Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

As for us, we had decided to institutionalize the US–Saudi dialogue and to move it away from the embargo to positive goals. (We also did not want to be isolated by the Euro-Arab dialogue.) For several months I had assigned task forces the responsibility of working out forms of cooperation that would give the Kingdom a tangible stake in the well-being of the United States and concrete benefits from such association provided the embargo was lifted. This would reduce Saudi readiness to take new measures hurtful to our economy. Ambassador Akins and a study group of State, Treasury, and NSC staff officials had sketched out programs in technical assistance and economic development; the Defense Department had many long-standing ideas on US–Saudi military cooperation. I thought that the best way to coordinate all of these subjects was to create Saudi-American joint commissions in the various fields; these would be permanent forums for discussion even in the absence of immediate needs.

  I had three meetings in a space of six hours. First, I briefed Omar Saqqaf on the status of disengagement. As I had expected, Saudi Arabia’s main desire was that some process acceptable to Syria be visible. Like every other Arab leader, Saqqaf had heard of Asad’s allergy to the October 6 line. But he was too wise to make an issue of this before negotiations had even started. I told him that I would talk with Prince Fahd and the King mainly on long-range US–Saudi relationships, not on oil and disengagement. Saqqaf was pleased; he said that the King liked to talk about such things and that the Saudis were particularly interested in economic relations. I said we were prepared to pursue these on a substantial scale after the embargo was lifted.

  By the time I arrived at Prince Fahd’s palace, word of my conversation with Saqqaf had already reached the Prince, the second man in the Kingdom. His reaction vindicated our strategy, which had among other goals to demonstrate to Europe that the United States could win any competition in bilateral approaches to the Arabs if the more desirable route of consumer solidarity was rejected. The bilateral relationship with the United States had the top priority of the Saudis, Prince Fahd volunteered as the meeting opened. Many European countries had offered long-term projects, Fahd pointed out, but these offers had been declined because the Kingdom wanted a close relationship with the United States. I outlined the various joint programs we were envisaging. We were also willing, I said, to coordinate our policy with the Kingdom in the Arabian peninsula — to assuage the growing Saudi uneasiness about being squeezed in a radical pincer movement between Iraq in the north and South Yemen in the south. I told him that we considered the enemies of Saudi Arabia our own enemies. I added a word about the embargo only as the meeting was ending. It was a blight on our relations; another delay in lifting it would produce a very serious crisis of confidence. Fahd gave it as his impression that the King was very interested in “repumping” the oil — a hint that the even more harmful production cuts would be eased, together with the embargo.

  The King himself was too wily to make an unambiguous commitment. He greeted me cordially, peering benevolently from around his headgear as I sat by his side, and offering prayers for the success of my mission. One did the Kingdom no favor by asking it to state a formal view on contentious issues. I briefed the King; I did not ask him to commit himself. And time and again I found that his protestations of friendship had concrete content, revealing itself in many signs of support for our diplomacy, never more importantly than in influencing Syria to pursue the disengagement process.

  Most of our conversation was devoted to his standard recital of the evils of Communism and Zionism, separately and especially in combination. Faisal did not consider the demonstrated enmity of Moscow to the Jewish state nearly so significant as the fact that many leaders of Israel had been born in Russia and that Russia was now letting more Jews emigrate to Israel. But that strange tale, like a cloud of dust in the desert, served marvelously to soften all dividing lines. Compared to that epic conflict between good and evil, what did the day-to-day issues matter? And when the cloud had passed, what was left was Faisal’s blessing of our approach to Syrian-Israeli disengagement. Without placing him in the direct line of fire, the King’s affirmation that he would pray for our success left little doubt of Saudi support. To foreshadow the approaching end of the embargo, the King in my presence ordered his ministers to join us immediately in talks on technological, economic, and military cooperation. The King could not have imagined that he could forge closer ties while wielding the oil weapon. He must have wondered at my obtuseness when I raised the subject of oil explicitly at the end of our talks. Faisal cautiously confined himself to saying that he would do his utmost to lift the embargo. It was probably as far as he could go if the decision had to reflect an Arab consensus. But I believed him. His evident eagerness for US–Saudi technical and economic cooperation showed that the leverage was not so one-sided.

  Omar Saqqaf, who suspected that I probably never grasped Saudi complexities, sought on the way to the airport to put my mind totally at ease. He said that it was clear from the conversation that the King would lift the embargo. Faisal had gone to great lengths to avoid saying anything of the sort. “That was,” said Saqqaf wearily in the face of such invincible dullness, “so that you would not be able to give it away in talking to the press at the airport; we cannot have the decision announced in Saudi Arabia.” In the Kingdom my alleged obsession with secrecy had not reached the legendary status it enjoyed in America. At any rate, Saqqaf’s prediction came true in two weeks’ time.

  The Jordanian Option

  IT had become customary on these journeys for Jordan to be the last port of call. This was partly because it was then the friendliest stop, a perfect place to unwind among associates of many crises. But I fear another reason was that for the time being Jordan was also the country least involved in our diplomatic exertions. Deep down it was a sad visit, the occasion for a feeling of guilt all the more nagging because it was finally irresolvable. In the short term everyone, including the doughty King of Jordan, agreed that Syrian disengagement had to come first. It was needed to give Sadat’s policy a radical anchor, however temporary. Jordan preferred to follow Syria rather than precede it, in order to avoid a repetition of the Syrian-Jordanian enmity of 1970.

  The Jordanian case was a classic demonstration that correct analysis does not always produce correct policy. At the risk of enhancing my hard-earned reputation for lack of humility, I must state that I understood the dynamics of the situation quite accurately. I repeatedly warned Israel that it had the choice of settling with Hussein or with Arafat; it had to be one or the other. For example, I told a group of American Jewish leaders before the shuttle on February 8:

  I predict that if the Israelis don’t make some sort of arrangement with Hussein on the West Bank in six months, Arafat will become internationally recognized and the world will be in a chaos. . . . If I were an adviser to the Israeli Government, I would tell the Prime Minister: “For God’s sake do something with Hussein while he is still one of the players.”

  I made the same point to Israeli Ambassador Dinitz on February 9: If Israel did not negotiate some sort of arrangement with Hussein, “within a year, Arafat will be the spokesman for the West Bank.”

  But in this period Israeli domestic politics were even less hospitable to any discussion of West Bank issues than before — while a new government coalition was still being formed, in which the National Religious Party was again needed as a partner. On March 1, as I was leaving for Damascus, Riyadh, and Amman, Golda and her colleagues had implored me not to mention publicly that the West Bank had even been discussed.

  My overnight stop in Amman March 2–3 thus had an air of melancholy about it despite its surface of friendship and cordiality. The meetings with King Hussein, Crown Prince Hassan, and Prime Minister Zaid Rifai were bound in these circumstances to lead to substantial agreement in concept and a shared frustration about execution — all the more so since Israel had recently rejected the modest Jordanian disengagement plan given to me in Aqaba on January 19 right after the Sinai disen
gagement (see Chapter XVIII).

  I urged Hussein to raise the issue once again after a new government was formed in Israel. Hussein had heard rumors to the effect that the United States welcomed a Palestinian state or would go along with the formation of a government in exile by the PLO, as some other Arabs were advocating. I emphatically rejected these schemes. (I did not doubt, though I did not say so, that these views may have been fairly widespread at working levels of the State Department.) I said:

  Your Majesty has our total support. Whatever rumors you hear have no basis unless we confirm them. If we have a message to communicate to you, we tell you directly; there is no need for rumors or other means. . . . There will be no dealing behind your back with the PLO. . . . In fact we cannot see any possible acceptable solution unless Your Majesty is the spokesman for the West Bank. This is our policy.

  But no amount of reassurance could remove Hussein’s basic dilemma. He summed it up as the choice of either continuing “to exercise full responsibility for securing Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank” or else informing his brother Arabs that “we are unable to get a solution on those lines and they would have to consult with the Palestinians to try other means.” We had little choice except to give Syria pride of place. Israel’s domestic structure made it impossible to negotiate more than one issue at a time; everyone — including Hussein — agreed that we needed a Syrian disengagement to start a momentum toward peace.

  This shuttle in the Middle East, the most relaxed of any of my period in office, ended with a spectacular entertainment that morning as the royal family and my staff and I were treated to the Jordanian marching bands’ performance of the British ceremony of “beating the retreat.” For our part, we thought we had made important progress on this trip. We had achieved more than we had set out to do. The Syrian-Israeli negotiations were in train. The oil embargo was all but lifted — a fact Saqqaf confirmed a few days later to Akins. And we thought the door was not yet closed on an Israeli–Jordanian negotiation to settle the West Bank and with it the so-called Palestinian problem.

  On March 18, the Arab oil ministers lifted the oil embargo unconditionally, subject to a review meeting on June 1 (which took no action). Saudi Arabia announced that it was increasing its oil production by one million barrels a day — helping to stabilize prices (and indeed to reduce them in real terms in the years to come). The hectic diplomacy of the past month had paid off. We had maneuvering room for our Mideast diplomacy, energy policy, and allied relations.

  * * *

  I. After I had delivered the list to Israel, I told the journalists accompanying me that I had in fact had it before visiting Damascus.

  II. Israel held 380 Syrian prisoners of war; 140 Israeli soldiers were missing in action on the Syrian front, of whom the 65 survivors were on the Syrian POW list.

  XXII

  The Decline of Détente: A Turning Point

  Détente under Attack

  WE were making progress, if slowly and painfully, toward peace in the Middle East. But we could not forget that our ultimate task was to strengthen peace in the world. The American people expected it from their leaders; the nuclear age imposed it as a moral and practical necessity. The Vietnam trauma had taught a fateful lesson: The American people’s faith in their leaders’ dedication to peace was a precious asset without which no foreign policy could be sustained. Similarly, our allies’ confidence that peace was the goal of our foreign policy was the prerequisite of the cohesion of our alliances. We could resist aggressive policies best from a platform of peace; men and women of goodwill and decency could be enlisted only in support of a policy of positive aspirations.

  But the responsibility of leaders is not simply to affirm an objective. It is above all to endow it with a meaning compatible with the values of their society. If peace is equated simply with the absence of war, if the yearning for peace is not allied with a sense of justice, it can become an abject pacifism that turns the world over to the most ruthless. To build peace on reciprocal restraint; to suffuse our concept of order with our country’s commitment to freedom; to strive for peace without abdication and for order without unnecessary confrontation — therein resides the ultimate test of American statesmanship.

  The discipline and sense of proportion necessary for such a course fell prey to the passions of the Watergate era. Somewhat unexpectedly, the quest for regional peace proved easier than its global corollary. Regional peace, especially in the Middle East, often emerges from the resolution of crises. And against my original expectations, of all aspects of foreign policy Watergate affected crisis management the least. Until the day he left office, Nixon retained an international reputation for being willing to stake American power and prestige swiftly and ruthlessly. Adversaries did not dare to test, under the pressure of short crisis deadlines, to what extent his authority had been impaired. No country took us on frontally until the Soviets prompted our alert at the end of the Middle East war, when one of its clients found itself in desperate straits. And even then the Soviets subsided as soon as we showed our teeth. We were thus able to use the crisis to shape events and reverse alliances in the Middle East in defiance of the pressures of our allies, the preferences of the Soviets, and the rhetoric of Arab radicals.

  But in the overarching policy of East-West relations, we were less fortunate. Even as we were moving from success to success in the Middle East, the structure of our East-West policy was being systematically dismantled. We were like an acrobat on a tightrope who, having made it to the middle, sees his safety net taken away and new weights added to his balancing pole; onlookers imagine that since he got this far the task cannot have been so difficult and can be made more complex without risks, tempting them to shout from below that there were better ways to get there in the first place.

  In the light of America’s historical experience, relations with the Soviets were a difficult challenge in the best of circumstances. The American perception of international affairs has traditionally been Manichean: Relations among states are either peaceful or warlike — there is no comfortable position in between. Periods of peace call for goodwill, negotiation, arbitration, or any other method that tends to equate relations among nations with human relations. In war the attitude must be one of unremitting hostility. Conflict is perceived as “unnatural”; it is caused by evil men or motives and can thus be ended only by the extirpation of the offenders.

  Americans traditionally have seen foreign policy less as a seamless web than as a series of episodic events or discrete self-contained problems each of which could be dealt with by the application of common sense and the commitment of resources. The image has been of an essentially benign world whose harmony was interrupted occasionally by crises that were aberrations from the norm. This belief derived in part from our geographic remoteness from the center of world affairs, which enabled us to shift to other countries the burden of maintaining the global balance of power. The perception would thus have become impossible to sustain in any event when the growth of Soviet power ended our invulnerability and forced us to abandon isolationism. But what might have been a slow philosophical evolution was turned into a trauma by the special characteristics of the postwar period.

  The Soviet Union is a tyranny and an ideological adversary, thus fulfilling our traditional image of irreconcilable conflict between good and evil. But Soviet ideological hostility translates itself into geopolitical rivalry in the manner of a traditional great power, seeking gains any one of which might be marginal but whose accumulation will upset the global equilibrium. Emotionally committed to facing an overall moral challenge in an apocalyptic confrontation, we thus run the risk of floundering vis-à-vis more ambiguous Soviet attempts to nibble away at the balance of power. At the same time, the postwar world was nuclear; statesmen now no longer risked their armies but their societies and all of mankind. Our adversary thereby became in a sense a partner in the avoidance of nuclear war — a moral, political, and strategic imperative.

  No s
ociety has ever faced such a manifold task; few could have been less prepared for it. The only kind of threat to the equilibrium for which history and experience had prepared us — an all-out military assault on the Hitlerian model — was the least likely contingency in an age of proxy conflicts, guerrilla subversion, political and ideological warfare. The modern challenges were ambiguous in terms of our expectations, were resisted hesitantly if at all, and — from Korea through Vietnam to Angola — caused profound division within our society. And the proposition that to some extent we had to collaborate with our adversary while resisting him found a constituency only with great difficulty; the emotional bias was with the simpler verities of an earlier age. Liberals objected to the premise of irreconcilable conflict and to the necessities of defense; conservatives would not accept that an adversary relation in the nuclear age could contain elements of cooperation. Both rebelled against the concept of permanent exertion to maintain the global balance.

  The most important task of the second Nixon Administration was therefore psychological: to educate the American public in the complexity of the world we would have to manage. The United States as the leader of the democracies had a responsibility to defend global security even against ambiguous and seemingly marginal assaults. We would have to do this while simultaneously exploring the limits of coexistence with a morally repugnant ideology. We would have to learn that there would be no final answers. I was convinced then — and remain so — that we cannot find our goals either in an apocalyptic showdown or in a final reconciliation. Rather, we must nurture the fortitude to meet the Soviet challenge over an historical epoch at times by resistance, at times by negotiation. Inevitably, this means that at any point in time the process will be incomplete and the solutions imperfect, hence vulnerable to domestic attack.