Real War (44 page)

One major problem a President has in carrying out a policy of détente is to justify following what appear to many to be two completely contradictory concepts. Throughout my public career I had earned a reputation for adamantly opposing communism and all it stands for. My visits to China and the Soviet Union in 1972 puzzled, disappointed, and even outraged many
of my strongest supporters. How, they asked, could I possibly tip tea cups with Mao, drink mao-tai with Zhou Enlai and vodka with Brezhnev? How could I justify proposing toasts, exchanging gifts, smiling and shaking hands with these ruthless, atheistic leaders of oppressive, aggressive regimes who opposed everything we stood for? Did this mean that I had changed my views with regard to the threat that totalitarian communism posed to the West? If not, what good purpose could possibly be served by “fraternizing” with those whose avowed goal is to impose their system on us and all free nations?

When I went to Moscow in 1972 I had no illusion whatever about the aggressive nature of Soviet intentions. During my first three years in office the Soviets had tested us in Cuba, in the Mideast, and in South Asia; they tested us again in Vietnam just two weeks before the summit. The fact that we had stood firm in each case, and had even met with the Soviets' deadly enemies in Peking before going to Moscow, did not “torpedo” the summit, as some had predicted it would. On the contrary, I am certain that our firmness helped to convince the Soviets that they had no choice but to negotiate with us.

I did not expect that personal meetings with the Soviet leaders would change their views. I knew that Brezhnev and his colleagues were all dedicated communists. However, I believed then, and I believe now, that while such meetings will not erase major differences in basic philosophy, they can be useful for narrowing the areas of potential conflict and exploring the possibilities of cooperation for mutual benefit. In a broader sense, the Soviet Union and the United States are the only two world nuclear superpowers; we therefore have an obligation to ourselves, to each other, and to the rest of the world to explore every possible avenue to see that our awesome power is not used in a way that could bring massive devastation to ourselves and to civilization as we know it.

It is essential to keep in mind the limits of what détente can achieve. It is equally important to know our adversaries and how to deal with them if we are to achieve even these limited goals. The Soviet leaders I have met, going back to 1959 when I first visited Moscow as Vice President, are very different from the old stereotypes of the bomb-throwing Bolsheviks of the
twenties or the sleazy subversives of the thirties and forties. As individuals, Russians, and communists, they are far more complex—less forbidding but potentially more dangerous.

As Russians, they are very hospitable hosts; they are generous, strong, and courageous; above all, they are proud of their Russian background and extraordinarily sensitive to personal put-downs or affronts.

As Soviet communists, they lie, cheat, take advantage, bluff, and constantly maneuver—trying always to win by any means necessary to achieve their goal.

As individuals, they differ widely in background and personal characteristics. Khrushchev was crude and boorish, with a quick intelligence and a devastatingly effective sense of humor. Brezhnev gave the appearance of being warmhearted, earthy, and very physical—in the way he would often grab my arm to make a point he reminded me of Lyndon Johnson. While not as quick in intelligence, he was more steady and less impulsive than Khrushchev. Kosygin was cold, aristocratic, a smooth technocrat; if he had been born in Chicago instead of Leningrad, he might well have ended up as the chief executive officer of a U.S. multinational corporation. Gromyko was dour, tough, maddeningly persistent, and inflexible in pushing his government's foreign policy line. Dobrynin was enormously able, smooth, gregarious, and sophisticated; considering the responsibilities he had, he was without doubt the best ambassador in Washington in my memory. Suslov, the hard-line Marxist theoretician, talked and acted with the dignified self-assurance of an American college profesor on tenure. All of them appeared to be genuinely devoted family men and, with the exception of Khrushchev, had good manners and dressed impeccably.

Considering these traits, several rules for conduct in negotiating with the Soviet leaders emerge. As individuals, they of course should be treated courteously. As Russians, they are extremely sensitive to being treated as inferiors. As Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once told me, the Soviet leaders desperately want to be welcomed as equal members of the international club of top world statesmen. In nations as well as individuals insecurity often breeds belligerent aggressiveness, especially if the sensitive party thinks he is being insulted or ridiculed. Overt put-downs infuriate the Russians and cause
them to become more belligerent. We must be sensitive to these concerns.

I am not suggesting that good or bad personal relations will have a major effect on state relations. However, the two cannot be separated; one affects the other. We should not assume that better personal relations will automatically improve bad state relations. Still, poor personal relations will make it more difficult to improve bad state relations, and could even aggravate them.

I would suggest these rules for those who negotiate with the Soviet leaders:

1. Any President who believes he can get the men in the Kremlin to change their policies by “charming them” or simply through personal persuasiveness is due for a rude awakening. Franklin D. Roosevelt tried at Tehran and Yalta and failed. The disillusionment that quickly dissipated the euphoric spirits of Geneva in 1955, Camp David in 1959, Vienna in 1961, and Glassboro in 1967 is stark testimony that charm and conciliatory rhetoric have no lasting effect on the tough, pragmatic Soviet leaders.

2. Conduct on the part of the President that conveys any sense of weakness or indecision can lead to miscalculation by Soviet leaders and to a testing of American will, as was the case when Khrushchev followed the Vienna summit of 1961 by putting missiles into Cuba in 1962.

3.  The Soviet leaders are taught to be conspirators virtually from birth. Therefore, it is important not to lay all your cards on the table. Above all, never tell them what you will
not
do; they may think you might do more than you can or will.

5. We must not make the common mistake of attributing our values to the Soviets. For example:

(a) The West is affected by world public opinion; the Soviets are affected only by their interests. UN resolutions condemning
their actions not only fail to constrain the Soviets; the Soviets greet such resolutions with contempt.

(b) Ruling out force is considered an act of virtue in the West; the Soviets and other potential aggressors consider it a sign of weakness. Ruling out American use of force provokes the use of force against us.

(c) “Sincerity” is an idealistic Western concept that means nothing to the Soviet leaders. Our former ambassador to Russia, Charles E. Bohlen, once told me, “Trying to determine whether the Soviet leaders are sincere about anything is a useless exercise.” Pointing to a coffee table, he added, “They are pure materialists. You can no more describe them as being sincere than you could describe that table as being sincere.”

(d) Western and communist attitudes toward peace also are poles apart. Before I went to Moscow in 1959 I asked John Foster Dulles what he thought of the view of some foreign policy experts that my major purpose should be to convince Khrushchev that the United States was for peace. He replied, “I totally disagree. He knows we are for peace. You must try to convince him that he cannot win a war.”

6. We should never negotiate from weakness. No further arms control talks, for example, should be held until the United States has firmly in place a credible program for restoring the military balance, vis-à-vis the Soviets, across the board. Otherwise, the Soviet leaders will be looking down our throats. At the conference table we can only negotiate on the basis of what we and they are definitely going to have in the arsenal.

7. Consistency coupled with firmness is absolutely indispensable. As UPI's veteran Moscow correspondent
Joseph Galloway recently pointed out:

In my dealings with the Russians like many before me I found it best to state your purpose, your aims, and your course clearly and firmly at the outset, and then hew to that line with every ounce of determination and doggedness you can muster.

If you bend even the smallest of your principles you convince the other side that there is at least a chance you will bend the larger ones, and that possibility is enough to keep the Russians working on you forever.

The conduct of American diplomacy with the Soviet
Union over the past two and a half years has broken those simple rules of conduct time and again.

Unilateral decisions have been made without seeking any Soviet concession in return. An amateurish eagerness to reach agreement has been displayed at the outset of difficult negotiations. Extraneous issues have been raised and the American prestige committed in their support, only to be allowed to fade and die. Rather than a single determined voice, the Russians hear a babble of diametrically opposed hard and soft lines from official Washington.

Many U.S. opinion makers regard the Soviet leaders as less formidable than I have found them to be.
Arthur Schlesinger, for example, argues that: “Our hard-liners like to think that the Soviet Union is a dynamic and purposeful state following a policy laid down with consistency, foresight and coherence. But it may as well be that the Soviet Union is a weary, drab country, led by sick old men, beset by insuperable problems at home and abroad and living from crisis to crisis. . . . ”

I would like to think that he is right. But looking at the Soviets' virtually unbroken record of successful conquests over the past five years, I fear he is wrong. And what we must constantly bear in mind is that the new generation of Soviet leaders will be at least as tough as the old; possibly tougher since, unlike Brezhnev, Gromyko, Kosygin, and most of the other present members of the Politburo, they will not be inhibited by vivid personal memories of the horrors of World War II. Of one thing we can be sure: like those they succeed, they will have a strategy of victory. Only a firm strategy of victory on our side will avoid defeat. The West must match them with leaders just as strong, just as intelligent, and if anything, more determined to defend what is right than they are to pursue what is wrong.

We can lose World War III, or we can win it.

We can lose it by defeatism: by imagining that the contest is unwinnable or unworthy. We can lose by waking up too late
to the importance of the conflict, and thus acquiescing too long in those incremental gains by the Soviet side that cumulatively can amount to a major, even a decisive, Soviet victory. We can lose by disdaining allies that are imperfect, or contests that affront our sensibilities. We can lose by self-indulgence, by telling ourselves that the sacrifice can wait until tomorrow, by postponing hard decisions until the need becomes so obvious that the decision comes too late. We can lose through a sort of “paralysis by analysis,” concocting overly intellectualized rationales for each new Soviet advance, and using these as an excuse for inaction.

Or we can win—if we decide to.

The first necessity is to recognize that we can win, and that we should win.

The next is to insist that we must win, and to make and stick to the basic political decision that we will do whatever is necessary to ensure victory. This sounds simple. It is not. It requires a conscious return to the concept of peace through strength. It requires discarding a lot of well-worn intellectual baggage and abandoning a lot of popular slogans. It requires overriding the clamorous voices of a lot of separate interests, all insisting that someone else sacrifice instead of themselves. It requires accepting risks.

America and the West need to be jolted into a sense of urgency. We no longer have the margin for error that we had even a few short years ago. That margin vanished with our advantage in strategic weapons.

When the United States had a decisive advantage in strategic nuclear power, relatively minor shifts in the geopolitical balance were of relatively minor consequence. But with the loss of that advantage, these shifts, when they go against us, are far more ominous, just as a misplaced step matters more to the tightrope walker than to the sidewalk stroller. With the West's oil jugular—the Persian Gulf—now directly imperiled, we are losing our margin of safety along with the margin of error.

More than two decades ago the late
Dean Acheson wrote of

the myriad decisions which will cumulatively determine whether or not our country becomes what it must be, and does what it must do, if the non-Communist world is to be pulled together, held together, and led, still strong and free,
through “peaceful competition,” or “cold war,” warm war, or hot war, or, perhaps, all of them separately or together. These decisions will be put to us not with the dramatic simplicity with which the thunder of bombs posed the issue at Pearl Harbor. A democracy can seal its fate with a gradualism and apparent inevitability which seems to blind its leaders to the nature of the road ahead, as they were blinded in the years before the Civil War.

Acheson's observation is even more true today.

We can drift down that path of gradualism. Or we can pull ourselves up short and decide to change course.

We can afford a vastly increased defense effort—if we
decide
to. We can postpone desirable social goals in order to ensure survival—if we
decide
to. We can carry the twilight war to the enemy—if we
decide
to. But we have to make the decision.

Having made the decision that we are going to do what is necessary, we then have to pursue it through a carefully coordinated strategy that embraces the short term and the long term simultaneously.