Real Peace by Richard Nixon

War II Germany has been the Soviet Union’s primary target in Europe. That is why Andropov’s insistence on counting French and British nuclear weapons against his SS-20s is such a patent sham. Both Britain and France maintain their forces for their own defense, not for the defense of others. Nuclear weapons under U.S. control are West Germany’s only deterrent against massively superior Soviet conventional forces. Without that deterrent West Germany would be nothing but blackmail bait for the hungry Russian bear.
    For 30 years after World War II American strategic superiority, the trip-wire, was enough to deter the Soviets from an attack in Europe. Those days are over. NATO must pick up the slack.
    Its first steps in that direction have been costly and controversial. While fear of the Soviet Union helps hold NATO together, fear of a nuclear holocaust among a growing number of Europeans threatens to tear it apart.
    Ultimately fear of the Soviets is not enough to sustain the Western alliance. The essence of deterrence is the belief in deterrence and the hope that the West’s military power is beingused as part of an overall plan to prevent military confrontation. Without hope of progress toward real peace NATO’s will to resist could collapse. Hard-headed detente will provide that hope; so too will the softening of harsh East-West rhetoric that will inevitably result as the superpowers begin to substitute negotiation for confrontation.
    The Western alliance must realize that Soviet advances in the Third World threaten the lifeline of every Western industrial nation . Whether this takes place in Afghanistan, Yemen, Ethiopia, or Angola, it is as much an attack on the Western alliance as would be an assault on Europe itself.
    In the third of a century since NATO was founded there have been enormous changes in the nature of the Soviet challenge. In the early postwar years the Soviet Union was dangerous to those on its borders, but it was not yet skilled in the projection of power. As the Soviet Union has grown stronger, however, it has also grown immensely more sophisticated in making its power felt far beyond its borders.
    NATO remains a traditional military alliance, its forces deployed to deter a Soviet blitzkrieg across the Elbe but dangerously unprepared for a Soviet thrust toward the Persian Gulf or a maneuver by Cuban proxy forces in Africa. In effect we have built a Maginot Line of nuclear and conventional forces along Western Europe’s border, while the Soviet Union has learned to use its forces to go under and around borders. As a result the West is in grave danger of being outflanked.
    When NATO was founded Europe was weak at the center but strong on the perimeter. The continent itself had been devastated by World War II, but the great European empires were still in place. Today Europe is strong at the center but vulnerable on the perimeter. If the perimeter is breached, the center will collapse. Soviet advances anywhere around the globe—in Asia, the Persian Gulf, or resource-rich Africa—are as potent a threat to Europe as any conventional attack. The industrialized West, including Japan, will be choked to death if the sources of oil and minerals essential to its economies fall into hostile hands.
    Some, including many in Europe who continue to expect the U.S. to carry the ball in crisis after crisis, think it ridiculous to suggest that the West could be defeated in the hinterlands rather than on the front lines. If it were, however, it would not be unprecedented. In the American Civil War some thought the North would win by capturing the capital of the Confederacy. But wiser hands knew differently. The Union would defeat the South not simply by pressing “On to Richmond!” but by cutting it off from the rest of the world by blockading its ports, seizing the Mississippi River, and thus stemming the flow of resources for the Confederate war effort.
    This was called the