Title: Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and the American Accommodation with China: A Review Article
Abstract: Richard Nixon, when President of the United States from 1969 to 1974, withdrew American troops from Indochina and initiated an accommodation with China that, as he immodestly but accurately put it, changed the world. These two Nixon Administration initiatives were part of a strategy of realpolitik that trans formed post-World War II U.S. foreign policy. Understanding the relationship between the Vietnam War and Sino-American detente is fundamental to analysing global international relations and especially U.S. relations with China. But now Richard Nixon is attempting to rewrite the history of his own administration. He does not want to be remembered as the first U.S. President to lose a war, and he has written No More Vietnams to argue his case. At the same time, he does want to be remembered ? and revered ? as the President who made with China. The problem is that he cannot have it both ways. In effect, the price of ditente with China was U.S. defeat in Vietnam. book was not written to preempt historians, Nixon claims. According to him, by January 1973 when the Paris accords on Vietnam were signed, his administration had achieved victory in Vietnam, and it was the U.S. Congress that lost the war subsequently by placing restrictions on the exercise of presidential war making power, and by cutting drastically White House requests for military and economic assistance to the Thieu government in Saigon. His argument, as I will show, does not work. Nixon's peace with honor, most analysts acknowledge, was a device for obtaining a so-called decent interval between an orderly withdrawal of U.S. forces from Indochina and a predictable communist victory. Ronald Steel, speaking of President Thieu, asks the central question: If he couldn't win with half a million American troops, how was he going to win without them?.1 But if Nixon lost the war in Vietnam, his initiatives to Beijing won the ? in the sense that he negotiated an end to the threat from China, which was a main rationale for the U.S. intervention in Indochina in the first place. Surpris ingly, there is no discussion of that in this book, in which Nixon is so busy blaming others for the communist victory in South Vietnam. When a former President of the United States writes a book that distorts key historical events in the history of his own administration, it is especially important for scholars to assess in detail the interpretation being presented. This review essay 231
Publication Year: 2000
Publication Date: 2000-04-01
Language: en
Type: review
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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