Nixon: Peace with Honour?

On 23 January 1973 President Richard Nixon announced that he had achieved peace with honour, and that all the conditions he had laid down for peace with North Vietnam had been met. Placed in the context of US war aims from 1965, one could easily argue that Nixon’s conditions for peace had become so weak that North Vietnam would have had little difficulty meeting them, leaving him with a peace, but little honour.

Nixon’s position on the war in 1968 did not differ significantly from that of Hubert Humphrey, his Democratic challenger. He promised to ‘end the war and win the peace’, and that while the war needed to be brought to be a swift conclusion, ‘it must be ended honourably’. The key to his campaign was a claim to have a secret plan to win the war; something he could not divulge for fear of undermining his negotiating position after the election. Meanwhile, he was secretly using contacts close to President Thieu to disrupt the peace talks scheduled to take place in Paris in the month before the election. Exploiting Thieu’s fears for the post-war settlement, Nixon told Thieu to pull out of the talks and wait until after the election, when he would receive better terms than under the Democrats. Nixon’s approach to ending the war consisted of four interconnected strands: escalation, Vietnamization, negotiation, and détente.

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President Nixon addressing the nation on the situation in South East Asia, 8 May 1972

Soon after gaining office, Nixon and his National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, initiated the large-scale bombing of Cambodia. Resuming the bombing of North Vietnam was not an option given the ongoing peace negotiations, but Nixon was anxious to hinder the Communist supply lines through Laos and Cambodia and provide the North with a clear sign of his reluctance to accept peace at any price. While the sporadic bombing of Laos continued, Operation Menu was a fourteen-month secret bombing campaign against supply lines and enclaves in Cambodia. It was followed by a 30,000-man invasion of Cambodia in April 1970, which aimed to destroy the Central Office of South Vietnam, believed to be the Viet Cong command centre in Indochina.

Nixon took the US bombing campaign to new levels in 1972. Faced with the imminent collapse of South Vietnam in the face of the NVA Easter Offensive, he launched the Linebacker campaign, returning the focus to North Vietnam with over 18,000 sorties flown from 16 April–30 June. Unlike Rolling Thunder, operational targets were decided by local commanders, and restrictions on targets were removed. In addition, Nixon went another step further than Johnson and gave permission for Haiphong Harbour to be mined on 8 May, thus restricting the enemy’s sea-based supply line. Linebacker ‘I’ proved to be simply the warm-up for Linebacker II, an unprecedented eleven-day bombing of the North’s main industrial areas around Hanoi and Haiphong which started on 18 December. The ‘Christmas Bombing’ inflicted 1,600 civilian deaths, but cost the US 27 aircraft and 43 airmen. Nixon and Kissinger claimed that the effects of this campaign brought the North back to the negotiating table: most historians disagree.

Nixon’s policy of escalation was arguably merely a cover for his main objective: the withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam. He announced the first withdrawal of US troops in June 1969, and on 3 November 1969 he announced his programme of Vietnamization: from this point on, responsibility for fighting the war would be gradually returned to the ARVN. While US troop levels fell to approximately 375,000 by summer 1971, training and funding of the ARVN increased. However, although the ARVN fought bravely on many fronts in Easter 1972, the need to call upon US air power illustrates the failure of Vietnamization as a realistic strategy for defending South Vietnam.

Perhaps the most ingenious element of Nixon’s approach was to combine the large-scale escalation with regular back-channel diplomacy with the North, and attempts to use warmer relations with both the Soviet Union and China to end the war. Bypassing even his own Secretary of State, William Rogers, he relied on Kissinger to negotiate with the North, while his own brand of shuttle diplomacy, visiting Beijing and Moscow in 1972, helped influence both countries to apply pressure to their communist ally in the North.

In spite of his success in keeping the North at the negotiating table, and getting them to accept a peace deal in January 1973, Nixon’s complex plan did not succeed in containing Communism in South East Asia. The main terms of the Paris Peace Agreement represented a humiliating retreat by the US from their position in 1965. While US troops would withdraw unilaterally, a National Council of National Reconciliation and Concord was to be set up to plan elections in the South, thus paving the way for possible future reunification. Meanwhile, as Congress passed the War Powers Act, preventing the President from declaring war without congressional approval, and blocked all funds for future use in Indochina, the USSR continued to arm North Vietnam. Thieu’s days as President of an independent South Vietnam were numbered.

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