The Atlantic and Its Enemies

South Vietnamese army, which, Thompson said, was now capable of action. There was much military justification for this, given the North Vietnamese army’s closeness to Saigon, and that it was preparing an attack. The Americans’ attack itself did not go badly — much equipment destroyed, food supplies captured, and US casualties falling from ninety to fifty per week — but there was an explosion of rage inside the USA.

This war had now, in a sense, to be won at home. American opinion was in places violently, hysterically, hostile: 1967 had seen 100,000 march on the Pentagon and there were arson attacks in several universities, including Stanford, where the Institute of Social Anthropology was burned down. The National Guard was called out, and over-responded, in panic: in May 1970 at Kent State University four protestors were shot, two of them girl students on their way to lectures. Four hundred and fifty colleges were closed down. Nixon responded violently to ‘bums blowing up campuses’ and famously got support from building workers at one demonstration in New York (he invited their leaders, ingratiatingly, to coffee at the White House; on another occasion he smarmed at student protestors whom he encountered by chance in the early hours on a visit to the Lincoln Memorial). By 1972 the administration was simply held in derision by almost anyone in the United States who could read and write. At the same time, Nixon alienated his own bedrock supporters.

The opposition to the Vietnam War does not, now, look very impressive. After they had won, in 1975, the Communists massacred a quarter of the population of Cambodia, and threw out the ‘boat people’ from Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of the population, forced onto refugee boats, many sunk or destroyed by Malay or Thai pirates before they reached long-term refugee camps in Hong Kong. At the time, the American opposition was saying that the North Vietnamese were just another version of Tito’s Yugoslavians, potentially neutralist and in effect social reformers in the Henry George sense of one peasant, one plot. There are long lists, of the best writers and scholars in the country, who blundered — and who would, very soon, be disavowed by the very people they thought they were defending. John K. Fairbank of Harvard and The Cambridge History of China thought that Mao was ‘one of the best things that has ever happened to China’. The doyen of Asian studies in the USA, Warren Cohen, agreed. His principal target was Dean Rusk, craggy provincial Protestant with a moral sense: who now looks right? Barbara Tuchman said that America was repeating the mistakes of the fourteenth century, when paranoia and the Black Death stalked the land; she wrote in Foreign Affairs that Chiang Kai-shek had been wicked, that in China famine had been ‘eliminated’. Marilyn B. Young recycled Leninist propaganda (The Vietnamese Wars 1945-1990 (1991)) to the effect that peasants with a back garden of rice-land were ‘exploiters’, and ‘concerned Asian scholars’ talked nonsense of the same sort. When the anti-Nixon people took over, their performance was lamentable. The fact was that a million people fled the North when independence came and a further million and a half when the Communists took over in the South. One of the Asian scholars was Chalmers Johnson of Berkeley, who complained of the student opposition that they never took his books out of the library. David Halberstam, who became the veteran journalist in the South, blamed the McCarthy persecution of the ‘Asia hands’ for the American inability to understand what was going on. Even a well-made film such as The Killing Fields, about the Cambodian horrors, somehow fails to mention Communism as the cause of them.

Nixon’s response was to withdraw American troops, promising to ‘Vietnamize’ the war. This had mixed results. The Delta was made safe again, but there was now in 1970 a full-scale war going on along the borders, and the North Vietnamese were quite well equipped to fight it — T54 tanks, 130mm anti-aircraft artillery and 350,000 Chinese to back them up. Cambodia was almost safe reserve territory for them, because King Sihanouk, in 1964, believed that ‘all of south-east Asia is destined to become Communist’, and he allowed the Vietcong tacitly to use his port, Sihanoukville, where better-off Cambodians made money from smuggling to the Vietcong. In 1969 Nixon had stealthily bombed the Cambodian trails while the Vietcong trained Khmer Rouge (12,000) as guerrilleros, whereat mobs in Phnom Penh sacked the Vietnamese embassy and killed local resident Vietnamese. Sihanouk went to Moscow and Peking to have the Communists taken out of the country and was himself exiled — taking up an alliance with the Khmer Rouge even though they went on to kill some of his children. Nixon deviously supported the man who replaced him, a general by the name of Lon Nol (even the CIA heard about this only when Nixon announced it on TV). The bombing in 1970 shattered just huts, and Nixon had acquired another brittle and touchy ally (when Lon Nol was offered sanctuary in the embassy when it all collapsed he refused, blaming the Americans for scuttling from the scene); an attempt to use South Vietnamese troops broke down when they were ambushed. In February 1971 another effort was made, this time to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail at Lam Son, and this was even worse. The Vietcong knew what was coming, and when the South Vietnamese had lost 3,000 men, President Nguyen Van Thieu ordered a retreat, but without telling the Americans. The retreat turned into a rout, fleeing soldiers clinging desperately to the skids of helicopters, and being torn to pieces by the treetops. There were even anti-American demonstrations in Saigon, and by now the Americans themselves were widely demoralized: to counter the use of heroin, urine tests had to be imposed on the army. In 1972 the North Vietnamese made a great effort to break the South. In March 40,000 men attacked over the 17th Parallel into the DMZ. In the first two weeks, there was a South Vietnamese collapse, made much worse because the roads were clogged by fleeing civilians and soldiers’ families — in fact by now there were 5 million refugees in a population of 17 million. An important base, Quang Tri, fell, and only vast US bombing stabilized the front.

Maybe South Vietnam could have been saved, but by 1971 the chief foundation of the American hegemony was collapsing: in mid-August 1971 Nixon refused to honour the gold bills of the dollar. This opened the way to a general crisis of the West, and in that Vietnam hardly counted, except as a symbol. The man who understood this was Henry Kissinger, who, for want of local solutions, looked for transcendental ones. Since the North Vietnamese were impossible, another dimension would have to be opened up on the board, and, here, geopolitics had its part to play. Kissinger had written an admiring book about Prince Metternich, the chief statesman of the post-Napoleonic period in Europe, when there had been forty years of peace, despite the emergence of international problems that were later on to cause great wars. He came to the White House with a formidable academic reputation, and he had qualities that made him dominant there. He had, in the first place, that central European accent that held lecture audiences spellbound. Hannah Arendt, who lectured in the style of the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lion, had the same trick, in her case of building castles of long words with an air of having something of vast importance to convey, which none of the audience afterwards could remember. Kissinger by contrast had content. There were, in post- Napoleonic Europe, problems that simply could not be solved on the ground. Of these, later on, Yugoslavia became the classic example, because it just broke up into unworkable fragments but at the same time could not be held together. Metternich knew when to haggle, when to browbeat, when to bore stiff, and it was a success. Kissinger — who was, after all, a refugee from a central Europe that had indeed produced all of the horrors and more that Metternich had foreseen — greatly admired him: the answer to insoluble problems was to internationalize them. That was what, over Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger now tried to do. It was a huge face-saving device: America would get out. She did, and the fall of Saigon at the end of April 1975 was one of the subconscience-entering scenes of the post-war world, perhaps its greatest.

The hope was in detente. Stalin had conceded Italy and Greece in return for this and that, at Teheran or Yalta. Could another such bargain be struck? But this time round there was China as well. There was increasing trouble between these two Communist giants; it could be exploited. In 1967 Kosygin had visited Johnson, who noticed the obsession with China, and even Nixon wrote an article hinting that US relations with China might be improved. In March 1969 Soviet and Chinese forces clashed on the river Ussuri, over a border question, and Moscow asked Nixon to condemn the Chinese nuclear tests; there were hints at a nuclear strike to destroy the Chinese ‘facilities’; and the Chinese were refusing the Russians the right to fly supplies to Vietnam or to use their airfields. The Chinese needed America against Russia. There was room, here, for clever-cleverness, and in April 1971 the world was surprised when an American table tennis team went to Peking. It was even more taken aback a year later, when Nixon followed, on 21 February 1972. Through de Gaulle, Ceausescu and others, approaches were made, along with indications that Taiwan would be formally derecognized. The Sino-Soviet split was real enough, and the Chinese (themselves barely recovering from economic and cultural convulsions) were anxious to fend off a Soviet attack. Moscow had made plain enough what it would do to Communists who took their own ‘path to socialism’, which Peking ineffably had done. Kissinger travelled incognito to Peking in July 1971, and in mid-July Nixon told television that he had accepted an invitation there. In February 1972 he went, and met a Mao who had insisted on leaving his hospital bed. There was a bargain: China would be protected from Russia; Taiwan would be left alone but downgraded; the Chinese would cease to support the North Vietnamese.

Then came Moscow’s turn, and the offer — suitably preceded by a bill to set up an anti-ballistic missile system — was of negotiations over ‘strategic-arms’ limitation, again handled by Kissinger by stealth. After news of