No other American President has aroused such widespread misgivings among both friends and foes as Mr. Nixon at the beginning of his second term. This may not worry him just now. He may even revel in his notoriety for toughness. But in the long run this is bound to hurt him and his country.
Some American commentators believe that Mr. Nixon has tried to model himself after President De Gaulle and that is why he did not think it necessary to consult members of his cabinet, Congress leaders or even key advisers like the CIA chief and the chairman of the joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of ordering terror raids on Hanoi and Haiphong last month. But this is a superficial view, for until recently he was always keen to explain all his major foreign policy moves, including those relating to Viet Nam, to his people.
Whatever Mr. Nixon’s self-image, he is not and cannot become another De Gaulle. While the French leader did not need proof in the shape of power and success to convince himself that it was his manifest destiny to restore his country to its former greatness and grandeur, the American President depends entirely on the still unrivalled power of his country to sustain whatever claim he has to a place in history. The difference between the two men is best brought out by their behaviour in times of adversity.
General De Gaulle lived the role of France incarnate even when the Nazis had occupied France, General Petain had gone over to them and he himself had had to take refuge in London and depend on the British government’s support for putting together a liberation force. Mr. Nixon bitterly denounced the press and announced his retirement from political life after a mere electoral defeat in the ‘sixties. Earlier he found it expedient to join Senator McCarthy in the disgraceful witch-hunt from the ravages of which the United States took more than a decade to recover.
Self-Doubt
In fact no two major figures have been more different from each other than General De Gaulle and Mr. Nixon. The French leader was a born aristocrat, self-assured and contemptuous of all politicians. The American chief executive is a product of a political machine and more often than not torn by self-doubt.
The more pertinent point, however, is that President De Gaulle could impose his will on France for a whole decade – from 1958 to 1968 – only because, faced with the danger of a civil war and collapse, his countrymen had no choice but to recall him from retirement and let him reshape the national institutions to suit his imperious temperament and imperial style of leadership. The United States faces no such peril and its people will not permit Mr. Nixon for long to denigrate, weaken or bypass well-established institutions like Congress and the Press. He will have to come to terms with them unless he is prepared for prolonged deadlocks which can paralyse the administration and create awkward problems for him.
The American President undoubtedly enjoys enormous powers. But it is only in the context of the cold war that first Mr. Johnson and then Mr. Nixon have been able to wage a full-scale war in Viet Nam without the explicit approval of Congress. Neither the present incumbent of that great office nor his successor will be able to abuse their authority in this fashion. Though unfortunately Mr. Nixon still retains the freedom to resume bombing of North Viet Nam in case some unsuspected last-minute snag leads to another breakdown in the Paris negotiations between Mr. Kissinger and Mr. Le Duc Tho or if Hanoi proves too impatient to reunite the country under its auspices, the general trend is in the reverse direction.
Broadly speaking, the era of direct and often unprovoked and unjustified American interventions in the domestic affairs of other countries is rapidly drawing towards a close. The US handling of the leftist government in Chile and the move towards some kind of detente with Mr. Castro may well turn out to be better indications of the future shape of American policy than the continuing uncertainty over Viet Nam.
Commitment
It is not necessary to question President Nixon’s commitment to the cause of peace or non-intervention in the affairs of weaker countries to make the point that the realities of power leave him no choice but to accept an international order which does not provide for US hegemony and to proclaim that the time is past when Americans could “make every other nation’s conflict our own, or make every other nation’s future our responsibility or tell the people of other nations how to manage their own affairs.” The two are complementary. In fact the new policy flows logically as much from the relative decline in the power of the United States vis-a-vis its Japanese and West European allies and its Russian adversaries as from the Sino-Soviet split, the pressure for autonomy in Eastern Europe and the growing demand for consumer goods within the Soviet Union.
Shorn of its rhetoric, the Nixon doctrine means nothing less than a recognition of the need to make the painful adjustment with the new facts of life on the international scene, particularly the economic power of Japan and Western Europe and the military might of the Soviet Union. Since the burgeoning economies of its allies and the remarkable achievements of its principal adversary in the nuclear and naval fields cannot be said to be in any way connected with America’s disastrous intervention in the civil war in Viet Nam, it follows that Washington would have had to undertake an agonising appraisal of its foreign policy even if it had not allowed itself to be sucked into the conflict.
Only in that event the compulsion would not have been so obvious and the process of reconciliation with realities not so quick and acceptable to the American people. The United States has inflicted terrible suffering on the people of Viet Nam since 1968 when it became clear that it could not win the war. But since then there has been no reversal of the trends towards a disengagement in Viet Nam, a detente with the Soviet Union and China and a re-definition of relations with Japan and Western Europe.
In plain terms, Mr Nixon has presided over the gradual abandonment of the goal of a Pax Americana during his first term and he has no option but to continue this process of redefining his country’s place in the world during his second. The irony of it is not only that a crusader in the cause of anti-communism has had to seek the friendship of both Moscow and Peking and their good offices to end the war in Viet Nam but also that a man obsessed with the passion of going down in history as a great president is charged by destiny with the task of reducing his country’s role in the world.
Mr Nixon has been lucky in that the decline in the relative power of the US should have been accompanied by the intensification of Sino-Soviet tensions, elimination from the Chinese leadership of men who favoured accommodation with Moscow and a united front with it against the United States over Viet Nam, a steady erosion of ideological fervour in the world communist movement and a host of other developments which have cumulatively exposed the weakness of the Soviet system and obliged the Kremlin to trim its ambitions. But one set of factors cannot hide or cancel the other. Instead, taken together they proclaim the beginning of a new era in which both the United States and the Soviet Union will not dominate the scene as they have done in the past quarter of a century.
Assessment
Such an assessment apparently informs present-day Chinese policy. In their propaganda the leaders in Peking continue to accuse America and Russia of colluding with each other in a move to divide the world into spheres of influence and thereby imply that such a division is still possible But their enthusiastic endorsement of the European Economic Community and their encouragement to Japan to strengthen its security system show that they are reasonably confident that the hegemony of the super-powers can be ended. They are taking advantage of Russo-American rivalry and are even leaning slightly towards Washington in a bid to frighten Moscow which has deployed almost 50 divisions on their borders. But that does not invalidate the above interpretation of their overall world view.
New Delhi’s priorities cannot be the same as Peking’s for the simple reason that it has friendly relations with the Soviet Union and it can confidently look forward to reasonable ties with the United States. But it, too, will do well to examine the Chinese assessment.
The Times of India 24 January 1973