The Nixon Effect. Douglas E. Schoen
overtures to Beijing and then to Moscow. More significantly, the American public widely approved of Nixon’s policies, seeing them as courageous efforts to reduce tensions and maintain a fragile peace. On foreign relations, as on domestic policy, Americans saw Nixon as a responsible centrist, a leader poised between irresponsible ideologues to his right and left.
This is not to suggest that the SALT agreements were without flaws. For one thing, the agreements, in “limiting” arms, played a bit with semantics—in that the limits applied to missile production that was already underway. And while the limits applied to the missiles, they did not apply to what were called MIRVs—multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles—the payloads that carried multiple warheads. Thus the Soviets and Americans could still add as many MIRVs as they liked, even if the number of missiles and missile launchers was capped. Both sides could thus produce warheads to an unlimited capacity. As Stephen Ambrose put it, overall SALT was “about as meaningful as freezing the cavalry of the European nations in 1938 but not the tanks.”32
Yet Ambrose also crystalized why SALT was so important in 1972:
For all the flaws, for all that he could have driven a harder bargain, for all that he had failed to freeze, much less reduce, nuclear arsenals and delivery systems, Nixon had achieved a symbolic breakthrough, namely that the two sides could set limits on their destructive capability. And he fully intended, in his second term, to move from that position to a treaty that would lead to reductions. Even more important, he had established a wholly new basis for the arms race. The ABM Treaty signified the acceptance by both sides of the concept of deterrence through ‘mutual terror.’ In Nixon’s words, “By giving up missile defenses, each side was leaving its population and territory hostage to a strategic missile attack. Each side therefore had an ultimate interest in preventing a war that could only be mutually destructive.”[33] More than any other individual, Nixon was responsible for that breakthrough.34 (Note 33 transferred from original text.)
From Nixon’s perspective, the benefits of the ABM Treaty, both in national security and in political terms, turned out to be significant. Politically, the trip built on the momentum he already enjoyed from his China visit. Domestically, the concepts of arms control and reducing tensions with the Soviets enjoyed substantial support. However imperfect, the agreement would offer some hope that the superpowers might move away from years of brinksmanship and hostility. The president’s speech to the Soviet people, in which he said that “we shall sometimes be competitors, but we need never be enemies,”35 resonated with Americans back home as well. His approval rating shot into the low sixties.
To be sure, Nixon’s moves resulted in a permanent rift between him and the conservative Right, which already saw his toasts with Chinese totalitarians as shameful. And conservatives would always maintain that it was Ronald Reagan’s more-confrontational approach that really brought an end to the Cold War, a decade later, rather than Nixon’s deal making. After 1972, the president’s political capital as an anti-Communist was fully spent; but at least he had it to spend.
Nixon always felt that the conservative Right did not appreciate the context of what he had achieved—that it saw the arms deal monolithically, from the perspective of anti-Communism. He, by contrast, saw a multilayered playing field. His deal with Brezhnev helped get the Russians to back off from deepening the conflict in Vietnam. The Russians didn’t stand down by any means, but for the rest of 1972, when American bombing reached some of the heaviest levels in the history of warfare, the Soviets did not push back hard. The arms control agreements had bought if not their acquiescence, then at least their restraint. In Nixon’s hands, then, détente was a practical tool—not some dew-eyed vision of a president who didn’t understand the Communists’ true intentions. I would argue the contrary: Nixon’s détente grew out of a shrewd, tragic understanding of how power in the world worked, and a determination to pursue American national interests. And there is no question that his deals with the Chinese and the Russians, in addition to their other benefits, gave the United States the leverage it needed to end the Vietnam War.
For a brief period after the summit, the détente momentum kept up. Nixon kept a promise to Brezhnev to supply the USSR agricultural credits, and the Soviets reciprocated by purchasing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of American grain. Détente was useful in the short term, especially as Nixon eased the United States out of Vietnam.
But détente did not prove to have staying power. Whether the results would have been different had Nixon been able to finish his second term, we cannot know. What we do know is that in the hands of his White House successors, and also as a result of a series of adverse events, the new beginning Nixon and Kissinger had forged with the USSR came apart. Détente lost its relevance as the Soviet bear began to roar again.36
As American leadership waned in the hands of Gerald Ford and then Jimmy Carter, the Soviets, seeing an end to the Nixon era of strategic balance, began to reassert themselves, especially in Africa and South Asia. Ford did not have the political momentum to pursue Nixon’s foreign policy—in fact, Watergate was a serious blow to détente, as it not only discredited Nixon but also emboldened the Republican right wing, which had never supported the policy. Ford even banned use of the word détente during his 1976 presidential campaign.37 The Soviet-American relationship soured further with American pressure on Soviet human rights issues. Though Carter and Brezhnev signed the SALT II agreements—covering strategic nuclear arms—the agreement was not yet ratified by the US Congress when, in December 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. That brought an end to any hope for SALT II ratification.
Carter, who had prioritized human rights as the basis of his foreign policy for his first three years in office, now shifted to a more “realist” orientation in foreign policy and a more traditional Cold War footing with Moscow. American-Soviet relations moved to a new, more dangerous phase, and the resulting tensions contributed to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. And it was Reagan, as conservatives insist to this day, who went on to win the Cold War with his massive arms buildup, unrelenting resistance to Soviet expansionism, and rhetorical anti-Communism.
But imagine how Reagan might have fared if he faced a Soviet Union that didn’t have to worry about the growing cooperation between the United States and China. Nixon’s opening of China is the silent context for Reagan’s victory in the Cold War, the piece of the puzzle that you don’t hear much about. It fundamentally altered the Cold War’s balance of power, and the shift had a direct impact on the Soviet Union. Washington and Beijing even shared intelligence on the Russians.38 It’s not my intention to minimize Ronald Reagan’s accomplishments, or his leadership in helping to bring down the Soviet Union, but only to point out that Richard Nixon authored one of the crucial chapters in that story.
Visionary Realism
Ultimately, what Nixon’s foreign policy exemplified is the school of foreign-policy thinking described today as “realism,” an approach that emphasizes real-world realities; the balance of power; stability; and a prevailing focus on the national interest—at the expense of ideological frameworks, humanitarian rationales, or hugely ambitious, transformative goals. The foreign-policy realist sees order and predictability as worthwhile goals in themselves, even when that order and predictability are consistent with the presence of dictators or other undemocratic political rulers, because the realist believes that attempts to overthrow or replace such regimes may well lead to more violence and chaos and prove even less manageable than the current order.
As applied to the Cold War, the realists tended to be those who advocated for more constructive relationships with Communist powers, in the interest of minimizing tensions and creating a more manageable framework for coexistence. They clashed often with conservative hawks, who felt that Communism, and the Soviet Union in particular, should be resisted at every turn, and that the ultimate goal of American foreign policy should be an outright triumph in the Cold War. Realists rarely allowed themselves to think that big.
That’s a thumbnail version of foreign policy realism, anyway, but what’s important in considering Nixon is that he was no more married to a narrow conception of “realism” than he was to other schools of thought. You might say that Nixon was a realist’s realist—his prevailing approach was to adopt whatever