“Geez, isn’t that a shame?” asked Bush, displaying his loyalty to Reagan. No, replied Scowcroft, “That would have been the worst thing that could have happened to us.” He was happy that the deal had fallen through. What bothered Scowcroft especially was the idea that the United States should do away with ballistic missiles, or remove them from Europe, leaving the continent under the threat of the conventional forces of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies. “It would have been a disaster for us, an absolute disaster,” Scowcroft believed.1
Scowcroft was reflecting the climate of opinion among those who had been involved in American foreign and defense policy over the previous decades. Even though no agreement was reached at Reykjavik, the realization that Reagan and Gorbachev had come close—that they had, in fact, talked about abolishing or restricting ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons—produced an intense counterreaction in Washington and among America’s allies. The British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher; West German chancellor Helmut Kohl; and the French prime minister, François Mitterrand, all voiced concern about the implication of removing American missiles from Europe. Shultz and the State Department supported what Reagan had been willing to accept at Reykjavik, but the response in the Pentagon and the National Security Council was frosty. American military officials, including notably the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were thankful that the dispute over the Strategic Defense Initiative had held up an agreement that they didn’t want in the first place.
“The chiefs thought they had dodged a bullet when Gorbachev insisted that the price had to be SDI,” recalled Colin Powell, who arrived in the Reagan White House a couple of months after Reykjavik. Admiral William Crowe, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, told Reagan he and the other chiefs were upset by the idea of doing away with ballistic missiles. John Poindexter, the national security adviser, argued to Reagan the importance of nuclear weapons. “Reykjavik scared everyone. It was seen as a scary proof that Ronald Reagan might do something terribly reckless,” recalled Nelson Ledsky, a staff aide at Reagan’s National Security Council.2
The objections to limiting missiles and nuclear weapons were linked to a broader, more generalized unease: the perception, commonplace in Washington at the time, that Gorbachev was a typical Soviet leader seeking in the usual fashion to reassert Soviet military power, and that Reagan might allow this to happen. “I was on the hawkish side, and very fearful that this kindly old gentleman [Reagan] was going to get suckered,” Fritz W. Ermarth, another National Security Council aide under Reagan, recalled many years later. “Now, you know, I think back on that [period] with some embarrassment…. Some of us worried that Gorbachev would actually succeed in revitalizing the system in some way.3
In the vanguard of this outpouring of criticism of Reagan’s performance at Reykjavik were Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Since Nixon’s resignation in 1974, he and Kissinger had gone their separate ways. Their estrangement was based, above all, on the fact that after Watergate led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974, the former president had lived in ignominy and isolation, while his former secretary of state stayed in the limelight. During these years, Kissinger often got the credit for Nixon administration foreign-policy initiatives, such as the opening to China and détente with the Soviet Union, and not infrequently, Nixon’s own role was minimized.
At Reykjavik, Reagan and Gorbachev had begun to chip away at the underpinnings of the Cold War by holding out the prospect of a world without ballistic missiles or nuclear weapons. During the following months, Nixon and Kissinger put themselves forward in public as the champions of the existing Cold War order. For a time the two men acted independently of each other, as they had over the previous twelve years. Eventually, however, Nixon and Kissinger decided to join together in a coordinated public campaign aimed at throwing cold water on Reagan’s diplomacy with Gorbachev.
In April 1987, the Los Angeles Times Syndicate distributed a commentary that carried the byline “By Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger,” an unprecedented joint op-ed by the two onetime architects of the policy of détente. It was published not only in the Los Angeles Times but in the Washington Post and, a few weeks later, in William F. Buckley’s National Review, the conservative magazine that had long been Ronald Reagan’s favorite publication. “Because we are deeply concerned about this danger, we, who have attended several Summits and engaged in many negotiations with Soviet leaders, are speaking out jointly for the first time since both of us left office,” wrote Nixon and Kissinger.4
The article was brooding in tone. It warned of impending disaster if Reagan continued on the course of Reykjavik. Nixon and Kissinger were worried in particular about trying to eliminate missiles or nuclear weapons from Europe. They suggested that the Reagan administration might, however inadvertently, “create the most profound crisis of the NATO alliance in its forty-year history—an alliance sustained by seven administrations of both parties.” Nixon and Kissinger proposed that the Reagan administration should go along with the elimination of missiles in Europe only if this could be linked to a separate deal reducing conventional forces. Such a linkage would have made it difficult, it not impossible, to reach any agreement at all.
Nixon and Kissinger made plain that their concerns were not simply about NATO or Europe: they were profoundly opposed to the idea of eliminating nuclear weapons. “Soviet strategy since the end of World War II has been to exploit the West’s fear of nuclear weapons by calling repeatedly for their eventual abolition,” asserted Nixon and Kissinger. “Any Western leader who indulges in the Soviets’ disingenuous fantasies of a nuclear-free world courts unimaginable perils.” Amplifying on this theme in a separate interview with Time magazine, Nixon asserted that “nuclear weapons have helped keep the peace for 40 years.”5
Their other broad theme was that Gorbachev was a traditional Soviet leader seeking to reassert traditional Soviet foreign policy and military power. Gorbachev’s foreign policy “can be said to be a subtler implementation of historic Soviet patterns,” the two men wrote. At the beginning of 1987, Kissinger had met with Gorbachev when he visited Moscow for the first time in a decade. Upon returning home, he pronounced his verdict. “Gorbachev and his associates seem less constrained by the past and more assertive with respect to Soviet power,” Kissinger wrote in a column in Newsweek. Even if Gorbachev’s domestic reforms succeeded, Kissinger said, “it does not automatically guarantee a more benign foreign policy. On the contrary, it may provide additional resources for expansionism and ideological challenges.”6
Above all, Nixon and Kissinger warned Reagan against trying to play the role of a peacemaker or worrying about his place in history. A president, they said, “must always remember that however he may be hailed in today’s headlines the judgment of history would severely condemn a false peace.”7
Among Reagan’s longtime supporters on the political right, the reaction to Reykjavik was considerably worse. Nixon and Kissinger had couched their criticisms in the careful idiom of foreign policy specialists. Others were not similarly constrained, particularly not the leaders of conservative groups.