“Conclusion” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
Conclusion
“Wise men come and wise men go, but one wise man goes on and on,” declared National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice at the Paul Nitze SAIS on April 29, 2002. “And, Paul, we’re very glad for that.”1 Rice was paraphrasing a quotation drawn from one of her mentors, former secretary of state George Shultz, who served during the Ronald Reagan administration. Initially scheduled for September 11, 2001, her speech had been intended to promote the merits of ballistic missile defense. Instead, the revised version dealt nearly entirely with the events of that terrible day as well as the global war on terror that President George W. Bush had commenced in response.2
In actuality, the Bush administration had withdrawn from the 1972 ABM Treaty, which Nitze had helped craft. After September 11, 2001, the top US national security priorities were terrorism and the threat that rogue states were perceived to pose to the American way of life. Policy makers in Washington, DC, and elsewhere surely could appreciate that 9/11 mirrored the Nitze Scenario from the Cold War, wherein an adversary might attack some part of the US homeland and threaten to massacre civilians unless the country surrendered. Implicit in that scenario was the perception that fear of another attack would force US leaders to back down from global commitments.
Nitze’s ideas about national security directly influenced the George W. Bush administration. They remain vital to the 2020s, as the United States competes with Russia and China, each possessing an enormous nuclear arsenal. The Cold War metaphor is omnipresent in debates about how the United States should approach these countries. So is the search for a new George Kennan and an updated Long Telegram or Mr. X article aimed to address such challenges as Russia, China, or global climate change pose. The problem with focusing on Kennan—and aspiring to be the next Kennan—is that it presumes that someone merely needs to lay out a basic strategy. That is not how the United States and its allies prevailed in the Cold War. It succeeded because of an individual like Nitze—even though Nitze underestimated Mikhail Gorbachev, whom he thought incapable of taking the necessary steps to end the Cold War.
Throughout his long career, Nitze was both correct and wrong about many things. He stayed relevant, however, and his Cold War bona fides allowed him to take risks with the walk in the woods proposal in 1982 and “Strategic Concept” in 1985. His practice of national security tells us far more about the nature of US foreign policy than Kennan or any other writer. In his focus on the matters of war and peace in the nuclear age—whether over Berlin or Cuba or elsewhere—Nitze and those to whom he reported were considering the least terrible options. Outside critics of insiders’ choices do well to keep that in mind. Whether for Cold War policy makers or those of the George W. Bush administration—or in the years since—a fair account of history requires empathizing with complexity, imperfect information, and the challenge of taking actions that not all Americans (or anyone else in the world) will embrace.
The Difficulty of Making National Security a Career (Then and Now)
A prerequisite for Nitze’s entry into his field and longevity was his status as a white male born to privilege. He grew up comfortably, attended elite institutions, and walked through many open doors. Nevertheless, Nitze worked hard. Through daring, luck, and persistence, he made money in the 1930s when most Americans did not. His investment in a vitamin company during that era paid off handsomely a few decades later. So did his post-World War II investment in Aspen, Colorado, which was possible only because of his very wealthy brother-in-law Walter Paepcke.
Unlike millions of other Americans who served in the Pacific or European theaters, Nitze seldom faced mortal danger during his wartime service. After 1945, he could have chosen an easier way to live. But, instead, he decided to tackle complex problems based on simple questions, which included: How to protect the US homeland and the American way of life? How to ensure that the United States’ allies recovered economically while also committing money to defend themselves? How to ensure that Americans’ aspirations for peace did not lead them to wish away the threat that the Soviet Union and communism posed to core values? And, perhaps most importantly, how to reduce the danger of nuclear war?
Nitze’s wealth allowed him to take political risks that might have led him otherwise to be fired. He was blessed with a robust physical constitution and took advantage of mountain and rural settings to renew his strength. Yet he also worked punishing hours and flew worldwide at the expense of spending time with his wife and children, who seldom appear in this book.
The Difficulty of Acknowledging Tension between Opposites (Then and Now)
Paul Nitze embraced a concept of “tension between opposites” and extolled the merits of holding two opposing ideas simultaneously. He criticized and endorsed presidents from both major political parties, switching his party registration from Democrat to Republican to Democrat, after which he served in multiple Republican administrations. He considered himself as a national security “expert” who could help manage crises and formulate solutions to complex—mostly nonpartisan—problems. Given the polarized state of today’s politics, the need for ideological purity would probably prohibit someone like Paul Nitze from serving in high positions in successive Republican and Democratic administrations.
Considering two conflicting viewpoints simultaneously is sound strategic planning. Simply putting certain ideas down on paper does not suffice today, nor did it during the Cold War. After drafting NSC-68 in early 1950, Nitze could have returned to New York and claimed authorship of the United States’ basic Cold War strategy. Yet he remained in Washington to keep working on the issues. Now, as then, follow-through is required. Staying on, while at times facing inglorious moments of rejection and failure, is a necessary burden. Then and now, meeting US national security objectives requires resilience and endurance.
The Difficulty of Nuclear Strategy (Then and Now)
Atomic weapons did not exist when Paul Nitze moved to Washington. After their advent in 1945, he seized the opportunity to gain expertise on the role they played in geopolitics. No one could prove or disprove any assertions about this topic. Since no nuclear state has (fortunately) ever used such weapons against another nuclear state, it is unknowable when and how they would. Even with declassified documents, it is impossible to prove or disprove why leaders acted as they did in moments when the use of nuclear weapons seemed plausible. For instance, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev ultimately backed down over Berlin in 1961 and then Cuba in 1962. Was it because of US nuclear superiority? That undoubtedly played a factor. However, US nuclear superiority did not prevent him from taking the tremendous risk of placing missiles on Cuba in the first place.
Then and now, it is not a simple matter to define victory and defeat in such crises. Khrushchev failed to achieve his objective of keeping missiles in Cuba. Yet was this a long-term victory for the Americans? Not by Paul Nitze’s analysis. The resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis allowed the Soviets to build up, while the Kennedy and Johnson administrations unilaterally stopped enhancing US forces. A nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union in October 1962 would have killed far more Soviets than Americans and not actually ended civilization. Ten years later, that grim calculus had changed. By Nitze’s logic, this change in circumstances was a Soviet victory. To proponents of MAD, it was a shared victory. Few within the Nixon administration saw it as a US victory.
During the Cold War, the two nuclear superpowers did not engage in serious arms negotiations until seven years after the Cuban Missile Crisis ended in October 1962. Not until two decades later did they reach agreements to reduce nuclear weapons. Today there are three nuclear superpowers—the United States, Russia, and the People’s Republic of China—and no historical precedent for trilateral nuclear arms reductions.
In sum, today’s world demands people who are willing to make a career in national security and focus on the types of questions that animated Paul Nitze—especially people who did not come from the same elite background as he did.
Paul Nitze and the United States’ Past and Future
The United States never redressed the strategic balance that obsessed Nitze since at least the 1970s. The collapse of Soviet power in Central and Eastern Europe did not lead to a crisis between East and West. Nor did it impair US risk-taking as the new administration set the objective for a post-Cold War geopolitical order. Nitze had always been skeptical that Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was sincere in his stated goals of reforming the Soviet system and pursuing restraint abroad. Just days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, on November 9, 1989, Nitze dismissed any notion that Gorbachev would allow such a thing to occur.
For Paul Nitze, the chief existential threat became global climate change. Policy makers ignored him. Critics of President Clinton’s foreign policy would turn to his playbook for assailing a sitting administration by citing “provocative weakness.” Only in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks did they embrace the spirit of NSC-68 in seeking a foundational document for the global war on terror, equating the terrorist network Al-Qaeda with the Soviet-led totalitarianism that seemed to be marching across the globe in 1950. Nitze was relevant to that cause insofar as his practice of national security had laid out a career path for translating ideas into policy. But these were not the foreign policy priorities he valued toward the end of his life.
“Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto impressed me by its nostalgia for the cultural warmth and beauty of the preindustrial-revolution era,” Nitze recalled at the end of his memoir. “I have a different but analogous nostalgia—a nostalgia for the warmth and beauty of European and American culture before the tragedy of the First World War as I remember it from my boyhood.” Whereas Marx had “wished to lay the foundations for a totally new society to be made possible by the prior elimination of all existing social structures,” Nitze attempted “to participate with others in building a new and wider world order in which scope for the further development of the main existing cultural elements would be possible.”3
Here is an expression of the nonideological pragmatism that drove Nitze’s career. He appreciated high culture and wished to be known as someone who did. Yet, when it came to national security problems, he advocated for applying cold logic. “You’ve got to be both an optimist and very careful,” Nitze once stated. “You’ve got to be like a mountain climber. A mountain climber doesn’t take any chances. He is very careful about each step he takes and he isn’t a mountain climber unless he prepares for every step with great caution.” “You want to keep policy headed in the optimistic, aggressive, forward direction, but you want to go at it with the greatest prudence and careful preparation.”4
His emphasis on prudence and preparation led Nitze to gain a reputation as someone with an unquenchable thirst for more money to be spent on defense. There is merit to that charge in that he sincerely believed that US strength enhanced global stability. Moreover, he was skeptical that democratically elected governments could plan well over the long term, given the constant pressures of elections, which demanded short-term results. He spent most of his adult life a Democrat yet had no particular loyalty to a political party. Very importantly, he never actually questioned democracy itself.
For Paul Nitze, the nation’s past—and that of civilization—contained the core values he sought to defend. “Even though more lives were lost in the Second World War,” he recalled, “the impact of the First on the structure of civilization, the disillusionment and brutalization of man and his humanity, were such that the civilized world was never again the same.”5 However, the core values of the United States did not need to be invented anew. Nitze committed to the founding ideals and aspirations of the United States—what the country should be striving for even when it was not living up to them in practice. In the Cold War, the Soviet Union provided a foil to those values, just as Nazi Germany did in World War II.
“The fundamental purpose of the United States is laid down in the Preamble to the Constitution,” according to NSC-68. It was “to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” What that meant in 1950 and throughout the Cold War was “to assure the integrity and the vitality of our free society, which is founded upon the dignity and worth of the individual.”6 “Three realities emerge as a consequence of this purpose,” NSC-68 went on to say: “Our determination to maintain the essential elements of individual freedom, as set forth in the Constitution and Bill of Rights; our determination to create conditions under which our free and democratic system can live and prosper; and our determination to fight if necessary to defend our way of life.” Quoting the Declaration of Independence, NSC-68 summed up the fundamental purpose of the nation: “with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
In his practice of national security, Paul Nitze was dogged in pursuit of these objectives. He helped create the architecture of the US national security state and a system for training future professionals to work in all branches of government. He contributed directly to the most pressing national security dilemma of the Cold War: nuclear confrontation. While Nitze saw himself as failing in most of his pursuits, his overall legacy has profoundly influenced the crafting of the policy during and after the Cold War. He only sometimes lived up to his standards of excellence; even when he did, he was only sometimes correct. Yet he never gave up and lost sight of the United States’ foundational aspirations.
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