|
|
Richard
Nixon: Incidents
Vietnamization
The
most important task before Nixon was to end the Vietnam war.
When he came into office, he had three policy options: unilateral
withdrawal, a showdown with Hanoi, and replacing American troops with
South Vietnamese forces trained by the U.S. (later called "Vietnamization").
None
of the options were particularly appealing. Although a small
but vocal minority on the left called for the immediate end to the
war, Kissinger and Nixon believed that a unilateral withdrawal would
have been impractical and undesirable. Aside from the sheer
pragmatic difficulty of pulling out half a million men without
suffering massive casualties as American forces retreated, the
administration also believed that abandoning South Vietnam would
signal to America's allies that the country was too weak to honor its
obligations. As the Atlantic Community was already under some
strain due to West Germany's rapprochement with the East, this
outcome was quickly rejected.
Kissinger
urged Nixon to force a showdown with Hanoi by getting Congress to
endorse the war, granting the North Vietnamese anything short of a
Communist takeover of the South at the negotiating table, and backing
up the American demands by hitting the Ho Chi Minh trail and thus
denying supplies to the Communists in the south. Nixon
hesitated to follow this strategy because he felt that Congress
wouldn't give the administration the strong endorsement it
needed. In addition, strikes against the Vietnamese logistics
system would have jeopardized relations with China just as Nixon
started to reopen relations with the PRC.
By
process of elimination, Nixon began Vietnamization. As
American troops were pulled out, the South Vietnamese would
theoretically take over seamlessly. This option, while hardly
perfect and ultimately unsuccessful due to the weakness and
corruption of the South's government, allowed for a dignified
American withdrawal and offered what Nixon called a "reasonable
chance" for the survival of democratic government in Vietnam.
Negotiations
with the Vietnamese
After
talks had broken down at the end of Johnson's term, Nixon pursued
negotiations with the North in an effort to secure his "peace
with honor." The American negotiating position called for
a ceasefire followed by withdrawal of all American armed forces and
the end of North Vietnamese support for the Viet Cong in the
south. The political future of South Vietnam would be left to
an election.
Until
October 1972, the North Vietnamese rejected the American proposal,
instead demanding an unconditional deadline for the American
withdrawal of troops, and only after the deadline had been set would
the negotiations move to other issues. As Kissinger wrote years
later, "America was asking for compromise; Hanoi for capitulation."
Forcing
the issue
With
more American troops leaving each month, the Nixon administration
had to deal with the question of how to support the Army of the
Republic of Vietnam (South Vietnam) with fewer land forces. The
answer was to begin the secret and, under the hazy concepts of
international law and the far stricter statutes of American law,
illegal bombing of Communist strongholds in Cambodia. The
raids, which occurred in 1969 and 1970, destroyed huge amounts of
Vietnamese supplies, blunting Communist attacks during this
period. But when the public learned of the administration's
strategy in 1973, its distaste for Nixonian secrecy and distrust of
the president grew. In all, the secret raids probably hurt the
administration's policies more than they furthered American interests.
Yet
Nixon had established a precedent that he would not be bound by what
had been, under Johnson, sacrosanct rules of engagement. He
used what he called the "madman" strategy to throw the
North Vietnamese off-balance in an effort to force concessions at the
negotiating table. Finally, after the Navy mined the Vietnamese
port of Haiphong, through which the North's allies were rearming
North Vietnamese forces, the North's position began to crumble.
With the election of 1972 almost certain to return a Nixon landslide,
the North Vietnamese decided that Nixon would take steps to
dramatically re-escalate the war unless they changed their
demands. On October 8, chief Northern negotiator Le Duc Tho
abandoned his position that the United States should overthrow the
Southern government, and agreed to negotiate other issues.
Ebullient,
Kissinger declared before the election that peace was "at
hand." But the talks soon broke down again.
Searching for a way to convince the Northern government that the
United States would see the fight through to the finish, Nixon began
massive bombing raids over the North Vietnamese capital over
Christmas, dropping thousands of tons of bombs in a few days.
The negotiations resumed, and on January 28, 1973, a ceasefire was
signed providing for the withdrawal of all U.S. troops from
Indochina. As another president would say of a different
American tragedy, the long national nightmare was over.
The
magnitude of defeat
Kissinger
would later comment on the magnitude of American defeat decades
later in his Diplomacy:
"South
Vietnam was thus put into the position of having to defend itself
alone against a more implacable enemy than any of America's other
allies faced, and under conditions America had never asked any other
ally to fulfill. American troops have been in Europe for two
generations; the armistice in Korea has been protected by American
forces for over forty years. Only in Vietnam did the United
States, driven by internal dissent, agree to leave no residual forces."
North
Vietnam was able to extract such a price for American withdrawal
because, having fought the Japanese, the French, and now the world's
leading power, the Communist regime had demonstrated its commitment
to finishing what it saw as an anticolonial revolution. Focused
on that goal, the North could ignore all other considerations, but
the United States had to be conscious of its relations with its
allies, China, the Soviet Union, and with intramural concerns (doves
versus hawks, Republican versus Democrats). In such a scenario,
defeat was inevitable. |
T. Roosevelt
Wilson
F. Roosevelt
Truman
Eisenhower
Kennedy
Johnson
Nixon
Philosophy
Incidents
Advisers
Evaluation
Citations
Carter
Reagan
Bush |
