THE POWER OF ISRAEL
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Thus the strategy—to check the expansion of communism wherever it might occur— was put in the service of moral rather than geostrategic ends. To assess the struggle geostrategically by region would have amounted to ceding the fundamental moral element of the conflict. Hence the war in Vietnam was not an attempt to defend US geostrategic interests in Indochina, which were questionable, but to prevent the spread of communism on the basis of principle, which wasn’t. By the same token, when domestic resistance to the war grew, it did so not on the basis of a differing geopolitical assessment but over the disputing of the fundamental moral imperatives that led to Vietnam, and indeed the waging of the Cold War itself. “The [foreign policy] establishment…might have turned against the war in Vietnam simply on the grounds that it was unwinnable, or at least not winnable at an acceptable price. They might have declared the war a mistake, well intended perhaps but poorly executed. But that was not how the liberal establishment…explained their failure. Instead they disowned an entire worldview. Vietnam became not just a lost war in a good cause; it became a metaphor for everything that was wrong with America, the symbol of America's misplaced confidence in its own moral and physical superiority.” 11 The limits of American power were seen as intrinsically linked to the limits of American justice. It was at this moment of shattered idealism that Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger inaugurated a brief, controversial period of traditional realism within American foreign policy. This approach downplayed the fundamental moral element of Containment in favor of a region-by-region assessment of geopolitical interests and a pursuance of détente. Elected on a promise to end the war, they initiated a widely criticized policy of escalation to facilitate the extrication of US troops from the region by forcing the Vietnamese to negotiate. “In the course of conducting the first large-scale American troop withdrawal in our history, under openly humiliating circumstances… [Nixon and Kissinger] actually improved America's geopolitical position vis-à-vis China, the Soviet Union, and the Arab world.” 12 The new, uniquely geostrategic approach facilitated negotiations with the Soviet Union, which concluded a landmark arms-control pact; led to the first dialogue with China which exploited the Sino-Soviet split in order to gain leverage against the Soviets; and in the wake of the Yom Kippur war, wrested Egypt and Syria from the Soviet orbit. Kissinger’s thought reflected a pragmatism in many respects contrary to the idealistic spirit of the American tradition, according to which, “Every statesman must attempt to reconcile what is considered just with what is considered possible. What is considered just depends on the domestic structure of his state; what is possible depends on its resources, geographic position and determination, and on the resources, determination and domestic structure of other states.” 13 Despite its material successes, this approach proved deeply 11
Robert Kagan, “How We Unlearned the Art of War”, The New Republic, December 3, 2001. Robert D. Kaplan, The Atlantic Monthly; June 1999; Kissinger, Metternich, and Realism - 99.06; Volume 283, No. 6; page 73-82. 13 Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973 - Sentry Edition.
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