Between the Old Left and the New Right

Henry A. Kissinger

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 1999

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Summary:  After Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election, a new political force -- the neoconservatives, former anti-Nixon liberals now bent on total victory over the Soviet Union -- emerged to undermine his diplomacy. Nixon and his heir, Gerald Ford, sought to carefully wear the Soviets down, but the neocons yearned to vanquish communism with a burst of ideological elan. The new right's insistence on smearing detente as appeasement led them to ignore subtle Soviet encroachments and abandon Ford when he urged Congress to aid Indochina and Angola. The neocons undercut the real foreign policy debate, which was between the White House and the liberals.

Henry A. Kissinger was Secretary of State in the Nixon and Ford administrations and National Security Adviser to President Nixon. His books include A World Restored and Diplomacy. This essay is adapted from the recently published third volume of his memoirs, Years of Renewal.

IN DEFENSE OF DÉTENTE

By the summer of 1974, when Gerald R. Ford took over as president, Richard M. Nixon's foreign policy had become controversial. Liberals chastised him for inadequate attention to human rights. Conservatives depicted his administration as overeager for accommodation with the Soviet Union in the name of detente, which, in their view, compounded bad policy with French terminology.

Each of these criticisms owed something to the discomfort evoked by Nixon's ambiguous personality, but the overriding cause of the complaints was that his foreign policy raised two fundamental philosophical challenges. Nixon sought to extricate the United States from Vietnam on terms he defined as honorable at a time when most of the intellectual and much of the political community wanted to get out of Indochina essentially unconditionally.

Even more important was Nixon's effort to guide the transition of America's role in the world from hegemony to leadership. For much of the postwar period, the United States was preeminent because of its nuclear predominance and economic strength. By the time Nixon took office, our nuclear monopoly was dwindling, Europe was regaining vitality, Asia was entering the international arena, and Africa was being swept by independence movements. Dominance reflects power; leadership requires building consensus. But the attempts, inseparable from consensus-building, to balance rewards and penalties ran counter to the prevailing philosophy of Wilsonianism, which tried to bring about a global moral order through the direct application of America's political values undiluted by compromises with "realism."

Over two decades later, as these lines are being written, many of the themes of the debates of the 1970s have reappeared in the contemporary argument over America's role in the post-Cold War world.

ENTER DETENTE

A nation's foreign policy inevitably reflects an amalgam of the convictions of its leaders and the pressures of its environment. To understand the Nixon administration's approach to East-West relations -- and the controversy that bedeviled Ford -- it is necessary to describe the situation that Nixon inherited.

Richard Nixon took office in the midst of one of the gravest foreign policy crises in American history. Over 540,000 American troops were fighting in Vietnam, and the country was tearing itself apart over what Walter A. McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania has brilliantly described as America's first "Great Society war." By this he meant that Vietnam was the first American war fought for no definable military objective. Rather, the strategic goal was to not lose, thereby giving South Vietnam time to create democratic institutions and social programs that would win the war for the hearts and minds of the population. Such a goal for a divided country independent for only a decade, in a society governed by colonialism for a century, required a time span of stalemated war beyond the psychological endurance of the American public.

The Nixon administration was prepared to assume the responsibility for extricating the United States and never blamed our predecessors for the debacle. We would not, however, leave the country for which nearly 40,000 ...

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