From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (131 page)

The move toward normalization of relations with China also stalled. Kissinger and Nixon had played the Soviet card to cultivate closer ties with China, which, in turn, were to be used as leverage against the USSR, a delicate and dangerous game indeed. Especially anxious about the "new czars," Beijing had gone along to the point that in 1972 Kissinger could describe China with some exaggeration as a "tacit ally."
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Relations cooled in the next two years. The United States was not sufficiently anti-Soviet to suit even Chinese moderates such as Zhou, who themselves were under growing fire from hard-liners. As the impact of Watergate grew, Nixon and Kissinger lost credibility in China. To get relations back on track, Kissinger in late 1973 proposed to Beijing a hotline and even satellite images to assist in targeting Soviet military installations. It soon became clear, however, that only a severance of all U.S. ties with Taiwan would bring closer relations, a step an already embattled administration was not about to take.
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Vietnam, Watergate, and detente became entangled with and were significantly influenced by a fourth Arab-Israeli war during Yom Kippur and Ramadan in 1973 that sparked yet another superpower close call. This time, the Arabs fired the first shot. Following Nasser's death in September 1970, the redoubtable Anwar Sadat took power in Egypt. More pragmatic than his predecessor, Sadat tilted toward the West, proposing a settlement with Israel based on land for peace and evicting fifteen thousand Soviet military advisers from Egypt. Sadat also repeatedly warned that if Israel did not respond positively to his overtures he would fight. When the Israelis declined, and the Nixon administration, preoccupied with triangular diplomacy and then Watergate, did not press them, Sadat made good on his threat. With financial assistance from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and
Syria launched a surprise attack on October 6, Yom Kippur. Catching Israel off guard, the Arabs scored huge victories. Israel lost a thousand troops the first day, five hundred tanks the first week.
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The U.S. response followed classic realpolitik lines and involved a gamble that might have backfired. The war came at an especially critical point in the Watergate scandal, and a beleaguered, depressed, and often inebriated Nixon was not an active player. Kissinger ran the show. He did not want Israel to lose the war. But he also reasoned that if Egypt and Syria made gains they could negotiate from a stronger position, increasing the possibility of a settlement. Thus when Israel pleaded with Washington for emergency resupply of equipment lost in the first days of the war, the administration hesitated. Kissinger blamed the delay on the Defense Department and used it to extract Israeli promises to accept a cease-fire and not to encourage American Jews to support Jackson-Vanik. Finally, nervous that a desperate Israel might resort to nuclear weapons, and determined to demonstrate that despite Vietnam the administration would back its allies and despite Watergate it could act decisively, Nixon interceded. "Get your ass out of here and tell those people to move," he ordered Kissinger.
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During the second week of the war, the United States initiated a massive resupply effort, at times totaling a hundred tons per hour, eventually providing Israel with eleven thousand tons of equipment and ammunition. The infusion of U.S. military hardware enabled Israel to gain the initiative, reoccupy the Golan Heights, and advance into Egypt and Syria. The Arabs, Saudi Arabia included, responded with an oil embargo, causing huge economic problems for the United States and its allies and providing yet another indication of America's growing vulnerability.

The Israeli counteroffensive provoked the most dangerous superpower confrontation since the Six-Day War, a demonstration of the value and limits of detente. Facing defeat, the Arabs appealed for Soviet help. In the best spirit of detente, Brezhnev and Kissinger arranged a cease-fire agreement. Characteristically, however, with a wink and nod, Kissinger gave Israel a green light to delay observance of the cease-fire. An angry Sadat responded by asking the great powers to send troops to uphold the cease-fire they had negotiated. Brezhnev in stern tones warned that if the United States did not go along he would consider unilateral intervention. It seems clear now that he had no intention of doing so, but an edgy Washington mistakenly viewed the letter as an ultimatum and in any event did not want Soviet troops in the Middle East. With Nixon in bed, reportedly
drunk, Kissinger presided over an emergency NSC meeting that beefed up U.S. naval power in the Mediterranean and moved military forces worldwide to DefCon 3, the alert preliminary to war. Kissinger later claimed to have orchestrated a "deliberate overreaction" to send the Soviets a message. His explanation may have been an after-the-fact rationalization for an alarmist response under stressful circumstances. In any event, Brezhnev responded calmly, and the superpower confrontation led to a cease-fire.
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From this point, Kissinger took the lead in Middle East peacemaking. Both sides had suffered horrendous losses in what turned out to be a "traumatic and fearsome experience." There had been no clear-cut victor, thus facilitating a settlement.
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Despite assuring the Soviets he would keep them engaged, he deliberately excluded them, making himself the indispensable person. Using the enticement of additional military aid, he brought Israel into the process. He also won over Sadat, with whom he formed close personal ties. Engaging in what would be called "shuttle diplomacy," he flew back and forth among the Middle East capitals. He got Israel and Egypt to agree to armistice lines and Egypt to reestablish relations with the United States. In March 1974, he secured removal of the Arab oil embargo. Two months later, he brokered an agreement between Israel and Syria. It was a bravura performance, which earned Kissinger yet more accolades—
Newsweek
's cover portrayed him wearing a Superman cape emblazoned with the label "Super-K." Kissinger made the United States the key player in the Middle East peace process and created the basis for later, more significant agreements. But his successes were not without costs. As U.S. influence in the Middle East grew, its ability to affect events elsewhere, most notably in Indochina, shrank. Kissinger's unilateralism achieved his essential aim of keeping the USSR out of the Middle East. But it also antagonized his Soviet counterparts, further undermined detente, and provided the Soviets a handy excuse to act unilaterally in other regions.
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The last hurrah of Nixon's diplomacy came in the summer of 1974 with a courageous but futile global grand tour. Throughout the Watergate proceedings, Nixon had continued to hope that foreign policy success would distract public attention from his domestic woes and demonstrate that he was indispensable. By this time, his presidency was in peril. He suffered
from a painful and life-threatening blood clot in one leg. Numerous times in his tempestuous career, Nixon had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat with some bold move. He undoubtedly hoped that his reception abroad would confirm his status as a world statesman, perhaps even salvage his presidency. The views of foreign leaders offered room for hope. Mao dismissed Watergate as a "fart in the wind."
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Soviet officials "simply could not grasp," Dobrynin recalled, that the president could be prosecuted for "such a small matter." They blamed Watergate on a Zionist or anti-Soviet conspiracy.
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Western European leaders also found Watergate hard to comprehend and would likely have preferred that Nixon remain in office.
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The first leg in the farewell globetrotting was the Middle East. In Egypt, huge crowds turned out to greet the nation's new friend. From there, he journeyed to Saudi Arabia, Syria, Israel, and Jordan, becoming the first U.S. president to visit Syria and Israel. Ironically, he was received more enthusiastically in Damascus than in Jerusalem, a reflection of U.S. evenhandedness since the October War. As a sop to Israel, he offered additional aid, including help with building a nuclear reactor for peaceful purposes. Nixon endured the journey despite at times intense pain, leading his physician to suggest that he might have a "death wish."
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After a stop back in the United States, the president traveled to Moscow in late June for a final meeting with Brezhnev. The visit included a three-day respite at a suburb of Yalta, hastily renamed Oreanda to spare Nixon political embarrassment from connection with another summit nearly thirty years earlier. Despite inflated U.S. hopes, the meeting produced only minor agreements, the limiting of ABMs to one for each nation rather than the two agreed upon in 1972 and assorted technical deals. There was no real progress on SALT II. In private conversations in the Crimea, Brezhnev pushed for a Soviet-American non-aggression pact, which, in the event of an attack on either signatory by an unnamed but obvious third party, bound the other to provide assistance, a nonstarter if ever there was one. By this time, however, detente had leveled off. Nixon returned home on July 3. His "last serious diplomatic moves had been gallant but hopeless efforts," Bundy has concluded, "typical of this last phase of his presidency when he was grasping at straws, hoping in vain for a
miracle."
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A little more than a month later, facing certain impeachment and likely conviction, he resigned the presidency.

N
IXON AND
K
ISSINGER DESERVE FULL CREDIT
for their important achievements. The politician and the professor had a keen grasp of the way the world was changing and a shrewd sense in terms of great-power politics of how to adapt. Kennedy and Johnson had initiated detente, to be sure, but Nixon and Kissinger took major strides forward, developing crude guidelines for cooperation with the Soviet Union and completing major strategic arms and trade agreements. Liberals and conservatives attacked detente at the time. Conservatives and neo-conservatives have denounced it since as a deal with the devil—what was needed with the USSR, they allege, was not negotiations and concessions but tough talk and diplomatic and economic pressures. In fact, despite its flaws, detente initiated processes that made possible the ending of the Cold War. It slowed a runaway arms race. It expanded the cultural exchanges that eventually helped discredit and weaken the Communist system. The opening to China was long overdue and inevitable, but Nixon and Kissinger seized the moment to start the process and carried it off with consummate diplomatic skill. Following the October War, Kissinger initiated a Middle East negotiating process that brought some progress toward peace, if not peace itself.

These significant accomplishments must be weighed against huge and glaring failures. Ironically, while taking steps to ease Cold War tensions, the two men imposed a rigid Cold War mindset on essentially local and regional problems in Latin America and South Asia. Their rampant interference in Chilean elections and their role in displacing the democratically chosen Allende violated hemispheric non-interference pledges and contributed to an era of bloody repression in Chile. Unabashed support for Pakistan and the elevation of the Indo-Pakistani dispute into a conflict with earthshaking global implications could have had disastrous consequences. Above all, there was Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger developed Vietnam policies from badly flawed assumptions and with means entirely inadequate to the ends they sought. The height of realism is recognizing when to cut one's losses. They did that only grudgingly and after four more years of war, with more than twenty thousand American lives lost, and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese. They accepted without close scrutiny the dubious belief that America's credibility as a great power depended upon achieving its goals in Vietnam. They naively
assumed that while scaling back U.S. power they could achieve the goal their predecessors could not, an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam. They were doomed to fail. Their stubborn persistence heightened divisions at home. The methods they used to deal with rising domestic dissent trampled on the Constitution and led directly to Watergate and the demise of the Nixon presidency. Their often bizarre behavior, the product of profound insecurities and revealed to the world in the Nixon tapes, at times raises serious questions about their fitness for office. Ultimately, they produced the very result they sought to avoid, massive popular disillusionment with global involvement and a marked turning inward. This, rather than a generation of peace, was their principal legacy.

"This is not the alliance as it once seemed," the venerable London
Economist
fretted in a somber article entitled "The Fading of America" printed just days before the fall of Saigon in April 1975. The
Economist
found solace in its belief that Europe remained important to the United States while Vietnam had always been "at the farthest stretch of the American arm." But obvious changes in the national mood on the eve of defeat in war still raised fears that "the pulling in of burned American fingers could affect Europe too."
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The
Economist
correctly detected major shifts in the American temper and rightly traced them to the Vietnam War, but the changes went much deeper than it allowed or likely understood. Old dangers seemed to be receding in the 1970s, new ones rising, the world less easy to comprehend. At home, Americans suffered the most serious and prolonged economic crisis since the Great Depression. National priorities underwent their most dramatic shift since Pearl Harbor. Where a crude consensus had prevailed through much of the Cold War, dissonance was the hallmark of a very different decade. Bitter debates over Vietnam and the cultural revolution at home had opened deep fissures in the body politic. While liberal doves challenged Cold War verities from the left, conservatives and neo-conservatives attacked the realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger from the right. The illusion of American omnipotence first exposed by the fall of China and the Korean War was graphically manifested again in the 1970s. A people accustomed to having their way in the face of recurrent failure felt frustrated and impotent and vented their fury on their tormenters—and their leaders. To complicate matters still further, a newly emboldened Congress in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate challenged more than three decades of presidential dominance in foreign policy. Against this backdrop of division and disarray, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter struggled to implement foreign policy after Nixon's resignation. Ford tried to perpetuate detente and ended up presiding over its demise; Carter sought to escape the Cold War and became its captive.