From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (129 page)

Nixon's China trip brought major payoffs. Conservatives naturally complained about the president consorting with the Antichrist and fretted about Taiwan; columnist William Buckley compared the smile on Zhou's
face to the way Stalin must have looked after Yalta. Not surprisingly, however, after all the publicity, the trip was immensely popular at home, winning bipartisan praise for the administration. There were immediate tangible results. The two nations established unofficial embassies through liaison offices in the capitals to conduct diplomatic business and promote trade. George H. W. Bush was named the first envoy. Commerce shot up, most of it U.S. grain exports to China. The expansion of travel and cultural exchange may have been more significant over the long haul. Nixon's bold move provided leverage against the USSR, helped ease tensions in East Asia, and reduced the threat of Sino-American conflict. For once, the actual results lived up to the hype spewed forth by the White House. The only untoward note was Nixon's gloomy, private postconference rumination, perhaps fueled by alcohol, over whether anyone would appreciate the significance of what had occurred.
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Indirectly, at least, Nixon's China trip also sparked a major escalation of the war in Vietnam. Increasingly nervous about U.S. approaches to China and the USSR and eager to exploit U.S. electoral politics and the vacuum created by Nixon's troop withdrawals, the North Vietnamese on March 30, 1972, launched a massive conventional invasion of South Vietnam. In its early stages, the so-called Easter Offensive succeeded smashingly. Again catching the United States and South Vietnam off guard, North Vietnamese forces advanced rapidly on three fronts, in the South driving within sixty miles of Saigon. Keenly aware of the implications for his foreign policy and especially for domestic politics, Nixon refused to stand by and allow South Vietnam to fall. Despite warnings from some anxious advisers that escalation might set off another outburst of domestic opposition or provoke Moscow to cancel the upcoming summit, he struck back with a vengeance. Aiming to cripple North Vietnam's capacity to make war, he ordered the most drastic U.S. escalation since 1965: a massive, sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam itself; a naval blockade; and the mining of Haiphong, the nation's major harbor. Insisting that the United States could not have a "viable foreign policy" if it was "humiliated" in Vietnam, he ordered that Hanoi be "bombed to smithereens." "The "bastards have never been bombed like they're going to be bombed this time," he vowed.
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Nixon's response blunted the North Vietnamese offensive. The ferocious fighting of the summer of 1972 raised the stalemate to yet another level of violence and on both sides in time created pressures for a settlement.

Nixon's bold moves in Vietnam proved no more than a speed bump on the road to Moscow. On his third day in the USSR, in a session at Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev's dacha, Soviet leaders launched a three-hour tirade against America's "cruel" aggression in Vietnam, even comparing the United States to Nazi Germany. Following this obviously for-the-record outburst, the conferees adjourned to a bountiful and convivial dinner during which Brezhnev and Nixon jokingly agreed that Kissinger should be exiled to Siberia.
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The treaties concluded in Moscow laid the foundation for Soviet-American detente, establishing areas of agreement and a spirit of concord but also leaving ambiguities and differences that would cause later discord and spark bitter political controversy in the United States. As in Beijing, the State Department was shunted away from the main event; at one point, Kissinger even conspired with Brezhnev to spring an agreement on his unsuspecting rivals! The Cold War adversaries formalized a statement of "Basic Principles" to guide their future relations. Kissinger put much stock in the document, and Soviet leaders were especially pleased with phrases that recognized their superpower status. A statement that relations would be conducted on the "basis of peaceful coexistence" obscured only to the uninitiated Soviet determination to continue superpower competition. The two nations agreed not to exploit regional tensions, establish spheres of influence, or "engage in efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other." In fact, neither gave up efforts to do so. Each in time would accuse the other of violating the Moscow statement. The United States agreed to a Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, something important to the Soviets; the Kremlin in turn accepted the U.S. proposal to discuss mutual and balanced force reductions in Europe. Nixon and Brezhnev also discussed economic issues, facilitating major agreements later in the year.
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For both sides, the arms control agreements formed the keystone of this first detente summit. Most of the terms had been hammered out in preliminary talks in Helsinki and Vienna and via the Kissinger-Dobrynin backchannel. Foolishly, in order to claim full credit for themselves, Nixon and Kissinger left the experts cooling their heels in Helsinki while they handled the final, sometimes important, details in the frenzied, pressure cooker atmosphere of a summit. A treaty limiting anti-ballistic missile defense to two systems for each nation, one to protect the respective capitals, the other a major missile system, headed off a costly competition that could
have undercut MAD and the entire concept of deterrence. Hailed at the time as a significant achievement, the first Strategic Arms Limitation Agreement (SALT I) became the object of much future wrangling between the two nations and among Americans themselves. This five-year agreement put no limits on MIRVs, a major shortcoming. It fixed upper limits on offensive missiles at 1,600 for the USSR, 1,054 for the United States. It also restricted the number of submarines capable of launching missiles (SLBMs) and the improvement of missile systems already in existence. The two sides fought for hours over the number of SLBMs and the way they would be calculated and over the meaning of words such as
significant, light,
and
heavy.
Higher numbers for the Soviets on ICBMs and SLBMs obscured an overall U.S. lead in nuclear weapons, giving domestic foes ammunition to attack the agreement. Nixon and Kissinger's secretive, sometimes sloppy, and often slippery negotiating methods—Kissinger had a rare knack for smoothing over fundamental differences with clever words—and their determination to secure agreements at almost any cost resulted in some disadvantages for the United States, providing aggrieved lower-level officials a means to exact revenge against their egomaniacal bosses.
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Over the long haul, the payoff from the Moscow summit was not as great as Nixon and Kissinger had hoped for or even promised. Not surprisingly, in the glow of success, they oversold the benefits of detente at home with promises of a "generation of peace," paving the way for future disillusion. The political left would attack the arms control agreements for not going far enough, the right for conceding too much. Subsequent negotiations produced a major agreement extending to the USSR most-favored-nation status and Export-Import Bank credits in return for settling the long-standing post–World War II lend-lease debt. American businesses rushed to cut deals, and trade briefly flourished, but the commercial agreements never reached their full potential, in part because they got hopelessly snarled in domestic politics. United States–Soviet trade was also tainted in American eyes by what became known as the "Great Grain Robbery," a deal in which, Kissinger later conceded, the Communists outfoxed the capitalists. The administration went to great lengths to facilitate Soviet purchase of one-fourth of U.S. grain production at bargain prices. At a time of global crop failure, the sales caused shortages in the United States, recharging inflation and jacking up food prices. Angry consumers were not appeased by White House statements that Soviet-American trade contributed to detente.
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That said, the summit was still enormously significant. It was the first such meeting since Yalta to produce major concrete results. Interestingly, in time, it would suffer a fate not unlike that of its 1945 predecessor. It was important in terms of establishing a working relationship between the two powers and in tangible accomplishments, especially coming at the same time as the rapprochement with China.
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Nixon exaggerated only slightly in telling Congress that "never before have two adversaries, so deeply divided by conflicting ideologies and political rivalries, been able to limit the armaments upon which their survival depends." For all its weaknesses, the SALT agreement represented, according to Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson, "the most important insight of the nuclear age: that an unconstrained arms race was futile, costly, and dangerous."
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At least for the short term, the summit was also extremely popular at home. Nixon's approval ratings shot up to 61 percent. Even the economy righted itself, the stock market hitting new highs and economic growth recording its highest rate since the boom year 1965. Nixon's reelection was all but assured.

When queried by exuberant colleagues on the return trip from Moscow what could be done for an encore, Kissinger replied without hesitation, "Make peace in Vietnam."
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He almost pulled it off. The bloody fighting following the Easter Offensive gave the belligerents compelling reasons to settle. North Vietnam suffered enormously from Nixon's fierce countermeasures; its troops in the South were decimated by U.S. air power. It sought now mainly to get American forces out of South Vietnam in order to deal with the Saigon government alone. It counted on electoral pressures to force Nixon to compromise.

Nixon and Kissinger were indeed eager to end a war that had caused huge problems at home and abroad, but they disagreed on the timing. As victory over dovish Democratic nominee George McGovern seemed more and more likely, the president feared that a preelection settlement might be seen as a desperate ploy to win votes. Kissinger, on the other hand, believed that the United States would have greater leverage with Hanoi before rather than after the election. He therefore pushed ahead with negotiations. The United States had already agreed that North Vietnamese troops might remain in the south after a cease-fire, a major concession that would decisively influence the ultimate outcome of the war. By this time resigned to what Kissinger called a "decent interval" between U.S. withdrawal and a
South Vietnamese defeat, the administration dropped its insistence that President Nguyen Van Thieu remain in power, accepting a tripartite electoral commission that would arrange a political settlement following a cease-fire. By mid-October, Kissinger and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, had cobbled together the essentials of an agreement.
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Ironically, given his key role in the sordid 1968 preelection maneuvering that encouraged Thieu to obstruct Johnson's last-minute peace ploy, Kissinger in his haste to close the deal failed to anticipate a repeat performance. Fresh from his triumphs in Beijing and Moscow and now an international celebrity, the imperious and impatient American spent five tense days in Saigon employing what he called "shock tactics" to force Thieu into line. Furious at not being consulted and deeply resentful of Kissinger's arrogant and heavy-handed diplomacy, Thieu understandably refused to endorse an agreement he considered tantamount to national and personal "suicide." He demanded wholesale changes. To Kissinger's consternation, Nixon backed the South Vietnamese president. Now confident of an easy victory in November, the president was willing to wait until after the election and then demand that North Vietnam "settle or face the consequences of what we could do to them."
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Kissinger's carefully phrased election-eve statement that "peace is at hand" reassured U.S. voters and sealed Nixon's overwhelming victory over McGovern, but the president's support for Thieu ensured the breakdown of the October agreement. Kissinger's efforts to palliate Saigon by reopening issues presumably settled provoked North Vietnamese diplomats to do the same, causing negotiations to stall in late 1972 amidst great acrimony. Nixon responded by ordering the most intensive and devastating air attacks of the war. The so-called Christmas Bombing dumped more than thirty-six thousand tons of bombs on North Vietnam, more than during the entire period of 1969 to 1971. The bombing gave Hanoi incentive to resume negotiations. It also provoked a furious reaction in the United States and across the world, forcing Nixon to recognize that he must end the war before Congress reconvened and took control from his hands. The negotiations resumed in January 1973. After a week of tense and sometimes bitter exchanges, the United States and North Vietnam finally settled on an agreement not markedly different from the one concluded in October. United States military forces were out of South Vietnam by March 31, 1973. The agreement produced neither the peace nor the honor that Nixon had held out for.

Success is fleeting in politics and diplomacy, and pride, as the saying goes, comes before a fall. Nixon had hoped in a second term to build on the accomplishments of the first. Instead, the United States became deeply entangled in yet another dangerous war in the Middle East, provoking yet another crisis with the USSR. Detente came under fire at home. The tenuous Vietnam peace agreement fell apart. Most of all, the two men were victims of their own haunting insecurities and their modus operandi. A growing rivalry between them, provoked in part over who deserved credit for their successes, brought out the worst in each. Foolish, illegal, and, as it turned out, quite unnecessary measures taken by the president's political operatives to ensure his reelection and the administration's clumsy and bungled cover-up rendered Nixon increasingly powerless and drove him from office.

As always, the Middle East posed perplexing challenges for U.S. policymakers. The Six-Day War exacerbated the ongoing and seemingly unresolvable Arab-Israeli dispute. Even while assiduously cultivating detente with the Soviet Union, Nixon and Kissinger, like their predecessors, continued to fret about Soviet expansion in the Middle East. The problem of countering Soviet and radical Arab influence was magnified after 1969 by the further decline of Britain's political influence and military power in the region and by America's continuing preoccupation with Vietnam.