Why not the worst?
Judis, John
Why not the worst? Alexander Haig brings strong-arm diplomacy to a volatile world John Judis "We've got to shed the sackcloth and ashes of our Southeast Asia involvement." —Alexander Haig, July...
...News and World Report, he also admitted he was "skeptical" about the "long-term desirability of the all-volunteer army...
...Kissinger recognized in 1969 that America's Cold War strategy had become obsolete...
...But the Reagan Administration is clearly determined to use military power—if only in the form of a threat—to defend America's place in the world...
...American policy makers face a difficult choice...
...Haig is an unabashed hawk, with a history of preferring the most extreme military options...
...At Nixon's and Kissinger's behest, he personally arranged with FBI official William Sullivan twelve of the seventeen wiretaps instigated against newspaper columnists and Administration officials...
...World Wars I and II followed...
...At the same time, Haig advocates using an American alliance with China against the Soviet Union...
...We've got legislative anarchy in this country and I need the support of the American people.' He didn't do that and that's where he lost the Presidency...
...According to Morris, Haig warned Nixon during the October 1972 negotiations that Kissinger was "too anxious for a deal...
...Former Kissinger aide Roger Morris describes Haig as playing "Stalin to Henry's Lenin" and as providing Kissinger with a "litmus test on the Right" for his policies...
...In Western Europe, Kissinger fought any centrifugal tendencies in NATO and refused to countenance communist participation in NATO governments...
...He was an ardent advocate of the 1970 invasion of Cambodia and the 1972 mining of Haiphong Harbor...
...George Shultz, former Nixon Administration Secretary of Labor and the Treasury, was ruled out because conservatives feared, in the words of Human Events, that he had "little appreciation of the Soviet threat" and because of Jewish and Israeli opposition to his evenhanded Middle East stance...
...Shultz was also strenuously opposed by Richard Nixon, who, perhaps recalling Shultz's refusal to set the Internal Revenue Service on Nixon's enemies, told Reagan that Shultz wasn't tough enough for the job...
...His appointment increases the odds that the world will be at war in the 1980s...
...In an Administration torn by conflict over the conduct of the Vietnam war, Haig continually supported the most extreme, brutal options...
...The immediate cause of his resignation was Carter's decision to send Haig's aide, General Robert Huyser, to Iran to help arrange the transfer of authority from the Shah...
...Ford and Haig first agreed that Haig would become Secretary of the Army, but instead decided he should become NATO commander, because he would not then require Senate confirmation...
...He has also demonstrated little respect for democratic rights, whether in the United States or overseas...
...The functional areas of arms control, monetary affairs, energy and security policy have got to be linked," Haig said in a June 1979 Newsweek interview...
...And rifts within both the Western and communist alliances required creation of a new balance in international diplomacy...
...He was an aide to General Douglas MacArthur during the Japanese occupation, then fought in the Korean War...
...Haig is highly intelligent and extremely forceful...
...and in 1979 he fought for the reintroduction of intermediate range missiles on Western European soil...
...Nixon, and Gerald Ford, and former NATO commander...
...The Soviet achievement of nuclear parity with the United States ruled out nuclear intimidation as a means of checking Soviet moves...
...Among Third World nations, he supported American allies, whatever their domestic practices...
...Haig has repeatedly endorsed Kissinger's concept of linkage...
...Haig distinguished between "authoritarian" governments that have "opted for a degree of control, which, though unacceptable by Western standards, has no universal overtones," and "totalitarian" governments, which "espouse from doctrinal conviction pretensions of universal applicability which portend continuing international tension This distinction allows Haig and Kissinger to defend the Argentinian government while trying to subvert the Nicaraguan regime...
...The Carter Administration was hopelessly divided between these two approaches...
...In a 1978 Esquire story, Haig recounted his version of the fall of Vietnam...
...As both the Soviet and American governments try to maintain their hold over their former spheres of influence, the chances for war markedly increase...
...Executive authority in dealing with other countries is diminished inevitably," Haig wrote, "by the knowledge that our main lines of policy, our alliances, and our reputation for fidelity may be at the mercy of a constant struggle to establish a fleeting consensus...
...When Kissinger recommended a bombing halt and more pressure on South Vietnam's Nguyen Van Thieu, Haig reportedly responded with angry cables...
...Haig was the only choice acceptable to both the Kissinger coterie and the New Right...
...While Haig has been consistently more skeptical about detente and more prone to confrontation than Henry Kissinger, Haig's broader foreign policy views still derive from his old mentor...
...As NATO commander, Haig argued that the main threat to the Western alliance would not come with a fabled Russian tank attack across Central Europe, but in the Third World...
...Roll up his sleeves and put the monkey where it belonged, in the Congress...
...As NATO commander, Haig did not hesitate to advance his own views, which were martial: He was openly critical of the Carter Administration for abandoning the neutron bomb...
...A month before Saigon fell, I met with Ford for an hour and a half," Haig said...
...Western and even Eastern Europe, China, and the OPEC nations are becoming independent world powers...
...In the context of the central systems' parity, the West must recognize clearly the consequential importance of regional nuclear and conventional force balances," Haig said in a 1978 NATO statement...
...Both the Soviet and American empires are crumbling...
...According to Newsweek, Haig "chafed over what he saw as Jimmy Carter's soft-line approach to the SALT talks, Soviet military buildups in Eastern Europe, and communist incursions in Africa and Central Asia...
...Thieu had told me, 'This is it.' I told the President what he should do...
...Alexander Haig may not kill us...
...In June 1972, he revived the idea of a South Vietnamese invasion of the North...
...Alexander Haig, July 1979 The 1980s promise to be a particularly dangerous period...
...They are basically bullies, playing with vicarious power, protected with the plea that they are carrying out orders...
...Just as two wars have taught that there is no separate security for an America isolated from its vital interests in Europe, so NATO must recognize that there can be no separate security for a West isolated from its vital interests in the Third World," Haig wrote in NATO Review...
...In the 1980s, after two decades of uncontested American-Soviet domination, the world is becoming multipolar again...
...military superiority to compensate for its growing economic disadvantage...
...They can, as one option, resign themselves to a diminishing world role for the United States...
...That left Haig, former aide to Henry Kissinger...
...In the Reagan Administration, this new power may accrue to Haig himself...
...The last straw, according to Hartmann, was Haig's attempted appointment of Nixon speech writer Patrick Buchanan as ambassador to South Africa...
...President John F. Kennedy used to have a saying, "Domestic policy can only defeat us...
...Take it to the public...
...Haig could easily dominate the Reagan Administration the way John Foster Dulles dominated the Eisenhower Administration or the way Kissinger dominated the Ford Administration...
...And Reagan himself has little knowledge of the subject...
...On the basis of his record, there is reason to fear the worst...
...This is not a pleasant prospect...
...In effect, Kissinger never abandoned the traditional Cold War of a world divided between Soviet and American power, but he recognized that more sophisticated measures would be required to sustain and hold together the American side...
...Kissinger sought that new balance in various ways...
...But Haig went on to assure his readers," As the memories of Vietnam and Watergate recede, the Executive will regain power...
...Haig's resignation in January 1979 stemmed partly from disagreements with Carter Administration foreign policy...
...Go on TV...
...Its current application would entail the elimination of any American human rights policy...
...The wiretaps were ostensibly designed to plug media leaks, but were really part of Nixon's and Kissinger's war against political opponents, both inside and outside the Administration...
...a warm handshake with the military regimes in Argentina and El Salvador...
...Haig was deeply involved in the Watergate events...
...the sale of arms to China...
...As Nixon's chief of staff, Haig fought the Watergate special prosecutor's attempt to secure the Nixon tapes and apparently coached Nixon on how to avoid prosecution...
...In a 1978 article in NATO Review, Haig also made clear that he shares Kissinger's Third World strategy...
...And he was a prime proponent of the Christmas 1972 carpet bombing of North Vietnam, which, for the sake of purely cosmetic changes in the peace treaty, devastated the North Vietnamese countryside...
...In 1969, he became Henry Kissinger's chief military aide on the recommendation of Johnson official Joseph Califano...
...In a fall 1980 Washington Quarterly article, he argued that Executive authority to deal with foreign policy has been undeservedly undermined by the new power Congress seized in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate...
...On the domestic front, this would require commitment to resource planning and conservation...
...With the rise of Germany, Japan, the United States, and France around the last turn of the century, the chances for war increased...
...Or they can try, instead, to use America's continuing John Judis is the political editor of In These Times and a contributing editor of The Progressive...
...Of all the major figures involved in Watergate and Vietnam, only Nixon and Gordon Liddy seem less repentant than Haig...
...In short, Haig seems to favor a rapid military buildup, including a draft...
...Haig could dominate Reagan as Dulles dominated Eisenhower or Kissinger dominated Ford To build those military capabilities, Haig supported Senator Sam Nunn's proposal for an annual 5 per cent real increase in arms spending...
...Haig has argued that Soviet nuclear parity and the shift in focus of American-Soviet rivalries to the Third World requires a change in the American defense posture...
...In a July 1979 interview with Aviation Week, Haig explained that "illegal Soviet activities in Africa, the Middle East, and other parts of the world . . . must be linked to East-West relations in general and to SALT II specifically...
...The advantages of the Chinese relationship will continue," Haig warns, "only if Chinese leaders are convinced that ties with the West ameliorate their existing weaknesses vis-a-vis the Russians...
...Reagan's other foreign policy advisers are either lightweights like Richard Allen or theorists with little foreign policy experience...
...He is a consummate bureaucratic in-fighter who has landed squarely on his feet in circumstances that sent others to jail or retirement...
...According to Ford aide Robert Hartmann, Haig also broached the possibility of a Nixon pardon with Ford before Nixon resigned...
...I believe that we must be armed with regional military capabilities to prevent the escalation of Third World dynamics into major conflict," Haig told Newsweek in 1978...
...In the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, global peace has depended partly on the existence of one or two dominant world powers which could arbitrate balance-of-power conflicts among lesser nations...
...Haig told one interviewer that the American failure in Iran made him wistful for the Eisenhower years...
...he wanted NATO members to increase defense expenditures by more than 3 per cent...
...Haig, in turn, hired Calif ano to help him get ready for Senate hearings on his appointment as Secretary of State...
...After receiving a degree in international relations from Georgetown University, he served in the Pentagon and was an aide to Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations...
...Haig accepts the Nixon-Kissinger view that a villainous Congress prevented Nixon from carrying out a popular mandate to fight the war in Vietnam on his terms...
...a cold shoulder if not worse to the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, and the postponement of any SALT agreement pending Soviet withdrawal from the Third World...
...Haig graduated from West Point in 1947...
...And he attempted, in a maneuver he called "linking," to gain diplomatic concessions from the Soviet Union by holding out the carrots of an arms control agreement, high technology imports, and recognition of Soviet legitimacy in Eastern Europe...
...Senator Henry Jackson was finally ruled out because he was a Democrat and because,for all his hawkishness on the Soviet Union, he has never been a fan of the various juntas the Reagan Administration intends to befriend...
...Haig remained chief of staff during the first months of Ford's Presidency, but finally fell out of favor when Ford found that he was making major appointments...
...Reagan reportedly considered three candidates for the top Cabinet post...
...While refusing to oppose SALT II directly in July 1979 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he took Kissinger's position that it would have to be buttressed by skyrocketing defense expenditures and Soviet commitments to overseas cooperation with the United States...
...Say, 'Okay, this is what's happening and it's Congress's fault...
...With Nixon's encouragement, he began to build an alliance with China against the Soviet Union...
...Haig has never commented publicly on Watergate since Nixon's resignation, but here again he seems to have ignored any relevant constitutional lessons...
...Hartmann has described Haig as the "veteran Praetorian Guard": "The common denominator of the Praetorians, whether in Caesar's palace or the White House," Hartmann wrote in Palace Politics, "is their consummate need for a tough commander...
...foreign policy can kill us...
...In a winter 1980 article in the Washington Quarterly, Haig hints that arms sales to the Chinese might be necessary...
...But as the most powerful person within the Reagan Administration operating within a world that is coming apart at the seams, Haig will get a chance to...
...In an interview with U.S...
...If this was unclear on November 4, it became clear when Reagan chose Alexander Haig as his Secretary of State...
...And he seems to have a greater willingness to use force to accomplish his ends than either Cyrus Vance or Henry Kissinger displayed...
...his pronouncements on the danger of communist participation in the French and Italian governments were so extreme that they prompted protests in 1977 from the French government...
...Haig was backed by Nixon and by David Rockefeller, chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (on whose board of directors Haig has served since last February...
Vol. 45 • February 1981 • No. 2
