Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  What Jobert proposed was a multistage scheme. Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan should each elaborate its own autonomous energy policy and conduct separately its relations with the oil-producing countries. On a second level, they could cooperate on high-technology projects such as deep-water drilling and gasification of coal. Third, all industrial democracies could cooperate on conservation and similar efforts within the framework of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) — a loose grouping of the key industrial nations, descended from the Marshall Plan organization, not known for decisive or rapid action. Finally, the consumer countries would not face the producers as a unit but would deal essentially bilaterally at a world conference devoted to energy matters in preparation for an even more sweeping conference dealing with raw materials in general.

  Jobert’s scheme was clever but too transparent. He sought access to American advanced technology while throwing all other issues into a forum so unwieldy that each consuming nation would be free — indeed, forced — to act on its own. Moreover, the unorganized consumers would be encountering not individual producers but OPEC. It seemed to us that the French proposal would institutionalize the weakness of the industrial democracies rather than overcome it.

  Together with other leaders who favored the European-Arab dialogue, the French strenuously denied any political objective or exclusionary motives. But the secrecy with which the proposed initiative was prepared, the refusal to brief us about its contents, argued otherwise. Gradually we did learn of its scope and implications — usually through diplomats of friendly countries who informed us without the knowledge of other allied partners and occasionally without the knowledge of their own superiors. For example, at a meeting of the political directors (senior foreign office officials) of the European Community in Bonn on January 10–11, France put forward a proposal to begin the European-Arab dialogue at an experts’ level and to culminate it at a foreign ministers’ conference — in itself proof that the purpose could not be the purely technical and cultural exchange that was advertised to us. On January 30, I ordered instructions sent to our European posts stressing that

  consultation is a two way street and before the member states launch a major initiative in the Middle East, we would expect every effort be made to arrange consultations between us in advance and to avoid the possibility of divergent policies. . . .

  On February 1, the Middle East experts of the European Community met. When the question of briefing the United States was raised, the West German representative chairing the meeting said that the United States was already informed of general proposals and principles. This statement was true in the sense that unauthorized leaks had alerted us; they hardly provided a basis for serious discussion. It was also demeaning.

  On February 6–7, the political directors met again and substantially adopted the French recommendation that the European-Arab dialogue lead to a conference at the foreign minister level. We were never told of this decision officially; in fact, a proposal that I be briefed by German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel in his capacity as President of the Council of Ministers was blocked by France.

  Our objection was not to a European-Arab dialogue as such; that was as natural as it was inevitable. We were uneasy about aspects of both procedure and substance. Our allies did not hesitate to use NATO consultative procedures to inform themselves on American policies; at the same time they avoided discussing Community decisions with us until they were irrevocable, by shunting them off into tortuous new procedures requiring the prior approval of all allies. So long as this process was confined to Atlantic relations it was irritating, but its damage was limited to frustrating new departures. In the cauldron of the Middle East, however, the European initiative of a foreign ministers’ conference threatened to sabotage our carefully elaborated strategy. We were proceeding step by step; the European Community had committed itself publicly to a comprehensive solution. We dealt with each of the principal Mideast parties separately; the Europeans were aiming at a conclave assembling all Arab countries, a forum that I was convinced would give the whip hand to the radicals. As I said to British Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home in early February:

  I just wanted you to know that any getting together of all the Arab states — moderates and radicals — would have most unfortunate consequences. It is bound to lead the radicals to make extreme statements which will be very difficult for the moderates to resist. This will immediately lead to pressures on the European leaders to endorse every point on the Arab radicals’ program. Second, they will link all the issues together and this is bound to have a negative effect on our political negotiations. Sadat has told us that the only way to deal with this situation is piece by piece. . . . If you go ahead with this EC initiative it is bound to upset things and then we will have to go in and pick up the pieces.

  The dialogue with the Arabs, moreover, was being urged by France explicitly as an alternative to a unified consumer challenge to the oil producers. Even those European leaders who did not share the French hostility to our approach sought relief from the conflicting pressures by adopting portions of each position. The result was institutionalized ambivalence. Few European nations agreed completely with France, yet — as in the Year of Europe — none was prepared for confrontation. Nor did any wish to court our ill will. Therefore, most acknowledged the principle of consumer cooperation but sought to define it so as not to preclude the autonomous policy favored by France. Every move toward one pole evoked a compensating gyration to the other. Early in January many European leaders — though not the French — began to edge toward some kind of energy cooperation. At the same time the European Commission cautioned against approaches to energy that would weaken the “political solidarity the Community intends to demonstrate as evidence of its existence and significance” — clearly a dig at us.

  We could see looming before us the same interminable procedural nightmare that had thwarted the Year of Europe, this time on an issue that did not simply mortgage the future but menaced the present. It was for this reason that we decided to bring matters to a head by extending, on January 9, 1974, a formal Presidential invitation to an energy conference in Washington to be held in early February. Federal Energy Administrator William Simon and I held a joint press conference on January 10 to announce the gathering. We stressed the urgent need for the consumers to achieve a common analysis of the situation and a joint strategy. I said:

  [A]s far as the consuming nations are concerned, the energy situation, and what it portends for the future, will be a test of the whole approach towards the international system that we . . . have pursued . . . towards developing nations for the last 25 years.

  It is a test of the proposition that the world has become truly interdependent, and that isolation and selfish approaches must be destructive for all concerned.

  To head off the endless procedural maneuvers over who would speak for Europe, we issued individual invitations to the major energy-consuming nations in the democratic world — initially those represented on the energy committee of the OECD. The European Community was invited to attend in its own right and to decide the level of its participation.I We would now see whether we would again be faced with the insistence that the European countries would speak to us only through a single instructed representative or whether the importance of the subject would produce a more natural pattern of consultation.

  None of our allies was eager for a consumer conference, and attitudes ranged from resignation to reluctance. But it was one thing to dissociate from us on Mideast diplomacy with statements known to have little impact; it was another to advertise isolation on energy matters from a partner who, if it went the bilateral route, would have by far the stronger bargaining position and who would be needed as a supplier of last resort if there should be a major oil cutoff. As I said to a staff meeting at State on January 8:

  The Europeans have to understand that we believe it to be in the common interest to have a multilat
eral solution which is of no special benefit to any one group or region, because we believe that beggaring your neighbor is going to hurt us all. So that we are prepared to work with them on a truly cooperative scheme, even though we will probably put more into it than they for the sake of world stability. But they must also understand that under no circumstances will we give them a free field for bilateral deals. And if they will not work multilaterally, we will force them by going bilateral ourselves. If we go bilateral, we can preempt them, I think, in most areas. We will under no circumstances turn over the field to them bilaterally.

  All during January we dealt with emissaries — from Britain, the Federal Republic, and smaller states — who sought to do the impossible; they wanted to give us enough of what we proposed for the sake of Atlantic unity, meet French concerns for the articulation of European identity, and court producer goodwill by dissociating from us for the sake of uninterrupted energy supplies. The Japanese also made clear their ambivalence — on the one hand recognizing the need for effective consumer cooperation, on the other hand fearing confrontation with the oil producers. The Prime Ministers of Japan and Britain and the Chancellor of West Germany replied in a week accepting Nixon’s invitation. They indicated great reluctance to create a permanent consumer grouping, which they saw as “provocative” — though the oil producers had never consulted the consumers when forming OPEC and prided themselves on acting as a unit. Each leader made clear that he was looking for an early way to bring the producers into the work of the consumer conference — which was almost a contradiction in terms. All kinds of subterfuges were devised to avoid the only solution that would make any sense: a permanent organization of consumer solidarity. The British — in the vanguard of those cooperating with us — went no further than to propose a “contact group” of ambassadors in Washington to coordinate work going on in existing institutions. No other ally risked that degree of specificity. But a group of ambassadors was a soporific, not a remedy. They would need instructions from meeting to meeting; they would lack a staff for serious work. After a few sessions such an institution would fall into desuetude. I told Alec Home (on February 11) that the issue was both moral and political:

  We ought to be establishing some kind of machinery which will enable us to prepare common positions among the consumers. We need this. Second, thirty million producers seem to have gotten together and established their own position. They have a cartel. Why should they be able to order around the eight hundred million consumers? Why should we assume that the consumers shouldn’t talk together? The important countries in the area are Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both of them are completely dependent on American political support. Why shouldn’t Europe want to use this American political power in the energy field? What we have here is an opportunity for a moral demonstration of what the West can do when it wants to get together and that it cannot be pushed around. We have to have a perception that it is a common problem and that we must work for common solutions.

  In the meantime, where energy was concerned, the European nations were not prepared to entrust their future to a single instructed representative acting for a united Europe. The European Community would participate in some form but so would the foreign ministers of individual countries that had been invited. And the four energy-poor countries of the Community that had not been invited insisted on sending their foreign ministers as well.II In short, on energy, unlike the Alliance itself, we were enabled to deal with allied governments as well as with the Community in the same forum.

  There was one ally who suffered no ambivalence. On January 18, Michel Jobert wrote me one of his “dear friend” letters. He objected to a meeting in Washington, to a conference of foreign ministers, to an association of consumers, to the invitation to Japan, and to the manner of inviting the European Community. It was statistically improbable that one document of a serious government could contain as many errors as he ascribed to our letter of invitation. Nevertheless, he graciously put forward an alternative proposal: France wished to see a United Nations conference on energy problems assembled as quickly as possible, on the theory that this might moderate the positions of producers, consumers, and developing countries. What Jobert omitted was that in a UN conference of 150 nations, OPEC would be united, the consumers divided. The developing countries would undoubtedly be led to side with the producers, either having been bought off with vague promises of concessional prices and economic aid or out of a stubborn sense of “Third World” loyalty. The Communist countries would have a field day viewing and exploiting the West’s discomfiture. The United States would be isolated. Jobert concluded his letter with another of his paradoxes, assuring me of French concern over energy, of his surprise at our invitation to the February conference, but also, and “most important,” of his “very solid friendship.”

  Our Embassy in Paris reported on January 21 that the French viewed our proposal for an energy conference “with a lack of enthusiasm bordering on hostility.” On January 24 Pompidou declared:

  We must talk; producers and consumers must understand one another. Therefore, they must meet, and we are ready to meet bilaterally at the European level with a group of Arab producers, for example, and at a global level between rich and poor consumers — for there are important consumers which are poor and are already suffering severely from the situation. . . .1

  France, in short, would talk with anyone, except with the United States in any forum involving our allies. Nevertheless, one by one they accepted Nixon’s invitation. France’s answer was for Jobert to travel to Syria, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq and mount a direct challenge to American policy. There he sought barter deals for oil on a national basis, thus acquiescing in the price gouge. And he egged on the Arab radicals to oppose the American mediation. In Baghdad he warned against “interim settlements” — and therefore by implication the just-concluded Egyptian-Israeli disengagement. “Why does the hand that holds the key turn it so slowly?” he jibed at American policy. While at it, he condemned the Washington Energy Conference as a “political” ploy aimed at the Arabs; it would not be another Congress of Vienna, he said — both a crack at my scholarly work and a promise that the Washington Energy Conference would have no lasting results (an outcome that Jobert was in a good position to bring about). While still in Baghdad he pursued the same theme with a Syrian journalist, adding a compliment for the skill with which the Syrians were “consolidating your military position on the front to deal with every eventuality” — hardly a counsel of moderation at the beginning of our disengagement efforts on the Golan Heights. We might be forgiven if we considered such tactics not only inimical to our own interests but also in the long run destructive of the well-being of the other industrial democracies — because if taken seriously in the Arab world they might drive the Middle East to a crisis that France would have no means to contain.

  France enveloped itself in silence until five days before the opening session of the conference. Then on February 6, after a meeting of the French cabinet, a spokesman announced that Jobert would attend:

  The participation of our country at this meeting responds, in addition to considerations of courtesy, to the desire to permit Europe to take a common position. While France is disposed to participate in an exchange of views on the different aspects of energy problems, it would not be able to give its adherence to the establishment of an organization of oil consuming industrial countries, independent from other consuming countries particularly developing countries, as well as producing countries.

  The formal statement of the cabinet decision was forwarded to the White House in a curt telegram from Pompidou after having been publicly announced — an unprecedented procedure and a special indignity toward a close ally. The cable contained not one personal explanatory word from the French President.

  But not only the procedure was extraordinary. The announcement made explicit France’s opposition to the very concept of the conference. Jobert, it was said, was being sent out of “courtesy”; he w
ould not be able to agree to any consumer organization; his sole charter was to exchange views on “different aspects of energy problems” — as if the conference were a scientific colloquium and not a forum for making decisions. The stated purpose of France’s attendance was not to achieve any particular goal but to “permit Europe to take a common position” — which, given French views, meant that Paris intended to exercise its veto within the European Community and thereby over the results of the conference.

  The direction in which France would seek to push its European partners, and the extent to which French views were beginning to prevail, emerged from a decision of the European Community Council of Ministers in Brussels on February 5, the day before the French cabinet decision (it was perhaps the condition Jobert extracted for attending). The nine foreign ministers designated as the Community’s representatives West German Foreign Minister Walter Scheel, in his capacity of President of the Council of Ministers, and Commission President François-Xavier Ortoli. Their instructions were to forswear confrontation with the oil producers; to oppose new permanent organizations of the consumers; to encourage a prompt dialogue with the producers; and to assign all work on energy to existing international institutions.

  This was not the purpose of the conference as we conceived it. The omens were hardly encouraging.

  The Ministers Convene

  THE Washington Energy Conference was a strange event. It was a meeting of allies, but it had something of the character of a clash of adversaries. Its purpose was to develop solidarity among the consumers, yet it meandered into the liturgical byways that had sidetracked the Atlantic dialogue for a year. Once again we found ourselves forced into a confrontation we did not seek. We would have been more than willing to deal with a united Europe in a spirit of give-and-take; there was certainly a margin for divergence. But the challenge laid down by Jobert went far beyond this. He wanted to use energy — as he had the Year of Europe — to create an identity for Europe, under French leadership, in opposition to the United States. The French described our initiative as an American attempt to exploit the energy crisis to increase our influence in the Atlantic area and they fought it doggedly on those grounds. They professed to see evidence of this, oddly, in our invitation to Japan, which seemed to them to resurrect the idea of the Atlantic declarations against which they had fought such a fierce rearguard action.