Free Real Peace by Richard Nixon Page A

the economic and military power of the United States in the world is not as commanding as it once was. After World War II the U.S. economy accounted for more than half of the world’s industrial production. The figure is now less than a third—in part because with our help Japan and West Germany, our adversaries in war, have become our strongest competitors in peace. Our military dominance is also gone. We have lost the strategic edge in land-based missiles to the Soviet Union. To meet the Soviet military challenge we need European forces, deployed through NATO; as well as our own.
    The U.S. has played the starring role in the Western alliancefor so long that our allies sometimes act as if it is a one-man show. Too often when crises have erupted—in Iran, in Afghanistan, in Central America—our allies have sat back and waited for the U.S. to step forward and respond. This cannot continue. The Europeans and the Japanese need the U.S., and the U.S. needs them. If hard-headed detente is to work, each nation in the industrialized West must realize that we live in a new world which the superpowers alone could destroy in a nuclear war, but in which we need the full participation of all our allies to build a real peace.
    NATO, as it prepares for its thirty-fifth anniversary next year, faces an urgent task: it must achieve no less than a new birth of purpose and function. It was formed in 1949 as a deterrent to a Soviet attack across the central plain of Europe, and since then it has been the most successful military alliance in modern history. But what was adequate in 1949 is not adequate to meet the challenges of 1983.
    As a military alliance NATO has precise, narrow perimeters. Today it must grow in order to survive: grow not in the sense of adding more members, but by expanding its geographical horizons, deepening its military strength along the front lines, and pulling itself together in the way it uses its economic power, one of its strongest weapons.
    Just as a house divided against itself cannot stand, an alliance cannot stand if its periphery is threatened, its military forces inadequate, its members divided on the question of how to use its economic power. NATO is weakened by all of these maladies, and to overcome them it must take a good, hard look at itself. It must refocus, rethink, reappraise, and renew.
    A common error in military planning is to prepare for the wars of the future with the strategies and the weapons of the past. Alliances are as prone to making this mistake as are generals and nations. To avoid the pitfall NATO must acknowledge the passing of an era, one in which the greatest likelihood of a Soviet attack was in Europe, and acknowledge the coming of a new era. Today the Soviets, directly or through proxies, have the ability to act virtually anywhere and on virtuallyany level of military force, from guerrilla insurrection through nuclear attack. We must be able to respond accordingly.
    If it is to meet the challenge of the new era, NATO must grow in three distinct ways.
    It must strengthen its military power.
    America’s historic guarantee of Europe’s security is questionable today because of our lost strategic superiority. The strategy of the Atlantic alliance was based on the proposition that the U.S. and Europe were militarily linked—that a Soviet attack against Europe would be senseless because of the certainty of a U.S. nuclear response. We now lack a credible deterrent to a Soviet attack on Europe for the same reason we lack a credible deterrent to an attack on the United States. Mutual suicide, again, is not a viable foreign policy.
    The so-called trip-wire—the likelihood of massive U.S. nuclear retaliation against a Soviet conventional attack in Europe—is dangerously frayed. Nothing has yet taken its place. With their multiple-warhead SS-20s trained on every military target in Western Europe, the Soviets could hold NATO hostage to the possibility of a