The collapse of high aspirations shattered the self-confidence without which establishments flounder. The leaders who had previously sustained American foreign policy were particularly anguished by the rage of the students. The insecurity of their elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage and a national trauma. Public demonstrations reached dimensions obliging President Johnson—who continued to describe the war in traditional terms of defending a free people against the advance of totalitarianism—to confine his public appearances in his last year in office largely to military bases.
In the months following the end of Johnson’s presidency in 1969, a number of the war’s key architects renounced their positions publicly and called for an end to military operations and an American withdrawal. These themes were elaborated until the Establishment view settled on a program to “end the war” by means of a unilateral American withdrawal in exchange only for the return of prisoners.
Richard Nixon became President at a time when 500,000 American troops were in combat—and the number was still increasing, on a schedule established by the Johnson administration—in Vietnam, as far from the U.S. borders as the globe allows. From the beginning, Nixon was committed to ending the war. But he also thought it his responsibility to do so in the context of America’s global commitments for sustaining the postwar international order. Nixon took office five months after the Soviet military occupation of Czechoslovakia, while the Soviet Union was building intercontinental missiles at a rate threatening—and, some argued, surpassing—America’s deterrent forces, and China remained adamantly and truculently hostile. America could not jettison its security commitments in one part of the world without provoking challenges to its resolve in others. The preservation of American credibility in defense of allies and the global system of order—a role the United States had performed for two decades— remained an integral part of Nixon’s calculations.
Nixon withdrew American forces at the rate of 150,000 per year and ended participation in ground combat in 1971. He authorized negotiations subject to one irreducible condition: he never accepted Hanoi’s demand that the peace process begin with the replacement of the government of South Vietnam—America’s ally—by a so-called coalition government in effect staffed by figures put forward by Hanoi. This was adamantly rejected for four years until after a failed North Vietnamese offensive (defeated without American ground forces) in 1972 finally induced Hanoi to agree to a cease-fire and political settlement it had consistently rejected over the years.
In the United States debate focused on a widespread desire to end the trauma wrought by the war on the populations of Indochina, as if America was the cause of their travail. Yet Hanoi had insisted on continued battle—not because it was unconvinced of the American commitment to peace, but because it counted on it to exhaust American willingness to sustain the sacrifices. Fighting a psychological war, it ruthlessly exploited America’s quest for compromise on behalf of a program of domination with which, it turned out, there was no splitting the difference.
The military actions that President Nixon ordered, and that as his National Security Advisor I supported, together with the policy of diplomatic flexibility, brought about a settlement in 1973. The Nixon administration was convinced that Saigon would be able to overcome ordinary violations of the agreement with its own forces; that the United States would assist with air and naval power against an all-out attack; and that over time the South Vietnamese government would be able, with American economic assistance, to build a functioning society and undergo an evolution toward more transparent institutions (as would in fact occur in South Korea).
Whether this process could have been accelerated and whether another definition could have been given to American credibility will remain the subject of heated debate. The chief obstacle was the difficulty Americans had understanding Hanoi’s way of thinking. The Johnson administration overestimated the impact of American military power. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Nixon administration overestimated the scope for negotiation. For the battle-hardened leadership in Hanoi, having spent their lives fighting for victory, compromise was the same as defeat, and a pluralistic society near inconceivable.
A resolution of this debate is beyond the scope of this volume; it was a painful process for all involved. Nixon managed a complete withdrawal and a settlement he was convinced gave the South Vietnamese a decent opportunity to shape their own fate. However, having traversed a decade of controversy and in the highly charged aftermath of the Watergate crisis, Congress severely restricted aid in 1973 and cut off all aid in 1975. North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam by sending almost its entire army across the international border. The international community remained silent, and Congress had proscribed American military intervention. The governments of Laos and Cambodia fell shortly after to Communist insurgencies, and in the latter the Khmer Rouge imposed a reckoning of almost unimaginable brutality.
America had lost its first war and also the thread to its concept of world order.
RICHARD NIXON AND INTERNATIONAL ORDER
After the carnage of the 1960s with its assassinations, civil riots, and inconclusive wars, Richard Nixon inherited in 1969 the task of restoring cohesion to the American body politic and coherence to American foreign policy. Highly intelligent, with a level of personal insecurity unexpected in such an experienced public figure, Nixon was not the ideal leader for the restoration of domestic peace. But it must also be remembered that the tactics of mass demonstrations, intimidation, and civil disobedience at the outer limit of peaceful protests had been well established by the time Nixon took his oath of office on January 20, 1969.
Nevertheless, for the task of redefining the substance of American foreign policy, Nixon was extraordinarily well prepared. As Senator from California, Vice President under Dwight D. Eisenhower, and perennial presidential candidate, he had traveled widely. The foreign leaders Nixon encountered would spare him the personal confrontations that made him uncomfortable and engage him in substantive dialogue at which he excelled. Because his solitary nature gave him more free time than ordinary political aspirants, he found extensive reading congenial. This combination made him the best prepared incoming president on foreign policy since Theodore Roosevelt.
No president since Theodore Roosevelt had addressed international order as a global concept in such a systematic and conceptual manner. In speaking with the editors of Time in 1971, Nixon articulated such a concept. In his vision, five major centers of political and economic power would operate on the basis of an informal commitment by each to pursue its interests with restraint. The outcome of their interlocking ambitions and inhibitions would be equilibrium:
We must remember the only time in the history of the world that we have had any extended period of peace is when there has been balance of power. It is when one nation becomes infinitely more powerful in relation to its potential competitor that the danger of war arises. So I believe in a world in which the United States is powerful. I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, not playing one against the other, an even balance.
What was remarkable in this presentation was that two of the countries listed as part of a concert of powers were in fact adversaries: the U.S.S.R., with which America was engaged in a cold war, and China, with which it had just resumed diplomatic contact after a hiatus of over two decades and where the United States had no embassy or formal diplomatic relations. Theodore Roosevelt had articulated an idea of world order in which the United States was the guardian of the global equilibrium. Nixon went further in arguing that the United States should be an integral part of an ever-changing, fluid balance, not as the balancer, but as a component.
The passage also displayed Nixon’s tactical skill, as when he renounced any intention of playing off one of the components of the balance against another. A subtle way of warning a potent
ial adversary is to renounce a capability he knows one possesses and that will not be altered by the renunciation. Nixon made these remarks as he was about to leave for Beijing, marking a dramatic improvement in relations and the first time a sitting American president had visited China. Balancing China against the Soviet Union from a position in which America was closer to each Communist giant than they were to each other was, of course, exactly the design of the evolving strategy. In February 1971, Nixon’s annual foreign policy report referred to China as the People’s Republic of China—the first time an official American document had accorded it that degree of recognition—and stated that the United States was “prepared to establish a dialogue with Peking” on the basis of national interest.
Nixon made a related point regarding Chinese domestic policies while I was on the way to China on the so-called secret trip in July 1971. Addressing an audience in Kansas City, Nixon argued that “Chinese domestic travail”—that is, the Cultural Revolution—should not confer
any sense of satisfaction that it will always be that way. Because when we see the Chinese as people—and I have seen them all over the world …—they are creative, they are productive, they are one of the most capable people in the world. And 800 million Chinese are going to be, inevitably, an enormous economic power, with all that that means in terms of what they could be in other areas if they move in that direction.
These phrases, commonplace today, were revolutionary at that time. Because they were delivered extemporaneously—and I was out of communication with Washington—it was Zhou Enlai who brought them to my attention as I started the first dialogue with Beijing in more than twenty years. Nixon, inveterate anti-Communist, had decided that the imperatives of geopolitical equilibrium overrode the demands of ideological purity—as, fortuitously, had his counterparts in China.
In the presidential election campaign of 1972, Nixon’s opponent, George McGovern, had taunted, “Come home, America!” Nixon replied in effect that if America shirked its international responsibility, it would surely fail at home. He declared that “only if we act greatly in meeting our responsibilities abroad will we remain a great nation, and only if we remain a great nation will we act greatly in meeting our challenges at home.” At the same time, he sought to temper “our instinct that we knew what was best for others,” which in turn brought on “their temptation to lean on our prescriptions.”
To this end, Nixon established a practice of annual reports on the state of the world. Like all presidential documents, these were drafted by White House associates, in this case the National Security Council staff under my direction. But Nixon set the general strategic tone of the documents and reviewed them as they were being completed. They were used as guidance to the governmental agencies dealing with foreign policy and, more important, as an indication to foreign countries of the direction of American strategy.
Nixon was enough of a realist to stress that the United States could not entrust its destiny entirely or even largely to the goodwill of others. As his 1970 report underscored, peace required a willingness to negotiate and seek new forms of partnership, but these alone would not suffice: “The second element of a durable peace must be America’s strength. Peace, we have learned, cannot be gained by goodwill alone.” Peace would be strengthened, not obstructed, he assessed, by continued demonstrations of American power and a proven willingness to act globally—which evoked shades of Theodore Roosevelt sending the Great White Fleet to circumnavigate the globe in 1907–9. Neither could the United States expect other countries to mortgage their future by basing their foreign policy primarily on the goodwill of others. The guiding principle was the effort to build an international order that related power to legitimacy—in the sense that all its key members considered the arrangement just:
All nations, adversaries and friends alike, must have a stake in preserving the international system. They must feel that their principles are being respected and their national interests secured … If the international environment meets their vital concerns, they will work to maintain it.
It was the vision of such an international order that provided the first impetus for the opening to China, which Nixon considered an indispensable component of it. One facet of the opening to China was the attempt to transcend the domestic strife of the past decade. Nixon became President of a nation shaken by a decade of domestic and international upheaval and an inconclusive war. It was important to convey to it a vision of peace and international comity to lift it toward visions worthy of its history and its values. Equally significant was a redefinition of America’s concept of world order. An improved relationship with China would gradually isolate the Soviet Union or impel it to seek better relations with the United States. As long as the United States took care to remain closer to each of the Communist superpowers than they were to each other, the specter of the Sino-Soviet cooperative quest for world hegemony that had haunted American foreign policy for two decades would be stifled. (In time, the Soviet Union found itself unable to sustain this insoluble, largely self-created dilemma of facing adversaries in both Europe and Asia, including within its own ostensible ideological camp.)
Nixon’s attempt to make American idealism practical and American pragmatism long-range was attacked by both sides, reflecting the American ambivalence between power and principle. Idealists criticized Nixon for conducting foreign policy by geopolitical principles. Conservatives challenged him on the ground that a relaxation of tensions with the Soviet Union was a form of abdication vis-à-vis the Communist challenge to Western civilization. Both types of critics overlooked that Nixon undertook a tenacious defense along the Soviet periphery, that he was the first American President to visit Eastern Europe (Yugoslavia, Poland, and Romania), symbolically challenging Soviet control, and that he saw the United States through several crises with the Soviet Union, during two of which (in October 1970 and October 1973) he did not flinch from putting American military forces on alert.
Nixon had shown unusual skill in the geopolitical aspect of building a world order. He patiently linked the various components of strategy to each other, and he showed extraordinary courage in withstanding crises and great persistence in pursuing long-range aims in foreign policy. One of his oft-repeated operating principles was as follows: “You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely.” As a result, in one eighteen-month period, during 1972–73, he brought about the end of the Vietnam War, an opening to China, a summit with the Soviet Union even while escalating the military effort in response to a North Vietnamese offensive, the switch of Egypt from a Soviet ally to close cooperation with the United States, two disengagement agreements in the Middle East—one between Israel and Egypt, the other with Syria (lasting to this writing, even amidst a brutal civil war)—and the start of the European Security Conference, whose outcome over the long term severely weakened Soviet control of Eastern Europe.
But at the juncture when tactical achievement might have been translated into a permanent concept of world order linking inspirational vision to a workable equilibrium, tragedy supervened. The Vietnam War had exhausted energies on all sides. The Watergate debacle, foolishly self-inflicted and ruthlessly exploited by Nixon’s longtime critics, paralyzed executive authority. In a normal period, the various strands of Nixon’s policy would have been consolidated into a new long-term American strategy. Nixon had a glimpse of the promised land, where hope and reality conjoined—the end of the Cold War, a redefinition of the Atlantic Alliance, a genuine partnership with China, a major step toward Middle East peace, the beginning of Russia’s reintegration into an international order—but he did not have time to merge his geopolitical vision with the occasion. It was left to others to undertake that journey.
THE BEGINNING OF RENEWAL
After the anguish of the 1960s and the collapse of a presidency, America needed above all to restore its cohesion. It was fortunate that the man called to this unprecedented ta
sk was Gerald Ford.
Propelled into an office he had not sought, Ford had never been involved in the complex gyrations of presidential politics. For that reason, freed from obsession with focus groups and public relations, he could practice in the presidency the values of goodwill and faith in his country on which he had been brought up. His long service in the House, where he sat on key defense and intelligence subcommittees, gave him an overview of foreign policy challenges.
Ford’s historic service was to overcome America’s divisions. In his foreign policy, he strove—and largely succeeded—to relate power to principle. His administration witnessed the completion of the first agreement between Israel and an Arab state—in this case, Egypt—whose provisions were largely political. The second Sinai disengagement agreement marked Egypt’s irrevocable turning toward a peace agreement. Ford initiated an active diplomacy to bring about majority rule in southern Africa—the first American President to do so explicitly. In the face of strong domestic opposition, he supervised the conclusion of the European Security Conference. Among its many provisions were clauses that enshrined human rights as one of the European security principles. These terms were used by heroic individuals such as Lech Walesa in Poland and Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia to bring democracy to their countries and start the downfall of Communism.
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