Watergate has raised many questions here about the prospects for the Nixon Administration’s long-heralded and increasingly controversial "Year of Europe," particularly whether the President can still win the Congressional support essential to it. But it is evident now, despite confused initial reactions, that Henry Kissinger’s proposal for a "new Atlantic Charter" has accomplished its primary purpose. It has thrown a very large pebble into the European pond. Within the European Community and its nine member governments, which have long been preoccupied with domestic concerns, it has commanded the kind of attention that European-American relations have not received since the clash of Gaullist and Kennedy "Grand Designs." An intricate negotiation is getting underway that promises to be as difficult as it is crucial for the future American role in the world.

Within days after Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947 called on Europe to unite for a joint attack on its problems, Foreign Secretary Bevin of Britain was assembling the leaders of the continent for a meeting in Paris to draft the response that led to the Marshall Plan and, later, to NATO, the Coal and Steel Community and the Common Market. If the response appears somewhat slower one month after Henry Kissinger’s April call for a comparable "new era of creativity in the West," no one could be surprised. To unite to receive American aid naturally was easier than to unite to give aid to America, more blessed as that might be in the eyes of heaven and Richard Nixon.

The search for solutions to the problems that haunt American relations with the European allies recalls Gertrude Stein’s last words on her deathbed.

"What is the answer?" she whispered. There was a long silence.

"Then," she finally asked, "what is the question?"

Henry Kissinger’s appeal for a bipartisan Watergate cease-fire on foreign policy issues to permit his work for a "lasting peace" to continue abroad, while the United States sorts itself out politically at home, strikes a chord in West Europe. On balance, despite many reservations, America’s allies rate the Nixon foreign policy and Mr. Kissinger favorably. Without forgetting the scars left by some of Washington’s hard-nosed methods in recent years — "We got the Watergate treatment too," a high Common Market official commented — West European leaders are less concerned than Americans about the White House "horrors" and more horrified over the possibility of 3 1/2 years of Presidential paralysis overseas.

"Actions accepted from an ally whose role is less crucial can produce a crisis of confidence if carried out by a partner occupying a dominant position. When the United States acts unilaterally, disarray in the alliance is almost inevitable. Bilateral United States dealings with the Soviets from which our allies are excluded or about which they are informed only at the last moment are bound to magnify Third Force tendencies."

Henry A. Kissinger, May 1964

‘I am not dangerous…(In the nuclear age) there is no alternative to conducting relations between our two countries on the basis of peaceful coexistence…We want the further development of our relations to become…an irreversible one…to give these relations maximum stability and to turn the development of friendship and cooperation…into a permanent factor for worldwide peace…mankind has now outgrown the rigid "cold war" armor that it was once forced to wear.’

Leonid Brezhnev in the U.S.
June 18-25, 1973

The debate among Western analysts in Moscow over the origins of Russia’s current policy of détente abroad and repression at home — and its likely durability — now centers, the visitor finds, around a thesis attributed to Henry Kissinger’s former deputy and chief Soviet expert, Helmut Sonnenfeldt. This thesis holds that the change in Soviet foreign policy stemmed from critical economic problems and a decision by Mr. Brezhnev and his Politburo friends in the early months of 1971 to give first priority in foreign policy for the next five to fifteen years to the acquisition of American technology.

This comment by a leading Soviet professor during my visit to Moscow indicates the skepticism among Russian intellectuals about the regime’s management of the ailing Soviet economy. To all the perennial troubles that have harassed the world’s first Communist economy for decades, a new and more ominous worry has been added: Russia’s industrial growth rate has been slowing down.

The Russians who have been struggling most valiantly to liberalize the Soviet system feel that they have become the chief victims of the Soviet-American rapprochement. A visiting American finds them bitter and depressed. They ask why Washington has permitted this to happen, as do other Russian intellectuals who are not openly identified with the dissident movement. At a private party in Moscow, with the phonograph turned up, the editor of a prestigious Soviet publication that has served as an outlet for unorthodox thoughts in the past raised his glass and toasted Senator Jackson of Washington as "Russia’s most popular American." He later explained that the Senator, through his amendment to the bill approving the Soviet-American trade agreement — which was instrumental in getting the Kremlin to suspend the exit visa tax on Jewish emigrants -had demonstrated that the United States could influence domestic Soviet policy if it tried.

In April 1969, long before the NATO allies had reason to be concerned about President Nixon’s later unilateral negotiations with Russia, Henry Kissinger told a White House visitor that the President believed a "profound transformation" of Soviet-American relations could be achieved. Washington’s step-up in the missile race and its much criticized delay in opening the Soviet-American strategic arms limitation talks — linking SALT to progress on other issues such as Vietnam, the Middle East and Berlin — stemmed from a decision by Mr. Nixon to go slow because he wanted to go far, farther paradoxically than some of his critics, and advisers, felt was feasible.