Nixon's China Initiative
Dornan, James
an hour. If it comes out of his leisure time, the difference between the salesman's usual pay and the $.84 is an implicit tax; if it comes out of productive time, it is also a loss to the...
...There has been, in sum, virtually no cogent examination of the political assumptions and purposes of the Nixon-Kissinger grand design for the reorientation of American foreign policy, or of the place of the Peking initiative in that design...
...To be sure, what has often been called %he mystique of the East" has long had a singular impact upon the American--not to say the western--political mind...
...In general, that strategy rests on the belief that virtually all of the forces and factors which determined the structure of world politics during the first two postwar decades have changed...
...The principal purpose of the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy is the achievement of a permanent improvement in relations with the USSR, and the opening to Peking must be understood primarily in terms of its contribution to that end...
...Nixo n 's "The biggest story...
...when Q, R, S, T et al...
...1-9], Reports to the Congress by Richard M. Nixon...
...It is thus clearly the Administration's view that other nations should no longer rely upon their alliances with the United States as the sole or even the primary instrument of their security...
...if our conflict with the Soviets has been mitigated by events--especially by a change in Soviet ambition.s--and can be expected to further diminish in the future, then America's fundamental security position is markedly improved...
...Nixon's policy, it was argued, represented the abandonment of the crusading internationalism of Woodrow Wilson and his liberal successors, and the adoption in its stead of the "national interest" as the standard guiding our international behavior...
...Peking made no pledge to diminish her support for insurrectionary movements along her southern border...
...It is surely to Nixon's credit that his administration has explicitly renounced the ancient American conviction that the world should be remade in the American image, and that policy making during his presidency has exhibited an awareness of the realities of power at home and abroad...
...and while not yet renomncing our defense pact with Taipei, we have agreed ultimately to eliminate the American military presence from the island...
...See Alsop, "In China, Everything is Changing" and "Conclusions After...
...It made possible a withdrawal from Vietnam under terms which earlier Nixon had considered unsatisfactory, but which placated the American public to the greatest extent feasible without doing severe damage to America's global position...
...It's hard to repress the suspicion that Faulkner, just one year Cowley's senior, came in for this devoted act of salvage in part by belonging to the right age-group...
...It cannot be too strongly emphasized, however, that the purposes of Nixon's defense program are quite limited, a point grasped by neither his opponents nor his supporters in Congress...
...Most of them missed the point of the twentieth century...
...Every public moment of the trip, appropriately embellished by rhapsodic commentary, was beamed home to enthralled television audiences...
...And if they invested twice as much during the 1970s as they did in the 1960s, the report concluded, it would not be enough...
...That was the year in which James Joyce turned 23, Ezra Pound 20, T.S...
...S1474-82...
...Another example of sloppy reporting is the widely-circulato:~ percentage increases over the oil cempames' profits and expels last yem', since last year was an extremely ~om~y yes~" on both ~eres (which is part of the pr(~blem, then and now...
...Our citizens' "psychological resources" have been exhausted and their "moral strength" has been undermined...
...indeed, even the "natural expansion of Soviet influence in the world" will not arouse American hostility unless the Soviets seek "exclusive or predominant positions" in areas where the United States retains vestigial interests...
...in addition, the Administration has explicitly renounced any American interest in altering the domestic political order of the Soviet Union, both by public statements to that effect and more recently by its vigorous opposition to the Mills-Vanik legislation aimed at forcing a liberalization of Soviet emigration policies...
...The unchecked bnild-up of Soviet strategic and conventional military power, the continued attempts by the SOviets to project political influence in the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, the uncompromising position the USSR has assumed in the various East-West negotiations now in progress all constitute challenges to Administration logic as yet unanswered...
...Foreign Policy for the 1970"s: A New Strategy for Peace [February 18, 1970 pp...
...le Nixon D~)ctrine in its original for~nuiation, while reiterating America's commitment t~ aid both those nations which we consider vital to our security and others which are threatened by nuclear attack, was in considerable measure a hortatory~ device aimed at erstwhile friends and allies...
...see "A Reader's Guide to the Visitors' Reports," National Review, March 3, 1972...
...Even more worrisome is the apparently irresistable inclinatio~ of every American president to believe that he can succeed where his predecessors have failed by bringing peace to the world...
...Over the longer term, Nixon may hope that China's own objectives will serve to check North Vietnam's more extended ambitions...
...the new distance which we have introduced into our relations with Europe and Japan, best symbolized by the "shocks" administered to the latter in 1971, appears similarly motivated...
...Beyond such underlying factors, several additional circumstances helped create a climate of opinion favorable to the President's initiative...
...Malcolm Cowley showed no visible concern for the comparably scandalous neglect of William Carlos Williams (1884), who was equally unknown at about that time...
...So Pater wrote in 1868...
...indeed, evidence indicates that uncertainty concerning America's future intentions is now widespread in the region...
...That the average American found the China trip of compelling interest, and in The Alternative February 1974 13 the main viewed it favorably, is therefore not surprising...
...Given the Administration's announced intention, referred to earlier, to review all American treaty commitments in the light of our "interests," the demise of the Taipei regime at some notdistant point appears probable...
...1,275 (e...
...While the role of China in world politics is not without significance for the Administration, Nixon and Kissinger continue to view the world in bipolar terms...
...In the past these interests have been in no small measure determined by the exigencies, real or perceived, of the Soviet-American conflict...
...Politicians control the price of natural gas and discover that everyone abandons costly coal, and that the shortage of natural gas creates a shortage of bricks (dried by gas) and fertilizer...
...The day is past when global security can depend solely on American power or American will...
...Wolfe was the most Joyce-obsessed of the lot, and the least war-conscious...
...The public thus might be largely satisfied with a political settlement which, though far from perfect, did not seem likely to set in motion a general communist advance throughout the Orient...
...Few of the nation's so-called Sinologists, for example, had accepted the analysis of Chinese aims which culminated in the extension of the containment policy to Asia...
...Visit to China," December 16, 1972, and January 15, t973, Boston Globe...
...But the moment remains...
...The Department of the Interior has a plan for getting oil from shale which, even in the pretot}3)e stage, '%'ould require an investme, nt of nearly I. billion dollars in the next ten years...
...I am satisfied that we have not given away one single thing to the Red Chinese," he stated, and he asked that "all Americans join in supporting the President of the United States in his efforts to establish world peace in the most direct and effective way possible...
...likewise Dalton Trumbo and Ayn Rand, John O~-Iara, Edgar Snow and Robert Penn Warren and Lionel Trilling...
...For them the "pro-war" was just childhood...
...but even these commentators did little more than denounce the euphoria and the atmospherics which accompanied the Nixon trip...
...As many commentators on international politics have pointed out, the danger that surnmitry and its accompanying atmospherics will create among the populace an illusion of international harmony is an ever-present one in a democracy...
...Although principally concerned with recommendations for America's post-Vietnam Asian policy, the article adumbrates in more-or-less complete form most of the themes of what was later to be called the "Nixon Doctrine," and lays the foundation for the unusually coherent global strategy articulated by the Nixon Administration after it assumed office...
...Alsop has asserted that the Soviets informally sought tacit Mnerican support for such an attack early in 1969, and John Newhouse alleges that the USSR during the SALT talks in 1970 proposed a plan for joint retaliatory action against China in the event of a nuclear war initiated by Peking against the USSR or the United States...
...Stability and order, not the "expansion of the domain of freedom," must become the goals of our foreign policy...
...Such consideratious as these explain the Administration's vigorous support for the Trident and the B-1 weapons programs...
...26, 1973) by the former head of the Council of Economic Advisers, Paul McCracken, shows why rationing or a higher gasoline tax will delay a solution to the shortage...
...The danger is obviously real that the Administration will allow its fascination with certain features of the new China relationship to obscure our differences with Peking over the future course of Asian and for that matter global international politics...
...See the 1972 Annual Report, pp...
...indeed, such activities continue unabated...
...Williams is nowhere mentioned in A Second Flowering, not even as part of the elder ambience, and is mentioned just once in an earlier Cowley book, The Literary Situation, where we are told only that he spent most of his time practicing medicine...
...But the Administration, it should be noted, perhaps not without disingenuousness has defended its pro-Pakistan policy as an effort to forestall total domination of the subcontinent by an Indian regime increasingly disposed to act ms Russia's agent...
...men, moreover, old enough by 1914 to have acquired some sense of what suddenly began to be swept away that August...
...That was certainly how Hemingway and Fitzgerald felt about fiction, if not about the century...
...II Doubtless because of the peculiar difficulties and delicate negotiations involved in establishing relations with the CPR, the Administration has been considerably more reticent in articulating its expectations for the Chinese relationship than it ires for that "Mth the USSR...
...See the summary of Asian reactions in William R. Kintner's The Impact of President Nixon's Visit to Peking on International Politics, pp...
...The 1973 Economic Report of the President points out that "the underlying rationale of the controls . . . is that the price and wage increases to be restrained were not increases necessary to avert shortages...
...in this view, moral example rather than military force was to be the means for changing the world...
...it is 1972, and the world situation which we now confront is an entirely new ball game...
...China in particular has been the focus of American attention since the late eighteenth century, in considerable measure for economic reasons...
...Moreover, by the time the Nixon-Kissinger team assumed office a consensus was rapidly forming among opinion leaders around the "limitationist" position concerning the goals and activities appropriate for American foreign policy in the seventies...
...In any case, there can be no doubt that the China policy had important political roots, related to the 1972 campaign as well as to the broader purpose of attracting popular support for the Administration's foreign policy generally...
...Rumors of new tensions in the Sino-Soviet relationship and of possible Soviet intent to launch a preemptive attack on Chinese nuclear installations may have influenced the pace of his actions as well...
...Net l~'ofi ~ Exports Year in percent: (thousands of of Sales ixuTels...
...For a characteristic discussion of these points, see U.S...
...The sheer vastness of the Orient, with its countless millions of people, its unfathomably nonwestern values, its ancient and proud yet curiously primitive civilizations, has fascinated westerners for centuries...
...23-56...
...To be sure, we must avoid an overly abrupt break with the patterns of the past to avoid upsetting the always-delicate equilibrium of the international system...
...Kissinger's thinking had been developing along lines remarkably parallel to Nixon's, especially between 1965 and 1968...
...Any given moment," he wrote, "has its value...
...cummings (1894): the personnel of Malcolm Cowley's A Second Flowering...
...In the last analysis they appear unable to accept the permanence of conflict as the fundamental reality of world politics...
...That consensus attracted many conservatives as well as liberals, although for fundamentally quite different reasons...
...In a letter to the Wall Street Journal (April 23, 1973), even John Kenneth Galbraith reminded the politicians, in a scolding tone, that "controls should not be used where price increases are caused by an excess in aggregate demand or a shortage in the specific supply...
...Herein may lie the explanation for the Administration's apparent lack of concern over both the relative decline of American military power and the political significance of that decline...
...John The Alternative February 1974 17...
...Today we must work with other nations to build an enduring structure of peace...
...Thus many conservatives expected that Nixon's China policy would attempt to exploit the Sino-Soviet dispute in order to improve America's position in the global conflict with the USSR...
...19(;6 i!.2('4 N.A...
...The striking decline in oil company profits is due to many factors, not the least of which are OPEC's (Organization of Petroleurn Exporting Countries) cartel pricing of crude oil, and the reduced depletion allowance since 1.969: The role of price controls is clearly indicated by the fact that wholesale costs of crude fuels have risen by more than 50 percentage points since 1967 (the wholesale petroleum index for October 1973 is 133.3, but extra supplies for expansion are fare more costly than the average), while the consumer price index for gasoline was 121.8 as of October--even lower than the average index of June 1971...
...Hornby of the Denver Post, not to mention the members of the congressional delegations which quickly followed the President across the Pacific, were lavish in their praise of the "New China...
...He's the youngest man to whom Cowley pays any heed...
...that it was accomplished through super-secret diplomacy followed by" a week-tong presidential sojourn in a land never before visited by a ranking American elected official was truly astonishing...
...should eventually have come to need mentors...
...he went so far as to suggest that "the period of harshness, of dogmatism, of extreme heavy-hm~dedness" in the Communist rule over China is drawing to a close...
...Background Briefing [United States Foreign Policy], June 26, 1970, mimeo) This statement, made to the press in mid-1970, deserved far more attention than it received...
...The loss of "face" for the United States implicit in the spectacle of an American president appearing as a supplicant in the court of the new Chinese mandarins had an immediate impact throughout Asia...
...if it comes out of productive time, it is also a loss to the economy...
...So this is the year for ad lmc gut reactions, for matter over nfind...
...Politicians force an arbitrary devaluation of the dollar, to stimulate exports, and then slap on export controls...
...For a discussion of this point, see author's "The Search for Purpose in American Foreign Policy," Intercollegiate Review, Winter 1970-71...
...There is little firm evidence on this issue, however, and it may be that most commentators have in any event missed the central point...
...Boxed between the great innovators and the war, defined by being just old enough to respond as younger contemporaries to the former and not too old to have escaped being romantic about the latter CYou went to the war and it was like going to a theater that advertised the greatest spectacle in history"), the men of 1894-1900 combined a superficial experimentalism (leaving out capitals, putting whole paragraphs in italics) with the vulgar hopefulness that accompanied the dawn of the new century...
...The twenty-eight major oit companies were short on capital, Chase Manhattan showed, and for several years had been forced to borrow money...
...Moreover, prudence alone would dictate that the possibility of a Moscow-Peking rapprochement, particularly in the post-Mao leadership era, not be totally discounted...
...As many commentators have observed, the Nixon Doctrine is notably vague as to precisely what "interests" are sufficiently vital to justify American intervention in Third World conflicts under the perceived changed conditions of world politics...
...more disquieting features of his approach, particularly as revealed in the position papers which he wrote for Nelson Rockefeller during the 1968 preconvention campaign, went unnoticed...
...He made fiction out of vanishing moments, and extracted the last pathos from the likes of his Tom Buchanan, who after the passing of the golden moment would '~drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game...
...The quality of life has changed, vastly for the worse for the ancient ruling class but for the better for everyone else . . . . The right way to see the New China, in truth, is to forget the Commtmist label and to consider the revolution as a specifically Chinese event...
...I have ever covered," Joseph Alsop wrote with characteristic hy~rbole: indeed, although nearly two years have elapsed since the event, it remains plausible to assert that the President's visit to Peking ranks among the most brilliant!y-staged foreign policy operations of the postwar period...
...That was their real peculiarity, that they were a "generation...
...Considered even within Nixon's own perspective, of course, the China policy has incurred substantial costs...
...No, he is a specialist, his practice limited to writers born within a six-year span, 1894-1900, which would be as comic_a] as specializing in the left feet of Ashtabula topologists were it not for the special nature of the case: had he not known so many of these writers personally, known their world so intimately, and had theirs and his not been the most exactly defined generation in American literary history...
...It is only necessary that our determination to reduce our efforts be clearly understood, so that others will realize that they must assume responsibility for their own defense...
...16-25 and 26-39...
...Such moments were to be preserved "simply for those moments' sake...
...Respected reporters such as Alsop and W.H...
...they now appear able to resist external aggression and to hold their own in relations with the bigger powers...
...it is only in the context of their convictions about the future of tile Soviet-American relationship, therefore, that many otherwise inexplicable features of the NixonKissinger foreign policy can be understood...
...One Chinese leader summed up rather effectively the impression gained from the visit when he told Washington Post reporter Stanley Karnow that "we don't owe the Americans anything, but the Americans owe us much...
...In 1945 every on of Faulkner's seventeen books was out of print...
...The contrast with the excesses which have often characterized Administration rhetoric on the future of U.S.-Soviet relations is striking...
...Japan and the nations of Western Europe, the latter gradually drawing closer together economically and politically, have recovered from the ravages of World War II, and are capable once again of assuming major roles in the world political system...
...Both camps agreed that the United States was " overextended" in its international commitments and hence needed to scale down considerably its operations and activities abroad...
...Cowley writes as though he'd never heard of Marianne Moore, he is exceedingly vague about whatever it was Pound may have accomplished (except coin the phrase "news that stays news" and teach Hemingway the doctrine of the Image), he is as blank about Stevens as about Williams, and is so little driven by impersonal rage at neglect that a truly scandalous neglect, that of I~uis Zukofsky (born 1904) has wrung from him over the years, to the best of my knowledge, not so much as a mention of Zukofsky's name...
...Has that a familiar ring...
...on the China initiative, urged conservatives to accept the fact that "this is not 1960...
...The one-time communist monolith has been shattered, replaced by a loosely organized bloc whose members quarrel as often as they cooperate...
...Steffens and the Shaws went only a little further in their praise of the Soviet system after their visits during the 1920s ~md 1930s...
...You encounter, working backward, Thomas Wolfe (1900...
...THE PUBLIC INTEREST Box 542 Old Chelsea Post Office New York, N.Y...
...At the same time, he repeatedly expressed concern about the possible impact of an overly precipitous withdrawal upon Soviet perceptions of our will and constancy...
...then Cowley's classic essay (reprinted and expanded here) demonstrated how by Malcolm Cowley Viking $7.95 the books all hung together, a home-made Comedie Humaine, and opinion suddenly pulled itself together...
...But there was a broad spectrum of American intellectual opinion equally receptive to the new policy...
...Cowley, himself born in 1898, has been writing about his contemporaries for fifty years, and has to his credit one especially shining effort, the nearly single-handed rescue of Faulkner from what he rightly calls ~'scandalous neglect...
...First, our foreign policy objectives and interests must be restructured...
...There has been widespread speculation, for example, that the Administration hoped to obtain Peking's support for a negotiated settlement of the Vietnam war...
...It has...
...We must also maintain strength sufficient to convince the Soviets that there is no alternative to d~tente and to deter direct threats to our physical survival from whatever source...
...141-52...
...indeed, his annual calls for an "American military capability second to none" represent mostly a bone tossed tO the defense conservatives there and elsewhere...
...In any event, while the Administration's restraint in discussing its China policy complicates the task of analysis, its general purposes are quite clear...
...Fitzgerald in particular was to spend nine years trying to achieve, he said, "something really NEW in form, idea, and structure--the model for the age that Joyce and Stein are searching for, that Conrad didn't find...
...D~tente with China would reduce fears that the latter might be the result of a "compromise" in Vietnam...
...The Soviets have doubtless already taken note of the scaling down of American purposes represented by the Nixon Doctrine itself...
...any attempt to use Peking as a permanent make-weight in the balance of power on the American side--a policy which the Administration has rejected, albeit for the wrong reasons--could prove to be dangerous in the extreme...
...1.968 10.7 N.A...
...virtually all rejected the thesis that China was the principal enemy in Vietnam, as the Johnson Administration had so often argued...
...Move back in time a little from 1905, move closer, closer to the great generation, and you get a picture...
...969 10.1 1,860 1970 9.3 1,444 1971 8.3 1,858 1972 6.6 448 1973 N.A...
...Indeed, the argument that Soviet foreign policy objectives in their broadest definition have decisively changed is only slightly more compelling now than when it was first raised not long after the Revolution of 1917...
...The deepening war-weariness of the American population, a reaction both against Vietnam and against the seemingly endless Cold War, had molded a ready constituency for policies of conciliation with our postwar adversaries...
...Few such events have attracted the support and aroused the enthusiasm of such a wide spectrum of professional opinion...
...Buckley himself was largely content to reiterate his moral objections to the Peking regime...
...On the domestic scene, the key factor was popular ambivalence: a majority of Americans appeared to desire an end to the U.S...
...Similarly affected is the whole range of American political interests abroad...
...i 967 ~, 1.0 N.A...
...Also they were born a little too late to have collected their wits before the 1914 war...
...so too will the need for military power and political influence to protect them...
...But we are in a realm of fine-tuning, not channel-changing...
...Viewed from 1905, the innovating masters fell in between...
...But that aside, virtually all commentators have missed the real point: the China gambit, electrifying though it may have been as international theater, and whatever its long-run importance, was actually only a sideshow in what Nixon clearly regards as the principal scenario of his foreign policy, the effort tc establish an effective d~tente with the Soviet Union...
...The American response to these transformations in international politics, according to the Administration, must be commensurately far-reaching...
...The Administration believes that Moscow's fear of China's military potential and territorial irredentism will furThe Alternative February 1974 15 ther strengthen the Soviet interest in a d6tente with the United States...
...Neither is an improvement in Sino-American relations being sought by the Administration as an end in itself...
...Is it too cynical to suggest that this may have been among the purposes of the China gambit from the outset...
...But beyond the now-repetitious salutes to the Chinese as a "great and vital people" without whose cooperation "no stable and enduring international order is conceivable" plus occasional references to China's future economic and milltary potential, he and Kissinger have said little concerning the assumptions and purposes of the new China policy...
...it was like a business in financial straits that could be rescued by a timely change in management...
...Not only his eight writers, recalls Cowley, but all their coevals--'~those who were lucky enough to be bern a little before the end of the last century"--spent much of their lives "feeliug that the new century was about to be placed in their charge...
...Since it had often been officially stated that the containment of China was one of the foremost reasons for our involvement in Shouldn't you be reading this intelligent quarterly edited by Irving Kristol and Nathan Glazer...
...Alan Reynolds has written an excellent critique of these and similar analyses of the "New China...
...223-69...
...Appropriately, though, his feel for his craft included a feel for his time---Cowley calls it "a quality that very few writers are able to acquire: a sense of living in history...
...It is a commentary on the depth of the utopian strain in the American political tradition that an Administration which prides itself on its toughmindedness and whose principal foreign policy architect is widely--if somewhat inaccurately--v~lebrated for his "realism" has proved to be little more immune than its predecessors from such temptations...
...Such analysis as has appeared in the press and professional literature has consisted principally of superficial remarks about an allegedly-emerging "tripolarity," with little attempt either to define the political, military, and economic conditions under which true tripolarity could occur, or to demonstrate that such a state of affairs is or should be the primary objective of American foreign policy...
...10011 Vietnam, once Chinese hostility had at least somewhat abated it was not as important to American credibility abroad that we stand firm in Indochina...
...So the 1905 bunch lived on a fringe, just old enough not to have been much affected by the great "modernist" generation of the 1880s----Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Stravinsky, Picasso...
...Fo!itici.a~s conixol the price of beef and find we have not only a shortage of beef and freezers, but of substitute meats and of tallow us~t to make candles, soap, and rubber...
...l~e media obviously had an enormous impact as well...
...The idea that poverty can be solved by keeping prices at a level that discourages production and encourages waste is simply ludicrous...
...To be sure, the current utopianism is of a sharply different variety than that of Wilson, FDR, et al...
...The sudden turnabout of relations with a nation toward which the United States had been unremittingly antagonistic for more than two decades was striking in itself...
...The effort to call forth a greater effort 14 The Alternative February 1974 by others in maintaining their own--and world secm-ity has constituted one of the Administration's major purposes from the outset...
...Nixon certainly was convinced even before the onset of his administration that the American public would not support a foreign policy which did not result in an American military departure from Southeast Asia...
...Waiter Pater too thought that the moment remained...
...1973 Annual Report, pp...
...but at the very least it is probable that the Administration would regard this as a not-unwelcome consequence...
...IH There can be no doubt that the Nixon China policy, and the more basic global strategy of which it is a part, reflects and reinforces some of the worst features of the American political character...
...Foreign Policy for the 1970's: Shaping a Durable Peace [May 3, 1973, pp...
...At the same time, the United States has arrived at a new definition of its primary interests and a new estimate of the means appropriate to safeguard them...
...the day is past when we can look forward confidently to a democratic world emerging under American auspices and leadership...
...Compare the section of the 1973 State of the World message dealing with the CPR with that discussing relations with the USSR...
...Kissinger's theory of international politics, as articulated in the hard-headed logic of A World Restored and Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, was believed to rest on precisely such a foundation...
...It would not be the least of the ironies associated with this Administration if the attention lavished on the Peking initiative caused the nation to misperceive the ultimate purposes and attendant dangers of the NixonKissinger global strategy generally...
...presence in Southeast Asia, but also were plainly apprehensive about expanding communist influence in Asia and elsewhere...
...Those interests concern especially the emerging new relationship with the USSR...
...If he did not manage this, part of the difficulty, as we may learn from casting a cold eye on Sheila Graham's embarrassing memoir, College of One, was that apart from his astonishing feel for his craft he was virtually illiterate...
...Psychic paternity works by a different law, in this case also negative...
...They did more than that, but that describes them partly...
...Equally damaging to America's prestige were the terms of the agreements announced at the conclusion of the Nixon visit...
...Some on the Right William Buckley most prominently-were far more dubious...
...The old "isms" the once-vibrant ideologies which for twenty years animated the foreign policies of the great powers---have lost their vitality, and more traditional goals such as security and economic progress have become the primary concerns of the superpowers...
...An intellectual mentor needs to be either young enough to be the client's big brother or old enough to be his grandfather...
...Orthodox liberals apparently believed as well that a reduced international role for the United States and a concentration upon domestic reform would enable America to better fulfill her historic mission of propagating American ideals...
...Those who attribute to Henry Kissinger the paramount role in the formulation of the Nixon Administration's foreign policy should reread the now-famous article, "Asia after Vietnam," written by Nixon himself for Foreign A~airs in October 1967...
...fewer still have so promiscuoLxsly stimulated the imagination of the American populace...
...At the end of his best novel, Jay Gatsby floats dead in a leaf-strewn swimming pool as a direct consequence of refusing to believe that you can't bring back the past ('WVhy, of course you can...
...Kissinger has made it even more clear that far-reaching changes in the structure of American alliances may be in the offing: "if the only argument for American military participation in an area," he has said, "is the fact that the United States happens to have made a treaty some fifteen years ago, that would be a very precarious position for that area and for us . . . . So there has to be a periodic review of our commitments and there has to be a very systematic attempt to define our interests...
...Two centuries ago," Nixon wrote in his 1971 Annual Report, "our mission was to be a unique exemplar of free government...
...He was the seismograph of microchanges, and could tell 1926 from 1927 by a hundred indices, as surely as we can tell the twenties from the thirties...
...Two decades ago it was to take up worldwide burdens of securing the common defense, economic recovery, and political stability...
...In the future, Nixon has announced, "our interests must shape our commitments, rather than the other way around...
...Beyond that, Nixon and Kissinger have sought to create a "momentum toward progress" in our relations with the Soviets by means of negotiations on a broad range of issues...
...Perhaps...
...Ellery Queen" were born (there were two of him, cousins) in 1905...
...Nixon and Kissinger manifestly hope that already-tempered Soviet designs can be further modified by American acceptance of the USSR's recently acquired global status and by American policies aimed at cooperation and interdependence...
...To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down...
...The United States publicly conceded that Taiwan is part of China...
...Now they are redressing the balance...
...With that conflict abated, they will of necessity be reduced in number and importance...
...You commence to encounter men who could feel that Joyce, say, was an elder contemporary, to learn from...
...Another Journal article (Nov...
...The universalization of American principles and values can no longer constitute an important purpose of American policy...
...The principal changes are said to be six in number...
...The CPR conceded virtually nothing, suffering at most a slight blow to its stature as leader of the worId's revolutionary forces...
...it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains...
...Everyone has big plans for the oil indnstry, all of which require money that ultimately must come out of prices...
...Many conservatives, on the other hand, were persuaded that the Nixon-Kissinger foreign policy bespoke a new "realism" in American diplomacy...
...188-89...
...Finally--most important of all in the Nixon view United States foreign policy is now inhibited by serious internal constraints...
...then Hart Crane and Hemingway (1899), Wilder and Faulkner (1897), Fitzgerald and Dos Passos (1896), e.e...
...For Horuby's articles, see Congressional Fuecord, January 29, 1973, pp...
...The China policy thus served his purposes nicely...
...The sheer audacity of the undertaking itself was obviously crucial...
...military preeminence has given way to a condition of strategic parity between the USSR and the United States, substantially reducing American freedom of maneuver in crisis situations...
...These are very bad times for economists...
...Petroiemm Pmfineries Distillat...
...No "grand alliance" between the United States and the CPR against the Soviets is intended, nor is any effort to be made to use the Chinese connection to alter a military and political balance of power which is rapidly worsening from the American standpoint...
...In the NixonKissinger design, our security in the future will be guaranteed above all through the new association with the USSR...
...Long before the specifics of his new foreign policy became known, Nixon's promise of "an era of negotiation, not confrontation" had struck a responsive popular cord...
...To be sure, it is doubtless true that there exist significant ancillary motives behind the Administration's Asian policy as well...
...Pollticians control the price of fertilizer and find that it is being bought at higher prices by foreigners, along with the ammonia nitrate needed to blast more coal...
...If the hopes and expectations of the American people have been overly aroused by the China visit---and it is by no means certain that such is the case--blame must be placed primarily on the media and not on the President...
...Nixon, in turn, has made it plain that we fully recognize the right of the USSR to great power status, with the appropriate territorial and other prerequisites...
...Milton Friedman and Henry Wallich have devoted Newsweek columns to explaining why prices of gasoline and heating oil must rise (ten to twenty cents a gallon would probably suffice...
...But since other nations are now capable of doing more for themselves, this need not mean a rising level of insecurity around the world...
...Peking agreed to facilitate scientific and other "people-to-people" exchanges, but the Chinese stand to profit as much from these as the United States...
...the econonfic m-rangements discussed at the Moscow and Washington surmnits in particular, they" believe, have established "an interdependence [~,tween our economies which provides a co'afinuing incentive to maintain a co:~structive relationship...
...the nation's ability to play a major role in world politics is thus severely diminished...
...Hence, most of the "old China hands" greeted the Nixon visit with unrestrained enthusiasm...
...Joyce, Pound, and Eliot weren't too young but just a little too old to serve as intellectt~l examples to Queen, Rand, Snow, Trumbo et al...
...For a more complete analysis of the main themes of the Nixon Administration's foreign policy, see the author's "The Nixon Doctrine, Strategy, and Tripolarity," available from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute...
...A substantial reduction in the American force on Taiwan, Secretary SchIesinger recently disclosed, is scheduled for this fall...
...Nixon has ~,tated that he undertook initial steps to establish contacts with the Peking regime shortly after assuming office, implementing a design he had first set forth in the 1967 Foreign Affairs article...
...Not only must American expectations be scaled down, but- our role in world politics must be substantially diminished as well...
...Barry Goldwater, on the other hand, in his first full comment...
...Eliot 17, which makes Eliot just conceivably old enough to have been Dalton Trumbo's father, an indiscretion he happily didn't commit...
...see the analysis in Stephen R. Graubard's Kissinger: Portrait of a Mind, pp...
...His doctrine was powerful medicine in England in the nineties...
...From the perspective of overall policy priorities, however, his views on the importance of Southeast Asia to the United States have been unclear for some time...
...Not only is the danger of a military confrontation with the USSR reduced, but the need to "contain communism" through a vast complex of alliance systems is largely eliminated...
...Yet a Chase Mm~hattan Bank study in September 1972 reported that oil industry sales were up 258 percent over the last ten years, while profits had increased by only 89 I~rcent r is, profi*~s per unit had fallen sharply...
...It has been suggested that the pro-Pakistan "tilt" of American policy during that nation's war with India was designed to earn plaudits from Pakistan's principal ally as well as to repay Pakistan from her aid in opening Washington-Peking communications...
...he was only 14 when it broke out...
...The distance between contemporary American foreign policy and the moralistic-legalistic tradition whose apotheosis was Wilson is thus not as great as it appears...
...the "age of tripolarity," if it is to come at all, is in their view still some time in the future...
...Alsop was writing for most of them when he enthused that "everything in China has changed, in truth, except the endlessly resilient, hardworking and clever Chinese people...
...Nevertheless, he and Kissinger both have grossly underestimated the power drive of the Soviet state, and have drastically exaggerated the stabilizing effects of nuclear weapons in the international system...
...16 The Alternative February 1974 Nevertheless, the conclusion remains inescapable that the dangers inherent in the Nixon China policy are limited when compared with those created by Administration assumptions about the possibilities for a ddtente with the USSR...
...Finally, Nixon's public utterances in Peking came perilously close to an admission that the United States bears primary responsibility for the Asian cold war itself...
...Kissinger has believed at least since 1968 that the Soviet Union-and for that matter the CPR--is no longer a revolutionary power, although still anxious for a large role in world politics...
...See Alsop, "Thoughts Out of China, I: Go Versus No-go," New York Times Magazine, March 11, 1973, and Newhouse, Cold Dawn: The Story of SALT, pp...
...1-3] and U.S...
...Given the new relationship with Peking, not to mention present public aversion to interventionist policies, Nixon appears to have concluded that Vietnam is of substantially less significance for American purposes than was the case earlier, and so was willing to accept a negotiated settlement whose terms made the ultimate survival of a noncommunist government in Saigon doubtful...
...Politicians control the price of steel pipe, so there isn't any available for drilling oil wells...
...The new nations of Africa and Asia have substantially matured since the early post-independence period...
...The energy shortage is only one of many shortages, and if we are to turn to rationing every time demand exceeds supply by 10-20 percent at the controlled price, we will soon be rationing nearly everything...
...But the economists---who naturally supply what is demanded--have created a bogus rationale for turning economic decisions over te the politicians...
...Finally, general public discontent with recent American foreign policy was a significant factor...
Vol. 7 • February 1974 • No. 5
