Real Peace

by Richard Nixon

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  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Myths of Peace

  The Keys to Real Peace

  NATO and Japan

  China

  The Third World

  Peaceful Competition

  Author’s Note

  To those who served

  INTRODUCTION

  I published Real Peace, my fifth book, in a private edition in 1983. It was my first and only experience as a publisher. It was also the only case in which I was able to approach writing an entire book in the way I had always wanted, which was to envision it as a long speech. I wanted it to have the impact of a book but with the clarity, simplicity, and immediacy of a spoken address.

  Real Peace was written five years after The Real War. During his first years in office President Reagan had vigorously addressed the crisis in superpower relations I had described in the earlier book. He had undertaken a massive defense buildup and was taking a more assertive line against Soviet aggression. Now I felt our goal as a nation should be a realistic strategy for preserving and extending peace around the world while reducing the chances of a suicidal nuclear war.

  My advice to anyone undertaking a major writing project is to do what I have done throughout my political career, whether with speeches, articles, or books: Make an outline. You do not have to be bound strictly by it. But unless you begin by ordering your thoughts coherently, your writing will meander rather than march, sag rather than sing. Always remember, too, that while you may think all your words are pearls of wisdom, shortening the string during the editing process will keep you from getting tangled in your own rhetoric. Publishers often want big, fat books they can label as “sweeping” or “definitive.” Sometimes a subject requires such length and detail, but all too often it does not. Shorter is frequently better, because shorter texts are usually more powerful and always more read.

  I began making notes over the Independence Day weekend in 1983. I finished the seventeen-page outline, written out in longhand on a yellow legal-sized pad, at 12:30 in the afternoon on July 4th, just before leaving my home in Saddle River to go to Yankee Stadium to see New York play the Boston Red Sox. The young Yankee pitcher, Dave Righetti, threw a nohitter, his first, and mine as well. I decided this was a good sign for Real Peace!

  Five weeks later, I had finished the manuscript. Any author will tell you that when he has completed a project he wants to see it in print as quickly as possible. But publishers require as much as six months’ lead time to get a book into bookstores. I decided to cut out the middle man and asked Marin Strmecki, who had helped research the manuscript and prepare it for publication, to produce the book instead. He found a printer and designed the book and the jacket, and by September it was finished. Without a publisher’s giant publicity apparatus to depend upon, I mailed copies of page proofs, and later, finished books, to key columnists and opinion leaders around the world. Their responses made Real Peace my most critically acclaimed book, and soon Little, Brown asked permission to publish a regular commercial edition.

  Many praised the book because they thought I was being critical of President Reagan’s hard line. But my most hard-hitting passages were about the myths of peace, the naive and fatally flawed nostrums being put forward by his harshest critics. I also returned to a theme I have repeatedly emphasized ever since Mrs. Nixon and I took a seventy-day trip around the world in 1953: the need to develop a more effective policy to promote freedom and prosperity in the Third World. “The people in these countries have terrible problems,” I wrote. “The communists at least talk about the problems. Too often we just talk about the communists.” Today the Berlin Wall has come down and most of the nations of Eastern Europe have begun to break free of Soviet domination. But in the developing world, the grinding poverty and misery that provide such fertile soil for communism persists and will do so for generations. The Soviet Union still spends $15 billion a year to prop up anti-American regimes in Vietnam, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, and Afghanistan. The Cold War has ended in Europe, but it is still being waged in the Third World.

  • • •

  During the 1980 Presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan proclaimed the war in Vietnam a noble cause. His critics called it a gaffe. I call it the truth. Of all the books I have written, No More Vietnams is the one that I felt I had an obligation to write—for the sake of the three million Americans who served, for the sake of the 56,000 who died, for the sake of the millions of people of Indochina still suffering under communism because of our failure, and for the sake of history.

  Vietnam is the most lied-about war in our nation’s history. In the wake of the Vietnamese gulag and the holocaust in Cambodia in which two million people were killed by the communist Khmer Rouge we had tried to keep out of power, those who opposed our efforts—including columnists, authors, and movie directors—have spent the last fifteen years scrambling to justify their antiwar position. Many of them still argue that we were on the wrong side. In this book I demonstrated not only that we were on the right side but that after our fighting men had won the war, the United States Congress lost the peace by slashing aid to our South Vietnamese allies at the same time the Soviet Union was dramatically expanding its aid to the communists in the North.

  When I wrote the book in 1985, I was suffering from what my doctor described as the worst case of shingles he had ever seen. In spite of this ordeal, or perhaps as a way of distracting my attention from it, I was able to do some of the best writing I have ever done. But I erred on one important decision: the title. The one I chose was based on this passage: “ ‘No more Vietnams’ can mean we will not try again. It should mean ‘We will not fail again.’ ” As I look back, the title seems too clever by half, as if I were trying to outsmart people by co-opting the antiwar critics’ favorite bumper sticker. Titles, like texts, should be simple and direct. If I were making the decision today, I would choose a different title: A Noble Cause.

  —RN

  March 14, 1990

  Saddle River, New Jersey

  THE MYTHS OF PEACE

  There can be no real peace in the world unless a new relationship is established between the United States and the Soviet Union.

  The two superpowers cannot afford to go to war against each other, at any time or under any circumstances. Each side’s vast military power makes war obsolete as an instrument of national policy. The cost to both sides of a full-scale conventional or nuclear war would far exceed any conceivable benefits.

  In the nineteenth century the German military strategist Clausewitz called war “the continuation of political activity by other means.” At that time national leaders used war or the threat of war as a last resort to extract concessions from their adversaries.

  Now, for the superpowers, using that last resort would be suicide. In the age of nuclear warfare to continue our political differences by means of war would be to discontinue civilization as we know it.

  War is an option whose time has passed. Peace is the only option for the future. At present we occupy a treacherous no-man’s-land between peace and war, a time of growing fear that our military might has expanded beyond our capacity to control it and our political differences widened beyond our ability to bridge them.

  The situation is precarious, but the moment is precious. It is imperative that the leaders of the United States and the Soviet Union seize the moment to achieve a major breakthrough for peace—not a mythical perfect peace but
a real peace, based on a joint recognition of the harsh reality that they have profound, irreconcilable differences but that their survival depends on their finding ways to manage their differences without war.

  A world war, whether conventional or nuclear, must never again be allowed to take place. One of the most empty-headed and dangerous fallacies of the nuclear disarmament movement is that the world would necessarily be better off without nuclear weapons. Those who survived the trench warfare of World War I, the Allied firebombings in Germany and Japan during World War II, or the Soviets’ recent use of chemical warfare in Laos can testify that conventional war brings its own unique horrors.

  We must not allow our understandable fear of a nuclear war to blind us to the increasingly awesome destructiveness of conventional weapons. Conventional weapons killed 15 million in World War I and over 54 million in World War II. Casualties in a conventional World War III would be far greater. We must face up to the fact that in any conventional or nuclear world war there will be no winners, only losers. Charles de Gaulle recognized this when he observed during our meeting at Versailles in 1969, “In the Second World War, all the nations of Europe lost; two were defeated.”

  The United States’ superiority in nuclear weapons, which we no longer have, was the indispensable factor in deterring the Soviet Union from launching a conventional war against Western Europe after World War II. While war has become obsolete as an instrument of policy the tools of war must continue to play a role in keeping the peace. Military deterrence, including nuclear forces, is an essential component of any lasting peace. When each side holds an equally good hand, a potential aggressor is likely to keep both his hands on the table.

  Paradoxically, though war is obsolete, we live in a world that is perpetually at war. In this summer of 1983, fifteen wars and a score of minor conflicts are raging around the globe. Since World War II there have been 140 wars, resulting in the deaths of over ten million people. Many of these have been local conflicts in the Third World in which nations have fought over religion or territory, or in which people have risen up against unpopular leaders. But virtually all of them have been haunted by the specter of superpower confrontation.

  In some cases the Soviet Union has initiated or exacerbated such conflicts; in other cases the U.S. has stepped in to protect its interests against communist aggression. As long as the superpowers view their interests and responsibilities on a global level, each small war is a world war in the making. Any guerrilla, no matter how obscure his cause or how remote his country, can fire a shot that will be heard around the world. A real peace between the superpowers must therefore take into account all conflict, everywhere in the world, and also those political, social, and economic tensions that lead to conflict.

  Real peace will not come from some magic formula that will suddenly and once and for all be “discovered,” like the promised land or the holy grail. Real peace is a process—a continuing process for managing and containing conflict between competing nations, competing systems, and competing international ambitions. Peace is not an end to conflict but rather a means of living with conflict, and once established it requires constant attention or it will not survive.

  Confusing real peace with perfect peace is a dangerous but common fallacy. Idealists long for a world without conflict, a world that never was and never will be, where all differences between nations have been overcome, all ambitions forsworn, all aggressive or selfish impulses transformed into acts of individual and national beneficence.

  Because of the realities of human nature, perfect peace is achieved in two places only: in the grave and at the typewriter. Perfect peace flourishes—in print. It is the stuff of poetry and high-minded newspaper editorials, molded out of pretty thoughts and pretty words. Real peace, on the other hand, will be the down-to-earth product of the real world, manufactured by realistic, calculating leaders whose sense of their nations’ self-interest is diamond-hard and unflinching.

  Those who make peace at the typing table rather than at the negotiating table have the luxury of being peacemakers without having to grapple with complex problems in the rough-and-tumble world of real international diplomacy. To them the only obstacle to peace is the regrettable lack of leaders who are as selfless and idealistic as they claim to be and who are willing to put aside parochial national interest in the interest of bringing peace to the world. They hope that this era will be the one in which self-interest, the force that has driven history since the dawn of history, will simply evaporate.

  Perfect peace has no historical antecedents and therefore no practical meaning in a world in which conflict among men is persistent and pervasive. If real peace is to exist, it must exist along with men’s ambitions, their pride, and their hatreds. A peace that fails to take these things into account will not last.

  We will meet the challenge of real peace only by keeping in mind two fundamental truths.

  First, conflict is a natural state of affairs in the world. Some nations are certain to be unsatisfied by what they have and will try to get more, for a variety of reasons and through a variety of means. Other nations will resist the designs of these acquisitive powers. One way or another nations in such positions will come into conflict, and if they cannot resolve their conflicts peaceably they will eventually try to resolve them violently.

  Second, nations only resort to aggression when they believe they will profit from it. Conversely, they will shrink from aggression if it appears in the long run it will cost them more than it benefits them.

  Short of changing human nature, therefore, the only way to achieve a practical, liveable peace in a world of competing nations is to take the profit out of war.

  • • •

  Most of the obstacles to peace today result from the Soviet Union’s expansionist policies. But there are also those in the West who impede the peacemakers. A few, their allegiances and their motives clear, do so intentionally. Those who do so inadvertently are far more dangerous.

  Lenin was fully aware of how helpful naive Westerners could be to the communist cause. He contemptuously called them “the useful idiots.” More out of ignorance than by design, the useful idiots earnestly plug ridiculously simplistic answers to our most complex problems. They are the sloganeers whose idea of thoughtful analysis is often limited to what will fit on a t-shirt or a bumper sticker. “Make love, not war.” “You can’t hug your kids with nuclear arms.” “Honk if you want peace.” Much of this fatuous nonsense is harmless, but unfortunately not all the useful idiots occupy themselves by marching and honking for peace. Some teach in our universities; some write newspaper columns; others pontificate on television.

  The complexities of the modern world are so baffling to them that they seek comfort in simple answers. What they fail to recognize is that for every complicated problem there is always a simple answer—and it’s usually wrong.

  Building a real peace will be arduous, frustrating work, and it is not surprising that some fall for shortcuts that promise to get them what they want quickly, painlessly, and cheaply. These shortcuts never work, and we should not expect them to work.

  In his heart everyone knows that the only people who get rich from the “get rich quick” books are those who write them. But just as there are countless “get rich quick” schemes there is also a wide array of seductively appealing “get peace quick” schemes.

  These are the myths of peace. Myths are fairy tales that people make up about things they otherwise would not understand. The ancients devised them to “explain” lightning and the changing of the seasons; today many concoct them to “explain” international relations. They are profoundly reassuring to those who otherwise would be profoundly confused by the complex dilemmas we face. But these myths are doubly dangerous: dangerous because they can distract and confound our leaders and clog decision-making channels, and also because of the chance that one of them might actually become official policy.

  The Disarmament Myth. This is the granddaddy of peace myths
, a favorite of generation after generation of idealists. Founded on a logical fallacy in which human intentions are equated with the means men use to carry out their intentions, the idea of disarmament has alternately seduced and disappointed peacemakers throughout history.

  “Disarmists,” those alarmists who think the world’s greatest evil is the arms race, believe that it is the existence of arms that causes war rather than the political tensions which lead to their use. Because of this fundamental misconception, the disarmists’ best hope for peace is a prescription for international disaster.

  If we are to make any progress toward real peace we must accept the fact that war results from unresolved political differences, not from the existence of arms. Pursuing arms control talks without dealing with our other nation-to-nation problems at the same time would be the ultimate example of treating a symptom while letting the disease run its brutal course. It is like a doctor prescribing aspirin rather than penicillin as a cure for pneumonia.

  One of the few arms control pacts of the twentieth century was concluded in 1922 at the Washington Naval Conference. The U.S., Britain, and Japan agreed to limit their naval forces by adopting a battleship ratio of 5-5-3; Japan had also signed a treaty with eight other powers agreeing to observe the integrity of China. But Japan’s ambitions in the Far East and its resentment of the Western powers were both far greater than its commitment to the agreements it had signed. In 1931 it invaded China, and in 1941 it struck our naval forces at Pearl Harbor.

  World War II resulted not from arms buildups but from the territorial ambitions of Japan and Germany. Germany’s and Japan’s arms buildups were a result of these ambitions, not the cause of them. The current arms race is between a similarly ambitious Soviet Union and a free world that has determined not to be caught off-guard again. The root causes of that conflict must be addressed before arms control can have any purpose.