Saints and cynics

And the making of foreign policy

In the late 1990s I organized a conference at the University of Texas at Austin on the foreign policy of Lyndon Johnson. Speakers addressed various aspects of Johnson's foreign policy. But the conversation kept returning to the Vietnam War. Two decades after the defeat of America-backed South Vietnam, it was common to conclude that Johnson's decision to escalate in 1965 had been a grave blunder.

Sitting quietly in the back row of the auditorium, so quietly that I didn't even notice him there, was Walt Rostow, Johnson's national security adviser during the crucial period of escalation. Rostow had retired from government to a position on the faculty of UT. I had gotten to know him as a gracious colleague and an insightful commentator on national security policy.

Toward the end of the last session of the conference, he raised his hand. I recognized him and he stood up to speak. The attendees also recognized him and fell quiet to hear what he had to say.

In calm tone he argued that most of what had been said about Vietnam during the previous two days was wrong. Yes, the American side had lost in the end. But that didn't make the effort misguided. On the contrary, said Rostow, the decade between escalation in 1965 and the defeat of South Vietnam in 1975 had represented a holding action, a fighting retreat against expansive communism in Southeast Asia. South Vietnam had been lost, but the other dominoes, to use the term of the time, had not fallen. In particular, Indonesia, the largest country of the region and one that in the early 1960s seemed about to be drawn into the communist orbit, had become a bulwark against Chinese expansion.

Rostow's argument that day was persuasive, as his arguments always were. But no one in the room was persuaded. They had heard it before, in some cases from Rostow himself. And it was just what someone would expect from the principal architect of a failed policy.

Rostow died several years later. His death was a loss to the UT community. I've often thought about that afternoon and about how one measures success and failure in policies that have large implications.

I've read enough of the memos and transcripts of meetings in the Johnson administration to know that no one at the time was calling the American effort in Vietnam a fighting retreat. Rostow in particular asserted that the United States would surely win. Events proved him wrong, and so he fell back on rationale B. Did that weaken the rationale B argument? If you do good things by accident, should you get credit for them?

This raises the larger question of whether motives or outcomes should matter more in evaluating the actions of people. George McGovern, by the testimony of most people who knew him, was a sincere, good-hearted soul. He campaigned in 1972 on a platform of withdrawing from Vietnam and acknowledging defeat. His opponent, incumbent president Richard Nixon, was by overwhelming evidence deceitful, cynical and manipulative. Nixon had begun to draw down American forces in Vietnam, but at the same time he secretly expanded the war into Cambodia. Meanwhile the operatives in his administration engaged in dirty tricks against his Democratic opponents. Some had already been arrested at the Watergate complex in Washington, but Nixon was furiously covering up their connection to the Oval Office.

Nixon won in a landslide. He proceeded to withdraw the last American troops from Vietnam. The North Vietnamese signed a truce agreement, but they and everyone else expected what subsequently happened: that Americans would lose interest in Vietnam after their country's troops were gone, and North Vietnam would complete its conquest of the South. The truce turned out to be a cynical cover for American abandonment of its ally.

Yet something else turned out to be true. Nixon's liquidation of America's Vietnam problem was part of a larger reordering of international affairs. While the world was watching Vietnam, Nixon sent Henry Kissinger to Beijing to open relations with China. Nixon didn't care much about China, but he intended to use China for leverage against the Soviet Union. The result was detente, which reduced the chances of World War III and made possible the first major arms control agreements of the Cold War.

Even many of those comparatively few people who had voted for McGovern acknowledged that he never would have been able to pull off anything like this. McGovern was a good man, but Nixon was a good diplomat.

Can someone be both? Or are the categories mutually exclusive? If you were in a high-stakes negotiation for the fate of your country, would you rather have McGovern or Nixon at the table for you?

The general question is timeless. Which is another way of saying it's often timely. It's particularly timely now that Donald Trump is again president. Some MAGA faithful assert that Trump's election was ordained by God. But even they would choose other role models for their children.

Yet if Trump could avert the collision that seems ever more likely between the United States and China, the world would owe him a lot. A good man in the White House would feel bound by commitments the United States has made to Taiwan during the last seventy years. A good man in the White House might very well engage in a war for Taiwan that has little chance of success.

A cynic, on the other hand, might turn his back on Taiwan the way Nixon turned his back on South Vietnam. The cynic might conclude that peace with China is more important than freedom for Taiwan. The cynic might decide that different rules govern the powerful than govern the weak.

Nixon was not merely a cynic. He was also the clearest thinker on strategic matters to occupy the White House in the modern era. The second trait was no less important to his success than the first.

Trump has the hallmarks of the cynic. He has yet to show he can think clearly on strategic matters. But if he can, he might surprise people by pulling off something Nixonesque.

Detente, that is, not Watergate.