The Four Ages of American Foreign Policy by Michael Mandelbaum

Author:Michael Mandelbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Détente

The thirty-seventh American president professed admiration for Woodrow Wilson158 and his first inaugural address included some Wilsonian language. He promised, for example, to “consecrate my office, my energies, and all the wisdom I can muster to the cause of peace among nations.”159 In conducting American foreign policy, however, he and his principal foreign policy advisor placed less emphasis than had come to be normal for American administrations on the promotion of American values and more on manipulating and adjusting to the distribution of power in the international system. In rhetoric a Wilsonian, in practice Nixon acted more as a disciple of Theodore Roosevelt.

The agenda with which circumstances presented Nixon upon entering office had less directly to do with values than with power. The United States had too little of it. The Vietnam War, combined with all the other Cold War responsibilities the country had undertaken, had strained the American economy and taxed the patience of the American public. The Nixon administration confronted the task of reducing the costs of waging the contest of systems with the Soviet Union without abandoning the basic American goals.

On July 25, 1969, at a press conference on the island of Guam, the president declared that henceforth the United States would expect its regional allies to bear more of the burden of the common defense.160 The redistribution of costs and responsibilities within America’s global coalitions, which became known as the “Nixon Doctrine,” turned out, however, not to be the main vehicle for bringing international commitments into balance with economic and political resources. In his inaugural address, the president identified the mechanism on which he would rely for doing so. “After a period of confrontation,” he said, “we are entering an era of negotiation.”

The Nixon era was notable for its international negotiations, many of them conducted by Henry Kissinger. The agreement he reached in Paris with North Vietnamese officials did not, in the end, preserve a noncommunist South Vietnam. He and Nixon had greater success, at least for a time, with negotiations with America’s major adversary, the Soviet Union.

The new relationship with Moscow that they attempted to create came to be known as “détente,” the French word for the relaxation of tensions. Nixon and Kissinger presumed, or at least hoped, that the Cold War had become, or could become, less a mortal ideological conflict and more a historically familiar great-power rivalry—an ongoing jostling for position rather than a clash of competing crusades. Kissinger’s best-known book, A World Restored,161 sometimes seen as a kind of road map for the Nixon foreign policy, had dealt with the replacement of ideological fervor by calculations of power as the dominant feature of the international relations of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.

Détente had its deepest roots in the impulse to lessen the chances of catastrophic war between the two nuclear superpowers. That impulse had prompted the two meetings that Dwight Eisenhower had held with Nikita Khrushchev as well as the measures that the United States and the Soviet Union had taken in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis.

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