“12. No Retirement, 1989–2004” in “America’s Cold Warrior”
CHAPTER 12 No Retirement, 1989–2004
As is customary for political appointees at the end of a presidential administration, Paul Nitze submitted a letter of resignation on November 15, 1988, one week after George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis. Having received no response, Nitze wrote memos for the incoming national security team. Incoming secretary of state James Baker offered Nitze the option of staying on as “Ambassador at Large Emeritus for Arms Control Matters.”
President Bush and Secretary of State Baker wanted to distinguish themselves from their predecessors, President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz. That meant the end of Nitze’s “strategic concept,” and any transition from strategic offensives toward strategic defenses, and Reagan’s ultimate goal of abolishing nuclear weapons. It also meant the end of Nitze’s tenure as special adviser to the president and secretary of state.
When it came to Nitze’s efforts to shape national security debates, there was no such thing as retirement. He put forth ideas for US leadership in the world, even after the rapid collapse of Soviet power and the dissolution of the Soviet state. He opposed the Persian Gulf War but could not resist marveling at the potential for precision-guided smart weapons to achieve military objectives. Over time, he came to believe that highly advanced conventional weaponry rendered the US nuclear arsenal unnecessary in achieving its primary objective of enabling risk-taking in moments of crisis. That did not mean that Washington should be overly eager to wield that might or press its advantages. Nitze opposed NATO expansion and was deeply skeptical of humanitarian interventions in the 1990s. He regarded the primary threat to US national security after the Cold War as emanating not from any one state or group of bad actors but rather from global environmental degradation.
George H. W. Bush Transition
“More fun to make them in the business side,” Paul Nitze responded to an interviewer’s question about deals in the private sector versus arms negotiations, in the waning days of the Reagan administration. “It’s exciting; if it works, you make money; if it doesn’t work, it isn’t fatal.” Public service, to Nitze, was not “really a personal decision”—“one works at these issues because you consider them basically much more important, much more significant; that’s why you work at them.” Negotiations were “much more painful, time-consuming, worrisome; you don’t do it for personal satisfaction.” Occasionally, there was some satisfaction; however, “I had much more fun with the Aspen skiing company.”1 Nitze intimated that his time in government might be reaching his end. Yet he wanted to keep working.
On February 4, Nitze received from White House aide Chase Untermeyer a boilerplate memo that stated: “we have begun to review and process your resume and shall contact you if your talents can be utilized.”2 He kept scheduled engagements. On February 6, 1989, he delivered an address at the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Norway, “Security Challenges Facing NATO in the 1990s.” In it, he lauded NATO’s success upon its fortieth anniversary yet warned of impending danger—namely, the Nitze Scenario whereby US forces remained vulnerable to a surprise Soviet attack. “U.S. fixed, land-based missiles have been vulnerable to Soviet attack for some time now, and the problem is getting worse,” he declared. “Successive U.S. Administrations have proposed plans for basing new ICBMs in survivable modes, but these plans have not garnered sustained support.” The new administration—in which he ostensibly served—“must resolve this problem, if this part of the U.S. strategic triad is to remain viable.” Nitze reiterated the importance of a “robust SDI research program” and cited the importance of “survivability and cost-effectiveness at the margin”—the so-called Nitze Criteria from 1985. The “basic outline of a START treaty has been established,” slashing by 50 percent strategic nuclear warheads and reducing Soviet ballistic missile throw-weight to equal ceilings.3 Nitze hoped for a quick resolution of the final hurdles he had failed to overcome the previous year.
In Oslo, Nitze was lauding Shultz’s accomplishments and laying out what he believed the new secretary and the rest of the Bush administration should be doing. He offered six lessons about arms control and overall foreign policy. “The Proper Approach to Linkage” was to pursue good agreements on their own merits—“we were negotiating to do ourselves a favor [not the Soviets a favor] by enhancing our security” with the 1987 INF Treaty, even as Soviet forces remained in Afghanistan. Nitze concluded by offering his thoughts on how to deal with Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, who had electrified the world during the UN General Assembly in New York City, in December 1988, by announcing a unilateral reduction of five hundred thousand troops. Gorbachev’s talk about “military sufficiency” and embrace of perestroika and glasnost were encouraging signs (though privately, Nitze remained highly skeptical). “But we must always remember to base our security policies on Soviet capabilities and behavior rather than hopes or expressed intentions. And, to date, their military capabilities have not changed substantially.” Nitze cited “NATO’s capability and will to resist unacceptable Soviet behavior” as a critical incentive in bringing about the hopeful signs coming out of the Kremlin.4 The takeaway was that nothing had fundamentally changed.
“I have thought further about your proposal that I stay at the Department of State with largely consulting duties and more time to do as I wish,” Nitze wrote Baker when he returned. “In some ways, it is an attractive offer. I doubt, however, that it will suit my temperament. I am rarely happy in a job unless I feel fully part of the team.” He did not want to be “a fifth wheel” and continued “to wish to render such assistance to an imaginative and effective foreign policy for the United States as I can.”5 “You know my unquestioned loyalty to you,” Nitze wrote in a less caustic letter to President Bush, on March 6, yet explained that Baker’s offer was not “a job in which I could hope to productive and helpful to your Administration.”6 Nitze exited ungracefully and was nearly crushed to death in a horse-riding accident on March 12, after which doctors performed two surgeries on his hip.
Nitze left the State Department and retreated to Massachusetts Avenue to finish his memoir. Then, on April 10, 1989, Johns Hopkins University announced that it was renaming SAIS the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. “We felt it was time … to express our thanks and respect to a man who has made so much of the history which our students are currently studying,” according to the dean of SAIS, George Packard.7 It undoubtedly helped that Nitze himself had given the school $5 million to pay off the loan for its main building at 1619 Massachusetts Avenue, located across the street from Brookings Institution. It is also a short walk from the other DC think tanks that had become permanent fixtures within the national security community. While this announcement seemed finally to certify Nitze’s retirement from government, he banished that prospect by saying: “If anybody wants me to come back, I’d be delighted.”8
The End of the Cold War
After recovering from his equestrian accident, Nitze hosted Soviet academics and diplomats both at SAIS and at his home at 3120 Woodley Road. These conversations intensified Nitze’s conviction that Gorbachev was no savior. Indeed, he “was wholly dedicated to a Leninist approach to policy,” a visiting Soviet academic told Nitze. Moreover, Gorbachev “would not permit a multiparty system or control of policy to escape from party hands.”9
On July 22, 1989, Soviet marshal Sergei Akhromeyev, who had sat across the table from Nitze in the October 1986 all-night meeting in Reykjavik, called on him at the SAIS office. Following his meetings with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, Akhromeyev provided Nitze a broad tour d’horizon of arms control and the Cold War. Nitze seized on the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty negotiations, about which he had recently published an op-ed telling the Bush administration what it should be doing.10 Akhromeyev complained about a lack of empathy on the US side. The Soviet Union was a land power surrounded by vulnerable coasts; the naval forces of the United States and its NATO allies vastly outpowered those of the Soviet Union. A balanced Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty needed to consider naval forces; Akhromeyev was doing all he could to reach such an accord. On harmonizing START with the ABM Treaty, Nitze attempted to revive his proposal from the latter of half of the Reagan administration, to establish lists of “other physical principles” technologies. He could not speak for the present administration’s priorities, “but his main concern was that the strategic situation [be] stable for both the U.S. and USSR … [so that neither] side be tempted to initiate nuclear war.” Both sides needed to press for further reductions beyond the 50 percent cut to which he and Akhromeyev agreed at Reykjavik.11
Nitze may have given Akhromeyev the impression that he was in a position to influence the Bush administration on the Conventional Forces in Europe and START. He was not, yet he would never stop trying. Through his assistant Michael Stafford, who had worked for him at the State Department during the second Reagan administration, Nitze kept tabs on developments in and around Foggy Bottom. On October 13, Stafford sent him a “State of Play on NST,” based on readouts from several State Department officials following Baker and Shevardnadze’s meetings in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Afterward, Shevardnadze declared that the Soviets were willing to accept a START agreement independent of a deal reiterating the ABM Treaty or a new bargain to restrict testing for missile defense. However, concerns about ALCMs, SLCMs, and mobile ICBMs threatened to derail the completion of a strategic arms agreement. “Given this lack of significant progress in START, nobody was able to explain to me why Scowcroft and Bush are predicting completion, or near-completion, of a treaty by the summit [expected to take place by the end of the year],” Stafford wrote Nitze. “So it remains a mystery.”12 There was nothing mysterious about Nitze’s role in this phase of nuclear arms negotiations: he had none for the first time in two decades.
Meanwhile, Nitze remained dubious about the prospects that perestroika could succeed. He took note of a September 16, 1989, article in The Economist proposing solutions to the challenges to the Soviet economy, which now faced a “ruble overhang” of some 200 billion rubles.13 Under Gorbachev’s plans to build a consumer sector, these would have to be spent in an economy with a gross domestic product of fewer than one trillion rubles. He typed up an analysis of the problems. “Laws concerning ownership, and on various forms of coops and leasing are to be passed before the end of the year,” he wrote. “Some say ten or 15 years may be required before enough goods would be available for a market economy. Others say convertibility is necessary for a proper connection to world markets and that this must come quickly. I have seen no model of how all this might be done.”14 Nitze saw no way to integrate the Soviet Union into the global economy.
On October 23, Nitze received the Burkett Miller Award from the Miller Center at the University of Virginia. Following a ceremony in the Dome Room of the Rotunda hosted by Miller Center director Kenneth Thompson, the realist scholar with whom Nitze had collaborated in the 1950s, Nitze reflected on his career and took questions from the audience. “I would not think it a wise idea to ‘marry’ Gorbachev,” he responded to one of them. “I think he has created a personal dictatorship by the threat of intolerable kinds of force against his opponents. He really is a person who believes in the Gulag Archipelago and is not averse to throwing people in it, and has been throwing them into it from time to time.” Gorbachev was not “anything other than a very agile and competent dictator, and I don’t see any reason for us to marry him as an individual.”15 The United States had already done such a thing during Nitze’s own career in government—“Many in the United States decided that Chiang Kai-shek was the answer to every prayer in the Far East, and we had a committee of one million supporting Chiang Kai-shek. That was a great mistake.” So was US support for the shah of Iran. “We certainly shouldn’t have married our policy in that part of the world to the Shah.”16 Nitze drew these comparisons between Gorbachev and strongmen on both sides of the Cold War despite the very significant political reforms then taking place in the Soviet Union.
When asked about Eastern Europe, Nitze expressed skepticism that Gorbachev would act differently from previous Soviet leaders. “The Poles and the Hungarians don’t want to leave the Warsaw Pact because they are afraid that the Russians will disapprove,” he opined, “and there are lots of things the Russians could do if they disapprove other than just reoccupying the countries.” He went on to say: “I don’t know that they will say it is pursuant to the Brezhnev Doctrine, but I do think it is not beyond the realm of the possible, and neither do the people in Eastern Europe think it is beyond the possibility that the Soviets will use military force against Poland, Hungary, etc., in the event they were to separate themselves militarily and come over to the other side.”17
Nitze needed to be corrected about all of those things. He greatly underestimated Gorbachev, who declined to respond when East German border guards lifted the gates at checkpoints on November 9, 1989. In the following months, Hungary and Poland, which had already taken bold steps away from the Soviet Union, exited the Warsaw Pact. After decades of warning about Soviet might and how that would encourage its leaders to take risks in moments of crisis, Nitze watched as Moscow’s imperium over Eastern Europe collapsed—nearly entirely peacefully.
Soviet intentions did not accord with Nitze’s expectations. Yet their capabilities remained. Even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nitze continued to wage his struggle against the threat posed by Soviet heavy missiles. He urged the Bush administration to become more ambitious on arms reductions to chip away at Soviet strategic advantages. “The President has now decided on a fast track for START,” he wrote General Lee Butler, who directed strategic plans and policy for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on December 6, 1989. “I am concerned that we are not asking for enough.” The current proposals, which remained based on the December 1987 START counting formula of 6,000 warheads, 1,600 ICBMs, and 154 heavy missiles—which Nitze and Akhromeyev had hammered out—“would not assure long-term stability and are bound not to be acceptable in the absence of some U.S. negotiating concessions to the Soviets,” he went on to say. To this last point, it was essential to trade away US systems before Congress nixed funding for them—so that Soviet negotiators could say they got something in return. “We need to have enough trading room to end up with a truly stable nuclear situation,” Nitze insisted. “Otherwise, there will be no basis for a cooperative long-term relationship between us.” The “principal long-term thorn in our side” consisted of the SS-18 Mod 5s, of which the Soviets were building as many as 150. While the Soviets were offering the US side the “equal right” to deploy one class of heavy missile to match that, “we don’t want one, and there is zero possibility the Congress will authorize one.” In sum: “We generally don’t ask for enough from the Soviets because of public pressure for an agreement regardless of the degree it can really add to our long-run security.”18
In previous moments of rapid political change—whether in 1950, 1968, or other times—Nitze had not reflected much about whether his assumptions were valid. Neither did he do so in late 1989, when peaceful revolutions took hold in Eastern Europe. From the 1970s onward, he had focused on the danger of the Nitze Scenario—that Soviet superiority would lead the United States to back down in a crisis, and confidence in that outcome would embolden leaders inside the Kremlin to take risks abroad. His thinking comprised three main propositions: (1) the Soviets enjoyed nuclear superiority, and that prompted them to take political risks; (2) the United States needed to modernize its forces to restore its strength; and (3) both sides should aspire to reach an agreement that would stabilize offenses and defenses so that neither side would be tempted to use them in the event of a crisis. By his own admission at the start of 1989, the first proposition remained, the objective called for in the second was unfulfilled, and that of the third was going nowhere. Yet none of that mattered in the most spectacular season of the Cold War. Revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe did not lead the Kremlin to leverage its strategic advantage to preserve the Soviet outer empire. No crisis ensued. Gorbachev’s actions defied Nitze’s predictions; and, more broadly, negated his entire theory of nuclear weapons and risk-taking.
Persian Gulf War
No longer was the leader of the Kremlin the United States’ number one enemy. A new candidate emerged. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in August 1990, and the George H. W. Bush administration faced a critical test of the emerging post-Cold War political order, Paul Nitze urged restraint. In his remarks to Congress on September 11, 1990, President Bush set the country on a path toward military confrontation with Saddam in order to get him to withdraw from Kuwait and curtail his aspirations for regional supremacy. For Nitze, the more pressing issue remained: deal with Soviet heavy missiles. On October 25, 1990, Nitze published an op-ed in the New York Times advocating ditching START and leapfrogging to START II. (Members of the Bush administration had intimated that START II would be on the horizon once they got START I signed and ratified, and that START II would include a ban on mobile MIRVs.) Nitze now regarded START the same way he had once criticized SALT: it squandered the opportunity to restrain or reduce the most destabilizing Soviet forces, the SS-18s, whose aggregate throw weight vastly exceeded that of anything in the US arsenal. Given the myriad challenges they were dealing with simultaneously, few within the Bush administration paid attention to Nitze.
Nor were they interested in his thoughts on how to deal with Saddam Hussein. On January 6, 1991, Nitze and Stafford published a joint op-ed in the Washington Post calling on the Bush administration to avoid an “all-out war” with Saddam.19 While they agreed that some action against Saddam was necessary—mainly to protect the free flow of oil to the global economy—they considered a full-blown allied ground assault to be dangerous. Nitze and Stafford laid out a series of contingency plans short of that. A stricter embargo and limited air strikes were, they thought, better options than an all-out war. Even were the coalition to achieve a smashing military success against Saddam, they warned that the long-term consequence would be the Middle East in chaos.
Nitze was following his own playbook. Accurate or not, his takeaway from the second Eisenhower administration had been that his public criticism of the New Look had nudged the president and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to shift course. During the Carter administration, his opposition to the president’s policies emboldened senators from both parties to withhold ratification of the SALT II. There was, in this case, no chance the Bush administration would back off in January 1991. Following the Senate’s vote to authorize the use of force against Saddam, there was also little chance the legislative branch would employ any means to constrain Bush’s actions. To the extent that members of the Bush administration read the Washington Post in the days leading up to January 17, when Operation Desert Storm commenced, they would probably have regarded Nitze merely as a nuisance.
The Persian Gulf War was in the event a smashing success for US conventional capabilities. Nitze, ever grumpy, warned of hubris after the ceasefire. From his perspective, Bush and Scowcroft’s “New World Order” conjured up memories of NSC-79, his unfinished paper on US war objectives with the Soviet Union (and the prospect of a US-imposed world order) that former secretary of state Dean Acheson had told him was inimical to the nation’s values. Talk of a “unipolar moment” filled Nitze with apprehension. NSC-79, “which has remained secret until now, should provide cautionary reading for the Bush administration if any of the four copies still exist in State Department archives,” read his Washington Post article in March 1991. Nitze now spoke openly about that paper, musing that the United States could have invaded and occupied the Soviet Union in the early 1950s—though at the cost of incredible losses and destruction—and then dictated a post-Cold War order. However, the rest of the world “would gang up on us if we tried to go it alone militarily and impose a Pax Americana. It was not in our interest then and it is not in our interest now.”20
For Nitze, the more pressing objective for the 1990s was still getting verifiable reductions of Soviet heavy missiles. He downplayed the agreement that Bush and Gorbachev signed on July 31, 1991. On August 9, Michael Stafford, now a fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center, wrote Nitze urging him not to come out publicly against START I, which allowed for 154 deployed heavy ICBMs, a category in which the United States possessed zero. Nitze consequently toned down his approach. He wrote an op-ed in the August 14, 1991, edition of the New York Times, stating that START I was “no place to stop.” That same month, the Pentagon established the Gulf War Air Power Survey, modeled on the Strategic Bombing Survey and led by SAIS professor Eliot Cohen. While Nitze served on the review committee, he did not play a substantive role.
Paul Nitze was now decidedly on the outside. Independent of anything he advocated, the Bush administration had already broached with the Soviets START II, which would eliminate MIRVs on land-based missiles. And it launched the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, which scrapped tactical and short-range nuclear weapons, took US nuclear forces off hair-trigger alert, and canceled the long-imperiled Midgetman and rail-based MX Garrison systems. The Presidential Nuclear Initiatives, which President Bush announced in September 1991 and January 1992, were reciprocal steps, not treaties, and required neither congressional approval nor a verification regime.
In an October 13, 1991, profile in the New York Times, Nitze expressed his reservations about the Bush administration, which had not sought his advice. He approved of scrapping tactical nuclear weapons, which he had long thought pointless. However, he did not approve of taking B-52s off alert, considering it a declaration that had “all the hallmarks of having been produced by a speechwriter, looking for a political gesture that would ring well here and in Europe, not by someone who sat down first to make an objective analysis of the strategic situation.”21 This critique was unfounded. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Stephen Hadley had gathered other national security professionals to make objective analyses of the situation. They had not invited Nitze to participate.
START and the Presidential Nuclear Initiatives notwithstanding, Nitze warned of stark dangers. In the aftermath of a failed coup attempt in Moscow in August 1991, the possibility of the collapse of the Soviet military augured the horrifying prospect of Soviet nuclear weapons falling into the hands of bad actors. That scenario animated the Bush administration to send to Moscow William F. Burns, the retired general who had served under Nitze at the INF negotiations in Geneva in the early 1980s. Once again, Nitze gave the administration no credit for their actions. He also criticized Bush for putting too much faith in Mikhail Gorbachev, comparing him (as he had at the Miller Center) to Chiang Kai-Shek and the shah of Iran. In the glow of post-Cold War victory, it was important—he cautioned—not to become complacent. He reiterated the warnings of NSC-79, insisting that “whenever any one country has risen to a position of power and dominance, others have banded together to try to cut it down to size.” It was an extraordinary statement for Nitze to blame the White House for making the United States too strong. In his view, Bush was also complicit in allowing the American people to believe that “all the serious threats to peace and stability have evaporated.”
Nitze resented that policy makers within the Bush administration failed to consult him. Observing the outcome of the Persian Gulf War did however lead Nitze to rethink some fundamental assumptions about nuclear weapons. In the May 1992 edition of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, he reflected on their role (or lack thereof) in the Persian Gulf War. “Much as we might wish otherwise, nuclear weapons cannot be disinvented; their existence, or potential existence, will continue. Therefore, the primary role of US nuclear arms should continue to be deterrence of nuclear use by others.” They should continue to be “an insurance policy to deter any future leader who may control all, or a major portion, of the former Soviet arsenal and may contemplate using it.” China was important, too—though “the Chinese strategic arsenal now appears to be smaller than once estimated.”22 US nuclear weapons could also serve to reassure friends and allies. However, Nitze did not see that the US nuclear arsenal would deter “other nuclear weapons states,” because there was no assurance that their leaders were rational. The overwhelming US nuclear arsenal had not caused Saddam to back down in late 1990, as the Soviets had done during the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.
This hardly meant that unilateral nuclear disarmament was Nitze’s answer to this new reality. US strategic forces needed to remain at least equal in size to that of the former Soviet Union, Nitze maintained, and Washington should “also retain a strategic reserve that would be as large as the strategic arsenals of all other nuclear nations combined.”23 He now endorsed significant reductions toward a minimal deterrent and exhorted US planners to think hard about what that constituted. A minimal deterrent meant relying on counterforce—meaning holding the enemy’s strategic forces at risk. In the post-Cold War era, he anticipated a lack of public support for targeting civilian populations—if there ever had been such support. The Persian Gulf War had also demonstrated the capabilities of US so-called smart weapons to dismantle Baghdad’s sophisticated C3+I network.
Nitze thus proposed deep cuts in US and Soviet arsenals, including eliminating MIRVed land-based missiles. In fact, the Bush administration was already pursuing that objective. When President Bush hosted the new Russian leader, Boris Yeltsin, in June 1992, both leaders publicly announced their intention to make swift progress toward a START II agreement that drew upon the infrastructure of START I to make drastic reductions in the most destabilizing nuclear systems. Afterward, Nitze praised this announcement while again shifting the goalpost. “There isn’t any need for the Russians to have any nuclear deterrent at all,” he said in an interview, since they had no actual enemy to fear. However, “it is necessary for the United States to maintain a worldwide nuclear deterrent” because US policy makers had plenty to worry about.24 Any rogue actor such as Gaddhafi or Saddam Hussein, in possession of only one nuclear device, could pursue regional hegemony safely in the knowledge that the United States would not risk confronting someone who might use it. The primary relationship between US nuclear strategy and risk-taking had not changed with the end of the Cold War. From Nitze’s perspective, the great danger was that the nuclear arsenals of opposing states would lead US leaders to self-deter and avoid confrontation. That reticence would encourage further aggression. Such a prospect updated the Nitze Scenario—that the potential of a surprise Soviet nuclear attack would lead US presidents to self-deter—to fit the post-Cold War era.
Even at age eighty-four, Nitze kept at it. He was intrigued by the independent presidential candidacy of Texas businessman H. Ross Perot. Along with those of Martha Stewart and O. J. Simpson, Nitze’s name appeared on campaign literature trumpeting a national committee that rejected the old ways of traditional party politics.25 Nitze attended a luncheon for Perot in July 1992.26 Private discussions did not go well. Perot “appalled one early booster, foreign affairs expert Paul Nitze, by apparently writing off Europe in favor of Asia,” the Washington Post reported that month.27 In September, Nitze signed a letter organized by former chairman of the Joint Chiefs William Crowe endorsing the presidential candidacy of the former Democratic governor of Arkansas, William Jefferson Clinton.
Meanwhile, the Bush administration completed START II, which George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin signed in January 1993. START II was set to eliminate all land-based MIRVs—an almost incomprehensible prospect during Nitze’s singular focus on a nuclear agreement with the Soviets from 1969 onward. Secretary of State James Baker’s hard-charging undersecretary, Reginald Bartholomew, took over Nitze’s spot in leading the experts groups with Sergei Akhromeyev, with special assistant James Timbie as the crafter of solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Nitze had no champions to which he could turn. He had never cultivated senators like Sam Nunn or Jesse Helms, who played critical roles in promoting or thwarting arms agreements. In contrast to his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, Bush was regarded skeptically by conservatives. Yet, they were hardly about to fall in with Nitze, whom they blamed for trying to scuttle the SDI. Ultimately, Bush signed off on “Brilliant Pebbles,” a modest program that pleased few hardcore SDI supporters. Nitze’s logic of not signing START I to get START II faster would have baffled arms control advocates in the Democratic Party.
In November 1992, the month of the first presidential election in fifty years in which Nitze did not aspire for a high position in national security, he got engaged to Elizabeth Scott Porter (“Leezee”), a businesswoman and socialite. The couple set a date to be married on January 23, 1993, three days after the inauguration of President Bill Clinton and one week after Nitze’s birthday. “He asked me if I wanted to marry an 85-year-old man or an 86-year-old man,” Porter was quoted as saying, “and I said it didn’t matter as long as it was Paul Nitze.”28
Legacy Building, Rethinking, and Climate Change
Nitze refused to retire from public life. Instead, he set about burnishing his legacy. He had wanted his memoir to be a composite of his experiences in government and his development of a theory of international relations based not only on his observation of power politics but also on the literature he had absorbed since his undergraduate days. As in moments throughout Nitze’s career, Henry Kissinger and George Kennan set individual examples that he could not surpass. Both synthesized their experiences in clear and vivid prose while propounding a realist theory of international relations.
In completing his memoir, Nitze had to contend with Strobe Talbott’s Master of the Game: Paul Nitze and the Nuclear Peace, which came out in 1988. A journalist with Time Magazine, Talbott wrote confidently and quickly. It was his third book with Nitze as a main character, and it argued that Nitze opposed deals on the outside only to embrace them when he served within the government. Nitze rejected that characterization. However, Talbott’s book preempted many interesting anecdotes and quotes that Nitze had shared in his unclassified yet-unpublished Air Force Oral History sessions, which the journalist had managed to unearth. Lee Blessing’s play “Walk in the Woods” opened officially on Broadway, on February 28, 1988, based on Nitze and Kvitsinsky’s efforts in the summer of 1982 to reach an INF accord prior to NATO’s deployment of Pershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles. It reached London later that year in a production starring Alec Guinness and Edward Hermann. The bar was thus set high for the life of the real Nitze to live up to previous depictions of him.
From Hiroshima to Glasnost came out in the fall of 1989 to decidedly mixed reviews. Writing in the Washington Post, historian Robert Beisner stated that the “judiciousness of Nitze surprises and disappoints” and lamented the lack of candor about such moments as Nitze’s “most recent history—the daring story of a mid-level bureaucrat trying to outmaneuver [President Ronald] Reagan himself in a design to exchange the vision of an Astrodome strategic defense system for sharp cuts in Soviet offensive missiles.”29 Of course, Nitze was hardly a midlevel bureaucrat, and he was not trying to outmaneuver Ronald Reagan. Yet that was not apparent to Beisner, who recommended that readers consult Strobe Talbott’s The Master of the Game to compensate for all the things Nitze omitted from his memoir.
Beisner’s critique of Nitze was mild compared to that of Harvard professor Stanley Hoffmann. In a scathing review in the November 23, 1989, edition of the New York Review of Books, he associated Nitze with the Cold War’s “extravagant price: so-called ‘limited’ wars, subversion, oppression within client nations, the grotesque arms race, and the perverse, seemingly ‘rational’ calculations of the strategic thinkers. George Kennan, who, like Paul Nitze, was ‘present at the creation,’ has, in beautiful prose, often ruefully reflected on the tragic waste caused by the cold war. Paul Nitze’s drab volume is a record of surfaces.” While his life “should be an interesting subject,” Nitze’s memoirs were “dull and dry.”30 “This is a disappointing memoir of a long, admirable life in public service,” Gregory Treverton wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “I wish Nitze had taken us beyond tactical skirmishes to help us more in understanding what made him tick.”31
It is true that Nitze never reflected on the “tragic waste” of the Cold War, which he regarded as a just cause in which Americans could always have contributed more for their security. It is also true that he wanted to say more about what made him tick than space allowed him in his memoir. He set about work on a new book aimed at composing a unifying statement about foreign policy such as he had been attempting to develop ever since the 1930s. In 1993, he published Tension between Opposites, which featured chapters profiling the men of action he had observed up close and admired the most: James Forrestal, Will Clayton, George Marshall, Dean Acheson, and George Shultz. The common theme was that each was “striving for harmony” between theoretical and practical concepts. His central metaphor was Heraclitus’s “bow and the lyre,” which created music out of physical tension—the example Nitze had described in his commencement address at the Groton School in 1953 and the one that applies to much of his thinking about the matters of national security. Forrestal and the others had thought similarly. And it was no accident that these figures, who crafted and implemented key policies, were not themselves politicians. Those politicians Nitze praised—especially Harry Truman and Ronald Reagan—excelled because of their plain-spoken common sense. Nor were they academics; each was a man of action. Nitze concluded the book by proposing a “council of state” for the United States that would define the long-term national interests of the country; it would then be up to the politicians to say what was possible. Kennan had also proposed such a council, yet the idea generated little support among the United States’ elected leaders.
Nitze lamented the current absence of the great men as had guided the free world through the 1940s. “Since the collapse of communism in 1989, I’ve often wondered what response [George] Marshall would have proposed now for the West,” Nitze wrote in the Chicago Tribune on June 12, 1993, following a recent documentary about the former secretary of state. “No doubt he would have felt an obligation to encourage the democratic movements trying to maintain order in Russia and Eastern Europe,” Nitze speculated. Yet he would also acknowledge the distinctions between the two periods. “Our economic situation today is not nearly as robust as it was in the late 1940s and, unlike Russia and the countries of the former Soviet bloc, the delicate European democracies of that time, while crippled, had the resilience to provide the institutional structure necessary to make productive use of massive amounts of American aid. Sadly, 50 years of communist stagnation has made the political and economic recovery of Eastern Europe—and especially Russia—a more difficult and complex problem.” The Marshall Plan had been “the right response for that time”; the United States now needed “solutions freshly struck from today’s clay, based both on U.S. political interests and on the distinctly American spirit of generous, constructive help that radiated from everything Gen. Marshall touched.”32 Nitze did not lay out what those solutions ought to be. Yet he put stock in the new generation—such was the rationale for the SAIS—to train the next generation of policy makers who would come up with the best solutions.
First, they needed to get their history straight. Nitze and other veterans of the Truman era had long assumed that the declassification and release of documents from the early Cold War would cast them all in a positive light. While this had been the case with Ronald Reagan, who cited the newly declassified NSC-68 on the campaign trail in advance of the 1980 election, the language of that document generally led to increased scrutiny of the Truman administration’s policies. Revisionist scholars cited the harsh language and terms such as “preponderance of power” to claim that the United States bore as much—if not more—responsibility as the Soviet Union for starting the Cold War. Nitze, who had always been ambivalent toward academia (and had also regarded academics as never accepting him), dismissed revisionists’ criticisms out of hand. “Don’t ever bother with it, it’s pure garbage,” Nitze would later grouse to editor Harold Evans while working on his memoir. “It had a lot of influence during the ‘60s.… The opposition to Vietnam fed very heavily on these historians.”33
In a September 23, 1993, address to the National War College titled “Toward a New National Security Strategy,” Nitze held forth on the context of the drafting of NSC-68 and refuted misconceptions about it. For example, he and other members of the Policy Planning Staff had not anticipated a shooting war with the Soviet Union in 1954, when they drafted NSC-68 in early 1950: they “recognized that Soviet doctrine was exceedingly flexible … [and Soviet leaders] assumed that capitalism would eventually fail and communism prevail but that [the Kremlin] made no attempt to predict when.” The other misconception, he thought, was that NSC-68 constituted a sharp departure from previous US policies. According to Nitze, it aligned with NSC-20/4 as well as George Kennan’s 1948 strategy statement based on his Mr. X article; the key distinction was that NSC-68 shifted the focus from economic assistance to military capabilities as the means toward “timely and adequate preparation” against Soviet aggression. He closed by exhorting members of the audience to take seriously the ideological component of the Cold War, which he regarded as a conflict about much more than just specific national interests: it was about freedom versus slavery.34
Nitze did not have great solutions to the immediate challenges of the post-Cold War order. In an October 7, 1993, breakfast interview with the Christian Science Monitor, he stated that “whatever happens in the world is of some degree of interest” to the United States. Yet that did not mean that US presidents needed to intervene everywhere. On Somalia, where eighteen US soldiers had just been killed, Nitze stated: “I guess I, along with everyone else, regret that we ever went in there.… But now that we’re in, it’s a different matter. The question is, how the hell do we get out?” Nitze regarded Yugoslavia differently. He encouraged the Clinton administration to use air power against Serbs, send in tanks to occupy Belgrade, and remove Slobodan Milosevic. “The world would be better off if we could get rid of Milosevic,” he declared.35
Meanwhile, aspiring men and women of action in and around Washington, DC, were following Nitze’s example for how to launch and sustain careers in national security. Professionals who chose national security as a career rotated among think tanks on Massachusetts Avenue, the Kennedy School or Belfer Center at Harvard, and branches of government. They yearned to write the policy memo that would become the Long Telegram or Mr. X article for the post-Cold War era and turn them into the new George Kennan. Few followed Kennan’s model of serving twenty years in the foreign service before authoring such documents. Instead, they sought to establish such personal connections that allowed them to pull the levers of influence, just as Nitze had successfully done inside and outside government.
Nitze’s own (unofficial) biographer, Strobe Talbott, exemplified this new practice of national security. When Tension between Opposites came out, Talbott, friendly with President Bill Clinton since their time as Rhodes scholars at Oxford University, held the portfolio at the State Department covering the former Soviet Union; within a year, he would become deputy secretary of state. “By 1994 he had, in a very real sense, become Paul Nitze, which is no small accomplishment,” so wrote David Ignatius in the Washington Post, in an article, “The Curse of the Merit Class,” citing the number of Rhodes scholars and members of the Aspen Strategy Group that populated national security positions in the Clinton administration.36 Talbott rose very early each morning to write extended briefings (“Strobegrams”) for the secretary of state and president. He had undoubtedly absorbed Nitze’s practice of achieving proximity to the levers of influence.
Nitze was happy to be married again and pleased that Tension between Opposites generated a warmer reception than had From Hiroshima to Glasnost. James Chace, who had debated Nitze on Firing Line over a decade earlier, called it “an arresting meditation on power.” On why Nitze never got a cabinet position, Chace quoted former secretary of defense Clark Clifford: “[Nitze’s] ambition and impatient intellect often manifested themselves in irritable peevishness and flashes of unveiled contempt for people whom he felt did not deserve the high government positions they held.”37 As Patrick Glynn put it in Commentary, “what is most fascinating is the degree of inwardness that this book shows to have been present in a quintessentially public man.” More so than his previous memoir, or Strobe Talbott’s Master of the Game, “this brief volume gives us a real glimpse of the inner Nitze.”38 Tension between Opposites was less likely to be assigned in college or graduate classes on international relations than works by Kissinger or Kennan (on whom Nitze bestowed warm words in the book). Nitze’s compensation was that his name was on the nation’s most prestigious school devoted to graduate studies in policy-oriented international relations.
Buoyed by the positive reception to Tensions, Nitze ruminated on power after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “The Gulf War offered a spectacular demonstration of the potential effectiveness of smart weapons used in a strategic role,” Nitze wrote in the Washington Post in January 1994, revisiting the points in his earlier Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article. They had neutralized Saddam’s C3+I system. Nuclear weapons had not played a role in reaching the US strategic objectives of overwhelming Iraqi forces and liberating Kuwait. “For the first time we might reasonably contemplate making nuclear weapons largely obsolete for the most practical and fundamental strategic missions,” Nitze concluded. While the United States should not consider smart weapons as a panacea to all problems—as many military planners had regarded nuclear weapons during the early years of the Cold War—it was time to rethink those weapons’ role during that conflict. “The lessons of the military utility of nuclear weapons must … be re-examined and frankly acknowledged,” as he put it. “We will never be certain what has deterred the use of nuclear weapons since 1945. We can speculate that the strategic nuclear arsenals in their morbid way did stay the use of these weapons, that mutually assured destruction may have prevented the use of nuclear weapons against other nuclear powers.” However, in reality, “using nuclear weapons has never entirely been ruled out, and much of the debate of operational nuclear strategy during the Cold War reflected this reality.”39
“What inhibited the American use of nuclear weapons was clearly sensitivity to the implications of the destructiveness of such weapons,” Nitze said. “And however much U.S. military doctrine asserted otherwise, their use was never an easy option for the United States, and some troublesome governments have known this and exploited it as a weakness in U.S. military posture.” During the McNamara era, the aspiration toward flexible response may have led to “a more credible U.S. military presence and deterrence for some situations,” yet “it did not improve our strategic deterrent.” Moreover, the US nuclear arsenal “was a one-use strategic deterrent” in the conflict with the Soviet Union (and fortunately the country had never found out what happened when deterrence fails). Nonnuclear options in the post-Cold War were more promising. “Developing true strategic conventional weapons offers us a flexible capability that no aggressor can discount safely in a wide range of circumstances.”40
For Paul Nitze at that moment, it still made sense to “continue to maintain a secure and widely dispersed array of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems until we are assured that the nuclear weapons of others constituted no threat to the United States and its associates.” Yet that did not mean the United States should ever use them. There remained a gap between the “destructive power of a first-class strategic arsenal, such as that of Russia, and the ability of American strategic conventional weapons to overcome that gap.” Therefore, the objective should be to understand and overcome that gap through technological research and astute strategies and tactics. “The Gulf War suggests that U.S. conventional weapons could offer an adequate deterrent against regional aggression. We must still evaluate whether other powers, such as China and Russia, have come to this conclusion. But the present threat does not come primarily from these nations, but rather from states such as Iraq, North Korea or even Libya.” The post-Cold War landscape required “nonstrategic conventional forces to stop aggression as it unfolds” as well as “overwhelming nuclear strategic capability, though not necessarily to use such weapons—even in retaliation—if we can disarm an aggressor with smart non-nuclear strategic weapons.” It was essential to preserve US preponderance of power, in other words, even after the Soviet Union had collapsed. That meant both conventional and nuclear superiority. “We must learn not merely to react, as eye for eye, or out of anger,” Nitze concluded, “but with wisdom and a sense of the great responsibility that comes with great power.”41
Nitze resumed this theme in a July 17, 1994, op-ed in the Washington Post in which he supported funding for the B-2 bomber. He cited this system, a legacy of the late Cold War, as part of a “mix of innovative strategic conventional capabilities, technologies and weapons we will need to back future foreign policy and deter emerging crises.” While he had not thought much of it during his years attempting to reach a START agreement, Nitze now viewed the B-2 in a conventional (nonnuclear) role to achieve strategic objectives. He again reiterated that, during the Cold War, “nuclear weapons added little to our practical ability to deter petty aggressors.” In the post-Cold War era, the prospect existed of nuclear war between countries over which the United States had little influence. There was also the possibility that more lethal nonnuclear technologies would give smaller states outsized power to do harm. “We need new strategies of deterrence and new technologies to permit the United States the flexibility to prevent escalation, as well as to allow us the power to act quickly to reduce further aggression. At the same time, deterrence strategy must also reflect diminished American capabilities and a shorter reaction time, with a smaller force structure, fewer overseas bases, and a smaller industry to support them.” Rather than spending more, “we should spend our shrinking defense budget more wisely, and focus on preserving technology and on the difficulty of retooling.”42
The B-2 could be used in punitive “Libya-style” raids, Nitze went on to say—in reference to the 1986 air campaign against Mu’ammar Gaddhafi following the bombing of a West Berlin disco. He had crunched the numbers and determined that it was more cost-effective than the F-117 “Stealth Fighter” and other such systems. It was also better than cruise missiles or carrier battle groups, and reached much of the globe even though it was based only at Diego Garcia, Whitman AFB, and Guam. In short, it was part of a potential mix of forces that could replace nuclear weapons as the basis for US deterrence.43
The United States needed to think bigger and focus on existential threats now that the Cold War was over, Nitze was sure. The man who had repeatedly warned about the prospect of the United States losing a nuclear war now saw the consequences of global climate change as potentially devastating. “The earth’s climate has remained stable for the past 10,000 years, but global warming threatens the stability that fostered the development of modern civilization,” he wrote in a June 2, 1997, op-ed in the Washington Post. “Rapid warming could render whole forests more vulnerable to the ravages of disease, pests and fires, destroying watersheds. Rising sea levels, flooding, drinking-water shortages and the northward spread of tropical diseases could displace millions of people. The economic and human costs may devastate continents, creating a crisis larger, and possibly more enduring, than any in recorded history.”44 Climate change could cause more wars over diminishing natural resources. To combat it, Nitze cited the precedent of Cold War arms reductions.
President Clinton “should not be swayed by arguments that global agreements would spawn an intrusive international bureaucracy,” according to Nitze. “Comparable criticisms were leveled at the arms treaties and dispelled—and the danger from not taking action is just as severe. Those agreements demonstrated that global problems could be solved through international agreement. Their lessons can help us limit and reduce the growing threat from climate change before we find ourselves facing catastrophe.”45 In this conception of US national security, no external enemy lurked—only Americans’ own ambitions and irresponsibility.
Moreover, in the effort to save mankind’s global habitat, there was nothing to be gained by further nuclear testing. On June 21, 1999, Nitze joined scientist Sidney Drell in calling for the US Senate to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. They cited tests the previous year by India and Pakistan as evidence that the world was headed in the wrong direction and that the United States needed to lead a reversal. “We strongly embrace President Reagan’s vision of a world free of nuclear weapons,” read the letter.46 This was not something that Nitze himself had believed when he was actually advising President Reagan. Yet he came to embrace it over the course of the decade that followed the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Precision-guided munitions could be used to deter rogue states and did not require vast sums of money. That was not the case in the early Cold War, when nuclear was the most advanced weaponry.
Nitze’s Practice of National Security and the Global War on Terror
Drell and Nitze hoped to leverage their Cold War bona fides to persuade Republican senators to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. They also pressed for ratification of START II, which had never entered into force. Leading national security figures advising Republicans during the 1990s had other priorities than Nitze’s at that time—even though they respected his Cold War tenure. On April 29, 1993, as the Clinton administration got underway, the Paul Nitze SAIS appointed Paul Wolfowitz as its fifth dean.
In 1969, Wolfowitz had been an intern for Nitze with the Committee to Maintain a Prudent Defense Policy, and his career followed a similar trajectory to Nitze’s thereafter. He worked at ACDA and the Department of Defense during the Ford and Carter administrations, assisted with the Team B report, taught courses at SAIS, and switched his political party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in time to join the Ronald Reagan administration. He directed the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff for its first two years and then served as assistant secretary of state for East Asia and then, still later, as ambassador to Indonesia. During the presidency of George H. W. Bush, Wolfowitz held the position of under secretary of defense for policy, which was equivalent to that of assistant secretary of defense for ISA (a job title that remained but had been placed under the authority of the under secretary of defense for policy). Nitze had held that position under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara and was offered it on three other occasions. Like Nitze, Wolfowitz regarded himself as a principled supporter of US values and interests and above the political party line. He also revered George Shultz, whom he served for six years during the Reagan presidency.
“The profession of [international] theory is facing a crisis,” said the outgoing dean, George Packard, upon Wolfowitz’s appointment. “None of the political scientists predicted how the Cold War would end.… Paul’s job is [to help SAIS determine] what is the posture the United States should take, what is the role of mutual forces.”47 Not only would he be helping students, but he would also be doing the same types of things that Nitze himself had done during the Eisenhower era. In addition, Wolfowitz would come to serve on various government commissions. In a profile of SAIS on the school’s fiftieth anniversary and the appointment of Wolfowitz, the Washington Post noted that much of the Cold War focus on Soviet studies now seemed irrelevant, and that the post-Cold War order would require new thinking about military strategy within academia—even as the focus in most political science and history departments shifted away from the study of high politics. “How do you take a field that settled into a rut and make it mean something in a very different world?” according to SAIS professor Eliot Cohen, who in the previous decade had written extensively about a potential NATO–Warsaw Pact conventional war in Europe—an improbable prospect that now seemed impossible.48
Critics called Wolfowitz (and Cohen) a “neoconservative,” a nebulous term that initially applied to Democrats (or others on the left) who grew disillusioned with the 1960s counterculture and abandonment of Truman-like foreign policies during the Vietnam era. Some, but not all, were former Democrats. Paul Nitze was sometimes cited as a neoconservative, as was George Shultz, whose Fifth Avenue Synagogue Speech in 1984, warned against the United States becoming the “Hamlet of Nations.”49 Neoconservatives assailed the foreign policies of President Clinton yet did not champion the causes that Nitze did by the late 1990s. Nitze, who saw the Cold War as a thing of the past, came to believe that nuclear weapons should eventually be eliminated; he regarded the effects of global climate change as an existential threat. He also disapproved of what he considered a failure of imagination by the Clinton administration. Along with George Kennan, Nitze signed a letter to the president warning that NATO expansion would reify Russians’ fears that the United States was attempting to isolate and encircle their country.
In the 1996 presidential election, Wolfowitz advised Donald Rumsfeld, the former secretary of defense who served as the campaign chairman of Republican nominee Robert Dole and had years earlier attempted to torpedo Nitze’s nomination to be secretary of the navy. Rumsfeld did not regard US national security challenges in the mid-1990s the same way as Nitze. After Clinton defeated Dole, Rumsfeld chaired the Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States, which the Republican Congress had mandated as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 1997.50 The report emanating from that commission warned of a threat “more mature and evolving more rapidly than has been reported in estimates and reports by the Intelligence Community.”
This report primarily drew from Nitze’s practice of national security—especially during his time out of government, when he worked on the Gaither Report and Team B. So was the “Statement of Principles of the Project for a New American Century,” which Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense Richard Cheney, and others signed on June 3, 1997.51 The think tank associated with it—the Project for a New American Century—replicated the type of work engaged in by the CPD. By the mid-1990s, Nitze’s views about contemporaneous US national security may no longer have mattered to policy makers. Yet his career inspired those figures who had served in government and were attempting to shift the terms of national security debates while carving out roles for themselves in future presidential administrations. Much of their thinking flowed from the premise of the Nitze Scenario. A rogue state knew that the US leader would not hit back. Acquiring a nuclear weapon could allow them to blackmail US leaders.
In the 2000 presidential election, Democratic nominee Vice President Al Gore sought to dispel any caricature of himself as an environmental radical. He did not claim that global climate change was a national security threat. Wolfowitz occupied a place on the national security team advising Gore’s opponent, Republican former Texas governor George W. Bush—the son of the former president. When the younger George Bush traveled to Stanford to receive a key endorsement from George Shultz, Nitze was absent. For Nitze, global climate change was a national security threat. The consequences of the industrial revolution for the world of his children and grandchildren were far more concerning than topics such as Saddam Hussein’s continued rule over Iraq.
“Americans need to understand that what we are talking about here is a large and long campaign [against terrorism] with substantial risks and sacrifices ahead,” according to a Wall Street Journal editorial on September 20, 2001, a few days after the attacks of September 11. “The task is large enough it warrants planning on the scale of National Security Memorandum 68, the Cold War planning document drawn up in 1950 by a joint State-Defense committee under the leadership of Paul Nitze.”52 The Cold War—not the 1991 Gulf War or humanitarian interventions during the Clinton era—was “the appropriate analogy to this war on terrorism.” The editorial warned of “many battles along the way, and not any one conclusive victory, at least not for a long time.” Later that month, Nitze met with his grandson, Nicholas Thompson, who was writing a joint biography about him and Kennan. After lamenting the horrible attacks on the United States, Nitze spoke about literature: “Missiles are boring; Conrad is interesting.”53
In the 1980s Nitze contributed significantly to Cold War deliberations by staying on and continuing to aspire to negotiate a grand bargain on nuclear arms reductions. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, however, his career boiled down to having crafted NSC-68. In the mid-1990s he had advocated for the use of “smart bombs,” yet the Wall Street Journal referred to that approach with scorn: “This war won’t be won by bombing from 15,000 feet, the way Kosovo was.”54 With the advent of the global war on terror, the premium was placed on constructing a winning wartime strategy. The United States was again on a “wartime” footing, following a decade of ostensible peace—just as it had been in the summer of 1950 when the country intervened in Korea and President Harry Truman signed off on NSC-68.
Nitze’s Last Year
As the United States now intervened in Afghanistan, and President George W. Bush attempted to rally international support against the so-called axis of evil—Iraq, Iran, and North Korea—Paul Nitze remained out of the public spotlight. Meanwhile, Paul Wolfowitz, who was now deputy secretary of defense, advocated for taking the war on terror to Saddam Hussein. The United States and a coalition of nations ultimately did this in March 2003. A year later, in April 2004, Wolfowitz delivered the keynote address at an event honoring Nitze hosted by the Aspen Institute, the think tank founded in 1949 by Nitze’s brother-in-law Walter Paepcke and which had both a sprawling campus beside the ski resort in Colorado and a Washington office just outside of Georgetown.
Wolfowitz shared personal memories of his interactions with Nitze. The central theme, however, was the fundamental importance of NSC-68 and how it was guiding the Bush administration’s global war on terror. Wolfowitz described how he and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had lunched with members of the 9/11 Commission. One of the members asked what they could do to ensure that their report and its recommendations gained traction and prevented future attacks. Wolfowitz responded that no one ever read the Pearl Harbor report that examined the lead-up to December 7, 1941. “What I told them basically was to write something similar to George Kennan’s Long Telegram or Paul Nitze’s NSC-68.” Unlike the Pearl Harbor report, Wolfowitz observed, NSC-68 “is still studied in colleges and universities, including colleges for strategists, like the war colleges of our military or our National Defense University.”55
“People who haven’t read NSC-68 or go to it thinking that it was a blueprint for a military build-up, are usually astonished by how much it resembles a philosophical treatise,” Wolfowitz stated. “Paul [Nitze] argued for military strength, but he argued most of all that the strength of this country comes from the character of our society and the values on which we are built.” “From the idea of freedom with responsibility derives the marvelous diversity, the deep tolerance, the lawfulness of the free society,” Wolfowitz said, quoting from section four of that document. “This is the explanation of the strength of free men. It constitutes the integrity and the vitality of a free and democratic system. It also explains why the free society tolerates those within it who would use their freedom to destroy it. By the same token, in relations between nations the prime reliance of the free society is on the strength and appeal of its idea, and it feels no compulsion to bring all [other] societies into conformity with it.”56 Wolfowitz did not recognize that many critics regarded the actions of the administration in which he served as trying to bring all societies into this very conformity.
Paul Wolfowitz professed that NSC-68 established the blueprint for the struggle between freedom and tyranny that underscored the Bush administration’s war on terror. “We recently intercepted a letter being sent by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda associate in Iraq, and a major terrorist mastermind in that country, to his colleagues in Afghanistan,” Wolfowitz told the audience, describing the man who founded the terrorist organization that became ISIS (so-called Islamic State of Iraq and Syria).
And that letter gives us an idea about how these people think about the benefits of a free and open society emerging in the heart of the Middle East. “Democracy in Iraq,” Zarqawi writes, “is coming. And that will mean,” he says, “suffocation for the terrorists.” Zarqawi talked disparagingly about Iraqis who “look ahead to a sunny tomorrow, a prosperous future, a carefree life, comfort and favor—how dare they.” For Zarqawi, prosperity and happiness were inconsistent with the terrorist mission. “We have told these people,” Zarqawi writes, “that safety and victory are incompatible, that the tree of triumph and empowerment cannot grow tall and lofty without blood and defiance of death; that the nation cannot live without the aroma of martyrdom and the perfume of fragrant blood spilled on behalf of God, and that people cannot awaken from their stupor unless talk of martyrdom and martyrs fills their days and nights.”57
As with Marxist-Leninism and the Soviet Union, according to Wolfowitz, Zarqawi’s words demonstrated the long-term plans of enemies of freedom.
“Our struggle against these people will be a struggle perhaps even longer than the Cold War,” said Paul Wolfowitz. “It will test our resolve perhaps even more than the conflicts of World War II. Although describing the mind of the Soviets, I think NSC-68 was prescient … in helping to understand the threat we face today.” Once again Wolfowitz quoted Nitze’s strategy statement: “The peace the Soviet Union seeks is the peace of total conformity to their policy. The antipathy of slavery to freedom explains the Iron Curtain, the isolation, the autarchy of a society whose end is absolute power. The existence and persistence of the idea of freedom is a permanent and continuous threat to the foundation of a slave society; and it therefore rejects as intolerable the long-continued existence of freedom in the world.” NSC-68 regarded the assault on free institutions as “worldwide.” “The idea of freedom is the most contagious idea in history”; however, as NSC-68 also stated, Wolfowitz promised that the United States would win the war on terror “like the previous great challenges the nation has faced, as long as we remain committed, like Paul Nitze, to defending freedom where it seeks to flourish.” Nitze was indeed committed to this goal. It is also true that he remained deeply concerned that a rogue state leader would attempt to curtail the United States’ freedom of action, just as the Kremlin did once it had reached and surpassed the United States in various nuclear capabilities after the Cuban Missile Crisis. During the last decade of his life, however, Nitze cautioned against waging a global ideological struggle and, as we have noted, regarded global climate change as the existential threat to the values he espoused in NSC-68.
In October 2004, six months after Wolfowitz’s testimonial, Secretary of State Colin Powell honored Nitze at the School of Advanced International Relations. “He is an icon to those of us who are in the State Department,” according to Powell, who had worked with Nitze during the last two years of the Reagan administration. “It was like having Moses at the table. [He] had 50 years under his belt when I was just trying to figure out how to be National Security Advisor.” Powell marveled at the spectacular achievement of the 1987 INF Treaty: “Paul, George Shultz and so many of us worked so very hard.”58
“Paul Henry Nitze, author of the basic U.S. strategy against the Soviet Union at the start of the Cold War and later a key negotiator of U.S.–Soviet arms accords that helped dismantle the global conflict, died of pneumonia Tuesday at his home in Georgetown,” the Washington Post reported on October 21, 2004.59 A memorial for Nitze was held on October 23, 2004, at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC, less than two weeks before the conclusion of the presidential contest between President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz spoke admiringly. Meanwhile, all the ships in the US fleet lowered their flags to half-mast. A man of action, Paul Nitze, lay at rest. Nevertheless, his practice of national security endures.
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