World Order (40 page)

None of these administrations had vouchsafed a plan for ending the war other than preserving the independence of South Vietnam, destroying the forces armed and deployed by Hanoi to subvert it, and bombing North Vietnam with sufficient force to cause Hanoi to reconsider its policy of conquest and begin negotiations. This had not been treated as a remarkable or controversial program until the middle of the Johnson administration. Then a wave of protests and media critiques—culminating after the 1968 Tet Offensive, in conventional military terms a devastating defeat for North Vietnam but treated in the Western press as a stunning victory and evidence of American failure—struck a chord with administration officials.

Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the Singapore state and perhaps the wisest Asian leader of his period, was vocal in his firm belief, maintained to this writing, that American intervention was indispensable to preserve the possibility of an independent Southeast Asia. The analysis of the consequences for the region of a Communist victory in
Vietnam was largely correct. But by the time of America’s full-scale participation in Vietnam, Sino-Soviet unity no longer existed, having been in perceptible crisis throughout the 1960s. China, wracked by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, increasingly regarded the Soviet Union as a dangerous and threatening adversary.

The containment principles employed in Europe proved much less applicable in Asia. European instability came about when the economic crisis caused by the war threatened to undermine traditional domestic political institutions. In Southeast Asia, after a century of colonization, these institutions had yet to be created—especially in South Vietnam, which had never existed as a state in history.

America attempted to close the gap through a campaign of political construction side by side with the military effort. While simultaneously fighting a conventional war against North Vietnamese divisions and a jungle war against Vietcong guerrillas, America threw itself into political engineering in a region that had not known self-government for centuries or democracy ever.

After a series of coups (the first of which, in November 1963, was actually encouraged by the American Embassy and acquiesced in by the White House in the expectation that military rule would produce more liberal institutions), General Nguyen Van Thieu emerged as the South Vietnamese President. At the outset of the Cold War, the non-Communist orientation of a government had been taken—perhaps overly expansively—as proof that it was worth preserving against Soviet designs. Now, in the emerging atmosphere of recrimination, the inability of South Vietnam to emerge as a fully operational democracy (amidst a bloody civil war) led to bitter denunciation. A war initially supported by a considerable majority and raised to its existing dimensions by a president citing universal principles of liberty and human rights was now decried as evidence of a unique American moral obtuseness.
Charges of immorality
and deception were used
with abandon; “barbaric” was a favorite adjective. American military involvement was described as a form of “insanity” revealing profound flaws in the American way of life; accusations of wanton slaughter of civilians became routine.

The domestic debate over the Vietnam War proved to be one of the most scarring in American history. The administrations that had involved America in Indochina were staffed by individuals of substantial intelligence and probity who suddenly found themselves accused of near-criminal folly and deliberate deception. What had started as a reasonable debate about feasibility and strategy turned into street demonstrations, invective, and violence.

The critics were right in pointing out that American strategy, particularly in the opening phases of the war, was ill suited to the realities of asymmetric conflict. Bombing campaigns alternating with “pauses” to test Hanoi’s readiness for negotiation tended to produce stalemate—bringing to bear enough power to incur denunciation and resistance, but not enough to secure the adversary’s readiness for serious negotiations. The dilemmas of Vietnam were very much the consequence of academic theories regarding graduated escalation that had sustained the Cold War; while conceptually coherent in terms of a standoff between nuclear superpowers, they were less applicable to an asymmetric conflict fought against an adversary pursuing a guerrilla strategy. Some of the expectations for the relationship of economic reform to political evolution proved unfeasible in Asia. But these were subjects appropriate for serious debate, not vilification and, at the fringes of the protest movement, assaults on university and government buildings.

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.

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 potential 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