Kissinger's Next Test

...BETWEEN HANOI AND SAIGON Kissinger's Next Test BYHANS J' MORGE NTHAU The fundamental ISSUe that drew the United States into Vietnam and kept it there for almost 20 years was the prevention of a Communist victory in South Vietnam We sought to achieve that end by creating and maintaining a non-Communist government in Saigon When even our massive military intervention did not assure the self-sufficiency of such a regime, we decided to leave the South Vietnamese to their own devices, provided our disengagement would not lead to, or at least would not look too obviously like, a Communist victory That was the political meaning of the Vietnamization program Once the policy was decided upon, the central question for us was no longer primarily who was to govern in Saigon, but how conditions for a period of transition could be agreed upon which would allow us to disengage without appearing to have been defeated The real issue was no longer victory but a decent interval between our departure and a Communist takeover, if such should be the result of our going home Indeed, this was the position Henry Kissinger took as far back as 1968, before he became the White House adviser on national security matters What President Nixon has been trying to do since 1969, and what has transpired in recent weeks about the conditions and prospects of a peace settlement in Vietnam, must be seen in the context of this new policy We wanted to leave, regardless of the long-range political consequences for South Vietnam, but, figuratively speaking, we did not want the first Communist soldiers to enter Saigon as the last American ones were on then way out Standing m the way of a negotiated settlement that would satisfy this basic American policy was, on the one hand, the incompatibility of our objective with the interest of the Saigon government in its survival and, on the other, the suspicion of the Communists that they would again be cheated out of a victory they saw in their grasp Thus South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu had to oppose a settlement, Hanoi had to tilt it in favor of a quick Communist takeover, and we had to postpone that outcome it we could not prevent it Reconciling these three contradictory and, insofar as American-South Vietnamese relations are concerned, incompatible positions in a negotiated settlement was the very difficult task history assigned to Kissinger It is a tribute to his ability that, although at the moment of this writing he has not solved the problem, he has been able to go as far as he has The new U S policy, it should be noted, could not have succeeded without the tacit support of the Soviet Union and China, for as long as the two major Communist powers favored North Vietnam's direct assumption of power in South Vietnam, Hanoi could afford to continue to insist upon a simultaneous military and political settlement, with the removal of Thieu as an indispensable precondition The United States obviously exacted a price from the Soviet Union and China for the normalization of relations, especially in the field of trade their unspoken approval of or at most low-keyed opposition to, the American policy of disengagement It is clear from North Vietnam's cutical statements, and especially from Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin's backing the reopening of negotiations in the face of Hanoi's opposition, that this pnce is being paid What we know at present is that North Vietnam and the United States have drawn up a compromise settlement, in the sense that both sides have conceded points they formerly insisted upon North Vietnam has accepted the separation of the military from the political arrangements and, more specifically has resigned itself to the continuation of the~Thieu regime for the time being The United States has agreed to a system of tripartite commissions which, while not performing the functions of a coalition government demanded by the other side, would have the administrative roles of supervising compliance with the ceasefire, preparing a new constitution and organizing elections Since the commissions' decisions must be unanimous, they are not likely to decide much Most importantly, however, the United States has consented to a temporary division of South Vietnam by allowing approximately 150,000 North Vietnamese troops to continue in control of the South Vietnamese territories they occupy now The divergent receptions these provisions have received from the three parties concerned are indicative both of their conflicting interests and of the inherent ambiguities of the agreement Saigon is particularly opposed to the North's troops staying where they are because this denies its sovereignty over part of the territory it has always claimed and, as we shall see in a moment, jeopardizes its sovereignty over the territory it still controls Hanoi maintains that the agreement is final as it stands, and has urged that it be speedily signed and put into effect The United States, anxious to placate Saigon, has requested another negotiating meeting of several days' duration in order to clean up what it has called "just a few matters to be made crystal clear" and "linguistic problems " Whatever the settlement as it stands at the moment will do, it is virtually certain to doom the Thieu regime Thieu came to power and has kept himself in power by virtue of American support, and of the consequent loyalty this has earned him from his Army Barely able to win his first election under laws rigged blatantly in his favor, he felt constrained to transform the second election into a plebiscite that eliminated all competition If there should ever be elections in South Vietnam resembling anything we call by that namea very open question Thieu would have no chance of winning Furthermore-and here we have the crucial issue-Thieu has been able to hold his own militarily only because of massive U S power from the air Even those observers who are most enthusiastic about the success of Vietnamization do not contend that the South Vietnamese Army could have blunted the North Vietnamese attacks without this Since a cease-fire-in-place m a guerrilla war staggers the imagination, the political future of South Vietnam will probably be decided not in the polling booth but on the same hamlet and jungle battlefields where it has been fought over for almost 30 years Lacking American support, Thieu, who hardly managed to prevail when he had it, is bound to lose that battle Hanoi, meanwhile, is of course aware that renegotiation of the agreement, tar from being limited to minor changes, will involve the substance of the understanding insofar as it affects the future of the Thieu regime In other words, renegotiation can only seek to tilt the balance of the future, now shifted toward the North, m the South's direction It is not surprising, therefore, that Hanoi has called the request for renegotiation "a very serious situation, which threatens to jeopardize the signing of the agreement " The United States is in the awkward position of having to allay the fears of both Saigon and Hanoi It cannot very well provide Thieu with a serious chance to survive without endangering peace with Hanoi Yet it can use its military power to wring from the hands of Hanoi, encouraged by neither Moscow nor Peking, some additional concessions that will not save Thieu but will make it easier for him and us to depart This appears to be the next test of Kissinger's statesmanship...