Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Were all the postures and frictions a matter, then, of appearances? Jobert did not reveal his thinking. Rather, having in effect stated his personal agreement with our Middle East policy, he began to harass us over Europe. He accused us of using, of all countries, Luxembourg to block the unity of the Nine. This was too absurd even for Jobert to pursue, so he ended the discussion with another paradox: “Well, you will never have a strong Europe anyway.” Then why all the fierce speeches and challenging statements? Jobert acted like a man doomed to act out failure for the honor of his country. He was similarly ambiguous about the various Atlantic declarations. He might or might not try his hand at a European Community draft; he would let me know early in January (in fact he never did). Anyway, he averred, the result would not make much difference. Jobert saw the complexities of the situation but not the direction that might lead to their resolution. Or perhaps he felt that any resolution would threaten France’s preeminence in Europe. In that case, the best outcome for France was that nothing should happen; Jobert on that reading had a vested interest in stalemate.

  And that was in effect Georges Pompidou’s theme when I saw him for the last time the next day, December 20, 1973. Pompidou was made of sterner stuff than Jobert. He was less playful and he knew that he was dying. He showed no sign of the excruciating pain that I learned later racked him almost constantly. He was courtly and polite as always. But perhaps the foreshortened perspective that fate had imposed on him accounted for the uncharacteristic abruptness with which he dismissed every conceivable initiative. He declared France’s lack of interest in the Geneva Conference, since it had been excluded by the Soviet Union and the United States. As for relations between the United States and Europe, he was leery of any attempt to codify them:

  I can tell you as a Frenchman that we see no need to have a formal declaration as a basis for relations between Europe and the U.S. But we don’t feel strongly about it — we would rather prefer that there be no declaration at all or that it be a very brief declaration and more at the European initiative, which would eliminate the need for an American “nihil obstat.”

  And he was opposed as well to my proposal of an Energy Action Group. Any grouping of oil consumers involved a risk of confrontation with the producers. He would not accept the slightest chance of a cutoff in oil supplies to France; hence, there was no point in a grouping of consumers.

  If France insisted on freedom of action on the Middle East, refused to participate in a consumer grouping on energy, and saw no point in any Atlantic declaration, little was left of the Atlantic dialogue. When two views of the future clash, only one of them can turn out to be right. What cannot be created by foresight must then be brought about through experience. And it was to this, the most painful method of education, that the Atlantic nations had by their disunity doomed themselves. The Year of Europe was over.

  What Went Wrong?

  MANY factors combined to produce disappointment. Most of the criticisms that were made in 1973 have since paled in significance and some were petty and partisan: that we were more at ease negotiating with adversaries than with allies; that we had insufficient consultation with European nations; that we were pressuring friends.

  To be sure, it was less complex negotiating with authoritarian governments, but we were much more deeply committed to the Year of Europe than to any initiative toward the Communist world. That is why we turned the other cheek to so many rebuffs. As for consultations, the account I have given leaves little doubt that the Year of Europe was awash with them.

  No doubt we made tactical errors. To attempt a major foreign policy initiative of this kind from the office of national security adviser was awkward. That was the way the President wanted it and with Secretary Rogers on the way out, I was certainly keen to try. We had achieved our successes in other areas without the State Department. But relations with Europe did not lend themselves to secret diplomacy followed by spectacular pronouncements. There were too many nations involved to permit the use of backchannels. North Atlantic diplomacy had well-established patterns for consultation that were guarded jealously, sometimes ferociously, by their bureaucracies. Had I been Secretary of State at the beginning, instead of national security adviser, I might well have been more sensitive to the need to engage allied foreign offices. But from the White House it was easier to deal with heads of government, and this antagonized the experts in the ministries whose goodwill was essential for the kind of detailed negotiations required by our initiative.

  These were only the superficial difficulties. The real problems were deeper and they lay in four areas: the Mideast conflict; East-West relations; the movement toward greater political unity in Europe; and Watergate.

  The Middle East crisis brought to the surface two basic issues in Atlantic relations: What is the correct behavior for allies in an area not covered by formal treaty obligations but affecting the vital interests of each partner? And how should allies conduct themselves when they fundamentally disagree with one another’s policies? Not all allied disagreements present the same problem, of course. There are issues that so predominantly affect one party that not much is gained by seeking a consensus. In such instances, understanding and acquiescence — or maybe quiet consultations — can prevent dangerous disagreement. Our attitude toward Brandt’s Ostpolitik was a case in point. The difficult issues are those that involve comparable interests of the two sides and different perceptions of them. That emphatically was the case in the Middle East.

  With respect to juridical obligation, I reiterate my belief that if the Atlantic Alliance is reduced to its legal content, it will sooner or later fail even in the area covered by formal obligation. The lifeblood of an alliance is the shared conviction that the security, in its widest sense, of each ally is a vital interest to the others; in crises they must not have the attitude that they will check with their lawyers to determine their legal duty. Ultimately, the Western Alliance must be sustained by the hearts as well as the minds of its members. It follows that a threat to the vital interests of a partner cannot be treated with indifference even if it is not technically encompassed by any provision of the Alliance treaty. Clearly, if Western security is jeopardized, it cannot make a decisive difference whence this threat originates. If the Soviet Union came to dominate the Middle East, it would have a grip on NATO’s lifeline; the collapse of Europe would follow as surely as if Soviet armies marched to the English Channel. If the radical Arab regimes gained the upper hand, the same results would occur if by some more circuitous processes — though some European countries do not share this judgment.

  But what does the theoretical importance of allied unity outside the NATO area imply for circumstances in which views radically differ? Are allies required to submerge their judgments to the unilateral decisions of a senior partner? This is how the issue was frequently posed by our European allies and it permits no theoretical answer. Major efforts must be made, far beyond what has been the case, to prevent such a clash from occurring. If differences cannot be reconciled, one or the other partner must be wise enough to stand aside at least long enough to permit one policy to prevail. If each ally insists on implementing its clashing views, competition or conflict must mathematically ensue. Each side runs the risk of thwarting the other without being able to achieve its own purposes. Divisions will tempt new outside pressures; the Alliance runs the risk of disintegrating.

  In the fall of 1973, the Atlantic Alliance seemed unable to break this vicious circle. Whatever the judgment of some of our allies about our Mideast policy prior to the war, the practical consequence of their actions described in this chapter was to paralyze our strategy if they succeeded or to underline European impotence if they failed. And for better or worse, we were the only ally in a position to produce rapid progress, which in turn was the prerequisite to defusing the crisis and reducing Soviet opportunities for political gain. That Europe differed with us on how to handle cease-fire violations was understandable; that it published its views on the day I
arrived in Cairo complicated both our strategy and Sadat’s, to the ultimate benefit of no free country.

  The word “Europe” as used in this chapter is in fact a misnomer. The opposition to us was led by France in the person of Michel Jobert, supported by Heath and tolerated by Brandt for their own reasons. The Benelux countries, Denmark, and Italy were uneasy about the growing confrontation. They were not inclined to challenge our policies on the Middle East even when they had private reservations. But they also prized the newfound Community political institutions, which put a premium on the appearance of monolithic cohesion. The European Community seemed to find political consensus by one of two methods: either a lowest common denominator of vacuity or vagueness, or any policy advocated passionately by one partner that the others who felt less strongly (or might even disagree with mildly) considered themselves obligated to support for the sake of European unity.

  As for East-West relations, they helped to prompt our initiative, and were a principal cause of its failure. We wanted to provide a psychological ballast to the democracies’ approaches to the Communist world. As I said in the Pilgrims speech, it was important to overcome the anomaly that the public tended increasingly to identify foreign policy successes with relations with adversaries. We were serious about a reaffirmation of Atlantic solidarity. We were prepared to subordinate détente policy to the consensus of our allies. But not all our allies were ready for similar undertakings. Several of them had developed a large stake, both domestic and international, in their unilateral overtures to the East. As the speech of Jobert quoted on page 711 shows, some of our partners wanted us to slow down our détente efforts so that they could accelerate their own.

  France and Germany, eager as they were to circumscribe our freedom of action, were not prepared to pay in the coin of a coordinated Western policy. Brandt did not wish to see his Ostpolitik constrained by the need to seek a larger Atlantic consensus. A free-wheeling German diplomacy aroused uneasiness in Paris. Earlier in the 1970s Pompidou had sought to counterbalance Germany by moving closer to us; in 1973, under the influence of Jobert, suspicion of Bonn brought Pompidou’s Gaullist instincts to the fore — seeking to tie down Germany by stressing European interests in contradistinction to American and competing with Germany in separate approaches to the East. That a European race to Moscow might sooner or later represent the first steps toward the possible Finlandization of Europe — in the sense that loosened political ties to America could not forever exclude the security field — was either lost, ignored, or ridiculed in the obsession with immediate tactics that for statesmen too often covers a deep uneasiness about the future.

  The third major cause of deadlock was that Europe’s political body-clock was out of phase with ours. Now that the Vietnam war was over, we sought creative tasks that would transcend our domestic traumas. But our allies had no such compulsions. On the contrary, they felt that they had enough on their plates. After much delay, the Common Market had expanded from the Six to the Nine at the beginning of 1973. Our proposal to discuss Atlantic relations inevitably if unintentionally raised the question of who would speak for Europe, and the Europeans sought the answer by evolving procedures so formalistic as to be incompatible with any normal idea of consultation. Even leaders who saw no incompatibility between strengthened Atlantic ties and European unity were afraid that Europe could not handle the two processes simultaneously. Sir Alec Douglas-Home came close to asserting this when he said:

  In an ideal world, we would have chosen a different time scale. We would have preferred that the new community of nine had time to shake down and find its way towards common positions with greater deliberation. But the pressure of events on both sides of the Atlantic and in Japan obliges us all to quicken the pace.

  Others, especially the smaller countries, agreed with Jean Monnet’s thesis that a transatlantic dialogue might actually assist European unity by forcing Europe to speak with one voice. But this only landed us in the middle of the decade-old European dispute between France, which insisted on leadership in a united Europe, and countries like Belgium that insisted on formal equality, with the Federal Republic maneuvering uneasily in between the different conceptions.

  For some Europeans — especially for France — the fact of European unity was inseparable from the manner in which it came about. They did not want unity to emerge from an American initiative. Heath, in Britain, had a similar view: At a minimum it raised for him the hateful prospect of having to choose between Paris and Washington, which he believed had aborted his negotiations for British entry into Europe in 1963. He preemptively opted for Paris before a choice was even demanded. Brandt was initially the most forthcoming, though in the context of 1973 that is a relative term. But even he was not willing to make an issue of it with his colleagues in France and Britain, especially as he preferred to avoid a tightening of Atlantic bonds in order to preserve his freedom of action for Ostpolitik.

  Our dilemma was that if we followed Monnet’s advice and pressed European unity, we would guarantee a repetition of the Franco-American disputes of the 1960s because Paris would construe it as contesting its claim to leadership in Europe. By taking account of French sensibilities and dealing through France rather than the European Community, however, we alienated many of the natural supporters of our initiative. In order to prevent being excluded, the smaller European states clung to the consultative procedures of the European Community, which were untried, time-consuming, and a major source of difficulty. And so, by a different route, we too wound up in a quarrel with France, after all — proving, I suppose, that success does not always lie in doing the exact opposite of what had failed in the previous decade.

  The contending pressures might have been shaped into a creative response by a dominant European statesman. Unfortunately, the key European leaders who might have reached for such a role were all facing problems of their own. In 1973, Pompidou had already begun the physical martyrdom which, together with the drugs to combat the disease, deprived him of the concentration and the inward aloofness essential for sustained policymaking. He needed all his strength to marshal his energies for the display of stoicism by which he obscured his agony so well that even our intelligence analysts debated the seriousness of his illness. Knowing his time was limited, he was in a hurry to arrange affairs, easily peeved, and understandably more resentful of heavy-handed tactics than he would have been had he been vouchsafed a longer perspective. We had counted on Pompidou as an ally in the Year of Europe, and I believe he would have been, in ordinary conditions.

  By a twist of fate, each of the other principals in the Atlantic dialogue was robbed nearly simultaneously of perspective and authority either by personal or by domestic circumstance. Willy Brandt, having accomplished his symbolic breakthrough to the East, was now confronting a host of mundane problems in economic policy and day-to-day diplomacy that were less suited to his special talents. Increasingly there was talk of replacing him. Within six months his own party found a pretext for removing him from office. When we put forward our initiative, Edward Heath seemed dominant in Britain. As 1973 proceeded, he too found himself consumed in struggles over industrial policy in Britain.

  But while Europe’s various hesitations had a reasonable basis and we were not always sensitive to them, there is little excuse for the brusque, indeed dismissive, manner with which the European nations, for all their problems, dealt with the country that had restored their economies and on which they continued to rely for their security. It was one thing to assert Europe’s identity and to work for its cohesion; it was another to seek it through tactics of deliberate confrontation with the United States.

  That Europe might not wish America to be involved in defining its own internal arrangements was understandable enough; European integration, even in the Monnet version, was always partly motivated by a desire to achieve independence from Washington. But our allies could have achieved this objective as easily, and more constructively, by bringing the Year of Europe to a rapid
conclusion and then turning to the elaboration of their institutions on the bedrock of a newly defined Atlantic relationship. What a year later became the Declaration of Atlantic Relations could have been drafted within three months of the offer and culminated at a summit meeting within the framework of the Alliance. Instead, our allies chose a procedure that was wounding, unworkable, and disruptive. It was never followed again.

  The various procedural and technical objections by European leaders were in part a reflection of Watergate. Nixon, of course, was facing the worst crisis of all his colleagues, though he clung to office the longest. A reaffirmation of the moral unity of the West simply could not be led by a President of the United States facing impeachment.

  We had intriguing testimony of the influence of Watergate in a dispatch in September reporting the view of Etienne Davignon, political director of the Belgian Foreign Ministry, that Jobert had shown a new interest in concluding the Year of Europe rapidly because he predicted that Watergate would be over by November and thereafter America’s bargaining position would improve. There was plenty of other evidence. Early in Nixon’s second term, Britain had explored a State visit (meaning the President would come in his capacity as head of state and stay at Buckingham Palace). These discussions languished as soon as the full extent of Watergate became apparent. Willy Brandt technically maintained his invitation but the permanent head of the German Foreign Office was reliably reported to have said that a Presidential visit might give rise to “immoderate events,” an elegant expression for public demonstrations. The French invitation was never withdrawn, but no date was ever proposed for it.