Nixon: Still a Global Feel

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

SEIZE THE MOMENT: AMERICA'S CHALLENGE IN A ONE-SUPERPOWER WORLD

by Richard Nixon

Simon & Schuster; 322 pages; $25

Looks like we have finally seen the last of the new Nixons. Anyone who remembers his campaign and White House oratory will recognize the old Nixon's rhetorical devices from the first page of his new book, the ninth he has written. Once again we encounter the continual setting up of straw men, the self-righteous refusal to take (or in this case recommend) the easy and popular course, even -- Lord help us! -- the incidentally-I-have-negotiated- with-Khrushchev bit. Some of the old class resentment and malice toward foes linger too. Doubtless Nixon genuinely believes Boris Yeltsin to be like Khrushchev in concealing a razor-sharp intelligence behind a somewhat oafish exterior. But when he scorns the American "foreign policy elite" for sniffing at Yeltsin because the Russian might not know which fork to use at a state banquet, he is rather obviously settling some old personal scores, and when he calls Mikhail Gorbachev "a Soviet version of Adlai Stevenson," he does not mean it as a compliment.

But the old Nixon also survives in a far more favorable sense: he has lost none of his sure instinct for gauging the force and direction of the tides of power in world affairs. For example, writing immediately after the failed Moscow putsch of last August, he predicts with remarkable prescience that the Soviet Union will dissolve into a "commonwealth of free and equal nations" that "will coordinate, not govern, the actions of republics." Consequently, his advice on foreign policy is well worth the attention even of those who still gag on hearing his name.

Nixon's central thesis is that the collapse of the Soviet Union presents the U.S. both with an unparalleled chance to help shape a more stable and peaceful world and with a great danger of a lapse into chaos and turmoil if the nation misguidedly turns its attention totally inward. He offers quite detailed advice on what to do about specific areas of potential trouble, generally in a spirit of cold-blooded realism. Again and again he insists on the continued importance of military power. If the U.S. wants to retain economic and . political influence in the new Europe, he says, it had better keep some troops there as well. Punishing China for the 1989 massacres of prodemocracy demonstrators by enacting a total economic boycott might be "emotionally satisfying" to Americans, but the U.S. "cannot effect positive change by ruining China's economy." The thing to do is keep China's free-enterprise economic innovations alive until the "neo-Stalinists" now running the country die and are succeeded by leaders who realize that "economic reform without political reform is ultimately unsustainable." Arabs and Israelis, says Nixon, will go on hating each other no matter what happens; the only thing that has ever been able to move them toward peace has been a belief that "the status quo was more painful than a potential compromise." But that very consideration offers ground for hope, since the U.S. has "the leverage to make the status quo more painful than a proposed settlement."

But what Nixon calls "the hard rock of enduring geopolitical realities" is honeycombed by an unexpected vein of moralism. The U.S. must continue aid to poor countries, says Nixon, at least partly because it has a "moral obligation" to help relieve suffering. More generally, the U.S. must spurn the suddenly fashionable new isolationism, not only for the expected practical reasons (its security and prosperity are inextricably bound up with those of the world at large) but also because it has "a moral imperative to use our awesome capabilities as the world's only superpower to promote freedom and justice."

O.K., O.K. Anyone who has more than a casual memory of the campaign gut fighter and unindicted co-conspirator of the Watergate cover-up will be irresistibly tempted to say "Look who's talking about morality" and snort in derision. So snort -- and then pay attention. This time, the man is right.