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What happens, I asked, if the President makes such a demand and Walesa remains in prison and the reforms do not occur? The President had already sent a strongly worded letter to Brezhnev over the hot line. Jeane Kirkpatrick, not unnaturally, wished to take the Polish question into the United Nations. I urged the President not to render Western action subject to a Soviet veto in the Security Council, and he accepted my advice. Sanctions against the Soviet Union and the Jaruzelski government, even a total embargo by the West, were discussed. "If Defense has its way," I told my staff, "we'll have the U.S. in a war scare and the Europeans off the bridge by Christmas." Christmas was three days in the future.
The question before the President was not: What is the most we can realistically do? It was: Shall we be Like Carter and waffle or shall we lead the world? I doubted greatly that the world would follow any President in some of the actions that were being proposed—and yet only through unified action could we achieve results within the range of reactions rationally available to us. Although some of Reagan's advisers clearly did not think he was being tough enough, he took a balanced Line, even speaking at one point about offering the East a Marshall Plan for the '80s and suggesting to the Soviets a new era of world cooperation.
I suggested that the President articulate first principles: nothing for the Polish government, a cutoff of Polish imports into the U.S., a policy of providing food for the Polish people if we were guaranteed that it would reach them. The Defense Department and most of the President's staff, out of genuine outrage but also because of a reflexive belief in the power of the public relations gesture, urged sanctions. To the advocates of this policy, the trans-Siberian pipeline—designed to carry up to 20 billion cubic meters a year of natural gas 3,300 miles from Siberia to Western Europe—was just the sort of highly visible issue that would focus and dramatize Western reaction.
From the beginning of the Administration, Weinberger had been alarmed by the pipeline, arguing that it would make Western Europe dependent on a potential adversary for a significant part of its energy supplies and provide the Soviet Union with a bonanza in hard currency with which to finance a continued arms buildup. In this he was correct, and as NATO commander I had opposed construction of the pipeline. But President Carter had chosen not to oppose it, and the Europeans had made massive financial and political investments in it. It was, quite simply, too late to say no.
I was unable to persuade the President and his staff that this was so. On Dec. 29, the President announced a List of sanctions against the U.S.S.R. and suspended the issuance of licenses for "an expanded List of gas and oil equipment." An official of the Commerce Department went beyond the Letter and intent of the President's policy, interpreting it as being retroactive. Inexplicably, the Administration accepted this bureaucratic fiat. This meant that the sanctions applied equally to items manufactured abroad by subsidiaries of American companies or under American License.
The Europeans reacted with aLL the bewilderment and vexation that such an invasion of their sovereignty