Anniversaries: a 60th and an interrelated 'three for three'

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In "A New Foreign Policy for the United States," published early in 1969, Hans Morgenthau argued that the "intellectual capital" of the 1947 formulations had been spent and was now "exhausted," so it was time for a new direction.

Richard Nixon agreed, and he came to office in 1969 with three great foreign policy dreams in mind: Détente with the USSR, a rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China, and a quick end to the war in Vietnam. After a period of containment, he would seek engagement, dialogue with our enemies.

He expected to end the war within six months. That didn’t happen, so by early summer, Nixon latched onto an idea that some had called "de-Americanization," but that Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird had labeled — in a great triumph of public relations — "Vietnamization." It was a program to rapidly withdraw American troops so that the South Vietnamese could take over the defense of their country, with the support of American air power.

Nixon’s enthusiasm for the way in which Vietnamization would permit him to end the war, at least for the United States — because we’d have no more casualties — emboldened him in July to pyramid the idea.

After presiding at the Apollo crew’s return from the moon, he flew to Guam, where he spoke with reporters. His prepared remarks dismissed the qualms of those who thought the United States should withdraw from Asia entirely. The United States should continue to play "a significant role," he said, and would keep our treaty commitments, but, he added, "we must avoid that kind of policy that will make countries in Asia so dependent upon us that we are dragged into conflicts such as ... Vietnam."

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Did this mean, a reporter asked, that we would not be involved in future Vietnam-type conflicts?

"I would simply say we are going to handle each country on a case-by-case basis," Nixon responded, adding that he was "attempting to avoid that creeping involvement which eventually simply submerges you."

Smelling news, the reporters pressed on. Would we respond to future conflicts with assistance and advisors? There was a "role" for that sort of assistance, Nixon said, but a line would have to be drawn "in becoming involved heavily with our own personnel .... I want to be sure that our policies in the future ... reduce American involvement. One of assistance ... in helping them solve their own problems, but not going in and just doing the job ourselves."

The president seems not to have intended these remarks as a big policy shift, but when reporters started referring to his ideas as the "Guam doctrine," then as the "Nixon doctrine," he warmed to it. The Monroe and Truman doctrines had extended America’s national interest to include the defense of the Western Hemisphere from European powers in the 1820s and to aid Greece and Turkey against Communism in the 1940s. Nixon sought to redefine our national interest downward and to make it conditional.

"The United States will participate in the defense of allies and friends, but America cannot — and will not — conceive all the plans, design all the programs, and undertake all the defense of the free nations of the world," he said a few months later.

For anti-Communists, this was anathema, a shocking retreat from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural vow. It was a wake-up call that would impel some toward the "neoconservative" foreign policy that has reached full flower in the George W. Bush administration.

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This year is the 35th anniversary of the foreign policy initiative of 1972. Nixon had meticulously planned the year so that a series of foreign-policy triumphs would go off like firecrackers, leading, he hoped, to his re-election and a huge mandate for a second term.

The first rocket lofted was his historic trip to Beijing in February. The second was his meeting with Brezhnev in Moscow in May, at which they signed an Anti-Ballistic Missile agreement and the SALT treaty. In the early fall, when Henry Kissinger came back from Paris with an agreement with the North Vietnamese to end the war 95 percent done, he announced, "Three for three, Mr. President."

Three for three it was, but each was seriously compromised. The peace in Vietnam was no victory; it consisted of accepting the same terms the administration had rejected in 1969, and it had been achieved at a huge cost in lives lost in the interim. The Anti-Ballistic Missile agreement was negligible, the SALT treaty only a modest beginning that hardly slowed the arms race. As for the opening to the People’s Republic of China, it, too, was a modest start, one that did not make inevitable full mutual recognition, free trade, and a lessening of tensions in the Pacific.

Nonetheless, a new foreign policy of "realistic" engagement had completely replaced that of the era of containment and confrontation. If its ethics were situational and its advances and retreats modest, that seemed a reasonable way to go about relating to the world, given the circumstances of the time.

Considering the enormous problems that a foreign policy of selective aggressive confrontation, pre-emptive war and attempts to instill democracy at the point of a gun have produced during the current George W. Bush administration, the Nixon-Kissinger realism seems downright attractive, and not only in retrospect.