Real War

by Richard Nixon

  Throughout history people have tended to think of intelligence as an instrument of war. Today it is an essential instrument of peace. The more we know about the Soviets, the less likely we are to underestimate or miscalculate what they may do. The knowledge that we have an effective intelligence community that can follow whatever they do will lessen their temptations.

  We have castrated the CIA and other intelligence agencies. We must restore their ability to keep the President and our other leaders informed, ready, and able to respond to danger. We must give them the means to do their job.

  Summit Meetings

  Harold Nicolson, in Diplomacy, sounded a warning about the dangers of summitry. “Such visits,” he wrote, “arouse public expectation, lead to misunderstandings, and create confusion. The time at the disposal of these visitors is not always sufficient to allow for patience and calm deliberation. The honors which are paid to a minister in a foreign capital may tire his physique, excite his vanity, or bewilder his judgment.”

  A summit meeting presents other pitfalls as well. When a President negotiates personally, he deprives himself of three major assets:

  He loses some of the enormous prestige of his position as head of state and head of government by talking as an equal with the head of government from another country. Frank I. Cobb made this point in a memo to Colonel House in 1918: “The moment President Wilson sits at the council table with their prime ministers and foreign secretaries he has lost all power that comes from distance and detachment. . . . He becomes merely a negotiator dealing with other negotiators.”

  He reduces the mystery, which is one of his greatest weapons in diplomacy; a President may appear more powerful and less predictable from a distance than in face-to-face encounters.

  Probably most importantly, he loses flexibility: an ambassador, or even a foreign minister, can put forth positions that a President can later modify or even repudiate. For example, Dulles, with Eisenhower’s approval, would often take a hard line, which would later allow Eisenhower to act as the conciliator. Kissinger, on the other hand, with my approval, would profess to want to be more conciliatory, and use the prospect of my harder line for negotiating leverage. As a veteran British ambassador observed, “Sometimes the function of a diplomat is to fail in a negotiation or to make little or no progress. But when a head of state gets involved, his need to look like a winner can do serious damage to a delicate process.”

  Against these costs must be balanced two benefits that might be produced from a summit meeting:

  In U.S.-Soviet relations a meeting at the summit allows each leader to take the measure of the other and thus may reduce the possibility of miscalculation in the event of a future confrontation. For example, my very heated discussion on the Mideast with Brezhnev in San Clemente in June of 1973 helped to give credibility to the alert I called a few months later during the Yom Kippur War.

  Summitry can also provide an opportunity for a President to exercise the powers of personal persuasion. President Carter’s Middle East negotiations vividly illustrate this point.

  But a President should go to a summit only if the stakes are worth the risks, and if the meeting is thoroughly programmed in advance. No American President should go to a summit with an adversary unless he knows what is on the other side of the mountain.

  The highly publicized formal summit meeting may seem like the ultimate forum for high-level discussion of state-to-state relations. This is not the case. Many people attend the main official meetings and the press is always buzzing around trying to pry out some detail for tomorrow’s headlines. In such circumstances the diplomatic rule of thumb about not broaching sensitive matters in public comes into play. At the formal meetings, where more people are present, I have found the Soviet leaders to be less forthcoming than when we meet informally or alone with just a translator. The larger the group, the less free the conversation, especially when the group consists of high-ranking communists. In the formal sessions everybody is talking for the record and talking like a record, carefully watching what he says. Real progress is more likely to be made in small, informal sessions—not those that are given over to social amenities, but the private working sessions that allow higher degrees of both candor and concentration.

  It is disastrous to play to the press during a summit meeting. When either leader does this he is tempted to take heroic positions that do not lend themselves to realistic accommodation later on. Bargaining stances openly proclaimed are difficult to back away from. Better results are produced in diplomacy when the leaders talk to each other instead of to the press.

  • • •

  Creation of a willowy euphoria is one of the dangers of summitry. During my administration excessive euphoria built up around the 1972 Peking and Moscow summit meetings. I must assume a substantial part of the responsibility for this. It was an election year, and I wanted the political credit for what I believed were genuinely major advances toward a stable peace. Further, some of our summit agreements faced tough opposition in Congress, and in order to win approval for them we tried to present them in the best possible light—emphasizing the great hopes we might realize if both sides adhered to both the letter and the spirit of the agreements. I did make efforts to keep expectations from getting out of hand: for example, I warned in a televised speech to a joint session of Congress on my return from Moscow that we did not “bring back from Moscow the promise of instant peace, but we do bring the beginning of a process that can lead to a lasting peace.” I cautioned that “Soviet ideology still proclaims hostility to some of America’s most basic values. The Soviet leaders remain committed to that ideology.”

  The events themselves were so dramatic, however, that unrealistic expectations were raised. Many people embraced the naïve notion that in the new era of détente the Soviets would suddenly abandon their ambitions and we would all live happily ever after. When Soviet adventurism continued, they then turned around and said détente was a failure. The euphoria also made it more difficult to gain support for the decisive actions and strong military forces that were needed to make détente succeed. Euphoria is dangerous in dealing with the Soviets, or with any adversary. Euphoria is a harmful illusion that eventually breeds disillusion; it also invites irresolution.

  Linkage

  There is one cardinal rule for the conduct of international relations: Don’t give anything to your adversary unless you get something in return. At the summit there should be no “free rides” for the Kremlin leadership. We should never engage in summitry for the sake of summitry and for the fleeting “spirit” of cooperation that these meetings customarily produce. Such “spirits” often gain very little for the United States, and a great deal for the Soviets.

  It was during the transition period between my election in 1968 and my first inauguration in 1969 that Henry Kissinger and I developed what is now widely called the concept of linkage. We determined that those things the Soviets wanted—the good public relations that summits provided, economic cooperation, and strategic arms limitations agreements—would not be gained by them without a quid pro quo. At that time the principal quid pro quos we wanted were some assistance in getting a settlement in Vietnam, restraint by them in the Middle East, and a resolution of the recurring problems in Berlin.

  In SALT negotiations they wanted an agreement limiting defensive weapons only, an area in which we were moving ahead faster than they were. We insisted there should also be a limit on offensive weapons, in which they were moving ahead faster than we were. Here, congressional approval of the ABM program was indispensable. In diplomacy, as in other walks of life, you can only get something you want if you can give your opponent something he wants. Unilateral concessions on our part—to prove our “goodwill”—are stupid and dangerous. As Henry Kissinger puts it, “As a general rule the Soviet Union does not pay for services that have already been rendered.”

  We “linked” our goals to theirs, and though it took two years for the Kremlin to accept this policy in th
e SALT I negotiations, it finally did.

  Linkage remains a viable strategy. The Soviets still want arms control agreements and economic cooperation, and the United States must again insist on a balance. We have great reason to be concerned over the Soviets’ African adventurism, the conduct of their ally Vietnam, their support of Castro’s “Hessians,” their aggressive use of the Red Army outside of the Soviet bloc, and their attempts to gain control of the Persian Gulf and to intervene in the Middle East. All these concerns are legitimate interests of the United States. We should not be shy or apologetic about linking what we want in these areas with what the Soviets want in other areas, any more than we should be apologetic about insisting that American interests be sufficiently safeguarded by the terms of arms control agreements themselves.

  There are no hard and fast boundaries that separate one form of Soviet imperialism from another. They are linked by a common thread that leads to the Kremlin. The Soviets know this, and if compelled by the leadership in the United States to accept linkage, they will do so. They have done so in the past. They will do so again.

  They will not accept linkage, however, out of an unselfish concern for preserving peace in the world. If we do not demand it, we will not get it. The Soviets do not like American determination to see justice done, but they will respect it. Linkage is a just concept. If pursued vigorously and from a position of sufficient strength, it will produce fair results.

  The primary purpose of arms control is to reduce the danger of war. But arms control by itself cannot do this. Political differences, not arms, are the root causes of war, and until these are resolved, there will be enough arms for the most devastating war no matter how many arms control agreements are reached.

  Trade by itself will not reduce the danger of war. In World War I and World War II nations that had traded with each other went to war against each other because of political differences.

  Trade and arms control must be linked with the settlement of political differences if the danger of war is to be reduced. Only if we use linkage in this way will we be attacking the root causes of war.

  Dealing with Our Allies

  During the first 150 years of our history it was often said that the President wore four hats—as chief of state, head of government, Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and head of his political party. Since World War II the President has worn a fifth hat, as leader of the free world.

  The Soviet Union has subjects and satellites; the United States has allies and friends. The Soviet Union dictates to its satellites; the United States does not dictate to its allies. But it is our responsibility as the strongest and wealthiest free world nation to lead. The President of the United States is the only one who has the power and prestige to provide this leadership. This is often more difficult than his other four roles, for it requires a combination of toughness, subtlety, decisiveness, and skill.

  Diplomacy can be used either as a sword or as a needle—as a weapon or an instrument of union. In dealing with allies the President is chiefly engaged in mending tears and strengthening seams.

  America remains powerful, but not all-powerful; our allies need us, but we also need them. This mutual interest is what brings alliances into being. One of a President’s chief tasks is to nurture that sense of common interest.

  In some ways good personal relations are more important in dealing at the summit level with allies than with adversaries. With adversaries, personal cordiality is not going to make opposing national interests disappear, though it can keep irritations from becoming unnecessarily inflamed, and it can sometimes help in the search for those conceptual break-throughs that make it possible to bridge gaps that had seemed unbridgeable. But with allies, relations can be conducted on an entirely different level of trust and confidence. Two leaders who know each other, who trust each other, who respect each other’s judgment, and who share common goals can establish a working relationship that transcends normal diplomacy and that greatly benefits both nations. The partnership between Roosevelt and Churchill in World War II is a prime example. My own friendship with de Gaulle helped greatly, when I first took office, in repairing the previously strained relations between the United States and France. And de Gaulle, whose eye was always fixed on the long view, offered me wise counsel on dealing with America’s global responsibilities, particularly with regard to the Soviet Union and China. West Germany’s Konrad Adenauer had a similar long perspective; though he died before I became President, I carried his counsel with me. I frequently had very helpful discussions with British leaders; with Harold Macmillan before meeting Khrushchev in 1959, for example, and with Harold Wilson and Edward Heath before my visits to Peking and Moscow in 1972. French presidents Georges Pompidou and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing both had special expertise on international economic issues, which made my talks with them both educational and constructive.

  The counsel of trusted allies can be particularly helpful in dealing with those parts of the world they know better than we do. Discussions with Japanese leaders like Nobusuke Kishi, Eisaku Sato, and Masayoshi Ohira gave me insights into Asian issues I could not have gained from Europeans or Americans. And the French know more about black Africa than we do, or probably ever will; so do the British, the Belgians, and others. The British, as a result of their imperial days, have a vast store of knowledge and understanding about South Asia, the Persian Gulf, and many remote but strategically important places around the world. Some leaders of small nations are intimately familiar with their parts of the world and wise about the whole world. Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew is in my view one of the world’s premier statesmen, even though his own stage is too small for the full exercise of his talents.

  The difference between meeting with friends and meeting with adversaries can best be summarized this way. When you talk to your adversaries you learn about them. When you talk to your friends you learn from them.

  We often tend to overlook the vital importance of maintaining and strengthening our ties with countries that are not major powers, some of which, like Australia and Brazil, because of their vast resources, are destined to be great powers in the future. If I were to advise a young man where to go to seek his fortune in the twenty-first century, I would recommend Brazil or Australia. Brazilians fought courageously side by side with U.S. troops in Italy in World War II, and I witnessed first-hand the bravery and dedication of Australian and New Zealand troops in the South Pacific. They were magnificent allies in war and we should seek their advice and assistance in maintaining the peace.

  Canada, our staunch ally to the north, should not be taken for granted simply because we share the longest unguarded border in the world. The Canadians are our best customer, buying 20 percent of our exports. But living next to an industrial giant like the United States can be difficult. Their understandable desire to lessen American control of their business enterprises should be respected and encouraged.

  The United States is fortunate to have genuine allies and not satellites. We should treat all of them as such—recognizing that they are as important to us as we are to them and that their judgment on great issues may at times be better than ours.

  As long as alliances are needed, maintaining the strength of those alliances will remain one of the President’s chief responsibilities. Success or failure will often depend on the President’s personal skills in dealing with allied leaders, and their personal assessment of the caliber of his leadership.

  The “Bully Pulpit”

  Presidents, particularly in this century, have often used the Oval Office, in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, as a “bully pulpit.” The power of the President as moral leader of the free world is immense, but to be effective, a President must use this power with great skill. Most importantly, he must use it only when the stakes are high and worthy of his commitment. The area of human rights is one in which that power, properly used, can be immensely effective. But it must be used selectively, with a discriminating awareness of the many
distinctions that exist in the real world.

  The tragedy of Iran is a case history of what happens when the United States fails to distinguish between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, between those that provide some human rights and those that deny all, between those who are our staunch allies and friends and those who are our potential enemies.

  I first met the Shah in Tehran twenty-seven years ago when I was forty years old and he was only thirty-four. He had just been restored to his throne. He was only reigning, however, not ruling. Power was being ably exercised by General Zahedi, the father of the Shah’s last ambassador to the United States. I found the Shah to be intelligent, dignified, quiet, and not too sure of himself. However, he was a good listener, and he demonstrated a profound understanding not only of the problems in his own country but of the world around him as well. Iran’s deposed, left-leaning anti-Western Prime Minister Mossadegh had left the Iranian economy in a shambles. Eighty-five percent of the people were illiterate. Women had no political rights whatever. Iran was still in the nineteenth century.