THE DETENTE DILEMMA

By Henry Kissinger

eYEARS OF UPHEAVAL

Detente with the Soviet Union was urged on us insistently when we entered office, hailed as a turning point when we carried it out and later blamed for all our contemporary dilemmas. In the retrospective of a decade, detente is being made to bear the burden for the consequences of America's self-destructive domestic convulsions over Viet Nam and Watergate. The former made Americans recoil before foreign involvement and thus opened an opportunity for Soviet expansionism; the latter weakened Executive power to resist Soviet pressure.

A collective amnesia has seized the participants in that tragedy. Liberals have been reluctant to assume any responsibility for the consequences of their two great causes of the 1970s. Some of the "neoconservatives" who had moved from the liberal to the conservative side after Viet Nam had few incentives to recall their own contributions to the collapse of international restraints. They forgot that they had assaulted as too bellicose the same foreign policy that five years later they denounced as retreat.

Any American President soon learns that he has a narrow margin for maneuver. The U.S. and the Soviet Union are ideological rivals. Detente cannot change that. The nuclear age compels us to coexist. Rhetorical crusades cannot change that either. A President thus has a dual responsibility: he must resist Soviet expansionism, and he must be conscious of the risks of global confrontation. His policy must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions.

The Nixon Administration sought a foreign policy that eschewed both moralistic crusading and escapist isolationism. The subtlest critique of our policy held that our emphasis on national interest ran counter to American idealism. On this thesis, Americans must affirm general values or they will lack the resolution and stamina to overcome the Soviet challenge; America must commit itself to a crusade against Communism, not just to geopolitical opposition to Soviet encroachment, or its policy will be based on quicksand. But obsession with ideology may translate into an unwillingness to confront seemingly marginal geopolitical challenges because they appear not to encapsulate the ultimate showdown--and thus lead to a gradual erosion, risking world peace as surely as a failure to face an overall challenge.

Historically, America imagined that it did not have to concern itself with the global equilibrium, because geography and a surplus of power enabled it to await events in isolation. Two schools of thought developed. Liberals treated foreign policy as a subdivision of psychiatry, conservatives as an aspect of theology. Liberals equated relations among states with human relations, emphasizing trust and unilateral gestures of good will. Conservatives saw in foreign policy the eternal struggle of good with evil, a Manichaean conflict that recognized no middle ground and could end only with total victory. Deterrence ran up against liberal ideology and its emotional evocation of peace in the abstract; coexistence grated on the liturgical anti-Communism of the right, for there could be no compromise with the devil.

Detente was thus built on the twin pillars of resistance to Soviet expansionism and a willingness to negotiate on concrete issues. In Jordan and Cienfuegos in 1970, in the India-Pakistan war of 1971, in the alert at the end of the October 1973 war, the Nixon Administration had vigorously opposed geopolitical challenges by the Soviet Union and its allies. We fought for a strong defense policy over bitter congressional opposition. Simultaneously, we explored the prospects of negotiation. By early spring 1973 a number of agreements had been achieved. But none of them caused us to imagine that tensions with our adversary had ended; we did not slacken our determination to maintain the military balance or resist Soviet expansionism. I believe a normal Nixon presidency would have managed to attain symmetry between the twin pillars of containment and coexistence. But the domestic climate was ill suited for any such effort. As a result, conservatives who hated Communists and liberals who hated Nixon came together in a rare convergence, like an eclipse of the sun. Conservatives were uneasy about the agreements being signed with a declared adversary. The liberal case was more complex. The Administration was pursuing arms control, East-West trade and other negotiations' that liberals had been urging for decades. But the blood feud with Nixon ran too deep. If Nixon was for detente, so the subconscious thinking seemed to run, perhaps the cold war wasn't all that bad.

The result was intellectual chaos. For years Nixon had been decried as a cold warrior; I had received my share of brickbats for the insistence on ending the Viet Nam War on honorable terms. Suddenly there was a new myth: we were both being taken in by the Soviet Union. Human-rights advocates affected outrage that detente was not being used to change the Soviet domestic structure by legislated ultimatums. Doctrinaire defense experts demanded that arms-control negotiations bring about unilateral Soviet reductions without sacrificing any American program. How to accomplish this was generously left to my discretion. The proposition reminded me of the story of the admiral who during World War II claimed to have found a solution to the submarine problem. He proposed heating the ocean and boiling the enemy to the surface. Asked how to accomplish this feat, he replied: "I have given you the idea; its technical implementation is up to you."

All this might have remained inchoate sniping but for the emergence of a formidable leader able to unite the two strands of opposition: Senator Henry M. Jackson of Washington. A mainstream Democrat, stolid, thoughtful, stubborn as could be expected from the combination of Scandinavian origin and Lutheran theology, Jackson was convinced that the Soviet goal was to undermine the free world. This was a true enough reading of Soviet intentions, and we agreed with it. Where we differed was in Jackson's corollary that all negotiation was futile.

Kissinger notes that his concept of "linkage"--insisting that the Soviets exercise restraint in international conduct in return for trade arrangements or technology exchanges--had long been decried as "an unworkable relic of the cold war." Now detractors of linkage not only adopted the theory, "they went us one better." Says Kissinger: "They linked most-favored-nation status for the Soviet Union not only with Soviet foreign-policy conduct but with Soviet emigration practices. During Nixon's first term we had, by quiet diplomacy, raised Jewish emigration from 400 a year in 1968 to 35,000 by 1973, and we had obtained a Soviet promise to increase the figure to 45,000. Senator Jackson, acting like a man who, having won once at roulette, organizes his yearly budget in anticipation of a recurrence, kept raising the ante." Jackson demanded that the Administration insist on 100,000 of all nationalities and specify the geographic areas from which they should be drawn. "Our policy toward the Soviets was based on a balance between the carrot and the stick," writes Kissinger. But a combination of Watergate and the new liberal-conservative coalition destroyed the carrot and "we were not given a bigger stick either."

Some argued that detente was sapping our defense effort. This was standing history on its head. In Nixon's first term, before detente had been heard of, the President had to battle against congressional cuts, amounting to some $40 billion in 1970 dollars, assaults on new weapons and a concerted effort to withdraw our forces even from Western Europe.

We never believed detente would ease our defense burden. Nixon, with my encouragement, consistently picked the highest budget option presented by the Defense Department. But the challenge turned out to be defense direction even more than defense spending. The basis of our strategy since 1945 had been the reliance on superior American strategic nuclear power to compensate for the Soviets' advantage in conventional forces and proximity to key areas. By 1973 the Soviets had achieved parity in numbers of strategic delivery vehicles and superiority in throw weight (the total aggregate weight of warheads). Thus resort to strategic nuclear war became less and less credible. The prohibitive price of a nuclear exchange was as likely to inhibit resistance as to discourage aggression. "Better Red than dead" turned from a parody into a program.

One overriding fact remains: an all-out strategic nuclear exchange would risk life as we know it. In no postwar crisis has a U.S. President come close to using strategic nuclear weapons. There was thus no more urgent task for American defense policy than to increase substantially the capacity for local resistance. But a buildup of conventional forces was decried as dangerous because it would tempt distant adventures, or as too costly.

After the Viet Nam cease-fire--and the first SALT agreement--we managed to increase the defense budget by some 5%. But even this relatively modest change ran up against the lingering inhibitions of Viet Nam, compounded by Watergate. Every new weapons system had to run a gauntlet of objections: it was unnecessary because we already had an "overkill" capability; it was dangerous because it would compel offsetting Soviet moves; it would jeopardize SALT negotiations; it would weaken us because it might preclude newer and even better weapons down the road. The attainable was being blocked by a quest for the ideal. The B70 bomber, the antiballistic missile, the Bl, the MX, the Trident II missile have all been canceled or delayed.

DEBATING ARMS CONTROL

At a moment when efforts to upgrade U.S. defense were thus stymied, Kissinger faced the formidable task of trying to negotiate a new agreement with Moscow on strategic arms limitations. He had to do so, he notes, in the midst of a long-running debate over the question, Does arms control enhance our security or damage it?

Arms control has a complicated history. In the earliest days of the nuclear age, some concerned scientists had argued that unilateral restraint would induce the Soviets to follow suit. There was not the slightest proof that the Soviets operated by such a maxim, and overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Secretary of Defense Harold Brown said during the Carter Administration: "We have found that when we build weapons, they build; when we stop, they nevertheless continue to build."

By the '60s another theory had emerged: strategic stability was to be achieved by invulnerable strategic forces on both sides; neither side should be able to benefit from a first strike or avoid cataclysmic destruction in retaliation. But if mutual invulnerability of strategic forces was to be the objective, our strategic power would no longer compensate for Soviet superiority in conventional strength or capacity for regional intervention. Given strategic parity, the democracies would have to build up their conventional strength if they wanted to avoid political blackmail. With every passing year, official arms-control theory thus ran more and more counter to the official strategic doctrine of nuclear retaliation.

Conservative opponents of SALT sometimes spoke as if it were possible to regain our nuclear superiority, but they soon recoiled before the twin obstacles of technology and cost. Liberals, on the other hand, were reluctant to draw the consequences for local defense from the strategic parity they were both advocating and accelerating. Both schools tended to neglect the need for strengthening regional or conventional forces.

The Nixon Administration at first sought to link SALT to Soviet geopolitical conduct. But it found itself under mounting pressure to begin arms-control talks, in effect unconditionally. Finally, the Defense Department, hitherto leery of SALT, seized on it as a means to close the gap that congressional budget cuts were opening up between Soviet and American strategic forces; the Pentagon urged us to put a numerical ceiling on Soviet offensive missile deployments through arms-control negotiations.

All these strands were present in the formal negotiations for SALT H that got under way in 1973. The major division over the nature of the agreement to be sought was between the psychiatric and the theological approaches to foreign policy. The "psychiatrists" saw in SALT a major step toward relaxing of tension and a world from which the specter of nuclear war was being lifted. To the "theologians," anything the Kremlin was willing to sign could not be in our interests. They sought to defeat SALT because they objected not to its terms but to its principle.

In this debate I was in a lonely position. I was a hawk on defense and a dove on SALT, earning opponents on both sides. I was convinced we had to strengthen conventional forces. But I also saw an important role for SALT in our national security policy. I did not believe that arms control could by itself ease tensions. Indeed, if not linked to some restraint of the geopolitical competition, strategic arms control might become a safety valve for Soviet expansionism. Every tune there was a Soviet aggressive move, there would be appeals that the new tensions now made arms-control talks even more important. This is why I favored linkage.

But I parted company with some conservative critics in my conviction that nuclear weapons added a new dimension of horror to warfare and new responsibility for national leaders. Arms control could also free resources for building up our conventional and regional forces. Besides, we faced a problem in the strategic field: the increasing conversion of missiles to multiple warheads or MIRV (multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles). If the Soviets MIRVed all of their land-based missiles, our land-based missiles would be at risk by the early '80s. SALT II seemed to me an opportunity to postpone this danger.

But SALT II soon became a casualty of America's bitter domestic divisions--and of a Soviet decision that, for reasons still not entirely clear, the time was not right for an agreement.

Was it Watergate that caused Moscow to put East-West negotiations into low gear in the spring of 1974? Was it the general trend of our domestic debate? Or were both of these used as a cover for decisions that Moscow made for its own reasons? The fact is that during April 1974, Soviet conduct changed.

When I visited Moscow in March, Brezhnev seemed to accept the principle of "counterbalancing asymmetries": a Soviet edge in total delivery vehicles (reflecting the existing situation) counterbalanced by an American advantage in numbers of MIRVed missiles. He conceded us 1,100 MIRVed missiles over the extended term of the agreement, vs. 1,000 for the Soviets. We considered the 100-missile advantage inadequate because of the Soviet lead in other categories. I proposed a considerably wider gap in our favor. Brezhnev rejected it at first with the comment: "If I agree to this, this will be my last meeting with Dr. Kissinger because I will be destroyed." But if past practice and actual Soviet conduct were any guide, more realistic figures would soon emerge. It did not happen that way. Instead, negotiations stalemated.

As it turned out, the absence of an agreement soon turned into fantasy the ceiling of 360 proposed by some Administration officials for MIRVed Soviet intercontinental missiles. The Soviets have since exceeded the limit of 1,000 we thought intolerable in 1974. The current SALT II ceiling is 1,200, or 200 above Brezhnev's offer, and the gap against us in overall delivery vehicles has increased as a result of voluntary decisions by successor Administrations, including the current one. So much for the argument that SALT is responsible for the strategic dilemmas we face today.

I cannot prove what would have happened had negotiations evolved in normal circumstances with a functioning President and a united American Government. I am convinced that in the spring of 1974 SALT turned into an end in itself for its votaries; for its opponents it was a danger to be combatted at any cost.

Missed opportunities can never be proved. But the sober teaching of 1973-74 is that idealism did not enhance the human rights of Jews in the Soviet Union (emigration for 1975 was less than 40% of that for 1973); that the undermining of SALT did not improve our military posture; and that the confusion over East-West policy produced perverse consequences. Soviet expansion increased, and the domestic divisions that had spawned the confrontation prevented an effective response.

Even during the summer of the visible disintegration of the Nixon Administration, however, Brezhnev proved most reluctant to give up his attempt to ease East-West relations. What he abandoned was any major commitment to expand the existing framework. For that he needed what the French call an inter-locuteur valable--an opposite number who could deliver. That is exactly what Nixon more and more had lost the power to do.

THE 1974 MOSCOW SUMMIT

It was in a mood of tension, anguish and premonition that the Moscow summit began. Petty squabbles sometimes took absurd forms. There was an unworthy dispute between Al Haig and me about whose suite in the Kremlin would be closest to Nixon's--a status symbol of debatable value under the circumstances. Haig won the battle. It was like fighting over seats at the captain's table on the Titanic after it had struck the iceberg.

The biggest obstacle to serious negotiations was the Soviet conviction that if Nixon survived politically he would lack authority, but in all likelihood he would not survive. Thus the Soviets finessed controversial items by scheduling many meetings between the leaders on subjects normally left to the foreign ministers: arcane technical discussions on agreements that had long since been prepared for signature at the summit. Most interesting of these was a draft treaty to prohibit underground nuclear tests over a certain "threshold" of explosive power.

During my visit to Moscow in March, Brezhnev proposed banning underground tests of nuclear weapons above a certain yield (later set at 150 kilotons). This opened up discussions on verification that represented a major advance. If we were to verify that tests were below the threshold, the Soviets would have to reveal their test sites. This--surprisingly--they agreed to do. The question of "peaceful nuclear explosions" then arose. We asked for on-site inspection, and after prolonged wrangling the Soviets agreed. Never before had they done so. But by then detente had been engulfed in controversy in America and doubt in Moscow. At home, the threshold test ban failed not by attracting bitter animosity, as with SALT, but by indifference. Most liberals, preferring a comprehensive test ban, fought the agreement and killed the first breakthrough toward on-site inspection. Conservatives saw no reason to rescue causes liberals had abandoned.

SALT was the most difficult issue at the 1974 summit. It had become a whipping boy in a deeper struggle over the entire nature of U.S.-Soviet relations and even over Nixon's fitness to govern. Even so, after meetings near Yalta in the Crimea, where Brezhnev had taken our whole party for a few days, it was decided that I would not accompany Nixon on a visit to Minsk but would return to Moscow to see whether progress could be made.

Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko and I met on July 1, 1974. We had been talking about extremes: either a permanent agreement that caused everyone to protect against every conceivable contingency, or a two-to three-year extension of the 1972 interim agreement, too short a period. Perhaps we should aim for a new agreement that would run for, say, ten years, from 1975 to 1985. Gromyko accepted and the negotiations were placed in a different framework. Nixon and Brezhnev agreed to meet during the winter to implement the new approach.

The strange thing was that by all normal criteria, the summit was a success. Significant agreements had been signed--not so fundamental as on previous occasions, but the sort of accords that showed that the two superpowers took progress in their relationship seriously. Even in SALT we had come much closer to an understanding of each other's position than was generally realized; otherwise it would not have been possible for a new President to conclude the negotiations within four months of entering office as Ford did at Vladivostok--an agreement that has yet to be improved in more than seven years of further negotiations.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.