Real Peace (7 page)

During World War II, the United States recognized the importance of economic power by setting up a Board of Economic Warfare. Today we need a Foreign Economic Policy Board to concert the use of our economic power. It should answer directly to the President because only he would be able to knock heads together when the bureaucrats in the various agencies involved with foreign economic policy engage in Washington's favorite sport: fighting for turf. Policies governing trade, foreign aid, loans, and support of international lending agencies must be coordinated to serve American foreign policy interests. A process should also be established for enlisting the cooperation of the private sector in serving those interests. It makes no sense for the government to cut off aid to hostile nations while American banks continue to make huge loans to those same nations.

Trade is not a panacea. It does not solve all our problems.
Nothing can remove the burden of deterrence from our shoulders. Our policies must be designed to take the profit out of war, but we should also put more profit into peace. On these two pillars—deterrence and detente—we can build a structure of real peace.

Summit Meetings
. Summitry between the leaders of the superpowers is indispensable in the pursuit of real peace. It is at the summit that we bring together the various strands of hard-headed detente. This is a delicate exercise that we should undertake only if progress on resolving substantive issues is assured. No American President should go to the summit unless he knows what is on the other side of the mountain.

Rushing into a quickie summit just so the leaders of the superpowers can get acquainted would be a stupid and devastating mistake. Such a summit might temporarily improve the atmospherics of our relations, but little else. The famous “spirit of Geneva,” as well as the spirits of other Soviet-American summits at Camp David, Vienna, and Glassboro, was illusory. When a summit is all spirit and no substance, the spirit evaporates fast.

Andropov is understandably reluctant to schedule a summit at a time when it might help President Reagan win reelection. But with the resurgence of the American economy and the President's rise in the polls, Andropov is caught between a rock and a hard place. If he deliberately delays a summit until after the election, he will find himself facing a President with a new mandate and a stronger bargaining position. Andropov needs a summit before the American election more than President Reagan does. We should not give it to him on the cheap.

The words coming out of Moscow seem to indicate that they would like a summit. Their deeds would indicate otherwise. Some pundits have seized upon certain “signals” they interpret as being positive. But permitting a half-dozen Pentacostalists to emigrate, making some semantic concessions on human rights at the Madrid conference, allowing progress toward expanded cultural and diplomatic ties, and lifting martial law in Poland while transferring most of its repressive features
to the civil code are not actions that deserve serious consideration. Real peace is too important for tokenism. Unless substantial progress is assured on arms control and on reducing Soviet adventurism in Central America, we should not agree to hold a summit.

If the summit produces too little, there are two dangers. The first is disillusionment. The first Reagan-Andropov meeting will receive enormous worldwide attention. Expectations will be high. If the summit fails to live up to them, the letdown will be catastrophic. The disappointment could lead both sides to give up on the process of peace and increase preparations for war.

The second danger is euphoria. Sometimes simply the fact of a summit gives many in the West unrealistic hopes for the future. They mistakenly believe that we have reached the end of the journey to peace rather than just made a beginning. This makes it more difficult for Western leaders to gain public support for the decisive actions and strong military forces that are needed to make hard-headed detente work.

Summits must produce more than tokenism. They cannot make miracles, but they can make progress. As Churchill once said, “It would, I think, be a mistake to assume that nothing can be settled with Soviet Russia unless or until everything is settled.”

The first Soviet-American summit in Moscow in 1972 was scheduled only after the Soviets agreed to the Berlin settlement in 1971. We believed that if we could reach an agreement on an issue that had plagued East-West relations for 30 years and had at times brought us to the brink of war, we could reasonably expect to make progress on other major issues.

Similarly, before we schedule the next summit, personal representatives of Presidents Reagan and Andropov should undertake a series of intensive, absolutely confidential negotiations to explore what progress can be made in reaching agreement on major issues. This would be the most promising forum in which to search for some form of accommodation that advances the general interests of both parties by compromising
on the specific interests of each. It would allow the two sides to subtly feel out the differing degrees to which various elements of the other party's positions are negotiable, and to try varying combinations of give-and-take.

The summit agenda must be broad. It must include arms control, trade, and conduct in areas where our political differences collide, such as the Middle East, Africa, and Central America. In these preparatory talks, links should be forged between these issues. For example, the Russians must be made to understand that there is no way the Congress could or should approve arms control or trade agreements reached at a summit when Soviet surrogates continue to try to build another beachhead in Central America.

The Soviets will loudly object to such linkage, but they will understand it. After all, their paranoia about having “friendly” buffer states on their borders puts them in a poor position for objecting to our concern about what happens to our neighbors. President Kennedy drew the line when the Soviets tried to put missiles into Cuba in 1962. I drew the line when they tried to put a nuclear submarine base on Cuba in 1970. President Reagan has drawn the line in El Salvador. He is right to do so. We should make it clear to the Soviets that we will do whatever is necessary to prevent the establishment of another Soviet base in the Americas.

All discussions should proceed on the principle of strict reciprocity. We give them something they want only if they give us something we want. By not capitalizing on our economic power, we have been giving away enormous assets for free. And the Soviets, who are experts at the hoarding and exploiting of power, must certainly view our failure to use our assets as a sign of both stupidity and weakness.

Our primary goal should be to build a new relationship with the Soviets in which we will be able to prevail upon them to cease their aggression. This can only happen when the bilateral relationship with us becomes more important to them than their adventurism.

We must develop a process for annual summits between the
leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union. These meetings can both reduce the chances of war and help restrain Soviet behavior.

Regularly scheduled summits allow each leader to take the measure of the other and thus can reduce the possibility of miscalculation during a confrontation. In 1973, on the last night of my second summit with Brezhnev, we had a midnight meeting in San Clemente about the Middle East situation. He tried to push me into agreeing on a settlement that the superpowers would impose on Israel and the other nations of the region. I categorically and firmly resisted this pressure. We went at it toe-to-toe for three hours. After that confrontation, he had to know that we were not bluffing during the Yom Kippur War four months later, when we called an alert of our military forces in response to his threat to send Soviet combat troops into the Middle East.

If the leaders of the superpowers get to know each other, it does not mean they will like each other. But each controls such enormous power that it is vital that they take every possible step to reduce the possibility that either might underestimate the will of the other to defend his nation's interests.

Regular summits will tend to restrain Soviet behavior. As a meeting approaches the Kremlin leaders will be reluctant to do anything that might “poison” the atmosphere and therefore make it more difficult to reach the agreements they want. Brezhnev had an eye on the calendar when he agreed to join us in bringing about a ceasefire in the war between India and Pakistan in 1971. He would have preferred to embarrass the Chinese by allowing his client, India, to gobble up China's client, Pakistan. But he knew the cost would include the cancellation of a summit meeting he wanted. We had made that risk categorically clear to him.

Regular summits that produce concrete results will help the United States and our allies mobilize public support for necessary defense programs. While we should not have a summit simply because our allies and friends favor it, the fact that we will go to the summit when it is properly prepared reassures
them. Hope for real peace is essential if the people of the United States as well as Europe are to continue to support the military strength necessary to maintain the foundation of deterrence on which detente rests. There may be occasional spurts of spending when the threat of Soviet aggression seems acute, but over the long haul the absence of hope for peace fuels the forces of appeasement.

Good or bad personal relations at a summit will not have a decisive effect on state relations. But the two cannot be separated. 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.

In negotiating with the Kremlin leaders, an American President should be cordial in personal matters but unyielding in policy matters. As Franklin Roosevelt learned, with tragic consequences for the people of Poland and the other nations behind the Iron Curtain, any President who believes he can get the men of the Kremlin to change their policies by charming them or simply through personal persuasiveness is due for a rude awakening. But while mushy sentimentality should be avoided, a President achieves nothing—by bluster and belligerence. The Russians are masters of the bluff and can usually detect that tactic when it is used against them. Bluster and bad manners may intimidate the weak but never the strong. Talking softly while carrying a big stick is the most effective way to deal with the Soviets.

While not decisive, personal relationships can be marginally important when dealing with the leaders of the Soviet Union. Before my meeting with Khrushchev in 1959, British Prime Minister Macmillan told me that the Soviet leaders desperately wanted to be “admitted to the club”—accepted and respected as major world figures in their own right and not simply because they control the great military power of the Soviet Union. The Russian people are a great people, and the Soviet Union is a great power. We should agree to admit the Soviet leaders
into the “club,” but only if they agree to abide by the rules. It is a cheap price to pay if it helps restrain Soviet conduct.

We must make the Soviets understand that there is no way that we would or should admit them to the club if they continue to act as the moral outlaws of the world. When they shot down the Korean jetliner, they also shot down the prospects for quickly improving our relations in mutually beneficial ways.

Our initial response was to express our outrage in the strongest moral terms. We should not mince words in venting our anger because it clarifies the moral issue that is at the heart of the East-West struggle. But we must not delude ourselves by thinking that our statements about morality will have any effect behind the Kremlin walls. Condemning the Soviet leaders with statements based on Western ideals about the sanctity of human life is like making faces at the Sphinx.

Some have understandably urged us to make a stronger response. They advocate that we break off our diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, halt all our bilateral negotiations, and impose an array of trade sanctions. But they are overlooking one of the important lessons of this tragedy. As a vivid example of the danger of accidental war, it points out the fact that in the nuclear age there should be more communication between the superpowers rather than less.

While this is not the first atrocity committed by the Soviets, the West should seek to make it their last by seizing the moment to implement a strategy for dealing with them. We must develop a policy of hard-headed detente that will convince the Kremlin leaders that they stand to lose far more than they could possibly gain by threatening our interests. We can succeed only if we use the unity the world has found in its moral outrage to forge a strategy for real peace.

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A major communist head of state in Eastern Europe recently remarked to me that the last 60 years have seen a curious reversal in the rhetoric of East and West. The communists used
to say that capitalism was collapsing, and now the capitalists are saying that communism is collapsing. He then observed, “Perhaps both are wrong.”

He was right. We have differences with the Soviets that we will never overcome. We will never condone their conquests and will always oppose their expansionist policies. But we cannot wish them away. They are there, so we have to deal with them. How we deal with them will determine whether we achieve real peace.

We should avoid hot rhetoric, but we should not mince words. If the world is to have real peace, the Soviets must change their aggressive ways. Their persistence in expanding their influence and control by violent means will sooner or later end in war. And the chances are good that such a war will end the world.

Winston Churchill once said, “I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest.” Hard-headed detente is not a magic wand that will with one wave instantly make over the ruthless men in the Kremlin. It is a policy that will lead them to cooperate in the search for real peace because it is in their interest to do so.