The American Strategy
When Richard Nixon
took his oath of office, China’s anxieties presented him with an
extraordinary strategic opportunity, though this was not at first
obvious to an administration divided over Vietnam. Many of the
policy elites who had made the decision to defend Indochina against
what they had conceived as a concerted assault from Moscow and
Beijing had had second thoughts. A significant segment of the
Establishment—significant enough to complicate an effective
policy—had come to the view that the Vietnam War was not only
unwinnable, but that it reflected a congenital moral failure of the
American political system.
Nixon did not believe
that one could end a war into which his predecessors had sent
500,000 American soldiers halfway across the world by pulling out
unconditionally—as many of his critics demanded. And he took
seriously the commitments of his predecessors from both parties,
whose decisions had led to the dilemmas he now faced. Nixon knew
that whatever the agony of its involvement in Vietnam, the United
States remained the strongest country in an alliance against
Communist aggression around the world, and American credibility was
critical. The Nixon administration—in which I served as National
Security Advisor and later as Secretary of State—therefore sought a
staged withdrawal from Indochina to give the people of the region
an opportunity to shape their own future and to sustain the world’s
faith in America’s role.
Nixon’s critics
equated a new approach to foreign policy with a single issue: in
effect, the unconditional withdrawal from the Vietnam War, ignoring
the millions of Indochinese who had engaged themselves in reliance
on America’s word and the scores of countries who had joined the
effort at America’s behest. Nixon was committed to ending the war,
but equally strongly to giving America a dynamic role in reshaping
the international order just emerging piece by piece. Nixon
intended to free American policy from the oscillations between
extremes of commitment and withdrawal and ground it in a concept of
the national interest that could be sustained as administrations
succeeded each other.
In this design, China
played a key role. The leaders of the two countries viewed their
common goals from different perspectives. Mao treated the
rapprochement as a strategic imperative, Nixon as an opportunity to
redefine the American approach to foreign policy and international
leadership. He sought to use the opening to China to demonstrate to
the American public that, even in the midst of a debilitating war,
the United States was in a position to bring about a design for
long-term peace. He and his associates strove to reestablish
contact with one-fifth of the world’s population to place in
context and ease the pain of an inevitably imperfect withdrawal
from a corner of Southeast Asia.
This is where the
paths of Mao, the advocate of continuous revolution, and Nixon, the
pessimistic strategist, converged. Mao was convinced that vision
and willpower would overcome all obstacles. Nixon was committed to
careful planning, though ridden by the fear that even the best-laid
plans would go awry as a result of fate intervening in an
unforeseen and unforeseeable manner. But he carried out his plans
anyway. Mao and Nixon shared one overriding trait: a willingness to
follow the global logic of their reflections and instincts to
ultimate conclusions. Nixon tended to be the more pragmatic. One of
his frequently expressed maxims was “You pay the same price for
doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as
well do it completely.” What Mao carried out with elemental
vitality, Nixon pursued as a resigned recognition of the workings
and obligations of fate. But once launched on a course, he followed
it with comparable determination.
That China and the
United States would find a way to come together was inevitable
given the necessities of the time. It would have happened sooner or
later whatever the leadership in either country. That it took place
with such decisiveness and proceeded with so few detours is a
tribute to the leadership that brought it about. Leaders cannot
create the context in which they operate. Their distinctive
contribution consists in operating at the limit of what the given
situation permits. If they exceed these limits, they crash; if they
fall short of what is necessary, their policies stagnate. If they
build soundly, they may create a new set of relationships that
sustains itself over a historical period because all parties
consider it in their own interest.