by Tony Judt
Bundy, as befits a former official of the CIA, has nothing against “secrecy,” an inevitable component of policymaking in any sensitive area, and one for which there are appropriate and legitimate institutional structures. His criticism concerns deception, and the peculiar combination of duplicity and vagueness that marked foreign policy in the Nixon era. “The essential to good diplomacy,” Harold Nicolson once suggested, “is precision. The main enemy of good diplomacy is imprecision.” And, paradoxical as it may seem, the main source of imprecision in this era was the obsession with personal diplomacy. Diplomacy (Harold Nicolson again) “should be a disagreeable business . . . recorded in hard print.”4
For Kissinger, in Bundy’s account, the reverse was true—he preferred to treat diplomacy as a series of confidential contacts with men with whom he could “do business,” while avoiding a clear and official record wherever possible. Moreover, in Bundy’s words: “Contrary to the repeated claims of Kissinger in particular, neither he nor Nixon operated solely, or even habitually, on the basis of dispassionate analysis of the U.S. national interest.” Both men thought rather of people in terms of “heroes and villains,” and both “were strongly influenced by personal impressions of individuals.”5
As a result, Kissinger sidetracked professional diplomats, established back channels with all manner of persons, and took over crucial negotiations himself, often without consulting the existing negotiating team and leaving them completely in the dark. On this Bundy is quite unforgiving. The “parallel track” in Paris, where Kissinger met secretly with Le Duc Tho while the official U.S. negotiators twiddled their thumbs, or a series of interventions in arms negotiations that resulted in the frustrated resignations of senior U.S. officials—these are the occasion for some of his more forthright strictures. Of the SALT 1 talks in 1970 he writes, “It was hardly the way to conduct a major negotiation: a President not really interested, his principal assistant intervening without the knowledge or concurrence of the negotiating team, and the team left to fend for itself.” Of those same SALT talks a year later: “Kissinger had left many loose ends, in another sloppy negotiating performance.” And of the Vietnam peace talks and Kissinger’s “personal diplomacy” in general: “Negotiations bored Nixon and fascinated Kissinger, whose enthusiasm was not always matched by his skill.”
How telling are these criticisms? That Kissinger was sometimes high-handed in dealing with his staff, or that on occasion he humiliated professional negotiators in order to preserve secrecy or highlight his own role, would be neither here nor there if he had secured the desired outcomes. Bundy’s emphasis on such matters may strike some readers as excessive. But on many issues his criticisms are justified by the evidence he provides of poorly executed negotiations and oversold agreements.
In order to keep direct control over everything in this way, Nixon and Kissinger did not just deceive others as to their actions; they were also, Bundy suggests, less effective than they might have been even in matters that interested them. As for places and problems in which they had no sustained interest, or about which they knew very little, the outcomes were disastrous. They were blindsided, for example, by the oil crisis of 1973-74 because, Bundy writes, neither man grasped the connection between domestic demand, U.S. domestic oil production, and the changing terms of trade in international energy (the U.S. share of world oil production fell from 64 percent in 1948 to 22 percent by 1972, even as U.S. domestic usage steadily rose). Oil—like trade, or small, peripheral countries—did not figure in their view of what counted or how the world worked, and they were consistently ineffectual or wrong, through either inaction or a badly conceived policy, when faced with such matters.
Three instances will serve to illustrate these claims. Cambodia— ”Mr. Nixon’s war”—is normally thought of as the major flaw in the Nixon record, and so it is. It is the occasion for Bundy’s strongest condemnation—“a black page in the history of American foreign policy.” In Cambodia the Nixon administration repeated all the mistakes of Vietnam on an accelerated and concentrated scale without the excuse of inexperience. It secretly authorized over 3,600 B-52 air raids against suspected (but undiscovered) Vietcong bases and against North Vietnamese forces in Cambodia in 1969-70 alone. By 1974, as Bundy shows, this policy had contributed to the rise of the Khmer Rouge—a Communist guerrilla organization whose crimes certainly cannot be laid at Nixon’s door, but whose political prospects were enhanced by the devastation brought about by the war. Bundy’s summary of the final stage of the Cambodian disaster is characteristic in its careful review of the record and worth quoting at length:
General Vogt [the commander of the U.S. Seventh Air Force] and most of the senior civilians involved (including Ambassador Swank) believed that the bombing kept Lon Nol afloat in the face of the 1973 Khmer Rouge offensive. It may have been crucial in enabling the government forces, using artillery, to hold their central enclave, including Phnom Penh, into 1974 and eventually until the early spring of 1975. Massive airpower used against a lightly armed attacking force with no antiaircraft capability could be effective in preventing victory for the opposing force.
On the other hand, the intensity of the bombing—as a matter of common-sense judgement shared by many objective observers— drove the Khmer Rouge to greater military efforts. It also made them more self-reliant, more separate from North Vietnam, more alienated from Sihanouk, and altogether less subject to influence from any of their Communist supporters. The bombing surely made it more rather than less difficult for any party to persuade the Khmer Rouge to accept a cease-fire and negotiate a political compromise—which was the stated objective.
The chances of such a change of course by the Khmer Rouge were almost certainly slim already. A determined negotiating effort to enlist Sihanouk . . . combined with a much more limited program of bombing to keep the threat alive, might just have stood a chance. As it was, intense bombing with no negotiating effort, until the Khmer Rouge was even more embittered, was the worst of all worlds. As throughout the American involvement in Cambodia, the policy miscalculations alone—apart from eventual congressional reactions—were monumental. They must be laid squarely at the door of Nixon and his two principal advisers, Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger.
Nixon, Kissinger, and Alexander Haig kept the details of the Cambodian operation to themselves and a handful of colleagues as long as they could, rarely sought advice from sources outside the military (which was uniquely concerned with blocking North Vietnamese supply routes passing through eastern Cambodia), and made, Bundy writes, imprudent and unsustainable promises to Lon Nol (Cambodia’s ruler following the overthrow in March 1970 of the ostensibly neutral Prince Sihanouk in the wake of the initial bombings). They not only lost the country to the Communists anyway, following a devastating four-year war, but undermined their own support at home and their country’s standing abroad. In Bundy’s words, “In short, the United States was raining bombs on a small country with little prospect of a good outcome. . . . The stakes in Cambodia came down, then, almost entirely to the asserted psychological impact in South Vietnam if Cambodia fell and to Nixon’s sense of personal commitment to Lon Nol.”
Hardly a victory for grand strategic thinking. There were well-informed people in the State Department (and even more at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris) who might have counseled Kissinger and Nixon against doing what they proposed, but they were not asked.6 Kissinger, even more than Nixon, held it as axiomatic that the world is run by Great Powers, to whose instructions and interests lesser states duly respond. Policy in and toward Cambodia was thus conceived and practiced with no consistent attention paid to the distinctive characteristics of any of the local interested parties. In the case of Communist states and organizations, moreover, Kissinger took it to be self-evident that the lines of communication ran straight and true, from Moscow (or Beijing) to the lowest guerrilla operative in the bush.
To be fair to Kissinger, he was not alone in this belief—and in the case of the satellite state
s of Eastern Europe under Stalin and his successors, or powerless and tiny Communist movements in Western Europe or the U.S., it was in large measure accurate. And the rulers of the Kremlin, at least, dearly wished it were universally true, and had an active interest in convincing outsiders that it was. But the experience of Malaysia, Indonesia, and much of Latin America might have taught otherwise, had those in power been listening. Just as the Vietnamese rulers in Hanoi were historically suspicious of China, so the Cambodian Communists were never in thrall to their Vietnamese “comrades,” though the Maoist “model”—which they had experienced firsthand in China—undoubtedly shaped their thinking more directly. Zhou Enlai even tried once to convey this basic truth about Asian history and Communist politics to Kissinger in person, to no apparent avail.
The Cambodian policy, in Bundy’s analysis, was thus ultimately justified by the claim that there was “linkage,” that just as invasion in Cambodia might pay off in Vietnam, so pressure in Hanoi (by its Soviet or Chinese “masters”) might trickle down to the Khmer Rouge and bring about some sort of truce in Cambodia itself. Hence the suggestion that one of the virtues of détente would be the leverage the U.S. could assert, through its improved relations with Moscow or Beijing, upon their ill-behaved offspring in Southeast Asia. The military and logistical links were there, but, as Bundy’s account makes clear, the leverage never existed.The whole enterprise rested on an astonishing mix of overconfidence, misguided strategic theorizing, and ignorance.
Cambodia was the worst example, but it was not the only one. In March 1971 the Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan violently suppressed riots in East Pakistan; millions of refugees fled into neighboring India. Tension mounted all year until December when, following Pakistan’s dispatch of large numbers of troops to quell discontent in East Pakistan, fighting broke out between India and Pakistan on India’s northwest frontier. The war lasted a matter of weeks, until the Pakistani forces surrendered and withdrew, and East Pakistan declared its independence as Bangladesh, leaving a defeated, humiliated, and much-reduced Pakistani state. The indigenous sources of this conflict needn’t concern us here; the point is that they were also of no concern to Washington, which nonetheless “tilted” heavily toward Pakistan, to the point of putting pressure on India and sending a U.S. naval task group to the Bay of Bengal.
Why should the U.S., which had no discernible direct interest in the conflict, resort to gunboat diplomacy and demonstrate such public support for one party—the repressive, dictatorial Yahya Khan—at the cost of alienating not just India, a major power in Asia and one of its few stable democracies, but also politicized Muslims everywhere? Why, in short, did Kissinger and Nixon engage in a piece of geopolitics that Bundy rightly describes as a “fiasco” and that has left a long and unhelpful legacy of distrust for the U.S. in the entire region? For the breathtakingly simple reason, Bundy writes, that Pakistan was perceived as a friend of China (Yahya Khan had the previous year served as the link through which Kissinger made contact with the Chinese), and India, as a notoriously “neutral” state, had cultivated good relations with the Soviet Union. In Kissinger’s words, quoted by Nixon himself, “We don’t really have any choice. We can’t allow a friend of ours and China to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia’s.”7
Yahya Khan had certainly performed friendly services for Nixon and Kissinger, helping establish the early contacts between Beijing and Washington and keeping them secret at a time when leaks might have been disastrous for Nixon’s China project. But even if one allows that Pakistan was a “friend of ours,” it did not follow that the U.S. need line up behind a violent and (as it proved) doomed military despot. However, in Kissinger’s words once again, “Why is it our business how they govern themselves?”8 And so, in another mechanistic application of hypothetical laws of geopolitical strategy, the U.S. backed the wrong man in the wrong conflict, securing, as might have been predicted, an undesired outcome and a legacy of reduced influence.
There is no evidence that China would have reacted badly, or even cared, if the U.S. had “sat out” the Indo-Pakistan conflict; there were even less grounds for believing that the Soviet Union was poised to intervene on India’s behalf—the ostensible reason for the dispatch of the naval task group. There is, on the other hand (according to Bundy), some evidence that Yahya Khan was misled, or given grounds for misleading himself, into thinking that he had American backing for his uncompromising stance, first in East Pakistan and then toward India. A fiasco indeed.
Let us allow that Southeast Asia by 1970 was a region in which the policy of any U.S. administration was probably doomed to meet an unsatisfactory and ultimately disastrous end. William Bundy, it must be said, does not suggest a strategy by which the U.S. could have brought to a better end the war he had earlier helped to set in motion. Let us further acknowledge that the Indian subcontinent was terra incognita to most Americans (though, once again, not to some scorned experts at the State Department and in other official agencies); it is not just in Washington, after all, that men have badly misjudged situations taking place in “far away countries of which they know little.” But what of Europe, the centerpiece of the cold war and thus the site of Nixon’s own experience of foreign policy in the fifties, as well as the region in whose history Kissinger established his scholarly reputation?
In later writings, both men took some credit for laying the groundwork of détente in Europe—in his memorial eulogy for the late president, Kissinger claimed this as one of Nixon’s major achievements. William Bundy is skeptical of this view. At the time, both men were very wary of any change in Europe that they did not fully control—and whereas West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had always consulted fully with Washington before making the slightest move, Willy Brandt in particular, while keeping his American allies fully informed, pursued his own agenda. In the worldview of Kissinger, only one superpower—the U.S.—was fully entitled to engage its counterpart— the Soviet Union—in serious conversations that might lead to significant change. The White House was overtly displeased at Brandt’s election to the Chancellery in 1969 and gave only grudging and unenthusiastic assent to his Ostpolitik—the treaties and agreements he negotiated between the Federal Republic and the Soviet bloc states.
One reason for this was that Kissinger, concerned with geopolitical factors in international affairs, was reluctant to accept a definitive territorial and frontier settlement in Europe. But he may, at the time, have underestimated its significance for Moscow. When the Kremlin chose to overlook Nixon’s resumed bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972 and went ahead with plans for a summit meeting, the U.S. administration took credit for its successful “gamble,” attributing Soviet acquiescence to Moscow’s nervousness at Nixon’s “China turn.” This view has been disputed by such contemporary Russian officials as Anatoly Dobrynin and Georgi Arbatov. “Kissinger,” Arbatov said, “thinks it was China that played the decisive role in getting us to feel the need to preserve our relationship with the USA. . . . But Berlin actually played a much bigger role, almost a decisive one. Having the East German situation settled was most important to us, and we did not want to jeopardize that.”9
Kissinger in his memoirs concluded “with hindsight” that the Soviets did not cancel the summit for several reasons. One was that cancellation would “bring about the Soviet’s worst nightmare, an American relationship with Peking not balanced by equal ties with Moscow.” But he also said that renewed Soviet-American hostility “would almost certainly have upset the applecart of Brandt’s policy, [and] the Soviet Union’s carefully nurtured strategy for Europe would have collapsed.” Bundy, for his part, concludes that Brandt’s policy of Ostpolitik “and its coming up for final Bundestag approval at that crucial moment saved the summit. At the moment of truth, stabilizing the situation in Germany, completing a new European order, and insuring Soviet control of the Eastern European nations . . . were more important to the Soviet Union than international solidarity.”
Whether or n
ot the European version of détente was such a good thing is a debatable issue—Bundy certainly admires it unstintingly, based as it was on “slow day-to-day changes and increased contacts,” in contrast to the more demonstrative U.S. version of détente, linked to high-level agreements and of questionable long-term value. I have argued elsewhere that both the West German Ostpolitik and the U.S. idea of détente demonstrated an inadequate grasp of the weakness and instability of Communist regimes, notably that of East Germany, and showed as well a cavalier insensitivity to the needs and hopes of the population of Europe’s eastern half, for whom a “definitive” postwar settlement fixing Europe’s political and ideological frontiers into place was far from desirable, and was much resented. In any case, détente’s indirect contribution to the destabilizing of the Soviet Union and its satellites was not part of Kissinger’s—or Brandt’s—goals. The architects of Helsinki cannot take credit for that accomplishment.10
What is beyond question is that Kissinger in particular grew rather frustrated in his dealings with the divided and changing leadership of Europe’s many states. As he put it himself, “[R]elations with Europe did not lend themselves to secret diplomacy followed by spectacular pronouncements. There were too many nations involved to permit the use of backchannels.” But then that is how it is with a continent full of medium-sized pluralist democracies. Willy Brandt wrote that “Henry Kissinger did not like to think of Europeans speaking with one voice. He preferred to juggle with Paris, London and Bonn, playing them off one against another, in the old style.”11 Brandt is somewhat disingenuous here; it suited him to think of European statesmen as speaking with one voice when they didn’t—and don’t. But his perception of Kissinger’s preferences seems no less accurate for that.
The “old style” was not very effective, however. One of its chief results was to weaken the Atlantic alliance, diminishing European trust in Washington. In April 1973, Kissinger, in a famously unfortunate speech aimed at America’s continental allies, declared a “European Year” without consulting a single European leader; the speech, in Bundy’s words, was “didactic, occasionally scolding and petulant, and free of any suggestion that the United States might have neglected some of its own obligations, or might have erred in some of its [own] economic policies or energy practices.”