The United States foreign policy during the Cold War was as much dependent on diplomatic efforts as much as it was related to both direct and indirect military conflict. The Cold War was a time when American practitioners of international relations thought deeply about what was the best and most effective way to deal with the existential threat of communist expansion. Most notably the United States relied on an overall approach to foreign policy which relied on containment of communist expansion by supporting regimes which were friendly to the American cause of fighting the Soviet Union. During the Vietnam War and during the Nixon administration the United States changed the emphasis of how it meant to fight the Soviets all over the world. The Nixon Doctrine was a major shift in US foreign policy because it took away the unconditional support of the United States in defending against the communist threat instead focusing on much more smart and efficient use of military power and foreign aid for governments under direct attack from communism. One of the most famous cases of the implementation of the Nixon Doctrine was through American support of the South Vietnamese government through the policy of Vietnamization. The Nixon Doctrine worked to strengthen the position of the United States without having to commit military forces to the defense of the nation under direct Communist threat.
The Nixon Doctrine as it was first explained by President Nixon in a press conference held in Guam in July of 1969 outlined the president’s view on security issues, especially as it related to American involvement in Asia after the failures which led to American involvement in Vietnam. Nixon in his speech to the press in Guam laid out two major points. First that the United States would support friendly governments in the region while maintaining their current treaty commitments (Kimball, 2006) While looking for a decided shift in American policy in Asia which hoped to sidestep a policy “that will make countries in Asia so dependent upon us that we are dragged into conflicts such as the one we have in Vietnam.” (Kimball, 2006, p.62) Additionally, Nixon pointed to the fact that the independent Asian nations should be responsible for dealing with their own internal threats. (Kimball, 2006). The Nixon Doctrine as it laid out here effectively meant that the United States would do the best it could maintain all of the previous commitments in the region while avoiding at any length possible a situation which could lead to the United States becoming involved in another conflict like the one in Vietnam.
The importance of the Vietnam War and Nixon’s desire to end that conflict or at the very least scale down American involvement in Southeast Asia was a very large part of the considerations put upon the rationale behind the Nixon Doctrine. One of the main ways which the US government intended to apply the Nixon Doctrine was through the policy of Vietnamization. Vietnamization was a policy advocated by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird which called for “shifting the burdens of the war from American shoulders to Vietnamese ones while bolstering South Vietnam’s military capacities.” (Sargent, 2015) The policy of Vietnamization highly emphasized the role that Nixon thought was key for the United States to be an active participant in the region while shifting the responsibility for the defense to local governments and away from the United States. The implementation of a plan like Vietnamization was highly dependent on the ability of the US government to negotiate the deal with the South Vietnamese as this was not an entirely unilateral decision. This also meant that the United States would have to shift the focus of the war in Vietnam away from the battlefield and towards other venues most importantly the negotiation table.
The Nixon Doctrine was first implemented by the Administration in its handling of the situation in Southeast Asia and the efforts by Nixon and Kissinger among others to attempt to draw down American involvement in the Vietnam War and to give more power to the government in Saigon over their own defense and to assure that the United States could extricate itself from the quagmire in Vietnam. The Nixon Administration, as a matter of fact, aimed to do this by implementing a plan which used American greatest strengths to its advantage. The use of diplomacy and power by Nixon and Kissinger rested on implementing a “five-point strategy.” This strategy included “Vietnamization, pacification, diplomatic isolation of North Vietnam, peace negotiations and gradual US troop withdrawals.” (Hess, 2015, p.183) American efforts at ending the war in Vietnam were highly dependent on using diplomacy especially with China and the Soviet Union in an attempt to find a way out of the war for the United States.
One of the most notable ways in which the United States foreign policy and diplomatic efforts changed during the Nixon era was that of détente and the use of triangular diplomacy as a method for the United States to reach its goals in the foreign policy arena. Nixon and Kissinger recognized that North Vietnam was highly dependent on both Soviet and Chinese support in order to fund and support their war effort. In order for the United States to take the initiative in weakening the relationship between Hanoi and Moscow. Hanoi’s assessment of détente was highly informed by a distrust of the United States and its willingness to control the spread of communism.
Nixon's policy of detente is aimed at achieving the objective of dividing the socialist camp in an attempt to weaken the revolution. In implementing a policy of "detente" with the big countries, the U.S. imperialists are scheming to "control" the socialist countries in their movement to develop the revolutionary offensive, while the United States is continuing its limited counteroffensives against the revolutionary movement in various areas and small countries. (Morris, 1999, p.16)
1972 was a very important year for the war in Vietnam and the role that triangular diplomacy played in the United States being able to extricate itself from that situation. Kissinger in May went to Paris to have a meeting with Le Duc Tho, a North Vietnamese leader, in which they attempted to come to a settlement to end the war. This was largely a failure given the success of the NVA’s Spring Offensive and the weakness of the American position in Vietnam. Attempts to use both the Soviets and the Chinese as a method of weakening the North Vietnamese government were highly unsuccessful and very much a point in which Nixon and Kissinger put much emphasis on in ending the war in Vietnam.
The Nixon Doctrine as it was developed through the course of the early years of the Nixon administration meant that the United States largely as a response to the quagmire and the disaster of the Vietnam War and its broader involvement in Southeast Asia that it needed to scale back its involvement in the affairs of other countries. In the Middle East, this new policy manifested itself with American support for Saudi Arabia and Iran as the preeminent regional powers. The United States chose Iran and Saudi Arabia first of all because of the necessity for American power to replace the British power in the region and furthermore because these two countries had something very important in common. Both Iran and Saudi Arabia could become American “deputies” in the region largely because they “Both were conservative and anti- communist enough when considering their own interests to resist any changes in the stability and the status quo of the Gulf.” (Furtig, 2007, p.628) American support for the Saudi Arabia and the Iran was largely predicated on the larger overarching concern of containment. The United States primary objective in the Cold War was to face the Soviet threat by attempting to contain it, keep it from spreading. In the Middle East, a very strategically important region of the world with its massive oil supplies and the ever constant conflict between Israel and the Arab world stability was key. Taking this approach to it both Saudi Arabia and Iran were the states that had the most interest in maintaining the regional status quo.
Saudi Arabia’s role in this construct perhaps was not as strong as Iran’s but it was still a key part of the Twin Pillars policy. The Saudi’s primary purpose in this construct was to “ensure the free flow of oil to the West.” (Kostiner, 2009, p.143) Additionally, Saudi Arabia despite being both economically and militarily weaker than their Persian neighbors was able to make themselves indispensable for American defense in the region. The Saudis were able to leverage both their legitimacy with the rest of the Arab world and that ever important resource oil as a way of assuring that they were as important if not more so than the Iranians in maintaining the regional order and being a key part of the fight against Soviet expansion. (Kostiner, 2009, p.143) In this sense, Saudi Arabia was as important as Iran in implementing the Nixon Doctrine in the Middle East.
There is yet another view of the issue which says that although the Nixon Doctrine in the Middle East was based on a Twin Pillars policy that instead the Nixon administration fluctuated to Iran primacy in the region as the way forward. Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger chose Iran and the Shah as a way forward largely because of the realities on the ground. British withdrawal from the Persian Gulf region as a part of a larger plan of imperial retrenchment “East of Suez” meant that there was a significant power vacuum in the region. This was something which benefited Iran and the United States seized as an opportunity. Nixon in a letter to the Shah wrote, “As you know, your thoughts and mine coincide at many points on this subject, and a number of the positions I expressed during my Asian trip last summer—as you have noted—would apply to the problems in your region as well.” (Alvandi, 2012, p.354) This meant that Nixon understood that he could support to Iran and the Shah and this would mean that they could use his greater power in the region as a way curbing Soviet power. The Nixon administration preference for the Iranian primacy was another facet of the larger Nixon Doctrine and its strengthening of regional powers as a way of containing Soviet influence.
The Nixon Doctrine as it was formulated was a response to the Vietnam War. Nixon, Kissinger, and his advisers recognized that the United States could not be directly responsible for the defense of every power against the direct Soviet threat or by forces supported by the Soviets. This meant that the United States while decreasing its direct presence would move to supporting states to deal with direct and indirect Soviet aggression and influence. This was the thinking behind the policy of Vietnamization which shifted the burden of the defense of South Vietnam into their government and the idea behind the Twin Pillars policy in the Middle East. The Twin Pillars, Iran, and Saudi Arabia were deemed to be the best options for regional defense because of their ideological place and their strength both militarily and with their neighbors.
References
Alvandi, R. (2012). Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: the origins of Iranian primacy in the Persian Gulf. Diplomatic History, 36(2), 337-372.
Fürtig, H. (2007). Conflict and Cooperation in the Persian Gulf: The Interregional Order and US
Kimball, J. (2006). The Nixon Doctrine: A Saga of Misunderstanding.Presidential Studies Quarterly, 36(1), 59-74.
Kostiner, J. (2009). Conflict and cooperation in the Gulf region. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.Bottom of Form
Hess, G. R. (2015). Vietnam: Explaining America's lost war.
Morris, S. J. (1999). The Soviet-Chinese-Vietnamese Triangle in the 1970's: The View from Moscow. Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
Sargent, D. J. (2015). A superpower transformed: The remaking of American foreign relations in the 1970s.
