Discussing American relations with Europe during the 1970s are, from left, Henry Kissinger, Klaus Larres and James Schlesinger. The three were part of the Kluge Center's roundtable of 15 historians and witnesses. - Paul Hogroian
The threat of the Soviet Union dominated the relationship between Europe and the United States during the 1970s, prompting the transatlantic countries to stifle their differences and stand together against the Soviets, according to experts and scholars in a roundtable discussion at the Library in June.
Klaus Larres, the Henry Alfred Kissinger Scholar in Foreign Policy and International Relations at the Library's John W. Kluge Center, assembled 15 historians and "historical witnesses"—including Henry Kissinger himself—to discuss "Reevaluating the Nixon/Ford/Kissinger Era: Transatlantic Relations and U.S. Foreign Policy in the 1970s and Beyond."
"The transatlantic conflicts in the 1970s never descended into the bitterness and deep-seated frustrations which could be observed recently," Larres said in his introductory remarks. He asked panelists to discuss the nature of the U.S.-European relationship during the 1970s and describe the differences today.
Participants engaged in lively discussions about the extent of the Soviet threat, European and U.S. attitudes toward each other during the 1970s, China, Vietnam, the style of Kissinger diplomacy, and the testy nature of the George W. Bush administration's transatlantic relations today.
An overflow crowd, nearly 200 people, attended the event. It was one of several programs hosted by the Kluge Center, which brings distinguished scholars from around the world to the Library for varying periods of time to pursue their research in the Library's vast collections.
Larres divided the roundtable into two panels. The first consisted of "historical witnesses" who participated in the events of the 1970s. The panelists and their former roles were: Henry Kissinger, national security adviser and secretary of state; James Schlesinger, secretary of defense and energy; Robert McFarlane, assistant to Presidents Nixon and Ford and national security adviser; Robert Ellsworth, ambassador to NATO and deputy secretary of defense; Joseph Sisco, assistant secretary and under secretary of state; Marvin and Bernard Kalb, broadcast journalists and authors; and Walter Isaacson, journalist and Kissinger biographer.
The second panel featured scholars Jussi Hanhimaki and Robert Litwak, Woodrow Wilson Center; Anna Nelson, American University; Keith Olson, University of Maryland; John van Oudenaren, chief of the Library's European Division, and Robert Wampler, National Security Archive. Also on the panel was historical witness Helmut Sonnenfeldt, former senior National Security Council (NSC) aide and State Department counselor, now a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.
Responding to Larres' observation that a transatlantic rift has deepened since the 1970s, Kissinger said, "There's an enormous difference between the environment of the present situation and the environment then.
"The period we're talking about was dominated by our consciousness of the Soviet Union as a superpower. Every crisis had to be conducted against a background of the possibility of escalating into nuclear war. Every ally realized there was a limit beyond which breaking with the United States was too risky," Kissinger said.
"The challenge of the '70s was how to construct a creative foreign policy in the midst of an undisputed permanent tension. The challenge of the present period is how to build a creative foreign policy in which there is no agreement on what the danger is, and therefore, the definition of positive objectives is much more difficult," he said.
"Nixon Building Up the Dollar," illustrated an article from the Sept. 1, 1971, New York Times titled "Why Europe Is Shocked," which discussed how Nixon's just-announced economic policy, including tariffs and controls on wages and prices, would affect Europe. - Jean-Claude Suarés
Even in the Middle East during the 1970s, the U.S. policy factored in the Soviets. "The fundamental underlying strategy was to reduce the Soviet influence in the Middle East and to bring about a situation where Arab nations would conclude that they could get weapons from the Soviet Union but they could not make progress in diplomacy with the Soviet Union," Kissinger said.
Vietnam, too, was viewed in a Cold War context, according to Marvin Kalb. "You thought about it in a larger context of a battle involving global communism," he said. The U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam was played out against the backdrop of the Soviet threat. "We believed that it was in the interest of the United States and the world for the U.S. to withdraw with dignity and in a manner that preserved our capability to conduct global foreign policy," Kissinger said.
Larres, however, challenged the panelists on the Soviet Union: "Wasn't it one of the problems in the transatlantic relationship of the '70s that Europeans increasingly thought the Soviet Union was no longer a real threat?"
Schlesinger answered: "That European feeling didn't come through in NATO. The Europeans were convinced the Soviet-Warsaw Pact had overwhelming conventional military superiority."
Kissinger added: "Until well into the '70s, the Europeans were convinced that the Soviet Union was a major threat. They never appealed to us on the grounds that the Soviets were no longer a danger."
He outlined the threat. "The Soviets occupied Czechoslovakia in '68. They sent 20,000 military personnel to Egypt in 1970. The Syrians invaded Jordan with weapons supplied by Soviets. The Soviets supplied a civil war in Angola and provided backup of Cuban groups. They were active in Ethiopia and Yemen, culminating in an invasion of Afghanistan. That was not a tea party," Kissinger said.
McFarlane pointed out that the Soviet Union masked the crumbling of its foundation while undertaking expansion to improve its influence in country after country. Panelists agreed the weakness of the Soviet Union became apparent only in the 1980s.
Other topics Larres raised for discussion included the "Year of Europe" and abandonment of the gold standard.
Kissinger said the "Year of Europe," a program he initiated immediately after the Vietnam War, was an attempt to reestablish a priority in relations with the transatlantic alliance. But it was proposed during the same months that Watergate exploded onto the scene, and European leaders were reluctant to be seen at a summit with Nixon. Leaders were never able to implement the "Year of Europe" goals and the program faded away.
Larres asked whether the abandonment of the gold standard marked a new U.S. policy toward Europe. After World War II, in order to rebuild Europe the United States supported the Europeans economically, even at the expense of the American economy. That policy changed when the Nixon Administration suddenly stopped using the gold standard.
"Absolutely right," said Schlesinger. "In the '40s and '50s we embraced policies that discriminated against the dollar on behalf of Europeans. With Europe flourishing and with the weaknesses in our own balance of payments, there was no longer any need to continue to discriminate against the U.S. in order to help out the Europeans on economic grounds."
Kissinger added, "When you want to close the gold window, you cannot have a negotiation about it, because when you begin discussing it, you're going to start a speculative frenzy. So you close it and try to mitigate the consequences."
Larres asked: "Did the United States take Europe for granted?"
"Nixon took for granted that a close Atlantic relationship was the keystone of his foreign policy—he didn't need to state it three times a week," Kissinger said. "I'm sure if you looked through the meetings he had, [you would find that] he saw European leaders more frequently than all the leaders of the rest of the world combined."
Schlesinger said, "We certainly did not take Europeans for granted." Despite opposition from Congress, the United States wanted to rebuild its forces in Europe after the war in Vietnam and, with the Europeans, create a solid, conventional capability that would deter Moscow from making a grab for Hamburg or across northern Norway, he said.
Larres asked the first panel a number of times whether the '70s era was a turning point in transatlantic relations. Most panelists felt it was not a turning point, because the focus of U.S. foreign policy was not Europe during those years, but China, Vietnam, the Middle East and the Soviet Union.
"I don't think the '70s were a turning point in European-American relations. I think they were an important pivot in international relations in general," Kissinger said. "So a lot of decisions had to be made by the Atlantic alliance that didn't have to be made before."
Larres posed a final question to the panel: "Can you draw comparisons between the '70s and '80s and today?"
"With the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the world has changed," said Bernard Kalb. "Countries have spun off in different directions and given priorities to their own foreign policy and national security requirements. We'll continue to see collisions taking place among countries that see issues critical for themselves in their own best interest."
Sisco said, "The Cold War is over. We're the singular power in the world." Taking on the threats of the world is going to be very difficult. "We need to be concerned whether we have the sustaining power," he said.
Kissinger gave his opinion: "The advent of terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction has produced a situation in which preemptive action is an inherent aspect of the international system, painful as that is. The terrorists are not subject to deterrents or diplomacy, because they have nothing to defend and they have no program they want to negotiate."
Kissinger said in the next phase of American foreign policy a dialogue should be held with Europe on the circumstances in which preemption can and should be taken.
"There has never been this ideal past of hearts and flowers," said Schlesinger. "What is different now is that there is no longer any glue of the sort that held us together while the Soviet Union was there. It frees Europeans to be much more independent of U.S. policy and also frees the U.S. to ignore European opinion in a way we never did during the Cold War."
Ellsworth paid tribute to Kissinger. "Things are very different now," he said. "In the Kissinger era, we had, as security adviser and secretary of state, a man who knew how the world worked and how it should work. I don't think we have anyone like that right now."
Despite current differences, the United States and Europe still share values, such as free minds, free trade and tolerance for individual liberties. Isaacson said, "These shared values are so fundamental that when the crunch comes, we're in this together."
At the end of the first panel, Larres opened the roundtable to questions from the audience. Some topics discussed included the economic impact of the 1973 Yom Kippur War on the United States and Europe, the ability of the United States to be a "saintly" world power, and the extent of today's threat of terrorism.
In addition to discussing many of the same topics as the morning panel, the afternoon panel discussed the style of diplomacy carried out by the policy-makers of the 1970s.
"I don't know if the '70s were a turning point, but there are a couple of interesting things about the '70s—how hard Nixon and Kissinger worked to keep the transatlantic alliance going," said Nelson. "Also, much of the conversation between the European allies was not about Europe, but the Middle East and the elephant in this room, Vietnam."
Analyzing the players, Nelson said, "Nixon was not a gregarious man. Not a man of small talk. I always thought Kissinger made it his duty to get along with people. He didn't conduct foreign policy by ignoring them but by trying to include them." Sonnenfeldt concurred with Nelson's observation. He said Kissinger got along with people that he needed to get along with.
Although Kissinger and French Foreign Minister Michel Joubert engaged in "constant fencing matches," Sonnenfeldt said, "the compatibility of the Western leaders and Americans was pretty good." Sonnenfeldt said Nixon always had respect for shrewd politicians, regardless of what their particular attitudes were.
At one point, according to Sonnenfeldt, Nixon told
West German Chancellor Willy Brandt, "Don't drop a friend for a new friend, unless you're sure the new friend is as good as the old friend."
The Nixon administration, Olson explained, had the ability to recognize limits, militarily and economically. "There was a greater sense of limits in the Nixon administration than there is now. The rhetoric of moralism is much higher now," Olson said, noting that Nixon used realism and not moralism in juggling the balance of power with the Soviets and Chinese.
Sonnenfeldt said Nixon viewed the international system as having five power centers—the Soviet Union, China, Japan, Europe and the United States—that would balance one another in complex ways on policy matters.
The panelists also said Kissinger often worked the back channels of diplomacy, informally contacting representatives and talking. Nelson said Kissinger and his small staff controlled the foreign policy maneuverings, without other civil servants bothering them. "It was very secretive, very closely held. Had it been in the hands of another national security adviser, it would not have gone so well," she said.
Sonnenfeldt pointed out that the cabinet and the National Security Council were not the decision-making bodies. Nixon made the decisions, he said.
A State Department historian in the audience asked what role Nixon played in creating foreign policy. Sonnenfeldt replied, "Nixon had the ability to listen to controversial discussions, pick his way through all of that, and make his choices."
