Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Conclusion

Nixon was elected President of the United States because he promised a quick end to the war in Vietnam. However, Nixon's platform of peace with honor and Vietnamization culminated into policy platforms that extended the war in Vietnam by another four years. "Peace with Honor" as a policy entailed the withdrawal of US troops and in increase in the saturation bombings in North Vietnam. Since China was in the midst of the Cultural Revolution it was internally weak and disunited due to the extent that it could not lend substantive numbers of troops to aid the Viet Cong. At this time Sino-Soviet relations had turned sour after 1960, when the soviets dropped their financial support for Mao's Great Leap Forward program, resulting in mass starvation and death, numbering just over 30 million. The Chinese turned to the US to counteract the soviet spheres of influence in Mongolia and Vietnam. In 1972 a process of normalization of relations between the US and China officially culminated in the inaugural visit of Nixon to China to toast Champaign with Mao and Zhou en Lai at a highly publicized state dinner. Nixon would later travel to Moscow in articulating the aims of his new foreign policy doctrine, triangular detente, between China and Russia. Detente as a policy intended to keep the two former communist allies now embittered enemies guessing as to whom would first sell out the other's interests to the Americans first. Russell D. Buhite describes the administration's use and objectives in using detente. "The purpose of this [diplomacy] was to create doubt in the minds of the leaders in each Communist state about each other's agreements with the United States: to use improved relations with the Chinese to make the Soviet's more manageable and use better relations with the Soviet's to make the Chinese more conciliatory."(American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 139) Detente was also an attempt to make the soviet's dependant upon American wheat shipments. In 1972 The US exported 25% of its wheat crop to the USSR alone. The single most successful feature of Detente however, was an effort to limit nuclear arms proliferation that culminated with the Salt I Nuclear arms limitation treaty in the same year.

Nixon's prolongment of the war in Vietnam triggered a major public backlash in the domestic front. The invasion of Cambodia triggered massive protest demonstrations at Kent State and Jackson State precipitating the incidents of lethal retaliation by US National Guardsmen opening fire on US students. Nixon in his own stubbornness refused to be deterred by these incidents and increased the saturation bombing of Northern Vietnam. The end result of this increased escalation of air power and troop demobilization culminated in the loss of 15 B-52's and a stiffened Vietnamese resolve that the war would continue until the Americans had left Indo China. In 1973 Nixon in the midst of the Watergate scandal agrees to an unconditional troop withdrawal from Vietnam.

The Vietnam War could not have been won in the context of original US objectives in Indo China, in that the US did not largely envision that the outcome would have involved their need to maintain an occupying force at the expense of installing a functional US friendly regime that would support the geopolitical and geoeconomic status quo. America had tied its fortunes to Europe through the Marshall Plan, but the ideologies that breed undifferentiated interests in a world of limited means meant that in maintaining the 'status quo' in the third world, meant that the US generally supported regimes that professed anti-Communist rhetoric. Third world economies were linked in an exchange commodity mode of vertical inequality with the core g7 nations, in that their economies relied on import substitution, requiring foreign, and core investment, to industrialize their economies. Inherently, third world nations locked in this system lost a good deal of political and economic autonomy in public policy, in that third world debt acted as leverage to prevent further economic development and specialization beyond cash cropping, and light industrial manufacturing. The commercialization of third world agriculture, increased their dependence on US grain imports, subsides for US farmers that could undercut local and regional indigenous agricultural export zones.

The Vietnam War presented itself as a moral failing of the US government in the minds of its citizens. The American public through demonstrations had gradually forced Nixon to withdrawal troops, but the overall outcome was what became known as the 'Vietnam Syndrome' in which the US was forced to justify its later interventions into third world countries in the name of peace and stability and risk losing face or international prestige. The policy Consensus on poverty and security as envisioned by JFK failed to materialize throughout successive US administration involvement in Vietnam. The American public would become somewhat united in the informal view that politicians in general after Nixon were a Motley bunch of oligharical elitists, that dictated public policy through the 'silent majority.'

The main reason why Nixon withdrew troops from Vietnam was that the Europeans refused to continue to foot the cost of the war. The Vietnam War had caused massive inflation and the US was now faced with a trade imbalance and was now indebted to all of Europe and Japan. Walter Lafeber describes the process in which Nixon delinked the dollar from the gold standard an effort to forestall European claims on American currency. "First he understood that the United States was no longer strong enough economically to back the dollar, the only real international currency, with gold, as it had since 1945, because its gold supply was running out as the metal was used to pay debts overseas. Nixon instead announced that the dollar would float--that is, would be left to the whims of the marketplace where private business and other governments could directly influence its worth."(American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 148)

Lafeber continues his analysis of Nixon's foreign policy aims, by noting that after Nixon withdrew from Vietnam in 1973, he tried to secure a balance of trade with Japan, and supported the Shah of Iran who continued to trade oil with the US during the OPEC embargo. By meeting with Soviet and Chinese leaders, Nixon's policies of detente hoped to play those two regional powers off of each other and that in lieu of America's diminished economic standing he could still accomplish containment, now that commitments in Vietnam could no longer be rationally supported, by consensus policies. Ultimately it was Nixon's paranoia that led to his own undoing.

In looking back at the Nixon administration, the view at the time was that this was a classical case of a breach or abuse of power on the pluralisim of American democracy. Nixon as a paranoid racist at times, could do little to relate with the Third world beyond his narrow economic security framework. An example of Nixon's infamous racial epetephs could be best described in the case of the Angola revolution which led to American intervention to support the porteguse colonial regime. The Soviet's had intervened on the side of the rebels and to to which Nixon surmised the nation of Angola as one big 'tar baby' that made their desires for self determination fatalisticlly doomed by Nixons own views of racial hiearchy. Since the Vietnam War had occured without congressional approval, Congress after Nixon passed the War Powers Act, limiting the actions of future presidents who had carved out considerable policy consensus through their use of interventionist foreign policy throughout the cold war. In all most historians extoll the early successes of Nixon's strategy of detente as begining the process of normalization of trade relations between the 1st and 2nd world. However, these same historians fault Nixon for being overly preoccupied with controlling domestic checks to his power such as Congress and the Democrat party, which in sum caused him to conduct what Stephen Ambrose defined a 'secret diplomacy.'

Nixon as did Kissinger, felt that american public opinion could never fully comprehend the real politic of the US cold war balance of power system. Rather American support was created through ideological policy platforms and that it was the ideology of fear that Nixon utilized as a rapid consensus builder for his foreign policy programs. "Kissinger argued that Americans, without the long historical experiences of Europeans did not appreciate the neccessity to follow complex balance of power policies that required subtlety, paitence, and direct confrontation with those, such as the Soviets and their communist satellites, who tried to upset the balance of power--a balance that after all was in favor of the US." (American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 150) Thus Nixon and Kissinger percieved that there was a real need to go above the conventional contraints imposed by domestic opinion and at times the Constitution in pursuit of the 'greater good.'

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