Reappraisals (57 page)

Nixon, Kissinger, and Alexander Haig kept the details of the Cambodian operation to themselves and a handful of colleagues as long as they could, rarely sought advice from sources outside the military (which was uniquely concerned with blocking North Vietnamese supply routes passing through eastern Cambodia), and made, Bundy writes, imprudent and unsustainable promises to Lon Nol (Cambodia’s ruler following the overthrow in March 1970 of the ostensibly neutral Prince Sihanouk in the wake of the initial bombings). They not only lost the country to the Communists anyway, following a devastating four-year war, but undermined their own support at home and their country’s standing abroad. In Bundy’s words, “In short, the United States was raining bombs on a small country with little prospect of a good outcome. . . . The stakes in Cambodia came down, then, almost entirely to the asserted psychological impact in South Vietnam if Cambodia fell and to Nixon’s sense of personal commitment to Lon Nol.”

Hardly a victory for grand strategic thinking. There were well-informed people in the State Department (and even more at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris) who might have counseled Kissinger and Nixon against doing what they proposed, but they were not asked.
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Kissinger, even more than Nixon, held it as axiomatic that the world is run by Great Powers, to whose instructions and interests lesser states duly respond. Policy in and toward Cambodia was thus conceived and practiced with no consistent attention paid to the distinctive characteristics of any of the local interested parties. In the case of Communist states and organizations, moreover, Kissinger took it to be self-evident that the lines of communication ran straight and true, from Moscow (or Beijing) to the lowest guerrilla operative in the bush.

To be fair to Kissinger, he was not alone in this belief—and in the case of the satellite states of Eastern Europe under Stalin and his successors, or powerless and tiny Communist movements in Western Europe or the U.S., it was in large measure accurate. And the rulers of the Kremlin, at least, dearly wished it were universally true, and had an active interest in convincing outsiders that it was. But the experience of Malaysia, Indonesia, and much of Latin America might have taught otherwise, had those in power been listening. Just as the Vietnamese rulers in Hanoi were historically suspicious of China, so the Cambodian Communists were never in thrall to their Vietnamese “comrades,” though the Maoist “model”—which they had experienced firsthand in China—undoubtedly shaped their thinking more directly. Zhou Enlai even tried once to convey this basic truth about Asian history and Communist politics to Kissinger in person, to no apparent avail.

The Cambodian policy, in Bundy’s analysis, was thus ultimately justified by the claim that there was “linkage,” that just as invasion in Cambodia might pay off in Vietnam, so pressure in Hanoi (by its Soviet or Chinese “masters”) might trickle down to the Khmer Rouge and bring about some sort of truce in Cambodia itself. Hence the suggestion that one of the virtues of détente would be the leverage the U.S. could assert, through its improved relations with Moscow or Beijing, upon their ill-behaved offspring in Southeast Asia. The military and logistical links were there, but, as Bundy’s account makes clear, the leverage never existed.The whole enterprise rested on an astonishing mix of overconfidence, misguided strategic theorizing, and ignorance.

Cambodia was the worst example, but it was not the only one. In March 1971 the Pakistani dictator Yahya Khan violently suppressed riots in East Pakistan; millions of refugees fled into neighboring India. Tension mounted all year until December when, following Pakistan’s dispatch of large numbers of troops to quell discontent in East Pakistan, fighting broke out between India and Pakistan on India’s northwest frontier. The war lasted a matter of weeks, until the Pakistani forces surrendered and withdrew, and East Pakistan declared its independence as Bangladesh, leaving a defeated, humiliated, and much-reduced Pakistani state. The indigenous sources of this conflict needn’t concern us here; the point is that they were also of no concern to Washington, which nonetheless “tilted” heavily toward Pakistan, to the point of putting pressure on India and sending a U.S. naval task group to the Bay of Bengal.

Why should the U.S., which had no discernible direct interest in the conflict, resort to gunboat diplomacy and demonstrate such public support for one party—the repressive, dictatorial Yahya Khan—at the cost of alienating not just India, a major power in Asia and one of its few stable democracies, but also politicized Muslims everywhere? Why, in short, did Kissinger and Nixon engage in a piece of geopolitics that Bundy rightly describes as a “fiasco” and that has left a long and unhelpful legacy of distrust for the U.S. in the entire region? For the breathtakingly simple reason, Bundy writes, that Pakistan was perceived as a friend of China (Yahya Khan had the previous year served as the link through which Kissinger made contact with the Chinese), and India, as a notoriously “neutral” state, had cultivated good relations with the Soviet Union. In Kissinger’s words, quoted by Nixon himself, “We don’t really have any choice.
We can’t allow a friend of ours and China to get screwed in a conflict with a friend of Russia’s.
”
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Yahya Khan had certainly performed friendly services for Nixon and Kissinger, helping establish the early contacts between Beijing and Washington and keeping them secret at a time when leaks might have been disastrous for Nixon’s China project. But even if one allows that Pakistan was a “friend of ours,” it did not follow that the U.S. need line up behind a violent and (as it proved) doomed military despot. However, in Kissinger’s words once again, “Why is it our business how they govern themselves?”
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And so, in another mechanistic application of hypothetical laws of geopolitical strategy, the U.S. backed the wrong man in the wrong conflict, securing, as might have been predicted, an undesired outcome and a legacy of reduced influence.

There is no evidence that China would have reacted badly, or even cared, if the U.S. had “sat out” the Indo-Pakistan conflict; there were even less grounds for believing that the Soviet Union was poised to intervene on India’s behalf—the ostensible reason for the dispatch of the naval task group. There is, on the other hand (according to Bundy), some evidence that Yahya Khan was misled, or given grounds for misleading himself, into thinking that he had American backing for his uncompromising stance, first in East Pakistan and then toward India. A fiasco indeed.

Let us allow that Southeast Asia by 1970 was a region in which the policy of any U.S. administration was probably doomed to meet an unsatisfactory and ultimately disastrous end. William Bundy, it must be said, does not suggest a strategy by which the U.S. could have brought to a better end the war he had earlier helped to set in motion. Let us further acknowledge that the Indian subcontinent was terra incognita to most Americans (though, once again, not to some scorned experts at the State Department and in other official agencies); it is not just in Washington, after all, that men have badly misjudged situations taking place in “far away countries of which they know little.” But what of Europe, the centerpiece of the cold war and thus the site of Nixon’s own experience of foreign policy in the fifties, as well as the region in whose history Kissinger established his scholarly reputation?

In later writings, both men took some credit for laying the groundwork of détente in Europe—in his memorial eulogy for the late president, Kissinger claimed this as one of Nixon’s major achievements. William Bundy is skeptical of this view. At the time, both men were very wary of any change in Europe that they did not fully control—and whereas West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had always consulted fully with Washington before making the slightest move, Willy Brandt in particular, while keeping his American allies fully informed, pursued his own agenda. In the worldview of Kissinger, only one superpower—the U.S.—was fully entitled to engage its counterpart— the Soviet Union—in serious conversations that might lead to significant change. The White House was overtly displeased at Brandt’s election to the Chancellery in 1969 and gave only grudging and unenthusiastic assent to his
Ostpolitik
—the treaties and agreements he negotiated between the Federal Republic and the Soviet bloc states.

One reason for this was that Kissinger, concerned with geopolitical factors in international affairs, was reluctant to accept a definitive territorial and frontier settlement in Europe. But he may, at the time, have underestimated its significance for Moscow. When the Kremlin chose to overlook Nixon’s resumed bombing of North Vietnam in December 1972 and went ahead with plans for a summit meeting, the U.S. administration took credit for its successful “gamble,” attributing Soviet acquiescence to Moscow’s nervousness at Nixon’s “China turn.” This view has been disputed by such contemporary Russian officials as Anatoly Dobrynin and Georgi Arbatov. “Kissinger,” Arbatov said, “thinks it was China that played the decisive role in getting us to feel the need to preserve our relationship with the USA. . . . But Berlin actually played a much bigger role, almost a decisive one. Having the East German situation settled was most important to us, and we did not want to jeopardize that.”
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Kissinger in his memoirs concluded “with hindsight” that the Soviets did not cancel the summit for several reasons. One was that cancellation would “bring about the Soviet’s worst nightmare, an American relationship with Peking not balanced by equal ties with Moscow.” But he also said that renewed Soviet-American hostility “would almost certainly have upset the applecart of Brandt’s policy, [and] the Soviet Union’s carefully nurtured strategy for Europe would have collapsed.” Bundy, for his part, concludes that Brandt’s policy of
Ostpolitik
“and its coming up for final Bundestag approval at that crucial moment saved the summit. At the moment of truth, stabilizing the situation in Germany, completing a new European order, and insuring Soviet control of the Eastern European nations . . . were more important to the Soviet Union than international solidarity.”

Whether or not the European version of détente was such a good thing is a debatable issue—Bundy certainly admires it unstintingly, based as it was on “slow day-to-day changes and increased contacts,” in contrast to the more demonstrative U.S. version of détente, linked to high-level agreements and of questionable long-term value. I have argued elsewhere that both the West German
Ostpolitik
and the U.S. idea of détente demonstrated an inadequate grasp of the weakness and instability of Communist regimes, notably that of East Germany, and showed as well a cavalier insensitivity to the needs and hopes of the population of Europe’s eastern half, for whom a “definitive” postwar settlement fixing Europe’s political and ideological frontiers into place was far from desirable, and was much resented. In any case, détente’s indirect contribution to the destabilizing of the Soviet Union and its satellites was not part of Kissinger’s—or Brandt’s—goals. The architects of Helsinki cannot take credit for that accomplishment.
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What is beyond question is that Kissinger in particular grew rather frustrated in his dealings with the divided and changing leadership of Europe’s many states. As he put it himself, “[R]elations with Europe did not lend themselves to secret diplomacy followed by spectacular pronouncements. There were too many nations involved to permit the use of backchannels.” But then that is how it is with a continent full of medium-sized pluralist democracies. Willy Brandt wrote that “Henry Kissinger did not like to think of Europeans speaking with one voice. He preferred to juggle with Paris, London and Bonn, playing them off one against another, in the old style.”
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Brandt is somewhat disingenuous here; it suited him to think of European statesmen as speaking with one voice when they didn’t—and don’t. But his perception of Kissinger’s preferences seems no less accurate for that.

The “old style” was not very effective, however. One of its chief results was to weaken the Atlantic alliance, diminishing European trust in Washington. In April 1973, Kissinger, in a famously unfortunate speech aimed at America’s continental allies, declared a “European Year” without consulting a single European leader; the speech, in Bundy’s words, was “didactic, occasionally scolding and petulant, and free of any suggestion that the United States might have neglected some of its own obligations, or might have erred in some of its [own] economic policies or energy practices.”

The result of Kissinger’s policies and his style, Bundy concludes, was to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its only credible international supporters—opening up a gap that was widened still further when the U.S. gave its NATO allies no advance warning of the worldwide military alert of October 24, 1973 (at the time of the Middle Eastern war). Like the Japanese government following the political and economic shocks of 1971 (the opening to China, the abandoning of the dollar-gold parity, and restrictions on U.S. imports), Western European politicians in the aftermath of the oil embargo, the Kissinger speech, and the cool response to
Ostpolitik
began to rethink their relations with Washington. As a result of behaving as though America’s European allies could be relied upon automatically to endorse U.S. actions, Kissinger and Nixon thus released them from the habit of doing so. The damage done to NATO and the Western alliance was still being felt well into the mid-eighties.

To be sure, Nixon and Kissinger had successes too, achievements that can be placed unambiguously to their credit. The opening to China and the first round of arms agreements with the Soviet Union are among these, and William Bundy is scrupulously fair in taking note of them, just as he is careful to defend Kissinger in particular against the more all-embracing condemnations of his critics. It was Alexander Haig, he suggests, who carried the misleading, secret pledges to Thieu and who must take most of the blame for the implementation of the Cambodian schemes. An ambitious officer raised in the MacArthur school of foreign policy, he treated legal and institutional restraints on the maximum use of military force in all circumstances as annoying and dispensable impediments. Bundy’s summary is unusually severe: “That a senior military officer might be so far wrong on a central constitutional point is striking (and disturbing) even at a distance of time.”