Kissinger's Creation

...decision to bomb the Cambodian sanctuaries...

...For .why should local events be viewed in the context of a global challenge if one does not recognize the existence of this challenge, particularly its global nature...

...The Russians, on the other hand, are "rigid" and "muscle-bound" in diplomacy, their "undying quest for petty advantage," their strenuous insistence on their prerogatives as a great power, and their ultimate reliance on massive military power all betraying an "extraordinary psychological insecurity...

...This surely was their policy, as Kissinger points out in his book...

...But after World war II, with Europe devastated and defenseless in the face of Soviet power, we had no choice but to accept our responsibility as the only country which could offer security and sustain hope...

...They are not the first systematic critique of the liberal orthodoxy on the war, but they are the most effective, in part because they are written from a perspective of intimate knowledge of the policy decisions and peace negotiations...

...The whole exercise involves a complete inversion of reality...

...Ours was a measured response (short of resuming the bombing of the North, which had been discontinued in October), encouraged by the Sihanouk government and in full accordance with the Hague Convention of 1907, which allows a belligerent to take counteraction in a neutral country which cannot or will not prevent its territory from being used by the other belligerent...

...effort during the month of April to negotiate a return to neutrality in Cambodia--an effort that was flatly rejected by Le Duc Tho, who maintained that all the conflicts in Indochina had become one and that no settlement in Cambodia was possibtewithout the overthrow of the (internationally recognized) government in Phnom Penh...

...consistently and mercilessly blamed us and the Saigon government for every diplomatic impasse while never blaming Hanoi for its absolute refusal to compromise...

...The recurring call in the U.S...

...But he does not fare as well against his "conservative" critics who have nevertheless been relatively silent, partly because they are now in a tacit alliance with Kissinger against the Carter administration, and partly because Kissinger has moved toward their position with respect to U.S.-Soviet relations...

...Neither did, the latter because it did not want to call attention to its illegal presence in Cambodia...

...The importance of the earlier concession was now disparaged, or else it was argued that Hanoi had in fact reciprocated or that the United States had been hardening its position...

...And as the denial of reality becomes more obvious by the day, the hatred of the Left for Kissinger grows more impassioned...

...On the contrary, our enemies have grown more contemptuous and our friends less cooperative, and throughout the world the rudimentary structure of peace built three decades ago seems to be giving way to the forces of anarchy and aggression...

...and] an alibi for not doing what must be done...

...Unfortunately, the really interesting questions raised by Kissinger's geopolitical strategy, above all his drtente policy, are not dealt with adequately in White House Years...

...By geopolitical, he means "an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium," that stable balance of forces that is the ultimate guarantor of peace and security...

...withdrawal, an escalation matched by proposals for political concessions to Hanoi: Each of these escalating concessions was advanced as the key to peace and as the only way to get negotiations started...

...Since Vietnam spawned this selfdestructive mindsec, and since its legacy of guilt continues to paralyze American foreign policy, Kissinger is determined in White House Years to refute the idea of American culpability in the war...

...The State Department's "compulsive peace initiatives" in the Middle East in 19691970 had the effect of emboldening Arab radicals and encouraging Soviet involvement, a trend that only began to be reversed when the U.S...

...The ideological character of Communism is one of those "objective realities" that statesmen must consider in determining "the scope available for creativity...

...Significantly, no reviewer has challenged this claim...

...When these are juxtaposed with Kissinger's account of the secret negotiations, in which Hanoi would not even consider (until October 1972) any proposal ether than complete and immediate U.S...

...With telling irony, he shows how policies that outraged our domestic advocates of "peace" and "disarmament" produced conciliatory responses ~ from our Communist opponents...

...It is oversold in White House Years where Kissinger repeatedly speaks of establishing "a new international order...

...The irony is that Kissinger shows himself in White House Years to be profoundly sensitive to the central ideological questions of our age and imbued with a faith in Western values, democratic institutions, and American society that seems almost "Out of character...

...It was the larger purpose of the Nixon administration, and it is also Kissinger's central purpose in White House Years, to establish an American geopolitical tradit i o n - t o "found American foreign policy on a sober perception of permanent na...

...And because China was itself a Communist state, the opening to Peking had the additional effect of eroding ideological convictions and the public's understanding of the nature of Communism...

...policy, stiffened Hanoi's resolve, and, together with North Vietnam's insatiable quest for hegemony, doomed the people of Indochina to their present miserable fate...

...9 The North Vietnamese, he writes, "had been insolent on May 2, when they thought they were winning...

...Kissinger owes his present salience partly to the incompetence of the Carter administration, which has failed to put forth anything even remotely resembling a coherent foreign policy...

...And in Cambodia they are employing mass starvation to eliminate an alien nationalism, a policy perfectly in keeping with Stalin's attempt to destroy the Crimean Tatars, the Chechens, and other non-Russian national groups during the Second World War...

...This is a lesson which America--or better, the Carter administration-should by now have learned...

...There is an irrational element to this animosity, a deep hatred, which cannot be fully explained by reference to differences of conception, policy, and worldview...

...He documents this pattern by showing how the New York Times, during a short period in 1969, moved by stages from favoring mutual withdrawal to supporting complete and unconditional U.S...

...C a l l e d by some critics McGovernism without McGovern, this policy has completely failed the test of reality...

...This is a completely evasive response, because, as Kissinger shows with an awesome accumulation of detail, the critics of the war in the U.S...

...Like a subversive bemoaning the decline of authority, Stanley Hoffmann notes that the country suffered from "domestic battle fatigue...

...When questioned publicly, Sihanouk pleaded ignorance about the bombing, which he called "an affair between the Americans and the Viet Cong-Viet Minh without any Khmer witnesses...

...The Shah's downfall is another stain on Kissinger's record (not on Carter's, of course), because he fed the Shah's delusions of grandeur, alienating the Iranian people in the process...

...The question, however, is not whether d&ente was oversold but why, given the inevitable danger of euphoria which Kissinger concedes, no effort was made to "intensify the ideological struggle," as the Russians so delicately put it...

...Kissinger's response in White House Years to the hardline opponents of his drtente policy is half-hearted and intellectually weak...

...No such obligation was discovered for the other side...

...But it is morality with a double standard that allows the Soviet bloc to assist a radical Chilean candidate (and is even prepared to overlook much more unseemly forms of Soviet intervention), but deems it improper for the U.S...

...12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980...

...While conceding the "potential incompatibility between drtente and defense," he" conveniently relegates his d~tente critics to the opposite extreme of the political spectrum from the Left, their "excesses of truculence" posing as serious an obstacle to American foreign policy as the Left's "excesses of conciliation...

...But like drtente itself, if was very much oversold in terms of its geopolitical significance...

...Nixon and Kissinger may have wanted to do that which was necessary to prevent a Communist victory but, as McGeorge Bundy writes in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, "the country was not that stern...

...The Soviet interest in arms-control talks was heightened by our decision to develop the ABM system, just as its readiness-to compromise was diminished when Senator Muskie, running for the Presidency, travelled to Moscow to assure the Russians that "there was a body of opinion in the United States that wanted to reduce US weapons spending...

...East-West rivalry and its attendant alliances with unsavory dictatorships of the Right...

...The attack begins with Cambodia...

...These portraits provide the counterpoint to Kissinger's famed globalism, the textural background against which he sought to apply "an integrating conceptual framework...

...Whether the issue is Iran, Indochina, SALT, or the entire pattern of American retreat and Soviet advance, the argument seems invariably to come back to Henry Kissinger, who, depending upon one's point of view, is held to be the cause of everything that has gone wrong or the indispensable master statesman to whom the nation must turn to set things right...

...The fact is that drtente was oversold...

...Power is the precondition for an effectively moderate policy, for as Kissinger wisely observes, "moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have a choice...

...But it would have been acknowledged had Phnom Penh _9 Hanoi protested...

...I t is symptomatic of the lamentable state of American foreign policy that today, three years into the Presidency of Jimmy Carter, the central figure in the national debate over America's world role and the country's most prominent statesman is not the President or an official of his administration but a former Secretary of State...

...In the real world, morality cannot be based THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 11 moral and intellectual basis for American foreign policy...

...At best it bought some time for America to regain its psychological balance and for the "inherent stagnation of the Communist system to work its corrosion" (though the technology we provided the Russians helped them escape the economic contradictions of Communism...

...Thus he is deeply suspicious of German nationalism (and wary of Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik) because he regards Germany's historical propensity to maneuver between East and West as a latent threat to the unity of the Western Alliance...

...At this point we come to the last refuge of the anti-war movement--the argument that whatever the merits of the war's objectives, America just didn't have the will to fight...

...This requires a conceptual framework which "links" events and illuminates their "nuances and interrelations," and which also establishes clear priorities...

...There is no question that Kissinger wins this debate...

...Toward this end, he writes, "we would have to learn to reconcile ourselves to imperfect choices, partial fulfillment, the unsatisfying tasks of balance and maneuver, given confidence by our moral values but recognizing that they could be achieved only in stages and over a long period of time...

...At Brussels Kissinger said that "I have always been restless with those who define the issue as 'drtente' or 'no drtente.' " But in White House Years he doesn't indicate the possibility of a third course...

...Surely such momentous events call for a reevaluation of the liberal orthodoxy of the past decade...

...Yet he leaves completely unresolved the dilemma that this new order depended upon the cooperation of states which did not and still don't accept its basic legitimacy...

...We foreclosed that option for ourselves, and it is hard to avoid seeing the connection between this decision and the mess we have today...

...when he invited Nixon to Phnom Penh on July 31, 1969, to mark the improvement of U.S.-Cambodian relations, or noted in an article published i n October that the Americans "will be obliged in their own interest to support the popular nationalists in their resistance against the new imperialism, that of Asiatic Communism...

...Following the usual double standard, Shawcross and his supporters make no mention of the wave of attacks that the North Vietnamese launched in Cambodia in early April, just two weeks after Sihanouk's overthrow, with the aim of toppling Lon Nol and expanding their logistics base for Operations in South Vietnam...

...If so, this was an instance where he allowed sentiment to triumph over reason...

...The subsequent "Christmas bombing" did not destroy the talks, as was predicted, but broke an impasse, producing " a more polite tone from the North Vietnamese" than anything that was heard since October...

...They are immensely detailed, brilliantly argued, and enormously powerful in their dramatic impact...

...Instead, they concentrate their fire on Cambodia, charging that the Nixon administration unilaterally involved a neutral Cambodia in the war and is thus ultimately responsible for the destruction of the country...

...But in what sense are the rulers in Hanoi less odious ? Their reign of terror has forced hundreds of thousands to flee Vietnam...

...Nobody today, with the possible exception of Noam Chomsky, is prepared to deny that Pol Pot is a massmurderer...

...Such will be the fate of America, Kissinger is convinced, so long as it fails t o establish an integrating, geopolitical tradition in foreign policy...

...Kissinger demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt that the basic cause of the war was Hanoi's rapacious desire to conquer Indochina...

...George Orwell once wrote t h a t , "Applied to foreign policy, pacifism either stops being pacifist or becomes appeasement...

...Carl Gershman KISSINGER' S CREATION With his memoir V/kite House Years, Henry Kissinger intensifies the ideological struggle at home--and the Left scrambles to save its skin...

...The statesman can master this reality and transcend it, but only if he has " a sense of history, an understanding of manifold forces not within our control, and a broad view of the fabric of events...

...For all his diplomatic maneuvering that went under the name of d6tente, Kissinger remains a Cold Warrior in his view that the Soviet Union poses a global threat which only the United States is capable of meeting...

...This same deadly anti-Americanism explains the readiness today of so many people to believe that the U.S...

...Perpetuating the myth that the Cambodian issue can be considered separately from the war in Vietnam, Shawcross doesn't even mention the countrywide offensive that North Vietnam launched from Cambodia against the South on February 22, 1969, almost a month before the U,S...

...Historically, America has not had such a tradition, preferring, as George Washington once said, "to steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world" and to avoid entanglements in foreign disputes except "for extraordinary emergencies...

...His main target is the group from which he broke (or which broke from him)--the "internationalist Establishment" which was demoralized by the shattering failure in Vietnam and which "collapsed before the onslaught of its children who questioned all its values...

...But there is no contradiction here at all, since a readiness to intervene is what makes "universal intervention" unnecessary...

...His task is to seize the "margin between necessity and accident," to grasp "the relationship of events," and to understand "the scope available for creativity...

...White House Years is an extraordinary achievement, a book that will endure and may eventually be seen to define the age in which we live...

...tional interest" and to free the country from the "fluctuating emotions that in the past had led us to excesses of both intervention and abdication...

...The evidence also does not support the view that our 1970 ground assault against the sanctuaries was an unprovoked act of aggression by which we enlarged the war in pursuit of military victory...

...One suspects, however, that Kissinger's reticence may also indicate that he is not entirely persuaded by his own arguments...

...This passage is documented by no fewer than 54 references to Times editorials over an eight-month span, and this is just one of the many instances he cites where opponents of the war took a totally one-sided and compulsively defeatist approach...

...But a third course was open to the Russians--the course of "drtente" and "no drtente...

...There is a sense in which Kissinger's critics are arguing at cross-purposes with him over essentially tactical and methodological questions that cannot be meaningfully discussed in the absence of some prior agreement about the nature of the threat that we face...

...As a result, their criticism is unfocused and often petty while his resPonse is polemical, for his intent is to win a "civil war" so that it will become possible again to establish a consensual Some critics calf Kissinger's approach amoral, in that it deprecates "sentiment" in decision-making, and some go so far as to consider it immoral in its readiness to use force or to condone measures such as interference in the Chilean elections...

...The Left liberals despise Kissinger's realpolitik, his reliance on an "amoral" balance of power, and his fixation on the Carl Gershman is Executive Director of Social Demoerats, USA, and a regular con, tributor to Commentary magazine...

...This is the first premise of his "intellectual framework," the basic assumption without which his concept of "linkage" becomes unintelligible, as indeed it is to many of his critics...

...At worst it was just another alibi, an excuse for not facing up to the hard realities of our predicament...

...22.50...

...Instead, they have shown themselves to be the worst killers since Hitler...

...Nor is any mention made of the U.S...

...It is precisely this "general validity" claimed by Communist ideology which, as Kissinger notes in White House Years, "transforms relations between states into conflicts between philosophies and poses challenges to the balance of power through domestic upheavals...

...Thus, we see Kissinger meeting with "a different 'Ducky' " (Le Duc Tho) on July 19, 1972...

...It was a role, Kissinger writes, for which we were not prepared either by experience or temperament, least of all for the task of dealing "with an adversary of comparable strength [the Soviet Union] on a permanent basis...

...Appearing at a time when the Hanoi government is providing fresh evidence every day of its ruthlessness, aggressiveness, and total subservience to Moscow, Kissinger's chapters on Vietnam will have wide credibility and could provide the basis for a full-scale revision of American attitudes toward the war...

...To be sure, such differences are enormous...

...Once made, the concession was briefly applauded, and indeed Hanoi was called on to respond...

...Kissinger's disagreement with his critics on the Left comes down in the end t o the question of the Cold War...

...It is a petty charge that is belied by the very nature of the book, which i s not the cautious statement of an office-seeker but a frank, passionate, at times recklessly polemical, always thoroughly absorbing apologia not just for the policies of the Nixon administration but for a comprehensive worldview...

...But it is more than that--much more...

...The chapters on Vietnam take up one-third of this massive volume...

...In his famous essay on Bismarck, Kissinger observed that "opposing systems of legitimacy are likely to clash if one of them claims general validity...

...One is tempted to say that this is Kissinger's response to the Left, which it is, as we shall see...

...They are using poison gas to subjugate Laos...

...And why should it be necessary to demonstrate "credibility" in one area in order to protect interests elsewhere if there isn't a global balance of power that is affected by our actions...

...Our discomfort expressed itself in an urge to escape the responsibility thrust upon us, first in an over-exuberant effort to refashion the world according to our moral 8 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 principles and self-image, then in a remorseful determination to abdicate our responsibility altogether...

...Since no one is ingenious enough to conceive a way to blame Kissinger for the failure to protect the embassy, the issue is just not raised...

...His eight years of stewardship over American policy now seem like a Golden Age in comparison to the spectacle of different officials voicing conflicting views at the same time, or the same official voicing conflicting views at different times...

...He exposes the cowardice of seven Ivy League presidents who had lost control of their campuses and sought to regain it by pleading for the abandonment of South Vietnam to tyranny...

...But Kissinger clearly thought he had transcended this reality, or at least that he had established a geopolitical framework for doing so...

...Nor have they been considered in the debate occasioned by the book, which has been almost entirely an affair between Kissinger and the Left...

...This was "Kissinger's war," for it was started, according to liberal mythology, after the Democrats left office in early 1969 and ended with the triumph of the Kissinger-created Khmer Rouge...

...It is a measure of the shame they now feel (but which they dare not admit publicly) that they no longer wish to claim credit for their "victory...

...This is the argument of William Shawcross's book Sidesbow, t and it is faithfully parroted by Stanley Hoffmann and others seeking to absolve themselves of blame for what has happened in Cambodia...

...The answer lies in the Left's need to escape accountability for the consequences of its own ideas and policiesl The events of the past few years have thoroughly discredited the intellectual and moral position of the Left--not just the far Left represented by Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, but the liberal Left of George McGovern and Edward Kennedy...

...America's opponents have responded to our good will not with restraint but with a swift kick in the teeth, leading to an unprecedented deterioration of the U.S...

...And we know from the Brussels speech and from many other statements he has made recently that he is now less tempted by the prospect of creating a new world order than he is concerned merely to reestablish something resembling a balance of power...

...The Indochinese Communists were said to be true nationalists whose victory would bring reconstruction and reconciliation...

...The book is organized chronologically and contains, in addition to a detailed account of the major international crises of the first Nixon term, brief, gem-like portraits of the countries and personalities that Kissinger dealt with...

...Barbara Tuchman, writing in the New York Times, has charged that it is "a campaign document" hastily completed so as to position Kissinger in 1980 for a _9 Little, Brown...

...position in the world, To friend and foe alike...

...He shows a Washington establishment "eager to assume the blame for every impasse" in negotiations, an intellectual class consumed by an "inexhaustible masochism," and a Congress in the grip of an "antimilitary orgy...

...triumphant return to the Department of State...

...But the simpler, safer course is to blame Kissinger for what has happened--a tactic known as saving one's skin...

...What is clear, though, is that the Nixon administration was faced with agonizing tactical and strategic decisions that had to be made in theteeth of a domestic opposition which directed its moral fury exclusively against the U.S., so much so that our domestic travail, as Kissinger writes, had taken on the character of a "civil war...

...In his rejoinder to the liberals, Kissinger follows the maxim (one of the many to be found in his book) that "statesmen get no prizes for failing with restraint...

...The recognized ability and will to exercise power reduces the need tO use force to a minimum--assuming, of course, that a policy of deterrence is but one aspect of a comprehensive"geopolitical" strategy that makes sense...

...Were he to return to office today--at a time when the mood of the country is shifting back toward selfassertion, and the requirements of "equilibrium" demand the rebuilding of American power and the recovery of its credibility abroad--Kissinger might be ideally suited to accomplish this more modest yet extremely urgent objective...

...This pattern of behavior could hardly be understood by an anti-war movement that, according to Kissinger, "fancied the North Vietnamese as peace-loving, essentially gentle creatures, offended by any demonstration of American power and eager above all to reciprocate gestures of American goodwill...

...One of the lessons of Vietnam that Kissinger seeks to drive home time and again is that in dealing with implacable opponents, our conciliation, if perceived as weakness, is inversely related to their flexibility...

...And if appeasement strengthens those who would make war and enslave others, it is not just naive, but, for all practical purposes, profoundly immoral...

...Indeed, he has a profound dislike for India, that "special favorite of American liberals," with its sanctimonious "claim to be neutral moral arbiter of world affairs" ("the policy," he notes, "by which a weak nation seeks influence out of proportion to its strength...

...Kissinger's critics should not be so modest...

...The article's title, "The implantation of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese along Our Borders," left little doubt about who Sihanouk felt had violated Cambodian sovereignty...

...The Chinese are admired as "the most unsentimental practitioners of balance-of-power politics I have encountered," historically conditioned to contend with powerful neighbors and potential aggressors and inwardly assured of "the uniqueness of Chinese values...

...But he signaled his approval in other ways, as t See my review in The Amert~an Spectator, September 1979...

...It could placate the hysterical Left in America and induce some cooperation from the Russians, but it was not a sufficient basis on which to build "a new international order...

...I t is in defense of this worldview--admirable ia concept if not always in practice (we shall take up the issue of d~tente later on) - - t h a t Kissinger joins issue with the liberal Left, which has become the principal obstacle to a policy of geopolitical engagement...

...He has far more affection for "the bluff, direct military chiefs of Pakistan" (and gratitude for their role as a secret channel to China) than for Indira Gandhi with her "almost hereditary moral superiority...

...Perhaps it was a sense of historic mission which led him to believe he had squared the circle of Communism...

...They were benign and friendly now, even though i n the interval their harbors had been mined and all re10 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 strictions on our bombing had been removed...

...Disarmament talks, Kissinger points out, could be advanced only "by presenting the Kremlin with risks and programs they were eager to stop," not by making unilateral gestures of restraint (such as cancellation of the B-1 bomber) which have never "elicited a significant or lasting Soviet response...

...Kissinger also owes his centrality in the present debate to the animosity that is being directed at him from the liberal Left...

...Common sense would seem to dictate the very opposite conclusion--that it was the anti-war movement that crippled U.S...

...But he has no such reservations with respect to Polish nationalism, which is viewed as a force for freedom forged in a continuing struggle for independence, a struggle in which Polish patriots have "been seized with the heroic and moving notion that they could restore freedom to their own people only by enhancing freedom everywhere...

...He does not hesitate to s~ate his preferences, which are not based on prejudice and certainly not on fashionable opinion, but rather on an appreciation of the interplay of psychology, culture, and history and their impact _9 on the global balance of forces...

...Why could it not also have been ours ? Whatever the explanation--that it was not politically feasible given the reaction to Vietnam, or that the Russians would have been offended--the fact remains that drtente was from the very beginning onesided...

...attempt to resist a Communist military victory was the cause of Pol Pot's murder of millions of people (and also of Hanoi's present policy of murder through starvation, if one cares to extend this argument to its logical end...

...He suggested that the present confusion over drtente was not unrelated to "theories to which, again, I myself have no doubt contributed...

...and while means cannot be justified by ends, they also cannot be judged apart from a consideration of the available options and their probable results...

...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 9 Small wonder, then, that in light of this evidence and in the present political climate, Kissinger's critics choose to downplay the Vietnam issue...

...And in the same speech he excoriated Western leaders for their "tendency to treat drtente quite theatrically . . . . not as a balancing of national interests.., but rather as an exercise in strenuous goodwill...

...I n the midst of all this, we have the publication of White House Years,* Kiss i n g e r ' s account of his role during Nixon's first term...

...It reveals the fundamental flaw of the liberal Left, the root cause of its failure of will and wisdom: an utter refusal to accept moral responsibility for its actions and views...

...to aid his democratic opponent...

...These examples, which are drawn from a vast range of observations, suggest the importance that Kissinger attaches to understanding the character of nations and their leaders--the material constituting the objective reality which conditions the work of the statesman...

...Stanley Hoffmann claims that the basic contradiction in Kissinger's conception of international politics is not moral but practical: "He seeks an order of restraint, yet his global view obliges him to universal intervention...

...These calls for ever further American concessions were regularly explained by the argument that the United States had a special obligation to prove its good faith to the other side and to abandon the quest for military victory...

...and Israel firmly blocked Soviet/Syrian intervention in the Jordan crisis of 1970...

...But here, too, the evidence does not support the position of the war's opponents...

...Vietnam is also Kissingefs,fauk since it was his .policy, as William Pfaff wrote recently- in the THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1980 7 New York Times, "to abandon South Vietnam to its enemies...

...It is nothing of the sort...

...They did, after all, succeed in stopping the war, as they once boasted with obvious pride...

...The result was that we could not dominate events but were dominated by them...

...Our buoyant engagement and self-pitying withdrawal both demonstrated that we were prisoners of our emotions, sentiments that did not explain reality but, like Bacon's Idols of the Cave, discolored "the light of nature...

...His preference for China over Russia is such that he seems ever tempted to riolate his stricture '!never to lean to one side or the other" in our role as tertius gaudens...

...But one will find no hint of self-criticism in White House Years, where he denies that drtente was oversold, barring some inevitable "campaign oratory" by Nixon...

...Even Stanley Hoffmann, who has written the most extensive critique of White House Years (the New York Review of Books, December 6, 1979), rests his case on the belief that the war was " a hopeless undertaking," not on the contention that we or the Saigon government resisted a political settlement which Hanoi was only too willing to negotiate...

...Worse still, he extended the war for four years at a cost of 20,000 American lives and immense suffering for the Indochinese--all for no purpose since, as Pfaff writes, "the result for Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos could not possibly have been worse than what actually happened...

...His case for having established a new reality hinges on the opening to China, which 'was surely a momentous event...

...It is not this guiding framework which limits freedom of action but its absence, for without it "policymakers are forced to respond to parochial interests, buffeted by pressures without a fixed compass...

...So is the seizure of the hostages, since he pressured Carter to admit the Shah to the United States, even at the risk of enraging Khomeini...

...The alternative to the administration's drtente polity, he writes, was "a crusading policy of confrontation" that would have risked our national cohesion, strained our alliances, and isolated America by conceding to our adversaries "a monopoly on the global yearning for peace...

...Some unsympathetic reviewers have called it too long (it is 1,521 pages), undigested, and tedious...

...To this list one must add Jimmy Carter, who came into office disparaging Kissinger and proclaiming a new policy that would emphasize morality and the reliance upon good will, and which would lay to rest that "inordinate fear of Communism" that led the country into Vietnam and isolated America from the ascendant revolutionary forces in the Third World...

...Nor is it explained how an eight-week incursion 20 miles into Cambodia, whose goal was to stabilize the military situation so that we could withdraw another 150,000 troops from Vietnam, was an attempt to enlarge the war...

...Sardonic and philosophical by turn, unapologetic but never defensive, he strikes back powerfully at those who had adopted the view that America "should withdraw from the world because we were too evil for it...

...Most damaging of all, there is the Communist holocaust in Indochina--a development that was not dreamt of in the philosophy of the liberal Left...

...Americahas become the pitiful, helpless giant that Nixon once spoke of--its moral posturing increasingly transparent, its paralysis of will universally perceived, its fear of Communism steadily growing...

...It is monumental in scope, masterfully written, and "devastating," as the Economist observed, "in its elegance and force...

...The bombing was not disclosed so as not to force Sihanouk to have to choose between endorsing it publicly, which would have obliged Hanoi to retaliate, and demanding that it be stopped, which he didn't want to do...

...He assaults the hypocrisy of Clark Clifford, Averell Harriman, and Cyrus Vance, who became born-again doves on Vietnam only after leaving the Johnson administration...

...Nor has America's new affinity with the Third World diminished antiAmericanism...

...But when Hanoi ignored the proposals, the result was not a call for American steadfastness but for further US concessions on the ground that the lack of progress was the fault of the United States or of Saigon...

...withdrawal accompanied by our overthrow of the Saigon government, the impact is overwhelming...

...In fact, the North Vietnamese were ruthless expansionists who treated "acts of goodwill that did not reflect the existing balance of forces.., as signs of moral weakness," while never failing to take seriously "displays of American s t r e n g t h . . , even as they resisted them" Kissinger demonstrates how this pattern was repeated in many other contexts...

...And his clear if often somber exposition of policy has a growing appeal to a country increasingly dissatisfied with an administration that makes a fetish of restraint in the face of blatant, humiliating provocations...

...Bu~ he doesn't develop this point in the present volume (which ends with Nixon's second inauguration), perhaps because his real conflict with Senator Henry Jackson and other drtente critics came after 1972--though the basic case against drtente was already made that year in the course of the SALT debate...

...But Kissinger has been out of office for three years, so the question remains: Why attack him now with such unmistakable vengeance...

...For example, in a speech delivered in Brussels last September, he conceded his own responsibility for the development of a strategic doctrine (Mutual Assured Destruction) that made a virtue of American strategic vulnerability and encouraged a complacent attitude toward Moscow's development of its counterforce capability...

...solely upon intentions, but is contingent also upon consequences...

...for concessions regardless of Hanoi's response led to what Kissinger calls " a series of constantly escalating proposals...

...Indeed, it was these tough measures--combined with the Moscow and Peking summits which isolated the North Vietnamese, and with Nixon's com: manding lead over McGovern in the polls - - t h a t led to the decisive breakthrough in the negotiations in October, when Hanoi finally dropped its demand that the Saigon government be overthrown as the price of a cease-fire...