From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (130 page)

The solution was a variation of the Nixon Doctrine, what came to be called the "Twin Pillars" approach. It built on Johnson's post-1967 policy of relying on the friendly, conservative, oil-rich kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Iran to defend U.S. interests. The Nixon Doctrine merely gave a new name to the old idea of furnishing weapons to friendly states to promote regional stability. With U.S. blessings, Saudi Arabia after 1969 used oil funds to more than double its military spending and brought together into the United Arab Emirates six tiny pro-Western and oil-rich Arab sheikdoms left vulnerable by Britain's departure.

Iran was the main U.S. bulwark of Middle East stability and the major beneficiary of the Nixon Doctrine. The shah dreamed of restoring the glories of ancient Persia, and Nixon's schemes suited him perfectly. Like Johnson, the president was captivated by the shah, naively viewing him, as did Kissinger, as "that rarest of leaders, an unconditional ally."
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During a 1972 visit to Tehran, after explaining the Nixon Doctrine, the president
leaned across the table and beseeched the shah: "Protect me." The administration opened America's vast arms bazaar to Iran, making the latest military hardware available (except, of course, nuclear weapons) and foolishly letting the shah decide how much was enough. While pushing oil prices as high as possible, the shah spent more than $16.2 billion over the next five years, the largest arms purchase to that time. Nixon praised the shah for "carrying burdens which otherwise we would have to assume," but Iran's short-term usefulness for U.S. interests obscured deeper and dangerous long-range problems.
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The price the United States paid for its Middle East "pillar" was to refrain from criticism of the shah's oppression of his people and indifference to their basic needs. Iranians increasingly viewed him as America's lackey. Their hatred for him and the United States grew together, sparking the revolution in which both would be swept up.

The administration came to a third Middle East pillar by a circuitous route. Nixon was at best ambivalent toward Jews. He often used anti-Semitic epithets. He railed against the liberalism of American Jews and especially their presumed domination of the media. But he admired Israeli toughness. He recognized that in 1968 Jews had voted overwhelmingly for his opponent; he felt no debt to the Israel lobby. Indeed, in the beginning, he vowed an evenhandedness in the Middle East that made Israel's supporters exceedingly nervous. Certain that Israel would soon have a nuclear weapon, the administration at first took a hard line, threatening to hold back the F-4 fighters LBJ had promised. "This is one program on which the Israelis have persistently deceived us and may even have stolen from us," Kissinger warned Nixon in 1969, referring to fissionable material illegally acquired by Israel in 1965. In the face of Israel's continued resistance and its promises to keep quiet about its nuclear accomplishments, however, the administration acquiesced in its refusal to sign the Non-proliferation Treaty and stopped sending inspectors to Dimona.
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Concerned that Kissinger's Jewish background would handicap him in dealing with the Middle East and in any event hunting for bigger game, the president at first left that part of the world to Rogers. The State Department developed an impartial and comprehensive peace plan based on UN Resolution 242 requiring Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied during the Six-Day War and resolution of the problem of Palestinian
refugees by repatriation or resettlement in return for recognition and peace.

Not surprisingly, the Rogers Plan went nowhere. Nasser expressed vague interest, but Egyptian border raids against Israel spoke louder than his words. Israeli leaders predictably denounced it as a "disaster" and warned that any "government that would adopt and implement such a plan would be betraying its country." The Israel lobby descended upon Washington in full force in early 1970 to protest the Rogers Plan and demand shipment of the F-4s. Nixon dug in his heels on the fighter planes, but in an incredible example of the maneuvering and pettiness that afflicted the administration, he helped sabotage the State Department proposal, telling Kissinger to get word to new Israeli premier Golda Meir, then beginning a tour of the United States, that "wherever she goes, in all her speeches and press conferences, we want her to slam the hell out of Rogers and his plan."
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As always, the threat of Soviet gains brought a U.S. administration back to Middle Eastern basics. In the summer of 1970, Moscow sharply escalated the regional arms race, sending surface-to-air missiles and MIG-21 fighter jets to Egypt along with fifteen thousand military advisers and two hundred pilots to assist in their use. Nixon and Kissinger were alarmed at this move and became even more agitated when Nasser shifted his new military assets against Israeli positions in the Sinai. At this time of crisis in Cuba, Chile, and now the Middle East, the administration on September 1 released the long-withheld Phantom jets for delivery to Israel.

The payoff was quick and significant. A September 1970 crisis in Jordan endangered the tenuous Middle East peace and threatened yet another superpower confrontation. Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat had established a virtual Palestinian state within Jordan from which he conducted raids against Israel. In September, Arafat's hit squads several times tried to assassinate Jordan's pro-Western King Hussein and then hijacked four Western airliners, a form of terrorism that would assume major importance over the next decades. When Hussein imposed martial law, the Palestinians mounted a civil war against the king. Fearing escalation, Nixon warned the Soviets not to let their Syrian ally join the fight. The Kremlin seemed to concur, but Syrian tanks soon rumbled into Jordan. As always, interpreting the actions of a Soviet ally as a direct challenge from Moscow, Nixon, with Hussein's reluctant assent, asked Israel for the help of its air force along the Syria-Jordan border. The Israelis also readied their forces in the Golan Heights. The United States dispatched naval and
airborne forces into the area. Jordan more than took care of itself, as it turned out, repulsing the Syrians and driving the Palestinians beyond its borders in what became known as Black September.
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The Jordanian crisis brought the United States and Israel back to where they had begun, Israel now becoming the third pillar of U.S. Middle East strategy. "The President will never forget Israel's role in preventing the deterioration in Jordan," Kissinger informed an Israeli official in late September.
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Nixon and Kissinger also demonstrated their gratitude in tangible ways. Adding the Middle East to their already bulging portfolio, they undermined persistent State Department efforts to push Israel toward political compromise and provided more and better aircraft. The two nations' intelligence agencies began active collaboration. Under the Nixon Doctrine, Israel became a "strategic asset."
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By the time of the next Middle East blowup, the administration had begun to crumble. Ironically, but not surprisingly given the personalities involved, it began with a falling-out between Kissinger and Nixon. The major reason—again no surprise—was jealousy. Adept at dealing with the media, Kissinger, the onetime Harvard professor, transformed himself in 1972 into not only a diplomatic superstar, the architect of the administration's smashing successes, but also an international celebrity who dated beautiful women such as actress Jill St. John, attended the toniest parties, and was even featured in
Playboy
magazine. Nixon at first found the "swinger" image amusing, but he quickly tired of it. He resented Kissinger's hogging the limelight. He watched with dismay as Kissinger got credit for the triumphs of 1972. His fury rose when the national security adviser appeared to blame him for the Christmas Bombing. He exploded when Kissinger, in ill-advised remarks to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, portrayed himself as a diplomatic Lone Ranger, a modern version of the western hero who rode into town by himself to take on the bad guys. When Nixon had to share
Time
's Man of the Year award with his adviser, he was reportedly "white-lipped with anger."
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Shortly after the election, the president decided that Kissinger must go. As it happened, no doubt to Nixon's consternation, the national security adviser remained—and was "promoted" to secretary of state in a summer 1973 shakeup largely because the Watergate imbroglio made him indispensable.

The scandal that brought the administration to its knees was unfolding even as Nixon celebrated his inauguration. What top officials initially
dismissed as a "third-rate burglary attempt"—a June 1972 break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington's posh Watergate hotel and apartment complex—grew in the summer of 1973 into a full-fledged exposé of presidential abuse of power. The burglars were tried and convicted in January 1973 just as the administration was setting an ambitious second-term agenda. Their ties to the president's reelection committee, efforts to silence them through payoffs, and the perjury of key witnesses were soon exposed. By March, White House counsel John Dean warned of a "cancer . . . close to the Presidency." In April, Nixon's top aides Bob Haldeman and John Erlichman were forced to resign in a failed effort to save the president himself. A Senate investigating committee and intrepid
Washington Post
reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward turned up sensational revelations of such things as the administration's failed cover-up, wiretapping of journalists and some of Kissinger's top advisers, payment of hush money to witnesses, and burglary of the office of "Pentagon Papers" leaker Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. The televised hearings mesmerized the public. Tape recordings of White House conversations tied the president more closely to the Watergate affair and exposed the nation to a distinctly unpresidential persona: nervous, petty, profane, vindictive. As late as April, Nixon's approval ratings were still around 60 percent; by August, they had plummeted to 31 percent. His image was irreparably tarnished. As his congressional foes closed in for impeachment, most of his time and energy was devoted to his political survival.
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The Vietnam peace agreement was one of the first casualties. To the surprise of no one, war continued in Vietnam after peace had been proclaimed. South and North Vietnam both regularly violated the cease-fire to bolster their military positions in anticipation of a political settlement. Negotiations for a new government quickly deadlocked. Nixon had hoped to uphold the peace agreement by the threat or actual use of air power against North Vietnam, and he had made secret promises to Thieu along those lines. Kissinger journeyed to Paris in May to press for observance of the cease-fire. But he found himself without leverage. And the North Vietnamese pointedly accused him of trying to deceive the public on Vietnam "as you have done with Watergate."
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Public opinion polls showed overwhelming popular opposition to military reintervention in any part of Indochina in any form. By this time, a Congress in full rebellion against a crippled president set out to end the war on its own. In late June, it approved
an amendment requiring the immediate cessation of all military operations in and over Indochina. The House upheld Nixon's angry veto, but he was forced to accept a compromise extending the deadline to August 15. For the first time, Congress had acted decisively to stop the war. "It would be idle to say that the authority of the executive has not been impaired," Kissinger lamented with obvious understatement.
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Later in the year, Congress passed over another veto the so-called War Powers Act, which required the president to inform the legislature within forty-eight hours of the deployment of U.S. military forces abroad and to withdraw them in sixty days in the absence of explicit congressional endorsement. The circumstances under which the debate took place, combined with Watergate and the vote terminating operations in Indochina, made virtually certain the end of direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

By late 1973, detente, the crown jewel of the Grand Design, had also fallen on hard times. Nixon and Brezhnev met in the United States in the summer of 1973, but there were no tangible results. The United States refused to go along with a no-first-use agreement for nuclear weapons urged by Moscow. There was no progress on a SALT II agreement. More important, detente had come under growing fire at home. Nixon's military advisers had never been happy with the SALT negotiations. Inasmuch as they approved arms negotiations at all, they wanted nothing less than equality across the board. The Joint Chiefs of Staff found allies in James Schlesinger, who succeeded Laird as secretary of defense in July 1973, in old Cold Warrior Paul Nitze, a top arms control negotiator who resigned in protest against SALT, and among conservative Republicans and Democrats in Congress.
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A more formidable challenge came from Democratic senator Henry Jackson of Washington. Soviet persecution of Jews reopened in the 1970s an issue that had aroused great moral indignation among Americans early in the century. Liberal on domestic issues and a hard-line anti-Communist, the idealistic and ambitious Jackson developed his own form of linkage by conditioning approval of the Soviet trade agreement on freedom of Jews to emigrate from the USSR. His amendment, cosponsored by Republican representative Charles Vanik of Ohio, struck a responsive chord among Americans eager to recapture the moral high ground in the wake of Vietnam, winning broad popular and congressional support. Absorbed in great power politics, Nixon and Kissinger failed to grasp the significance of Jackson's move. They did not use detente to encourage Soviet concessions. Nor
did they warn Moscow of dangers to the trade bill or lobby Congress for restraint. The Soviet leadership exacerbated matters by clamping an exit tax on those seeking to emigrate. The Jackson-Vanik amendment passed Congress in December 1973, the opening round in a congressional challenge to detente that would continue throughout the decade. The Kremlin responded by canceling the trade agreement. The debate over Jewish emigration marked the emergence onto the national political scene of human rights issues that would play a key role in U.S. foreign policy for years to come.
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