350. Minutes of the Secretary of State’s Staff Meeting, Washington, August 16, 1976, 8:10 a.m..1 2
LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
- Henry A. Kissinger, Secretary of State
- Charles W. Robinson, Deputy Secretary
- Philip C. Habib, Under Secretary for Political Affairs
- Carlyle E. Maw, Under Secretary for Security Assistance
- Helmut C. Sonnenfeldt, Counselor
- William E. Schaufele, Jr., Assistant Secretary, African Affairs,
- Harry W. Shlaudeman, Assistant secretary, Inter-American Affairs
- Arthur W, Hummel, Assistant Secretary, East Asian & Pacific Affairs
- Arthur A. Hartman, Assistant Secretary, European Affairs
- Alfred L. Atherton, Jr., Assistant Secretary, Near Eastern & South Asian Affairs
- Roger Kirk, Deputy Director, INR
- Winston Lord, Director, Policy Planning Staff
- Paul Boeker, Economic & Business Affairs
- Frederic Z. Brown, Press Relations
- George S. Vest, Politico-Military Affairs
- Samuel W. Lewis, Assistant Secretary, IO
- Robert J, McCloskey Assistant Secretary, Congressional Relations
- Frank V. Ortiz, S/S
- Richard W Aherne, S
[Omitted here is material unrelated to the Philippines.]
Okay, Art.
MR. HUMMEL: I just got back on Saturday evening and I am still trying to catch up.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Back from where? Oh, I forgot that you had been gone.
MR. HUMMEL: I will do a trip report. We have [Page 03] more problems in the Southeast Asian countries. The reporting has indicated, at least to me, in terms of the reverberations back from the Third World group on these countries, that we previously felt were more sensible.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Like where, Malaysia?
MR. HUMMEL: I didn’t go to Malaysia, but from Thailand and Indonesia. I stopped briefly in Singapore.
MR. ROBINSON: It has an impact on the Philippines.
MR. HUMMEL: My feeling is the negotiations with the Philippines are in somewhat more trouble.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Chuck’s impressions is that we are not doing much to help them. This is also my impression.
MR. HUMMEL: Yes. I will have some suggestions on how to handle this sort of thing.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: My impression for months has been that for some reason I can’t figure out, we have chosen this to make our grand stand.
MR. ROBINSON: Well, that is —
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Without approval from me.
MR. HABIB: There is a memo that was just sent [Page 04] to you on the weekend, which is out, with some options and some approaches which I think will bring the whole thing together.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: That has nothing to do with it.
MR. HABIB: In some ways, the Defense Department has been dragging its feet because it is quite satisfied with the present agreement. We have an agreement now that goes to ’99.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Which they have got to be given to understand will not be sustained.
MR. HARTMAN: That is the same attitude as the Greek thing. They don’t want anything to set a precedent.
MR. HABIB: As a result, you bog down in some of these technicalities on definitions, and things like that, which don’t allow you to go forward. They don’t help you to get the financial element of the agreement squared away. It is bogged down in OMB, which is refusing to consider the thing at the present time. And if you can’t provide the financial inducement —
SECRETARY KISSINGER: That is only $4 million of an opening bid.
[Page 05]MR. HUMMEL: They want to wrap up a final answer at the top-most level, and that is what we are hung up on. I think we ought to break this out, and go in with the decision on opening bids, and save for later the wrangle on how high we shall go eventually.
MR. HABIB: We need an opening bid. Our proposal was an opening bid.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: What we can’t have is middle level people fighting with middle level people at OMB. One phone call by me will bring it to a head. And it is easier making it now than two months ago. I could have done it two months ago, and that forces it to the President. There is no way. You guys can talk until you are blue in the face. Lynn is playing a different game. He doesn’t care about the Philippine bases.
MR. HABIB: The only reason you haven’t got the two, we knew Chuck was going out, and as soon as he got back, the thing is going to be brought to your attention now to break it loose. Because that is what has to be done.
MR. HUMMEL: We have agreement on the opening figure. At least there is no disagreement.
[Page 06]MR. HABIB: That is right, except in OMB, which is what the Secretary has to break loose. They say they don’t want to start that high. So that is why it has got to be broken loose. We have got Defense to agree to the starting figure. OMB doesn’t like it. I went over the memo on the weekend. It will be coming up. We will take your latest discoveries from your trip out there into account. And there are certain things the Secretary has to do now, and one is to get OMB to knuckle under.
MR. ROBINSON: There are two basic issues. One is the technical hang-ups.
MR. HABIB: My suggestion is —
SECRETARY KISSINGER: We can settle the thing in one week, if we can get Marcos — if we have a will to settle it, and if we can get Marcos. All the rest is baloney. That is the sort of negotiation that used to be done if I would go out there. If that is what Marcos’ attitude is, which I suspect it is, since Marcos can’t afford to let us give up the bases, either. We could basically settle this thing in a week or two, if we could get cooperation at the top level here and cooperation at the top level there. All the rest is — excuse me — chicken shit stuff. This is all little bureaucrats trying to [Page 07] prove how important they are by kicking stupid figures around.
What is the sense of arguing about a low figure when you know full well you have got to go to the higher figure. So it is the minor leaguers approving $64 million or $60 million, when they know it is going to be let at $75 million.
MR. HABIB: Or $100 million.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: It will not be $64 million, so what is the sense of arguing about that figure. We have spent six weeks at least on whether it should be $60 or $64 million.
MR. HABIB: That hasn’t been a factor in the negotiation. My suggestion, very frankly, is that we give it one month to clean up all of the details, and then whatever is left, that you go out and solve it in 24 hours.
SECRETARY KISSINGER It will never work that way. I can’t go out. But it will never work that way, because Defense is going to find a way of screwing it up.
MR. HABIB: They have vacillated over it, they either want it or they don’t want it before the election. [Page 08] I don’t think Marcos is playing it square. Marcos is trying to figure out whether he can get a better deal before or after the election.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Marcos is not a fool. He knows he can’t get a better deal from us, and he will get a worse deal from the Democrats.
So, you figure the Democrats are going to start out with a big bang on the bases agreement?
MR. ROBINSON: I think he recognized that —
SECRETARY KISSINGER: He can do better — he can either get the best we can do. We are not going to do better after the election, if Ford gets re-elected.
MR. HUMMEL: There are not only technical matters, there is another memo on the way to you about a substantive problem about how the treaty applies in various difficult cases.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: That is it exactly. That is the real issue.
MR. HUMMEL: Exactly. This is a substantive issue, and not merely technicalities.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: That has to be settled. That is a serious issue. The rest is minor league stuff, [Page 09] I agree with you.
MR. HABIB: This isn’t going to be settled in negotiations.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: Not settled out there.
MR. HABIB: That is going to have to be settled at a very high level.
MR. ROBINSON: That is the only way, and I don’t think you will make much progress on these technical problems.
MR. HABIB: That does not have to be part of the negotiation of the treaty itself, of the base agreement. The base agreement has nothing to do with that directly. You can negotiate the base agreement provided there is an interpretation of the mutual security treaty. That could be done separately and distinctly, and it has got to be done at a high level.
MR. LORD: As far as the political part, but the technical part you can separate and try to use it as leverage.
MR. ROBINSON: Politically, he doesn’t have anyone in that country that can open his mouth about one Goddamn thing.
[Page 10]SECRETARY KISSINGER: Don’t be an idiot. The guy is sitting out there, with Viet-Nam having gone down the drain, having the only U.S. bases there. He needs something to justify our being there. The fact that he doesn’t have any opposition doesn’t prove a bloody thing.
MR. HABIB: If he goes too far and pushes us, he will get into trouble in his own country. We don’t have to knuckle under on anything with this guy.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: That is not the point. It is spectacularly not the point. It is that mentality that has gotten us into difficulty.
MR. HABIB: This fellow has been playing games on certain things. He will say one thing one month, and something else another month. It is not that Sullivan hasn’t tried. I am not trying to defend everything Sullivan has done.
SECRETARY KISSINGER: He has missed the point of what concerns the Philippines sitting out there with an American base. Therefore, he kept raising a whole series of objections, since he never got the principal point, which is a political one.
Once we have answered that, then we can see [Page 11] whether he is playing games. Before that, we can’t know whether he is playing games because we have studiously avoided what bothers him.
MR. HABIB: We have answered him for ten years. And he hasn’t accepted the answer.
Okay, wait until you study the issue, you will see what I mean.
[Omitted here is material unrelated to the Philippines.]