America must come to grips with the realities of power. It must accept power, accept its existence, accept its exercise, and accept the ambiguities of result that are sometimes inherent in its use in a conflict-ridden, imperfect world. The time has passed when we could afford to temporize, to equivocate, to hesitate, when we could indulge the luxury of moralistic pettifogging as an excuse for keeping our feet out of the muddy waters. In today’s world, purity is no excuse for pusillanimity. Every day lost in mounting our own strategic counteroffensive narrows an already perilously thin margin of safety.
Perhaps a nation that equates celebrity with wisdom, that looks to rock stars and movie actresses as its oracles, deserves to lose; and yet there is more to America than that. There is more backbone, more common sense, more determination—if only the public can be wakened to what the reality is. And make no mistake about it: If the American people do wake up one day to find themselves confronted with the stark choice between war and slavery, they are going to fight. They are going to fight with missiles, with airplanes, with ships, with tanks; they are going to fight, if need be, with sticks and stones and with their bare fingernails.
Americans have not known suffering on such a scale as the Russians have. But we have known it, and we have overcome it. The frontier was not a garden party. World Wars I and II were not Woodstocks. The immigrants who came to our shores in prewelfare days scrabbled for existence, and they grew strong in the process. We have not confronted suffering on the Soviet scale because we have not had to. But we have shown time and again that what we had to do, we could do, once we recognized the necessity for doing it.
If those who have never known the absence of freedom are slow to recognize how much it means to them, it is equally true that those who have never lived in freedom may underestimate the strength of a free people’s gut determination to preserve it. Faced suddenly with the prospect of its loss, they are going to discover its value. And this, in the final analysis, is what must give the Kremlin leaders pause.
Meanwhile, we must underscore that basic truth with actions that drive its meaning home. We must show the Kremlin that its drive for military supremacy is ultimately futile. We must recognize that what we are engaged in is a war, even if not in the conventional sense in which our history books have defined it. If this war is not to escalate to the level of an actual armed clash, we must fight it effectively on the nonmilitary level.
The crucial element in developing a strategy to win victory without war is willpower. Military power and economic power are necessary, but they are useless without willpower.
It has been said that where there is a will there is a way. As we have so often proved in the past, by summoning up our will we can find the way.
10
Presidential Power
Presidents must have a will to power or they will not be successful presidents. They must constantly search for power, building it, if necessary, out of every scrap of formal authority and personal influence they can locate. They must constantly guard whatever power they have achieved. They must hoard power so that it will be available in the future.
—James MacGregor Burns
When to pause, lower one’s voice; when to thrust out one’s jaw in defiance?
—Hugh Sidey
When I first entered Congress more than thirty years ago Truman was in the White House, Stalin was in the Kremlin, MacArthur ruled Japan, and Europe lay in ruins. Since then I have watched nations advance and decline, and have seen leaders succeed and fail. America has been through seven presidencies. It has confronted many crises, fought two wars, and narrowly averted fighting others.
As I have watched the unfolding of world events over these years, it has become clear to me that the one factor most crucial to the strength and cohesion of the West, and to the chances for peace, is the leadership provided by the President of the United States.
The President has great power in wartime as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. But he also has enormous power to prevent war and preserve peace. Having had both responsibilities, I know that the latter can be even more important than the former. It can also be more difficult to exercise effectively, especially in this era of a “war called peace.”
Americans prefer to conduct their peacetime contests in the international arena by Marquis of Queensberry rules. For the Soviet leaders, however, the same rules apply in peace as in war, and those are the rules of the street-fighter: anything goes. To meet their challenge, the American President must use all the power at his command in an effective and responsible way. “Responsible” here includes the specific responsibility that he alone bears for ensuring the nation’s survival and the free world’s future.
This requires that he think realistically, not naively; that he be a skilled diplomat; that he know when to go to the summit and when not to go, and what to do when he gets there; that he never give our adversaries something they want unless he gets from them something we want; that while respecting the principle of openness when feasible, he preserve secrecy when necessary; that he recognize that gathering intelligence and conducting covert activities are justified as much to prevent war as to wage it; and finally that he accept the reality that moral perfection in the conduct of nations cannot be expected and should not be demanded. A President needs a global view, a sense of proportion, and a keen sense of the possible. He needs to know how power operates, and he must have the will to use it.
The effective use of power, especially on the world scene, is a skill that only experience can teach. But we can learn from the experience of others. We can draw on the wisdom of others. In the heyday of the British Empire young Englishmen grew up with their eyes on the far corners of the earth. The British had a national tradition of ruling a vast empire from a small island; this is one reason they were so adroit at it. A global view came naturally, and so did a familiarity with the exercise of power and with the ways of the world. In the postwar world America has assumed global responsibilities; we must try to prepare our next generation to carry them. We must understand that while the President is chosen by Americans, that choice can determine the future of free people everywhere.
If I could carve ten rules into the walls of the Oval Office for my successors to follow in the dangerous years just ahead, they would be these:
1 Always be prepared to negotiate, but never negotiate without being prepared.
2 Never be belligerent, but always be firm.
3 Always remember that covenants should be openly agreed to but privately negotiated.
4 Never seek publicity that would destroy the ability to get results.
5 Never give up unilaterally what could be used as a bargaining chip. Make your adversaries give something for everything they get.
6 Never let your adversary underestimate what you would do in response to a challenge. Never tell him in advance what you would not do.
7 Always leave your adversary a face-saving line of retreat.
8 Always carefully distinguish between friends who provide some human rights and enemies who deny all human rights.
9 Always do at least as much for our friends as our adversaries do for our enemies.
10 Never lose faith. In a just cause faith can move mountains. Faith without strength is futile, but strength without faith is sterile.
Having laid down these rules, I would also suggest that the President keep in his desk drawer, in mind but out of sight, an eleventh commandment: When saying “always” and “never,” always keep a mental reservation; never foreclose the unique exception; always leave room for maneuver. “Always” and “never” are guideposts, but in high-stakes diplomacy there are few immutables. A President always has to be prepared for what he thought he would never do.
Private Diplomacy
By its nature, diplomacy must be conducted beyond the range of cameras and microphones if it is to succeed. Diplomacy is not the raucous haggling of an Oriental bazaar, but rather a quiet, often subtle process of feeling out the
differing degrees to which various elements of the other party’s position are negotiable, and of trying varying combinations of give-and-take. Negotiators have to be able to advance tentative proposals, to explore alternatives, and to test the other side’s reactions. They can only afford to do this if they can do it in privacy. Genuine negotiation is a search for some form of accommodation that advances the general interests of both parties by compromising on the specific interests of each. In such an agreement each side gets something, and each side also gives something. Premature exposure of part of the agreement—or even of tentative proposals that might later be abandoned—can destroy the whole agreement. Privacy in negotiations advances agreement. Publicity defeats it.
Frequently results can be achieved through quiet diplomacy that could never be achieved through public diplomacy. A classic illustration of this occurred during my first term, in 1970. In the fall of that year U-2 flights over Cuba revealed that a base was being constructed at Cienfuegos which could be used for submarines armed with nuclear missiles. This violated the 1962 U.S.-Soviet agreement on Cuba. But instead of confronting the Russians publicly with our knowledge of this violation, we decided to use quiet diplomacy so that they could withdraw without losing face publicly. Henry Kissinger informed Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin that we were aware of the base under construction, told him unequivocally that we considered it to be a violation of our agreement, and let Dobrynin know that we were keeping things cool deliberately so that the Soviets could withdraw without a public confrontation.
Two weeks later Dobrynin handed Kissinger a note reaffirming the 1962 understanding about Cuba and stating that the Soviets were doing nothing to violate that understanding. U-2 flights showed that construction had slowed down at the sub site. After some face-saving delays it stopped altogether and the base at Cienfuegos was abandoned. Our strategy had worked. The Russians had decided to take advantage of the maneuverability our low-profile strategy afforded them. By denying that the violation had ever existed, they backed away from the crisis and still saved face. Quiet diplomacy supported by steady nerves and a still-superior arsenal had prevailed. We had not forced the issue into the open where the Russians could retreat only at the cost of a great deal of prestige. We made it easier for them to retreat, thereby averting another confrontation at the brink over Cuba.
This episode proved the wisdom of Liddell Hart’s dictum:
It is an elementary principle of strategy that, if you find your opponent in a strong position costly to force, you should leave him a line of retreat—as the quickest way of loosening his resistance. It should, equally, be a principle of policy, especially in war, to provide your opponent with a ladder by which he can climb down.
Our low profile proved to be the ladder the Soviets used.
In the 1978 meetings at Camp David with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin President Carter also dramatically demonstrated the benefits of negotiating in an atmosphere free from the baying of press hounds. His private meetings with Sadat and Begin proved absolutely essential to the breakthroughs that paved the way to the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord.
There are, of course, times when going public becomes a useful tactic to advance a negotiation, to rally support, to bring pressure on the other side, or to counter enemy propaganda. In January 1972 I disclosed publicly that for nearly two and a half years Henry Kissinger had been periodically traveling in secret to Paris and conducting negotiations there with representatives of North Vietnam, and I also disclosed the proposals we had secretly made. North Vietnam had been cynically exploiting the secrecy of those negotiations; we were being accused of intransigence, when in fact we had advanced extremely forthcoming peace proposals and had been stonewalled by the North Vietnamese. In this case, with North Vietnam clearly hoping to wear down America’s will by blaming us for the lack of progress and thus fanning heightened antiwar sentiment, it became important to make the record public. As I put it then, “Just as secret negotiations can sometimes break a public deadlock, public disclosure may help to break a secret deadlock.” Even in a case such as this, however, the public disclosure is a tactic; the negotiations themselves still have to proceed in secret.
The British diplomat Sir Harold Nicolson put the case for private diplomacy perfectly in his book Diplomacy. He said that while a foreign policy must be openly proclaimed and subjected to the closest scrutiny of the public, the negotiations that are necessary to carry on that policy must be kept secret or else the policy itself will be sabotaged. Commenting on Woodrow Wilson’s secretiveness during the negotiation of the Treaty of Versailles, Nicolson noted that even “the highest apostle of ‘open diplomacy’ found, when it came to practice, that open negotiation was totally unworkable.” Wilson, he declared, had failed “to foresee that there was all the difference in the world between ‘open covenants’ and ‘openly arrived at’—between policy and negotiation.”
The “Hole Card”
Diplomacy often requires a delicate and intricate balancing of ambiguity and straight talk, the unpredictable and the very predictable. A complex game is played out between adversaries, a game that involves, or should involve, the least amount of guesswork on the part of the American, and the greatest amount of guesswork on the part of the other side.
In this respect international relations are a lot like poker—stud poker with the hole card. The hole card is all important because without it your opponent—the Soviet leader, for instance—has perfect knowledge of whether or not he can beat you. If he knows he will win, he will raise you. If he knows he cannot, he will fold and get out of the game.
The United States is an open society. We have all but one of our cards face up on the table. Our only covered card is the will, nerve, and unpredictability of the President—his ability to make the enemy think twice about raising the ante. If we turn that card up, it is no contest. We must, of course, have good cards showing. But we must also make the Russians think that our hole card is a very good card indeed. The Russians are masters at disguising their hole card—they are masters of the bluff. More often than not, that is all their hole card is, a bluff.
Nevertheless, we can never make that judgment with certainty, so we must exercise caution in our negotiations with them or with their surrogates. To be on an equal footing with them, our “up” cards must be as good as theirs, and our “down” card—the President—must be every bit as unknown as theirs.
Many examples from recent years illustrate the danger of turning all our cards up, as well as the benefit of keeping one down.
In 1950 the United States had overwhelming nuclear superiority. But when Secretary of State Dean Acheson announced an American view of vital international interests, he excluded South Korea. The North Korean communists thought that our intentions were face up on the board, and that they did not include the defense of South Korea. So they attacked, confident of both Soviet and Chinese support. It was a miscalculation by them, based upon a misrepresentation by us. Had Acheson’s statement left doubt in the minds of the communists, the war in South Korea might have been avoided.
During the course of the war Truman again turned up a card by announcing his intention to refrain from using tactical or strategic nuclear weapons in the conduct of the war. The North Koreans, Chinese, and Soviets once again gained full knowledge of our hand, so they felt comfortable continuing to pursue the war at the conventional level. Only when Eisenhower assumed power did the card again become a mystery. Eisenhower was a proven, strong military leader. They had ample reason to wonder about his intentions, and Eisenhower gave them no reason to believe he would not use our strategic superiority. On the contrary, his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, sent strong hints through diplomatic channels that he might. With mystery restored to the equation, the communists began to negotiate seriously and the war was soon ended.
When French and British forces moved into Egypt at the height of the Suez crisis, Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin propos
ed to President Eisenhower that the Soviets and Americans engage in a joint military action to stop the fighting in Egypt, a proposal the White House immediately branded as unacceptable. As the fighting increased, however, and it appeared possible that the Soviets might take some unilateral action, Eisenhower ordered the Joint Chiefs to put American military units on alert. Even after a cease-fire was declared, the Soviets continued to threaten to send “volunteers” into Egypt. While Eisenhower’s answer to this was diplomatically worded, NATO Commander Alfred Gruenther was authorized to be blunt: a communist attack on the West would result in the Soviet bloc being “destroyed . . . as sure as day follows night.” As Eisenhower noted in his memoirs, “The Soviet threat proved to be nothing but words.” However, it was clear that Eisenhower’s credibility as a strong military leader, combined with our overwhelming nuclear superiority, was the decisive factor that deterred Soviet intervention.
Two years later, in 1958, when the United States confronted Chinese communist threats to take over the Nationalist-held islands of Quemoy and Matsu, Eisenhower explained to me his version of the concept of the hole card. Reflecting on his own experience as a military commander, he said that “You should never let the enemy know what you will do, but it’s more important that you never let the enemy know what you will not do.”
If the adversary feels that you are unpredictable, even rash, he will be deterred from pressing you too far. The odds that he will fold increase greatly, and the unpredictable President will win another hand. By contrast, statements that appear to rule out the use of force, while perhaps meant to be nonprovocative, will in fact provoke an antagonist to push for more.
Real War Page 29