Cold War De-Escalation with Jeremi Suri | BRI Scholar Talks: Cold War & the Presidency Series #4

0:00 dayton was an effort to sell at home that cold war policies were not about war that they were about peace that we had to do the things we were doing deploy our forces overseas prepare for war so that we could prevent it from happening and that the leaders in all of these countries especially the united states and soviet union were trying to work to forestall

0:22 conflict not to create conflict [Music] this is tony williams a senior fellow with bri and we are pleased to bring you the fourth episode in our cold war and the presidency series and really honored for this episode to have on jeremy suri who will be talking about nixon

0:43 kissinger and the cold war in this series our main question is how individual presidents have shaped executive powers during the cold war and so he’ll help us answer that and by way of introduction jeremy suri holds the mac brown distinguished chair for leadership in global affairs at the university of

1:04 texas at austin and is a professor in the university’s department of history and the lbj school of public affairs dr suri is the author and editor of some nine books on politics and foreign policy most recently the impossible presidency the rise and fall of america’s highest office

1:24 and his other books include uh they’re very relevant to our discussion henry kissinger and the american century and also liberty sheriff’s guardian american nation building from the founders to obama uh jeremy thank you very much for uh agreeing to come on the show my pleasure i’m looking forward to our conversation all right very good well

1:45 let’s jump right in with our first question in your book on henry kissinger you describe how he and nixon faced but also importantly help to shape a fundamental redirection of the cold war from a bipolar superpower struggle to a more complex multi-polar world

2:06 you also describe how they really saw themselves as strong and decisive statesmen uh who would create a world with greater order uh according to to their view freed from unfortunately maybe the the usual constraints of democratic politics uh and also normal bureaucratic channels uh diplomatic channels um what were their goals

2:28 in the conduct of cold war foreign policy so i i think you you’ve provided a perfect introduction for thinking about uh nixon and kissinger they come into office the two of them after a really difficult period in american society this is the period of the vietnam war of course and they inherit that war a war that’s not going well where the

2:49 united states has put in a great deal of resources in a faraway place uh and turmoil at home over civil rights um this is not simply the moment of the civil rights movement this is a moment also when there are deep debates and conflicts within american society over the future role of the us government with regard to various inherited racial uh issues and economic issues in our

3:10 society so nixon and kissinger really believe they need a strong contained presidency that can pursue policy with limited interference from what they see as many of the conflicts and controversies around them they want to forge new partnerships with allies overseas and those at home who they think will be

3:31 useful for their goals they want to show that the us government is capable again the perception in 1968 1969 when they come into office is that the us government is not capable of winning wars and not capable of dealing with civil rights issues at home they want to show that they’re capable of doing this and most of all they want to become the agenda

3:52 setters this is really the most important point they believe that the issues of the day have taken agency away from leaders and that leaders particularly the president that the president has to be able to assert his dominance as agenda setter as the person who sets out what the priorities for the country will be otherwise they fear more violence more

4:14 chaos at home and abroad great and one of their first priorities as you just mentioned was i think the vietnamization of the vietnam war uh and as you as you’re mentioning to restore that sort of tattered american credibility um and so how did they try to combine i think as you described it in your book

4:35 the military escalation with negotiations and oftentimes secret negotiations right uh so nixon and kissinger believed that one of the problems in vietnam and elsewhere was that the united states had become this lumbering giant we had all this power all this capability but we were letting others tell us how

4:55 to use it and we were on the defensive everywhere the soviets would make an advance in one area and we would respond ho chi minh would do something in vietnam and we would respond they wanted to reassert direction and use american power in a more focused way and so in vietnam what that meant was a combination of escalation and negotiation

5:17 the escalation involved using more air power and it meant investing in training more vietnamese soldiers south vietnamese soldiers to take up the burden of the war and that’s what vietnamization meant it meant that the united states would stay engaged but it wouldn’t be directly american soldiers doing this work that we would train local surrogates that would make it easier to sell this

5:38 at home because it wouldn’t be americans dying they claimed but it also could be more effective if done well because you’d have local soldiers who had more legitimacy on the ground and american credibility would be built not on american soldiers killing vietnamese communists but on the vietnamese themselves doing that work and are being the supporters of the

5:59 righteous actors on the ground so that’s what vietnamization meant it meant actually a different kind of escalation even as we were taking our own forces out at the same time as nixon and kissinger were pushing for more air power and more south vietnamese soldiers to be trained they were also reaching out to the north vietnamese through the soviet union and through china and

6:21 the argument they were making to the soviets who you think would want to see the united states bleed in vietnam the argument nixon and kissinger made was that this war is getting out of hand and it’s now going to jeopardize soviet interests in the region and soviet interests in arms control and other deals with the united states so if the soviet union wanted the united states to be more pliable to be a better

6:42 uh interlocutor into better deal maker for other areas then the soviet union had to help us in vietnam help convince soviet allies in north vietnam to negotiate a deal with us and what nixon and kissinger were seeking which to some extent they were able to get in 1972 was a deal from the north vietnamese sponsored by the soviets and the chinese

7:04 in part for a de-escalation so american soldiers could withdraw and so the war could be turned over to the south vietnamese okay great and and speaking of uh the russians nixon and kissinger really also contributed to the decrease in tensions with the soviet union in that spirit of daetant and we’re able to really achieve in any

7:26 way significant progress in the area of arms control so why did they do it and and how were they able to achieve that success so this is really one of their great achievements as you said tony that the the emphasis upon turning the cold war from continued conflict and near military escalation between the united states and the soviet union

7:46 into actually a set of rules a set of deals that allowed for the united states to remain anti-communist and allowed for the soviet union to continue to exist but made the risk of warfare and danger much less than it had been before nixon and kissinger had lived through the cuban missile crisis they didn’t want to relive that moment so daetant was an effort to create boundaries on what would be

8:09 safe and unsafe conflict to put guardrails on this uh there would be no direct confrontation between the united states and the soviet union uh europe uh the states of europe that were at the center of the cold war there would be no effort to change those borders there would be no effort to undermine the other side internally right we would no longer try to support people seeking to overthrow the soviet regime in

8:30 the soviet union they would not do that at home conflict would continue elsewhere though it would be okay in the third world as it was called at the time and places such as the middle east and north africa for there to be continued rivalry between allies of the soviet union in the united states so the idea was to create certain kinds of rules and within that then to achieve certain measures that would be in the interests

8:51 of both superpowers to reduce spending on nuclear weapons and eventually to reduce many of those uh weapons to reduce the test the testing of those weapons which would create uh atmospheric problems and to help one another deal with third parties deal with actors that might instigate a conflict between the united states and the soviet union

9:12 and this is an important part of daetant recognizing that smaller actors often played the two sides off of one another and trying to limit the ability for that to happen one other element of data that i emphasize actually in an earlier book i wrote uh called power in protest was that daetant uh was an effort to sell at home that cold war policies were not about

9:34 war that they were about peace that we had to do the things we were doing deploy our forces overseas prepare for war so that we could prevent it from happening and that the leaders in all of these countries especially the united states and soviet union were trying to work to forestall conflict not to create conflict so that’s the big difference tony you see between the rhetoric of a john f

9:55 kennedy which is more traditional cold war rhetoric pay any price bernie burton and nixon and kissinger who are talking about controlling conflict and creating rules and limits on conflict okay great and and you mentioned um playing off uh the superpowers against each other and probably us one of the most stunning proofs of the shift of american

10:17 cold war strategy under nixon and kissinger in a multi-polar world was that opening of china uh to diplomatic relations uh so how do they pull this off and what were the short and long-term effects of opening china it’s such an important topic especially because china’s such an important topic in the contemporary world as well so from 1949 when the communist regime

10:39 comes to power in china until 1971 1972 the united states had no relations with the communist regime we actually pretended it didn’t exist we said they were illegitimate that the real representatives were in taiwan nixon and kissinger shift that and it is one of the most decisive and important shifts uh during their leadership why do they do this they do this first of all because

11:00 the united states is isolated in the only country in this role we’ve inherited this position but secondly because they recognize that china needs the united states even the communists in china and we need them that we have mutual interests and kissinger in particular will say over and over again that mutual interests should override ideology interests override ideology so it is not

11:22 an apology for the communist regime which is pursuing horrible policies in the late 60s and 70s their so-called cultural revolution but it’s an act of realism to say that this regime is really important for us the chinese are engaged in near warfare with the soviet union even though both states are communists the leader of china does not recognize the soviets any longer

11:43 as the father communists and they have a long border with many disputes it’s still true today and kissinger and nixon recognize that the chinese will want american help they also recognize that the soviets will be motivated to help the united states if they see us moving toward the chinese because they will want to stop us from becoming too close to the chinese

12:03 so this is what nixon and kissinger call triangular diplomacy the other thing that they recognize which is really interesting is that uh for all the communism of mount sudan he still wants recognition from the united states there still is value in the united states telling the world that this is a legitimate country even though the rest of the world already sees that and by reaching out to mao they’re able

12:25 to give him something and they can get some things in return potentially help in vietnam uh and down the line more trade and there are a lot of american business groups that are keen in the 1970s as they are today to do business in china and so this is an important motivation as well okay great last questions regarding executive power

12:45 uh you argue that nixon and kissinger distrusted normal diplomatic channels like the state department to conduct foreign policy and they really wanted to kind of control it out of the white house and the national security council and we’re really willing to engage not only in secretive diplomacy but as you write in the book nixon was willing to use

13:06 presidential powers in whatever way he deemed necessary so what effect does the nixon administration’s cold war diplomacy have on the executive branch in this country i think one of the real problematic legacies that we’re living with from the nixon years is the growth of the white house

13:26 and the president in the white house and his national security adviser as actors with less accountability than was intended in the constitution and was intended in the national security act of 1947 and the practice of foreign policy before that presidents like eisenhower and kennedy and johnson had used covert operations but they had not conducted diplomacy in

13:48 war from the white house in the same way uh nixon and kissinger distrusted the state department they distrusted to some to some extent the defense department because these were civil service professionals for the most part who were doing their job but were not always loyal to the president they were loyal to their job over the president which is how it’s supposed to work they wanted absolute loyalty because

14:08 they were trying to do and they believed for the right reasons they were trying to do some things that were unorthodox opening relations to china as example that we just talked about and um they felt that the bureaucracy uh that the checks and balances that our framers brilliantly built into our system hampered their ability to act and this was an old complaint right that in a democracy we’re less flexible

14:30 we’re slower because we have to go through all these legal processes so they tried to short-circuit that the most extreme example of that was uh bombing cambodia to try to interdict supply lines to south vietnam in 1970 and not telling congress not telling the american public in fact lying about it this doesn’t condemn

14:52 the policies they were pursuing but it points to a constitutional and an institutional problem and democrats and republicans coming after nixon and kissinger have been too quick to use american force and they have centralized too much power in the white house it’s important that the framers believe that the chief foreign policy person for the president was to be the secretary of

15:13 state who would be accountable to congress that is a congressionally confirmed position the nsc advisor which is created as an administrative position in 1947 grows with kissinger in particular into the main foreign policy position for that administration many others and congress has no oversight over the nfc advisor this is a real problem and i think it’s something we struggle with

15:35 uh today it’s really important that we have a discussion i think with this history in mind about what we think is the appropriate constitutional framework for foreign policy making i think we’ve deviated from that and i think nixon is an important moment when that deviation becomes i think really really problematic jeremy a really important conversation

15:56 uh really appreciate you coming on to uh to talk about uh nixon and kissinger in the cold war thank you for the excellent questions i i enjoyed every minute of it well a great conversation leaves you wanting more and i definitely recommend our viewers uh pick up a few of your nine bucks uh and learn more to learn the rest of the story uh thank you again so thank you for

16:19 joining us for our mini curriculum video series on the cold war and the presidency check out our other episodes on fdr truman kennedy and reagan with interviews with several leading historians on this important topic thank you