Nixon Calls for ‘New Realism’ on Soviets

The old American foreign policies of containment and detente are inadequate for dealing with the Soviet Union, former President Richard M. Nixon said Thursday as he called for “a new realism” in dealing with the Soviet Union, based not on friendship but on respect.

Nixon told the Los Angeles World Affairs Council that the two superpowers need “rules of engagement for living with our differences rather than dying over them.”

Addressing an audience of about 1,100 at the Bonaventure Hotel, the former President said that the two nations “can never be friends, but we cannot afford to be enemies.”

He said American foreign policy toward the Soviet Union should be built on “the hard reality of mutual respect” and not “the soft illusion of mutual affection.” And he called on President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev to avoid an “insane” continuation of the nuclear arms race.

‘Substantial Pillars’

The two leaders, Nixon said, should “re-establish the practice of regular summits” to form a long-term relationship “built upon eight very substantial pillars of peace.”

The summits are important because they “reduce the chance that either (leader) will misjudge the other and underestimate the other’s will to resist where his vital interests are threatened,” he said.

Nixon, 72, appearing fit and vigorous despite recent minor illnesses, was surrounded both by old friends and an old political enemy. Nixon’s budget director, Roy L. Ash, and his ambassador to Britain, Walter H. Annenberg, sat in the front row with council member Edmund G. (Pat) Brown, who won reelection as governor by defeating Nixon in 1962.

They listened as Nixon outlined his “pillars of peace:”

--The Soviet Union is a military superpower that “deserves our respect.” It matters little whether Reagan and Gorbachev liked each other upon meeting last November in Geneva, he said. “Affection between allies is useful. Respect between adversaries is indispensable.”

--Neither side likes the other’s political system and many profound differences may never be settled. The goal of diplomacy should be to resolve differences where possible, and where it is not, avoid “dying over them.”

--”We will not seek to impose our system on them and we will resist their efforts to impose their system on us or our allies.”

--The United States should not seek military superiority but should do what it can to prevent the Soviets from obtaining it.

--The United States should meet the Soviet Union “halfway” to “defuse Third World conflicts in areas where our interests collide in such a way that they could draw us into war.”

--Both superpowers have a common enemy--international terrorism.

--U.S. trade with the Soviet Union should be increased.

--Instead of containment and detente, “we should break new ground by combining competition and coexistence. We should compete with each other economically and ideologically on both sides of the Iron Curtain. We should cooperate with each other in trying to prevent that competition from escalating into armed conflict.”