Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  Now, the Europeans cannot have it both ways. They cannot have the United States participation and cooperation on the security front and then proceed to have confrontation and even hostility on the economic and political front. And until the Europeans are willing to sit down and cooperate on the economic and political front as well as on the security front, no meeting of heads of government should be scheduled.

  On March 19 he repeated the same theme in a question-and-answer session before the National Association of Broadcasters in Houston. By then new forces were at work.

  Our hectic Mideast diplomacy was paying off. On March 18 the Arab oil ministers lifted the embargo unconditionally, subject to a review on June 1, which never took place. A day later Saudi Arabia announced it was increasing its oil production by one million barrels a day, helping to stabilize prices. The sense of panic in Europe immediately diminished. European attitudes began to change. In some ways our firm reaction had lanced the boil. If we no longer pressed for an Atlantic Declaration or for a trip by Nixon to Europe, the Europeans could no longer imagine that they had leverage on us. The substantive disagreements were no cause for crises. We favored European unity; we simply did not want its organizing principle to be hostility to the United States. What we asked for in consultation was what the Community did with every other area of the world. The blowup had developed from an unusual mix of events and people. Nixon’s Watergate ordeal, the growing weakness of both the Heath and Brandt governments, and Pompidou’s fatal illness threw Atlantic policy into unnecessary confusion.

  Other events began to alter the political landscape. By the time the explosion occurred, Edward Heath — almost compulsively reluctant to separate from France — had been defeated in the election of February 28. The successor Labour government under Harold Wilson had a more subtle view of the requirements of European unity. When I passed through London a month later, the new Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, told his subordinates in my presence that he wanted an end put to the mutual needling. On March 16 the German Ambassador in Washington, Berndt von Staden, came up with an idea for new consultative machinery: The Community would no longer delay consultation until the foreign ministers had frozen the various projects in concrete. What did I think of consultations after the political directors had agreed but before an issue had been put before the foreign ministers? I told von Staden that this would probably solve the procedural problem.

  On March 24 I stopped in Bonn, at the request of Scheel, on the way to Moscow. Brandt unexpectedly joined the meeting. The German leaders transformed von Staden’s ideas into a formal proposal. I accepted it on the spot, having previously discussed it with Nixon. While we were at it, we reviewed a whole host of issues before the Alliance and reached a common position. There was no longer any hint that this was prevented by Community procedures.

  A little more than a week later, Georges Pompidou died, and therewith Jobert’s tenure drew to a close. In early April I had most conciliatory meetings with Scheel and Gaston Thorn, then Luxembourg Foreign Minister, whose career proved to what extent integrity, intelligence, and goodwill in even a tiny country can be turned into important, sometimes decisive, factors. The British took over the drafting of the NATO declaration. Key elements of the proposed declaration between the United States and the European Community were incorporated into it; the rest were dropped. The new French government under the Presidency of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, with Jean Sauvagnargues as Foreign Minister, dealt with us in a new spirit. By the next NATO meeting in Ottawa in June, the immediate crisis was over. By then, too, Brandt had been replaced by Helmut Schmidt, who had already made clear his priorities at the energy conference. What emerged at Ottawa was the single Atlantic Declaration we had proposed in the first place.

  The close relationship we had sought to achieve with formal declarations came about instead as a result of common necessity, practical arrangements, and a restoration of mutual human confidence. Suddenly, key issues were handled easily; consultations were regular and intimate. Mid-1974 ushered in one of the best periods of Atlantic cooperation in decades.

  And yet the free world’s problem was deeper than personalities and broader than energy. It remains my conviction that the vitality of democracy in the modern period depends in large part on public confidence that the democratic world is master of its own future. As economic difficulty ate away at the morale, optimism, and social peace of the industrial nations, an emphatic demonstration of an effective collective response seemed to me of profound political and moral importance. Our divisions would only compound the pervasive sense of helplessness, dependency, and vulnerability in the West and encourage those forces in the world that consider the West decadent and doomed. The challenge remains. If we truly value our civilization, we will maintain the unity and common purpose that give it both its meaning and its strength.

  * * *

  I. The countries invited were Canada, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom. The invitation to the European Community was in the letter to West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, whose turn it was to serve as President of the Community. Also invited was Jonkheer Emile van Lennep, the Secretary General of the OECD.

  II. The thirteen countries finally attending were Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

  III. Ambassador David Bruce also participated during the conference. A working group, headed by Helmut Sonnenfeldt and Winston Lord and including Bill Donaldson, Arthur Hartman (Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs), and Charles Cooper as the NSC staff’s representative, prepared the working documents, did the first drafts of speeches, and in general buttressed the conference.

  XXI

  The Road to Damascus: An Exploratory Shuttle

  BETWEEN the energy conference and the explosion with our allies, I flew to the Middle East for another shuttle, less dramatic in its results but almost as important in its consequences as the Sinai negotiation a little more than four weeks earlier.

  Our diplomatic strategy for the Middle East hinged, in February 1974, on reconciling two mortal enemies, Israel and Syria. Everything turned on the perception of our ability to negotiate between them a disengagement of forces on the Golan Heights. Insofar as Arab leaders thought that the United States and only the United States could achieve it, there was credibility to our position that we would not mediate unless the oil embargo was called off. The linkage was audacious, for we ourselves wanted to pursue such a negotiation so as to continue to dominate Mideast diplomacy and prevent the isolation of Sadat. But turning the oil weapon against the producers was more than a tactic. It was at the heart of our policy to rally the oil-consuming countries who were so worried about oil supplies that they were in danger of succumbing to political blackmail. It was a piece of necessary bravado when we told them at the Washington Energy Conference that we would end the embargo on our own without anyone’s help.

  A less auspicious pair for mediation than Israel and Syria would be hard to imagine. Deeply distrustful of each other as only nations can be that claim the same soil, they had lived in sullen enmity for a generation, hatred for the other indelible in each country’s soul. Syrians considered Palestine part of “Greater Syria” and the Jewish state the obstacle to Arab unification. Israelis recognized that among their immediate neighbors Syria was the most militant and implacable. Deep down, Egypt had no Palestinian vocation; it had to overcome nationalist impulses to dedicate itself to that cause. Indeed, it is a tribute to the power of Arab ideology that Egypt sacrificed so much for so long for an enterprise emotionally so distant. Lebanon yearned for peace but was too anxious for its own fragile cohesion to play an active role in Mideast diplomacy. It advocated a Palestinian homeland but for a negative reason: to solve the problem of the refugee Palestinian population in Lebanon that threatened to destroy the fabric of the nation, and
later carried out the threat. The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan had been prepared to negotiate at almost every stage. Only Syria had made intransigence a national characteristic. It had steadfastly refused to accept Israel, to talk to Israel in any forum, or to entertain any mediation based on the proposition that Israel had a right to exist.

  The persecution of Jews in Syria and its history of hostile instability fused menace with mystery in Israeli eyes. Yet strangely enough — and as much as both Syrians and Israelis will resent me for saying this — they were more similar in attitude and behavior than either was to Egypt, for example. The Egyptian leadership group is suave, jaded, cosmopolitan. Their Syrian counterparts are prickly, proud, quick to take offense. Egypt is accustomed to leadership in the Middle East; there is a certain majesty in its conduct and in its self-assurance. Syria fights for recognition of its merit; it consumes energy in warding off condescension. Israel shares many of Syria’s qualities.

  The Egyptian President was sure of his authority; he did not need to build a consensus for individual acts, or if he did, he managed masterfully to obscure the process by which he achieved it. Sadat in one form or another had been negotiating since 1971; Hafez al-Asad was entering the negotiating process for the first time. For so controversial a move as a negotiation with Israel, he had to build a consensus daily, maybe even hourly. Even had he been so disposed, he could not dare the great gestures of Sadat, who sacrificed tactical benefit for long-term gain. The Syrian President needed to win every point if he wished to retain his authority; he could yield only to overwhelming force majeure. The Israeli leaders, for wholly different reasons, were in the same position.

  But had each side understood the domestic difficulties of the other — and of them they were, in fact, woefully ignorant — it would not have helped a great deal. The mirror image of a dilemma is a dilemma. Neither could transcend itself. Even finding a framework for negotiations between them was a struggle.

  To begin with, there was no Israeli cabinet decision to proceed with a negotiation with Syria on disengagement; indeed, in a manner of speaking there was no Israeli cabinet. Discussions on forming a new government after the inconclusive general election of December 31, 1973, were still proceeding. The governing Labour Party’s loss of seven seats proved fateful in a small Parliament of 120 in which coalitions had to emerge from many groupings. The Likud opposition headed by Men-achem Begin was in no position to take over; but neither was Labour able to form a new government on its own without, in Dayan’s words, “having to make far-reaching concessions to a few small parties for joining a coalition.”1 As Golda Meir wrote of the election outcome,

  the entire right wing had now combined into a bloc of its own. A coalition would have to be formed again, and it would clearly be a back-breaking job to form it, since the religious bloc, which was a traditional coalition partner of ours, was itself deeply divided on the question of who should lead it and what its policy should be at this tremendously difficult time.2

  In the meantime, the old cabinet ministers were frozen in their jobs by the quirk of Israeli law that no member of an interim government is permitted to resign. Stable as is no other Israeli cabinet and yet conscious of its ephemerality, the caretaker government maneuvers amidst perils, temptations, and pressures. It was aware that the Egyptian disengagement might wither if not matched on the Golan Heights and that the prolongation of the oil embargo would then be blamed on Israel. But it also knew that public sentiment in Israel regarded peace with Syria as a delusion. Sporadic artillery duels persisted between Syrian and Israeli units on the Golan Heights throughout this period.

  The Golan, moreover, was not the Sinai. The Suez Canal was over two hundred kilometers from Israel’s 1967 border, across a useless and unpopulated desert. The depth of the Israeli penetration on the Golan Heights after the 1967 war was about twenty-five kilometers; the Israeli salient toward Damascus after the 1973 war added roughly an equal distance. Everything about the Golan was immeasurably more complicated than the Sinai. Much less territory was available to bargain over; every mile of territory came close to having strategic significance. There were few Israeli settlements in the Sinai, mainly close to Israel’s borders. But Israel had established twenty-odd in the crowded Golan, many within a few kilometers of the 1967 armistice line (see the map on page 938). Since Israel had never yet abandoned a settlement in its history and would surely not do so for a mere disengagement accord, the margin for compromise on withdrawal was narrow. And Syria, it was expected, would want to repopulate the towns and villages in the area, flooding them with thousands of civilians and complicating Israel’s security problem as well as the task of inspecting agreed arms limitations. Finally, Syria had neighbors — specifically radical, Baathist Iraq — opposed to any negotiations with Israel and in deadly rivalry with its sister party in Damascus.

  Against this background, neither side moved with particular grace; each tended to phrase its contributions to the peace process in the form of peremptory demands. But to their credit, both the Israeli cabinet and the Syrian President overcame their misgivings.

  The attempt to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable began on Sunday, January 20, 1974. Before returning home after completing the Egyptian-Israeli disengagement agreement, I had stopped in Damascus to symbolize our interest in progress on the Syrian front. Asad had given me his ideas for disengagement. They were not modest. He showed his inexperience in negotiation by suggesting three options for Israeli withdrawal — guaranteeing that only the one most favorable to Israel would receive any consideration. But not much consideration. Even his minimum option required that Israel abandon all Syrian territory captured in the 1973 war as well as half of the Golan taken in 1967, in return for a mere cease-fire and separation of forces. But the hard line was less significant than the fact that Syria was willing to negotiate at all. That marked a sea change in Syria’s attitude. To give the impression of progress, I stopped in Tel Aviv that same evening and left Asad’s ideas with an Israeli negotiating team so reluctant to confront them that it refused even to haggle.

  The Golan Front: Cease-Fire Line after the October War

  On January 28, now back in Washington, I received Mrs. Meir’s formal reply. In order to avoid having to put the issue before her caretaker cabinet, she raised a condition: There could be no negotiation until there was some sign that Israeli prisoners of war held in Syria would be returned. At a minimum, Israel wanted the names of its POWs and Red Cross visits to verify their treatment. By now I was getting more skilled at the exegesis of Israeli formulations. I pointed out to Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz that Golda had carefully avoided saying that she would negotiate if these conditions were fulfilled. Dinitz admitted that this was so; the lack of a cabinet decision left no other choice. However, he believed that Syrian compliance with these terms would make the start of negotiations highly probable.

  I decided to act on this assumption. On January 29 I informed Asad (and Sadat) that if Syria provided a list of prisoners and permitted Red Cross visits there was a good chance of obtaining an Israeli counterproposal on disengagement. On January 30 Dinitz confirmed this. Over the next few days, in Washington, I worked out a package deal and a schedule and transmitted them to Asad on February 5.

  The proposal contained five steps. First, we would convey to Israel the number of prisoners of war that Syria held. Second, Syria would send the list of names of these Israeli prisoners of war to its Interests Section in Washington. Third, Israel would be asked to come up with a concrete proposal on disengagement, which it would make available to me in exchange for the list of prisoners of war. Fourth, after the Red Cross had visited Israeli prisoners in Syria, I would transmit Israel’s disengagement proposal to Asad, and simultaneously ask Israel to send a senior official to Washington to discuss possible modifications. Fifth, a negotiating process would begin, in the framework of the already existing Israeli-Egyptian military working group in Geneva.

  I emphasized that I would not proceed w
ith the negotiations, however, until the oil embargo had been lifted: “I will only be able to initiate with Israel such efforts to solve the immediate problem of getting Syrian-Israeli disengagement moving after the oil embargo has been lifted.” On February 6 I instructed Ambassador Hermann Eilts in Cairo to inform Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmy of the proposal, also stressing that the oil embargo should be lifted “promptly.”

  Asad waited only forty-eight hours to fulfill the first step I had proposed. On February 7 we received word that the Israeli prisoners in Syria numbered sixty-five. The number exceeded Israeli expectations and it put a floor under Israeli concerns. They knew now that Syria could not deliver fewer as part of a disengagement arrangement.

  The Soviet Dilemma

  IN the meantime, another visitor had added to our complications. Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko, who had accompanied Leonid Brezhnev on a visit to Havana, stopped in Washington on February 4 and 5 to chide us for “unilateral” actions in the Middle East. Before he met Nixon, I summed up the problem posed by Soviet Middle East policy in a memorandum to Nixon:

  The Soviets were obviously caught by surprise by the rapid pace of US negotiations with Israel and the Arabs, and, of course, chagrined by their virtual exclusion. Initially, at least, they made their displeasure known, particularly to the Egyptians. But in recent days — as reflected in Brezhnev’s remarks in Cuba — the Soviets seem to be shifting to accommodate themselves to the concept of disengagement and to the procedure of piecemeal, temporary settlements. . . . [T]hey are using whatever influence they have in Damascus to encourage the Syrians to negotiate their own disengagement, but on the condition that the link to Geneva be firmly established, and that the Soviets have some role.