Real Peace

by Richard Nixon

  While not decisive, personal relationships can be marginally important when dealing with the leaders of the Soviet Union. Before my meeting with Khrushchev in 1959, British Prime Minister Macmillan told me that the Soviet leaders desperately wanted to be “admitted to the club”—accepted and respected as major world figures in their own right and not simply because they control the great military power of the Soviet Union. The Russian people are a great people, and the Soviet Union is a great power. We should agree to admit the Soviet leaders into the “club,” but only if they agree to abide by the rules. It is a cheap price to pay if it helps restrain Soviet conduct.

  We must make the Soviets understand that there is no way that we would or should admit them to the club if they continue to act as the moral outlaws of the world. When they shot down the Korean jetliner, they also shot down the prospects for quickly improving our relations in mutually beneficial ways.

  Our initial response was to express our outrage in the strongest moral terms. We should not mince words in venting our anger because it clarifies the moral issue that is at the heart of the East-West struggle. But we must not delude ourselves by thinking that our statements about morality will have any effect behind the Kremlin walls. Condemning the Soviet leaders with statements based on Western ideals about the sanctity of human life is like making faces at the Sphinx.

  Some have understandably urged us to make a stronger response. They advocate that we break off our diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, halt all our bilateral negotiations, and impose an array of trade sanctions. But they are overlooking one of the important lessons of this tragedy. As a vivid example of the danger of accidental war, it points out the fact that in the nuclear age there should be more communication between the superpowers rather than less.

  While this is not the first atrocity committed by the Soviets, the West should seek to make it their last by seizing the moment to implement a strategy for dealing with them. We must develop a policy of hard-headed detente that will convince the Kremlin leaders that they stand to lose far more than they could possibly gain by threatening our interests. We can succeed only if we use the unity the world has found in its moral outrage to forge a strategy for real peace.

  • • •

  A major communist head of state in Eastern Europe recently remarked to me that the last 60 years have seen a curious reversal in the rhetoric of East and West. The communists used to say that capitalism was collapsing, and now the capitalists are saying that communism is collapsing. He then observed, “Perhaps both are wrong.”

  He was right. We have differences with the Soviets that we will never overcome. We will never condone their conquests and will always oppose their expansionist policies. But we cannot wish them away. They are there, so we have to deal with them. How we deal with them will determine whether we achieve real peace.

  We should avoid hot rhetoric, but we should not mince words. If the world is to have real peace, the Soviets must change their aggressive ways. Their persistence in expanding their influence and control by violent means will sooner or later end in war. And the chances are good that such a war will end the world.

  Winston Churchill once said, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Hard-headed detente is not a magic wand that will with one wave instantly make over the ruthless men in the Kremlin. It is a policy that will lead them to cooperate in the search for real peace because it is in their interest to do so.

  Hard-headed detente gives the Kremlin leaders a choice between aggression and restraint. If they choose the first, the danger of war will escalate and the burden of arms will become unbearable. The world will be an increasingly perilous place to live in. If they choose the second, we can reduce the risk of war and reap the fruits of real peace. We will still have our conflicts, but these will not lead to war. If we act together, the United States and the Soviet Union can contribute to peace for ourselves and for others. If we continue to act against each other, peace has no chance.

  NATO AND JAPAN

  In considering the role the United States and Soviet Union must play, we must always bear in mind that other nations, particularly those of Western Europe and Japan, must be part of any effective effort to build a real peace. After all, the struggle between East and West for 35 years has in large part been a struggle over the fate of Europe and Asia.

  Given the Soviets’ ambitions and strength, Europe cannot have peace and freedom without the United States. But by the same token the U.S. cannot build a lasting peace without Europe. As Franklin Roosevelt said to his war-weary people in 1945, “We have learned that we cannot live alone, in peace.” We learned that lesson from lighting the bloodiest war in history, and it is even more true today.

  The U.S. is linked with its European allies on a variety of levels. We are largely a composite of European peoples and European ideals. We share values, faiths, and cultural and philosophical heritages with Europe. But what links us most fundamentally is our reverence for liberty, and we realize that the greatest evil of Soviet totalitarianism is that it smothers liberty. Our military alliances and our close economic and cultural relationships are expressions both of our common heritage and our mutual awareness of a common external threat.

  That is why Japan, while an Asian rather than a European nation, is as central to the Western alliance as any NATO member. Strategically, along with China it holds the eastern ramparts. Economically, its might is indispensable if we are to have an effective Western economic policy. And practically, it has much to gain from an alliance with the West because it has just as much to lose as the U.S. and the Europeans from further Soviet advances.

  The postwar Japanese economic miracle was the result of an unprecedented synthesis of East and West. Japanese creativity, drive, and skill, channelled through Western systems of government and free enterprise, made Japan one of the economic giants of the modern world. The Japanese have reaped the rewards of liberty, and not surprisingly they have shown a growing willingness to defend what they have built.

  Americans sometimes have a certain messianic, “We’ll save the world” attitude. We believe in our system and way of life and are eager to share both with the rest of the world. Woodrow Wilson did not call on the American people to fight in World War I just to save America but to serve the greater goal of making the world safe for democracy. We have always been confident that the sheer rightness of our ideals will win out in the end.

  We believe the American ideal is still the world’s best hope. But the economic and military power of the United States in the world is not as commanding as it once was. After World War II the U.S. economy accounted for more than half of the world’s industrial production. The figure is now less than a third—in part because with our help Japan and West Germany, our adversaries in war, have become our strongest competitors in peace. Our military dominance is also gone. We have lost the strategic edge in land-based missiles to the Soviet Union. To meet the Soviet military challenge we need European forces, deployed through NATO; as well as our own.

  The U.S. has played the starring role in the Western alliance for so long that our allies sometimes act as if it is a one-man show. Too often when crises have erupted—in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Central America—our allies have sat back and waited for the U.S. to step forward and respond. This cannot continue. The Europeans and the Japanese need the U.S., and the U.S. needs them. If hard-headed detente is to work, each nation in the industrialized West must realize that we live in a new world which the superpowers alone could destroy in a nuclear war, but in which we need the full participation of all our allies to build a real peace.

  NATO, as it prepares for its thirty-fifth anniversary next year, faces an urgent task: it must achieve no less than a new birth of purpose and function. It was formed in 1949 as a deterrent to a Soviet attack across the central plain of Europe, and since then it has been the mo
st successful military alliance in modern history. But what was adequate in 1949 is not adequate to meet the challenges of 1983.

  As a military alliance NATO has precise, narrow perimeters. Today it must grow in order to survive: grow not in the sense of adding more members, but by expanding its geographical horizons, deepening its military strength along the front lines, and pulling itself together in the way it uses its economic power, one of its strongest weapons.

  Just as a house divided against itself cannot stand, an alliance cannot stand if its periphery is threatened, its military forces inadequate, its members divided on the question of how to use its economic power. NATO is weakened by all of these maladies, and to overcome them it must take a good, hard look at itself. It must refocus, rethink, reappraise, and renew.

  A common error in military planning is to prepare for the wars of the future with the strategies and the weapons of the past. Alliances are as prone to making this mistake as are generals and nations. To avoid the pitfall NATO must acknowledge the passing of an era, one in which the greatest likelihood of a Soviet attack was in Europe, and acknowledge the coming of a new era. Today the Soviets, directly or through proxies, have the ability to act virtually anywhere and on virtually any level of military force, from guerrilla insurrection through nuclear attack. We must be able to respond accordingly.

  If it is to meet the challenge of the new era, NATO must grow in three distinct ways.

  It must strengthen its military power.

  America’s historic guarantee of Europe’s security is questionable today because of our lost strategic superiority. The strategy of the Atlantic alliance was based on the proposition that the U.S. and Europe were militarily linked—that a Soviet attack against Europe would be senseless because of the certainty of a U.S. nuclear response. We now lack a credible deterrent to a Soviet attack on Europe for the same reason we lack a credible deterrent to an attack on the United States. Mutual suicide, again, is not a viable foreign policy.

  The so-called trip-wire—the likelihood of massive U.S. nuclear retaliation against a Soviet conventional attack in Europe—is dangerously frayed. Nothing has yet taken its place. With their multiple-warhead SS-20s trained on every military target in Western Europe, the Soviets could hold NATO hostage to the possibility of a successful nuclear first strike. As NATO’s new missiles are deployed beginning late this year the theater balance will be gradually corrected. The MX program will begin to restore the strategic balance. But this will still leave a yawning gap in the West’s defenses: our substantial weakness in conventional forces.

  There is a dangerous military imbalance in Europe that must be corrected across the board, at both the theater nuclear level and the conventional level. The West needs a seamless web of military power in which the fabric will be just as strong wherever and however our opponents try to penetrate it.

  Some say a balance between NATO and the Soviet Union in theater nuclear weapons will obviate the need for a conventional buildup. Others say that if NATO restores the conventional balance the new medium-range theater missiles, the Pershing II and the cruise, need not be deployed in Western Europe.

  Both these contentions are wrong. The Soviet threat exists at both levels, nuclear and conventional, and the threat must be countered with equal effectiveness at both levels.

  Once East-West nuclear forces are stabilized, the incentive for Soviet aggression in Europe using conventional forces will vastly increase because of the Warsaw Pact’s decisive advantage on the ground. As matters stand now, NATO could hold out only for a matter of weeks, perhaps days, against such an attack. Combatants in war will always use the ultimate weapon to avoid defeat. Any conventional war stands a good chance of escalating to the nuclear level.

  NATO’s neglect of its conventional forces has lowered the nuclear threshold and increased the chances of nuclear war in Europe. But the damage is not irreparable. According to a recent study published in the London Economist NATO would only have to spend a relatively modest four percent more a year to beef up its conventional forces to levels which could deter a Soviet conventional attack. By thus raising the nuclear threshold, it’s worth every cent it would cost.

  However, developing the capability to deter a Soviet conventional attack does not mean that NATO could safely accept superiority in nuclear weapons by cancelling deployment of the new Pershing II and cruise missiles.

  Even with sufficient NATO forces on the ground, we need theater-level nuclear equality with the Soviet Union. The Russians think of war as war; they do not make polite distinctions between the use of nuclear weapons and conventional weapons. What has been called the “unusability of nuclear weapons” makes them more usable to the Soviet Union than to the West. The Soviet Union has no domestic restraints from a population paralyzed by media reports about the terror of nuclear weapons. It can manipulate the fear of nuclear weapons in the West without being too concerned about the fear of nuclear weapons in the Soviet Union.

  If because of NATO’s increased conventional forces the Russians launched an attack on the ground and that attack was repulsed, they would be tempted to use their SS-20s against Europe as long as NATO lacked the capacity of striking back at the Soviet Union with medium-range missiles such as the Pershing II and the cruise.

  In the short term, before the Warsaw Pact-NATO conventional balance is achieved, renouncing a first strike or cancelling the new medium-range missiles would sound the death knell for NATO. Keeping 200,000 American soldiers in Europe at a time when the Soviet Union had superiority at both the conventional and theater nuclear levels would leave them fatally vulnerable to attack.

  Failing to restore the theater nuclear balance would force the President of the United States to withdraw our forces from Europe. Without American troops NATO would disintegrate, leaving to the Soviets the morsel that has tantalized them since World War II: West Germany, a non-nuclear power that could not by itself resist a Soviet attack even for a few days.

  Since the end of World War II Germany has been the Soviet Union’s primary target in Europe. That is why Andropov’s insistence on counting French and British nuclear weapons against his SS-20s is such a patent sham. Both Britain and France maintain their forces for their own defense, not for the defense of others. Nuclear weapons under U.S. control are West Germany’s only deterrent against massively superior Soviet conventional forces. Without that deterrent West Germany would be nothing but blackmail bait for the hungry Russian bear.

  For 30 years after World War II American strategic superiority, the trip-wire, was enough to deter the Soviets from an attack in Europe. Those days are over. NATO must pick up the slack.

  Its first steps in that direction have been costly and controversial. While fear of the Soviet Union helps hold NATO together, fear of a nuclear holocaust among a growing number of Europeans threatens to tear it apart.

  Ultimately fear of the Soviets is not enough to sustain the Western alliance. The essence of deterrence is the belief in deterrence and the hope that the West’s military power is being used as part of an overall plan to prevent military confrontation. Without hope of progress toward real peace NATO’s will to resist could collapse. Hard-headed detente will provide that hope; so too will the softening of harsh East-West rhetoric that will inevitably result as the superpowers begin to substitute negotiation for confrontation.

  The Western alliance must realize that Soviet advances in the Third World threaten the lifeline of every Western industrial nation. Whether this takes place in Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, or Angola, it is as much an attack on the Western alliance as would be an assault on Europe itself.

  In the third of a century since NATO was founded there have been enormous changes in the nature of the Soviet challenge. In the early postwar years the Soviet Union was dangerous to those on its borders, but it was not yet skilled in the projection of power. As the Soviet Union has grown stronger, however, it has also grown immensely more sophisticated in making its power felt far beyond its bord
ers.

  NATO remains a traditional military alliance, its forces deployed to deter a Soviet blitzkrieg across the Elbe but dangerously unprepared for a Soviet thrust toward the Persian Gulf or a maneuver by Cuban proxy forces in Africa. In effect we have built a Maginot Line of nuclear and conventional forces along Western Europe’s border, while the Soviet Union has learned to use its forces to go under and around borders. As a result the West is in grave danger of being outflanked.

  When NATO was founded Europe was weak at the center but strong on the perimeter. The continent itself had been devastated by World War II, but the great European empires were still in place. Today Europe is strong at the center but vulnerable on the perimeter. If the perimeter is breached, the center will collapse. Soviet advances anywhere around the globe—in Asia, the Persian Gulf, or resource-rich Africa—are as potent a threat to Europe as any conventional attack. The industrialized West, including Japan, will be choked to death if the sources of oil and minerals essential to its economies fall into hostile hands.

  Some, including many in Europe who continue to expect the U.S. to carry the ball in crisis after crisis, think it ridiculous to suggest that the West could be defeated in the hinterlands rather than on the front lines. If it were, however, it would not be unprecedented. In the American Civil War some thought the North would win by capturing the capital of the Confederacy. But wiser hands knew differently. The Union would defeat the South not simply by pressing “On to Richmond!” but by cutting it off from the rest of the world by blockading its ports, seizing the Mississippi River, and thus stemming the flow of resources for the Confederate war effort.

  This was called the “Anaconda Plan.” Although it was derided at first, eventually it helped the North win the war.