There's a Chinese restaurant (sort of Chinese-Thai) near my home in Minnesota that features a campy picture on some of its menus that, while it is not this exact picture, is pretty close:
That's Henry the K, Henry Kissinger - either the architect of US foreign policy in the early 1970s or merely Richard Nixon's instrument, depending on your view - with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai in Beijing in 1972. "Nixon went to China." You've heard this one, yes?
Kissinger stuck around when Nixon had to resign in 1974 and Gerald Ford became US president. Ford and Kissinger did their best to continue the Nixon policy of relaxing tensions and finding common ground with the Soviet Union. Nixon's opening to China (i.e., the People's Republic, not the Republic of China - Taiwan - which Nixon sold out, as they said on the Republican right) was intended partly to make the Soviets really, really want to make progress on relations with the US on a strictly bilateral basis, lest the US and the PRC gang up on the Soviets. Triangular diplomacy. Simple idea. It worked, too.
Here is an at-least-equally great shot of Ford in The Ultimate Presidential Fur Coat, along with Soviet Communist Party General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and Kissinger in Vladivostok in 1974.
What could have been so compelling that it would lead the pride of Grand Rapids, Gerry Ford, to fly halfway around the world and dress up like a pimp for the cameras? That brings me back to my provocation.
Lovely idea, detente. A relaxation of tensions. I believe it was a metaphor for...the physical relaxation of tension in the string of a longbow. As the US-Vietnam War ground on to its inevitable conclusion in US defeat and Vietnamese victory (and no, with all respect to Kevin Kline in A Fish Called Wanda, it was not a tie), Nixon built on the initial diplomacy of President Lyndon Johnson to move toward a mutual accommodation in the strategically important US-USSR relationship. This entailed placing some limits on the nuclear arms race. More intangibly, tensions were truly relaxed. The atmosphere of ceaseless crisis that had enveloped international affairs for 20-25 years lifted in the 1970s, for a time. People in the US and the USSR (and elsewhere) felt that a nuclear war, too horrible to contemplate really in very specific and realistic terms, became much less likely.
Is there another way to think of detente? Yes. Instead of an "East-West" process, simply a change in the superpower relationship, you can think of it in "North-South" terms. Were the US and the USSR not agreeing to a sort of superpower condominium - dividing up the world into sectors or spheres of influence, agreeing there was no reason to fight? There was plenty for them both.
Nixon and Brezhnev, looking awfully pleased with themselves. How would detente have looked from, say, Cuba or Chile? Hm.
This took us back to the American war in Vietnam, as well as various interventions, overt and covert, within the Western Hemisphere in the 1960s and 1970s. At the very same time that detente was springing forth from Washington, DC, the United States continued to muck about in the Third World. As did the Soviet Union, in its own, more geographically limited way. But since the US took the initiative in detente, it's perhaps a tougher and more important question to ask:
Why still with the interventions? Really, how do you make sense of the "two Nixons"? He ran for president in 1968 saying there was a "new Nixon." But the Old Nixon and the New Nixon occupied the Oval Office at the same time. Old Nixon destabilized Salvador Allende in Chile any way he could think of and green-lighted the golpe against Allende by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. (Extra credit question: On what date in the calendar was Allende overthrown?)
Let's consider the US-Vietnam War and how it ended again. It ended with terrible scenes like this one, as US citizens and those who had worked with them in their counterrevolutionary, nation-building effort in "South Vietnam" (see last week's post for my fixation on those quote marks) tried like hell to get out of the country in 1975.
There are only so many seats on the helicopter. Really not good.
I asked my students, What were the results of the US defeat? A new sense of realism in US policy, said one, meaning that the US now thought about the limits of its power to intervene militarily with success abroad. The Vietnam syndrome, another offered. Also a good answer. Calling it a "syndrome" was a masterpiece of propaganda if ever there was one. A syndrome is a disease, something you surely wish to be rid of. Most people who "suffered" from this syndrome thought it was a fine thing. They were a lot more reluctant to see the US make war in the Third World than they had been before Vietnam. Bully for them.
So. If the Vietnam War led to a new realism in US foreign policy, a new focus on what US strategic interests really were and were not - which, essentially, meant rolling back the globalizing tendency in the Cold War that got its start rhetorically in the Truman Doctrine and took concrete shape starting with the Korean War - then why in the world continue to overthrow reformist regimes in the Caribbean and Latin America? What was so important to the US about the Dominican Republic that Lyndon Johnson invaded it in 1965 to keep Juan Bosch, who had been elected and overthrown there, from returning to power? Why support a golpe in Brazil in 1964? And why Nixon's fixation with Allende (an avowed Socialist, unlike the others overthrown by the US or with US support in this period, but surely committed to Chile's democratic and constitutional system)?
Students were puzzled. So, perhaps, is Stephen Rabe, whose rich accounts of these events students have read. Rabe emphasizes the US determination, under Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, to see "No more Cubas" in the Western Hemisphere. But he doesn't probe much deeper about US motives in this period. Even if US policymakers were afraid of democratic regimes leading to revolutionary regimes (does it ever really work like that?), you need to ask what strategic threat a second Cuba in Latin America would have posed to the US, in a new age of realism. And did JFK, LBJ, and RMN really, truly believe what they said about the likelihood of more Cubas? I don't know, honestly. Possibly intervening in the Western Hemisphere, at least after the Vietnam War really went bad, was some compensation. At least the US could still flex its muscle in its "backyard." Sad to think it could have come down to this. Students were a bit skeptical of such a psychological explanation, god love 'em.
Answer to extra credit question: 11 September. Until 2001, when people mentioned "11/9" (as they would, putting the date first and the month second, everywhere outside the US), they were talking about Allende's overthrow. The latest scholarship seems to indicate that, after Pinochet's forces bombed and overran the presidential palace in Santiago, Allende killed himself rather be taken alive.
No comments:
Post a Comment