Authors: Henry Kissinger
any sense of satisfaction
that it will always be that way. Because when we see the Chinese as people—and I have seen them all over the world …—they are creative, they are productive, they are one of the most capable people in the world. And 800 million Chinese are going to be, inevitably, an enormous economic power, with all that that means
in terms of what they could be in other areas if they move in that direction.
These phrases, commonplace today
, were revolutionary at that time. Because they were delivered extemporaneously—and I was out of communication with Washington—it was Zhou Enlai who brought them to my attention as I started the first dialogue with Beijing in more than twenty years. Nixon, inveterate anti-Communist, had decided that the imperatives of geopolitical equilibrium overrode the demands of ideological purity—as, fortuitously, had his counterparts in China.
In the presidential election campaign of 1972, Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, had taunted, “Come home, America!” Nixon replied in effect that if America shirked its international responsibility, it would surely fail at home. He declared that “
only if we act greatly
in meeting our responsibilities abroad will we remain a great nation, and only if we remain a great nation will we act greatly in meeting our challenges at home.” At the same time, he sought to temper “
our instinct that we knew what was best for others
,” which in turn brought on “their temptation to lean on our prescriptions.”
To this end, Nixon established a practice of annual reports on the state of the world. Like all presidential documents, these were drafted by White House associates, in this case the National Security Council staff under my direction. But Nixon set the general strategic tone of the documents and reviewed them as they were being completed. They were used as guidance to the governmental agencies dealing with foreign policy and, more important, as an indication to foreign countries of the direction of American strategy.
Nixon was enough of a realist to stress that the United States could not entrust its destiny entirely or even largely to the goodwill of others. As his 1970 report underscored, peace required a willingness to
negotiate and seek new forms of partnership, but these alone would not suffice: “
The second element of a durable peace
must be America’s strength. Peace, we have learned, cannot be gained by goodwill alone.” Peace would be strengthened, not obstructed, he assessed, by continued demonstrations of American power and a proven willingness to act globally—which evoked shades of Theodore Roosevelt sending the Great White Fleet to circumnavigate the globe in 1907–9. Neither could the United States expect other countries to mortgage their future by basing their foreign policy primarily on the goodwill of others. The guiding principle was the effort to build an international order that related power to legitimacy—in the sense that all its key members considered the arrangement just:
All nations, adversaries and friends
alike, must have a stake in preserving the international system. They must feel that their principles are being respected and their national interests secured … If the international environment meets their vital concerns, they will work to maintain it.
It was the vision of such an international order that provided the first impetus for the opening to China, which Nixon considered an indispensable component of it. One facet of the opening to China was the attempt to transcend the domestic strife of the past decade. Nixon became President of a nation shaken by a decade of domestic and international upheaval and an inconclusive war. It was important to convey to it a vision of peace and international comity to lift it toward visions worthy of its history and its values. Equally significant was a redefinition of America’s concept of world order. An improved relationship with China would gradually isolate the Soviet Union or impel it to seek better relations with the United States. As long as the United States took care to remain closer to each of the Communist superpowers than they were to each other, the specter of the Sino-Soviet
cooperative quest for world hegemony that had haunted American foreign policy for two decades would be stifled. (In time, the Soviet Union found itself unable to sustain this insoluble, largely self-created dilemma of facing adversaries in both Europe and Asia, including within its own ostensible ideological camp.)
Nixon’s attempt to make American idealism practical and American pragmatism long-range was attacked by both sides, reflecting the American ambivalence between power and principle. Idealists criticized Nixon for conducting foreign policy by geopolitical principles. Conservatives challenged him on the ground that a relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union was a form of abdication vis-à-vis the Communist challenge to Western civilization. Both types of critics overlooked that Nixon undertook a tenacious defense along the Soviet periphery, that he was the first American President to visit Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania), symbolically challenging Soviet control, and that he saw the United States through several crises with the Soviet Union, during two of which (in October 1970 and October 1973) he did not flinch from putting American military forces on alert.
Nixon had shown unusual skill in the geopolitical aspect of building a world order. He patiently linked the various components of strategy to each other, and he showed extraordinary courage in withstanding crises and great persistence in pursuing long-range aims in foreign policy. One of his oft-repeated operating principles was as follows: “You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely.” As a result, in one eighteen-month period, during 1972–73, he brought about the end of the Vietnam War, an opening to China, a summit with the Soviet Union even while escalating the military effort in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, the switch of Egypt from a Soviet ally to close cooperation with the United States, two disengagement agreements in the Middle East—one between Israel and Egypt, the other
with Syria (lasting to this writing, even amidst a brutal civil war)—and the start of the European Security Conference, whose outcome over the long term severely weakened Soviet control of Eastern Europe.
But at the juncture when tactical achievement might have been translated into a permanent concept of world order linking inspirational vision to a workable equilibrium, tragedy supervened. The Vietnam War had exhausted energies on all sides. The Watergate debacle, foolishly self-inflicted and ruthlessly exploited by Nixon’s longtime critics, paralyzed executive authority. In a normal period, the various strands of Nixon’s policy would have been consolidated into a new long-term American strategy. Nixon had a glimpse of the promised land, where hope and reality conjoined—the end of the Cold War, a redefinition of the Atlantic Alliance, a genuine partnership with China, a major step toward Middle East peace, the beginning of Russia’s reintegration into an international order—but he did not have time to merge his geopolitical vision with the occasion. It was left to others to undertake that journey.
After the anguish of the 1960s and the collapse of a presidency, America needed above all to restore its cohesion. It was fortunate that the man called to this unprecedented task was Gerald Ford.
Propelled into an office he had not sought, Ford had never been involved in the complex gyrations of presidential politics. For that reason, freed from obsession with focus groups and public relations, he could practice in the presidency the values of goodwill and faith in his country on which he had been brought up. His long service in the House, where he sat on key defense and intelligence subcommittees, gave him an overview of foreign policy challenges.
Ford’s historic service was to overcome America’s divisions. In his foreign policy, he strove—and largely succeeded—to relate power to
principle. His administration witnessed the completion of the first agreement between Israel and an Arab state—in this case, Egypt—whose provisions were largely political. The second Sinai disengagement agreement marked Egypt’s irrevocable turning toward a peace agreement. Ford initiated an active diplomacy to bring about majority rule in southern Africa—the first American President to do so explicitly. In the face of strong domestic opposition, he supervised the conclusion of the European Security Conference. Among its many provisions were clauses that enshrined human rights as one of the European security principles. These terms were used by heroic individuals such as Lech Walesa in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia to bring democracy to their countries and start the downfall of Communism.
I introduced my eulogy at President Ford’s funeral with the following sentences:
According to an ancient tradition, God preserves humanity despite its many transgressions because, at any one period, there exist ten just individuals who, without being aware of their role, redeem mankind. Gerald Ford was such a man.
Jimmy Carter became President when the impact of America’s defeat in Indochina began to be translated into challenges inconceivable while America still had the aura of invincibility. Iran, heretofore a pillar of the regional Middle East order, was taken over by a group of ayatollahs, who in effect declared political and ideological war on the United States, overturning the prevailing balance of power in the Middle East. A symbol of it was the incarceration of the American diplomatic mission in Tehran for more than four hundred days. Nearly concurrently, the Soviet Union felt itself in a position to invade and occupy Afghanistan.
Amidst all this turmoil, Carter had the fortitude to move the
Middle East peace process toward a signing ceremony at the White House. The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt was a historic event. Though its origin lay in the elimination of Soviet influence and the start of a peace process by previous administrations, its conclusion under Carter was the culmination of persistent and determined diplomacy. Carter solidified the opening to China by establishing full diplomatic relations with it, cementing a bipartisan consensus behind the new direction. And he reacted strongly to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan by supporting those who resisted the Soviet takeover. In an anguished period, Carter reaffirmed values of human dignity essential to America’s image of itself even while he hesitated before the new strategic challenges—to find the appropriate balance between power and legitimacy—toward the end of his term.
Rarely has America produced a president so suited to his time and so attuned to it as Ronald Reagan. A decade earlier, Reagan had seemed too militant to be realistic; a decade later, his convictions might have appeared too one-dimensional. But faced with a Soviet Union whose economy was stagnating and whose gerontocratic leadership was quite literally perishing serially, and supported by an American public opinion eager to shed a period of disillusionments, Reagan combined America’s latent, sometimes seemingly discordant strengths: its idealism, its resilience, its creativity, and its economic vitality.
Sensing potential Soviet weakness and deeply confident in the superiority of the American system (he had read more deeply in American political philosophy than his domestic critics credited), Reagan blended the two elements—power and legitimacy—that had in the previous decade produced American ambivalence. He challenged the Soviet Union to a race in arms and technology that it could not
win, based on programs long stymied in Congress. What came to be known as the Strategic Defense Initiative—a defensive shield against missile attack—was largely derided in Congress and the media when Reagan put it forward. Today it is widely credited with convincing the Soviet leadership of the futility of its arms race with the United States.
At the same time, Reagan generated psychological momentum with pronouncements at the outer edge of Wilsonian moralism. Perhaps the most poignant example is his farewell address as he left office in 1989, in which he described his vision of America as the shining city on a hill:
I’ve spoken of the shining city
all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace—a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
America as a shining city on a hill was not a metaphor for Reagan; it actually existed for him because he willed it to exist.
This was the important difference between Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon, whose actual policies were quite parallel and not rarely identical. Nixon treated foreign policy as an endeavor with no end, as a set of rhythms to be managed. He dealt with its intricacies and contradictions like school assignments by an especially demanding teacher. He expected America to prevail but in a long, joyless enterprise, perhaps after he left office. Reagan, by contrast, summed up his Cold War strategy to an aide in 1977 in a characteristically optimistic epigram:
“We win, they lose.” The Nixon style of policymaking was important to restore fluidity to the diplomacy of the Cold War; the Reagan style was indispensable for the diplomacy of ending it.
On one level, Reagan’s rhetoric—including his March 1983 speech referring to the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire—might have spelled the end of any prospect of East-West diplomacy. On a deeper level, it symbolized a period of transition, as the Soviet Union became aware of the futility of an arms race while its aging leadership was facing issues of succession. Hiding complexity behind a veneer of simplicity, Reagan also put forward a vision of reconciliation with the Soviet Union beyond what Nixon would ever have been willing to articulate.