Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  But the conversation with Gromyko was only shadowboxing. Brezhnev was concerned not so much with the status of current negotiations as with the whole trend of events in the Middle East. At Zavidovo in May I had summed up for Brezhnev our assessment in light of Soviet support for the Arab maximum program: “It is hard to convince Israel why they should give up the territory in exchange for something they already have [a cease-fire], in order to avoid a war they can win — only to have to negotiate then with the most intransigent element of the Arabs [that is, the Palestinians].” We were planning a major diplomatic initiative after Israel’s elections in late October and were in the meantime stalling. But at Zavidovo, Brezhnev had invoked the threat of war; he hinted at increasing difficulty in holding back his Arab allies. He growled that we were counting on a state of affairs that might not last: “It is impossible not to take some steps or President Nixon and I might find ourselves in an impossible situation. . . . After all, nothing in the world is eternal — similarly the present military advantage enjoyed by Israel is not eternal either.” Brezhnev had offered me no program. I thought the veiled threat of war was bluff because in our view a war would lead to a defeat for the Arabs from which the Soviets would not be able to extricate their clients. Gromyko had given me a set of principles at Zavidovo, but they were identical to the Arab program. Since Brezhnev in his talk with me had not been prepared to retreat one inch from it, we had deferred discussion until the June summit.

  Now that the summit was here, the Soviets had, strangely, indicated no special desire to discuss the Middle East. There was the sparring with Gromyko over the communiqué, but neither in Washington nor on Air Force One nor in San Clemente had there been any sign that Brezhnev wanted to talk to Nixon about the Middle East.

  I thought we could relax from serious business at last when, at 4:30 P.M. on June 23, Nixon gave a cocktail party around the swimming pool of his residence for those members of the Hollywood community willing to come to San Clemente in the middle of Watergate. There were not many. Brezhnev seemed to enjoy himself. A family dinner for just ten people in Nixon’s small dining room was to follow at 7:00 P.M. But even before the party had started, Brezhnev suddenly pleaded fatigue — that time change again — and asked that dinner be moved up to six. Nixon obliged, providing thin gruel indeed for those loyal and hardy few who had risked opprobrium to travel for two hours from Los Angeles to attend a reception lasting barely an hour.

  The dinner went off jovially enough. Brezhnev felt at ease in the family atmosphere. Nixon gave a sensitive toast about the responsibility of both leaders for the well-being of the children of the world, a responsibility both men had to feel deeply in light of their attachment to their own children. When Nixon concluded, Brezhnev walked around the table and embraced him. At about 7:15 P.M. the Soviet party excused itself. Brezhnev needed all the rest he could get in view of the fact that another of those debilitating time changes was coming up. He was returning to Washington the next morning to rest at Camp David before departing for Paris on June 25. Nixon retired to his bedroom, I to my residence about ten minutes away.

  At ten o’clock my phone rang. It was the Secret Service informing me that Brezhnev was up and demanding an immediate meeting with the President, who was asleep. It was a gross breach of protocol. For a foreign guest late at night to ask for an unscheduled meeting with the President on an unspecified subject on the last evening of a State visit was then, and has remained, unparalleled. It was also a transparent ploy to catch Nixon off guard and with luck to separate him from his advisers. It was the sort of maneuver that costs more in confidence than can possibly be gained in substance. Concessions achieved by subterfuge may embarrass; they are never the basis for continuing action between sovereign nations because they will simply not be maintained.

  I told the Secret Service to inform the Soviets that nothing could be done until I saw the President. About fifteen minutes later I awakened Nixon. His initial grogginess was replaced by immediate alertness when I told him what was afoot. “What are they up to?” he asked. “Who knows?” I replied, “but I fear we are not going to get through a summit without a dacha session.” Nixon told his valet, Manolo Sanchez, to light a fire in his study in the small tower overlooking the Pacific. Meanwhile, I looked for Gromyko, to find out what this was all about and to make clear that I would be present. It transpired that Brezhnev had been seized with an all-consuming desire to discuss the Middle East. Rather coolly, I said I would inform the President and let the Soviet party know when he was ready.

  So it happened that around 10:45 P.M. on Brezhnev’s last night with Nixon, the Soviet leader made his most important proposition of the entire trip: that the United States and the Soviet Union agree then and there on a Middle East settlement, based on total Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders in return for not peace but an end to the state of belligerency. Final peace would depend on a subsequent negotiation with the Palestinians; the arrangement would be guaranteed by the great powers. This was, of course, the standard Arab position. Brezhnev must have understood — and if he did not, Gromyko was much too experienced not to know — that there was no chance whatever of implementing such a proposal or of reaching any such agreement in the remaining few hours. It did not stop Brezhnev. He wanted no public declaration, he said. It could be a secret deal, known only to the people in the room. He did not vouchsafe to us how so revolutionary a scheme as a peace imposed by the United States and the Soviet Union on the Middle East could be kept secret if it were to be implemented.

  Nixon, as always calm under pressure, replied that there was nothing to be done that night. Nor could we accept the “general working principles” given to me at Zavidovo. I would try my hand at revising them and get the text to Brezhnev before he left Camp David on June 25. This idea found no favor with the General Secretary. As at the dacha, he went back to bullying:

  If there is no clarity about the principles we will have difficulty keeping the military situation from flaring up. . . . Without an agreement on general principles we don’t see how we can act. . . . I am categorically opposed to a resumption of the war. But without agreed principles . . . we cannot do this.

  In other words, twenty-four hours after renouncing the threat of force in the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War, Brezhnev was in effect menacing us with a Middle East war unless we accepted his terms.

  And he was vehement as he did so. Dobrynin told me afterward that he had told Sukhodrev to refrain from translating some of Brezhnev’s more pointed remarks. But what got through was clear enough. Brezhnev wanted to settle the Middle East conflict that summer and the terms he proposed were the Arabs’ demands. The facts were that there was no chance even of launching a serious peace process before the Israeli election four months away, and there was no possibility at any time of achieving the terms Brezhnev was proposing. For Nixon to force the issue at the height of Watergate hearings would have added the allegation of engaging in a diversionary maneuver to the charge of betraying an ally. In any event, the program put forward by Brezhnev was unacceptable to us on its merits.

  To be sure, Brezhnev was probably threatening as much from frustration as from conviction. He must have heard the same Egyptian threats as we had and may have shared our own estimate that such an attempt was bound to end in Arab defeat. He knew that our ally was militarily stronger and that we held the diplomatic keys to a settlement. He wanted to bulldoze us into solving his dilemmas without paying any price. At a minimum he sought to build a record for shifting the onus of a deadlock onto us and to prevent a further erosion of the Soviet position in the Arab world.

  These explanations do not detract from the egregiousness of Brezhnev’s performance. It was a blatant attempt to exploit Nixon’s presumed embarrassment over Watergate — to the visible discomfiture of Dobrynin, who knew that what was being asked was as impossible domestically for us as it was senseless diplomatically. This also must have accounted for the icy aloofness of Gromyko. We were prepared t
o discuss overall principles with Moscow in consultation with our ally Israel and, for that matter, with Egypt, with which preliminary talks had already started. We were not willing to pay for détente in the coin of our geopolitical position. After an hour and a half of Brezhnev’s monologue, Nixon brought matters to a conclusion firmly and with great dignity by stating that he would look over the record of the discussions in the morning; the problem was not as simple as Brezhnev had presented it; the best he could do was to ask me to present a counterdraft to the principles submitted at Zavidovo by Gromyko:

  I will take it into account tomorrow. We won’t say anything in terms of a gentlemen’s agreement. I hope you won’t go back empty-handed. But we have to break up now. It would be very easy for me to say that Israel should withdraw from all the occupied territories and call it an agreed principle. But that’s what the argument is about; I will agree to principles which will bring a settlement. That will be our project this year. The Middle East is a most urgent place.

  That was the end of it. As at the dacha in 1972, Brezhnev subsided. He gave us a synopsis of what he proposed to discuss with Pompidou when he stopped in Paris on the way home. But the bad taste remained, and we could not forget the conversation in Nixon’s study when the Middle East exploded a little more than three months afterward.

  On the final day, June 24, as is always the case in meetings with Soviet leaders, the squalls had lifted. Brezhnev and Nixon said goodbye on the lawn in front of the residence in San Clemente. Brezhnev thanked Nixon profusely and stressed that he was leaving with “a good feeling.” He looked forward to welcoming Nixon to the Soviet Union the following year and expected that further progress would be made then. Nixon asserted that the improvement of US–Soviet relations served the cause “not only of peace between our two great countries but of building an era in which there can be peace for all the peoples of the world.”

  Nixon accompanied Brezhnev on the short helicopter ride to El Toro Marine Corps Air Station. Brezhnev took the occasion to suggest that the talks on mutual force reductions in Europe might be given impetus if the Soviet Union and the United States began them with a symbolic reduction of perhaps ten thousand men.

  Nothing came of the idea. When Nixon bade Brezhnev farewell, it was the last time they met as equals. The next summit a year later in Moscow took place little more than a month before Nixon’s resignation.

  A Summing Up

  THE 1973 summit laid bare the ambiguities of East-West relations in the nuclear age. Both sides were painfully aware of the risks of war. I continue to believe that Brezhnev was sincerely prepared for a prolonged period of stability. But no Soviet leader can step out of his philosophical skin and abandon the Leninist postulate that a country’s influence is ultimately determined by the correlation of forces. The physical energy of the aging Soviet leadership may have had its limits; its willingness to run risks may have been reduced after a lifetime of struggle. But Soviet leaders literally have no framework for exercising restraint when faced with a propitious balance of power. An opportunity for strategic gain would not be left unexploited indefinitely because of bourgeois scruples or personal relations with Western leaders.

  From this perspective, the impact of the 1973 summit was almost certainly unfortunate — not for foreign policy reasons but because of the dramatic demonstration of America’s internal disarray. By the end of the visit the Soviet party understood that the summit had been overshadowed by Watergate, as Dobrynin told me needlingly two weeks later. More gravely, the summit began to convince the Soviet leaders that Nixon’s problems might turn out to be terminal. This did not yet tempt them to adventures staking Soviet assets. But it undoubtedly made them less willing to expend capital on preventing adventures by friendly nations — and thus it surely contributed to the Middle East war.

  Almost immediately the perception of Watergate slowed the pace of diplomacy. Brezhnev took himself out of the direct line of fire in US–Soviet negotiations. There was no sense involving the prestige of the General Secretary with the possible collapse of the Nixon Presidency. As in negotiations on the Year of Europe, diplomacy became more bureaucratic, less bold. The 1974 Moscow summit between Brezhnev and Nixon turned into a pale imitation of the first two without thrust or underlying purpose.

  The strategy of the Nixon Administration presupposed a decisive President willing to stake American power to resist Soviet expansionism and ready to negotiate seriously if the Soviets would accept coexistence on this basis. But both of these courses of action were being destroyed by our domestic passion play. Therefore many of our critics missed the fundamental point. Liberals accused us of being too Machiavellian; conservatives, of being too accommodating. Neither fully understood that we had no real choice. Watergate did not permit us the luxury of a confrontational foreign policy, and it deprived conciliatory policies of their significance. Moderation, after all, is a virtue only in those who are thought to have an alternative. In the nuclear age there is no substitute, I am convinced, for a long-range policy that avoids either confrontation for its own sake or acquiescence in Soviet expansion. We must resist marginal accretions of Soviet power even when the issues seem ambiguous. And we must be ready for real coexistence should the opportunity appear. That is a challenge of unprecedented complexity, requiring acute judgment, resolution, and faith. In the early Seventies it was engulfed by our domestic crises. But the challenge remains, and the way America responds will determine whether a free society can preserve its security and advance its values.

  * * *

  I. The distinguished, now neoconservative, journal Commentary, for example, in 1970 criticized Nixon for his ABM program, MIRV testing, and laxity in pursuing SALT. It bitterly opposed Nixon’s Vietnam policy and once came close to welcoming an American defeat.1

  II. In 1965, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara defined the “assured destruction” requirement as the capacity to destroy one-fourth to one-third of the Soviet population and two-thirds of Soviet industry. Three years later, the requirement was lowered; in 1968 it was defined as one-fifth to one-fourth of the Soviet population and one-half of Soviet industry.13

  III. Nixon’s Foreign Policy Reports of 1970–1973, written by me and my staff, called repeatedly for a change in targeting, but little was done until the stewardship of James R. Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense. Paradoxically, however, the decline of our capability for a counterforce strategy turned even the more sophisticated targeting into a risky tit-for-tat option with no logical stopping place once it was embarked upon.

  IV. The strategic significance of equal aggregates would depend on the level at which the numbers were equalized. For example, one favorite proposal was to equalize missile throwweight. As a result of unilateral procurement decisions made by each side in the Sixties, Soviet throwweight was about four times our own. On the other hand, the weight of warheads on our airplanes more than made up the difference. Advocates of a throwweight limitation, looking for the most advantageous definition for us, therefore urged that it be confined to ICBMs. Their argument was not unreasonable; bomber throwweight was not, in fact, suitable for surprise attacks because of the long time it took for airplanes to reach their targets. What was never explained was why the Soviets would accept our definition or how we would convince them to do so given known building programs. But assuming there were equal ICBM throwweight limitations, if the ceiling was set at the Soviet level and there were no limitations on MIRVS, both sides would develop a first-strike capability. This violated every precept of arms control because in a crisis it would give each side an incentive to strike first. But if we did not build up to the Soviet level - and there were neither programs nor proposals to do so — the “equality” would remain theoretical; only the Soviets would gain a first-strike capability. This was even more dangerous; it would compound conventional inferiority by strategic instability. A joint ceiling at the Soviet level was no doubt easy to negotiate, if we lost our sanity, since it was meaningless; it constrained no Sovi
et program and gave us a freedom we were unlikely to use. Pursuing the idea of equality in the other direction — getting the Soviets to come down to our levels — was chasing illusions. They would want us to give them something in return, such as accepting continued inequality in launchers. This was precluded by the Defense Department’s near-religious dedication to equal aggregates. Or else we would have to threaten a massive buildup of our forces. In the fevered Congressional climate of the closing stages of the Vietnam war and the beginning of Watergate, there was no possibility of this either. We would be lucky to keep what we had.

  V. The Verification Panel was an interagency subcommittee of the National Security Council with responsibility for SALT planning. It included representatives of the Departments of State and Defense, CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, ACDA, and NSC staff, under my chairmanship.

  VI. Having saved long-range cruise missiles in 1973 did not keep me from being attacked two years later for allegedly slighting them in SALT negotiations.

  VII. American officials in charge of the planning may have contributed to Brezhnev’s reluctance to take side trips. They proposed to a Soviet advance team a visit to Pittsburgh, where Brezhnev could meet American steelworkers — mostly of Polish, Czech, or Serbian ancestry — and could walk along a catwalk overlooking the blast furnaces. The Soviets quickly ruled this out, testifying either to the rapid communications with Moscow or the prudence of Brezhnev’s trip planners. A Soviet politician who has survived to reach the Politburo probably has learned not to get too close to blast furnaces, particularly if run by East Europeans.