Known and Unknown - Donald Rumsfeld [123]
Building on his success, the California governor fashioned yet another issue that resonated with many Americans who felt the United States was slipping into a position of weakness. In the face of the Soviet threat, Reagan said, “The evidence mounts that we are Number Two in a world where it’s dangerous, if not fatal, to be second best.”18 What Reagan could not have known was that he had zeroed in on the issue at the center of an ongoing internal debate Kissinger and I had been having in front of Ford.
Six days after Reagan’s victory in North Carolina, I met with the President and Kissinger in the Oval Office to discuss this very issue. Kissinger disagreed with any public admission of the unpleasant facts I was marshaling; namely, that after nearly three decades in the Cold War, the U.S. military capability trend lines relative to the capabilities of the Soviet Union were adverse to us, and the Soviets’ overall capability was now roughly equivalent to ours. Absent a clear and sustained shift in our defense investment, the trend lines, favorable to the Soviets, would put them in a position of superiority in the years ahead.
“The impression that we are slipping is creating a bad impression around the world,” Kissinger avowed. I also wondered at the time if he took Reagan’s criticism personally, since he had presided over most national security issues for the past seven years.19
“But it’s true,” I rebutted.
“Then we have to define our goals,” Henry said. “It is inevitable that our margin since ’60 has slipped. Are we trying to maintain the same margin as we had in 1960 or to maintain adequate forces?”
“We have been slipping since the ’60s from superiority to equivalence,” I countered. “And if we don’t stop, we’ll be behind.”
I believed Reagan’s incendiary claim that America was the “number two” power was not yet technically correct, but it was clear to me that absent increases in our overall defense investment, his assertion would eventually become true.
Kissinger’s immediate goals and mine were in conflict here. Kissinger wanted the perception of American superiority to aid his negotiating positions and to reassure our allies, and for the strong diplomatic position it would provide as he worked on arms agreements with the Soviets. In contrast, I needed us to acknowledge the truth of the U.S. decline in our relative capability so that the American people and Congress would support the increases in defense investments necessary to reverse the adverse trends.
President Ford listened intently to our back-and-forth discussion. This was the type of spirited, open exchange that was healthy and needed, and which had been missing on foreign and defense policies in the past.
“I don’t think [I] should say we are slipping,” Ford finally decided. “I can say we need to redouble our efforts. I don’t want to say we are getting behind. I’ll say we have a challenge, we have rough equivalence and we’ve got to keep up.” The President also decided to criticize the Democratic Congress for its reductions in defense spending.
“I think the posture to take is that Reagan doesn’t know what he’s talking about and he’s irresponsible,” Kissinger advised.20
Even though Kissinger was bothered by the California governor’s unrelenting attacks, I thought Reagan was making a critically important point. The only thing irresponsible would be to dismiss it.
Kissinger and I also found ourselves in different corners on his negotiations with the Soviets over a second Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT II).* The debates over the arms-control agreement sometimes made me feel, as I later described it, “like the skunk at the garden party.”21 Ford hoped to sign a second treaty before the end of his term and, I suspected, before the presidential election in November.
I was concerned that the Soviet Union had not proven to be true to its word in previous negotiations. The Soviets were not forthcoming about the level of their defense expenditures. They also appeared to have been violating at least the spirit of the first SALT by concealing missile silos