1999

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1999 Page 22

by Richard Nixon


  The meeting at Reykjavik in 1986 is a prime example of how not to conduct a summit. Never has so much been risked with so little forethought. In one meeting with Gorbachev, President Reagan actually negotiated about eliminating not only ballistic missiles but also all other nuclear weapons on the basis of a scrap of paper on which an aide had scrawled a couple of talking points. Had it not been for the fact that the President, to his great credit, adamantly refused to trade away the SDI, the United States might have cast aside the core of Western defense strategy—all without consulting its allies or even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ironically, even if no weapons are ever deployed as a result of the SDI, it has already once saved the West from disaster.

  In the end, the unprepared summit at Reykjavik achieved nothing in terms of Western interests. First, it allowed the Soviets to get off the hook for their recent kidnapping of American journalist Nicholas Daniloff. Second, it enabled Gorbachev to paint the SDI as the principal obstacle to a sweeping arms-control agreement. Third, its loose talk about eliminating nuclear weapons sent shock waves through the West. No summit since Yalta has threatened Western interests so much as the two days at Reykjavik. It is almost inevitable that any freewheeling summit will careen toward disaster.

  Do not allow arms control to dominate the summit agenda. At a summit, a President must give proportional weight to the entire spectrum of U.S.–Soviet issues. In fact, a summit agenda should place top priority not on arms control but on the potential flashpoints for U.S.–Soviet conflicts. After all, it is not arms but the political differences that lead to their use that cause wars. The failure to devote sustained attention to these political differences sends the wrong message to Moscow. Kremlin leaders watch their counterparts closely at a summit. Our choice of issues carries a signal: What we address is what we think important. If we skirt an issue, they will assume we are giving them a free hand on it.

  Conflicts in the Third World are the most important issues to raise. Soviet leaders must be made to understand that it would be both irrational and immoral for the United States and the West to accept the doctrine that the Soviet Union has the right to support so-called wars of national liberation in the noncommunist world without insisting on our right to defend our allies and friends under assault and to support true liberation movements against pro-Soviet regimes in the Third World. We cannot realistically expect the Soviets to cease being communists dedicated to expanding their influence and domination, but we must make it clear at the summit level that military adventurism will destroy the chances for better relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, thereby nullifying any potential benefits Moscow might derive from reduced tensions.

  The Reykjavik summit in 1986 and the Washington summit in 1987 were primarily arms-control summits. Gorbachev succeeded in his efforts to block progress, and in fact any real negotiations, on any other issues. At the next summit, the United States should insist that equal priority be given to the causes of war as is given to the arms that could be used to wage war. Arms-control talks are important and can serve our interests. But they should proceed in tandem with and be expressly linked to the other issues on the agenda. A relaxation of tensions that is based exclusively on arms control and that allows Soviet expansionism to run unchecked will lead not to real peace but to false hopes and runaway euphoria.

  Do not negotiate with a deadline. We tend to make foreign policy in four-year cycles. A typical American President aspires to overhaul our policies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and to settle all outstanding questions before the next presidential election. He is a man in a hurry and is visibly concerned with the ticking clock. Kremlin leaders are acutely aware of the pressure that time puts on a President and are capable of exploiting it ruthlessly. Our top leaders must therefore be more realistic in what they hope to achieve. No single President will solve all the issues, and no single issue will be solved for all time by any President. At the summit, we must be willing to walk away without a deal if the terms are not right. It is a fatal mistake for any American President to negotiate with a deadline. After all, Gorbachev’s negotiating deadline is about twenty-five years.

  Institute annual summits. If a President hews to these five basic guidelines, he can go toe-to-toe with any Soviet leader at the summit. As part of his overall negotiating strategy, he should seek to establish a process of annual summit meetings with the top Soviet leader.

  Annual summits are useful for three reasons. First, since both leaders will want substantive agreements for a summit, the fact that one is scheduled gives added impetus to negotiations mired in the bureaucracies. It is one of the best ways for the United States to put the heat on the Soviets to budge from their entrenched positions. While this should not be carried to the point of seeking an agreement for the sake of an agreement or of negotiating against a deadline, scheduled annual summits can help break negotiating logjams. Second, the regular discussion of political differences on an annual basis reduces the possibility that one leader will miscalculate the reaction of the other. Each will have ample opportunity to stake his ground and demonstrate his will to defend his interests. While the two leaders might not like each other, they will understand each other. It will therefore lessen the chance that a miscalculation by one will result in a war neither wants. Third, the fact that a summit is scheduled will inhibit aggressive moves by the Soviet Union in the run-up to the meeting. Neither leader wants to be accused of poisoning the atmosphere prior to a summit.

  Some might be tempted to conclude that it is hopeless to expect a democracy to come out on equal terms in negotiations with a totalitarian dictatorship. But in the past we have reached sound agreements. The Austrian Peace Treaty of 1955, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1962, the Berlin agreement of 1971, and the SALT I Treaty of 1972 all represented significant progress in U.S.–Soviet relations. In each case, however, we must remember that the agreement did not mark an end to the superpower conflict but simply took a step toward setting up a process to live with the continuing conflict.

  If we recognize their limitations and if we adhere to proper guidelines for their conduct, negotiations with Moscow can serve a useful purpose—in effect providing rules of engagement for competition without war. But we must not pursue negotiations in isolation from the other aspects of overall strategy. We can go forward with talks only if we do what is necessary to maintain deterrence and keep up our competition. To negotiate without maintaining a deterrent leads to gradual accommodation and capitulation. To negotiate without continuing to compete leads to acquiescence to Soviet aggression. If we learn to combine the three—deterrence, competition, and negotiation—we will be in a position to achieve real peace in the years beyond 1999.

  6

  THE

  FRAGMENTED GIANT

  In the years beyond 1999, the balance of power in the world will reflect less and less the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union and more and more the rising importance of three other global geopolitical giants: Western Europe, Japan, and China. The future of the world rides to a large degree on whether these other power centers contribute to the strength of the East or the West. Therefore, in the years before 1999, the United States must undertake a concerted effort to integrate the world’s three rising power centers into a broad coalition to deter Soviet aggression and create a stronger world order.

  There are those who would contest that view in the case of Western Europe. They do not believe that NATO matters anymore. They sum up the shift in world power by describing the nineteenth century as the century of Europe, the twentieth as the American century, and the twenty-first as the Pacific century. They argue that Europe is finished as a major factor in world affairs. No European country by itself can qualify as a superpower. Even Great Britain, France, and Germany, the nations which once were the world’s premier military and economic powers, are soft and decadent, unable to see their own interests, much less to mobilize the willpower to defend them. Their leaders are obsessed with satiating
the appetite of their rapacious welfare states rather than playing a constructive world role. Those who view Europe in this way, as a collection of geopolitical has-beens, conclude that the United States should therefore cast Europe aside and either turn to the Pacific or go it alone in the world.

  In one respect, this view is correct: The two world wars of the twentieth century have exacted a heavy toll on the European nations. In World War I, all the absolutist monarchies, the political systems of half of Europe, were uprooted. In World War II, the seeds of destruction were sown in the colonial soil of all the great European empires. As de Gaulle told me in 1969, “In World War II, all the nations of Europe lost; two were defeated.” Europe entered the postwar period as a continent suffering from historical exhaustion. In the first half of the century, its peoples had barely survived two devastating wars, and their instincts told them to withdraw from the world and to adopt a more parochial outlook.

  But the critics of Europe ignore the positive side of the ledger. Britain and France are no longer rivals, and France and Germany are no longer enemies. Western European countries have made great strides in integrating their economies and have taken the first halting steps toward political unity. While for almost a century it was customary to describe Turkey as “the sick man of Europe,” it is now well on the way to vigorous economic and political health and provides more divisions for NATO than any other country. After remaining neutral in World War II, Spain adopted a democratic government and has joined NATO, and, despite the dispute over the future of U.S. air bases, socialist Prime Minister Felipe González remains committed to remaining in the alliance.

  While the fragmented giant of Europe still has a long way to go before it achieves genuine unity, we should not ignore the fact that the countries of Western Europe have come a long way since 1945. We can safely predict that these countries, which clashed in dozens of crises in the one hundred years before 1945, will not go to war against one another again in the next century. That has not happened since the Pax Romana fifteen centuries ago.

  Moreover, it is still in the interest of the United States to remain in NATO and to maintain the U.S. military presence in Western Europe. The population of Western Europe is greater than that of the United States and almost as great as that of the Soviet Union. With one-fourth the territory of the United States and one-eighth that of the Soviet Union, our NATO allies have a total GNP almost equal to ours and more than 50 percent higher than the Soviet Union’s. Western Europe’s peoples are highly educated and capable of exploiting the enormous promise of high technology. Most important, for the first time in history all the West European nations have democratic governments.

  Thus, for the United States, Western Europe continues to be the single most strategic piece of territory in the world. It contains over a quarter of the world’s economic power and represents the forward line of defense against the Soviet Union. Yet, a profound crisis today threatens the future of the Atlantic Alliance. Harold Macmillan saw this coming thirty years ago when he told me, “Alliances are held together by fear, not love.” Ironically, today while the Soviet threat is greater, the fear of Soviet aggression is less. When it was established in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization represented an appropriate response to the threats we faced in 1949. But since then the world has changed. If NATO cannot adapt, it will not survive. It needs to grow to meet the new challenges we face, or it will perish.

  The crisis of NATO has grown out of the profound transformation of the world in the last forty years.

  When the leaders of the original twelve NATO states gathered in Washington to sign its charter in 1949, each grounded his decision to join the alliance on four common assumptions:

  1. Moscow posed a dangerous military threat to Western Europe. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Western leaders were haunted by the nightmare of scores of Red Army divisions sweeping across Europe to the English Channel. European communist parties compounded the image of Soviet hostility by dutifully toeing the party line from Moscow and vigorously denouncing any West European participation in the Marshall Plan. As a result, no democratic leader—not even those of Europe’s socialist parties—denied the danger. Among the democratic parties of Western Europe there was unanimity on one point: military aggression by the Kremlin was a real threat.

  2. Moscow’s superiority in conventional forces could be countered with American nuclear superiority. In 1950, the NATO countries had fewer than 600,000 ground troops, while the Soviet Union had 1.5 million. But the leaders of the West stood firm in the face of the Soviets’ two-to-one conventional superiority, because of overwhelming U.S. nuclear superiority. The United States had in its arsenal three hundred nuclear bombs, while Moscow had only tested its first crude nuclear explosive less than a year before. Thus, the members of NATO assumed that nuclear weapons could guarantee Western Europe’s military security for the foreseeable future.

  3. U.S. economic strength compared with Western Europe’s enabled the United States to bear a major share of the financial burden of conventional defenses in Europe. In 1950, the U.S. economy represented over half of the world economy, while the countries of Western Europe were still suffering from the economic devastation of World War II. America had reached its economic zenith; Europe was still digging out of the rubble. Western Europe had to demobilize in order to devote its resources to economic recovery. As a result, the United States stepped in to fill the breach, deploying more than 435,000 ground troops in Europe by 1953 and expending more than $60 billion in 1987 dollars on the Marshall Plan.

  4. The military threat from Moscow was focused on the European continent. In the immediate postwar years, the members of NATO assumed that the major target of the Kremlin’s aggressive designs was Western Europe. If Moscow unleashed a war of aggression, they believed, its divisions would roll across the European plain. Moreover, the Soviet Union was not yet a global superpower. Moscow did not have then the capacity to project military power beyond the countries on its borders. Thus, the threat was only to Europe, and the response needed to come in Europe.

  None of those assumptions are held in common by all the leaders of NATO countries in 1988.

  First, a profound disagreement has developed between NATO leaders on the opposite sides of the Atlantic over how great a threat the Soviet Union poses to the West. Generally, Americans believe that the Soviet threat remains as great as or even greater than ever. They point to the massive buildup of Soviet strategic and conventional forces—as well as to the continuing domination of Eastern Europe and the string of geopolitical gains Moscow tallied up in the 1970s—as proof of the Kremlin’s hostile intentions toward the West.

  Many in Western Europe agree with the American view of the East–West conflict. They remember the Berlin crisis in 1948, when only an airlift by the Western powers prevented Moscow from starving the city’s western sector. They remember the malicious delight with which Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall, the only wall in history put up not to keep invaders out but to keep its own citizens from escaping. They are well aware of the grimness of life under communism in Eastern Europe. Most of all, they know that the Warsaw Pact’s forces always train to fight an offensive, not defensive, war.

  But in recent years there has been a tendency among West Europeans, especially but not exclusively those on the left, to see the Soviet Union in a different light. The more responsible critics of the U.S. point of view believe that Americans are overreacting to a real but exaggerated threat. They argue that the Soviet threat is not so overwhelming and immediate as to require a frantic response. They point out that communism in the Soviet Union is not a historical success story. Given the Kremlin’s great internal problems and its increasing difficulty in holding its East European empire, the Soviet Union is not in a position to threaten seriously Western Europe. Only a madman in the Kremlin, in their view, would consider launching a war of aggression across the central European plain. And the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack is minimal, because ruling ove
r a Europe of destroyed cities and dead bodies would not be a rational war goal of any sane leader. They therefore believe that American anxiety and the American call for more vigilance and military preparedness represent an overreaction of an immature world power.

  The less responsible European critics of America take this analysis a step further. They believe that the United States is a greater threat to peace than the Soviet Union. They argue that Western Europe should opt out of the East–West struggle. Their heated rhetoric accuses the United States of forcibly conscripting Western Europe in its Cold War with the Soviet Union and insidiously refers to American troops in Western Europe as “occupation forces.” They believe that a third world war is more likely to result from U.S. recklessness than from Soviet aggression. Unfortunately, two major European socialist parties, the Labour Party in Britain and the Social Democratic Party in West Germany, have succumbed to these views. Their platforms in recent campaigns have called for the complete removal of American nuclear forces from Europe and other steps which would lead directly to the dissolution of NATO.

  This problem will undoubtedly get worse before it gets better. NATO is a victim of its own success. Western Europe has enjoyed unprecedented stability, prosperity, and security largely as a result of the alliance. As Michael Howard has observed, “It takes only one generation of successful peacekeeping to create the belief that peace is a natural condition endangered only by those professionally involved in the preparation for war.” NATO’s success in deterring a Soviet attack has led many to question whether a threat existed in the first place. With the new Gorbachev leadership in Moscow more attuned to public relations, the problem will become greater. Some public-opinion polls already indicate that West Europeans believe that the actions of the United States threaten peace as much as or more than those of the Soviet Union. If this becomes a trend, it will make not communism but neutralism the wave of the future in Europe.

 

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