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Chapter Five: Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger
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Chapter Five Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger Realists as Conservatives The Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy team of to epitomizes Republican foreign policy realism. Richard Nixon was a thoroughgoing political pragmatist with an instinctive dislike of liberal elites, a readiness to embrace government activism on economic matters, and a penchant for bold, innovative departures in international affairs. Henry Kissinger was a brilliant and in many ways a deeply conservative foreign policy strategist who believed that revolutionary states such as the Soviet Union could be constrained peacefully through the careful coordination of military power and diplomacy. Together, these two presided over a skillful reorientation of American diplomacy that put great power relations and geopolitics first. They slowly extricated the United States from Vietnam, opened up ties to China, consolidated America’s strategic position worldwide, and pursued sophisticated versions of containment in relation to the Soviet Union. The one inherent problem with this approach was not that it was unusually immoral, ephemeral, or unsuccessful —it was none of these things—but that it downplayed the continuing and very real power of ideological factors in Soviet foreign policy. In party political terms, Nixon was arguably the first modern Republican president to reach out specifically to cultural and national security conservatives, across party lines. He had considerable personal electoral success with his center-right combination of populist cultural conservatism , economic activism, and foreign policy realism, but this success did R I C H A R D N I X O N A N D H E N R Y K I S S I N G E R not translate into new Republican majorities. In particular, Nixon’s behavior over the Watergate scandal eventually weakened or discredited much of his policy approach, even where there was no necessary connection . GOP conservatives and anti-Communist foreign policy hawks were thus ultimately empowered, in a strange twist of fate, to attack s policies of arms control and détente, about which they had never been enthusiastic. c An assessment of Richard Nixon’s foreign policy, like everything else about him, is vulnerable to what might be called a bad-faith model: as if nothing that he did could possibly be admirable, or done for the right reasons. Remembered primarily for Watergate or for his personality, Nixon is hard to like. There was never any question about his intelligence , political skill, or capacity for hard work: he had all of these qualities in abundance. The questions that always lingered had to do with his character and his personal appeal. Nixon was capable of bold, creative, even visionary departures in policy. Yet he could also be disappointingly petty, jealous, and vindictive—indeed, remarkably so, in someone so accomplished. He compounded these genuine faults with a more superficial weakness that nevertheless hurt him politically, namely, an intense social and physical awkwardness. While he pretended to be otherwise, Nixon was in fact an extremely shy, reflective, and private man, uncomfortable around other people. In a sense it was a testament to his remarkable tenacity, ability, and intellect that he climbed to the summit of the American political system, despite being fundamentally ill-suited to electoral politics. Foreign affairs were his special strength, and his particular interest. During the early s, his international policies were considered a remarkable practical success, even by many Americans who otherwise disliked him and considered him unethical. Today, however , the conventional wisdom in academic circles is overwhelmingly critical, with the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy legacy commonly characterized not only as immoral but as frequently inept and largely ephemeral . Indeed, the criticism sometimes slips into a mode as petty as Nixon could be, obsessed with gossip and small-scale maneuver. The following analysis reveals something very different.1 [34.238.143.70] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:48 GMT) C H A P T E R F I V E Richard Nixon was born in Yorba Linda, California, to parents of limited means. His mother was a serene, pious Quaker, his father, a combative, struggling small businessman. In his memoirs, Nixon said that he lay in bed as a child and dreamed of traveling to “far-off places.” He was a serious, determined student, attending Duke University Law School before returning to Southern California. Nixon identified early on with the centrist, internationalist wing of the Republican Party, supporting Wendell Willkie for president in . He worked in the Office of Price Administration in —an experience that soured him on government bureaucracy—followed by service in the Pacific theater...