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unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits escalated almost as rapidly as the American deployment. The argument soon left the plane of how to find an honorable way out to the proposition that, morally, there was little difference between Hanoi and Saigon. Since they saw no moral basis for the war, the critics argued that pursuit of what was involved was not an error in judgment but a moral rot at the core of the American way of life. The victory of the communists in Indo China, which three administrations of both parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became for the radical protest nothing less than a desirable national catharsis. The critique expanded from the worthiness of America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America, not only in Vietnam but globally. Vietnam became the first war in which prominent Americans visited the enemy capital to oppose their [own] country during highly publicized visits.

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By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines were drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication, leaving the field to the protesters or join[ing] them in the argument that extrication was prevented, above all, by the short-sightedness and warped mentality of America's leaders.

The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods [chosen] to pursue their aims. Indeed, they considered rules of conduct as the invention of a system they meant to overthrow. By street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all authorities, from universities to the US government, which they blamed for America's alleged crimes, they sought to wreck any policy designed to vindicate in Vietnam the values on which America's post-World War II policy had been based. (We have [had] a small reminder of these methods in the Seattle and Washington,

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D.C. protests against the global economic system.) Nixon, who for all his railing against the Establishment was a product of the "greatest generation," did not have the human qualities [with which] to transcend this gulf, if indeed it was bridgeable.

But now that all the documents and records of the negotiations are becoming available, some historians will sooner or later feel obliged to credit Nixon for his untiring effort to keep from compounding defeat by dishonor. To this day, the liberal critique accuses him of needlessly prolonging the war, implying that there was some honorable way out that Nixon refused to take.

But the records show without any ambiguity that the Nixon Administration offered withdrawal, starting with its first negotiations with the Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho. What the Nixon Administration would not accept was a political

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process guaranteeing a Hanoi-dominated communist government.
The records will show that we sought, and offered, a variety
of formulas to permit the people of South Vietnam a genuine
choice. What we would not accept - and what, until the end,
Hanoi never ceased demanding - was the abandonment of all the
millions who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors,
had thrown in their lot with the United States. Hanoi's
rejection of any [of a] variety of free choices for the people
of Vietnam is the reason for the prolongation of our
extrication during Nixon's first term.

In liberal and much media rendition of events, Nixon never
receives credit for having substantially carried out his
promise of extricating America from Vietnam (which no serious
observer of his record could have interpreted as involving
unilateral withdrawal): he reduced American casualties from
twelve hundred a month at the end of the Johnson

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Administration to thirty a month at the end of Nixon's first term; and unilaterally withdrew American troops from five hundred fifty thousand to thirty thousand. And of the twenty thousand casualties Nixon is accused of sacrificing needlessly, twelve thousand were incurred in the first year[s] and nine thousand in the first six months, when Hanoi cynically greeted the new Administration with a countrywide offensive, before the Administration was even organized.

To end the self-flagellation on Vietnam is not a question of historical justice [toward] individual presidents, but of historical justice [toward] a national experience. Mistakes should be debated and admitted. But when they are transformed into assaults on the entire system and the good faith of all leaders, the national purpose ultimately suffers. America owes itself an objective assessment of that Vietnam experience, which has not yet happened.

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The political schism was sharpened by the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened their taste for political power. After Kennedy's assassination, they sought to shape the immediate issues from the outside, in the process splitting into two groups - the job applicants and the revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

Vietnam's Legacy

The split has never been healed. The fusion of ideology and strategy of the early Cold War period has been broken. Though American exceptionalism continues to be affirmed, its

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application is subject to profound dispute. Since the Vietnam
war, there have been three main currents in American foreign
policy.

- The remnants of the Cold War strategy of the 1950s and
  1960s.

- The acolytes of the protest movement, who came to high
office themselves in the Clinton Administration.

- And, a new generation that does not remember [and] has
[not] experienced the Vietnam schism, and [now] faces a world
radically different from both the Cold War and the Vietnam
protest perceptions. This generation, largely focussed on
economic issues, has not yet developed either an ideology or a
strategy for a world radically different from that of the Cold
War.

The Cold War policy combined faith in the universality of
American values allied [with] a strategy to preserve and

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defend the free world until the collapse of communism, which
was considered inevitable. When, under the impact of Vietnam,
liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of
strategy and redefined exceptionalism in terms of "soft
issues" such as environment and human rights - which could be
achieved without the use of military power - traditional
American strategy was vindicated by conservatives and neo-
conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on
distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on
rigorous anti-communism and extreme toughness on negotiations
dealing with strategic balance, especially arms control
negotiations. And in the Reagan Administration, against an
adversary weakened by decades of overextension, it achieved
great successes.

But in the aftermath of Reagan, some of his disciples
emphasize the rhetorical side of his efforts at the expense of

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the hard-headed strategy with which he pursued the 1980s equivalent of a containment policy. [Yet] with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. They seem torn - especially in the neo-conservative group - between searching for [some] equivalent danger [to] the Soviet Union, in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized; or [the pursuit of] American exceptionalism in a global crusade.

But China - the target for this effort - is as yet too weak, too unideological and its potential danger too distant to allow foreign policy to be organized on this basis or reconciled with a concert of powers. And pursuit of hegemony has always exhausted any country attempting it, both domestically and, eventually, internationally. To be true to itself, America must always stand for democracy; but to shape the world, it must also be able to understand both its

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interests and their limits, and not be afraid to define
either.

By far the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is
the conclusion the liberal community has drawn from the
Vietnam war, as exemplified by the Clinton Administration. It
treats the Cold War as a misunderstanding, if not an American
creation. It recoils before the concept of national interest
and shrinks before the use of power [unless] it can present it
[as being] in the service of some "unselfish" cause - that is
to say, no more in the interest of America than of anyone
else. On many occasions and many continents, President Clinton
has apologized for American support of past authoritarian
leaders during what he always derogatorily describes as Cold
War preoccupations. [But] where did America suppress
democratic alternatives, since almost all the first generation
leaders of Africa emerged from the independence struggle? And

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why should America apologize for hostility to an Iranian
leader who took dramatic steps threatening Western oil
supplies and legalized the Communist party in the middle of
the Korean war, when there was a legitimate fear of Stalinist
subversion in many regions of the world?

The constant apologies for fifty years of American history
are matched by an uneasiness with American power. This is
illustrated by the difference between the liberal attitude
toward the Gulf war and toward Kosovo. The Gulf war was
conducted on behalf of [a] national interest [mandating]
uninterrupted supplies of oil for America and the industrial
democracies. But it received at best lukewarm support from
Congressional liberals, and the final vote in the Senate was
very narrow.

On Kosovo, the attitudes were reversed. It was the
conservatives who inquired into the national interest and the

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liberals who insisted that the absence of a purely American interest was the ultimate justification for the enterprise. But six months later, Chechnya proved that even universalists must learn the maxim that foreign policy is the art of the possible.

By the same token, the Clinton Administration's attitude is [shown by] the differential treatment of [its] two military operations in 1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling the UN inspectors placed there at our insistence. We responded by bombing for four days. But [in 1999] we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight days even though the traditional American national interest was far less clearly involved. And in each chase, the operation was undertaken with a reluctance to accept casualties that ultimately conveyed to the American public the

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absence of any vital interest. For Americans surely would not
recoil from casualties in defense of their vital interests.

What Vietnam has bequeathed to the new generation is an
exceptionalism looking for definition, and a strategy of
slogans rather than national purpose. It is not that this
generation is obsessed by the debates of the Vietnam war, with
which it is largely unfamiliar. Nor does it have feelings of
guilt about self-interest, which it pursues strenuously in its
economic activities. But it has little knowledge of history or
of national policy and hence lacks a sense of direction in the
international political arena.

When I was in graduate school, public service was considered
a high calling. In the globalized economic world, the post-
Cold War generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to
Washington. This is not only a question of financial
renumeration but, in part, is also due to the reluctance to

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enter a calling marked by battles that leave too many victims,
and which turns too many of its political disputes into
matters of criminal law. Abdication from politics threatens
American exceptionalism [with] an erratic reliance on a world
that runs itself by more or less automatic economic forces. It
is possible to believe this because our world has, in fact,
been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war.
And in such a world, American leaders are tempted to define
national interest in terms of instructing the rest of the
world in the advantages of free trade, non-proliferation and
human rights, and to turn negotiations into attempts to
achieve compliance with an American agenda.

When economic and military power in a democracy is coupled
with condescension and righteousness, dominance becomes
grating and leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony -
which, nearly automatically, elicits resistance. In addition,

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the legacy of Vietnam remains [in the form of] a fear of domestic convulsions and a recoil[ing] before the decisive use of American power. And that, paradoxically by its very hesitations, ends up making crises more frequent (which is why the Clinton Administration has been drawn into more military operations abroad than any previous administration).

The post-Vietnam generation is inheriting the intellectual vacuum created by the paralysis left by the Vietnam factional disputants. Economics will not provide a safe haven from the need for a national strategy. The globalized world will emerge only by way of dislocations and new tensions, both within and among societies. The nation state remains the unit of political accountability - even while it is itself in a process of transition. In many regions of the world, the nation state is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic subgroupings or by joining larger regional groupings. And the

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proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a
challenge faced by no previous society.

Yet if our new generation of national leaders is embarrassed
to deal with the concept of national interest or with the
unapologetic use of power as a last resort, it will
demonstrate not moral elevation but progressive paralysis.
Certainly any concept of national interest would not be
American if it did not derive motivation from America's
democratic tradition or its concern with collective security.
But it must also be prepared to face up to some hard questions
imposed by reality.

What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter
how painful the means? What, to be true to ourselves, must we
seek to accomplish no matter how small the attainable
consensus and, if necessary, alone? What wrongs is it

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essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not
compelled by the [national interest]?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy - or be able to
meet our new challenges - until we can achieve a national
consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect
among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the
Vietnam period, that they are engaged in a common enterprise
rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may
be able to evade these [issues] during the national campaign
about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them
once he enters the Oval Office.

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1

3389 WORDS

KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE 4/16/00

Not too long ago, former President Gerald Ford and I were
reminiscing about his Presidency and our respective
experiences in government service. And we concluded that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred (with) the passage
of time. But we had shared one experience that will never lose
its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last
Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from
the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of
frenetic activity, showing images of officious aides ripping
telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying
subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the
stillness induced by {awareness} that choices are narrowing.

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2

The number of those involved in decisions shrinks to ~~one~~ three

one; still in a position to affect events, their solitude

magnified because, the more severe the crisis, the fewer

volunteers there are willing to assume responsibility.

Thus it was that, on that final day in April 1975, Ford and
I were quite alone; he in the Oval Office, I in the Security
Advisor's suite down the hall, interrupted only by the
periodic phone call as the Pentagon reported the departure of
each helicopter. Freed from other duties, we had become
spectators of events we could no longer influence, suspended
between a pain we could not still and a future we were not yet
in a position to shape.

in a position to shape.

For those who [have] lived through the final day, any account must
appear fragmentary and dominated by the perspective of
wherever the author found himself as chaos engaged in a struggle for
cessation of fire. For those who were spared the years of American efforts to
surrender.

For a while we had to stop. The interdepartmental
debate which marked the end of the tragedy: whether
to speed up the withdrawal of the last fewbulldozers and engineers
needed using or to stick it out and permit the movement
of a number of Vietnam veterans to escape while they give up on
reports of VC advances to the north and other VC advances

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3
curmoil and the anguish, the passions will seem
incomprehensible. And history is no help, since the writing of
it [has] replicated the bitter schisms that opened up during
that tragedy. Radical critics endlessly repeat their litany of
bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted
psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal
aberration or sublimates it to the strident anti-communism of
converts to conservatism who, in reality, had been on the
radical side while the war was going on, and who have their
own reasons for avoiding its memory. Reluctant to come to
grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half
century, Americans find it difficult to draw the real
lessons from what America did to itself during that sad
period.

I will therefore concentrate on what America did to itself
when it was a victim of the Vietnam tragedy: what it did to
during that sad period. For the real victim of that [era] was

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American exceptionalism - the faith in the universality of our values - and the impact this has had on the conduct of American foreign policy.

## Entering Indo China and Leaving It

It was what has been described as the "greatest generation" that entered Indo China in the heyday of American exceptionalism in pursuit of the strategy with which it had stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe, restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, American strategy concentrated on <u>promoting</u> <u>stopping</u> Soviet aggression and <u>economic and social progress</u> in regions under American protection to remove communist opportunities for internal upheavals.

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5

Though the conduct of the Cold War is often presented as if
it had been based on nearly unanimous consensus, there was
always significant opposition, especially in the intellectual
and academic communities. They argued either that the
communist threat was exaggerated, or that the United States
was associating with too many questionable regimes to sustain
its claim as a defender of liberty. But their critique was
confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the
validity of the American experience.

By the advent of the Kennedy Administration, this policy was
given its most sweeping formulation in the new president's
inaugural address, to the effect that the United States would
"bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend,
oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of
liberty." There was no opposition to that open-ended

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commitment, or to the conventional wisdom that Indo China was
an essential outpost in the defense of liberty.

In the interregnum between presidencies, President Dwight
Eisenhower recommended to his successor military intervention
in Laos if North Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month
of his inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand,
adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though
the CIA was used for covert measures). But when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and
intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand
US military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1962. President
Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over
five hundred thousand by the time he left office. Initially, there
was no significant opposition, either within or outside the
Administration, to that massive deployment. Though later on
the decision was blamed on Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's

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closest advisers - McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean Rusk - who urged that escalation.

By the end of the Johnson Administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous American war of wearing down the adversary by attrition, could not succeed against guerrillas defending no territory and therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor could any of the non-communist countries of Indo China be called a democracy, by any stretch of the imagination. For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing emotional insecurity and self-doubt compounded the despair and doubt about the entire political process. Triggers were set for a wake of the assassination of their hero, John F. Kennedy.

While the leaders were seized by doubt and paralysis, the critics went ever further toward challenging the very essence of American foreign involvement. The argument that the war was

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unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits escalated almost as rapidly as the American deployment. The military argument seen left the plane of how to find an honorable way out, to the proposition that, morally, there was little difference between Hanoi and Saigon. Since they saw no moral justification in protesting the war, the critics argued that pursuit of what was ultimately cause of the war involved was not an error in judgment but a moral rot at the core of the American way of life. The victory of the communists in Indo China, which three administrations of both parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became for the radical protest nothing less than a desirable national catharsis. The critique expanded from the worthiness of America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America, not only in Vietnam but globally. Vietnam became the first war in which prominent Americans visited the enemy capital to oppose their own country during highly publicized visits.

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By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines were drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication, leaving the field to the protesters or joining them in the argument that extrication was prevented, above all, by the short-sightedness and warped mentality of America's leaders. The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods chosen to pursue their aims. Indeed, they considered rules of conduct as the invention of a system they meant to overthrow. By street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all authorities, from universities to the US government, which they blamed for America's alleged crimes, they sought to wreck any policy designed to vindicate in Vietnam the values on which America's post-World War II policy had been based. (We have [had] a small reminder of these methods in the Seattle and Washington)

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a similar split in the political schism was sharpened by the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened their taste for political power. After Kennedy's assassination, they sought to shape the immediate issues from the outside, in the process of developing into two groups - the job applicants and the revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

## Vietnam's Legacy

The split has never been healed. The tension of ideology and in American exceptionalism, the strategy of the early Cold War period has been broken. Though by all standards, the policies of the United States are principles of American exceptionalism, continues to be affirmed in its

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the hard-headed strategy with which he pursued the 1980s
equivalent of a containment policy [yet] with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to
the post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. They
seem torn - especially in the neo-conservative group - between
searching for [some] equivalent danger [to] the Soviet Union,
in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized; or
[the pursuit of] American exceptionalism in a global crusade for
democracy + free markets.
But China - the target for this effort - is as yet too weak,
it's ideology for national security
too unideological and its potential danger too distant to
allow foreign policy to be organized on this basis or it be
reconciled with a concert of powers. And pursuit of hegemony
has always exhausted any country attempting it, both
domestically and, eventually, internationally. To be true to
itself, America must always stand for democracy; but to shape
the world, it must also be able to understand both its

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---

(4)

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liberals who insisted that the absence of a purely American interest was ~~the ultimate justification~~ for the enterprise.

But six months later, Chechnya proved that even universalists ~~L~~ L for fear of Russian power must learn the maxim that foreign policy is the art of the possible.

By the same token, the Clinton Administration's attitude is [shown by] the differential treatment of [its] two military operations in 1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling the UN inspectors placed ~~after best~~ there ~~at our insistence.~~ We responded by bombing for four days. But [in 1999] we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight ~~all months later~~

~~but~~ an operation was undertaken with a reluctance to accept casualties that ultimately conveyed to the American public the

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20

What Vietnam has bequeathed to the new generation is an
<u>one in read</u> of <u>no less</u> <u>appreciation</u> <u>appraisal</u> by an
<u>exceptionalism</u> looking for <u>definition</u>, and a strategy of
<u>seclusion</u> and <u>reticence</u> in quest of a strategy
<u>slogans</u> rather than <u>national purpose</u>. It is not that this
generation is obsessed by the debates of the Vietnam war, with
which it is largely unfamiliar. Nor does it have feelings of
guilt about self-interest, which it pursues strenuously in its
economic activities. But it has little knowledge of history or
of national policy and hence lacks a sense of direction in the
international political arena.

When I was in graduate school, public service was considered
<u>a high calling</u>. In the globalized economic world, the post-
Cold War generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to <u>service</u> in
Washington. This is not only a question of financial
renumeration but, in part, is also <u>due to the reluctance to</u>
<u>selectivity</u>.

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enter a calling marked by battles that leave too many victims,
and which turns too many of its political disputes into
matters of criminal law. Abduction from politics threatens
American exceptionalism (with an erratic reliance on a world
that runs itself by more or less automatic economic forces. It
is possible to believe this because our world has, in fact,
been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war.

(letter from the protected movement or from business schools) is

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T-875

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24

essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not compelled by the National interest?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy - or be able to meet our new challenges - until we can achieve a national consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the Vietnam period, that they are engaged in a common enterprise rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may be able to evade these issues during the national campaign about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them once he enters the Oval Office.

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1

3389 WORDS

Not too long ago, former President Gerald Ford and I were
reminiscing about his Presidency and our respective
experiences in government service. And we concluded that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred [with] the passage
of time. But we had shared one experience that will never lose
its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last
Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from
the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of
frenetic activity, showing images of officious aides ripping
telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying
subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the
stillness induced by [awareness] that choices are narrowing.

10/25/2000

2

The number of those involved in decisions shrinks to [the ones] still in a position to affect events, their solitude magnified because, the more severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers there are willing to assume responsibility.

Thus it was that, on that final day in April 1975, Ford and I were quite alone; he in the Oval Office, I in the Security Advisor's suite down the hall, interrupted only by the periodic phone call as the Pentagon reported the departure of each helicopter. Freed of other duties, we had become spectators of events we could no longer influence, suspended between a pain we could not still and a future we were not yet in a position to shape.

For those who [have] lived through it, any account must appear fragmentary and dominated by the perspective of wherever the author found himself as chaos concluded two? years of American efforts. For those who were spared the

(4)

3

turmoil and the anguish, the passions will seem
incomprehensible. And history is no help, since the writing of
it [has] replicated the bitter schisms that opened up during
that tragedy. Radical critics endlessly repeat their litany of
bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted
psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal
aberration or sublimates it to the strident anti-communism of
converts to conservatism who, in reality, had been on the
radical side while the war was going on, and who have their
own reasons for avoiding its memory. Reluctant to come to
grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half
century, America[ns] find it difficult to draw the real
lessons from what America did to itself during that sad
period.

I will therefore concentrate on what America did to itself
during that sad period. For the real victim of that [era] was

00

4

It was what has been described as the "greatest generation" that entered Indo China in the heyday of American exceptionalism in pursuit of the strategy with which it had stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe, restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, American strategy concentrated on stopping Soviet aggression and economic and social progress in regions under American protection to remove communist opportunities for internal upheavals.

(4)

5

6

In the interregnum between presidencies, President Dwight
Eisenhower recommended to his successor military intervention
in Laos if North Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month
of his inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand,
adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though
the CIA was used for covert measures). But when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and
intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand
US military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1962. President
Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over
five hundred thousand by the time he left office. Again, there
was no significant opposition, either within or outside the
Administration, to that massive deployment. Though later on
the decision was blamed on Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's

(4)

By the end of the Johnson Administration, frustration had
set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous
American war of wearing down the adversary by attrition, could
not succeed against guerrillas defending no territory and
therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor
could any of the non-communist countries of Indo China be
called a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. For
those who had made the decision to send American troops,
growing emotional insecurity and self-doubt compounded the
despair and doubt about the entire political process in the
wake of the assassination of their hero, John F. Kennedy.

00

8

(4)

9

(4)

10

(4)

11

(4)

12

13

The political schism was sharpened by the intellectual
community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely
achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to
affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-
range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened their taste
for political power. After Kennedy's assassination, they
sought to shape the immediate issues from the outside, in the
process splitting into two groups - the job applicants and the
revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of
the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the arguments of the
protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to
helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

Vietnam's Legacy

(M)

14

O

15

defend the free world until the collapse of communism, which was considered inevitable. When, under the impact of Vietnam, liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of strategy and redefined exceptionalism in terms of "soft issues" such as environment and human rights - which could be achieved without the use of military power - traditional American strategy was vindicated by conservatives and neo-conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on rigorous anti-communism and extreme toughness on negotiations dealing with strategic balance, especially arms control negotiations. And in the Reagan Administration, against an adversary weakened by decades of overextension, it achieved great successes.

16

(Y)

18

19

(4)

20

(4)

21

22

23

10

24

6

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3389 WORDS

Not too long ago, former President Gerald Ford and I were
reminiscing about his Presidency and our respective
experiences in government service. ~~We agreed~~ and we concluded that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred [with] the passage
of time. But we had shared one experience that will never lose
its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last
Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from
the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of
frenetic activity, ~~showing images of~~ officious aides ripping
telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying
subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the
stillness induced by [awareness] that choices are narrowing.

N.B. I didn't have time to do much more this time, but I'm happy to look at further drafts.

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The number of those involved in decisions shrinks to [the once] still in a position to affect events, their solitude magnified because, the more severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers there are (willing) to assume responsibility.

For those who [have] lived through it, any account must appear fragmentary and dominated by the perspective of wherever the author found himself as chaos (concluded two? decades of a major commitment. [Years ago] American efforts) For those who were spared the

04/17/00

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P.03/24

bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal aberration or sublimates it to the strident anti-communism of converts to conservatism who, in *some cases*, had been on the

anti-war (radical) side while the war was going on, and who have their own reasons for avoiding its memory. Reluctant to come to grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half century, Americans find it difficult to draw the real lessons from what America did to itself during that sad period.

That, however, will be my subject here. For, one of *the* will therefore concentrate on what America did to itself the most important casualty (during that sad period) for the real victim of that era was

04/17/00

MON 13:27 FAX 202 887 5222

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c12 4213934

It was what has been described as the "greatest generation" that entered Indo China in the heyday of American exceptionalism, in pursuit of the strategy with which it had stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe, restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, American strategy concentrated on stopping Soviet aggression and economic and social progress in regions under American protection to remove communist opportunities for internal subversion.

04/17/00

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American

5

Though the conduct of the Cold War is often presented as if it had been based on nearly unanimous consensus, there was always significant opposition, especially in the intellectual and academic communities. They argued either that the communist threat was exaggerated, or that the United States was associating with too many questionable regimes to sustain its claim as a defender of liberty. [But their critique was confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the validity of the American experience.]

By the advent of the Kennedy Administration, this policy was given its most sweeping formulation in the new president's inaugural address, to the effect that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." There was no opposition to that open-ended

There were a few radical exceptions. For example, Appleman Williams, et al.

Full quote!

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commitment, or to the conventional wisdom that Indo-China was
an essential outpost in the defense of liberty.

In the interregnum between presidencies, President Dwight
Eisenhower recommended to his successor military intervention
in Laos if North Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month
of his inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand,
adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though
the CIA was used for covert measures). But when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and
intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand
US military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1961. President
Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over
five hundred thousand by the time he left office. Again, there
was no significant opposition, either within or outside the
Administration, to that massive deployment. Though later on
the decision was blamed on Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's

04/17/00

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we were defending in
live up to the
(Don't be too high)
(Did we say the highest country in the world called a democracy by any stretch of the imagination?)
(Indo-China)
(Standard of democracy.)
For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing emotional insecurity and self-doubt compounded the despair and doubt about the entire political process in the wake of the assassination of their hero, John F. Kennedy.

04/17/00 MON 13:30 FAX 202 887 5222

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8

unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits
escalated almost as rapidly as the American deployment. The
argument soon left the plane of how to find an honorable way
out to the proposition that, morally, there was little
(That Hanoi was morally superior).
difference between Hanoi and Saigon, Since they saw no moral
basis for the war, the critics argued that pursuit of (what was
involved) was not an error in judgment but a moral rot at the
core of the American way of life. (The Victory of the
communists in Indo-China, which three administrations of both
parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became
for the radical protest nothing less than a desirable national
catharsis. The critique expanded from the worthiness of
America's allies to (challenging) the worthiness of America, not
only in Vietnam but globally. Vietnam became the first war in
which prominent Americans (visited) the enemy capital to oppose
their (own) country, (during highly publicized visits)

O

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By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines were drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication, honorable, desirable, and achievable. They left (though the field to the protesters, or joining) them in the immediate argument that extrication was prevented, above all, by the new administration's short-sightedness and warped mentality of America's leaders.

The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods of pursuing their aims. (Indeed, they considered rules of conduct as the invention of a system they meant to overthrow.) By street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all authorities, from universities to the US government, which they blamed for America's (alleged) crimes, they sought to wreck any policy that might (designed to) vindicate in Vietnam the values on which America's entire post-World War II policy had been based. (We have had a recently small reminder of these methods in the Seattle and Washington,

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10

D.C. protests against the global economic system.) Nixon, who for all his railing against the Establishment was a product of the "greatest generation," did not have the human qualities (with which) to transcend this gulf, if indeed it was bridleable.

But now that (all the) documents and records of the negotiations are becoming available, some historians will sooner or later feel obliged to credit Nixon for his untiring effort to keep from compounding defeat by dishonor. To this day, the liberal critique accuses him of needlessly prolonging the war, implying that there was some honorable way out that Nixon refused to take.

What the Nixon Administration would not accept was a (political) as a negotiated outcome.

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11

Process guaranteeing a Hanoi-dominated communist government.

The records will show that we sought, and offered, a variety
of formulas to permit the people of South Vietnam a genuine
choice. What we would not accept - and what, until the end,
Hanoi never ceased demanding - was our simple
millions who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors,
had thrown in their lot with the United States. Hanoi's

admirant rejection of any [of a] variety of [free choices for] the people
of South Vietnam is the reason for the prolongation of our

Nixon does not credit for having pulled U.S. forces
out of Vietnam gradually but steadily while a negotiated
promise of extricating America from Vietnam (which no serious
compromise was being pursued.)

observer of his record could have interpreted as involving
unilateral withdrawal. He reduced American casualties from
twelve hundred a month at the end of the Johnson

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12

Administration to thirty a month at the end of Nixon's first term; and unilaterally withdrew American troops from five hundred fifty thousand to thirty thousand. And of the twenty thousand casualties Nixon is accused of "sacrificing needlessly" twelve thousand were incurred in the first year[s] and nine thousand in the first six months, when Hanoi cynically greeted the new Administration with a countrywide offensive, before the Administration was even organized.

A balanced judgment (on the self-flagellation) on Vietnam is not a question of historical justice [toward] individual presidents, but of historical justice [toward] a national experience. Mistakes should be debated and admitted. But when they are transformed into assaults on the entire system and the good faith of all leaders, the national purpose ultimately suffers. America owes itself an objective assessment of that Vietnam experience, which has not yet happened.

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001

13

The political schism was sharpened by the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened their taste for political power, and they sought to shape the immediate policy decisions from the outside. In the process, they split the job applicants and the revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

## Vietnam's Legacy

The split has never been healed. The fusion of ideology and strategy has sustained us in the early Cold War period. Though American exceptionalism continues to be affirmed, its

04/17/00. MON 13:40

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- And, a new generation that does not remember [and] has
[SIDE BY SIDE] the Vietnam schism, and [NOW] faces a world
radically different from both the Cold War and the Vietnam
protest perceptions. This generation, largely focussed on
economic issues, has not yet developed either an ideology or a
strategy for a world radically different from that of the Cold
War.

The Cold War policy combined faith in the universality of
American values (allied) with a strategy to "contain" search and

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encroachments. 15
(Reend the free world until the collapse of communism, which was considered inevitable when) Under the impact of Vietnam, however, liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of over time, they American strategy, and redefined exceptionalism in terms of "soft issues" such as environment and human rights - which could be achieved without the use of military power. Traditional American strategy was indicated by conservatives and neo-

conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on rigorous anti-communism and extreme toughness on negotiations dealing with strategic balance, especially arms control.

(Negotiations) And in the Reagan Administration, against an adversary weakened by decades of overextension, it achieved great successes.

04/17/00 MON 13:54 FAA 202 667 5222

GOLDENHUNTER

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equivalent of a containment policy. [Yet] with the collapse of
the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to
the post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. They
seem torn - especially in the neo-conservative group - between
searching for (some) equivalent danger [to] the Soviet Union,
in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized; or
else vindication for democracy.

the pursuit of American exceptionalism in a global crusade,

But China - the target for this effort - is as yet too weak,
too unideological and its potential danger too distant to
allow foreign policy to be organized on this basis (especially if
we wish to have allies with us).

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By far the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is the conclusion the liberal community has drawn from the Vietnam war, as exemplified by the Clinton Administration. It treats the Cold War as a misunderstanding, if not an American creation. It recoils before the concept of national interest and shrinks before the use of power [unless] it can present it [as being] in the service of some "unselfish" cause - that is to say, no more in the interest of America than of anyone else. On many occasions [and many continents], President Clinton has apologized for American support of past authoritarian leaders [due to being] in Africa during what he always derogatorily describes as "Cold War preoccupations." [But] where did America suppress democratic alternatives, since almost all the first-generation leaders of Africa emerged from the independence struggle? And

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demOCRATIc who took dramatic steps threatening Western oil supplies and legalized the Communist party in the middle of the Korean war, when there was a legitimate fear of Stalinist subversion in many regions of the world?

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19

Just as symptomatic of By the same token, the Clinton Administration's attitude is its (known by) the differential treatment of [its] two military operations in 1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling the UN inspectors placed there at our insistence. We responded by bombing for four days. But [in 1999] we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight days even though the traditional American national interest was far less clearly involved. And in each case, the operation was undertaken with a reluctance to accept casualties, which ultimately conveyed to the American public the

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APR-16-200E 23:00

GOLDHAMMER

21

enter a calling marked by battles that leave too many victims, and which turns too many of its political disputes into matters of criminal law. ~~This~~ Abduction from politics threatens ~~to turn~~

~~complex~~ American exceptionalism (with) an erratic reliance on a world that runs itself by more or less automatic economic forces. It is possible to believe this because our world has, in fact, been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war.

And in such a world, American leaders ~~are tempted to defining~~ may imagine that for some policy consists merely in national interest in terms of instructing the rest of the world in the advantages of free trade, non-proliferation and human rights, ~~and to turn~~ demands for negotiations into attempts to ~~achieve~~ compliance with an American agenda.

~~such vast~~

When economic and military power in a democracy is coupled with condescension and righteousness, dominance becomes grating and leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony - which, nearly automatically, elicits resistance. ~~(In addition,~~

(4)

APR-16-2001 23:01

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the legacy of Vietnam <ins>remains</ins> [in the form of] a fear of domestic convulsions and a recoil[ing] before the decisive use of American power, <ins>which</ins> and that paradoxically by its very hesitations, ends up making crises more frequent (which is why the Clinton Administration has been drawn into more military operations abroad than any previous administration).

The post-Vietnam generation is inheriting the intellectual vacuum created by the paralysis left by the Vietnam factional disputes. Economics will not provide a safe haven from the need for a national strategy. The globalized world will emerge only by way of dislocations and new tensions, both within and among societies. The nation state remains the unit of political accountability - even while it is itself in a process of transition. In many regions of the world, the nation state is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic subgroupings or by joining larger regional groupings. And the

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004

24
--
essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not
compelled by the [national interest]?

10

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RE:
Article

NOTES/COMMENTS:

Apr-17-00 03:52P Bremer

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1 of 3

Henry

April 16

It is a good article, with an especially powerful opening.

General comments

1. I am not sure that there are in fact three groups now vying to define American foreign policy--in particular whether the third group(top pg 12) really exists. If it does, I don't think the article makes the case clearly. When you describe this group(top of page 19) they wind up sounding a lot like Clintonites, whom you have previously and correctly identified as the anti-Vietnam group two. In fact, at the end of the long para on pg 19, you essentially identify Clinton as one of them.

2. Which brings me to the second point: as you know, there is a large overlap between groups one and two--both believe in American exceptionalism, both believe America's goal should be to promote American values and democracy, etc. Even the promotion of "soft issues(which you identify as a goal of the right--pg 12 middle-- though the left certainly would claim paternity.). It is not even clear to me that there are major differences between them on the application of American force, since many noe-cons were cheering Kosovo.

3. If there is not a "third group", then perhaps the focus of the end of the article should be on the need for such a group which can find the political philosophy appropriate to the challenges America today faces and for which neither of the two groups' answers are adequate(as you suggest on pages 20-21).

4. The section on the right(pgs 13-14, could be sharpened a bit. First the trigger event was not really the end of Reagan but the collapse of the Soviet Union. To make the section clearer, you might then say that this event faced the right with two alternatives: either finding a new enemy or seeking hegemony(your description bottom page 14 belongs at the beginning of the section).

Apr-17-00 03:52P Bremer

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threatening Western oil supplies and legalized..."

7. pg 16, next para-the apologies now cover 50 years (actually 250 if you count slavery).

8. top pg 20-not clear what you mean by economics not providing a refuge--from what?

LPB

Apr-17-00 03:53P Bremer

APR-15-2000 22:41

GULDHHITTEK

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1

2511 WORDS

KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE 4/15/00

Former President Gerald Ford and I were reminiscing the other day about his Presidency and our respective <u>reveries</u> to the government. And we concluded that even the high points have a way of becoming remote with the passage of time. But one experience will never lose its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from the roof of the American embassy.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of frantic activity, with officious aides ripping telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the stillness that settles over the process. The number of those involved in

Apr-17-00 03:53P Bremer

HMK-13-2000 22:41

GOLDEN HILLER

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2
decisions shrinks to those who are still in a position to
affect events, their solitude magnified because the more
severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers are prepared to assume
responsibility.

So on this last day, Ford and I were alone; he in the Oval
Office, I in the Security Adviser's suite down the hall,
interrupted only by periodic phone calls as the Pentagon
reported the departure of each helicopter. We were freed of
other duties, suspended between a pain we could not still and
a future we were not yet in a position to shape.

It is impossible to recreate the mood of that period. For
those who lived through it, my account must appear fragmentary
and dominated by the perspective of the author. For those who
were spared the turmoil of the time, the passions will seem
incomprehensible. And history is no help, since it replicates
the schisms that opened up during that tragedy. Radical

Apr-17-00 03:53P Bremer

APR-15-2000 22:41

GULDMAMTEX

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F.03/10

critics endlessly repeat their version of bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a literal abdication or sublimates it in a strident anti-communism of converts to conservatism who had, in effect, been on the radical side while the war was going on.

I will therefore desist from dissecting the events that had brought us to this pass - shelves in libraries are filled with them. Nor can I do more than assert our sadness for the victims of the tragedy and melancholy for what America had done to itself. Instead, I will deal with what the trauma of Vietnam, of which the departure from Saigon was the culmination, did to the way American foreign policy has been conducted over time.

It was what has been described as the "great generation" that entered Indo China in the heyday of American

Apr-17-00 03:53P Bremer

APR-15-2000 22:41

GOLDHAMMER

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4

exceptionalism - the faith in the universality of its values -
and material power. It pursued the strategy with which it had
stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe,
restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and
stopped the Soviet advance into Europe. A mixture of the
experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the
New Deal, American strategy concentrated on stopping Soviet
aggression and closing the gap between expectation and reality
in regions under American protection to remove communist
opportunities for internal upheavals. Though in retrospect the
conduct of the Cold War is presented as if based on a nearly
unanimous consensus, there was always significant opposition,
especially in the intellectual and academic communities, that
argued either that the Communist threat was exaggerated, or
that the United States was associating with too many

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But the advent of the Kennedy Administration, the
containment policy was given its most sweeping formulation in
the new president's inaugural address, to the effect that the
United States "would support any friend, oppose any foe to
assure the survival and success of liberty." There was no
opposition to that open-ended commitment, or to the
conventional wisdom that Indo China was an essential outpost
in the defense of liberty. In the interregnum between
presidencies, President Dwight Eisenhower had recommended to
his successor military intervention in Laos if North
Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month of his
inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand, adjoining
Laos. He recoiled from intervening but when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and

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intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand
military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1962. President Lyndon
Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over five
hundred thousand by the time he left office. Again, there was
no significant opposition either within or outside the
Administration. Though later on the decision was blamed on
Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's closest advisers - Bundy,
McNamara and Rusk - who urged that step.

By the end of the Johnson Administration, frustration had
set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous
American war, of wearing down the adversary by attrition, did
not work against guerrillas who could choose when to fight.
And none of the non-communist countries of Indo China could be
called a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. For
those who had entered the war, the result was growing
emotional insecurity and self-doubt, compounded by the

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assassination of Kennedy who made many of his acolytes doubt
the entire political process.

But while the leaders were host to paralysis, the critics
went ever further toward challenging the very basis of
American policy. Starting with the argument that the war was
unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits,
critics rapidly extended their critique from looking for an
honorable way out to two planes - that morally there was
little difference between Hanoi and Saigon, and that there was
no ideological basis for the war and, in time, that pursuit of
the war reflected not an error in judgment but a moral rot at
the core of the American system. The victory of the Communists
in Indo China, which three administrations of both parties had
sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became for the
radical protest nothing less than a desirable national
catharsis. The critique shifted from the worthiness of

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5. on pg 15, you should add, because they deserve to be reminded of it always, that the left likes to pretend that foreign policy was "easy" during the Cold War, and that there were few disagreements about how to conduct it. Yet the left was wrong on every major foreign policy issue from the Vietnam war to the Gulf War.

Other points

1. pg3-You say you won't spend time dissecting events, but then do so from pg 4-11. Perhaps this para should be redone to say that you want to discuss how Vietnam has effected American Foreign policy, and to understand that, a little history of our involvement in Vietnam is necessary.

2. pg4 top-your description of the philosophy of the "great generation" sounds a lot like today--belief in the universality of our values and material power(which given our domination of the "new economy may even be relatively greater today than it was 50 years ago). Which is why the two groups you describe begin to resemble one another. In fact, one could call their philosophy "the New American Exceptionalism"

3. pgs6-7: Somewhat contradictory on when opposition to Vietnam began. Pg 6 says "no significant opposition", while top page 7 speaks of basic challenges to the policy. Certainly by the end of the Johnson administration there was a large movement on campuses, at least, opposed to the war.

4. top pg 9-what "qualities" were there which Nixon or anyone could have brought to bear?

5. pg 11, end of first para: "...contributed little to helping America escape..." Otherwise it sounds as if you mean you and Nixon. It was after all an American tragedy.

6. top pg 16-"..to an Iranian leader who took dramatic steps

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B

By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines
were drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched
us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication
and left the field to the protesters, or joined them in the
argument that extrication was prevented above all by the
short-sightedness and psychological warp of America's leaders.
The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority,
saw no need for restraint in the methods to pursue their aims.
By street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all
authorities, from universities to the US government, which
they blamed for America's dilemma, they sought to wreck the
basis for any policy seeking to vindicate the values on which
America's post-World War II policy had been based. Nixon, who
for all his railing against the Establishment was a product of

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thrown in their lot with the United States. This is why, in
liberal and much media rendition of events, Nixon never
receives credit for having substantially carried out his
promise of extricating America from Vietnam: he reduced
American casualties from twelve hundred a month at the end of
the Johnson Administration to thirty a month at the end of
Nixon's first term; and American troops from five hundred
fifty thousand to thirty thousand. And of the twenty thousand
casualties Nixon is accused of sacrificing needlessly, twelve
thousand were incurred in the first year and nine thousand in
the first six months, when Hanoi launched an offensive before
the Administration was even organized.

The political schism was matched by that in the intellectual
community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely
achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to
affect policy, they had to write medium? or lengthy papers.

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11

But with the advent of the Kennedy Administration, they developed a sense for power, and with Kennedy's assassination they sought to shape the immediate issues, splitting into job applicants and revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the disuccisons of the policymakers and the revolutionaries the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to helping us escape from the tragedy.

The split has never been healed. Since the Vietnam war, there have been three main currents in American foreign policy.

- The remnants of the Cold War strategy of the 1950s and 1960s, now enunciated mostly by conservative and neo-conservative groupings.

- The acolytes of the protest movement, who came to office in the Clinton Administration.

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And the other alternative, the conduct of an ideological foreign policy to spread human rights and democracy as a means to establish an international order, confuses America's necessary motivations with an achievable short-term policy. It is unhistorical in the sense that organically pacific democracies emerged only at the end of a long process of evolution, while, in the early stages of democratization, an appeal to nationalism and ethnicity has frequently been used as a unifying force, as for example in the case of Vladimir Putin in Russia.

The end of a major adversary should neither lead to the artificial evocation of one nor to the transformation of American foreign policy into a crusade in pursuit of a hegemony that has always exhausted any country attempting it, both domestically and, eventually, internationally. To be true to itself, America must always stand for democracy; but to

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shape the world, it must also be able to define its interests and its limits and not be afraid to define either.

But the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is the conclusion the liberal community has drawn from the Vietnam war, as exemplified by most of the key figures in the Clinton Administration. They treat the Cold War as a misunderstanding if not an American creation. They recoil before the concept of national interest and shrink before the use of power when they can present it as an "unselfish" cause, that is to say, no more in the interest of America than of anyone else. On many occasions, all over Africa and in many places in Europe, President Clinton has apologized for American support of leaders due to its Cold War preoccupations. But where in Africa did America suppress democratic alternatives since almost all the first generation leaders had emerged from the independence struggle? And why should America apologize for

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16

hostility to an Iranian leader who legalized the Communist party in the middle of the Korean war, when there was a world wide fear of communist subversion?

The apologetic tone toward twenty years of American history is matched by an uneasiness with the use of power. This is illustrated by the difference with which America's inconclusiveness in the Gulf war was treated as compared to Kosovo. The Gulf war was conducted on behalf of the national interest in uninterrupted supplies of oil for America and the industrial democracies. But it received at best lukewarm support from Congressional liberals, with the final vote in the Senate very narrow.

On Kosovo, the attitudes were reversed. It was the conservatives who inquired into the national interest and the liberals who insisted that the absence of a purely American interest was the ultimate justification for the enterprise.

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Symptomatic of the Administration's attitude is the differential treatment of the two military operations of 1998-99. Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling the UN inspectors placed there at our insistence. We responded by bombing for four days. But we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight days even though the traditional national interest was less clearly involved. And in each case, the operation was [undertaken] with a reluctance to accept casualties. What was ultimately conveyed to the public [was] that, no matter what our leaders affirmed, no vital interest was at stake since Americans surely would not recoil from casualties in defense of vital interests.