Diplomacy

John F. Kennedy came into office believing Vietnam was not merely one front among many in the Cold War but a decisive test of whether or not the US could win hearts and minds in the kinds of guerrilla conflict now common across the decolonizing world. The preoccupation with Vietnam in particular blinded Kennedy to the realities of the region, especially the extensive use of Laos by North Vietnam to funnel men and supplies to the insurgency. The war would be won or lost in South Vietnam, and Kennedy introduced a policy “which is still with us today—the notion of ‘nation-building’” (648-49). Yet there was no way to make South Vietnam into a functioning democracy during a violent insurgency, and the US was still reluctant to escalate its own involvement, which was at the time advisory to South Vietnam.

Any demands for democratic reform would weaken the government, but strengthening its repressive apparatus further alienated the Diem regime from the population. After Diem ordered a brutal crackdown on Buddhist monks, Kennedy signaled a willingness to accept a military coup of Diem, who was assassinated only a few weeks before President Kennedy himself was assassinated in Dallas in November 1963. South Vietnam descended into chaos, and President Johnson inherited a cabinet dedicated to finishing what they started. By 1965, the US had massively increased its troop deployment and was seeking a military victory as a precondition to political reform while restraining its actions enough to ensure Chinese noninvolvement.

By 1967, Johnson offered a bombing halt in exchange for “productive” talks (as quoted on p. 664), convincing North Vietnam the US public was eager to terminate a war that was being broadcast daily on its television screens. Domestic opposition to the war became more intense, and Johnson ultimately conceded to the North’s demand that the National Liberation Front, responsible for the insurgency the South (and colloquially known as the “Viet Cong”) be a participant in peace negotiations. The Tet Offensive of January 1968 failed in its attempt to destabilize South Vietnam, but it proved the North’s determination to pursue the war, even after years of sustaining fierce US bombardment. Six weeks later, Johnson shockingly announced a unilateral end to the bombing of North Vietnam and refused to seek reelection. The task of ending America’s war in Vietnam would fall to his successor, Richard Nixon.

Taking office just as opposition to the war was reaching a fever pitch, Richard Nixon committed to the difficult task of withdrawing from an unwinnable war while retaining American credibility. With Henry Kissinger as his top foreign policy official, Nixon had to find a way to move beyond the North’s demand of total US withdrawal and South Vietnamese surrender. The plan became a phased withdrawal of US forces, a transfer of responsibility to the South Vietnamese, while convincing the North they could not count on a quick victory following the US exit. The North chose not to chase the Americans out, instead dragging out negotiations while expecting the withdrawal of US troops to feed demand for the rest to come home.

Under the canny negotiator Le Duc Tho, the North Vietnamese insisted time was on their side and that the only remaining option was to expedite US withdrawal to avoid unnecessary pain. Opponents essentially echoed Hanoi’s demands, but Nixon refused to sell out Saigon and actively collaborate in the formation of a communist-dominated unity government. Yet domestic pressure continued to mount, particularly after the US invaded Cambodia in 1970 and resumed the bombing of North Vietnam, including mining its harbors at Haiphong. At long last, Hanoi accepted the terms of a prompt US withdrawal, the exchange of prisoners, and a commitment to a peaceful resolution while the US continued to support Saigon. However, Congress promptly forbade further involvement in Southeast Asia, while the North only stepped up its efforts to reunify the country by force.

Kissinger regrets the enormous political damage Vietnam inflicted upon the United States, seeing it as the result of its excessive idealism, which soured once the US had to come to grips with political limits in a way its history had never required. He sees the anguish the US suffered as a result of a war to be indicative of its moral seriousness and hopes its tragic results can link its moral sensibilities to “an international environment less hospitable and more complex than any in the past” (701).

While extricating the US from Vietnam, President Nixon was trying to manage the broader problem of the US now inhabiting a more multipolar system, particularly with the rising economic power of Europe and Japan. One of the few realists (alongside Teddy Roosevelt) to occupy the White House, he sought balance over harmony, but he also admired Wilson for his belief that America could perform a singular role in securing international order. Nixon sought to define threats more narrowly, but this required a new understanding with the Soviet Union, as traditional Cold War thinking turned any potential area of communist expansion into a vital concern. Vietnam showed how this approach could let commitments determine interests, and the Nixon administration insisted that “[their] interests must shape [their] commitments” (as quoted on p. 712). He would not abandon containment but would identify potential areas of cooperation with the Soviet Union, such as arms control. Using a strategy of “linkage,” Nixon dangled the prospect of arms control negotiations in exchange for Soviet assistance in ending Vietnam, by pressing Hanoi to accept Nixon (and Kissinger’s) terms. This was meant to advance a more holistic strategy than standard US foreign policy, which tended to aggregate the preferences of each bureaucratic department.

Most significantly, Nixon sought to improve relations with the People’s Republic of China, a US adversary since its formation in 1949. The two communist powers were bitter enemies despite their shared ideology, and Nixon saw an opportunity to use the prospect of friendship with Beijing to extract concessions from Moscow and vice versa. Substantive progress with China was slow, especially due to disagreements over the status of Taiwan, but they established a framework that would culminate in the normalization of relations between them, along with a declaration that neither would seek hegemony in the Asia-Pacific. With the Soviet Union now facing NATO in the West and China in the East, the US was back in the driver’s seat rather than waiting to respond to the next act of Soviet aggression.

Once Vietnam no longer occupied the center of US foreign policy, it could turn its attention to a wider range of pressing global concerns. Under the banner of détente, a general easing of relations with the Soviet Union, there was once more some room for diplomatic maneuvering in Europe. The Nixon administration backed a policy of Ostpolitik, West German outreach to its communist counterpart, in exchange for a guarantee of Western access to Berlin. In the Middle East, the Soviet Union found itself tethered to the increasingly unrealistic objections of radical Arab states; the US proved its support for Israel could also achieve satisfaction of key Arab demands, such as with the Israeli-occupied Sinai. This culminated in Israeli-Egypt peace processes, which began under Nixon and successfully concluded with a peace treaty in 1979 under President Carter.

Despite these successes, détente was an extremely controversial policy, all the more so after the Watergate scandal tarnished the whole of Nixon’s legacy. Nixon’s worldview, which “perceived the world as composed of ambiguous challenges, of nations impelled by interest rather than goodwill, and of incremental rather than final changes” all challenged the moralistic and legalistic shibboleths of traditional foreign policy (742). He alienated conservatives for his willingness to work with the communist powers and alienated liberals for refusing to subject the conduct of foreign policy to moral categories. In Kissinger’s estimation, it was the very success of Nixon’s policies that made them ripe for criticism, that he had “so tranquilized East-West relations that it became safe to challenge them at home” (745).

The fiercest opponent of détente was the conservative Democratic senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson from Washington, who aggressively sought to lift any restrictions on US rearmament to achieve total superiority over the Soviets. Nixon, by contrast, saw this as a means to free up spending for more innovative defense programs. Jackson also drew a hard line on the question of human rights, particularly the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate (often to Israel). Nixon was not opposed to such emigration but had sought a gradual increase as part of détente; but Jackson insisted on an absolute lift as part of an ideological challenge to communism. Nixon wanted to moderate Soviet behavior; Jackson wanted victory over the Soviet system. Détente reached its climax at the Helsinki Agreements, which at last settled the postwar boundaries of Europe, while also requiring each signing party to abide by certain human rights provisions. Jackson and his allies were furious with Helsinki at the time, but its human rights provisions would ultimately inspire activists in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and elsewhere, who ultimately posed a challenge the Soviet Union proved unable to handle. 

Ronald Reagan came into office to restore moral clarity after the vagaries of détente. By the time he left office, he got his way, with the Soviet Union on the brink of collapse and America regaining its role as the lone global superpower. The Soviet empire swallowed far more than it could digest and proved “neither strong nor dynamic enough for the role its leaders had assigned it” (764). Reagan was an unlikely figure for such a historic movement; a former actor with little knowledge of global affairs and a hatred of communism that was intense even by the standards of American moralists, he struck many observers as far too hardline and simplistic for the needs of the time. Part of Reagan’s unexpected insight was his ability to turn communist logic on its head; instead of the capitalist movement doomed on account of its own contradictions, it was communism that could not survive when it failed to meet the basic needs of its citizens. He at once suggested the Soviet leaders were evil while also implying the limits of their system left them open to conversion.

The Reagan Doctrine would affirm the need to roll back communist advances around the world, from Afghanistan to Nicaragua, while carrying out a massive military buildup that would expose the USSR’s inability to catch up. Moscow denounced Reagan as a warmonger, only to have Reagan upend the conventional wisdom on nuclear weapons with his support for a missile defense program capable of overcoming the stalemate of mutual assured destruction, where the two sides accepted the reality of a nuclear threat so long as they retained the capacity to retaliate in kind.

Reagan’s first term saw no breakthrough with the Soviet Union, largely because its aging leadership saw a succession of deaths. In his second term, he found a potential partner in the comparatively young Mikhail Gorbachev, a reformer hoping to revise the Soviet system and therefore eager to pursue diplomacy with the West. Early efforts to negotiate stalled over Reagan’s unwillingness to abandon missile defense, which the Soviets regarded as an American effort to pursue absolute technological superiority, but once the US realized Gorbachev was practically alone in his reformism, which implicitly challenged the Communist Party’s monopoly on power, they decided to support him as a bulwark against Cold War hawks in the Kremlin. Gorbachev cut Soviet troop deployments in Eastern Europe but in doing so unleashed nationalist passions in the Soviet satellites, and when Gorbachev responded with further liberalization, those satellites pushed for outright independence. Reform therefore demanded further reforms, until the Communist Party lost its legitimacy and Gorbachev had to concede not only the Soviet empire but the very existence of the Soviet state as its constituent republics each voted for independence.

The end of the Cold War seemed like a quintessential Wilsonian moment, where an autocracy proved unable to manage itself and democracy was ascendant around the world. But while America might not have a peer competitor, power as a whole “has become more diffuse and the issues to which military force is relevant have diminished” (805); and so the United States cannot rely on its superior capabilities to solve emerging problems. Ethnic conflict, post-colonial politics, and the new rank of actual and potential great powers such as China and India each present problems with little precedent in the history of international relations. Wilsonianism will not be able to put a uniform stamp of democracy and human rights on these heterogeneous conditions. Russia will not lose its traditional fears and insecurities to embrace a liberal, American-led future. Kissinger states that a reunified Germany will once again pose problems for Europe, requiring an American commitment to NATO to prevent the ghosts of nationalism from returning to the fore.

Japan and China will vie for power in Asia, requiring careful American diplomacy with both in order to ensure equilibrium. China in particular should be a focal point of attention due to its enormous potential as an economic and military power, with a long history of regional hegemony. The United States will need to cultivate a sense of realpolitik to manage these disparate issues, Kissinger concludes, seeking “the patient accumulation of partial successes” rather than the fulfillment of a grand ideological design (836).