However, at this point Reagan began to confront growing resistance to the prospect of a treaty, both inside the United States and in Europe.
The opposition in Washington was led by the veterans of America’s Cold War diplomacy: Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Brent Scowcroft. These leading figures of the Republican foreign-policy hierarchy had been attacking the president with increasing intensity since he and Gorbachev had talked at Reykjavik about abolishing nuclear weapons. They didn’t like what was being said about a treaty banning missiles in Europe. “If we strike the wrong kind of deal, we could create the most profound crisis of the NATO alliance in its 40-year history,” wrote Nixon and Kissinger in the Sunday Washington Post less than two weeks after Shultz returned from Moscow. It was the grave risk of such a treaty, they said, that had caused them to join together on a public issue for the first time since Nixon’s resignation.4
Two days after this article, Nixon made his secret visit to the White House. Reagan had invited him for talks about the prospects for a summit and an arms-control agreement. Nixon’s memo to himself from that session shows that within minutes after he sat down with Reagan, he began to call into question the administration’s negotiations with Gorbachev. Nixon challenged what he later called “the Reagan-Shultz position”—that is, their eagerness for an agreement limiting nuclear weapons.5
The thrust of Nixon’s message was that Reagan should be more hawkish in dealing with Gorbachev. At one point, Nixon told Reagan that a deal with the Soviets would not really help Reagan’s standing with the American public. After all, said Nixon, polls show that military action helps a president far more than diplomacy does. Recalling this part of the conversation in his private memo for his own records later that night, Nixon wrote: “I pointed out that many people felt my popularity had gone up because of my trip to China. In fact, it had improved only slightly. What really sent it up was the bombing and mining of Haiphong.”6
Nixon argued that a summit in Washington should focus not on arms control but other issues, such as Afghanistan and Central America. He also criticized the details of the arms-control agreement that Reagan and Shultz were envisioning. Gorbachev had proposed a deal in which the two superpowers would remove all intermediate-range missiles from Europe but still keep one hundred of these missiles elsewhere. As a result, the Soviet Union would have maintained intermediate-range missiles in Asia. Nixon argued that Reagan should be able to persuade Gorbachev to give up the missiles in Asia too.
Nixon’s broader complaint was that any agreement to remove these missiles from Europe would leave the Soviet Union with a large advantage in conventional military forces. Reagan pointed out that in his own face-to-face conversations with Gorbachev in Geneva and particularly Reykjavik, the Soviet leader had seemed sincere in his desire to reduce Soviet military power, including conventional forces. Gorbachev had said he didn’t want to continue the unending arms race between the two superpowers. Nixon thought Reagan was naïve to believe in Gorbachev. He wrote in his subsequent memo that this part of his conversation with Reagan was “somewhat disturbing.”7
Reagan’s high-level critics were much more enthusiastic than he was about the value of nuclear weapons. American nuclear weapons were a key element to the American strategy of preventing Soviet aggression, and their supply should not be reduced, they argued. The principal exponent of this point of view was Brent Scowcroft, who had been Kissinger’s aide and President Ford’s national security adviser.
“It is not self-evident that fewer nuclear weapons ipso facto represent a better strategic situation,” wrote Scowcroft in the spring of 1987. “We have for some 40 years relied on the threat of nuclear weapons to keep the Soviet hordes at bay.” Scowcroft particularly opposed removing intermediate-range missiles from Europe. These missiles could deliver nuclear weapons deep into Soviet territory, Scowcroft argued, and their presence reassured Europe that the United States would come to its defense.8
In an interview nearly two decades later, Scowcroft continued to believe he had been correct. The American intermediate-range missiles in Europe “were what we relied on in case of an attack, to cut the Soviet front-line troops from their supplies,” Scowcroft said. “What we needed to do was to cut the Soviet supply lines, to attenuate the force of any attack.” The intermediate-range missiles gave the Americans that capacity, Scowcroft argued, and “it was wrong to negotiate them away.”9
Reagan and Shultz pointed out that the United States would still be able to protect Europe with the many hundreds of nuclear weapons it could use from bombers or from American ships at sea. The treaty under discussion with Gorbachev would not affect those other nuclear weapons at all; it would merely cover the intermediate-range missiles in Europe. Still, the attacks on the proposed deal did not abate.
There was inescapable irony in the fact that the criticism of Reagan’s conciliatory stance toward Gorbachev came from many of the same former officials who had, during the 1970s, been the proponents of détente with the Soviet Union.
To an extent, their reactions may have reflected their sense of alienation from the Reagan administration’s diplomacy. For years, Nixon and Kissinger had been at the center of all conversations between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now they were on the outside. Not only were they not responsible for the proposed new arms agreement, but they had no public identification with it of any kind. Indeed, they were in position to gain considerably more public attention as opponents of the Reagan administration’s diplomacy than as supporters of it.
During his talk with Reagan, Nixon privately acknowledged that Kissinger’s motivations, in particular, might be suspect. The former president said he had heard that Shultz “was climbing the wall because he felt that Kissinger and I were attempting to sabotage his agreement.” Nixon conceded it might have appeared that “if the agreement had been made by Kissinger itself [sic], he would have hailed it as a historic achievement.” Nevertheless, the former president went on, while others might believe this about Kissinger, Nixon himself certainly did not.10
The condemnations from the foreign-policy elite also reflected a general disbelief that Ronald Reagan could be responsible for an improved relationship with the Soviet Union—or indeed, that any arms-control agreement negotiated under Reagan could be of genuine significance. After all, Reagan had been the leading opponent of détente in the 1970s. His early years in the White House had brought a period of Cold War tension unprecedented since the Cuban missile crisis. He had consistently rejected efforts at arms control during the initial years of his presidency. How, then, could these veterans of détente take seriously what Reagan was now attempting to negotiate? The former officials had grasped correctly the political dynamics underlying some of Reagan’s diplomacy with Gorbachev—above all, Reagan’s desire to regain stature and divert public attention away from Iran-Contra. Where they erred was in dismissing the long-term value and impact of the diplomacy itself.