We believe that we are now well on the way toward accomplishing what we set out to do earlier this year. The discussions have been useful, and they will proceed in a constructive spirit.
The disputes so far largely concerned procedures rather than substance, timing rather than purpose. Everybody — even Jobert — had shied away from open confrontation and had taken pains to insist that disagreements reflected misunderstanding or technical disputes rather than conflicting interests. In all likelihood, if the initiative had been allowed to play itself out, it would have been brought to a tolerable conclusion; there was, after all, a limit beyond which procedural obstructionism could not be pushed. The outcome would probably have been short of the ultimate hopes of my Year of Europe speech but it would have reflected enough of its aspirations to indicate a positive direction.
But the outbreak of the Middle East war ended what was either an illusion or a charade. On some issues of major concern to the allies, differing and occasionally even clashing interests emerged. And what was even more painful, some of our allies seemed to be looking for an opportunity to make them explicit.
The Impact of the Middle East War
LIKE the deep frustrations suppressed by a family for the sake of appearances that then explode with disproportionate fury at the first pretext, the accumulated tensions in our alliances suddenly erupted with the outbreak of the Middle East war. The hitherto theoretical arguments about whether American and European interests were always parallel, the until-now abstract debate about the nature and limits of détente, burst forth from the first day of the war.
It was not that our allies did not have a case from their perspective. Most were genuinely convinced that our failure to press a settlement on Israel had produced the war, that we had in effect put vital European interests at risk for reasons of American domestic politics. The always latent view that Mideast tensions would suddenly disappear if only Israel would return to the 1967 borders was put forward with increasing explicitness. Our arguments to the contrary — that Arab radicalism derived partly from ideology and not solely from the Arab-Israeli conflict; that concessions achieved under Soviet pressure would strengthen rather than weaken the radical position; that to set unachievable goals would undermine the prestige of the democracies — were even less persuasive when panic replaced analysis. Our European allies had no faith in the step-by-step approach; they thought that they could win over the radical Arab states. Before the Middle East war, the dispute had rested uneasily beneath the surface; neither side of the Atlantic had pushed its views to a showdown. But once the war was under way, many of our allies made up for their earlier restraint.
For present purposes, the issue is not whose analysis was correct. I have explained our reasoning at length in previous chapters. The European position was certainly not frivolous; Europe’s dependence on oil was compounded by frustration at being a bystander to crisis in a region of its previous preeminence. The deeper problem raised by the October war was the proper conduct of allies in an emergency when they sincerely disagree with one another either about causes or about remedies: Should they use the occasion of their partners’ embarrassment to vindicate their own views? Or do they have an obligation to subordinate their differences to the realization that the humiliation of the ally who, for better or worse, is most strategically placed to affect the outcome weakens the structure of common defense and the achievement of joint purposes? In 1956, when faced with this choice during the British and French attempt to seize the Suez Canal, the United States imposed its own assessment on its allies. While dubious about British and French military plans, I had bitterly opposed Eisenhower Administration policy then. I have always believed that many of our later difficulties have stemmed from our insensitive conduct toward our allies at that time, which both stimulated a long-festering resentment and fostered a sense of impotence that accelerated their withdrawal from overseas commitments and added to American burdens.
Now the tables were turned and Europe showed no greater wisdom than we had nearly two decades earlier. On the first day of the war, October 6, Britain and France were unwilling to go along with our suggestion for a UN cease-fire resolution that would urge the parties to return to the status quo ante. On October 10, our NATO ally Turkey advised us that Incirlik Air Base and other American facilities in Turkey were available for NATO purposes only; they could not be used for anything to do with the Middle East war. On October 11, Turkey went public with its position. With its arch-rival thus publicly committed, Greece could not be far behind. On October 13, Foreign Secretary Christos Xanthopoulos-Palamas announced that “US bases have nothing to do with the Arab-Israeli war.”1 (October 13 happened to be the start of our all-out airlift.)
Franco’s Spain, though not a member of NATO, was tied to the United States by a treaty of friendship and cooperation. Nevertheless, on October 11 the Spanish government declared that it would not permit the United States to utilize Spanish bases “in a local conflict such as the Arab-Israeli war.” In case that statement was not sufficiently explicit, a second statement issued later left no loopholes: Our bases in Spain could not be used in connection with the Middle East war “at any time, in any way, directly or indirectly.”2
Whatever one’s view of the wisdom of our past Mideast policy, which our allies had criticized, by then the die had been cast; the longer the war continued, the greater the risks for all democracies. The best hope for avoiding disaster was to end the war as rapidly as possible and in this a show of Western unity could have played an important role. Instead, all our NATO allies except Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Federal Republic of Germany (for a time) either directly or indirectly dissociated from the airlift and banned our overflight of their territories. Henceforth American planes from Germany had to fly out over the Atlantic, skirt France and Spain, enter the Mediterranean at Gibraltar, and fly directly to Israel — a detour of nearly 2,000 miles. (After the war I complained to Sir Alec Douglas-Home that the Soviet Union had been freer to use NATO airspace than the United States, for much of the Soviet airlift to the Middle East overflew allied airspace without challenge.)
Throughout the war we were given to understand, in the many indirect ways available to a government as close to us as Britain’s, that it would be appreciated in London if we did not use British bases either for the airlift or for intelligence collection in the Middle East. There was never a formal refusal on the airlift because it had been made plain that we should not ask. Our occasional overflights of the combat zone by SR-71 supersonic high-altitude reconnaissance — essential for our decision-making process — had therefore to originate in the United States, adding to our expenses and reducing their effectiveness. There was the additional difficulty that the bases on allied territory for the tankers that refueled the planes were also closed — a proscription we could avoid only by some complicated maneuvers.
Typical of the attitudes we faced, on October 11 Jobert had told me in Washington that France had no wish to participate in the diplomacy to end the war. Only the United States and the Soviet Union were in a position to succeed: “If the two great powers do not agree, then we can’t do anything ourselves.” Jobert stated that France would not take any precipitate action and — unusual for him — had some kind words for our tactics. None of this stopped him only six days later from violently attacking us in a speech before the National Assembly while the war was still going on. After depicting Israel as the country that had consistently prevented Middle East peace, Jobert castigated both the United States and the USSR for keeping the war going, in the process postulating the moral equivalence of the two sides — the intellectual presupposition of European neutralism: “We see Mr. Brezhnev, the apostle of détente, and Dr. Kissinger, now a Nobel Peace Prize winner, shaking hands while sending thousands of tons of arms by air.”
Dissociation from us in the Middle East war was thus coupled with an attempt to opt out of any possible crisis with the Soviet Union. There was a tendency to gloat about th
e flimsiness of “our” détente with the Soviets — as if our allies had not preceded us on that road by several years and pressed us to follow them. At the same time, they expected the crises to be resolved by our ability to use that very détente.
It was true, as NATO Secretary General Joseph Luns publicly pointed out on October 14, that during some phases of the Middle East war the Soviet Union had violated the principles of international conduct signed between Brezhnev and Nixon in 1972,3 specifically the pledge not to seek unilateral advantage. But why was the comment addressed exclusively to the United States? Since the principal European countries had signed similar documents several years before, they had every possibility to protest in their own names. Instead, they left the containment of the Soviets in the Middle East to us. Soviet expansionism was an exclusively American problem only if one assumed that American and European objectives in the Middle East were divergent, if Europe had less to fear from a radicalized Middle East. This was absurd, for the impact of Soviet domination of the Middle East would be even more serious for Europe than for us. Moreover, if it was important to hold the Kremlin to its commitments not to exacerbate conflict, Europe and America had to do this together. Economic pressures, slowing down or even abandoning the European Security Conference, reducing exchanges — all this, as was seen in subsequent years, required joint action on both sides of the Atlantic.
But as the fear of confrontation mounted, several of our allies moved in the opposite direction. They continued to press for concluding the European Security Conference at the summit level; they would not risk over the Middle East the web of their economic relations with the Communist world — which grew increasingly vital to them for economic reasons as the oil crisis triggered a worldwide recession. Once again Jobert gave the concept its most rigorous cast.
If during the war Jobert had seemed to postulate the moral equivalence of both the United States and the Soviet Union, immediately afterward he was more positive in detailing areas of cooperation with the Soviet Union than with the United States. Indeed, one of his principal objections to Soviet-American détente was that it might deflect the Soviet Union from multiplying its contacts and trade with Europe.I Détente served a triple purpose, each part aimed at the United States: It was blamed for not preventing the Mideast crisis; it was invoked to end the tension; and it was supposed to furnish for Europe an alternative to exclusive reliance on the United States.
Once the Middle East erupted, the issue ought not to have been whether American policy before or even during the war had always been wise. The problem was whether Europe could protect its interests best by separation from us or by closing ranks. Did flirtation with the radical Arab position guarantee oil supplies, or did it encourage intransigence that might prolong the war and paralyze diplomacy? Did proposals that had no chance of being accepted help the peace process, or did they undermine the position of Arab moderates like Sadat who were prepared to move in a series of attainable steps? Did detachment from the United States moderate Soviet policy, or did it tempt the Kremlin to play the Western allies off against one another, imperiling the security of all free peoples? We thought that unity promised the greatest benefits; most of our allies chose the route of dissociation.
Europe avoided facing this painful reality by means of an essentially legalistic argument to the effect that obligations of the North Atlantic Treaty did not extend to the Middle East. But our case for allied cohesion was based not on a legal claim but on the imperatives of common interests. When close allies act toward one another like clever lawyers, if they exclude an area as crucial as the Middle East from their common concern, their association becomes vulnerable to fluctuating passion.
The stampede of dissociation began with the cease-fire and the Arab cutback in oil production. The prospect of my trip to Moscow had been warmly welcomed by Home in a personal message on my departure; in Moscow on October 21 I had briefed the British and French ambassadors within an hour of the completion of my cease-fire talks with Brezhnev; indeed, thanks to the communications breakdown described in Chapter XII, it is probable that London and Paris learned the results of my discussions in the Kremlin before Washington and certainly before Jerusalem. But when the October 22 cease-fire came under stress, the tenuous allied cohesion evaporated. On October 23 our Ambassador in Bonn, Martin Hillenbrand, was abruptly informed that the Federal Republic would no longer approve shipments of American equipment to Israel from German ports; a second strong German démarche was made the next day. The formulation of the German request was symptomatic: State Secretary Paul Franck of the Foreign Office suggested to Hillenbrand that the Federal Republic, having shown understanding for our interests during the war, was now entitled to ask for our understanding of their interests (as if German interests had not been involved and they had done us a favor).
The alert screwed tensions tighter. Our allies did not take comfort from the fact – as they might have — that even during the crisis of authority over Watergate, the United States was prepared to run a major risk to defend the global equilibrium. Instead, they concentrated on the indisputable fact that there had been no prior consultation over an alert that involved US troops stationed in Europe. The alert had been brought about by our conviction that the Soviets were contemplating sending troops into the Middle East and that we had only a few hours to warn them off. We sought to demonstrate that we took the prospect of Soviet intervention seriously.
Afterward, there were press reports of the “shock wave” that had crept over Europe after the “explosive news” of the American alert.4 There were widespread complaints that some allies had learned of the alert only from news tickers. This was, of course, not true of all governments. As noted in Chapter XII, we had informed British Ambassador Cromer early on October 25 of both Brezhnev’s threatening letter and our readiness measures, barely an hour after making the preliminary decisions and well before they had been implemented. And Cromer had later confirmed that London agreed with our assessment of the seriousness of Brezhnev’s threat. However, Britain had the same problem with our advance notice of the alert as with our special consultations on the Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War (see Chapter VII). Unwilling to draw attention to the fact that they still enjoyed preferential status in Washington, British officials did nothing to stem the tide of criticism from the other allies — and fell in with the prevailing brouhaha over inadequate consultation. On October 31 the New York Times reported that Prime Minister Heath on the previous day had pointedly refused to endorse the nuclear alert — raising temperatures in Washington a few more notches.
Abstractly, our allies were justified in their complaints. Realistically, we had little time and we had to balance serious considerations. Our eye was on an imminent Soviet military move; our plan was to increase readiness and permit the Soviets to detect our preparations. This, we hoped, would give the Soviets pause; our written reply to Brezhnev, to be delivered around 5:30 A.M. Washington time, would give them a pretext for resolving the issue. Our Ambassador to NATO, Donald Rumsfeld, would be instructed to brief NATO an hour after our note to the Soviets was delivered. We chose this timing above all because we knew that to obtain allied support we would have had to give reassurances of the limits of our commitment; we preferred that these not reach Moscow via our allies until the Politburo had made at least a preliminary decision.
The allies were really objecting not so much to timing as to the absence of opportunity to affect our decision. But imminent danger did not brook an exchange of views and, to be frank, we could not have accepted a judgment different from our own. There was no middle position between alert and no alert. At issue were only readiness measures, not actions. In our perception, nevertheless, it was a clear emergency, and it fell to us to act as custodians of Western security. Whether our estimate of the danger was correct must be decided by more impartial students of the period. But on that night of potential crisis, our duty was to act on the facts as we perceived them. Of course, unilateral s
teps such as the alert can only be a last resort; allies should be consulted whenever possible. But emergencies are sure to arise again; and it will not be in anyone’s interest if the chief protector of free world security is hamstrung by bureaucratic procedure in the face of imminent Soviet intervention.
Dissociation from the alert ironically extended even to the diplomacy by which we sought to end the looming US–Soviet confrontation. In order to give the Soviets a face-saving way out — and to erect a legal obstacle to a unilateral Soviet move — we had promoted the idea of a United Nations Emergency Force from which all permanent members of the Security Council were excluded. We thought we had won when Sadat had accepted our proposal. But Britain and France objected to their exclusion, though I do not understand to this day what benefit participation in a UN force would have conferred on them. Their UN ambassadors briefly threatened a veto even though this would have risked reopening the issue of Soviet troops in the Middle East.
The Federal Republic of Germany on October 25 — the day of the alert — chose to make public what it had already told us privately; a peremptory government statement was issued:
Weapons deliveries using West German territory or installations from American depots in West Germany to one of the warring parties cannot be allowed. The West German government is relying on America to finally halt deliveries from and over West Germany.
Since we were already carrying out the Federal Republic’s private request, the purpose of the public statement could only be to distance Bonn from Washington for the benefit of a presumed Arab constituency in the midst of an acute crisis. Similarly, the Spanish government took it upon itself to declare after October 25 that the US alert did not apply to American bases in Spain because the consent of both countries was required for their use. On October 26 our allies, at the request of France, suspended work on the NATO draft declaration as a sign of displeasure over the fact that the American alert had been called without adequate consultation. On October 27 an Italian government spokesman stated that membership in the Alliance did not oblige Italy to assist the United States in its Middle East policy.
Years of Upheaval Page 105