-
3. Kissingerism in Action
- Cornell University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
3 Kissingerism in Action The year 1968, the historian Melvin Small recently claimed, was “the foreign policy election of the twentieth century.”1 Foreign affairs played a central role in the presidential race between Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey. The crisis of containment and its most glaring manifestation, the Vietnam War, obliged Nixon and Humphrey to dedicate most of their speeches and interviews to international matters. The role of the United States in the world system, the new strategies necessary to face the Soviet challenge, and the way the United States could reaffirm and relaunch its leadership in the West were widely debated and discussed. Justifying Détente Most of the foreign policy decisions the Nixon administration would take were somewhat compulsory, nevertheless; they were choices that even a 78 The Eccentric Realist Humphrey administration would have made and that had, in part, already been adopted by Johnson. There were, of course, more radical responses to the crisis the United States was facing. Alternative suggestions oscillated between those of the New Left to end involvement in Vietnam and drastically modify the methods and goals of U.S. foreign policy, to those from the Republican Right that supported a return to strategic and moral Cold War certainties and a revived containment strategy toward the Soviet Union and international Communism. In what was considered the legitimate political discourse of the time, options and possibilities were, however, much more circumscribed. The United States could not give up the international responsibilities it had acquired during the Cold War, but neither could it continue to promote an unsustainable strategy of global containment. A change was indispensable. The margins of change were nevertheless narrow . The crisis of containment was not matched by a structural transformation in the international system conducive to strategic innovations and turns. In spite of the dominant public rhetoric, the system continued to be bipolar, and thus it defined the parameters of any new U.S. foreign policy initiative. Dialogue with Moscow, rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China, and exit from the Vietnam imbroglio—the cornerstones and supposed innovations of Nixon and Kissinger’s strategy of détente— represented policies that had already been pursued, albeit intermittently, by the Johnson administration. As such, it was an approach capable of generating a much-needed consensus at home. Negotiations with the North Vietnamese had officially begun in the months preceding the 1968 election. Indeed, Humphrey had hoped until the last minute to be able to strike an agreement that could have greatly benefited him at the polls.2 An analogous possibility of an opening to China had been carefully explored by the Johnson administration and endorsed by some important advisors to President Johnson. The tensions between Moscow and Peking were increasingly evident, although their most graphic manifestation would come in 1969 when Soviet and Chinese forces repeatedly clashed along the Ussuri River. The stereotyped image of a Communist monolith, which had long influenced (and distorted) American strategies, could no longer be invoked to prevent the normalization of relations with China. Johnson would have probably sought such normalization, had it not been for the Cultural Revolution in China and the subsequent political and social turmoil it caused. Nixon himself had [3.80.24.244] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:26 GMT) Kissingerism in Action 79 solicited a change in the U.S. approach toward China in a famous article that appeared in a 1967 issue of Foreign Affairs. Once elected president, however, Nixon proceeded cautiously on this front, influenced by domestic considerations and conditioned by the doubts and Eurocentric approach of his national security advisor.3 More important, détente with Moscow and the promotion of serious negotiations on nuclear weapons revealed continuity between the foreign policy of Johnson and Nixon. Dialogue with the Soviet Union had been ongoing, with inevitable ups and downs, for many years, at least since Stalin ’s death and the Soviet diplomatic offensive that followed.4 The July 1963 treaty banning nuclear testing in the atmosphere, outer space, and under water had represented a crucial turning point. The treaty sanctioned the informal beginnings of détente and, in many ways, its institutionalization. It was the moment when the two superpowers finally recognized the existence of fundamental mutual interests, both in a negative sense (avoid a nuclear war) as well as a positive one (preserve a quasi-nuclear duopoly and the bipolar order that derived from it). After...