Alexander Haig

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tradition. H.R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman at the height of their pride would never have dared such an act of lèse-majesté. They were aides, not members of the Cabinet, and they sat against the wall, as all other aides have always done. Deaver was seated there now—but a meeting or so later, he joined the others.

Sitting at the table, the triumvirate of Meese, Baker and Deaver had the schoolboyish habit of scribbling and passing notes among themselves. During the first Cabinet meeting, I wrote on my notepad: "Government by Cabinet or troika?"

Warning Signals For the Soviets

The Soviet Union, at the time of Reagan's Inauguration, possessed greater military power than the U.S., which had gone into a truly alarming military decline even before the withdrawal from Viet Nam accelerated the weakening trend. Reagan was, and remains, President of a U.S. that no longer deploys irresistible economic influence and military power.

But if America is weaker than it was, it is still a superpower. That is a fact of history and nature from which there can be no escape. The U.S., if it does not wish to sow fear and confusion in the world and create conditions of the greatest danger for itself and for all of humanity, must behave like the superpower it is. For all but the final year of Carter's presidency, it had refused to do this, apparently as a matter of conscience.

Because of Viet Nam and Watergate, the U.S. had, for some time before Carter took office, been too distracted to act like a superpower. The consequences were devastating. The balance of the world was disturbed. Our enemy, the Soviet Union, had been seduced by the weakness of the American will and had extended itself far beyond the natural limits of its own apparent interests and influence. Soviet diplomacy is based on tests of will. Since Viet Nam, the U.S. had largely failed these tests. Like the assiduous students of Western vulnerabilities that they are, the Soviets would send out a probe—now in Angola, again in Ethiopia, finally in El Salvador—to test the strength of Western determination. Finding the line unmanned, or only thinly held, they would exploit the gap. From such unstable situations, routs develop.

It was time to close the breach and hold the line. From the experience of the 1970s, I was convinced that the Soviet Union did not want war. But where the U.S. was soft or inconsistent or ambiguous in its policies, the Soviets were increasingly willing to take risks. We had to change that pattern of cause and effect.

No frivolous playground test of manhood was involved here. "Mere confrontation should never be the aim of our policy. If the Reagan Administration came into office with the determination to resist Soviet adventurism, it arrived also with the idea of reopening a realistic dialogue with Moscow.

The weakened position of the American deterrent and dissatisfaction with the results of the earlier Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) had convinced some that the negotiations were too dangerous to be undertaken at all. Conversely, I believed that we could not pursue policies that raised tensions with the U.S.S.R. and at the same time claim we were too weak to negotiate with them. Moreover, the American people would never agree to a posture that supported only a major arms buildup but ruled out negotiations that