by James Philip
Oddly, in the San Francisco colloquium of the nations, there had been no ceremony of remembrance, nor even a silence for the fallen at the first meeting of the United Nations since October 1962; an omission never again allowed to happen. When the nations next gathered, in Tokyo, in August of 1967, the General Assembly stood and observed a one-minute silence, as it has at the start of every day’s proceedings ever since.
Significantly, by that time, US-Soviet rapprochement had moved on from fine words – and gratuitous photo-opportunities – in San Francisco to serious discussions and to making the first, tentative concrete steps towards a real, and lasting de-escalation of tensions between the two main protagonists of the greatest single disaster to ever befall human kind.
As Henry Kissinger – by then in his self-imposed exile from the corridors of power – was to pithily remark as he brooded in his Harvard cloisters, and as he circulated at all the best DC parties: ‘Only Nixon could have gone to Russia!’
Whether it was said whimsically, or not, posterity tells us that President Nixon’s trip to the Soviet Union immediately prior to the August 1967 Tokyo round of United Nations talks, marked the end of the undeclared war fought ever since October 1962 and, again, with hindsight, henceforth ensured that the single guiding principle of US and Soviet foreign policy, was to avoid making the same catastrophic mistakes again.
In his memoirs, Nixon claims that he was the one who came up with the idea of a de-militarised zone ‘in perpetuity’ in Europe, after which it was simply a case of poring over a map.
It was more complicated than that, obviously.
However, at Sverdlovsk in July 1967, and in the subsequent Soviet-US summits in 1968, old European and Balkan national boundaries were effectively ‘up for grabs’, and despite the objections of the British, the French – belatedly the Italians also – and the Scandinavian League, the Nixon Administration came to regard the ‘neutralisation of the Central European question’ as the bedrock of future world peace. Playing for the highest possible stakes, behind closed doors every ‘territorial option’ was ‘on the board’.
In the aftermath of the October War there was going to be no second Versailles, no great vindictive and acquisitive Treaty, no discussion of reparations and very little high-minded, or principled debate. In the name of peace, the United States and the Soviet Union determined that their once and future allies would pay the price for their [US-Soviet] folly, negotiated in absolute secrecy and delivered their ‘agreed settlement’ to the United Nations General Assembly in Delhi in 1968, as a fait accompli.
Completely ignoring the condemnation of virtually the entire United Nations, a thing both sides had expected and already discounted because at the end of the day ‘might is right’ in international diplomacy, the White House and the Sverdlovsk Kremlin had calculated, correctly, as posterity will attest, that they had stumbled upon a formula which satisfied each party’s key existential strategic interests in Central Europe, and therefore removed – in part at least – the likelihood of another ‘October 1962 crisis’ for the foreseeable future.
That the resulting ‘settlement’ did nothing to address other global flashpoints, was tacitly accepted in Washington DC and the USSR; but that was not the point. The ‘point’ was to remove the critical European nexus of thermonuclear conflict between the globe’s one remaining superpower, the United States, and the Soviet Union which one day might again rise from the ashes to rival it. The great as yet untapped potential of the planet’s two most populous nations, China and India, to threaten their long-term primacy was ignored.
For the American side, especially in what was, in 1968, after all, a presidential election year, ‘peace in our time with Russia’, seemed an intoxicating prospect.
In the Soviet Union a concordat with the Americans was hungrily snatched at because it signified the end of a terrible, five-and-a-half-year winter of despair, even though, realistically if not philosophically, it halted, indefinitely, the supposedly irrevocable onward march of Marxist-Leninism in Europe.
At this remove it seems a little arcane to recollect the machinations of the mainly, now anonymous US State Department and Soviet Foreign Ministry apparatchiks, who haggled over the lines on the maps of Europe. Likewise, Richard Nixon and Alexander Shelepin will, no doubt, be forever viewed by academic historians as latter-day counterparts of the monsters of Versailles in 1919, Woodrow Wilson, Clémenceau, and Lloyd George, albeit with the footnote that neither Nixon or Shelepin actually laid the ground work for a future World War in their children’s or grand-children’s life times.
Or not yet, anyway.
US and Soviet officials had hammered out the new map of Europe, labouring first in Sverdlovsk, then at Malta where the draft agreements were signed by President Nixon, and Chairman Shelepin, sealing what were to be proclaimed in July 1968 as the Valletta Accords, probably never imagining that their construct would still be intact half-a-century later, and still the centrepiece of the enduring European peace.
Apparently, the Soviets had favoured the Rhine as the western extremity of what became the Continental Central European De-militarized Zone (CCEDMZ), and the Alps as its southern demarcation line; but then there was the question of which Alps, the Swiss or the Bernese, etcetera ad nauseum, even before alternative lines of latitude were discussed, the 43rd, or perhaps the 44th, 45th, the 46th or the 47th. On the Soviet side the Kremlin’s men knew that the Rhine was never going to be the western boundary of the ‘great DMZ’ any more than the Moskva River was going to be its eastern counterpart.
But the debate had needed to start somewhere!
At some stage – by Soviet accounts after the Vodka had been flowing freely for some hours at that first Sverdlovsk summit, where Nixon and Alexander Shelepin, his Russian host, had got on famously by all accounts despite their stern expressions in every public photograph – the River Oder and the Eastern Niesse to west and the Vistula to the east were mooted as possible riverine demarcations. In the north the Baltic coast became the upper limit of the zone, and after, apparently, a relatively short knockabout conversation, the Latitude 46 degrees north was proposed as the southern ‘end’ of the zone.
Inevitably, the devil was in the detail.
Nevertheless, with the addition of one or two ad hoc straightened or continuation lines into the Alps and elsewhere, just to ‘tidy things up a little’, the basis of what became the first Valletta Accord was more or less settled very early on, with the two leaders proposing to unilaterally demilitarize – in perpetuity, which nobody took very seriously at the time – some one hundred and seventy thousand square miles of Central Europe, about forty percent of it mountainous but included because of the existence within those regions of several key passes.
One wonders if Richard Nixon or Alexander Shelepin ever truly appreciated that they had been presented with a once in a millennium opportunity, given that in that post-war era much of the ground concerned, north of the Alps was a war-depopulated wasteland, possibly inhabited by only a few hundred thousand people?
They knew, of course, that much of the region was virtually impassable east to west or north to south. The Red Army had patched up several trunk highways, mostly to reoccupy Berlin, itself a giant rubble field, otherwise there was virtually…nothing there.
Perhaps, the truth of the matter is that neither men were profound historical thinkers, simply stone-cold realists. It cost the United States and the Soviet Union very little, and in reality, their decimated allies were in no position to cavil about it, to damp down their number one geopolitical flashpoint for a generation by trading somebody else’s land for peace. So, that was what they did.
Nothing ever goes quite to plan.
That was a given.
The Red Army and Air Force was required to vacate its bases west of the Vistula not later than 31st December 1968; which was to cause all manner of ructions on Capitol Hill that autumn and delayed the eventual ratification of the Valletta Accords until the tumultuous late sum
mer of 1969.
In any event, President Nixon had returned home from that historic first summit in Sverdlovsk in 1967 claiming he had foiled Warsaw Concerto, a Soviet plot to conquer all of Western Europe; while on his part Alexander Shelepin was able to tell his own people that Warsaw Concerto had achieved all its objectives in safeguarding the Motherland’s western borders!
Margaret Thatcher’s first official biographer, Nicholas Ridley, who had been a minister in each of her administrations, was to recollect:
‘After the Americans came back from Sverdlovsk, in England, our emotions were ambivalent. Subsequent to the outcome of the Valletta talks, the Prime Minister was incandescent even though, oddly, we all felt that a great weight had, or rather, was about to be lifted off our shoulders. Regardless of how distasteful the betrayal of the national aspirations of the survivors in all those old and new European polities, each and every one now sadly consigned to that apocryphal dustbin of history, suddenly, we could start thinking about switching scarce resources from the defence of France and, to a degree, our Scandinavian allies to other fronts and in due course, whole-heartedly to the great project of national reconstruction. Problematically, the Valletta Accord deepened the existing rift between the Prime Minister and the Nixon Administration in Washington. We took the view that we [the British and our Commonwealth allies] had been badly treated, snubbed in fact, by the Americans at San Francisco, and that the outcome of the Sverdlovsk summit later that year was insult heaped upon injury, perceived or real.’
British reservations about the US-Soviet ‘peace process’ ran so deep that even before the end of 1967, Margaret Thatcher and Richard Nixon were deeply embroiled in an increasingly acrimonious unpublicised dispute about who, exactly, was going to man and support the ‘Army of the Rhine’, the existence of which British assumed to be axiomatic, and the American side, now deemed as surplus to requirements.
Then as now, it is truly remarkable how frequently two countries which share a common language mislay so much in translation!
Much of the problem lay in personal chemistry, or in the case of Richard Nixon and Margaret Thatcher, the lack of the same. From the high point of their alliance in early 1966 during the crisis days of the war in the Midwest, things had gone downhill a long way by 1968. By then the mere mention of the President’s name brought a frown to the Angry Widow’s brow, while in Washington, it was no secret that the President dreaded each contact with Margaret Thatcher.
‘President Nixon was caught on the horns of an old diplomatic dilemma,’ Henry Kissinger was to observe, some years later. ‘There are two kinds of allies: one might be regarded as expendable; others, the minority, are too important to cast adrift. The lesson of the years 1962-1968 was that in this second group there was only one ally that we had to keep close, whom we could not afford under any circumstances to lose. The British. Without the British, Western Europe would become our direct responsibility. Without the British opening doors to the CMAFTA – Commonwealth Mutual Assistance and Free Trade Agreement – trade zone, markets, intelligence co-operation, technological partnerships and military assistance arrangements, the patched together post October War alliance of the democracies, might easily collapse, and we [the United States] would be friendless in international forums other than for the support of those countries we could ‘buy’ with foreign aid. By definition, countries which had to be bought, could not be relied upon in times of crisis. Richard Nixon might well have been the only man who could have gone to Russia; but ‘peace’ with the British was, in many ways, much more important to the survival of his Administration throughout 1968.’
However, that the British were, in hindsight, so poorly attuned to the President’s problems at home, is not to be wondered at even at this remove. For the United Kingdom, the gruelling campaign, although ultimately successful in France, had very nearly been the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. What had begun as a humanitarian mission to save as many French refugees as possible from the anarchy enveloping Northern France in the winter of 1964-65, had turned into an ever-expanding economic assistance and military commitment, which had not so much threatened, as very nearly derailed the perilous stability of the nation’s perilous finances, and threatened the green shoots of its industrial and commercial recovery. On top of this, in England there had been a growing mood that, yet again, British soldiers, sailors and airmen were spilling their blood for the good of Uncle Sam. Where, people asked, were the GIs whose boots ought to be on the ground? What use was an Eagle Squadron crewed by volunteer American pilots, flying the latest high-technology British fighter plane – the Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) Kestrel – if all they did was train, and occupy hangar and mess space at bases in England and Scotland, when British squaddies, airmen and sailors were fighting and dying to liberate the French?
Worse, because Commonwealth allies like the Canadians, the Australians and the South Africans were being told – Administration members publicly boasted about it in private - by the White House that it was bankrolling the British, they had little or no real motivation to militarily go to the aid of the Old Country.
The fundamental issue was that most of the people in Richard Nixon’s White House – when they were not covering up their crimes or circling the wagons around the beleaguered Commander-in-Chief – had little or no sympathy for British complaints. The US was paying its share of the costs of the French war; what was wrong expecting the Brits to act as their proxies? Given the poisonous political climate in North America, it would, in any foreseeable case, have been extremely onerous to actually send US troops back to the European theatre. Thus, it was easier to sell the line, which had the advantage of being true, that that the Brits were being paid to fight the Commies in Europe.
That was good…right?
Except, of course, when it was not.
And it completely ignored the eight hundred pound brooding, ill-tempered silverback Gorilla in the room: the question of whether the People’s Republic of China was going to put up with a post-October War settlement that left it out in the cold?
The White House argued that the Communists had no choice; and that its Taiwan policy was non-negotiable.
Which the British had always said was just plain dumb.
And warned, that one day, it would probably would come back to bite the Nixon Administration…where it hurt the most.
All of which still, even today, obscures the fact that 1967 was the year in which the world turned the corner, even though self-inflicted vicissitudes a-plenty still lay ahead in the years to come.
Extract from Essays on Foreign Policy, 1967-71 [Professor E.M. Calleja-Christopher], Berkeley Betancourt Foundation Press, 2017.
Chapter 2
Wednesday 21st February, 1968
Government House, Yarralumla
Lady Marija Christopher looked up from the letter she was writing when she heard the quiet knock at the open door to her small, pleasantly intimate office, situated just across the hall from her husband’s decidedly more vice-regal suite of rooms. She smiled, putting down her trusty Parker fountain pen as in breezed her ex officio ward, the Honourable Lucy Corinna Agneta De L’Isle, the youngest daughter of the former Governor General of Australia.
Lucy’s father, whom coincidentally, was the only man alive simultaneously enjoying the distinction of being a Member of the Order of the Garter, and a holder of a Victoria Cross, William Philip Sidney, the Lord De L'Isle and Dudley, was presently her Majesty’s Secretary of State for Defence in Margaret Thatcher’s National Conservative Government in Oxford, England.
Lucy had lost her eldest sister, Elisabeth, then twenty-one years of age, in the chaos of the October War; mercifully, her three surviving older siblings, in faraway Australia with her and her late mother at the time, had survived the cataclysm. Tragically, her mother had passed away shortly after the war; but her two surviving sisters and her brother, were all making new lives in Australia. Catherine, twenty-five, was married now; Philip, t
wenty-two, was in the Army; and Anne, twenty, was at Sydney University, ‘living out’ with family friends in New South Wales during term-time.
Anne planned to return to Yarralumla for the coming weekend, when Lucy’s birthday, her fifteenth, which was actually today, was going to be ‘properly celebrated’ with a gala in her honour at Government House.
At around the time Lucy’s father’s – already somewhat war-elongated governorship – had come to an end in the summer of 1966, there had been a suggestion that she and Anne might accompany him back to England. In retrospect, she now realised that her father had simply been waiting to meet Peter and Marija, before he made a final decision. And once he had got to know the ‘new team’ at Government House, ‘the decision’ had, well, pretty much made itself.
The Christophers had been, in effect, acting in loco parentis on behalf of Lucy’s father both in respect of her, and her elder sister, for the last eighteen months. However, notwithstanding Peter and Marija still took a very close interest in Anne’s affairs, they recognised that, now that she was in her second year at University, she needed the freedom to branch out, having made her own new circle of friends and settled happily into life in Sydney. Lucy, on the other hand, still only thirteen when her father returned to England, with her mother dead and her elder brother and sisters having already, or in the process of flying the coop, had been, briefly, bereft at the thought of losing her father, too.
All her fears seemed so silly now.
Had the ‘Yarralumla Couple’ as the Australian press now affectionately referred to Peter and Marija, not been prepared to ‘take her on’, Lucy knew that her father would have had no option but to take her home to England, where at the time, it was said that things were still ‘pretty grim’.