July 24, 2018—What A Week That Was!

“To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” ~Sir Winston Churchill.

As one who spent five years of my life across the negotiating table from representatives of the former Soviet Union, I’ve always taken comfort from these wise words of Winston Churchill.

In that context, I have considerable sympathy for those who are trying to negotiate with the Russians in the midst of all the incoherent noise of the current political discord within our body politic. And I have a great deal of cynicism regarding the current brouhaha and the many absurd claims of both sides of the political aisle.

These days are reminiscent of those leading up to and during when I was President Reagan’s Chief Negotiator at the Geneva Defense and Space Talks (DST). My primary responsibility was protecting his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), which was the Soviet’s primary target in our negotiations and propaganda by the Soviets and via their apologists around the world — including within the United States.

Recounting some of those experiences 35 years ago may be worth considering among the loud complaints about President Trump’s negotiations with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, made by the press and politicians alike, who apparently have forgotten if they ever knew what those days were like.

Let’s take a short trip back up to 1983…when I became Assistant Director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) responsible for backstopping our bilateral Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START) and Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) negotiations with the Soviet Union — very familiar efforts because most of my career had been in worrying about technical aspects of the systems that were the subject of those negotiations, including how best to verify related arms control agreements and many Soviet violations of arms control agreements.

Shortly after I arrived at ACDA, the Soviets walked out of all our negotiations with them in October 1983. They sought to give political force to their objections to our deployment of the INF missiles in five NATO nations: our Ground Launched Cruise Missiles (GLCMs) in Great Britain, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands and especially our Pershing Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missiles (IRBMs) in West Germany — all well justified in response to the major Soviet deployment of its SS-20 IRBMs that had begun during the Carter administration to threaten our troops and NATO allies.

The following year was a highly political year in all five deployments nations, the “Quint” as we referred to them in our regular High Level Group (HLG) and other meetings in Brussels. NATO stood together to resist the Soviet effort to block the re-election of the “Quint” leaders (among others in the Western alliance) — and all were in fact re-elected in what I consider to be one of NATO’s high points, if not its highest.

And yes, the Soviets went all out to block Ronald Reagan’s re-election in November 1984. They were joined in a massive Democrat campaign to fan the flames broadcast by the Soviets about how our strategic modernization and SDI programs were courting major nuclear war via an international Nuclear Freeze movement, which was echoed by an international Catholic Bishops’ letter calling for nuclear disarmament.

Notably, Senator Ted Kennedy reportedly sought Soviet help in defeating Ronald Reagan in 1984. Click here and here. (How’s that for collusion?) See the below somewhat earlier photo of a young Teddy Kennedy doing his own thing across the table from Soviet General Secretary Brezhnev.

During this era, Reagan was regularly caricatured as a warmonger, in spite of his now well-known interest in nuclear disarmament, but as a consequence of leading from strength and restoring our then atrophying strategic nuclear systems and hollow army. (Most notably not leading from behind. Sound familiar?)

In any case, after the electoral “silly season,” both we and the Soviets sought a pathway back to the negotiating table as various Soviet General Secretaries died. Based on a meeting between Secretary of State George Shultz and Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko on January 7, 1985, “new talks,” called the Nuclear and Space Talks (NST) reinstated the START and INF Talks — and originated a new Defense and Space Talks (DST) forum in which the Soviets focused on blocking President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

My job in those talks was to find creative ways to say “Nyet” to those Soviet efforts — to ban “space strike arms,” as they referred to antisatellite systems and missile defense systems other than the two ground-based sites permitted by the ABM Treaty. We were notably successful, and gained major negotiating leverage that helped lead to both INF and START treaties, especially after the October 11-12, 1986 Reykjavik Summit.

Reagan walked out of that Summit because of Gorbachev’s demand that we limit our space defense activities to the laboratory, which would have spelled the end of our R&D on space-based defenses. General Secretary Gorbachev and other Soviet leaders recognized that President Reagan would not give up SDI and that Russia could not then compete with U.S. technology. A question is now whether this is still the case, as the Pentagon is playing catch-up with both Russian and Chinese high technologies.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

On November 19, 1985, President Reagan met for the first time with the new Soviet General Secretary Michael Gorbachev in Geneva to discuss the full gamut of arms control and related matters. Click here for the transcript of their first meeting that lasted over an hour, with only President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev and their two interpreters present.

Repeat: they were alone except for the interpreters, who from my own personal experience I will emphatically testify transcribed excellent records in our talks. So much for all the high-pitched criticism regarding President Trump being alone with Russian President Putin without a note-taker.

This November 19, 1985 record was declassified on May 16, 2000, so maybe in a few years all those clamoring biddies will get to see what actually transpired in these recent negotiations. But the real proof of Helsinki’s merit will be in what happens as a consequence of the President’s meetings with Putin, including later this year.

I would note that after we went to Geneva in March 1985, I spent many hours with the first Soviet Chief DST Negotiator Ambassador Yuli Kvitsinski, who had led the INF Talks before the Soviets walked out in October 1983. He previously served as the Soviet number two man at the Soviet Embassy in Bonn, and perhaps knew a young KGB operative in East Germany, Vladimir Putin.

Most memorably, Kvitsinski took the “Walk in the Woods” with Ambassador Paul Nitze who exceeded his instructions from President Reagan that demanded a complete ban of INF missiles, which we eventually achieved in 1987, as recently discussed by Bret Baier’s Three Days in Moscow. Broadway made a play named after the “Walk in the Woods,” which would have settled for much less than we later got years after the Soviets walked out of those talks. Patience, please.

The bad news is that the Russians are now violating the INF Treaty that they inherited, just like they and the Soviets have violated numerous other arms control agreements they signed.

Whatever . . . Putin years ago openly stated his view that the end of the Soviet Union was a major historical mistake for Mother Russia, which he now seeks to rectify. And I anticipate he will be pushing updated versions of the same policies the Soviets pursued on my watch in Geneva.

One last related point I want to make. Spies will be spies. And all nations spy. Moreover, the leaders of all nations try to pursue their national interests as they see them — and sometimes that means seeking to influence the elections of others. As President Trump accurately indicated, we have also done so.

For example, check here for a July 12, 2016 Washington Times accounting of how President Barak Obama sought to oust Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu in his reelection campaign.

President Obama’s terrible Iran deal was not welcomed by the Israelis, either. President Trump’s plan to end that agreement is another reason for Israel’s strong support of President Trump.

Speaking of spies, consider for a moment the brouhaha surrounding the charges about President Trump’s alleged disparaging remarks about the intelligence community, as if the IC is always right. Of course nothing could be further from the truth.

In my message last week, I noted that the Soviets surprised us with how quickly they developed their Plutonium fission weapons and Uranium fusion weapons — because their spies had penetrated our pioneering Los Alamos development activities unbeknownst to our spies on their activities.

More recently, the IC missed the pace of Iraq’s nuclear development program prior to the first Gulf War in 1990 — afterward we discovered the Iraqis were within months of having that capability. Then a decade later CIA Director George Tenet declared that it was a “slam dunk” that Iraq had since then further developed nuclear weapons — a primary input to our again going to war with Iraq after which we learned that they had no such weapons.

Please understand I have great respect for the Intelligence Community, after working with many analysts throughout my career. Nevertheless, there is good reason for senior leaders to be skeptical of many IC pronouncements, without any intended associated ridicule.

Indeed, I know members of IC who are skeptical of many of their pronouncements. But it should be clear from my above comments that there is little doubt that the Russians sought to influence our 2016 election just like many previous elections — and as we should expect them to try to do so again in the future.

Finally, so much for the “holier than thou” attitude of those who berate President Trump for fulfilling his campaign promises, which are in fact paying dividends on many fronts, whatever may sometimes be his unwelcome, undiplomatic rhetoric.

And by the way, whatever may be the complaints about President Trump’s meeting with our NATO allies, they seem more complimentary than belabored in mainstream press accounts.

After all, his approach apparently is paying dividends for America, literally. The last several Presidents have all said that our European NATO allies must pay more for their defense — to no avail. But they are now increasing their support, in response to President Trump’s open public challenges. The mainstream press should get used to his approach and find the good that it has produced.

And what a week that was!

Bottom Lines.

To be sure, I would like to see the Russians stay out of our elections — but I am not so foolish to believe that words will assure that result. And the American people deserve a grown-up perspective on these matters. I perceive much of the mainstream media as being foolish and delusional, at a minimum.

It may be that the opportunity of the early 1990s is lost and gone forever, but at least it should not be forgotten that when Boris Yeltsin was Russia’s President, we had the opportunity to work together to build a “Joint Global Defense to Protect the World Community” as he formally proposed in his January 1992 United Nations General Assembly speech. Keep that thought in mind.

Perhaps as our “powers that be” contemplate President Trump’s Space Force proposal and they can expect a torrent of Russian and Chinese objections, we all might reexamine the past lessons we should have learned and how they might be updated for dealing with today’s threats, now with much improved technology that is also being pursued by Russia and particularly China.

And remember Churchill’s pronouncement, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.”

What can you do?

Join us in praying for our nation, and for a rebirth of the freedom sought, achieved and passed to us by those who came before us.

Help us to spread our message to the grass roots and to encourage all “powers that be” to provide for the common defense as they are sworn to do.

Begin by passing this message to your friends and suggest they visit our webpage www.highfrontier.org, for more information. Also, please encourage your sphere of influence to sign up for our weekly e-newsletter.

Encourage them to review our past email messages, posted on www.highfrontier.org, to learn about many details related to the existential manmade and natural EMP threats and how we can protect America against them. I hope you will help us with our urgently needed efforts, which I will be discussing in future messages.

Click here to make a tax deductible gift. If you prefer to mail a check, Please send it High Frontier, 20 F Street 7^th Floor, Washington, DC 20001.

E-Mail Message 180724