Advice from an Old Warrior

By Hugh Sidey

Hugh Sidey/The Presidency

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

With that, Richard Nixon starts a new book, Real Peace: A Strategy for the West, a 109-page compendium of the old warrior's world views. He is publishing the small volume privately to hurry it into the hands of the leaders and geopolitical scholars who have listened to him in decades past. Page proofs in black folders sent out in plain brown envelops reached the press a few days ago with a small note containing this poignant line: "If it wasn't so long, I guess you might call this my Farewell Address."

It was mere coincidence that Nixon's volume appeared just as the superpowers were squaring off over the downed Korean airliner. Yet the timing reinforces his conviction that we are approaching a momentous period in world affairs. "The situation is precarious," he writes, "but the moment is precious."

Just for fun, Nixon gouges old enemies like liberals, journalists, academicians and anybody he believes to be timid and self-righteous. He tears down what he sees to be myths ("The nuclear freeze is a fraud"). "Confusing real peace with perfect peace is a dangerous but common fallacy," Nixon writes. "Perfect peace is achieved in two places only: in the grave and at the typewriter. . . 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."

That is the psychological landscape in which Nixon has always dwelt, the back alley he has roamed and sometimes seems to understand too well. In a way his book is a survival guide for civilized nations surrounded by global punks, chiefly the Soviets. He calls for "detente with deterrence"--shorthand for closer diplomatic and trade relations with the Soviet Union--even as we build the MX and the cruise and Pershing missiles, and improve our conventional forces to achieve a true military balance. Arms don't cause wars, he insists, human intentions do; and only when perceptions of the futility of trying to beat us soaks into the Soviet mind will we have true arms reduction. The struggle between the Soviets and the U.S. will go on in "a vast gray area between peace and war." We may not win, Nixon declares, but we must try and we must surely not lose. "Above all," he says, "we must not stand aside and let events control us. If we ride the hurricane, we will become part of it."

Nixon would marshal our economic power through a new foreign economic policy board reporting directly to the President. It would help forge an "iron link" between the Soviets' behavior and the West's willingness to trade with them.

Nixon proposes institutionalizing U.S.-Soviet summitry through annual meetings that are patiently prepared and calmly executed. He even offers a short course on summitry: "An American President should be cordial in personal matters but unyielding in policy matters . . . a President achieves nothing by bluster and belligerence."

Nixon would raise Latin America to top priority. Our policy there since World War II, he writes, "has been inadequate, inept, and worst of all plagued by fitful starts and stop." In Central America, he believes, "while our current policy is not an ideal one, it is the least we can do under the circumstances."

What is plain in this arresting little volume is that Nixon, were he President, would take the U.S. and its allies on a global crusade to sell the glories of our system to the Third World, to carry a big stick against bullies, to tone down our morality lectures to allies and instead listen more to their problems, to make the search for real peace an exciting competition. "Today," writes Nixon, "the only kind of revolution on the market is too often the kind the Soviets and their surrogates sell. Tomorrow, we can put them out of business." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.