SECOND TERM PLANS MR NIXON AIMS TO BUILD A WORLD PEACE STRUCTURE

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33093, 7 December 1972, Page 16

SECOND TERM PLANS MR NIXON AIMS TO BUILD A WORLD PEACE STRUCTURE

(By!

STEPHEN BARBER,

, writing to the "Daily Telegraph," London, from Washington)

(Reprinted from the "Daily Telegraph" by arrangement)

President Nixon’s sweeping personal victory at the polls earlier this month over what he regards as the forces of isolationism in America has set the stage for a series of balance-of-power diplomatic moves next year. In his second term at the White House, which will necessarily be his last, he has no concern with re-election. He can concentrate exclusively on a private obsession: the desire to complete the work of a boyhood hero, Woodrow Wilson, and go down in history as a great global peacemaker.

At his inauguration in 1969, he proclaimed that an era of confrontation would give way to one of negotiation. And now this concept is being quite deliberately extended — from negotiation to co-operation and, mark the new key-word, interdependence. The original Nixon Doctrine laid it down then that henceforth the United States would no longer be the world’s policeman. America’s allies would find themselves under steadily increasing pressure to fend for their own national security, except where directly threatened by a nuclear super-Power. Mr Nixon’s goal, as he has reiterated it during the past four years, has been to create a credible structure of peace. Groundwork laid The plain fact is that Mr Nixon is much more interested in world affairs than domestic, and always has been. Rightly or wrongly, he is convinced that during the past four years he has laid solid ground-work — “the hard concrete of common interests and mutual agreements and not the shifting sands of naive sentimentality”—with his summit meetings in Peking and Moscow and so on, upon which more enduring accomplishments can be achieved to celebrate the Republic’s bicentennial in 1976. His blueprint was sketched out in a foreign policy broadcast on November 4, which deserved closer attention than it got. “Peace cannot be wished into being” said ' Mr Nixon, “it has to be carefully and painstakingly built . . . through networks of alliances, respect for commitments, patient negotiations, through balancing military forces and expanding economic interdependence . . .

and most important of all, it has to be built in such a way that all those who might be

tempted to destroy it will instead have a stake in preserving it.” In other words, instead of trying to contain Russia and China in frozen hostility, as had been America’s strategy for more than two decades, he intentionally shifted to a new tack. While retaining a very strong military defence posture, America should engage in active and expanding trade relations with both its cold war adversaries and their satellites, without in any way conceding merit to their Communist political systems, deliberately to promote interdependence. Needless to say American conservatives are not entirely happy with the notion that fat Russians are less liable to be troublesome than thin ones. But the alternative strategy for dealing with them that the Democrat, Senator George McGovern seemed to advocate, struck them as far more alarming—he would have favoured reliance on America’s shining armour of moral superiority as the surest negotiating instrument in the pursuit of global detente, abandoning such tiresome allies as South Vietnam’s President Thieu to the tender mercy of their enemies almost as an act of contrition along the way. Essential ingredient Mr Nixon takes the view that a strong American national defence is an essential ingredient in the successful reduction of EastWest tensions, and that any unilateral cuts in United States military power at this stage can only de-stabilise the world by encouraging the Kremlin’s adventurists to resort to aggression. The American leader looks towards the preliminaries for a European security conference which has just begun in Helsinki, and the parallel moves on mutual and balanced force reductions between N.A.T.O. and Warsaw Pact Powers early next year as a means of maintaining the peace momentum.

In Mr Nixon’s own words, next year is to be “a very busy one” in international affairs. It is understood at the White House that he intends to visit Western Europe in February or March to consult with Mr Heath and the other N.A.T.O. leaders. A new summit is expected in Washington in the spring when Mr Brezhnev, the Russian Communist party chairman, is due for a return visit. These events are likely to be followed up by a fulldress State trip to America by Japan’s Emperor Hirohito to underscore the now accepted reality that his country is number three, after the United States and Russia, and before the new West Europe and China in the world’s economic Top Five. After that, Mr Nixon wants to make the Presidential call on Tokyo that was denied to his old chief. General Eisenhower, in 1960. Special attention The reason for the special attention being given to the Western Allies and Japan is two-fold. The American leader feels it is vital to preserve America’s relations with its partners not only for defence purposes and because any estrangement between them might tempt the adversary to exploit such a situation and thus paradoxically, retard the lookedfor thaw, but also try to avoid threatening collisions over trade.

As Mr Nixon views it, a new pattern of world trade is rapidly developing which cannot fail to have far-reaching consequences — particularly in respect of the new code-word: interdependence. America is, for example, running out of oil and natural gas at an alarming rate already, whereas Russia has vast untapped reserves of both these energy sources in Siberia.

Contrariwise, America’s farmers are so vastly productive that, as is currently being demonstrated by the huge Russian wheat purchases this year, a situation can be foreseen where the two super-Powers might well find it increasingly convenient if not entirely attractive, to trade off their surpluses with one another in a fashion that could scarcely fail to have side effects elsewhere in the world in the long term. This would be interdependence with a vengeance. Of course, neither side would dare become the other’s economic prisoner, nor is a system of mutual hostages likely to spring into being overnight. But Mr Nixon is certainly very fond of observing that the seed was sown in Moscow in May with a series of little-noted agreements on space cooperation, medical and scientific research exchanges and the like that is hoped might pave the way for further developments, providing the cement for a more stable world order.

Some Washington observers have wryly described this process as “diplomacy by sell-out” suggesting that Mr Nixon got the Russians and Chinese to put pressure on North Vietnam to come to terms with America over a cease-fire in Indo-China and that Hanoi, in turn, sold out its Viet Cong allies in return for Washington’s “leaning” on Saigon—the whole game having begun with the Californian’s exploitation of the fierce tension between Peking and Moscow and willingness to dump Formosa’s Nationalist Chinese to bring that feud into the open at the United Nations. Breaking a lag-jam Whether this is a fair analysis or not scarcely matters: the main thing was to break up a log-jam. Obviously, before any of this can really gather momentum it will be necessary to get the Vietnam war settled and out of the way. But Mr Nixon is entirely determined that it shall be—and for the excellent reason that his wisest advisers are firmly of the opinion that if the current negotiations between Dr Kissinger and Hanoi’s Le Due Tho in Paris bog down and the war drags on into next spring, the American Senate, which has quit fussing lately, will start giving him trouble again. For Mr Nixon just about the most ignominious thing that could happen to America would be to find itself forced to pull out of the’ war by an adverse Congressional vote over operational funding. And he has no intention of allowing it to come to that.

Once Vietnam is behind him to all intents and purposes, his next move is expected to be to step up diplomatic initiatives to defuse the Middle East, push Israel and Egypt into realistic ceasefire talks and get the Suez Canal re-opened for international shipping. And here again the leverage of interdependence seems likely to be brought to bear —the effort being made to create a structure of peace of such a kind as to provide the adversaries with a stake in preserving it