Interview with Richard Perle, January 1987 [Part 2 of 2]
Summary
Richard Perle was an aide to U.S. senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson from 1969 to 1980 and assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1987. In the interview he conducted for War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, Perle details the military and political deficiencies that the incoming Reagan administration confronted, which he mainly attributed to inadequate budget allocations by previous administrations. It was an error, he believes, to overstate the differences between the policies of Carter and Reagan, since Reagan essentially continued the military doctrine and programs begun by his predecessor. Perle defends the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposed by President Ronald Reagan during his first term. He challenges those who assert that SDI would inevitability trigger an out-of-control arms race, and he takes on the argument that SDI is “only worth pursuing if it can lead to perfection.” Known for his strong views on defense policy, Perle rejects the notion that arms-control agreements have limited either superpower’s military programs and can ensure U.S. security, which he believes is rooted solely in U.S. military power. He praises the effort to research, develop, and test the feasibility of strategic defense. However, Perle wishes that President Reagan had consulted Congress, the country’s allies, and the Department of Defense and prepared a working SDI program before publicly announcing the idea in a speech on March 23,1983. Perle views the Soviet Union’s opposition to SDI as hypocritical, and he puts forth that the Reyjkavik Talks had a “good outcome for the president … but a bad outcome for [Soviet Union general secretary Mikhail] Gorbachev.” Perle views the nuclear-freeze movement as “more of a nuisance than anything else,” and he feels that it was driven by “ignorance and fear in equal measure.” He concludes that an effective U.S. strategic posture requires a dynamism that a nuclear freeze would have made difficult.
Topics
Nuclear arms control, Nuclear weapons
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Transcript
Negotiating With the Soviet Union
Interviewer:
You've probably answered this ten times. I'm not going to push it but... How do you deal with the Soviets? What was your view or what was Scoop's view? How did they differ from the state department's view? The Carter state deparment.
Perle:
Scoop's view of how to deal with the soviets had a number of ingredients that one rarely finds, uh, in professional diplomacy. And the first was candor and straightforwardness; he thought it terribly important to say exactly what one meant to the Soviets, and not to be diplomatic, and not to dance around, uh, the issues. Second, he thought it was important to be fair, but firm. He was convinced it was wrong to back the Soviets into a corner, and it was wrong to put the Soviets in a position where they had to choose between concluding an agreement or some, uh, visible humiliation. He was never interested in, uh, delivering a defeat, uh, to the Soviet Union, but I suppose most of all he was convinced that you had to have a very clear view of your objectives, and whatever else you did, you had to be prepared to walk away from the table, rather than conclude an agreement that didn't meet those minimum objectives, and he was appalled at the negotiations in which the objectives were lowered with virtually every encounter, uh, so that in the end the agreement reached bore no relationship, uh, to the purposes that had caused us to embark on the discussions in the first place.
Interviewer:
You say that he didn't believe the MX would solve the vulnerability problem. Was this because he was concerned that the basing mode wouldn't be politically acceptable in the United States? I believe that Nitze thought that it wouldn't be acceptable under the SALT agreement.
Perle:
Scoop Jackson had reservations about the MX that was proposed by the Carter administration, partly because he thought this, the construction of thousands of garages in, uh, in the desert would probably never be approved politically. Uh, he was concerned that the design of the system had been, uh, encumbered, and the costs greatly increased in order to, uh, make it consistent with a sense of what was verifiable under an arms-control agreement, and that this was a, a pointless and, uh, um, absurd diversion, since the Soviets were never going to agree that, uh, a scheme of the sort that Carter had in mind was verifiable no matter how hard we tried to persuade them otherwise. And of course he objected to a situation in which we concluded arms-control agreements that permitted the Soviet threat to our security to grow, and then were compelled to build additional weapons ourselves in order to restore the balance that he thought could better be achieved by agreements that reduced the threat.
Interviewer:
But if you don't have SALT, you kill it and then you're saying there's nothing you can do. You can't negotiate away their advantage in heavy missiles. Our missiles are vulnerable there's no scheme that we can come up with that will make them invulnerable, so you're worse off.
Perle:
Well, Scoop never believed that you couldn't negotiate a, uh, a balanced agreement with the Soviet Union. It always depended on what the alternatives were as they saw them. And, uh so he was, he did not share the view that, uh, the Soviets would never, uh, diminish their advantage in heavy missiles, and I, uh, I think that subsequent negotiations, beyond the Carter administration, have indicated that the Soviets are indeed prepared to accept a diminuition of their advantage in heavy missiles, so you can't obtain at the bargaining table something you don't even ask for, or something that you asked for with, uh, near indifference, and abandon at the first sign, uh, that it, it might not be immediately agreeable to the other side. It was a question of how tenaciously you negotiated.
Interviewer:
Going back to Moscow, you think that they shouldn't have gone to their fallback position so soon. As soon as Gromyko said no, they said okay, how about Vladivostok?
Perle:
No, the, the great mistake...
Interviewer:
Start again, please.
Perle:
The great mistake that, uh, the Carter, the new Carter administration made, uh, early in 1977, was in abandoning its negotiating position almost, uh, immediately when it encountered objections from Gromyko. That is not the way to negotiate with the Soviets, they never make concessions easily, and they never make them early in a negotiation, and from that moment, I think, the Soviets believed that they had the psychological advantage in the conduct of those negotiations. And so at the end of the day, the SALT II treaty failed to achieve Carter's most important ambitions, as he himself understood them, and, uh, constituted an agreement, uh, that the Senate Armed Services Committee voted was not in the national security interest of the United States. But the fatal, the fatal mistake was made at the very beginning.
Interviewer:
On December 15th, '79, seventeen members of the armed services committee signed a letter to Carter saying they might back the treaty if there were some changes made in the overall defense posture. Jackson didn't sign it. Why didn't he? Why did he separate himself out from seventeen other members?
Perle:
Well, it was not seventeen other members of the Armed Services Committee, because there were only seventeen members of the committee. It must have been seventeen senators.
Interviewer:
Anyway...
Perle:
Uh, Scoop thought the SALT II treaty should not be ratified, and the view that you would swallow hard and ratify a marginal treaty if the administration put more money into defense, which was a view that Sam Nunn and some others uh, took the lead in proposing, was not Scoop's view. He thought a bad treaty ought not to be ratified. He believed that we needed to invest more in defense, because through the decade of the 1970's there was a decline in real terms in American defense spending that had left us deficient in almost every category, principally conventional levels. And so he was very much in favor of the kinds of increases that that, uh, were being advocated by the seventeen signers of that letter.
Interviewer:
Carter jacked up the defense budget five billion dollars, didn't he, at the end?
Perle:
After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and in, in a, a futile effort to, uh, obtain approval for the SALT II treaty, Carter put additional funds into the, into the defense budget, that's right. But the, the, the, the only really impressive Carter defense budget was his last one, and in particular the projections of what he would do in his second term, and he never got the second term. Those projections have often been more fanciful than real.
Interviewer:
Do you think it was a weakened president because of the hostage crisis and the inflation due to the oil embargo, and the Cuban brigade fiasco, that killed SALT? Not necessarily in Jackson's mind, he may never have voted for it.
Perle:
I believe there was, uh, very broad public support for an arms-control treaty with the Soviet Union, and a halfway decent treaty would have been approved, despite the weaknesses of the administration. But it was, in fact, at that point, a weak administration, weakened by the Iran hostage crisis, weakened by, uh, Carter's uncommunicativeness and his relative unpopularity in the country, and a variety of other problems. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was clearly the coup de grace, but I believe that even before that, uh, that treaty couldn't have been ratified, but a halfway decent treaty could have been ratified, a treaty supported by, uh, Scoop Jackson and a Howard Baker and, and others who were influential in the Senate, would have been readily ratified.
Interviewer:
Can you imagine what would have happened if they had ratified the treaty in the fall and the Soviets had gone into Afghanistan? wWhat would that have done to future negotiations? Would the senate have been irate?
Perle:
Well, the length of Senate indignation is, uh is, uh, measurable, and it isn't that long. It would not be the first time; uh, you have the invasion of Czechoslovakia right after, uh, Glassboro, uh, you have the Yom Kippur War shortly after the 1972, uh agreement. Uh, the Soviets, in fact, will do what they think it is in their interest to do, independent of whether there exist agreements between us, and if that comes as a shock to the Senate, then we have some very naive senators.
Interviewer:
Thank you very much.
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