KISSINGER'S APOLOGIA
Draper, Theodore
In the first pages of the first volume of his memoirs, Henry Kissinger remarks with some bitterness about the way he was treated by McGeorge Bundy, his dean at Harvard and a predecessor as...
...With respect to Soviet-American negotiations in 1970, the China initiative gave the United States "an ace in the hole...
...The first surprise is the type of relationship that Kissinger soon established with the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin...
...On the one hand, Kissinger tells us that he belonged to the Realpolitiker school of thought, which argued that the Soviets were more likely to be conciliatory if they feared an American policy of rapprochement with China...
...244 otherwise goes into the minutest of details...
...In relation to what other reasons for retaining confidence in the United States...
...One sentence reads: "I wanted to accumulate nuances for a long-range strategy...
...By 1971, Kissinger succeeded in adding Middle East diplomacy to his laurels, leaving Rogers totally naked of responsibility for foreign policy and not even knowing most of the time what was going on...
...What has this jumble of inconsistencies, contradictions, vain hopes, and non sequiturs to do with the hard, cold doctrine of geopolitics...
...Once this demand was withdrawn in October of that year, the way was open for a deal between the United States and North Vietnam, the former to withdraw all of its forces, the latter to leave its forces in South Vietnam in place...
...Laird was often "Byzantine" in his political maneuvers...
...they are simply not geopolitical concepts...
...Another example of muddled verbiage makes "nuances and interrelations" the test of foreign policy...
...his resistance was so great that Kissinger calls it "almost maniacal...
...Speaking for our side, I can say we will attempt to implement these principles in the spirit in which they were promulgated...
...Postscript I WISH TO CALL ATTENTION to an aspect of Kissinger's book that concerns the use of classified documents and is nothing less than scandalous...
...He sometimes relies on one, sometimes on the other, without ever making clear how they fit together...
...KISSINGER'S REFERENCE, becomingly modest, to the "perhaps undue credit" foisted upon him takes us to the second stage of his rising star...
...1325] . . . . What was success for us—the withdrawal of American forces—was a nightmare for our allies...
...5, 544...
...What was the expenditure of men and material in Vietnam worth in relation to American interests, domestic and foreign, as a whole...
...Few foreign ambassadors in American history have ever benefited so much from such close rapport and bonhomie...
...Back in July 1968, when he was still working to make Nelson Rockefeller the next president, Kissinger had written into one of Rockefeller's speeches the idea of engaging in a dialogue with Communist China in order to form "a subtle triangle of relations between Washington, Peking, and Moscow...
...29 Another writer, favored with some 25 interviews with Kissinger and two of his closest aides, went even further—he had Kissinger "in real measure running the world" during the October 1973 Arab-Israeli war...
...It hardly helps to substitute an even more general and elusive term, "equilibrium," for "geopolitical...
...Still later, Kissinger apportions praise and blame for Nixon's method of government in this way—the President's "complex personality" contributed the "impetus" but "I, as the organizer of these procedures and their driving force, must, of course, share the responsibility for the shortcomings" as well as "perhaps undue credit for the successes...
...created linking both sides...
...Even if the outlines were clear before, Kissinger adds so much to our intimate knowledge of the events that there is nothing like it in the entire literature on the war so far...
...By now he knew Nixon and his minions, Haldeman, Erlichman, and Ziegler, well enough to realize that his disembarkation at a remote corner of Andrews Air Force Base, "inaccessible to newsmen and photographers," was no accident...
...But Kissinger for one had ruled out such a perspective of American military victory years before...
...It betrays Kissinger's intermittent yearning to have the ' Theodore H. White, The Making of the Presidency 1972 (New York: Bantam edition, 1972), p. xviii...
...For how long...
...What separated everyone in the Nixon administration from its moderate critics, Kissinger claims, was "not a philosophy but a nuance...
...Kissinger's use of the term "equilibrium" is almost always elusive and never more so than here...
...His book conveys much of the brute force, the intellectual virtuosity, and the insatiable appetite for power that enabled him to come out on the top, only slightly soiled, of a political dunghill...
...But the real trouble is in the second sentence...
...Here, as elsewhere, there is much less in Kissinger's theorizing than meets the eye...
...He writes: "The China initiative also restored perspective to our national policy...
...And it is dangerous because attempts to seek tactical gains might lead to confrontations which could be catastrophic...
...it was, in any case, incompatible with the policy of piecemeal withdrawal...
...The former as a long-term strategy had been ruled out...
...Obsessed by past resentments and suspicions of betrayal, he lived in a self-induced ambience of ubiquitous enemies...
...At the same time, however, Nixon believed that any active policy in the Middle East was then doomed to failure and to stir up domestic hostility against anyone identified with it...
...Nixon in his own memoirs treats Kissinger much more gently, a gentlemanly restraint that he may now sorely regret...
...Other people's "confidence" in the United 15 The father of modern geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, saw Eastern Europe as the key to world power and, therefore, believed that Russia was the most probable victor in the coming struggle to dominate the world...
...He does not push this one as hard and as often as "honor," but it is worth considering whether there is anything to it...
...16 Look, August 9, 1966...
...That a presidential assistant—whose only strength, Kissinger tells us, is "the President's confidence"—could hold his own in such a competition makes one wonder about the power of the imperial presidency...
...Yet he not only survived...
...the anxieties of Nixon's advance men to get "exposure in prime television time" in China...
...At the time, however, Kissinger pretended that his role as National Security Adviser conformed to the latter specifications rather than, as he now reveals, to those of the President's principal foreign-policy adviser and operational head...
...If authority were needed to testify that the United States conducted its war in Vietnam at the expense of the rest of the world, two of the highest-ranking testimonials would come from President Nixon and Dr...
...From the beginning they were inflexibly determined to get all American forces out of Vietnam and to overthrow the South Vietnamese regime headed by President Nguyen Van Thieu...
...Something else is at stake here...
...Only a dimwit would be won over to any interrelation because of the nuance given to it...
...After describing Nixon's administration as "an array of baronies presided over by feudal lords" beset by the zealous retainers of a central authority, Kissinger admits that he "became the beneficiary of this state of affairs...
...The triangle of China, Soviet Russia, and the United States is not made up of equivalent sides...
...As late as April 1975, he had expressed the opinion that he expected the Soviet Union to move toward making relations with the United States better, not worse...
...Kissinger enjoys showing Nixon at his crassest...
...the principles were not even needed if the theory operated as postulated...
...One result is suppression of all evidence of his responsibility for the illusions of detente...
...Kissinger himself "cheerily professed to be a megalomaniac...
...It is in connection with China that Kissinger finally gets the geopolitical position of Vietnam straight...
...The American SALT negotiator, Gerard C. Smith, was more than once put in the humiliating position of bargaining with Soviet representatives without knowing what Kissinger had already agreed to...
...He was appointed Secretary of State four year later by a jealous Nixon who already resented his subordinate's disproportionate share of credit for the conduct of foreign policy, which was Nixon's special pride and exclusive prerogative...
...He lied to both the Secretary of Defense and Secretary of State about the number of American troops to be withdrawn from South Vietnam...
...We will probably have little chance of maintaining the agreement without evident hair-trigger U.S...
...Whatever one may think about this statement of the American goal, it belongs to a tradition of chivalry, not geopolitics...
...The more he tells us about his triumphs and travails, the more disquieting they become...
...The ill-fated Rogers Plan, of December 1969, which Nixon says he knew all the time had no chance of being accepted by Israel and which made Rogers, "as Kissinger frequently reminded me, 'the most unpopular man in Israel,'" exactly suited what Nixon had in mind for Rogers...
...But Nixon's publicity hounds were no match for Kissinger...
...Other presidents have appointed weak secretaries of state in order to direct their own foreign policy...
...the Soviets have vastly greater external capabilities...
...Until the end of 1972, as Kissinger saw it, North Vietnam had always insisted that the United States should, directly or indirectly, abandon the Thieu regime and replace it with a North Vietnamese-controlled "coalition government...
...It contained 12 basic principles that, in effect, tied the arms agreement, according to Kissinger, to "an agreed code of international conduct"—the code of detente...
...I happened to exchange some words with Kissinger at a conference in Princeton that same week...
...11-13...
...We had no way of understanding the primeval hatred that animated the two sides" (p...
...Whether or not the present classification system is good or bad is not here the question...
...The first stage of Kissinger's rise had little to do with his abilities, his nuances, or his concepts...
...Most of Kissinger's quotations come from the White House and National Security Council documents...
...In fact, the first American political theorist to work out a complete geopolitical system almost four decades ago assigned just such a role in the region to China...
...he relates the circumstances with no more than an occasional expression of wonderment about how odd the whole procedure was...
...The United States could no more end the war between the Vietnamese by peaceful negotiation than by military force...
...McGeorge Bundy has sufficiently shown how inconceivable it is that Kissinger should have found this idea "inconceivable...
...His intellectual facility impressed and intimidated...
...After 1971, Kissinger could not recall a single occasion when Nixon made any change in a negotiation once Kissinger had set it in motion...
...He was, for example, "bored to distraction" by the technical arguments put forward by different departments on the SALT negotiations...
...Kissinger "bridled" at Nixon's assignment of all Middle Eastern problems to Rogers in 1969 and 1970 and tried to get them for himself too...
...The first Nixon was "weird" in his administrative approach...
...it was a gross perversion of the American system of government...
...Instead, Dobrynin was permitted to enjoy confidences and take liberties that he was never expected to reciprocate...
...could not be expected to last, it followed that the United States had to be ready to renew the war in Vietnam at any time, in months or years, at a moment's notice—and Kissinger warned Nixon in advance that this was the logic of their course...
...Whoever was right, Presidential assistants are not supposed to be so headstrong and even insubordinate...
...The Chinese have extremely limited military capabilities outside their own borders...
...24 The more intriguing question is: Why did Kissinger find it so inconceivable...
...One gets the impression that Laird was not a man one would want to buy the proverbial second-hand car from...
...In effect, we were not in Vietnam as a result of geopolitical imperatives...
...it was also a political commitment...
...251 would continue after a settlement...
...His reasons were that the Soviets may not react rationally and that the Chinese may think that we might downgrade them if we improve our relations with the Soviet Union...
...The same must be said of his memoirs, whatever opinion one may have of his ideas and policies...
...The facts of life, demonstrated abundantly in every day's newspaper, are that the closer we get to one of the Communist superpowers, the less likely the other is to "deal with us constructively...
...Kissinger's strange Soviet interlude was over...
...No partial quotation can be properly understood without its context...
...One factor should not be missed...
...But the latter was equally unsatisfactory to Kissinger, who finally agreed to it with some reluctance...
...Could one check up on how he used these documentary sources...
...it needs over 400 pages to get through the first year of his service in 1969 alone...
...Boston, March 11, 1976...
...Nixon's successor, Gerald Ford, even found it necessary as almost his first order of business to announce Kissinger's retention to restore some confidence in the shaky new presidency...
...Yet Kissinger has always given them a place of inordinate importance in his scheme of things...
...The decisive reason Nixon and Kissinger could not go along with Thieu to the bitter end was, as Kissinger puts it, that such a course "would have guaranteed the collapse of all remaining support at home...
...3 How could someone with this background become converted to detente, and how does he explain it now...
...He was so insecure that he constantly needed "reassurance" from the few persons close to him...
...Logically, the "Basic Principles" merely spelled out the theory of marginal advantages...
...Kissinger was still dazed by the appointment...
...But on page 1076, Kissinger tells the reader who may have forgotten what he had been told some 300 pages earlier: If we appeared irresolute or leaning toward Moscow, Peking would be driven to accommodation with the Soviet Union...
...Kissinger says that Nixon told him at their first meeting before his appointment that he regarded Rogers as the "ideal man" for Secretary of State, for one reason because Rogers was unfamiliar with foreign affairs, for another because Rogers was "one of the toughest, most cold-eyed, selfcentered, and ambitious men" Nixon had ever met...
...4 His theory of "linkage" was, therefore, critical for the success of this program...
...He had never accepted Vietnamization, but he had played for time or had hidden his true feelings in such a way that even Kissinger was misled...
...is In any case, Kissinger cannot complain if we test his Vietnam policy by his own standards of nuances and geopolitics...
...On the occasion of signing the principles, he stated: "Of course, these principles have to be implemented...
...The new relationship with the Soviet Union was the political side of his personal relationship with Dobrynin...
...Kissinger complains that this ruse deceived "many unwary Americans...
...On the other hand, Kissinger pushes a more conciliatory, benign line with respect to both Communist powers...
...The Chinese-American rapprochement was and is a good thing in its own right...
...Kissinger largely succeeded in extricating himself from the Nixon administration's disgrace and downfall...
...The terms, he writes, gave South Vietnam the means to survive "theoretically...
...Selective quotation is a frequent source of distortion and even falsification...
...Despite his long infatuation with nuances, Kissinger in this book leans most heavily on "geopolitics...
...This background leads into Kissinger's extraordinary interpretation of the pathological relationship between the President and Secretary of State: In consequence he [Rogers] could not really grasp that in the new relationship his was the clearly subordinate position...
...253 from documents obviously of the highest classification...
...1391] . . . . Peace involving American withdrawal was a traumatic event for the South Vietnamese...
...All we get from Kissinger is shaken "confidence," as if this were an absolute...
...In the end, Kissinger's power over the American media may explain more about how he did it than his power over anything else...
...On this reasoning, one could never cut the losses inevitably incurred by a miscalculation of such magnitude...
...In this passage, an accumulation of nuances is no longer enough to make up a long-range strategy or, as Kissinger also calls it, "an integrating conceptual framework...
...Now, there may be nuances in the way a long-range strategy is expressed, for expression is the chief function of nuances, but no accumulation of nuances can add up to a long-range strategy...
...What was also involved, he went on, were "credibility," "prestige," and ending the war "honorably," above all the last...
...One might imagine from Nixon's account that Rogers and Kissinger just happened to hold low opinions of one another: "Rogers felt that Kissinger was Machiavellian, deceitful, egotistical, arrogant, and insulting...
...And the Secretary of Defense comes out relatively untarnished compared with the President and Secretary of State who, besides Kissinger himself, are the key figures in the drama that slowly but inexorably unfolds...
...266] . . . . But Hanoi would not move without some pressure...
...a "monumental traffic jam" deliberately staged in the center of Belgrade...
...6 The second principle read in part: "The USA and the USSR attach major importance to preventing the development of situations capable of causing a dangerous exacerbation of their relations...
...This system is a political and intellectual outrage...
...Yet its very flaws contribute to its ultimate impressiveness—the inexhaustible self-absorption, the endless assault of detail, the craving for vindication...
...Much as the Chinese stick in the Russian craw and force the Russians to keep about 45 divisions on the Chinese border, China represents much less of a deterrent to Russia on a world scale than the triangular theory would lead one to expect...
...Weird" is hardly the word for it...
...Richard M. Pfeffer, ed...
...Necessity was only one step away from availability, if "vested interests" could be 4 Kissinger's theory of "vested interests" was put forward by him on May 29, 1972 (Department of State Bulletin, June 26, 1972, p. 884...
...By themselves, nuances and interrelations beg the question...
...His one attempt is quite inadequate and even misleading: "By 'geopolitical' I mean an approach that pays attention to the requirements of equilibrium...
...It was the idea that the United States could not conceivably fail in months or years to come to make good the private assurances given to Thieu by Nixon that failure by North Vietnam to abide by the terms of the agreement would bring "swift and severe retaliatory action" and a response "with full force" by the United States...
...Professor Spykman did not expect any one dominant world power to come out of World War II...
...I can sympathize with those reviewers who have dealt with it impressionistically...
...There were, Kissinger points out, only two real choices—military escalation and Vietnamization...
...As Kissinger puts it plaintively, "it was not a heroic homecoming...
...he foresaw three "autonomous zones" in the Far East, North America, and Europe, with China favored in the first, the United States in the second, and a difficult balancing act between Great Britain, Russia, and Germany in the third...
...In that case, the withdrawal implicitly, if not explicitly, 21 "All his life, he too had known only war...
...The dictionary says that nuance means: "A slight or delicate variation or difference in expression, feeling, opinion, etc...
...In 1971, Nixon declared: Now, in terms of our world situation, the tendency is, and this has been the case for the last five to six years, for us to obscure our vision almost totally of the world because of Vietnam...
...Thieu had to be bludgeoned into going along with the final settlement in Paris...
...2 In an interview in the Wall Street Journal, January 21, 1980, Kissinger reiterated: "Well, I have always objected to the concept of the China card...
...20 Kissinger's proposed barter never had a chance...
...On one occasion, he said: "The difference between great policy and mediocre policy or substantial policy and average policy is usually an accumulation of nuances...
...He sought refuge, in dealing with foreign leaders, in laboriously memorized memoranda or escape into "general observations...
...The necessary condition for Kissinger's rise was an odd couple—Richard Nixon and William Rogers...
...Nixon was, to be sure, "not by nature courageous," but he "steeled himself to conspicuous acts of rare courage...
...As for Nixon's strategy of using him against Rogers, 237 Kissinger acknowledges: "I do not mean to suggest that I resisted Nixon's conduct toward his senior Cabinet officer...
...Could the settlement have restored the confidence of our allies and dependents in the world at large...
...In one of them U.S...
...He served notice that "cooperative relations" with the Soviet Union—he would have said "detente" if the term had not become politically taboo— could not "survive any more Angolas...
...Despite Dobrynin's long service in Washington over almost two decades through every Sturm and Drang, despite "his unquestioning support of the Soviet line," Kissinger virtually nominates him for a future Nobel Peace Prize: "If someday there should come about the genuine 3 interested readers may follow Kissinger's pre-1969 views in greater detail in my article in Commentary, June 1974...
...He dreaded meeting new people...
...A typical exhibition of this technique of wounding and salving is his comparatively friendly treatment of former Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird...
...The main question that arises is what Kissinger understood by a Chinese-American accord...
...It was or should have been, in Kissinger's scheme, far more important than the arms agreement, which was in itself a highly problematic first installment...
...It was "with a combination of politeness and subconscious condescension that upper-class Bostonians reserve for people of, by New England standards, exotic backgrounds and excessively personal style...
...Reality does not change just because, or solely because, of a change of terms...
...It took the position that a certain balance of power was still inherent in any international system, but that it was no longer "the overriding concept" because continual maneuvering for marginal advantages in the nuclear era had become "both unrealistic and dangerous...
...His early strategy called for trading an improvement in SovietAmerican relations for Soviet pressure on North Vietnam to make peace on acceptable terms...
...Kissinger has some trouble making up his mind...
...Ironically, Kissinger's subsequent tenure as Secretary of State made Rogers's ordeal at his hands a dangerous precedent...
...There are cards and cards, some more valuable than others...
...Some of Kissinger's pen portraits of colleagues in his own government, including the president under whom he served, can only be described as scathing...
...Both sides maneuvered warily for another year before it was clear that they were going to make a serious effort to reach an understanding, and it took another year and a half to reach one...
...Nixon, according to Kissinger, first saw him as a "surrogate," then as a "competitor for public attention...
...By any standards, Kissinger's book is also exotic and excessively, if understandably, personal...
...It is a "card," but it is not "an ace in the hole," whereas Kissinger thinks it is "an ace in the hole" without being a "card...
...Laramie, Wyoming, February 4, 1976...
...It can only be described as the coziest and chummiest imaginable...
...Until 1969, when he went to Washington, Kissinger held very severe and consistent positions on both...
...It has had a period of stagnation...
...I know of no diplomatic memoirs that are so undiplomatically indiscreet...
...But Nixon was unwilling or unable to be his own secretary of state...
...What is the real difference between regarding China as "a means of leverage," "an ace in the hole," and a "card...
...IV Most of the reviews of Kissinger's book I have seen have been so impressionistic that they suggest how difficult it was for the reviewers to deal with it substantively...
...That done, Nixon had to fill the vacuum with someone else...
...The price was no more than a face-saving device...
...Their nightmare was not this or that clause but the fear of being left alone [p...
...it would require another book to do justice to it substantively...
...In White House Years, Kissinger's position on Vietnam is essentially the same as that of 1968...
...He was rancorous and vindictive—more so in victory than in defeat...
...The only remedy is to declassify any document of which a part has been declassified...
...25 And why did the logic fail to work in practice...
...For what is involved now is confidence in American promises...
...What has happened to the Sino-Soviet hostility that had, on page 763, "followed its own dynamic...
...Since it would be unseemly for a 238 Secretary of State to seem to accept Rogers's punishment as a model, Kissinger's memoirs are studded with mea culpas about the way he behaved and Rogers was treated...
...Rogers was given to administer a single area of policy, and that only for a time...
...On his return from his first trip to China in October, Kissinger saw signs that "the President was becoming restive at the publicity I was receiving...
...A world in which the South Vietnamese would have to stand entirely on their own was full of terrors that his pride would not let him admit [p...
...an equilibrium that left North Vietnamese forces in possession of much of South Vietnam was hardly calculated to last very long...
...Thieu himself, who knew best, believed that American withdrawal under any circumstances was tantamount to the abandonment of South Vietnam and his regime...
...His glazed expression," Kissinger reports, "showed that he considered most of the arguments esoteric rubbish...
...So long as the Soviet armed forces are gigantic enough to permit a buildup on all fronts, including the Chinese, the Russians can enjoy maximum freedom of action...
...Dishonor, if it is understood to mean Thieu's collapse, was merely delayed...
...Nixon had such an uncontrollable tendency to give impetuous and irresponsible orders that he depended on his subordinates, Kissinger in foreign and H. R. Haldeman in domestic policy, to save him from himself by disregarding his instructions until he had cooled off...
...In the triangle, Nixon-KissingerRogers, the last was hardly a player at all...
...In at least one respect, the book is, by any previous standards, exotic...
...Since Nixon planned in any case "to direct foreign policy from the White House," this recommendation suited both of them—Nixon to have a foreign-policy "apparatus" at his immediate disposal, Kissinger to be its coordinator and developer...
...And from his point of view Thieu was right [p...
...we were there because, as Kissinger also said a month earlier in 1968, we had created our own difficulties through a series of military and political "conceptual failures...
...gave him credit for "humanizing" the Kremlin ieaders for a whole generation of Americans...
...The answer is that geopolitics had little or nothing to do with it...
...we might, in fact, tempt a Soviet preemptive attack on China and thus be faced with decisions of enormous danger...
...In the second stage of Kissinger's meteoric career, then, Nixon replaced Rogers as the main rival...
...He was anti-detente because he viewed it as an insidious Soviet tactic to lull and gull the West in preparation for the next period of Communist expansion...
...Here, again, we face a general, abstract, psychological term—"confidence...
...Unusual personal qualities undoubtedly had much to do with it...
...Nuances, Kissinger soon found out, had rio effect whatever on the North Vietnamese...
...He lied to Rogers about Kissinger's first trip to China in 1971...
...Time after time, the President, Kissinger reveals, lied to his Secretary of State and, on occasion, to his Secretary of Defense as well...
...Kissinger also has a more pragmatic rationale for the last four years of the American war in Vietnam—that "sacrificing our friends" would have shaken "the confidence of all who depended on us...
...He recounts a "bizarre interlude" at, of all places, the Vatican...
...He even makes a return of American forces to Vietnam inevitable or obligatory because North Vietnam's "singleminded quest for hegemony, we were certain, 23 "Our constant search for some compromise formula illuminated the cultural gap between us and the Vietnamese because the very concept of compromise was alien to both Vietnamese parties...
...He managed to embody a singularly potent combination—a sense of mission with a streak of opportunism...
...Nothing else could have sufficed if, as we were already told, the real problem was that the American withdrawal caused the South Vietnamese to lose "the sinews of confidence and cohesion"— that, in effect, American forces had to carry the burden of the fighting as the sine qua non of the Thieu regime's survival...
...he was, in important matters, not even a spectator...
...Equilibrium has no such concrete, clear-cut connotation...
...The geopolitical outlook is peculiarly hard-boiled and coldblooded...
...The disease permeates Kissinger's pages and contaminated all who came in contact with it...
...Nixon's vengefulness was Kissinger's opportunity...
...He had given up the hope of military victory as early as 1966 after making two trips to Vietnam at the invitation of then Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge...
...How did Kissinger do it...
...Why...
...What else was there to the lingering hope...
...The only other option, as Kissinger recognizes, was to resort to unlimited military escalation on the assumption that the war had to be won or lost by the United States...
...The real story of detente, SALT I, and the "Basic Principles" cannot be found in these 243 pages...
...In fact, Kissinger notes, Nixon started on this course immediately—the day after his inauguration—before Rogers had had a chance to show any evidence of the "tendency" ascribed to him...
...the importance of Vietnam would have been settled by its geographical location...
...The real force that drove the United States out of Vietnam, Kissinger admits, was the popular American revulsion against the war...
...He reduces his interest in the principles of detente to the merely "tactical," designed to intensify Soviet dilemmas, reduce Soviet influence in the Middle East, and "outmaneuver the `peace' pressures" at home...
...It was a means to get the United States out of the war, not to end the war between the Vietnamese...
...In most parts of the world, they have to worry much more about what the United States will do than what the Chinese will do...
...It would have seemed inconceivable even a generation ago that such power once gained could not be translated directly into advantage over one's opponent...
...9 The Angolan intervention brought out the new Kissinger, who remarkably resembled the old, pre-Nixon, Kissinger...
...The answer is, I believe, that he was moved by a confusion of motives and forces, some of which is still reflected in his book...
...But now both we and the Soviet Union have begun to find that each increment of power does not necessarily represent an increment of usable political strength...
...Kissinger did not express surprise or administer a rebuke at such a question...
...But from time to time he was willing to resort to a "military showdown" and thought that "going for broke" militarily should be seriously considered...
...His record was not such as to merit the overwrought acclaim it drew from the media...
...It was— and is—one of Kissinger's conceits that such moves could be "subtle," as if no one were quite so clever as he is...
...Kissinger himself virtually admits that the peace terms gave the South Vietnamese government only a theoretical, rather than a practical, chance to survive because it lacked the will to do so without direct American military support...
...1372] . . . . The South Vietnamese, after eight years of American participation, simply did not feel ready to confront Hanoi without our direct participation...
...The "philosophy" in question was American withdrawal...
...But what actually passed between these two went far beyond a civil working diplomatic association...
...Geopolitics tends to regard "space" as fundamental, and the power with the greatest amount of space at its command the most likely to expand and conquer...
...There were, according to Kissinger, two Nixons—the one that functioned or malfunctioned most of the time in periods of relative stability, the other one that acted spasmodically when confronted by a crisis or critical decision...
...Has anyone who ever worked for a president described him in these terms...
...to resist it indefinitely was, however, impossible...
...6 The exception was the theory of "marginal advantages...
...In his book, Kissinger generously gives Nixon the main share of that credit, without neglecting to mention that he had come independently to the same judgment about China and designed many of the moves in that direction...
...Kissinger invested so heavily in Soviet good will because he believed that Soviet cooperation was needed to solve the most acute foreign problems confronting the United States...
...Yet Kissinger adds that Rogers was not totally wrong to blame him...
...The book contains literally scores of direct references to and textual quotations 26 William Safire, Before the Fall (New York: Doubleday, 1975), pp...
...In the end, American honor a la Kissinger could have been saved only if the United States had been able and willing to send back sufficient force to Vietnam to save Thieu from collapse in 1975...
...Therefore Soviet participation could become crucial [p...
...All this has mysteriously disappeared from a memoir that 5 Department of State Bulletin, June 26, 1972, p. 885...
...They were undertaken to find a way to bring the war to an end and thereby save South Vietnam from the risks of Vietnamization...
...13 "Statesmen must act, even when premises cannot be proved...
...Traditionally, geopolitics has had more to do 12 Interview, New York Times, October 13, 1974...
...Did nuances matter or did geopolitics prevail...
...Unquestionably, the failure to analyze adequately the geopolitical importance of Vietnam then [in 1961-62] contributed to the current dilemma...
...References to or paraphrases of Department of State documents appearing in the book do not reflect a decision to declassify those documents, nor do references to DOS views, opinions or policy positions reflect a decision to declassify any classified documents underlying or setting forth those views, opinions or policy positions...
...Moreover, the "personality clashes" between Kissinger and Rogers "did neither of us any credit...
...As Kissinger told Oriana Fallaci in the interview he now recalls with acute pain, he had set out to achieve three things: peace in Vietnam, rapprochement with China, and "a new relationship with the Soviet Union...
...In the first phase, he explains: "Ironically, one reason why the President entrusted me with so much responsibility and so many missions was because I was more under his control than his Cabinet...
...Kissinger's approach to the media, according to Safire, was "selective and flattering," and it drove the White House staffers nearly out of their minds with envy and rage...
...Initially, at least, he derived his power wholly from the favor of a miscreant lord in the White House...
...Two of Kissinger's hagiographers somehow managed to link him with G. )rge Washington...
...New York: Harper & Row, 1968) pp...
...27 (Kissinger admits only to the fact that he did nothing to counter the deception...
...In Kissinger's own narrative, Rogers took all the indignities heaped on him for over two years without fighting back...
...This silence is the most deafening confession he could have made...
...We can drive China into the hands of Russia or provoke Russia into attacking China...
...According to this interpretation, the United States did not and could not make the Soviet Union and China into rival, quarreling powers, though it is less clear why we could not exploit that rivalry whether or not it exploited itself, whatever that may mean...
...Nixon's appointment of Kissinger was something of a fluke...
...In late 1971, Kissinger became acutely aware of a change in Nixon's attitude...
...As Kissinger himself recognizes: "This curious antiphonal relationship between the two men had the consequence of enhancing my position, but my own role was clearly a result of that relationship and not the cause of it...
...At that preliminary meeting, according to Nixon's memoirs, Kissinger advised him to build up a "national security apparatus" in the White House to coordinate foreign and defense policies and develop "policy options...
...What is declassified for one should be declassified for all...
...The negotiations in Paris, then, could not be about Vietnamization...
...The school of pre-World War H German geopoliticians, headed by General Karl Haushofer, held that it would be possible for Germany to gain the upper hand through an alliance with Russia or outright conquest of Eastern Europe...
...he managed, without any political constituency, by sheer force of intellect and personality, to outlast the President whose native habitat was in the darkest recesses of that jungle...
...In return, the White House took pains "to distance itsel' from Kissinger because the President "was bound to become restless with an Assistant who was beginning to compete with him for public attention...
...Kissinger said that he would be lucky to hold it for six months...
...In a geopolitical perspective, it would have mattered little whether or not there were 500,000 Americans in Vietnam...
...This Nixonian practice was not merely "weird...
...He reincarnated the old doctrine of "containment" in so many words—"It is our responsibility to contain Soviet power without global war...
...28 A usually sober British correspondent in Washington appointed him "the second most powerful man in America...
...That Kissinger should want to pass off not only himself, but everyone in the Nixon administration as secret doves, differing from other doves only slightly, by a nuance, would seem too farfetched to deserve serious consideration...
...it is "one of the episodes of my public life in which I take no great pride...
...Kissinger's and Nixon's divergent explanations of how it was accomplished show each of them retrospectively making the other responsible...
...If we adopted the Chinese attitude, however, we might not even help Peking...
...240 best of all possible worlds...
...I do not mean to suggest that Kissinger and Dobrynin should have been at verbal swords' points, whatever the relations of their countries may have been...
...It is one of those words, like "geopolitics," that is being used as a substitute for thought and deserves to be put back in the dictionary for a rest...
...In both cases, a geopolitical aberration is said to create reasons for increasing the cost of the aberration...
...The first move was made by the Chinese immediately after Nixon's election...
...He was dead set against "a disguised form of victory" for North Vietnam, but that is what he eventually settled for...
...He drops a hint, though it is supposed to apply to someone else...
...If Kissinger had had his way, according to Nixon, Rogers and the State Department would not even have been permitted to gnaw away at the bare bone of the Middle East...
...The sadism was Nixon's, the masochism Rogers's...
...The analogy with royal courts fits Nixon's administration better than any other "model" and is particularly apt for Kissinger's place in it...
...they were currying favor with us becat se they were quarreling...
...In contemporary America," Kissinger observes with reference to Nixon, "power increasingly gravitates to those with an almost obsessive desire to win it...
...European public opinion as represented by the media, he concedes, opposed the war...
...Except for the Middle East, and even that only until 1971, "Nixon would listen to the agencies for a while and then act from the White House...
...He saw himself as "the lonely embattled leader propping up faltering associates...
...14 This is something of an exaggeration...
...The preoccupation of his White House with public relations was "monomaniacal...
...By dropping its demand for the dismantling of the South Vietnamese regime in advance, North Vietnam did pay "some price" for the American withdrawal...
...He also makes getting "the two Communist powers competing for good relations with us" the essence of the triangular strategy, as if the United States could shift from hostility to benevolence in its China policy without incurring the increased hostility of the Soviet Union...
...Lest readers miss all the nuances of his celebrity, Kissinger refers in the book's notes to "a good account" of the mood in the White House in William Safire's memoirs of his White House years...
...To obey the will of the people went against the grain...
...Geopolitics is also no respecter of credibility, prestige, or honor...
...he was even lured into deceiving his readers about Kissinger's alleged opposition to the Christmas 1972 bombing of North Vietnam...
...The wonder is not that the North Vietnamese agreed to drop their demand...
...If one took this ex post facto rationalization seriously, detente was a weapon of the Kissingerian cold war, not a process of conciliation...
...16 It took him two more years to come forth with an alternative to military victory...
...The attribute of courage in crisis is the highest and almost the only praise that Kissinger bestows on Nixon, sometimes to take the sting out of his less admirable traits...
...246 with world mastery than with equilibrium...
...thus my office assumed constantly growing responsibilities...
...Kissinger has, more recently, called for a policy that "must be pursued over an indefinite period of time...
...The negotiable issues were the conditions for American withdrawal, short of abandoning the Thieu regime to its own fate...
...Yet he distrusted his associates so intensely that he worked to tear them down...
...he was trying to calculate the political impact and salability of the various options, of which only the broad outlines interested him...
...VIII Finally, something more must be said about the question with which we started: How did Kissinger do it...
...Considering where he came from and how far he had to go, Kissinger's feat in Washington was an authentic tour de force...
...Only Kissinger could benefit...
...Nixon became so "restless" that at one time he would not see Kissinger for several weeks...
...He has gone so far as to hold that nuances are all that really matter...
...He admits to some minor errors of judgment...
...On this question, Kissinger has some surprises in store for the reader...
...248 our friends in Vietnam sacrificed or not...
...They showed their disrespect for his "integrating conceptual framework" by sending their Cuban proxies into Angola toward the end of 1975...
...They may, in his own words, be referred to as "nuances" and "geopolitics...
...7 Department of State Bulletin, July 10, 1972, p. 40...
...The problem arises because of something that Kissinger says was "inconceivable" to him at the time...
...What was there to the hope...
...He pursued these themes with sophistication and tenacity for about a dozen years before he was called on to do something about them...
...Kissinger gives him the saving grace of being able to make "lonely decisions" that were "extremely courageous" and demonstrated his "strategic grasp...
...Throughout history, the primary concern of most national leaders has been to accumulate geopolitical and military power...
...By "interrelations," Kissinger explains, he means the "linkage" of events...
...When Kissinger tells of Ambassador Rush's instructions to act on Kissinger's orders without the knowledge of his own State Department, he comments guiltily: "It was an odd way to run a government...
...In any case, Rogers was left out of the first meeting between Nixon and Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin...
...Kissinger also makes clear that neither Nixon nor he took office with more than a nebulous idea about how to go about inaugurating a new China policy...
...1467...
...Even if the Nixon administration saw its duty as the preparation of South Vietnam for fighting its own battles, that preliminary period could not last forever...
...It implicitly admits that there was nothing in Vietnam itself to justify the American role in the war...
...It tells of Haldeman's belated realization that "superstar" Kissinger was the President's chief competitor for the title of " #1 Peacemaker...
...1320] . . . . We had no way of understanding the primeval hatred that animated the two sides [p...
...This line of thought lands Kissinger in a flagrant contradiction...
...it could not have been more so long as the survival of the Thieu regime depended on the presence of American armed forces...
...Were 18July 6, 1971 (in Department of State Bulletin, July 26, 1971, p. 93...
...This kind of inconsistency haunts Kissinger's interpretation of the new China policy...
...If he was as tough, cold-eyed, self-centered, and ambitious as Nixon described him before Rogers took office, then Nixon deliberately set out to humiliate him...
...Perhaps his greatest feat was to beat the President's media machine at its own machinations...
...Nixon's publicity peddlers tried to sell him from the bottom up...
...This is not to say that credibility, prestige, and honor are not important from some points of view...
...Its criterion is the conquest of space and power, whatever means may be necessary to achieve the goal...
...In any case, nuances and interrelations are not of similar or comparable status...
...Kissinger volunteers an explanation that must be seen to be believed...
...Presidents have had competition from Cabinet members, whom they had to get rid of, but this must be the first time that a 239 president has had so much competition from a mere assistant, whom, in addition, he did not even dare to dismiss...
...Kissinger protected himself by holding onto the post of National Security Adviser as well as that of Secretary of State, preventing anyone else from doing to him what he had done to Rogers...
...Kissinger's play is with words, not with cards...
...He again lied to Rogers about Kissinger's trip to Moscow in 1972...
...He hardly knew Kissinger, but one of the things he says he knew was that Kissinger had made "disparaging comments" about him—a mild version of what Kissinger used to say about Nixon...
...The summit meeting of May 1972, therefore, was not content with the first strategic arms limitation treaty (SALT I...
...10 San Francisco, February 3, 1976...
...This equivocation more than anything else led to the interminably long, excruciatingly tortuous negotiations with North Vietnam and their disastrous denouement...
...The Vietnamese negotiations followed suit...
...7 No More Vietnams...
...A marked aspect of the work of Frederick Jackson Turner was geopolitical...
...23 It is not altogether clear whether Nixon and Kissinger were deceiving themselves or deceiving Thieu...
...In 1971, Kissinger managed three negotiations in three months, and in all of these, as he put it, "the regular bureaucracy had not participated, indeed, was unaware" of their very existence...
...As Kissinger portrays him, he had no mind for the kind of diligent effort required for developing or enforcing policy...
...GRADUALLY, the maw of Kissinger's "back channel" swallowed up one area, issue, and policy after another...
...Kissinger had from the outset little or no hope that he could get any real concession from the North Vietnamese left to themselves...
...In that case, since the Soviet leaders were supposed to be so innately cautious and patient, they would have considered the Angolan intervention a waste of time and substance...
...At some point it was necessary to make the Thieu 20 "In all my conversations with Dobrynin I had stressed that a fundamental improvement in US-Soviet relations presupposed Soviet cooperation in settling the war [p...
...He has repeatedly put forward two, though not always with the same emphasis...
...We could not "exploit" that rivalry...
...In his article in Foreign Affairs, written in the summer of 1968, he implied that a wrongheaded geopolitical assessment had landed us in the Vietnam dilemma...
...But first, there is another related question: Why did Richard Nixon subject his old, "personal friend," Bill Rogers, to such humiliation and degradation...
...It was overdue, but that is no reason for taking credit away from them...
...Dean Acheson, who served longer and participated in much greater history-shaking events, needed only one volume and a quarter as many pages to tell his entire story...
...the nuance was a "lingering hope that Hanoi might at some point negotiate, paying some price to accelerate our total withdrawal...
...Even less could he face the proposition that he might have been appointed, at least in part, because his old friend wanted to reverse roles and establish a relationship in which both hierarchically and substantively he, Nixon, called the tune for once...
...One story, with which Kissinger must have regaled countless dinner parties, 234 has Nixon planning to go straight from a memorial Mass for Charles de Gaulle at Notre Dame Cathedral to the gastronomic pleasures of the restaurant Maxim's, a "mind-boggling" faux pas from which Kissinger rescued him...
...it was diseased...
...22 But what if Thieu were right that his regime could not long survive the complete withdrawal of American forces...
...19 Still, Kissinger has given us some standards for judging his handling of the Vietnam negotiations...
...I was not the only one to whom he spoke at this time in this vein...
...they were also akin in that they understood each other better than Kissinger understood either of them...
...In his memoirs, Nixon added indignity to injury by calling Rogers "a strong administrator" and "a resourceful negotiator...
...he merely "evaded his request...
...1325...
...He defines the difference between Secretary of State Rogers and himself in terms of Rogers's "tactical" perspective and his own "strategic and geopolitical" approach...
...A fully developed American geopolitical system appeared in 1942 with America's Strategy in World Politics by Professor Nicholas John Spykman of Yale University (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1942...
...According to the theory of marginal advantages, however, neither side would gain any increment of usable political strength even if it failed to implement the principles...
...has begun to define its interests and objectives in global terms"—as if the U.S.S.R.'s interest in Cuba since 1960, to go back no further, had been less global than its interest in Angola...
...Only one other person—Prime Minister Chou En-lai of China, who is written about with gushing veneration—gets higher marks from Kissinger...
...Unfortunately for Kissinger's theory of marginal advantages, the Soviets were not converted to it...
...8 THE READER of White House Years will not get a word about marginal advantages or increments of power, even though they played such a large part in Kissinger's thinking in the years of detente...
...he could be "maddening...
...I tried to be more optimistic—he would not come out too badly if he held on to it for a year...
...If we could free our diplomacy from the dead weight of two decades, each Communist superpower would have greater inducement to deal with us constructively...
...247 States transfers the stake in Vietnam to the world outside...
...Once Thieu realized that the United States was determined, one way or another, to withdraw its forces from Vietnam, even threatening to make a separate peace, he capitulated to the inevitable...
...2 If it was not ours to play, what in the world were we playing with in Peking...
...Yet all these personal characteristics hardly account for the extravagant adulation that he inspired...
...249 regime in South Vietnam stand on its own and take the risk of defeat...
...The book cannot be understood solely in terms of its own period...
...Yet it is symptomatic of a deep strain that runs through the Vietnamese sections of the book—an "ambivalence," to which he confesses, and even a guilty conscience...
...28 Marvin Kalb and Bernard Kalb, Kissinger (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1974), pp...
...His emphasis is on "our moral position," on avoiding "dishonor," on getting out "with dignity...
...Kissinger explained: The reason is that the determination of national power has changed fundamentally in the nuclear age...
...As for geopolitics, it was a bad reason for staying in but one of the best reasons for getting out of Vietnam...
...He was anti-Soviet in the sense that he considered the Soviet Union to be the most dangerous, most implacable enemy of the United States and all that it stood for...
...China was next...
...Beyond the "broad outlines" and most often before they were set, Kissinger took over...
...A country that as a result of popular revulsion could not stay in Vietnam could not expect to get back, Watergate or no Watergate...
...The dean of the New York Times columnists sometimes wrote as if Kissinger had been dictating to him...
...5 With one exception, this paraphrase closely followed the text of the "Basic Principles...
...Exotic is one word for it...
...The drama began when Richard Nixon unexpectedly invited Kissinger to become his Assistant for National Security Affairs in November 1968...
...Midway through his memoirs, Kissinger modestly remarks that "I was supposed to be skillful in dealing with the press...
...In practice, the more one of them deals with us "constructively," the more apt is the other to deal with us "destructively...
...I have chosen to limit myself to the last three in order to deal wth these subjects more thoroughly than would otherwise be possible...
...241 And if the United States did not have a China card to play, must we conclude that China did not have an American card to play either...
...they are, in fact, as ungeopolitical or antigeopolitical as one can get...
...European leaders, though they did not say so publicly, "wanted the war ended quickly," but also "wanted America's credibility unimpaired...
...3 ("He has come to be recognized as the very portrait of American diplomacy, the way George Washington is identified with the dollar bill"), pp...
...Interrelations may be given this nuance or that, but the nuance is still bound to make no more than a slight or subtle difference to the interrelations...
...he was a "masterleaker of trivialities...
...Nuances" are just about the smallest change one can use in diplomacy...
...He was almost physically unable to confront people who disagreed with him...
...If the U.S.-North Vietnam agreement of 1973 25 " Thus, we can anticipate no lasting peace in the wake of a consummated agreement, but merely a shift in Hanoi's modus operandi...
...In briefings, Kissinger favored China over Soviet Russia because the former was the weaker party...
...Kissinger absolves himself by carefully noting that Nixon began to exclude Rogers from all important negotiations "at a time when it would have been inconceivable for me to suggest such a procedure...
...During the India-Pakistan crisis of 1971, White House and State Department representatives "dealt with each other as competing sovereign entities, not 236 members of the same team, and the President sought to have his way by an indirection that compounded the internal stresses of our government...
...At the same time he was incapable of giving direct orders to or imposing discipline on even his Cabinet...
...The muddle gets progressively worse as Kissinger repeatedly tries to explain the new China policy...
...Unrealistic" maneuvering should be more dangerous to the interests of the maneuverer than to anyone else...
...Ambassador in Bonn Kenneth Rush followed Kissinger's orders "without the knowledge of his own State Department...
...That new relationship was consecrated in 1972 with the official sanctification of the policy of detente...
...Safire cheerily offers the opinion that Kissinger was no more than a "realistic megalomaniac...
...Such a Soviet operator might be considered more effective, slippery, and dangerous than any other, to be handled with the greatest care...
...He makes the American engagement in Vietnam a struggle over a principle—"that America did not betray its friends"—and ended the war in such a way that its friends cried to high heaven that they had been betrayed...
...In the first pages of the first volume of his memoirs, Henry Kissinger remarks with some bitterness about the way he was treated by McGeorge Bundy, his dean at Harvard and a predecessor as National Security Adviser to the President...
...The difference between the United States and South Vietnam in the later stages of the Paris negotiations was, he says, that "our goal was honor," their "problem was survival...
...Instead, Kissinger was converted to the Soviet point of view: he suddenly woke up to how usable this marginal advantage could be to the Soviets...
...That his [Thieu's] methods were obnoxiously Vietnamese, that in the process [of balking] he nearly wrecked our own internal cohesion, does not alter the reality that he fought valiantly, that he was right by his lights and the realities of what he knew of Hanoi's purposes [p...
...Nixon also adds this tidbit not found in Kissinger's book: "Kissinger suggested repeatedly that he might have to resign unless Rogers was restrained or replaced...
...I received a reply dated January 16, 1980 from Deputy Assistant Secretary for Classification and Declassification Clayton E. McManaway...
...The mere reference to equilibrium does not tell us whether it is geopolitically sound or not...
...12 He has maintained that "intangibles" can determine the outcome of events...
...The defense of "honor" and "prestige" could only permit a delaying, rearguard action...
...Geopolitics since Sir Halford Mackinder's time early in this century has always been based on a single factor—geography—as the determinant of history...
...It has considerable, but limited, effect on the SovietAmerican relationship...
...Kissinger cultivated the haut monde of Washington's columnists and correspondents...
...Yet, it is clear, he oscillated between these poles, never able to commit himself fully to either one...
...Kissinger's Rogers is a study in political sadomasochism...
...In negotiations, which he tried desperately to avoid, "he was nervous to the point of anxiety...
...But there was one hitch...
...245 thing is that it should be slight or subtle...
...This can only mean, if it signifies anything more than a rhetorical last gasp, that the United States without Watergate would have "enforced" the Paris agreement by all means in its power, including the use of its own forces...
...On another occasion, Nixon thought it appropriate to congratulate the Shah of Iran by citing one of former President Eisenhower's profundities to the effect that all successful political leaders had in common marriages "above themselves...
...The geopolitical tradition has emphasized war through geographical expansion rather than peace through equilibrium...
...Kissinger finally came to see that Thieu and Tho (Le Duc Tho, North Vietnam's main negotiator) were alike in their tactics and behavior...
...Kissinger is apparently so embarrassed by his role in the codification of detente that his book comes close to distorting the record...
...Nevertheless, Nixon was sufficiently impressed by a single encounter with Kissinger to decide on the spur of the moment to offer him the post of National Security Adviser "in an uncharacteristically impulsive way...
...Detente stood or fell on the "Basic Principles," as Kissinger himself had previously interpreted them: They state that both sides will attempt to their utmost to avoid military confrontation and that neither will attempt to take unilateral advantage in situations, recognizing that the great nuclear powers cannot be pushed in a position that jeopardizes their basic survival without noting it and therefore recognizing that the attempt of traditional diplomacy to accumulate marginal advantages is bound to lead to disastrous consequences in the nuclear age...
...More of the answer than was previously accessible comes out, consciously or not, in these pages...
...By far the longest and most anguished part of the book deals with the negotiations that brought an end to the American intervention in Vietnam...
...From the first my presence made it technically possible and after a time I undoubtedly encouraged it...
...By the end of that year, Nixon almost automatically approved Kissinger's "tactical management of foreign policy" on a day-by-day basis, though the President still reserved for himself the ultimate decisions, especially in a crisis...
...The United States, he laments, has "no geopolitical tradition...
...As Kissinger subsequently developed it, the theory held that the balance of power no longer fully applied in the nuclear age...
...As late as 1918, long after he had developed his "sectional" theory of American history, Turner "still thought in terms of geographic determinism, and he sought explanations for political and social behavior in physiographic pressures, rather than in the many forces responsible" (Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson Turner, New York: Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 372...
...Civil wars that go o .3 long and as ruthlessly as the one in Vietnam cannot be ended by a third party, which has paid so heavy a price for its interposition that it desperately seeks a way out...
...What made Kissinger do it...
...In another connection, Kissinger magnanimously places the responsibility for conditions that put State Department officials "in an extremely uncomfortable position" on "the personalities at the top, including myself...
...Does "our options toward both of them" mean our options toward both of them together or toward each of them singly...
...He came to his basic position on the war before going to the White House...
...and he shunned persuading people or inspiring his subordinates...
...We have no reason to suppose that this will not be done by the leaders of the Soviet Union, but if events should prove these hopes on either side to be incorrect, then we will, of course, both of us, have to draw the appropriate conclusions" (Ibid., June 26, 1972, p. 885...
...1435...
...This interpretation can only mean that the United States and China were using each other, as well they might, against the Soviet Union...
...One way to judge Kissinger's policy is to subject it to the test of his own guiding ideas or concepts...
...10 We have gone beyond the bounds of White House Years, which ends at the beginning of 1973...
...Kissinger observed and lent himself to it...
...If American honor depended on the Thieu regime's survival, and that survival depended on continued, indefinite American military presence in South Vietnam, the Paris agreement of January 1973 was no more than a token offering to American honor and Thieu's survival...
...Kissinger refers to his "solitary procedures," another way of saying that he went off on his own and confronted Nixon with accomplished facts...
...For all his flaunting of geopolitics, his justification for what we were doing in Vietnam is primarily moralistic...
...His hope originally rested on getting the Soviet Union to bail us out...
...When Time magazine chose both of them as Men of the Year, Kissinger knew that Nixon would not be pleased and even tried unsuccessfully to remove his name...
...The "lingering hope" of "some price" to be paid by North Vietnam is thus made to justify four years of a futile and repulsive war...
...If Kissinger had been right, the Soviets should have realized that a mere increment of power in such a faraway African country could not give them any "usable political strength...
...Kissinger has lots of fun with the frenzied 252 efforts of Haldeman and Ziegler to get "photo opportunities" for the President on the evening television shows...
...and paid him tribute for having "co-opted" many of his potential critics—including themselves, it may be added...
...Dobrynin was Kissinger's first "back channel," which sent the latter on his way to effective operational control of American foreign policy...
...In the first months of 1976, Kissinger announced the beginning of a new era—that "the U.S.S.R...
...THIS SETUP INEVITABLY resulted in a vicious feud between Kissinger and Rogers...
...The NixonKissinger foreign policy aimed at achieving nothing less than "fundamental settlements" through "an integrating conceptual framework...
...He resented and suspected most of all the members of his Cabinet and the bureaucracies that served them...
...But, as Kissinger spends pages assuring us, only the demand, not the determination, was dropped...
...Because "both sides possess such enormous power, small additional increments cannot be translated into tangible advantages or even usable political strength...
...The essential paragraph in his reply reads: With regard to quotations from any classified Department of State documents in the book, the quotations themselves are declassified, but not the remainder of the documents from which the quotes were taken...
...After Nixon's reelection in November 1972, "he was determined not to have his second term tormented like the first by our national trauma...
...Because Thieu made known that he had been faced with an ultimatum, which he had rejected, Nixon says that he was "shocked" and "I felt we would now be justified in breaking with him and making a separate peace with Hanoi"—as if he had not already threatened to make a separate peace...
...Kissinger sold himself from the top down...
...it is rather that they took so long to do so...
...This reasoning makes it appear that if we call our rapprochement with China something other than a "card," it will make the Soviets less likely to react irrationally or China less nervous about improved Soviet-American relations...
...But he also pronounces: "The China card was not ours to play...
...This "back channel" was more than a mutual admiration society...
...11 Kissinger's own Soviet policy would have done better if he had followed this advice...
...Nixon's version of this feud is characteristic of the man...
...By 1970, relations between Kissinger and Rogers had deteriorated to such an extent that, Kissinger says, the two of them could not engage in a "rational discussion...
...If they had been declassified for him, could I or any other scholar have access to them...
...We are now approaching the crucial point, which Kissinger does his best to obfuscate by hiding behind a screen of excess verbiage...
...One can understand Kissinger's admiration for "a thoroughgoing professional" who "moved through the upper echelons of Washington with consummate skill" and whose "skill at putting his American interlocutor on the defensive was infinite...
...One thing is certain—no one who wishes to think or write about the world events of the 1970s can ignore it...
...The entire case is essentially based on one point...
...The discretion of European leaders is easily understood...
...But the commitment of five hundred thousand Americans has settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam...
...The real problem of Vietnam was concrete and relative...
...29 Henry Brandon, The Retreat of American Power (New York: Doubleday, 1973), p. 22...
...It reduced Indochina to its proper scale—a small peninsula on a major continent...
...One of the things that must have endeared Kissinger to Nixon was the former's immediate advice to make the White House itself the headquarters of a foreignpolicy and defense "apparatus...
...This diplomatic recipe is a good example of Kissinger's occasional weakness for abstract formulas that get lost in muddled verbiage...
...It is numbingly long and stupefyingly detailed...
...26 Kissinger's approach was different from that of Nixon's retainers...
...Kissinger felt that Rogers was vain, uninformed, unable to keep a secret, and hopelessly dominated by the State Department bureaucracy...
...V The least candid, most untrustworthy portion of Kissinger's book deals with the Soviet Union and the policy of detente...
...he cannot bring himself to mention a major one...
...By selecting them as his chosen confidants and flattering them with his assiduous attention, he made them feel closer to the seat of power than ever before...
...For example, the North Vietnamese negotiators proposed a "coalition government" for South Vietnam, but in such a way that, as Kissinger understood it, it would effectively give the North control...
...Not surprisingly, "Nixon's brooding disquietude with my new-found celebrity inevitably transmitted itself to his staff, only too eager to build him up and relishing the bonus of cutting me down to size after years of riding high...
...24 Foreign Affairs, Winter 1979/80...
...China does not threaten the Soviet Union anywhere as much as the Soviet Union threatens China...
...7 The last sentence implied that the Americans and the Soviets had been moving toward a meeting of minds on the obsolescence of "marginal advantages" and "increments of power...
...By means of this dodge, no one else can gain access to these documents to determine how faithfully Kissinger made use of them...
...That was the affair of American honor, credibility, prestige...
...and if the code prevailed, an arms agreement could be a welcome but unessential factor in keeping the peace...
...To avoid a disguised form of victory it was necessary, in his view, for the United States to "enforce" the agreement (which he mistakenly calls a "treaty"), as if a country that had found it politically impossible to maintain its forces in Vietnam could find it politically possible to send them back en masse to prevent a North Vietnamese takeover or, more realistically, to drive out the North Vietnamese after a takeover...
...21 What, then, made the settlement "honorable...
...It was made possible by Nixon's need to reduce Rogers to a figurehead...
...the real issue is whether government officials should be permitted to make a mockery of it...
...1375] . . . . We failed early enough to grasp that Thieu's real objection was not to the terms but the fact of any compromise...
...Kissinger's answer is that all would have worked out as planned "but for the collapse of executive authority as a result of Watergate...
...no such American gimmick ever deceived many unwary Vietnamese...
...This "triangular theory" suggested that China, Soviet Russia, and the United States were more or less equivalent power centers, each of which could try to play off one of the others against the third...
...267...
...he simply did not know what was going on...
...It cannot mean the first, because they were no longer together...
...This duality more than anything else drives Kissinger into going over the ground of the Vietnam negotiations interminably, sometimes veering one way, sometimes another, never quite—I suspect—convincing himself or the reader...
...The secrecy and duplicity with which Nixon, assisted by Kissinger, conducted foreign policy inevitably resulted in tragicomic confusion and cross-purposes...
...By shifting the attention away from Vietnam, it is of a piece with the idea that the presence of 500,000 American soldiers settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam...
...It implied that the United States had become embroiled in a Vietnamese civil war, and that the only way to get out was to give the civil war back to the Vietnamese...
...The procedures so painful to Rogers were clearly instigated by Nixon...
...Vietnamization did not have to be negotiated with North Vietnam...
...Moreover, even on Kissinger's showing, Rogers was not always wrong...
...Kissinger's president was surely, in Kissinger's words, a "flawed" and "strange" man...
...He has rewarded Dobrynin with such fervent, effusive praise that it should stand the Soviet Ambassador in good stead for promotion in the Soviet hierarchy...
...He was "petty in calm periods" and "small-minded in dealing with his associates...
...readiness, which may in fact be challenged at any time, to enforce its provisions" (p...
...Moreover, neither of them nor both together can do what Kissinger here asks them to do—satisfy the need for "an integrating conceptual framework...
...The troublesome problem is a legacy of the triangular theory...
...Though Kissinger had long detested detente and had even distrusted it when France and Germany had embraced it, he was converted to it by 1971...
...The bone Nixon was originally willing to throw to Rogers was Middle Eastern policy...
...27 James Reston, New York Times, December 30, 1972...
...18 In this book, Kissinger relates that he told Thieu in 1972: "We have fought for four years, have mortgaged our whole foreign policy to the defense of one country...
...The linkage to other outstanding issues came in another key document—the "Basic Principles of Relations Between the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics...
...Memory of his formerly dominant role may have reinforced Rogers's alleged "tendency" to disagree with Nixon and to refuse to do battle for him "at critical junctures...
...Rogers must have sensed what was happening because much of a weekend was spent, Kissinger says, "fighting off Rogers's pleas—basically not unjustified"—to attend...
...it was written by the born-again, anti-Soviet, post-1976 Kissinger and reflects many of his latter-day preoccupations...
...30 Edward R. F. Sheehan, The Arabs, Israelis, and Kissinger (New York: Readers' Digest Press, 1976), p.38...
...If those eight years were not enough to attest to America's "credibility" as a faithful ally, how many more would have been necessary...
...First, he relates (as does Kissinger) that he sent a message on December 19 to Thieu about his "irrevocable intention to proceed, preferably with your cooperation, but, if necessary, alone...
...It also stated: "Both sides recognize that efforts to obtain unilateral advantage at the expense of the other, directly or indirectly, are inconsistent with these objectives...
...On that major continent, China is the geopolitical center of gravity...
...But there has never been a case as shameful and indecent as that of Nixon's treatment of his old, "personal friend," William Rogers...
...his good humor was often "rascally...
...I wondered how Kissinger could make use of classified documents on such a large scale and of such recent vintage...
...This system did not conform to the "bureaucratic politics model," which presupposes that official policy and action largely result from "bargaining" by different "players" in the government...
...250 sealed the fate of the South Vietnamese government...
...He protests that "in all conscience," we could not impose "an unacceptable peace on our ally" and then tells in the most agonizing detail how he helped to impose a peace that our ally considered to be unacceptable to the point of near hysteria and tears of rage...
...Rogers was not the only victim of this eerie practice...
...Therefore, they will do their utmost to avoid military confrontations and to prevent the outbreak of nuclear war...
...It is not for the average reader...
...We cannot have it both ways...
...235 Otherwise, Rogers and the State Department were deliberately and systematically deprived of every other area or policy that traditionally pertained to them...
...He could be "maddening" in calm times...
...VI Of all the subjects in his book, Kissinger dwells at greatest length and with most pathos on the Vietnam war...
...I do not feel happy with the notion that we use China to annoy the Soviets as a penalty for Soviet conduct...
...If either side broke the code, the whole point of an arms agreement was lost...
...Since this volume ends in 1972, we must be resigned to another volume and about 3,000 pages before Kissinger tells all...
...He wishes to make it, as might be expected, an achievement of world-shaking significance...
...It is not enough to expound, as Kissinger does here, on the need for an integrating conceptual framework and then make it nothing more than a mix of nuances and interrelations in the abstract...
...A full study of the way the usually disenchanted, hard-to-please Washington media mentality was wooed and won by Kissinger would be needed in order to get at the roots of this phenomenon...
...The "peace with honor" rested, in the last analysis, on the North Vietnamese concession that it was not necessary to overthrow the South Vietnamese government in advance as the price of a cease-fire...
...The theory of marginal advantages was also written into the President's foreign policy report to Congress of May 3, 1973...
...In brief, he was anti-Soviet and anti-detente...
...Kissinger ends this tale with the punch line: "The King of Kings looked off into the distance with melancholy...
...It is not to denigrate the desirability of a ChineseAmerican understanding to recognize that the United States can potentially be more useful to China than China can be to the United States...
...No serious or experienced negotiator would be taken in by them...
...He lied to cover up decisions he had made months earlier without their knowledge...
...Instead, he offers a version of detente that differs little from the familiar carrot-and-stick policy of "posing risks and incentives to encourage Soviet restraint...
...another part recognized that the United States was tearing itself apart socially and politically on Thieu's behalf and could not go on doing so much longer...
...Some are only a sentence or two, some much longer...
...What made his version distinctive was that he gave it a theoretical foundation that made detente seem structurally sound and even built into the nature of the new international order...
...This system led to situations that would be ludicrous if the consequences had not been so serious...
...The move toward China, he explains, was intended to shape a new "global equilibrium" to give the United States a "balancing position" to improve relations with both the Soviet Union and China...
...Nixon, on the other hand, relates that "Kissinger had suggested that we develop a private channel between Dobrynin and him"—and Nixon agreed...
...19 Spykman, op...
...On page 763, he explains: Neither Peking nor Moscow was quarreling With the other to curry favor wig h us...
...The question is what kind of China card we are playing with, not whether it is a card at all...
...they need an integrating conceptual framework to give them function and direction...
...The "opening to China" by Nixon and Kissinger may well be their most important, enduring contribution...
...He was admittedly right in January 1971 to protest against using South Vietnamese forces for an offensive in Laos...
...Kissinger as an intellectual in politics captured the allegiance and excited the imagination of a journalistic elite that is itself largely made up of intellectuals manques...
...He was apparently not prepared for such a change and for this reason may have reacted with unusual outrage...
...What in any case does "credibility" in this intangible and abstract form mean in these circumstances...
...cit., p. 469...
...They worried about getting the picture of their chieftain to the hoi polloi on television news shows...
...If there is bad faith on either side, the aspirations expressed here cannot be realized...
...His skill at avoiding unpleasant subjects was "finely-honed...
...One part of Kissinger, as he himself makes clear, sympathized with Thieu's position...
...Nixon distrusted State and wanted sensitive matters handled by the White House alone, but my presence made the two channel procedures possible and I was quite willing to step into the breach to conduct negotiations with my small staff and no interagency liaison...
...So I wrote a letter of enquiry to the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs of the State Department...
...Even with more space at one's disposal it is impossible to do justice to all of Kissinger's themes—Chile, the Middle East, nuclear strategy, Cambodia, India-Pakistan, China, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam...
...The main narrative pushes on relentlessly, often week by week or day by day and sometimes even hour by hour...
...Whatever may be thought of Kissinger's argument that the 500,000 Americans settled the issue of the importance of Vietnam, geopolitics was involved only in the sense that they had been sent in defiance of geopolitical considerations...
...The American problem from this point of view was less with North Vietnam than with South Vietnam...
...He blandly remarks that no human organization could be free of personality and policy conflicts, such as those that took place among Rogers, Kissinger, and Laird...
...But Laird was also "magnificent—strong, loyal, daring and eloquent" in crises...
...they must decide, even when intangibles will determine the outcome" (Speech before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, April 17, 1975...
...Very little then is left of the idea that Rogers brought his debasement on himself by failing to recognize that he was no longer the dominant partner or did not grasp his subordinate position...
...These are the harshest words that Nixon puts in his book about Kissinger and Rogers, still playing them off against one another, as if he were not personally culpable and had not stacked the cards in favor of Kissinger...
...Though I did not think so at the time," Kissinger writes, as if he had finally seen the light, "I have become convinced that a President should make the Secretary of State his principal adviser and use the national security adviser primarily as a senior administrator and coordinator to make certain that each significant point of view is heard...
...What was the price...
...Again and again, he uses the term "geopolitical" as if it were his personal revelation or trademark...
...The third principle committed both powers "to everything in their power so that conflicts or situations will not arise which would serve to increase international tensions...
...22 Nixon's version is characteristically disingenuous...
...After the Soviet connection came SALT, the strategic arms limitation talks...
...he was the "probable source" of any newspaper story he complained about...
...it is equally evident that I nurtured them...
...even if the Soviets violated the understanding and grabbed for marginal advantages and increments of power, they could not be translated into "usable political strength...
...In effect, only quotations were declassified, documents were not...
...it exploited itself...
...I wondered aloud how long he would hold his new job...
...The masters of nuance in the Paris negotiations were, according to Kissinger, the North Vietnamese, not the Americans...
...It is largely a chronicle of events, with set pieces on famous and infamous people whom he met or worked with, bits and pieces of potted history, and scatterings of familiar reflections and ruminations to leaven the lump...
...The important 9 "I think the relationship has had a setback...
...Honor wasn't saved...
...As Kissinger saw it, a Soviet-American understanding could not be based on a single issue, even one so important as arms control...
...If that were all there had been to Kissinger's detente theory, he could hardly have been accused of originality...
...once the split between them occurred we had options toward each of them separately, not both at once...
...Such variations or differences do not by their very nature alter anything of substance or something of the essence...
...30 Why did they do it...
...At this meeting, Nixon set up privately with Dobrynin the first of the notorious "back channels" that effectively cut the State Department out of SovietAmerican policy and made it the monopoly of the White House, which, in practice, meant Kissinger and his "apparatus...
...It enables political figures to control the history of their own deeds or misdeeds...
...Dobrynin would not have dared to ask the question at all if he and Kissinger had not had other such tete-atetes...
...Kissinger explains that Nixon "wished to establish his dominance over negotiations with the Soviet Union" and, therefore, "required the exclusion of Rogers, who might be too anxious and who might claim credit for whatever progress might be made"—this before Rogers was even given a chance to show what "a resourceful negotiator" he was...
...Kissinger himself must have had some such arrangement in mind when he told Theodore H. White in November 1972 that "what the world needed was a self-regulating mechanism," the key to which was China.' If there were such a thing as a "self-regulating mechanism" in world affairs, this one would have to be based on the assumption that the Washington-Peking-Moscow triangle was all that really mattered and that the three powers were so nearly matched in strength that one could not overcome a second without the aid of the third...
...even with a cease-fire they simply could not imagine how they would be better off without us [p...
...No one who had known him in previous years (my own acquaintanceship with him went back to 1944 in the 84th Infantry Division) could have 233 predicted that he would long survive in Washington's political jungle...
...He saw a single marginal advantage or increment of power, not as the waste of effort that it had been in the previous theory, but as encouragement to seek further marginal advantages and increments of power—"If adventurism is allowed to succeed in local crises—an ominous precedent of wider consequence is set...
...This is the reductio ad absurdum of Kissinger's entire argument...
...In the end, I am sure, it will far outweigh in importance anything else with which he had to deal...
...Nixon also dealt with the other Cabinet members, except for former Secretary of the Treasury John Connally, through White House assistants...
...He made decisions "inside his self-imposed cocoon...
...The reality was something else: "But they did not of themselves provide the sinews of confidence and cohesion in Saigon to maintain the equilibrium which had in fact been achieved on the battlefield...
...I have the impression that the Soviet Union is now fairly anxious to pick it up again" (Interview with Pierre Salinger in L'Express, Paris, April 12, 1975...
...The appearance of division in high councils, Kissinger observes, makes White House politics "not so different from life at royal courts...
...11 Wall Street Journal, January 21, 1980...
...After an important meeting between the Chinese and American ambassadors in Warsaw in January 1970, for example, Kissinger matter-of-factly records: "The day after the Warsaw meeting Dobrynin appeared at my office, seeking a briefing, undeterred by the fact that this was a favor Moscow never vouchsafed to us on any topic...
...He rejected victory by military escalation...
...He even accepted with minimal protest the indignity of receiving no reply for months from Dobrynin, though no such letdowns seem to have spoiled their warm personal relationship...
...In this book, nuances again get co-star billing...
...666, 669-70...
...Kissinger does not hide the fact that he took full advantage of the opportunity...
...Some presidents with weak secretaries of state have taken on much of the diplomatic burden themselves...
...If the Kissingerian theory was valid, there was nothing to worry about...
...He restored the balance of power to its traditional position of primacy in world politics...
...242 relaxation of tensions and dangers which our period demands, Anatoly Dobrynin will have made a central contribution to it...
...HI W can now begin to get the answer to the question: How did Kissinger do it...
...My favorite Kissingerian nuance is still another...
...It runs on and on for almost 1,500 pages...
...Pride supposedly prevented Rogers from admitting to himself that his old friend, the President, deliberately made many important decisions when the Secretary of State was off on foreign trips...
...If China is permitted to develop its economic and military potential in coming decades, a geopolitician would presuppose that this small peninsula would be most likely to gravitate to the Chinese sphere of influence...
...In the same year, Kissinger received some sage advice from Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Ch'iao Kuan-hua, who presumably spoke with the approval of Kissinger's favorite statesman, Chou En-lai: "One should not lose the whole world just to gain South Vietnam...
...This move was initiated by Nixon almost immediately in February 1969 with respect to SovietAmerican negotiations...
...The heart of the matter was Vietnamization...
...Even when Kissinger claims that Nixon's procedures "worked" in practice, he now professes to believe that they should not be repeated...
...Nixon subsequently found other opportunities to teach Kissinger "a lesson in the limits of my authority...
...The second Nixon emerged only in times of crisis or during the need for critical decisions...
...If everything else was reserved for the White House, Rogers had to be given something with which to occupy himself...
...It sweeps aside such vulnerable human sentiments as credibility, prestige, and honor...
...Despite this, he pretends or deludes himself that the resolution of the Vietnamese civil war could have been left "to the free decision of the people" or amenable to "a genuinely free political choice by the people...
...As a political theorist, Kissinger sometimes betrays a peculiar propensity to substitute words for realities, as if a "China X" would be in reality so different from a "China card...
...Only the State Department so far has replied to my inquiries, but no doubt the system in all is identical...
...The summit meeting Moscow in May 1972 made it "the teg rating conceptual framework" without which, he insists, it is impossible to conduct a serious and fruitful foreign policy...
...Was honor saved...
...Beginning in January 1976, he began to change his line somewhere between 90 and 180 degrees...
...14 For a word that is made to do so much work, however, Kissinger makes very little effort to explain just what should be understood by it...
...On the Chinese side, he once told Nixon, "Washington was being brought into play as a counterweight to Soviet pressures...
...But if the tactical gains were sure to be wasteful, why should they lead to catastrophic confrontations...
...By the end, as previously noted, he had Nixon brooding about his "new found celebrity...
...8 Kissinger was not always fully consistent...
...Energy, stamina, even "megalomania" made his extraordinary career possible...
...Even if the confidence of our other dependents and allies were shaken, we could not judge how much this factor should influence American policy in Vietnam without asking: How much was it shaken...
...In this book, Kissinger recalls his triangular theory of 1968 with the following explanation: Our relations to possible opponents should be such, I considered, that our options toward both of them should be greater than their options toward each other...
...During the Vietnam negotiations in 1972, Kissinger virtually defied Nixon's wishes and substituted his own judgment for that of the President on how to deal with the North Vietnamese...
...a relaxation of tension had to encompass all outstanding issues...
...it also urged that the United States should expand its contacts with China "as a means of leverage against the Soviet Union...
...He chose this one, according to Kissinger, for thoroughly malicious reasons...
...This sort of spurious profundity cannot stand close examination...
...Here, what we do becomes most instrumental in determining the relationship between Peking and Moscow...
...IN THE PARIS NEGOTIATIONS, Kissinger holds that one thing was not negotiable—the survival of the Thieu regime in South Vietnam...
...Nixon even asked Soviet leader Brezhnev's cooperation to deceive Rogers...
...His frequently savage denigrations are scarcely alleviated by his habit of following them with a few kind words, as if to take the sting out of them or protect himself from the accusation of unmitigated malice...
...nevertheless, it cannot be doubted that Europeans looked on with increasing distress and disbelief as the United States spent itself in eight years of a hopeless war on the other side of the globe...
...Kissinger's Nixon is a study in political pathology...
...his entire career had been based on American support...
...CURIOUSLY, KISSINGER'S VIEW of the Vietnam war has never had anything to do with nuances or geopolitics...
...During the 1950s, Kissinger relates, Rogers was the "psychologically dominant partner" in the friendship with Nixon...
...One reason why geopolitics never came to dominate American political and historical thought is that, as Professor Hans J. Morgenthau once put it, "geopolitics is a pseudo-science," based on "the fallacy of the single factor" (Politics Among Nations, New York: Knopf, 2nd ed., 1955, p. 146...
...What other options did these allies and dependents have, even in the worst of eventualities...
...0 254...
...In December 1971, we are told, neither the Secretary of State nor the Secretary of Defense nor anyone from their departments was permitted to attend a "crucial meeting, where, as it turned out, the first decision to risk war in the triangular Soviet-Chinese-American relationship was taken...
...It betokened "a geopolitical revolution," "a new international order...
...It is or should be particularly abhorrent to historians and other scholars...
Vol. 27 • April 1980 • No. 2
