Years of Upheaval

by Henry Kissinger

  No, if there was to be immediate progress on the West Bank, it had to be through Jordan. If the PLO were indeed becoming more moderate — which was far from clear — it could prove this in its subsequent dealings with Jordan as well as other Arab countries that had a stake in the Palestinian question. In this manner, the PLO would become an Arab, not an American problem.

  I repeated this theme on many occasions during the fateful summer of 1974. On May 31 I had told an executive session of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

  The sensible next step, speaking frankly to this committee, would be Jordan, for two reasons: one, because it is the most moderate of the Arab governments. It has been the one that is friendly to the United States.

  And secondly, because the best way to deal with the Palestinian question would be to draw the Jordanians [into] the West Bank and thereby turn the debate of the Palestinians into one between the Jordanians and the Palestinians rather than between the Palestinians and Israelis.

  On the other hand, Israeli domestic politics does not permit a disengagement on the Jordan River right now because they need the National Religious Party in order to support the government.

  On June 5 I told a group of American Jewish leaders: “I’ve said to them [the Israeli leadership] they should next take up Jordan, but the Israeli domestic situation makes this impossible.” On June 8 I said to Moshe Day an, who was visisting the United States after leaving the government a few days earlier: “There are two possible strategies — to bring the Jordanians into the West Bank, or to stonewall with Jordan and sooner or later all hell will break loose with the Palestinians.” On June 17, during Nixon’s visit in Israel, I made the same point to Prime Minister Rabin and repeated it at a press conference that day:

  Of course, the most efficient way for the Palestinians to be brought into the process is through a Jordanian negotiation, in which there is the historical background and for which Israel has always declared its readiness in principle.

  But the conditions did not exist for such a step. The Israeli cabinet faced two insuperable difficulties. Its one-vote majority in the Parliament was too narrow a base to sustain a negotiation as divisive as disengagement on the West Bank. A large body of Israeli opinion was opposed to the reestablishment of any autonomous Arab political authority on the West Bank; others resisted relinquishing the smallest slice of land they believed had been given to the Jews in the Old Testament. The National Religious Party would surely bring down the government at the first sign of a West Bank negotiation. All this had caused Golda Meir — and this was the second obstacle — to promise that there would be a new election before any agreement concerning the disposition of the West Bank was concluded. Rabin and his colleagues were understandably reluctant to call for new elections within weeks of having achieved office.

  Our inhibitions were equally great. If we insisted on a Jordan negotiation, we had to calculate on new elections in Israel, which from starting day usually took a minimum of six months to produce a new government. We would be stalemated at the precise moment that as a result of the Golan disengagement our influence was at its highest. Moreover, a President facing impeachment was not in a brilliant position to insist on a negotiation that — if Israel resisted, as was nearly certain — would multiply his domestic opponents.

  Then there was the problem of Egypt. We admired Sadat; we saw him as the indispensable driving force toward Middle East peace. With-out his cooperation the Middle East was certain to slide again into impotent frustration. And Sadat was opposed to what was later called the Jordanian option; at any rate, he did not want to defer his own claim to another slice of the Sinai for the better part of a year through the Israeli election process and the uncertain number of months it would take to negotiate. Sadat’s visceral distrust of Hussein reinforced his cool calculation that the process of Jordanian disengagement involved too many pitfalls to stake on it the Middle East peace process he had so painfully nursed along to this point. He must have reasoned that a Jordanian disengagement could never be an isolated act. It would open the Palestinian drama, reverberating throughout the area by a logic not amenable to the timetables of others.

  Nor was Syria eager for a Jordanian move. During the shuttle I had talked to Asad about the desirability of assigning to Hussein the principal responsibility for West Bank negotiations. He had not rejected it; he had replied noncommittally that a great deal of thinking would be needed to find a proper approach to the Palestinian problem. But at a minimum it meant that Syria’s attitude toward the PLO had also been aloof. Syria staunchly supported what it called the rights of the Palestinian people; at the same time it sought to control the PLO in fulfillment of an age-old dream that sees Palestine as part of Greater Syria. A few years later it resisted a PLO takeover of Lebanon, temporarily allying itself with the hated Christians to prevent Palestinian domination of a neighboring country. In 1974 Syria advanced no concrete plan in behalf of the Palestinian cause; it appeared reserved about the PLO; it was more aware of the complexities of the Jordanian option than its possibilities. No senior Syrian official ever mentioned West Bank disengagement, with whatever partner, as a serious prospect.

  Torn between our analysis and objective conditions, I played for time, keeping both the Egyptian and Jordanian options open — finally committing to neither — hoping that circumstance might resolve our perplexities. It is a course I have rarely adopted and usually resist intellectually. Circumstance is neutral; by itself it imprisons more frequently than it helps. A statesman who cannot shape events will soon be engulfed by them; he will be thrown on the defensive, wrestling with tactics instead of advancing his purpose.

  And that is exactly what happened on the Palestinian question. When on October 28, 1974, an Arab summit in Rabat designated the PLO as the sole Arab representative and spokesman for the West Bank and removed Jordan from the diplomacy, the Israeli dilemma and the Palestinian negotiating stalemate that I predicted — and did not head off — both became inevitable. They have not been resolved to this day.

  During Nixon’s visit to Israel, all this was still in the future. Rabin and Nixon discussed the next steps in a general, almost random way. Rabin was eager to link further diplomacy to an arms package for Israel, Nixon to a general commitment to negotiate. Each got what he wanted. The result did little to resolve the choice before us. But it suited the necessities of both sides at that moment to submerge the strategic questions in a process of consultation. It was agreed that Yigal Allon, the new Foreign Minister, would visit Washington later in the summer and Rabin soon after. In the meantime we would also invite the foreign ministers of Egypt and Syria as well as the King and Prime Minister of Jordan. Out of these exchanges we hoped to crystallize a strategy by the early fall.

  On the face of it, this was a sensible course. With the Syrian disengagement agreement barely two weeks old and a new government in office in Jerusalem, a period for consultation and reflection was in everybody’s interest. It was what we had told all the Arab countries we would seek. What we had not counted on was the Rabat decision, though even without it the trend was probably against the Jordanian option.

  Jordan’s thankless situation was symbolized by two facts: that it was the last stop on Nixon’s journey, and that I was unable to accompany him there. The reason for the former was the same as what had placed our Hashemite friends close to the end of every shuttle: No decisions were required in Amman; we knew what needed doing; to get it done depended on events elsewhere. Amman was a good place for summing up and seeking perspective in a friendly environment. The cause of my absence was the semiannual meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Ottawa, of which I had already missed the first day. Since the meeting was to agree at last to the Atlantic Declaration that I had personally proposed fourteen months earlier, it would have been a callous affront to my Atlantic colleagues not to be present at the consummation of our own enterprise. And since the Mideast trip had to be squeezed in before the Moscow summit and one could not arrive i
n Israel on the Sabbath, there was no flexibility there, either.

  But this was little consolation to the Jordanians, who must have felt that the absence of Nixon’s principal negotiator symbolized their relegation to a secondary role. Nixon’s visit on June 17 and 18, as I could gather from Scowcroft’s reports to me, went as well as circumstances permitted. Nixon repeated his by-now standard theme that the methods that had opened relations with China and pacified the Soviet Union would also work in the Middle East. In a toast he used a rather effective line that he had tried out at every occasion on the trip: “I do not tell you where this journey will end. I cannot tell you when it will end. The important thing is that it has begun.” The trouble with Jordan was unfortunately that its journey had not even begun. Nevertheless, Hussein sent off his distinguished guest warmly with the spectacular parade ceremony of “beating the retreat” I had witnessed earlier, performed by four British-trained Bedouin bands marching in perfect precision.

  So ended Nixon’s foray into the Middle East. For his associates it was an anguishing experience. We sensed in the exaggerated solicitude of our hosts the pity that is the one sentiment a head of state can never afford to evoke. The pretense that they were dealing with a functioning President was possible for some leaders only because they were not familiar enough with American domestic affairs, for others because they knew no other mode of treating a visiting head of state, and for still others because their whole policy had been based on belief in American mastery of events. But the members of the Nixon party were beyond illusion and we knew too much. We were torn up inwardly by the difference between what might have been and what deep down we all realized there now must be. Of course, we could not yet predict the precise modality that would spell the end of the Presidency, one of whose major achievements was being celebrated daily in the motorcades and banquets of the Middle East.

  Despair manifested itself in much petty bickering. Ron Ziegler protected his notion of Presidential preeminence in news stories with the ferocity of a police dog. There were disputes about the assignment of quarters and seats on the Cairo-Alexandria train. But these were the symptoms of the frustration all of us felt over what was the grim, unspoken backdrop of the journey.

  We witnessed with some wonder the tumultuous receptions in capitals with which relations had been established only in recent months. We were proud that our country was playing a central role in making peace not just for itself but between nations that without us would have found neither the language nor the method of reconciliation. All heads of state were seeking from us a road map for the future. Nixon acquitted himself well while suffering excruciating physical and emotional pain. He provided sensible comments; he responded to the needs of his interlocutors with firmness and perception. The only thing he could not provide was what was most needed: a reliable guide to the long-term thrust of American foreign policy. For it would not be long now before he would become an observer of the forces he had helped shape.

  More Accusations

  BY now our domestic struggle was malarial. The fever chart would rise and the patient would approach delirium for a few days. Suddenly the fever would break, leaving no trace save the increased weakness of the victim. The only difference was that normally a malaria patient recovers.

  I had returned from the Syrian shuttle to the assault over wiretaps; we came back from Nixon’s Mideast journey to another charge so absurd and technical that it was hard to know where to begin to refute it: Senator Henry Jackson’s accusation that Nixon and I had made a secret deal with the Soviets enabling them to exceed the limits of the first SALT agreement by up to 124 missiles. Where the uproar over the wiretaps had reflected some hypocritical confusions, the charges of secret deals were pure domestic political warfare.

  By the summer of 1974, Nixon seemed so close to the end of the line that whatever tenuous restraints had until then inhibited wholesale domestic attacks on our international position fell away. Indeed, the incipient collapse of the Presidency encouraged rather than stifled dissent; a school of opinion developed that handcuffing the mortally wounded Nixon was in the national interest lest the President at the imminent summit with Brezhnev make improvident concessions.

  Nixon was scheduled to arrive in Moscow on June 27, 1974, for his third summit with the Soviet leaders. How little deference he paid to Soviet sensibilities even at this late stage of his Presidency was shown by the fact that he had postponed his Moscow visit by three days to give him an opportunity to journey to the Middle East and to stop over in Brussels on the way to Moscow to sign the just-completed Atlantic Declaration — neither action calculated to endear him to the Kremlin. Nevertheless, Jackson considered that he was performing a national service if he constricted the Administration’s freedom to negotiate by undermining its credibility. For all I know, he may have actually believed what his staff told him about the fantasy of a secret deal.

  Jackson, whatever the accuracy of his charges, was redoubtable. He knew a great deal about defense, which enabled him to speak with technical knowledge. As the second-ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he had many friends in the Pentagon supplying him with their version of inside information. When I testified before Jackson, I often found myself in the anomalous position of being confronted with secret documents from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that had never been seen in the White House. And Jackson had as allies many groups who were supporting his other causes, such as Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union. While they had no special animosity toward me, they also did not want Jackson’s credibility eroded — thus in effect giving him moral support.

  In a normal period, the absurdity of his charges would have made them fall of their own weight. What could possibly induce a President and his chief aide to concede gratuitously and secretly to the Soviets 124 more missiles than those provided in an agreement? It was implausible even in the absence of detailed knowledge. But in the final weeks of the Nixon Administration, no accusation was too preposterous to receive a hearing; and in fairness, many seemingly incredible allegations had turned out to be true. What made Jackson’s accusations more effective than they deserved to be was that they concerned highly technical provisions of the SALT agreement nearly incomprehensible to the layman. Indeed, the effort to rebut them involved so many complexities that the uninitiated were likely to believe that, where that much explanation was needed, something was bound to be wrong. Conceivably, my account in these pages will contribute to this impression.

  Under the 1972 Interim Agreement on limitations of strategic offensive weapons, the Soviet Union was permitted 950 modern ballistic missiles on sixty-two nuclear submarines. To reach that figure and stay within the agreed overall ceiling, the Soviets were obliged to dismantle 210 older ICBMs. The debate between American and Soviet negotiators at the 1972 summit in Moscow concerned what older missiles the Soviets should replace.8 It was in the Soviets’ interest to “trade in” their oldest, most obsolete weapons, preferably missiles of less than intercontinental range that they would have retired anyway. Our aim was precisely the opposite: to bring about a dismantling of missiles most dangerous to us. In the course of the final negotiations in Moscow, my staff and I, on the basis of consultations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had worked out the following priorities among the Soviet missiles available for retirement. The missile we were most eager to get rid of was the land-based ICBM designated as the SS-7. This had a range of over 6,000 miles and a warhead of six megatons; seventy of these heavy throwweight weapons were in hardened underground silos and thus were reasonably invulnerable. Next in priority were 134 SS-7 and SS-8 intercontinental missiles on vulnerable above-ground launching pads (the SS-8 was a variation of the SS-7); they were useful for a first strike or for retaliation against an American nuclear attack that had spared Soviet strategic forces. Our third priority was thirty missiles on an older Soviet nuclear submarine that we designated as the H-class. Each of these missiles had a range of only 900 miles and a relatively small warhead, bu
t the submarine was capable of sustained operation. The lowest priority was assigned to sixty or seventy missiles on even older submarines we designated as the G-class. These vessels were diesel-powered, noisy, and of limited endurance. The range of their missiles was 300 to 700 miles; nine of these submarines (carrying twenty-seven of the shorter-range missiles) had to surface before they could fire.

  We did not consider the G-class submarines a strategic threat. None had been operating off our Atlantic coast since 1966 or off our Pacific coast since 1969. In truth, it made no sense to imagine that the Soviet Union would cart seventy relatively low-yield weapons to within a few hundred miles of our shores on obsolescent submarines while it already had over 1,000 intercontinental missiles and was building to 1,500 ICBMs and 950 submarine-based missiles with a range of 1,500 miles and over. We therefore did not want the Soviets to use these obsolete weapons for a “trade-in.”

  As it turned out, the SALT agreement reflected our priorities precisely: The H-class submarines were defined as “modern”; if the Soviets wanted to build 950 of the newest sea-based missiles, the H-class submarines would have to be retired; otherwise their thirty missiles would count in the total. The 210 SS-7S and SS-8s would have to be dismantled. We had achieved our objective, we thought, of preventing the Soviet Union from trading in a weapon that would in any case have to be retired, for a modern weapon. To close every loophole, we insisted that if for some unfathomable reason the Soviets placed modern missiles on the obsolescent G-class submarine, they too would count against the total of 950. We were rather proud of the negotiating accomplishment.