NEW YORK -- Former President Richard Nixon, in an article published today, said the United States should resume annual summit meetings with the Soviets and have 'hard-headed' detente with them.
In the first of two articles in The New York Times, Nixon wrote, 'To many Americans, detente has become a dirty word,' to be junked in favor of U.S. nuclear superiority and trying to strangle the Soviets economically.
But Nixon said the absence of detente would 'deprive us of many of our most effective diplomatic weapons' and a way to peacefully resolve differences.
The former president drew a line between 'soft-headed detente - the hand-wringing, willowy, flower-power kind' and the type he prefers - 'the hard-headed kind: detente with deterrence.'
The views of Nixon, who pursued a detente policy while president, contrast to the Reagan administration, which has held out the possibility of a summit meeting but has not pushed for one.
Nixon said resuming annual U.S.-Soviet summit meetings would 'increase the chance agreements can be reached, by increasing pressure on lower-level officials to narrow differences before the annual deadlines.'
Even if no agreements are reached, he said, the summits would serve a purpose: 'when the leaders of the two major powers know each other, the possibility of war by miscalculation is reduced.'
In addition, he said, the fact of approaching annual summits 'tends to inhibit the Soviet Union from engaging in adventurous practices beforehand.'
Said Nixon, 'We can call it peaceful competition. We can call it waging a struggle by non-military means. We can call it detente. Whatever we call it, it is better than the alternatives of either sterile confrontation or nuclear conflict.'
The United States must both restore the nuclear balance with the Soviet Union and 're-establish a credible link between trade in those items the Soviet Union wants and the general patterns of Soviet behavior,' Nixon said.
Nixon said both sides can benefit from the results of detente - 'properly conceived and balanced arms limitations ... expansion of trade, on a strictly non-subsidized businesslike basis.'
Detente can help the United States by going head-to-head with the Soviets where America is strongest, he said.
'We no longer outgun the Russians, but we do outproduce them, and we clearly outdo them in providing what people all over the world want: freedom, abundance and a chance to live in peace and let the human spririt thrive,' Nixon said.
'This hard-headed detente is not a love affair,' he wrote. 'It does not mean that we and the Soviet Union agree. Rather, it means that we profoundly disagree. What it provides is a means of peacefully resolving those disagreements that can be resolved, and of living with those that cannot.'
