Musings on President Nixon's Strategic Accomplishments

When most people hear the name "Richard Nixon", they think of one thing: the Watergate scandal. Despite his own efforts to rehabilitate his image upon leaving the White House, and despite some careful efforts by President Reagan to restore some of the disgraced chief executive's legitimacy, Nixon remains mostly reviled. His Secretary of State, Dr. Henry Kissinger, remains controversial in some circles, but his reputation has weathered the decades a bit better.

Aside from my own disdain for the Nixon Administration's actions with respect to the Watergate scandal, going to see the 1999 comedy Dick, and being annoyed that Episode 105 of Chappelle's Show had Chappelle shouting "Why, Nixon!? Why!?" instead of "Why, Johnson!? Why!?", I'd never really paid Richard Nixon much mind. However, while doing some pre-readings for graduate school in 2012, I read World Politics and the Evolution of War by John J. Weltman (Amazon, Google Books), which is one of the best books on military history I've ever read. Before reading Weltman, I was aware of America's mixed results in Southeast Asia - I have always believed that Vietnam was not an outright loss for the United States, although it also wasn't an outright win. Weltman's book introduced me to the wider strategic context: that Nixon and Kissinger learned of a growing rift between the Soviet Union and China, and used disengagement from Vietnam as leverage to open relations with China and, in so doing, deepened the Sino-Soviet rift. (According to Weltman, at one point that rift was in danger of escalating into a Sino-Soviet nuclear war.)

In recent months, I've enjoyed reading several articles about President Nixon and, to a lesser degree, Dr. Kissinger.

War on the Rocks: A New Nixon Doctrine: Strategy for a Polycentric World

The New Statesman: Rethinking Nixon: Forty Years After Watergate, Can the 37th President be Rehabilitated?

War on the Rocks: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: A Troika of Realists

With respect to that last article about President Nixon, Dr. Kissinger, and the Shah of Iran, one of my recent posts quoted a couple of sources on the "Nixon Doctrine", in which American allies were empowered to see to their own security needs with American assistance, but without direct American involvement. I cited it in reference to the Dhofar Rebellion - one of my favorite topics, as longtime readers will know. In January of 1975, roughly six months after President Nixon's resignation and less than a year and a half before the official declaration of victory in Dhofar, President Ford hosted Sultan Qaboos at the White House. (You can see PDFs pertaining to the Ford Administration's interaction with Sultan Qaboos and the Dhofar War here, here, and here.) Under the Nixon and Ford Administrations, the "Nixon Doctrine" - this concept of empowering and supporting proxies - showed promise, although that promise was subsequently undermined by the Carter Administration.

President Ford was, of course, serving out the remainder of President Nixon's term, and only six months into that remainder, he would have had few opportunities to differentiate from the policies established by his disgraced predecessor. The 1976 election produced a close result, and had President Ford avoided this fatal debate gaffe, he might have carried the 1976 election and continued Nixon's approach to foreign policy. Roughly three years into President Carter's term, America's strategic position had badly eroded, two examples of this being the Shah's ouster in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. As Sir Laurence Martin noted in his fourth BBC Reith Lecture from 1981, essentially assessing the strategic landscape that President Carter left to President Reagan:

The incentives and disincentives to acquire a military capability are many. Prestige plays a role as an incentive and expense as a disincentive. But the most powerful considerations naturally arise from the strategic balance itself. Thus if the Great Powers of the developed world are to discourage nuclear proliferation in the Third World, they will have to play a role in the security affairs of that world. This already happens, of course. When both South Korea and Taiwan reacted to the Indian nuclear test, and to the weakening of American prestige following Vietnam, by moving towards nuclear reprocessing, the United States not only twisted their economic arms to desist, but strengthened its security assurances on the clear condition that the nuclear efforts subsided. President Carter’s plan to withdraw the American garrison from South Korea was shelved.

Of course, history played out much differently. National disillusionment with the Watergate scandal, combined with President Ford's gaffe and a variety of other factors, led to Carter's narrow victory in 1976, and Carter's subsequent failures led to the resounding victory of Ronald Reagan in 1980. I question whether Republicans could have held the White House through to 1989, let alone to 1993, had it not been for President Carter's disastrous tenure; the prospect of any one party holding America's Executive Branch from 1969 until 1989 or 1993 would have been extremely unlikely. Even so, the groundwork of detente with the Soviet Union and engagement with China which was laid mainly by President Nixon from 1969 through to 1974, with President Ford carrying on until early 1977, sowed some of the very seeds that President Reagan would eventually reap during the 1980's when his administration delivered the long coup de grâce that finally demolished the Iron Curtain by the twilight of President George H.W. Bush's tenure in the Oval Office.

As such, it's unfortunate, albeit understandable, that President Nixon is known only for a knuckleheaded scandal, rather than the strategic triumphs he and Dr. Kissinger orchestrated during his tenure, and contributed to during subsequent administrations, serving to soften America's memory.