1999 (32 page)

The meeting at Reykjavik in 1986 is a prime example of how not to conduct a summit. Never has so much been risked with so little forethought. In one meeting with Gorbachev, President Reagan actually negotiated about eliminating not only ballistic missiles but also all other nuclear weapons on the basis of a scrap of paper on which an aide had scrawled a couple of talking points. Had it not been for the fact that the President, to his great credit, adamantly refused to trade away the SDI, the United States might have cast aside the core of Western defense strategy—all without consulting its allies or even the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Ironically, even if no weapons are ever deployed as a result of the SDI, it has already once saved the West from disaster.

In the end, the unprepared summit at Reykjavik achieved nothing in terms of Western interests. First, it allowed the Soviets to get off the hook for their recent kidnapping of American journalist Nicholas Daniloff. Second, it enabled Gorbachev to paint the SDI as the principal obstacle to a sweeping arms-control agreement. Third, its loose talk about eliminating nuclear weapons sent shock waves through the West. No summit since Yalta has threatened Western interests so much as the two days at Reykjavik. It is almost inevitable that any freewheeling summit will careen toward disaster.

Do not allow arms control to dominate the summit agenda.
At a summit, a President must give proportional weight to the entire spectrum of U.S.–Soviet issues. In fact, a summit agenda should place top priority not on arms control but on the potential flashpoints for U.S.–Soviet conflicts. After all, it is not arms but the political differences that lead to their use that cause wars. The failure to devote sustained attention to these political differences sends the wrong message to Moscow. Kremlin leaders watch their counterparts closely at a summit. Our choice of issues carries a signal: What we address is what we think important. If we skirt an issue, they will assume we are giving them a free hand on it.

Conflicts in the Third World are the most important issues to raise. Soviet leaders must be made to understand that it would be
both irrational and immoral for the United States and the West to accept the doctrine that the Soviet Union has the right to support so-called wars of national liberation in the noncommunist world without insisting on our right to defend our allies and friends under assault and to support true liberation movements against pro-Soviet regimes in the Third World. We cannot realistically expect the Soviets to cease being communists dedicated to expanding their influence and domination, but we must make it clear at the summit level that military adventurism will destroy the chances for better relations between the United States and the Soviet Union, thereby nullifying any potential benefits Moscow might derive from reduced tensions.

The Reykjavik summit in 1986 and the Washington summit in 1987 were primarily arms-control summits. Gorbachev succeeded in his efforts to block progress, and in fact any real negotiations, on any other issues. At the next summit, the United States should insist that equal priority be given to the causes of war as is given to the arms that could be used to wage war. Arms-control talks are important and can serve our interests. But they should proceed in tandem with and be expressly linked to the other issues on the agenda. A relaxation of tensions that is based exclusively on arms control and that allows Soviet expansionism to run unchecked will lead not to real peace but to false hopes and runaway euphoria.

Do not negotiate with a deadline.
We tend to make foreign policy in four-year cycles. A typical American President aspires to overhaul our policies vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and to settle all outstanding questions before the next presidential election. He is a man in a hurry and is visibly concerned with the ticking clock. Kremlin leaders are acutely aware of the pressure that time puts on a President and are capable of exploiting it ruthlessly. Our top leaders must therefore be more realistic in what they hope to achieve. No single President will solve all the issues, and no single issue will be solved for all time by any President. At the summit, we must be willing to walk away without a deal if the terms are not right. It is a fatal mistake for any American President to negotiate with a deadline. After all, Gorbachev's negotiating deadline is about twenty-five years.

Institute annual summits.
If a President hews to these five basic
guidelines, he can go toe-to-toe with any Soviet leader at the summit. As part of his overall negotiating strategy, he should seek to establish a process of annual summit meetings with the top Soviet leader.

Annual summits are useful for three reasons. First, since both leaders will want substantive agreements for a summit, the fact that one is scheduled gives added impetus to negotiations mired in the bureaucracies. It is one of the best ways for the United States to put the heat on the Soviets to budge from their entrenched positions. While this should not be carried to the point of seeking an agreement for the sake of an agreement or of negotiating against a deadline, scheduled annual summits can help break negotiating logjams. Second, the regular discussion of political differences on an annual basis reduces the possibility that one leader will miscalculate the reaction of the other. Each will have ample opportunity to stake his ground and demonstrate his will to defend his interests. While the two leaders might not like each other, they will understand each other. It will therefore lessen the chance that a miscalculation by one will result in a war neither wants. Third, the fact that a summit is scheduled will inhibit aggressive moves by the Soviet Union in the run-up to the meeting. Neither leader wants to be accused of poisoning the atmosphere prior to a summit.

Some might be tempted to conclude that it is hopeless to expect a democracy to come out on equal terms in negotiations with a totalitarian dictatorship. But in the past we have reached sound agreements. The Austrian Peace Treaty of 1955, the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1962, the Berlin agreement of 1971, and the SALT I Treaty of 1972 all represented significant progress in U.S.–Soviet relations. In each case, however, we must remember that the agreement did not mark an end to the superpower conflict but simply took a step toward setting up a process to live with the continuing conflict.

If we recognize their limitations and if we adhere to proper guidelines for their conduct, negotiations with Moscow can serve a useful purpose—in effect providing rules of engagement for competition without war. But we must not pursue negotiations in isolation
from the other aspects of overall strategy. We can go forward with talks only if we do what is necessary to maintain deterrence and keep up our competition. To negotiate without maintaining a deterrent leads to gradual accommodation and capitulation. To negotiate without continuing to compete leads to acquiescence to Soviet aggression. If we learn to combine the three—deterrence, competition, and negotiation—we will be in a position to achieve real peace in the years beyond 1999.

I
n the years beyond 1999, the balance of power in the world will reflect less and less the dominance of the United States and the Soviet Union and more and more the rising importance of three other global geopolitical giants: Western Europe, Japan, and China. The future of the world rides to a large degree on whether these other power centers contribute to the strength of the East or the West. Therefore, in the years before 1999, the United States must undertake a concerted effort to integrate the world's three rising power centers into a broad coalition to deter Soviet aggression and create a stronger world order.

There are those who would contest that view in the case of Western Europe. They do not believe that NATO matters anymore. They sum up the shift in world power by describing the nineteenth century as the century of Europe, the twentieth as the American century, and the twenty-first as the Pacific century. They argue that Europe is finished as a major factor in world affairs. No European country by itself can qualify as a superpower. Even Great Britain, France, and Germany, the nations which once were the world's premier military and economic powers, are soft and decadent, unable to see their own interests, much less to mobilize the willpower to defend them. Their leaders are obsessed with satiating the appetite of their rapacious welfare states rather
than playing a constructive world role. Those who view Europe in this way, as a collection of geopolitical has-beens, conclude that the United States should therefore cast Europe aside and either turn to the Pacific or go it alone in the world.

In one respect, this view is correct: The two world wars of the twentieth century have exacted a heavy toll on the European nations. In World War I, all the absolutist monarchies, the political systems of half of Europe, were uprooted. In World War II, the seeds of destruction were sown in the colonial soil of all the great European empires. As de Gaulle told me in 1969, “In World War II, all the nations of Europe lost; two were defeated.” Europe entered the postwar period as a continent suffering from historical exhaustion. In the first half of the century, its peoples had barely survived two devastating wars, and their instincts told them to withdraw from the world and to adopt a more parochial outlook.

But the critics of Europe ignore the positive side of the ledger. Britain and France are no longer rivals, and France and Germany are no longer enemies. Western European countries have made great strides in integrating their economies and have taken the first halting steps toward political unity. While for almost a century it was customary to describe Turkey as “the sick man of Europe,” it is now well on the way to vigorous economic and political health and provides more divisions for NATO than any other country. After remaining neutral in World War II, Spain adopted a democratic government and has joined NATO, and, despite the dispute over the future of U.S. air bases, socialist Prime Minister Felipe González remains committed to remaining in the alliance.

While the fragmented giant of Europe still has a long way to go before it achieves genuine unity, we should not ignore the fact that the countries of Western Europe have come a long way since 1945. We can safely predict that these countries, which clashed in dozens of crises in the one hundred years before 1945, will not go to war against one another again in the next century. That has not happened since the Pax Romana fifteen centuries ago.

Moreover, it is still in the interest of the United States to remain in NATO and to maintain the U.S. military presence in Western Europe. The population of Western Europe is greater than that of the United States and almost as great as that of the Soviet Union.
With one-fourth the territory of the United States and one-eighth that of the Soviet Union, our NATO allies have a total GNP almost equal to ours and more than 50 percent higher than the Soviet Union's. Western Europe's peoples are highly educated and capable of exploiting the enormous promise of high technology. Most important, for the first time in history all the West European nations have democratic governments.