Real War (38 page)

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.

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.”

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 proposed 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.

Even when you are strong, it is bad strategy to let yourself appear weak. This can lead to a dangerous miscalculation on your adversary's part. The 1961 Vienna Summit between Khrushchev and Kennedy led to such a miscalculation. Perhaps Kennedy was confident of his own resolve, but he did not project that confidence to Khrushchev. As James Reston has since written, “Kennedy went there shortly after his spectacular blunders at the Bay of Pigs, and was savaged by Khrushchev. . . . “I had an hour alone with President Kennedy immediately after his last meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna at that time,” Reston reported. “Khrushchev had assumed, Kennedy said, that any
American President who invaded Cuba without adequate preparation was inexperienced, and any President who then didn't use force to see the invasion through was weak. Kennedy admitted Khrushchev's logic on both points.”

Khrushchev later called Kennedy's hand by putting missiles into Cuba. A dangerous confrontation with nuclear overtones resulted, one that could have been prevented had Kennedy's conduct in Vienna given Khrushchev a greater impression of strength and determination.

In 1973, when the United States and the Soviet Union were roughly equal in nuclear capability, Brezhnev demanded that the United States join the Soviet Union in sending troops into the Mideast during the Arab-Israeli war. This would have created a potentially explosive situation. And Brezhnev threatened that if we did not agree to joint action, he would send in Soviet forces unilaterally.

When we ordered a military alert Brezhnev backed down. The alert might not have had this effect had Brezhnev not concluded from his conversations with me in June of that year, and also from the strong actions we had taken to protect our interests in Vietnam in 1972, that I might back up my strong words with strong actions. He was not willing to take that risk.

In 1979 the Carter administration's relatively mild reaction to previous Soviet moves may well have led Brezhnev to conclude that he could send the Red Army into Afghanistan without provoking a strong U.S. response.

Public statements that we will not let the Russians push us around are not effective. They dismiss these as bravado, primarily because they engage in that sort of bluster so much themselves. They must always have very serious questions about what a President will do. For example, we should not make statements that we will never launch a preemptive strike. Whether or not we would ever exercise that option, we should always leave open the possibility that in extreme circumstances we might.