From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations Since 1776 (123 page)

When the harsh reality sank in, U.S. officials responded angrily. "The Cold War is not over," LBJ ruefully conceded, and Rusk complained of the Soviets "throwing a dead fish in the president's face."
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Fearing that Moscow might also move against Romania or even Yugoslavia, the United States issued firm warnings. On the other hand, still eager for negotiations, it responded with no more than perfunctory protests and token retaliation. While canceling the summit, Johnson kept the door open for negotiations after a respectable interval, hoping, as he put it, that Soviet leaders might want to "take some of the polecat off them."
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Indeed,
until after he left office, he clung to hopes of a last-minute summit while demanding prior assurances of positive results on complex arms control issues. Moscow was understandably wary. President-elect Nixon made clear he would not honor the terms of an eleventh-hour deal.

Even without a summit, 1968 was a watershed year in the Cold War. The Czech crisis briefly set back superpower contacts, but it also furthered detente. The U.S. and USSR went to great lengths to avoid confrontation, even to the point of deploying forces along the Czech border in such a way as to minimize possibilities of a clash. At the "moment of truth," historian Vojtech Mastny concludes, both sides "showed a prudent disposition to underestimate their own strength and overestimate the strength of the adversary," making them less inclined to contemplate war. After 1968, neither side seriously considered war in Europe, thus stabilizing the region where the Cold War had begun and providing a solid basis for detente. Conservative American critics have grossly overestimated the impact of LBJ's inaction in the face of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. It did uphold the fragile status quo in Eastern Europe, to be sure, but it did not resolve Moscow's huge problems within the Warsaw Pact. Nor did it lead to tighter Soviet control over bloc nations. More important, perhaps, it made clear to the Kremlin the high cost of such actions. The year 1968 was thus an important landmark on the road to the end of the Cold War.
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The "global disruption" of that year produced other changes that marked the end of the postwar era. The U.S. non-response to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and its commitment to the NPT suggested to West German leaders that Washington would sacrifice German reunification to the interest of stability and order. Bonn thus embraced what would be called
Ostpolitik,
approaches to the USSR and Eastern Europe separate from the United States that provided an independent, European force for detente. Fearing that Moscow might intervene forcibly in East Asia, Chinese leaders clamped down on the Cultural Revolution and looked to the United States as a possible counter to the Soviet threat. When North Vietnam tilted toward the Soviet Union in 1968, China began to withdraw troops from Vietnam and invited Washington to reopen the Warsaw talks suspended the preceding year. These small steps opened the way for Nixon's dramatic moves toward normalization.
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The year 1968 also marked the beginning of the end of the postwar economic boom. The economic crisis of 1967–68, the most serious since the Great Depression, set off a prolonged malaise among the industrialized nations. The stopgap measures taken to deal with the March gold crisis eased the immediate problems, but they weakened the U.S. commitment to the Bretton Woods system of currency stabilization. The costs of what Paul Kennedy has called "imperial overstretch" also afflicted the USSR, creating additional incentives for both sides to find common ground, encouraging still greater independence among allies on both sides, and enabling the losers of World War II, Germany and Japan, to emerge as major players in the world economy. In the world economy, as in geopolitics, 1968 was a year of dramatic changes.
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L
YNDON JOHNSON REGISTERED IMPORTANT ACCOMPLISHMENTS
in foreign as well as domestic policy. Especially on arms control issues, his administration took steps toward detente with the USSR, establishing the conceptual framework upon which his successor would build. He moved cautiously in the right direction in dealing with China and Panama. As part of the Great Society, he scrapped the ultra-nationalistic and racially based national-origins immigration legislation of 1924, a system that had favored Northern and Western Europeans and, along with legalized segregation, embarrassed the United States in dealing with the non-white world. Condemning that law as "alien to the American dream," he secured passage in October 1965 of legislation that favored refugees from Communist countries and the Middle East, immigrants with special skills, and people related to U.S. citizens or resident aliens.
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That landmark law opened the doors to a huge new influx of immigrants, the largest numbers from the Middle East, Asia, and especially Latin America, by century's end reconfiguring the nation's demographics.

Despite his achievements—and his wishes to the contrary—LBJ's presidency is still remembered mainly for Vietnam. A consummate pragmatist as a senator, in domestic politics, and on many foreign policy issues, he could not find in Vietnam that elusive middle ground that would have permitted disengagement without undermining his own and the nation's prestige. The war he took on with grave misgivings and struggled at great cost to end dominated his presidency and eventually drove him from office. It helped destroy the Great Society in which he had invested so
much; it damaged the U.S. economy. In foreign policy, historian Nancy Tucker has written, "it intruded upon virtually every decision the administration made." It "strained friendships, aggravated animosities, and left a problematic legacy."
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A war fought to uphold the nation's world position made the United States an international whipping boy. Its repercussions would last into the next century.

Vietnam was symptomatic of the larger foreign policy conundrum of an embattled presidency. Following long-established Cold War dictates, LBJ was committed to upholding a worldwide status quo in a time of sweeping change and as U.S. power operated under growing constraints. When Thieu blocked the administration's last-minute peace ploy in late 1968, Harry McPherson moaned that the "American Gulliver is tied down by the South Vietnamese Lilliputians."
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In fact, during the Johnson years, "the American Gulliver" faced upstart Lilliputians all over the world. Despite major challenges in Panama and the Dominican Republic, LBJ held the line in Latin America, but he did so at the cost of much of the goodwill the United States had earned early in Kennedy's presidency. He kept the Western alliance together, but the defection of France and the growing independence of West Germany made it more an association of equals than one dominated by the United States. He paid a high price to allies to secure minimal support for the war in Vietnam. In the Six-Day War, where headstrong proxy Israel furthered major U.S. aims, the result was closer entanglement with Israel, greater reliance on Iran and Saudi Arabia, and deeper Soviet involvement in the Middle East. Johnson's abdication in March 1968, according to historian H. W. Brands, represented a "defeat for the policy of global containment," an implicit concession that "the job was more than America could handle."
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The most urgent task for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger would be to devise new strategies to adapt to America's changed position in the world.

It was an act without precedent in the annals of twentieth-century U.S. diplomacy: the odd couple of President Richard M. Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry A. Kissinger devising and implementing a foreign policy imaginative in concept and radical in some of its essential elements. The two men perceived the dramatic changes that had occurred since the end of World War II and set out to craft what Nixon called a "new approach to foreign policy to match a new era of international relations."
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Keenly aware of the relative decline in U.S. power, they adapted by exploiting the rivalry between their two Communist adversaries, scaling back commitments, and using regional powers to promote world order. These self-styled realists operated in the manner of the great nineteenth-century European diplomatists they so admired. Shutting out the foreign policy bureaucracy, Congress, and indeed the nation, acting in secrecy and often with great dramatic flair, they pulled off in 1972—their year of triumph—breathtaking achievements, grandly staged summits in Moscow and more incredibly in Beijing, and the possibility of peace in Vietnam, helping to seal Nixon's smashing reelection victory in November.

Within less than two years, their Grand Design was in tatters, a disgraced Nixon forced to resign the office he had fought so doggedly to obtain. Brilliant in many respects, the Nixon-Kissinger scheme was fatally flawed in others. It assumed a level of cooperation and compliance on the part of other nations that simply did not exist. At home, moreover, in some very important ways, the two men swam against powerful currents. They insisted upon the primacy of foreign policy at a time when the nation, already in a postwar mode, was turning inward. They fancied themselves masters of realpolitik when Americans, recoiling from Vietnam, were rediscovering the idealistic strain in their foreign policy. They sought to expand the already broad parameters of what had been tagged the "imperial presidency" when Congress was out to recapture its place in the policymaking process surrendered during the Cold War and the nation was reacting against executive excess. More than anything else, Nixon
and Kissinger undermined their own plans by the methods they used. The ends justified the means, even when the latter conflicted with traditional American values. The secrecy they claimed essential to implement their bold ideas made enemies at home and antagonized allies abroad. They had no interest in or patience for—indeed placed themselves above—the painstaking work of building domestic support for their policies. When they encountered opposition, they sometimes responded with anger and vengefulness, resorting to illegal methods to discredit or silence their foes. Ultimately, they were snared by the web of intrigue, deceit, and reprisal they themselves had spun.
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By the time Nixon took office in January 1969, the contours of a new international system had become clear. The postwar years were over; a new and uncertain era was taking form. The Western European nations and Japan had recovered from the war economically and were challenging U.S. preeminence. The Western alliance was intact, but the allies acted more and more independently of the United States. Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev's August 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia by no means resolved Moscow's growing problems with the Warsaw Pact nations. More ominously for the Kremlin and significantly for the United States, the Soviet Union and its erstwhile ally China, after years of shouting, began shooting at each other. According to Soviet accounts, Chinese troops in early 1969 crossed their long East Asian border on nearly one hundred occasions, sparking fighting, casualties on both sides, and the threat of war. Soviet officials railed at those "squint-eyed bastards," shifted troops and planes to the east, contemplated nuclear attacks on Chinese forces, and floated discreet inquiries about how the United States might respond to a preemptive strike against China's fledgling nuclear capacity. The Chinese denounced what they now labeled their "#1 enemy." Mao Zedong urged the people to dig tunnels and store food.
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The easing of the Cold War, rising Sino-Soviet tensions, and the chronic problems facing the multitude of new nations contributed to rampant instability in the Third World.

If a new international system presented opportunity as well as threat, the situation at home posed challenges as formidable as those faced by any incoming president since Franklin Roosevelt. The postwar economic
boom was ending by the time Nixon took office. Unemployment and inflation stoked by spending for the war in Vietnam increased during 1969. Economic growth slowed. At the end of the year, the nation was in recession for the first time in a decade. By the beginning of Nixon's second term, the economy had become a serious problem, soon exacerbated by skyrocketing fuel prices from an Arab oil embargo and afflicted by the new phenomenon of "stagflation," a simultaneous increase in unemployment and inflation that became the economic hallmark of the 1970s.

The most ominous problems in 1969 were political and especially social rather than economic, starkly symbolized by the violent protests and arrests at Nixon's inauguration parade. The nation was more divided than at any other time since its own Civil War. The rise of black power militance provoked a white backlash. A top-level commission appointed by Lyndon Johnson following riots in Detroit in 1967 ominously concluded that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."
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Anti-war protests, the women's liberation movement, and the sexual revolution sparked deeply divisive culture wars that would rage into the next century. The rise of a counterculture—usually young, alienated rebels, often called hippies, who rejected the values of mainstream society—provoked an angry and fearful response from the middle-class Americans they disdained. A mushrooming crime rate and rising violence created the appearance of a nation coming apart at the seams. Within Nixon's first year, there were more than six hundred bombing incidents or attempts within the United States; the number more than doubled the next year. In an increasingly polarized society, with the left screaming revolution and the right demanding law and order, the center seemed to be crumbling.

The "team" that would devise new policies for a new era comprised an unlikely duo at best. As part of the Jewish diaspora of the 1930s, Henry Alfred Kissinger fled Nazi Germany as a youth and settled in New York City. After serving in the army, he earned a B.A. and Ph.D. in political science at Harvard, writing a dissertation on Castlereagh and Metternich, the architects of post-Napoleonic world order. As a faculty member at Harvard, he cultivated the international foreign policy elite, and his books on important issues brought him to the attention of establishment figures. He advised moderate Republican Nelson Rockefeller on foreign policy. As a consultant for the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, he participated in several Vietnam peace initiatives. During the 1968 campaign, he shamelessly played various sides against the middle. His owlish,
professorial appearance and dry, self-effacing wit only partially obscured an enormous ego and a burning ambition to shape policies rather than write about them. His thick German accent and slow speech seemed to give authority to his pronouncements.
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