1999 (29 page)

When we choose our leaders, we must remember that they are not candidates for sainthood. Personal character should always be a proper subject for debate and examination, but it is far more important to know whether a candidate has the strength and intelligence to hold his own across the table from Gorbachev than whether he might have smoked marijuana in college. If in the past sainthood had been a job requirement for high office in the United States, we would have denied ourselves outstanding military and political leaders. Cleveland had a child out of wedlock but served ably as President. Grant had been an alcoholic, but he was the general who led the Union armies to victory in the War Between the States. Lincoln suffered bouts with mental depression but freed the slaves and preserved the Union. Political pundits forever deride the quality of our leaders. But American politics has deteriorated to the point where any man who cherishes his private life has to think twice before stepping into public life and submitting himself and his family to murderous vendettas by sensation-crazed reporters and inquisitions by senators posturing for the television cameras.

Our foreign-policy process requires three key elements to function properly. First, it needs a strong central leader—a President
who can draw the best from his advisers, who can glean the key information from his departments, and who can exercise independent judgment on foreign-policy questions. It may have been possible in the nineteenth century for a President to delegate foreign policy totally to his Secretary of State. But in that era the level of tariffs, not survival, was the big foreign-policy issue. With so much at stake, the President must be a hands-on leader.

A President must have a sense of history. Sir Robert Menzies, who served brilliantly as Prime Minister of Australia, aptly observed that in a leader an obsession with the “verdict of history” can “only serve to distract the statesman's attention from the stern need for decision and action.” What was vital, in his eyes, was that a leader possess “a sense of history, a phrase which I use to describe a state of mind which draws inspiration and light from the recorded past, not a state of mind which is anxious to be regarded well in the unrecorded future.” In negotiating with Kremlin leaders, we will never get where we want to go unless we have a keen understanding of where we have been and how we have gotten there.

Second, the President must appoint to the key posts of Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Director of Central Intelligence individuals who have the background to lead, not follow, their departments. Those who make up the permanent bureaucracies in State, Defense and the CIA have ingrained ways of thinking that bias their analyses and recommendations. And they are experts at buttering up the boss. It is inevitable that an inexperienced appointee, no matter how able, will be captured—taken in by the departmental line—and will lose his usefulness to the President. He will become the bureaucracy's representative to the President rather than the President's representative in the bureaucracy.

Third, the President must retain a strong National Security Council system. After the Iran-contra hearings, it was the common wisdom among Washington's political pundits that the national-security adviser and his staff had grown too strong and should be demoted to the status of mere paper-pushers. Some put it bluntly: “Put the State Department back in charge of foreign policy.” The next President could not make a greater mistake than to follow this advice. A President needs more than a clerk as his national-security
adviser. He needs a strong individual who can organize the decision-making process, crystallize the policy options, and ride herd on the bureaucracies to keep them in line. While the President steers policy with his decisions, it is in the bureaucracies that the rubber meets the road. Without a national-security adviser to exercise hawk-eyed vigilance over the implementation of presidential decisions, the President will see a great deal of slippage between what he wants done and what in fact gets done.

Without these three ingredients, the policy-making process will become fragmented. The bureaucracies will be like wheels without an axle: they will still roll—but they will go off in their own directions. Most important, they will not provide the President with the kind of information and counsel he needs to choose the right tactical moves in negotiating with Moscow.

The next question is who should negotiate with the Soviets. The arcane debates in think tanks and university seminars and on television talk shows typically conclude that all negotiations should be conducted by the State Department. This is not possible when we are negotiating with Moscow. In such talks, we need to distinguish between those issues that should be handled in the formal government-to-government channel and those that should be taken up on a personal basis between one leader and another.

Government-to-government negotiations conducted primarily by the State Department can be effective only on issues where the two sides have common interests. In dealing with our allies, our diplomats routinely resolve most issues in official channels. That can be true in dealing with Moscow, but only on specific issues where our interests and those of the Kremlin are compatible. Measures to reduce the risk of accidental war or agreements to promote cultural exchange are the type of issues that fall into this area. Our diplomats are masters at devising compromises that benefit both sides, but when clashing interests rule out compromise that ability is irrelevant.

When we negotiate with Moscow on issues where American and Soviet interests are irreconcilable, we cannot achieve meaningful results through official diplomatic channels. The President must handle these negotiations on a head-to-head basis with the top Soviet leader. Raising these issues at the highest level conveys the
importance we assign to our interests in these matters. It also recognizes the fact that no other forum offers even the shadow of a hope for progress. Some may still believe that real progress can be made on the tough issues like Afghanistan and Central America in meetings in which assistant secretaries of state and deputy foreign ministers read from prepared position papers. But those who hold this view are living in a dream world.

In dealing with communist regimes, we must bear in mind the differences between officials in the party and in the government. Decisions are made by the party, not in the government. Government officials are the handmaidens of party leaders. We can apply all the persuasive power in the world on a Soviet government negotiator, but he will not budge an inch on his own from his position on a major issue. In deriding a proposal for settling an issue at one meeting of foreign ministers, Khrushchev dismissed them as irrelevant, remarking that his Foreign Minister would sit on a block of ice if he told him to. That is still the case. To make progress in negotiations on critical issues, an American President must deal with the top Soviet Communist Party leader.

Gorbachev might choose to negotiate through his ambassador in Washington, his Foreign Minister, or some other personal representative. The President must be ready to do likewise. In some cases, he might want to use his Secretary of State, in others his national-security adviser, and in still others a special representative, perhaps even someone outside government. The key point is that the President must designate an individual whom Gorbachev will recognize as the President's personal representative. If the Secretary of State is selected, it must be clear that he wears the hat not of a cabinet department head but of the President's emissary. Gorbachev must understand that whoever has this assignment speaks for the President and reports only to the President.

These negotiations must take place in secret. Secrecy has a bad connotation in the United States. In our elite universities, political-science professors still warble with approval about Wilson's imperative about “open covenants openly arrived at.” But they fail to understand that in most cases with the Soviets the only way we can conclude an open covenant is to arrive at it in secret. There is a world of difference between a secret treaty and secret negotiations.
In a democracy, secret agreements on important issues cannot and should not be tolerated, but secret negotiations to reach important agreements are not only necessary but justifiable.

That is especially true in the case of negotiations with communist states. All totalitarians—not just the Soviets—are obsessed with secrecy. Without secret negotiations, there would have been no opening to China in 1972, and no peace agreement in Vietnam in 1973. Some may point out that in those two cases secret negotiations were appropriate because the United States did not have diplomatic relations with either China or North Vietnam. But even the SALT I accords with the Soviet Union would have been impossible without secret talks.

Secrecy is necessary for more fundamental reasons. First, by its nature diplomacy must be conducted beyond the range of cameras and microphones. Negotiating with Moscow is not like haggling with a rug merchant in an Oriental bazaar. Instead, it is a quiet, subtle process of feeling out the differing degrees to which various elements of the other party's position are negotiable, and of trying varying combinations of give-and-take. Each side has to be able to advance tentative proposals, to test out hypothetical alternatives, and to plumb the other side's reactions. Both sides need to have the opportunity to advance propositions without being bound by them. Negotiators can afford to do this only if they can do it in privacy.

Second, genuine negotiations require each side to compromise specific interests to advance both sides' general interests. That, in turn, requires concessions from both parties. When U.S.–Soviet negotiations have been conducted in highly visible forums, such as the thirteen-year-long Mutual and Balanced Force Reduction Talks in Vienna, they have produced nothing. It is far more difficult—and sometimes impossible—for one side or the other to make a major concession in public. If a side needs to back down from its initial position, it allows the internal opposition to
any
negotiated accommodation to crystallize and block further progress. That is true in the United States, but it is particularly true in the Soviet Union, where every concession must always appear as a victory. Either side can present a fair agreement as a package of beneficial
trade-offs, but neither can ever package specific concessions as anything but detrimental.

That is why a President is well advised to establish a back channel outside the bureaucracy for negotiating with the Soviets. It is essential to have a private means to communicate with Kremlin leaders, outside formal channels and beyond the intruding lenses of television cameras. During my administration, the back channel involved discreet, regular meetings between Henry Kissinger and the very capable and experienced Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin. These were critical in the early phases of our talks, when each side was exploring the position of the other. We made far more progress in those working sessions than we did in the highly publicized formal negotiations.

A back channel is indispensable in defusing potential crises before they become public and both sides are forced to dig in their heels. In 1969, the back channel enabled us to avert a major crisis over the Soviet attempt to construct a nuclear submarine base at Cienfuegos, Cuba. It also gave us a way to prevent the war between Pakistan and India from escalating into a major U.S.–Soviet conflict. The next President should establish a back channel with the Soviets. Since it minimizes the risk of leaks and the inhibitions on frank exchanges between the top leaders, it maximizes the chance of a successful resolution of contentious issues.

In the negotiations themselves, the United States must employ six key tactics:

Flanking actions.
What we do outside our negotiating sessions is as important as what we do inside them. It is a geopolitical axiom that you cannot win more at the conference table than you can win on the battlefield. The same is true in other negotiations as well. If we do nothing more than table elegantly phrased proposals, we will achieve nothing in the negotiations. We need to take actions to outflank Moscow's position. In arms-control negotiations, we must deploy whatever weapons systems are necessary to assure our strategic security and must mobilize support for our negotiating position among the American people and among our allies. If we want the Soviets to agree to a withdrawal from Afghanistan, we must help the Afghan resistance raise the cost of Moscow's occupation
of the country. The Soviets are tough negotiators. They will make agreements we want only if we create conditions which would put them in a worse position if they failed to do so.

Linkage.
This tactic, linking progress on one issue to progress on another, is highly controversial. When I practiced linkage as President, the political pundits and the professional diplomats were virtually unanimous in their disapproval. But linkage remains absolutely essential to a genuine improvement in U.S.–Soviet relations.

Kremlin leaders will take the United States to the cleaners in superpower negotiations unless we impose linkage among issues. The two sides do not have the same degree of interest in progress on all issues. There are some, like trade, in which Moscow has more at stake. There are others, like resisting Soviet adventurism in the Third World, in which the United States has a stronger interest. Moscow is more than willing to negotiate solely on the former. If the United States acquiesces to that unbalanced approach—if it fails to link the two sets of issues—it will allow the Soviets to dominate the negotiating agenda and we will inevitably come out the loser.

Moscow will always reject explicit linkage, whether involving trade or arms control. Yet, while they will not adopt the principle of linkage, they will adapt to the fact of it. During my administration we linked the talks to ban anti–ballistic-missiles systems, a top priority for the Soviets, to those to limit offensive strategic systems, a top priority for us. If we had not insisted on linkage between the two, we would never have succeeded in concluding SALT I. The Soviets would have negotiated on the ABM Treaty and stalled on the interim accord on offensive systems, thereby gaining a free hand to continue their nuclear buildup. We also linked the progress in the negotiations on increases in East–West trade—which was a Soviet priority—to Soviet behavior in other parts of the world. When the Kremlin took actions that threatened our interests, we slowed the talks to a crawl. The Soviets soon got the message. They did not like it, but they did respond to it.