Real Peace, by Richard Nixon

I read Richard Nixon's 1983 book, Real Peace.  This book overlapped in areas with the last foreign policy book by Nixon that I read, 1999: Victory Without War.  There were three things in Real Peace that particularly stood out to me.

First of all, Nixon in Real Peace seems to support reducing nuclear weapons, whereas in 1999: Victory Without War he appeared to be critical of President Ronald Reagan's START agreements and more supportive of limiting (as opposed to reducing) the number of nuclear weapons.  But I could be off-base on this, for I have not committed either book to memory, plus I may have missed some things in my reading, so perhaps Nixon in both books supported reducing nuclear weapons, without being committed to complete nuclear disarmament.

Second, in talking about China, Nixon says that he supports China and the Soviet Union seeking to reduce tensions with each other.  This stood out to me because some have said that Nixon sought to exploit the division between Red China and the Soviet Union, and that the United States' rapprochement with Red China gave the U.S. another card that it could play as it dealt with the U.S.S.R.  In Real Peace, Nixon says that it was preferable for the U.S. to reach out to Red China, since otherwise Red China in its vulnerability would have been pulled even more into the Soviet orbit, and that would not be good for the U.S.  While Nixon favors an easing of tension between Red China and the U.S.S.R., he doesn't want tensions to be eased that way (i.e., through the pulling of Red China into the Soviet orbit).  But Nixon does favor Red China and the U.S.S.R., as autonomous nations, easing tensions with one another, since hostility between the two could lead to war, perhaps even a world war during the nuclear age.

Third, on page 99, Nixon states regarding the Kremlin leaders that "We must not object to their attempts to spread communism as long as they use peaceful means to do so."

This surprised me, since Nixon throughout the book is concerned about Soviet expansionism.  So now he's open to it, as long as it does not occur through violence?  Did he consistently apply this policy?

What if Communism triumphed through elections?  Nixon in Real Peace criticized the leftists in El Salvador, saying that they were resistant to internationally-supervised elections.  What would he say about the Sandinista victory in Nicaragua in 1984, in an election that the UN and Western European observers said was fair (see here)?  Well, there were conservative Americans who said that they were not entirely fair, since the Sandinistas restricted freedom of the press and assembly.  Was the election that the Sandinistas lost, the one in 1990, fair?  Many would probably argue that it was, yet a professor once told me that a number of Nicaraguans voted against the Sandinistas because they wanted the United States to leave their country alone: the U.S. was funding destructive contras on account of the Sandinistas, so let's vote out the Sandinistas!  Technically, that could have been a fair election.  But was it truly fair, considering the surrounding factors?

Anyway, those are my ramblings for the day.

No More Vietnams, by Richard Nixon

I finished Richard Nixon’s No More Vietnams.  In this book, Nixon defends the Vietnam War as a noble cause.  He critiques how his presidential predecessors conducted the war, defends his own approach, and blames the Democratic U.S. Congress’ failure to continue providing support for South Vietnam for Communist North Vietnam’s takeover of that country.  Nixon in later years would express regret for the title of this book, No More Vietnams, saying that he should have entitled it A Noble Cause.  Nixon’s argument in the book was not that the United States should be paralyzed from intervening in other countries out of a fear of another war like Vietnam, but rather that, if the U.S. had to intervene, it would do what it takes to win—-that it would not lose, as it did in Vietnam.

I was initially hesitant to read No More Vietnams because I had already read other books that discussed Nixon’s stances and strategies regarding the Vietnam War.  I read his memoirs, and his criticisms of President Johnson as well as his own approach to the war were significant elements in the narratives of some of the biographies about Nixon that I had read.  But I am glad that I read No More Vietnams because, overall, Nixon goes into more detail in that book in terms of defending his own point-of-view.  I wouldn’t say that this is the case regarding his explanation for why the United States entered the war, for, on this, he simply states that “The United States intervened in the Vietnam War to prevent North Vietnam from imposing its totalitarian government on South Vietnam through military conquest, both because a Communist victory would lead to massive human suffering for the people of Vietnam and because it would damage American strategic interests and pose a threat to our allies and friends in other non-Communist nations” (page 152, in an edition in which No More Vietnams is attached to another book by Nixon, Real Peace).  Nixon believes that the answer to why the U.S. was in Vietnam is “simple” and “apparent.”

But Nixon does go into detail when he defends his point-of-view on relevant issues: why he believed that Ho Chi Minh was a Communist rather than merely a Vietnamese nationalist; how we can know that Nixon’s military strategy was not targeting civilians; why Nixon did not believed that most young people were against him; and the list goes on.  When defending his decision to intervene in Cambodia, where North Vietnam supposedly had bases from which it was channeling supplies to the Communists in Vietnam, Nixon responds to the charge that he was violating Cambodia’s neutrality under a Geneva agreement by quoting the agreement itself: it said that the U.S. did not have to honor a country’s neutrality if its enemy was using that country as a base.  Nixon also argues that, under President Lyndon Johnson, there actually was a Gulf of Tonkin incident, contrary to the claims of some that the U.S. made that up as a pretense to escalate its involvement in the Vietnam War, for Nixon states that the North Vietnamese account of the war assumes that the Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred.  And, while Nixon seems to acknowledge that the Tet offensive was on some level a loss for the U.S., he also notes that it severely damaged the Communist forces in Vietnam and set them back significantly. There were often times when I wished that Nixon would document his claims, either through footnotes, or by referring to sources within his text.  There were times when he did, but I wished that he had done so more.  Overall, however, I found his arguments to be detailed and thoughtful.

Something that interested me in reading No More Vietnams was that Nixon, although he criticized his predecessors for not being tough enough in their prosecution of the war, acknowledged that he himself was limited in terms of his ability or willingness to be aggressive.  Nixon said that President Johnson was reluctant to be too tough because that could anger the Soviets and the Chinese, but Nixon indicated that he himself had similar concerns when he was President.  Another factor was the lack of popular support for the war, which Nixon apparently found to be constrictive.  Overall, I found Nixon’s discussion of the Vietnam War in No More Vietnams to be open and honest about its challenges, at least in comparison to what he wrote in his memoirs.  Nixon, in both his memoirs and No More Vietnams, portrays the South Vietnamese army as brave and heroic, against detractors who considered it to be a lost cause.  But Nixon in No More Vietnams acknowledges that his policy of Vietnamization (which is having the South Vietnamese army take up more of the slack of fighting the war) took a while to be effective.

There is a lot more in No More Vietnams than what I mention in this blog, but I will stop here.  I found a lot of what Nixon said to be persuasive, but I should probably read a source that is more critical of his policy on Vietnam.  I’m hoping that Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland can be that source.  I have already read some critiques of Nixon’s policies: Jerry Voorhis had his criticisms in The Strange Case of Richard Milhous Nixon, Joan Hoff was rather critical, and, in biographies about Nixon, there is often a summary of the arguments that certain Nixon aides were making when they were suggesting that the President not attack Cambodia.  But, overall, I have not found their arguments to be persuasive, for, if Cambodia was being used by North Vietnam as a base for supplies, then it makes sense for the U.S. to attack the North Vietnamese bases in Cambodia.  The only anti-Nixon or anti-Vietnam War argument that makes sense to me is that the war was taking the lives of many innocent civilians, and that makes me second-guess whether the war was worth the effort, even if I can understand the rationale for it.  Consequently, while I accept Nixon’s portrayal of North Vietnam as a brutal Communist country, I am open to hearing whatever pacifist arguments there may be as to what alternatives there were to war: was there a way to stop Communist North Vietnam’s expansion, without military force?  I am skeptical, but I am open.  The issue is relevant even today, as the U.S. continues to debate military interventions, whether in the form of drones, troops, or bombs.

The Real War 4

I finished Richard Nixon's 1980 book, The Real War.

In the 1990 introduction to his next book, Real Peace, Nixon states the following:

"Real Peace was written five years after The Real War.  During his first years in office President Reagan had vigorously addressed the crisis in superpower relations I had described in the earlier book.  He had undertaken a massive defense buildup and was taking a more assertive line against Soviet aggression."

Indeed, President Ronald Reagan did do many of the things that Nixon proposed in The Real War.  Reagan sought to redress the problem of American military inferiority to the Soviet Union.  His Administration offered military aid to anti-Communist insurgents in such countries as Nicaragua and Afghanistan.  And Reagan offered support to anti-Communist regimes that did not have stellar human rights records, on the supposition that these countries would be much worse off if the Communists were to take them over.

But there were some things that Nixon talked about in The Real War that Reagan did not do until his second term.  Nixon promotes detente in this book, a concept of negotiation with the Soviet Union, but Reagan was long a critic of detente.  Nixon does not say this, but he may have had people like Reagan in mind when he wrote in The Real War that detente was misunderstood----that it was not a policy of naievity about the Soviets but actually entailed a degree of toughness on the part of the United States.  Reagan negotiated more with the Soviets in his second term.

Nixon talks in The Real World about the importance of the U.S. cultivating a relationship with Communist China, which had a poor relationship with the Soviet Union.  Did Reagan do that?  I had to do an Internet search to find out, for I hadn't heard or read a great deal about President Reagan's stance on Red China.  According to this article, Red China was upset that the U.S. was selling arms to Taiwan, but Reagan met them halfway by limiting (albeit not ending) the sales.  The article also states that, under Reagan, "China and the United States worked together closely to deter Soviet aggression in Afghanistan, sharing intelligence and sending arms to the mujahedin", that "the Reagan administration sold avionics kits to upgrade China's F-8 fighter as well as improve submarine torpedoes and artillery shells", and that "Reagan's speeches in China emphasized American values of freedom and democracy and highlighted common interests in trade and anti-Soviet strategy."  Reagan apparently exploited the Sino-Soviet rift to make gains for the West in the Cold War, something that probably met with Richard Nixon's approval.

What did Nixon think about Ronald Reagan calling the Soviet Union an "evil empire"?  I don't know for sure, so I'm just guessing.  Nixon explicitly treats the Cold War as a conflict between good and evil in the last chapter of his book.  Yet, Nixon earlier in the book is against alienating the Soviets by treating them disrespectfully, since he regards the Soviets as insecure people who desperately want to be taken seriously on the world stage.  My guess is that Nixon was not against Reagan calling the Soviet Union an evil empire, as long as Reagan did not trivialize or disrespect the Soviets in whatever interactions he had with them.

An issue on which Nixon and Reagan differed: Nixon on page 218 of The Real War calls for reintroducing the military draft, which he ended as President.  Reagan as President, however, opposed bringing back the draft.

One thing that interested me in reading The Real War was that Nixon in 1980 did not expect for the Cold War to end anytime soon, even were the policies that he proposed to be implemented.  On page 331, Nixon states: "Over the longer term we can encourage peaceful evolution within the Soviet Union itself.  However, this is a task not of decades but of generations.  Pressed too rapidly, it would bring a brutal repression; developed gradually, so that it less directly threatens those in power at any given time, it can gradually show results, just as it did under the Tsars in the nineteenth century."  But the Soviet Union changed, not over generations, but within a decade, namely, the 1980's.  And yet, even after the Soviet Union changed, Nixon had the same concerns that he expressed on page 331 of The Real War: that, if the U.S. does not play its cards right, Russia could fall into the hands of brutal Communists.