Article published September 1982
NOTE: In August 1982, about 18 months into the Reagan Administration, former president Richard Nixon published an article titled “Hard-headed Détente” in the New York Times. The following response was distributed to newspapers by Public Research, Syndicated.
Remembering their years in office, retired politicians bask in nostalgia’s warming rays. The golden afternoons when they wielded power seem so very much finer than the present, where dawn, noon, and twilight all come in shades of grey. Political memoir invite us to share the glory, on condition that we too remember those days as glorious, those men as masters of statecraft.
Richard Nixon partakes of this understandable tradition. He prefers not to dwell on domestic misadventure, of course. But foreign policy, always his greater enthusiasm, still mesmerizes him. He hopes that his account of his conduct will inspire us to similar action today. Such inspiration would guarantee him his coveted redemption in `history’ and, he doubtless believes, advance the interests of his country.
This requires Mr. Nixon to defend his principal foreign policy, détente with the Soviet Union. In a recent article in the New York Times, he argues for détente much as he did during his presidency.
He claims that détente reduces “the danger of nuclear war,” and of all war. At the same time, it “engag[es] the Soviet Union in those fields in which we have an overwhelming advantage”: the rich fields of economic and intellectual liberty. “Those critics who would have us scuttle détente and return to narrow confrontation are urging a form of unilateral disarmament,” by “depriv[ing] us of many of our most effective diplomatic weapons.” Although he scorns what he calls “soft-headed” détente, which would tempt the soviets with carrots while leaving the stick at home, he celebrates “hard-headed” détente, his détente, whereby trade and cultural exchange dovetailed, as it were, with military deterrence.
He admits that détente turned out badly, citing the resultant American disadvantage in land-based nuclear missiles, Soviet domination of southeast Asia, Angola, Ethiopia, Yemen, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan, “and the cruel snuffing out of Poland’s flickers of freedom.” But he insists that “The failure was not of détente but rather of the management of détente by United States policy makers,” the sadly inadequate men who always seem to follow any retired politician’s incumbency. With his memories Mr. Nixon also offers a promise: today, “in the broader context of détente, with an intricate mixture of both positive and negative incentives, the Soviet Union will respond. As it did in the early 1970’s it will moderate its behavior.”
We too must tie today’s policies to our memories. But we cannot afford Mr. Nixon’s understandable nostalgia. Détente failed because it misconceived not only the nature of the Soviet Union but the nature of America. The disasters that overtook Presidents Ford and Carter issued from Mr. Nixon’s policy, not only from mere clumsiness in carrying it out.
It was during the Nixon Administration that America gratuitously promised to refrain from building missiles that would threaten the Soviets’ land-based arsenal; in return, the Soviets accelerated their plans to do exactly that to us. It was during the Nixon Administration that the Soviets organized guerrillas in Africa and the Middle East, drawing a circle around our major oil supplier. It was during the Nixon Administration that the Soviets increased their exploitation of trade and cultural exchange for purposes of espionage. The harvest came later, but the crop was irrigated then.
More important, “hard-headed” détente encouraged an atmosphere in which “soft-headed” détente could thrive. Mr. Nixon remembers when he and Mr. Brezhnev “regularly clinked champagne glasses to celebrate agreements.” “We smiled at one another in public,” he writes, after “bargain[ing] hard” in private. True, but in America the public event eclipses the private one; Americans see the appearance, and hope for the best. In the Soviet Union, the hopes of the audience mean little, and no one believes public appearances, anyway.
A political atmosphere that encourages “soft-headed” détente allows “soft-headed” politicians to gain electoral victories. One need only remember Mr. Carter, and his naïve dismissal of his predecessors’ “inordinate fear of communism.”
Economic realities mirror these political ones. Mr. Nixon fails to cite even one example of a Soviet military concession in the face of an economic sanction , threatened or enacted. (He cites military threats). He argues, reasonably, that we cannot force the Soviet economy to collapse by refusing to trade, as some of today’s optimists suggest. But he ignores the fact that we cannot significantly influence the Soviets by trade, either, and for the same reason: their economy runs on command, not demand. Within limits, they can do much as they please, come feast or famine. Because our economy runs on demand, we find that our corporations resist economic sanctions, and they thereby contribute to the very “soft-headed” détente Mr. Nixon abhors.
Détente, as conceived by Mr. Nixon, was mismanaged by American presidents for a simple reason: it was unmanageable. The nature of the American political and economic system exerted pressures on our presidents unequal to the pressures exerted on the Kremlin. By weakening America and strengthening the Soviet Union, détente may have brought us closer to war, or to capitulation without war.
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