuclear non-aggression pact — are intended both to safeguard peace and to undermine our alliances and other associations.

  Almost certainly, Brezhnev continues to defend his detente policies in Politburo debates in terms of a historic conflict with us as the main capitalist country and of the ultimate advantages that will accrue to the USSR in this conflict. Brezhnev’s gamble is that as these policies gather momentum and longevity, their effects will not undermine the very system from which Brezhnev draws his power and legitimacy. Our goal on the other hand is to achieve precisely such effects over the long run. . . .

  The major, long term question is whether the Soviets can hold their own bloc together while waiting for the West to succumb to a long period of relaxation and to the temptations of economic competition. Certainly, our chances are as good as Brezhnev’s, given the history of dissent in East Europe.

  In short, I rejected the proposition of our critics that the Soviet Union stands to benefit more from peaceful competition than do the democracies. It is a counsel of despair, the opposite of what I believe to be reality. It shows an unwarranted historical pessimism, a serious lack of faith in the American people. Nixon would have no part of it. In his famous 1959 “Kitchen Debate” in Moscow he scoffed at Khrushchev’s boast that he would bury us — and Nixon was right. Nothing has changed in the intervening two decades to suggest that the Communist world, inferior in resources and organization, can outstrip the West in prolonged competition. If the Soviet Union overtakes the West in military power, this will be caused not by détente but by the failure of the democracies to do what is clearly necessary. The argument that the American people cannot understand a complex challenge and a complex strategy to meet it, that unable to handle both deterrence and coexistence it must base its policy on truculence, reflects a lack of faith in democracy.

  If the West saw to containment, I was convinced that it would win its historical bet. The Soviet Union’s economic system was glaringly weak; its ideological appeal had faded; its political base and empire were precarious. In the sixty-year history of the state, it had never managed a legitimate, regular, succession of leadership. There had in fact been only three changes of leader: Of the four General Secretaries of the Communist Party, two (Lenin and Stalin) died in office; the third (Khrushchev) was replaced in a couplike procedure; the fourth (Brezhnev) was still consolidating his powers in early 1973, though even then signs of declining health could be noticed. The system had failed to deal seriously with the desire for political participation of the intellectual and managerial elite that industrialization inevitably spawns. Or else it sought to preempt their political aspirations by turning the ruling group into a careerist “new class” bound to produce stagnation. Moreover, the Soviet Union has yet to cope with the looming reality of its growing non-Russian population, soon to be a majority, with the severe problem of adjustment that it will entail.

  The increasingly intractable problems of the Soviet economy were already becoming apparent. In 1972 its growth rate was estimated to be 1.5 percent, about equal to the population growth; this was stagnation incarnate. Total planning seems to obstruct growth in direct proportion to the scale of the economy. All incentives work in the wrong direction. Factory managers understate their potential output lest they be locked into targets that bottlenecks outside their control will prevent them from meeting. Planners do not have the test of the market to gauge the preferences of consumers (even industrial consumers). In such a vacuum they produce merchandise that is both unwanted and inferior. Quality is impossible to guarantee by directives; hence each manager tends to fulfill his quota in the manner least dependent on other sectors of the Soviet system. (An East European planner once told me that if the quota for locomotives was expressed in weight, his country produced the heaviest locomotives in the world; when it was expressed in numbers, they were the lightest and shoddiest — in each case the line of least resistance was followed.)

  With no discretion to change plans, managers are forced to operate at the margin of bureaucratic legality: to hoard scarce materials or to seek reliable suppliers on the sly. This culminates in the paradox that a totally planned economy requires a black market, that is, a secret free market, to function at all. But this only magnifies the classic weakness of Communist economies: chronic shortages and chronic surpluses side by side.6 The dilemma of Communism is that it seems impossible to run a modern economy by a system of total planning, yet it may not be possible to run a Communist state without a system of total planning.

  The Communist Party�
�s raison d’être is its monopoly of power — but this produces another anomaly. The small group of votaries who arrogate to themselves superior insight into the processes of history derive from this conviction the monomaniacal intensity required to make revolution. But once they are firmly established in power, what is their function? They are not needed to run the government or the economy or the military. They are guardians of a political legitimacy that has long since lost its moral standing as well as its revolutionary élan. They specialize in solving internal crises that their centralized system has created and external crises into which their rigidity tempts them. The Party apparatus duplicates every existing hierarchy without performing any function. Its members are watchdogs lacking criteria, an incubus to enforce order, a smug bastion of privilege inviting corruption and cynicism.

  In every Communist state — it is almost an historic joke — the ultimate crisis, latent if not evident, is over the role of the Communist Party. In Poland, the Party was almost swept away because it was irrelevant and impotent. And we are still only at the beginning of that process of transformation. If Moscow is prevented by a firm Western policy from deflecting its internal tensions into international crises, it is likely to find only disillusionment in the boast that history is on its side. I remain convinced that a long period of peace will favor the pluralism of a democratic system — the economic vitality, genius for technological innovation, and creativity of free peoples.

  The Nixon Administration’s hard-headed geopolitical approach to East-West relations, though not easily grasped at home, was in fact effective with the Soviet leaders. For while the men in the Kremlin do not mind playing on Western preconceptions that identify diplomacy with good personal relations, they really do not know how to deal with a sentimental foreign policy. No Western leader who specialized in “understanding” them, as if foreign policy were like personal relations, ever succeeded. Soviet leaders have come up through a hard school. They have prevailed in a system that ruthlessly weeds out the timid and the scrupulous. Only a great lust for power — or near-fanatical ideological conviction — can have impelled them into careers in which there are few winners and disastrous penalties for losers. Personal goodwill, that mirage of Western diplomacy, cannot move them. Their ideology stresses the overriding importance of material factors and the objective balance of forces. They cannot defend conciliatory policies toward the outside world amid the struggle for power that characterizes the Soviet system except by emphasizing that objective conditions require them.

  This is why unsentimental realists seem to find greater favor in that capital whose ideology rejects the proposition that man can alter the foreordained course of history. And Nixon was nothing if not a realist. Few leaders were less likely to confuse coexistence with psychotherapy or peace with good personal relations. His personal insecurity made him doubt that he could charm anyone — especially the dour Soviet leaders. He knew that there was no substitute for posing calibrated risks that would make aggression appear unattractive; he strove mightily to preserve the balance of power. But he was not afraid to explore incentives to give the Soviets a stake in cooperation even while he sought to make expansionism too dangerous. Over time, as other factors came into play, a stable peace might be founded on conviction and not only on necessity. On this basis in May 1972 the erstwhile Communist-baiter and the General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party had met in Moscow to explore the boundaries of coexistence.

  I believe that a normal Nixon Presidency would have managed to attain symmetry between the twin pillars of containment and coexistence. Nixon would have been able to demonstrate to the conservatives that détente was a means to conduct the ideological contest, not a resignation from it. And he could have handled the liberal pressures by rallying a majority of moderates behind his policy of settling concrete issues. He could then have used his demonstrated commitment to peace to marshal the free peoples of the Alliance behind a new approach to defense.

  But early in his second term Nixon was no longer a normal President. And the damage was nearly irreparable. Between the Moscow summit of 1972 and Vladivostok in 1974, the chances for stable long-term coexistence between the United States and the Soviet Union were the best they have ever been in the postwar period. The USSR suffered a major setback in the Middle East and accepted it; the conflicts between us, while real, were managed. We had laid extensive foundations through a network of agreements. We had assembled incentives and penalties that seemed to moderate Soviet behavior. Never were conditions better to test the full possibilities of a subtle combination of firmness and flexibility.

  We will never know what might have been possible had America not consumed its authority in that melancholy period. Congressional assaults on a weakened President robbed him of both the means of containment and the incentives for Soviet moderation, rendering resistance impotent and at the same time driving us toward a confrontation without a strategy or the means to back it up. The domestic base for our approach to East-West relations eroded. We lost the carrot in the debate over Jewish emigration that undercut the 1972 trade agreement with the Soviet Union. And the stick became ineffective as a result of progressive restrictions on executive authority from 1973 to 1976 that doomed Indochina to destruction, hamstrung the President’s powers as Commander-in-Chief, blocked military assistance to key allies, and nearly devastated our intelligence agencies. In time the Soviets could not resist the opportunity presented by a weakened President and a divided America abdicating from foreign responsibilities. By 1975 Soviet adventurism had returned, reinforced by an unprecedented panoply of modern arms.

  Partly as a result of our domestic weakness and Soviet power, for many of our allies détente became what conservatives had feared: an escape from the realities of the balance of power, a substitution of atmospherics for substance. In a period of recession induced by the oil price explosion, several European countries turned to East-West trade as an economic lifeboat, not an instrument of a well-thought-out foreign policy. Their leaders played to a domestic gallery, appearing as “mediators” between the Soviet Union and the United States.

  Thus America sacrificed a great deal to its domestic divisions. The process began with the debate over the relationship of trade with the Soviet Union to human rights.

  Grain and Emigrants

  NO issue of foreign policy saw such a drastic reversal of positions as East-West trade. From the moment the Nixon Administration came into office in 1969, liberal critics pressed us to relax Cold War restrictions on trade.7 Less than six months after the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, leading journals, academics, and the Democratic Congressional majority (as well as liberal Republicans) attacked our doctrine of linkage that tied trade relaxation to Soviet foreign policy behavior. Since 1969 and 1970 were turbulent years in US–Soviet relations, we granted no export licenses whatever. This, we were told, was dangerous and ineffective: We were playing into the hands of Stalinist hard-liners in the Kremlin; trade with the Soviets was not a favor to them but to us; it would promote peace; it would speed the liberalization of the Communist regime; and in any case, if we did not trade, our allies would. Some conservative businessmen joined the liberal side of the debate, regarding the linkage of trade to foreign policy benefits as an illegitimate attempt to bargain with their assets for objectives in which they had no direct interest.

  The Nixon Administration held to its course. We eased restrictions slightly after the first breakthrough in SALT in May 1971 and the completion of the Berlin negotiations in August of that year. Only after the 1972 Moscow summit did we agree to a progressive improvement — always taking care to relate our moves to Soviet restraint in foreign affairs. We granted credits only to specific projects, never on a blanket basis. The Soviets were given to understand that our relative flexibility would not survive a foreign policy challenge.

  Later on, when the public mood changed, it was sometimes said that the Nixon Administration had naively relied on economic incentives to moderate So
viet behavior. In light of Nixon’s firm commitment to military containment, and the grudging East-West trade policy of his first term, this is a serious misconception. We did believe that carefully controlled trade would reinforce a coexistence based on a balance of forces. Economic ties in our view could make a difference but only if the Soviets were deprived of the option of adventurism. Having blocked Soviet encroachment in 1970 and 1971, we were prepared to test the possibilities of coexistence soberly and carefully, but not by adopting arguments we had been refuting for nearly four years.

  The first brouhaha was over the US–Soviet grain deal. In 1972 the Soviets exploited our free market, buying up nearly a billion dollars’ worth of grain on concessional terms — almost the whole of our agricultural surplus — before anyone knew what was happening.8 The real trouble, as it turned out, was not the eagerness of the government to sell, though Nixon was surely not blind to the political benefits of a grain deal in an election year. The Soviets’ coup was due primarily to their shrewd calculation that each grain company would try to keep its sales secret from its competitors. Thus, if they spread their orders widely, the Soviets reasoned (accurately), the greed of the companies would obscure the extent of Soviet purchases until the contracts were signed.