Real Peace

by Richard Nixon

  The one sure way to prevent a nuclear holocaust would be to eliminate all nuclear weapons. But complete nuclear disarmament is an impossible dream. The reason is simple: nuclear weapons are simple. The principles of physics that make them possible are widely understood by governments, by terrorists, even by college undergraduates. The materials for making them are within the grasp of virtually every modern nation.

  Some, out of desperation or supreme naivete, have suggested that an international authority be established to banish nuclear weapons and make sure they are never built again. Because such an authority would by necessity be privy to the inner workings of every government in the world, it would itself be the most powerful and ultimately the most dangerous institution on earth. Incredible political force would have to be brought to bear to keep nuclear weapons from being built, and that force would be so vast as to change the character of life on earth. Like the seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, the disarmists are in effect asserting that we must offer ourselves and our liberties up to some superstate so that it can protect us from being devoured by each other in the nuclear state of nature.

  That the disarmists would propose some outlandish “world government” shows that most of them, to put the most charitable light on the matter, are living in a dream world in which problems between nations can be solved by some authority other than national governments. This delusion is a form of radiation sickness. If you look directly at an atomic blast you may go blind; apparently intellectual blindness can result from contemplating the nuclear weapons issue for too long.

  Nuclear weapons will always exist. We must learn to live with what we know rather than wasting our energies in the pretense of not knowing it. But while we cannot eliminate nuclear weapons, we can do a great deal to prevent them from being used. It is only by learning to live in peace with our adversaries that we will learn to live with nuclear weapons.

  The World Government Myth. After the cataclysm of World War II, in which 55 million people died, those who had served and survived returned home to the happy news of the United Nations conference in San Francisco. Everyone was hopeful that through this new organization we would debate about our disagreements rather than fight about them.

  But as was the case with the League of Nations after World War I, the promise of the UN was illusory. The League of Nations and the UN were both noble but unavailing attempts to turn man’s most idealistic impulses about peace into reality. Envisioned as the peacekeeper of the postwar world, the UN has been unable in most cases either to forestall war or to end a war once it was begun. One expert has concluded that of 93 separate conflicts between 1946 and 1977, the UN held limited debate on 40, did not debate at all about 53, and did not significantly contribute to the resolution of any.

  Many nations are ably represented in the UN by dedicated, highly intelligent delegates, and the organization as a whole does important work in such areas as health and hunger relief. At its best the United Nations serves as a forum for the views and complaints of smaller nations that otherwise might be ignored in a world dominated by the superpowers. But at its worst it is more often than not a propaganda arm of the Soviet Union and its satellites and shills, a hall of distorting mirrors where peace-loving Russian armies are “invited in” by their victims, where the aiding and abetting of terrorism is actually “supporting wars of national liberation”—where, as in the world of George Orwell’s 1984, “war is peace” and “freedom is slavery.” The UN has exacerbated many conflicts either by cavalierly blaming the U.S. or by ignoring the involvement of the Soviet Union. While 160 flags fly at the UN, the one that flies the highest is the double standard.

  No major power will submit an issue affecting its basic interests to a forum in which it can be overruled by smaller powers. The UN’s failure shows that international problems must be solved by negotiations between autonomous governments or they will not be solved.

  The Myth of Peace Through Trade. Optimism, like hope, springs eternal, and from each generation of leaders spring the eternal optimists who say that trade between aggressive adversaries softens their belligerence. Five years after the Russian Revolution David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, said that trade with the Soviets would “bring an end to the ferocity, the rapine, and the crudity of Bolshevism surer than any other method.” Many in the West, eager for what they called “peaceful coexistence” with the new communist government, agreed. Western businessmen scrambled for access to what they hoped would be rich new Soviet markets, and the Russians obligingly granted over 300 “concessions” to Western companies. Eventually all these manufacturing firms were expelled, but not before Soviet engineers had studied and copied Western industrial technology and methods and put them to work during Stalin’s massive industrial buildup in the 1930s.

  That first round of economic cooperation in the 1920s did not bring the West and the Soviets closer together. It did help turn the Soviet Union into a much stronger adversary.

  Yet today there are many, especially in the Western business community, who share Lloyd George’s view. Their optimism, though commendable, is again based on faulty logic. Peace-through-trade did not work before, and it will not work now. As Konrad Adenauer told me in 1967 just before his death, “Trade is trade.” Nations enter into trading relationships in the hope of making a profit, and any nation with aggressive ambitions can be expected to use its profits in the pursuit of those ambitions.

  In both world wars nations that had traded with each other fought each other. Before World War II Japan had trade ties with the U.S. that had been painstakingly built up since the nineteenth century. Germany traded extensively with each of the countries it invaded.

  In the end both nations’ leaders found their grievances and territorial ambitions to be far stronger than their desire to remain at peace and engage in peaceful commerce with their neighbors. Believing that they could profit more from war than from peace, they went to war. Their choice proved that just as weapons are dangerous only insofar as they may be used to resolve political differences, commerce with an adversary contributes to peace only if it is part of a larger structure designed to reduce political differences. Otherwise, by trading with an aggressive, expansionist power you are fueling a fire that could eventually consume you.

  The Myth of Peace Through Friendship. Some of the useful idiots put no faith in leaders. Others put far too much. The latter believe that if leaders would only meet and get to know one another, peace would follow as a matter of course. Since they think international conflict results primarily from misunderstanding and bad communication, they assume that friendships between nations and treaties and agreements designed to set the world right will inevitably result from friendships between national leaders.

  This has never been the case, in our century or in any other. William Jennings Bryan, Woodrow Wilson’s first secretary of state, believed war could be prevented if nations would agree to meet amicably to settle their disputes, and he signed treaties with 30 nations creating mechanisms for doing so. World War I followed fast on Bryan’s heels. In the 1930s Imperial Japan’s promise to observe the integrity of China did not prevent or delay its Invasion of Manchuria. In World War II Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, thus violating the two-year-old Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact.

  History is a pathetic junkyard of broken treaties. Yet naive idealists persist in believing that summits, state dinners, windy toasts, tearful bearhugs and abrazos, and solemn signing ceremonies are the very essence of diplomacy. They put great faith in good relations among leaders, and their hearts swell when they turn on the evening news and see two “former” adversaries grinning and tipping glasses at each other.

  The media frequently mistake such atmospherics for real diplomatic progress because they only scan the surface of events, accumulating photographs of smiles and handshakes to print and copies of agreements to excerpt and summarize. Following such a meeting the diplomatic correspondents count up all the sm
iles, handshakes, and agreements, scrutinize the texts of the dinner toasts, study how pleased the officials are with themselves on the flight home, determine how many souvenirs the diplomats’ wives bought, and then, relying on a journalistic calculus known only to themselves, pronounce the event a success or a failure. In the end they and their readers will probably learn little or nothing about what actually happened when the leaders sat down by themselves and tackled the substantive issues. In front of the cameras the leaders had been friends joined in the pursuit of peace, but behind closed doors they reverted to their real selves: aggressor, victim, cat, mouse, hawk, chicken, winner, loser.

  Handshakes do not change national ambitions or interests. “Friendship treaties” do not necessarily express or create friendship. When two leaders sit down to talk, they do not turn into philanthropists. They do not give away anything without getting something in return which they value as much or more. Good personal relations do not ensure good state relations. All leaders, not just communist leaders, put their nations’ interests above their personal likes and dislikes.

  Leaders go to meetings with adversaries in pursuit of good press back home, in search of leverage to use in relations with other nations, or in the hope of exploiting the other side’s weaknesses or irresolution and coming out ahead as a result. International relations are not like lunch at the club or a round of golf with friends. They are more like entering a snake pit where good intentions and good manners, adhered to slavishly in the face of your enemy’s malevolence, are bound to be distinct hindrances. No leader should meet with an adversary unless he is fully aware of his own strengths and weaknesses and those of his opponent; unless he has something he wants to bargain for and something to bargain with; and unless he is prepared to be worked over by professionals.

  Face-to-face meetings between leaders of hostile powers always have been and will continue to be useful for only two reasons. First, they help the leaders get each others’ measure and as a result help them avoid potentially disastrous miscalculations later on. Second, they provide a setting for the exceedingly delicate, difficult process of making agreements the observance of which will serve both sides’ interests simultaneously. Unless agreements are self-enforcing they will not last. It is a reflection of the great difficulty of meaningful negotiation between adversaries that such agreements, amid all of history’s friendship treaties and nonaggression pacts, have been few and far between.

  • • •

  In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars. Men praying to the same God killed each other by the thousands in America’s Civil War and by the millions in World War I and World War II. Unless men change, a real peace must be built on the assumption that the most we can do is to learn to live with our differences rather than dying over them.

  THE KEYS TO REAL PEACE

  The door to real peace must be unlocked. Two keys are required to open it. The United States has one; the Soviet Union has the other. Unless the superpowers adopt a new live-and-let-live relationship, the world will not see real peace in this century. If we fail to work toward that end, suicidal war is inevitable. If we succeed in reaching it, not only does world war become avoidable, but world peace becomes possible. Working against each other, the superpowers will enter a spiral of escalating differences that could lead to war. Working together, they can be an irresistible force for peace not only for themselves but for others as well.

  Never has real peace been so necessary and yet so difficult to achieve. The stark truth is that the ideologies and the foreign policies of the superpowers are diametrically opposed. The struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States is between an avowedly and manifestly aggressive power and an avowedly and manifestly defensive one, between a totalitarian civilization and a free one, between a state that is frightened by the idea of freedom and one that is founded on it.

  The United States wants peace; the Soviet Union wants the world. Our foreign policy respects the freedom of other nations; theirs tries to destroy it. We are interested in peace as an end in itself; they are interested in it only if it serves their ends. The Soviets pursue those ends unscrupulously, by means short of all-out war. They lie, cheat, subvert governments, disrupt elections, subsidize terrorists, and wage wars by proxy. For the Soviets, peace is a continuation of war by other means.

  Russians and Americans can be friends. But the governments of the Soviet Union and the United States can never be friends because their interests are irreconcilable. The peace we seek cannot be based on mutual friendship. It can only be grounded on mutual respect for each other’s strength.

  We will continue to have political differences that will drive us apart. We must also recognize, however, that the United States and the Soviet Union have two common interests that can draw us together. As the world’s two greatest military powers, we both want to avoid a major war that neither of us would survive. As the world’s two major economic powers—each with enormous resources and capable people—we can cooperate in ways that could benefit both of us immensely.

  We must not delude ourselves into believing that the East-West struggle is the result of a giant misunderstanding that can be overcome if we sit down and talk it over. We can form Soviet-American friendship societies or tip vodka glasses with Kremlin leaders, but it will not lead to peace. That approach assumes the Soviets share with the West a “sincere” desire for peace. But as Ambassador Charles Bohlen told me in 1959, “Trying to determine whether the Soviet leaders are sincere about anything is a useless exercise.” Pointing to a coffee table, he added, “They are pure materialists. You can no more describe them as being sincere than you could describe that table as being sincere.”

  If our differences are so intractable, is peace possible? Our differences make a perfect, ideal peace impossible, but our common interests make a pragmatic, real peace achievable. We are entering a new phase of the East-West struggle. In view of the verbal missiles rocketing between Washington and Moscow, we might conclude that the chances for peace are remote. But if we look beyond the rhetoric to the realities, we can be more optimistic. The table is set for a breakthrough toward real peace.

  In working for peace, we must not pursue the unachievable at the expense of the attainable. Neither we nor the Soviets can compromise our basic values. Only if we recognize that we are not going to settle our differences can we avoid going to war over them. The most we can hope to achieve is an agreement establishing peaceful rules of engagement for our continuing conflict. If we cannot walk arm-in-arm down the road toward peace, we must try at least to walk side-by-side.

  • • •

  The enormous military strength and the aggressive policies of the Soviet Union lead many in the West to conclude that the prospects for peace are virtually nonexistent. Their concerns are justified, and I have addressed them in The Real War. But our analysis of the Soviet position cannot stop with their troop and weapons count. In designing our foreign policy, we must know not only our adversary’s strengths, but also his weaknesses. We must not wallow in despair about Soviet might, for then we will fail to focus our attention on Soviet vulnerabilities.

  No man knows the strengths and weaknesses of the Soviet Union better than Yuri Andropov. For fifteen years he was the head of the KGB, the Soviet espionage and police apparatus. There he received reports from the vast network of Soviet agents at home and abroad and travelled extensively throughout the Eastern bloc. We can be certain that as he steps up to bat, he knows the score, knows the other team, knows how to play the game, and is prepared to put more than pine tar on his bat.

  The West knows little about Andropov himself. When he came into power, he was the subject of intense speculation in the West. Some media observers suggested that he was a closet liberal, a pussycat who would be easy to deal with because he liked American jazz and drank Scotch rather than vodka. Such comme
ntators are forever confusing style with substance. They are suckers for style because style is their bread and butter. In the 1950s, they dismissed Nikita Khrushchev as a lightweight because he spoke bad Russian, drank too much, wore ill-fitting clothes, and had crude manners. They were wrong about Khrushchev, and they are wrong about Andropov. Anyone who claws his way to the top in the murderous jungle warfare of the Soviet hierarchy is bound to be a formidable adversary. Only the strong survive and reach the top in communist regimes.

  We know this for sure about Andropov. He is an intelligent, dedicated, ruthless communist who shares the global ambitions of every Soviet dictator since the Bolshevik Revolution. Those who expect the Soviet Union to moderate its belligerence as soon as Andropov consolidates his power are deluding themselves.

  Fortunately, however, he is a hard-headed pragmatist, not a madman. This makes him less dangerous in the short run but potentially more dangerous in the long run, unless we develop pragmatic policies that will affect his interests.

  Andropov knows the strengths of the Soviet Union. He can point to some significant achievements over the past decade. Since 1974, over 100 million people have come under communist domination or have been lost to the West. Most ominously, the Soviets have gained superiority over the West in the most powerful and accurate nuclear weapons, land-based strategic and intermediate-range ballistic missiles.

  Today the Soviets, through their Cuban and Nicaraguan surrogates, are threatening to make Central America the next East-West battleground. Through their Libyan proxies, they are advancing in Central Africa. They are inching, via Afghanistan, toward the Persian Gulf. Through their support of Syria and the radical Palestinians, they are trying to exacerbate the Arab-Israeli conflict. By supporting both Iran and Iraq they are positioning themselves to pick up the pieces after that war in the oilrich Persian Gulf. Their propaganda machine is operating at full throttle, helping fuel the disarmament movement in Western Europe and thus continuing their 35-year-old campaign to divide the West against itself. The overall picture they present to the West is one of enormous power that backs up a menacing, expansionist foreign policy.