The Truman Administration, 1945-1953
As soon as the war came to an end, the United States began to reduce its armed forces, undertaking what amounted to a unilateral disarmament, but this process did not go as far as it had after most other wars. The nation was committed to occupations in Germany and Japan. Wartime agreements meant that the Soviet Union, Great Britain, and France shared the burden in Germany, but the United States became the sole occupying power in Japan, a reflection of its predominant role in the Pacific war. The necessity to occupy the defeated nations began the process that led to the maintenance of extensive armed forces during peacetime, but other influences, especially widespread instability in Europe and Asia, eventually forced the United States to make expenditures on military requirements in amounts unheard of in the past.
President Harry S. Truman recognized the need to revise obsolete national security legislation and spearheaded the unification of the armed forces that took place between 1947 and 1949. World War II confirmed one of the most important aspects of modern warfare--the need for careful coordination of land, sea, and air assets to cope with the complexity of military activity. The National Security Act of 1947 created the National Security Council (NSC), bringing together the principal officials charged with the conduct of national security affairs. After consulting the NSC, the president was empowered to set basic national policy and strategy. The law also created the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Office of Secretary of Defense to provide overall direction, and it made the air force an independent service, designating three service secretaries to lead the army, navy, and air force. The Joint Chiefs of Staff was formalized to provide a forum for interservice negotiations, but the legislation did not authorize a chair for the group of uniformed service chiefs. Experience soon showed that the new National Military Establishment did not provide sufficient leadership. Amendments in 1949 created the Department of Defense, providing the secretary of defense with an augmented staff and converting the three independent services into constituent departments of the larger organization. A chairman was provided for the JCS to enhance its ability to assist in coordinating defense matters. Only minor changes have been made since 1949. These arrangements did not fully integrate the services, but they strengthened the hand of the president in providing direction for the large peacetime forces that served at home and around the world.
This presidential capability was essential for the conduct of the cold war. At the end of World War II, only two great powers remained, the United States in the Americas and the Soviet Union in Eurasia. The two global struggles had destroyed all others, including Germany, Great Britain, France, and Japan. The bipolarity of international power led rapidly to a confrontation over the occupation of the power vacuums that existed at the extremities of Eurasia where the fighting had taken place. The United States strongly objected to Soviet measures that it deemed were intended eventually to establish Soviet domination of Eurasia, particularly the creation of satellite states in Eastern Europe. The Russians offered a parallel justification for their opposition to a continuing U. S. presence, the claim that this activity was part of a U. S. imperialist scheme to crush international socialism and create an imperium in Europe and Asia. The confrontation of Soviet and U. S. power ensured that the world would remain an armed camp for the indefinite future as the two superpowers maintained extraordinary peacetime military formations to support their diplomacy.
Following the Wilsonian formula, the United States had initially expected to exert its influence in world politics primarily through the United Nations, but the new international organization proved incapable of resolving most of the problems of the cold war, especially questions of peace and war. For the UN to function efficiently as a peacekeeping agency, there must be unanimity among the great powers who sit on the Security Council as permanent members. These countries each possess the right to veto contemplated actions. The inability of the Soviets and the Americans to settle their differences meant that the United States had to look to other means of intervening extensively in world politics.
President Truman provided the impetus for the development of U. S. policy and strategy to deal with the Soviet threat. As the stirring events of the early postwar years clarified the stakes of the cold war, Secretary of State George Marshall (1947-1949) and his successor, Dean Acheson (1949-1953), arrived at a policy of containment, put forth in July 1947 by Foreign Service officer George F. Kennan. The United States would use its power, including its military strength, to curb Soviet expansion in crucial regions of the world. To fulfill this policy, the nation adopted a strategy of nuclear deterrence, relying primarily upon its initial monopoly of nuclear weapons and its later superiority. These concepts would guide the actions of the international coalition organized by the United States, otherwise known as the free world or as the western bloc of nations. Bilateral or multilateral regional defense agreements would coordinate the endeavors of the anti-Soviet nations. Although President Truman and his successors were unable to work through a universal and permanent alliance to cope with plenary postwar instability, they remained faithful to fundamental Wilsonian revolution in national security affairs--willingness to intervene in Europe and Asia through various defense arrangements that tied together the anti-Soviet nations and to maintain huge, professional, war-fighting armed services to back its activities.
Truman and his successors forged a national consensus in support of containment and nuclear deterrence. This accordance was reflected in bipartisan cooperation in national security affairs, a broad acceptance of the notion that politics ended at the water's edge. Bipartisanship amounted to a truce in executive-legislative struggles over national security matters, although it also entailed close consultation between the White House and Capitol Hill. This situation assured the dominance of the executive in setting foreign policy and defense policy and in guiding the national security agencies, including the Department of Defense, although Congress made constructive contributions. In other words, the exigencies of the cold war strengthened the ability of the president to direct national security affairs as the nation worked its way through many international crises.
The fundamental security arrangements for Europe were worked out during the period 1947-1950. Besides maintaining its own armed forces, the United States contributed extensive economic assistance to rebuild the shattered economies of Western Europe by means of the European Recovery Program, better known as the Marshall Plan and launched in mid-1947. It also sent considerable military assistance, which was eventually rationalized by the workings of a collective defense agreement, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), ratified in July 1949. General Eisenhower became the first NATO commander, lending his enormous prestige to the keystone of cold war defense policy. A collective defense arrangement for the Americas, the Rio Pact of 1947 (Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance), matured the principle of hemispheric collective defense against aggressors in Europe and Asia. Soviet policy came to be equated with that of the Nazis, a development that helped to assure continuing public support for containment in Europe.
When the Korean War broke out in 1950, it had the effect of confirming the existence of the cold war and hardening the nation's commitment to containment and nuclear deterrence. The North Korean invasion of South Korea in June across the thirty-eighth parallel evoked a swift presidential response. Truman dispatched the few U. S. forces then available to support the South Korean Army and quickly obtained United Nations support for a "police action" to preserve the sovereignty of South Korea. This step became possible because the Soviet Union was then boycotting the UN as a means of expressing its annoyance over the failure of that organization to recognize the Communist government that had seized power in China early in 1949.
The onset of the Korean conflict strengthened the cogency of an important top-secret document, National Security Council Paper Number 68 (NSC-68), which set basic U. S. policy and strategy for the cold war. It reflected the judgment that the Soviet Union represented a growing long-term threat to national security. Considerable increases in the military capabilities of the United States and its allies were necessary to counter the Soviet buildup, and Congress proved willing to provide the necessary appropriations.
The mobilization for the Korean War accomplished the expansion of the U. S. armed forces contemplated in NSC-68. For example, the army increased in strength from just under 600,000 troops to 1.5 million and from ten divisions to twenty divisions. The air force growth was even more impressive, from forty-eight groups and about 400,000 personnel to ninety-three wings and close to 1 million people.
Once again, the requirements of the cold war strengthened the hand of the executive branch. Truman acted on his own, deciding against asking for a grant of authority from Congress. He made use of the Selective Service System and call-ups of reserve and National Guard units to provide manpower for the war and used the new institutions created to manage national defense, such as the Department of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to conduct a limited war in East Asia.
The Korean War produced an extraordinary challenge to the president's power as commander in chief. General Douglas MacArthur, the UN commander, managed to halt the North Korean offensive by September 1950 and to turn the tables, routing the enemy and regaining the thirty-eighth parallel. He then advocated continuing operations to oust the Communist Kim II Sung in North Korea and to unify the country under the staunch non-Communist Syngman Rhee. Truman and the JCS were dubious, worried about possible intervention by mainland China, Communist Mao Zedung having taken control of that nation in 1949. MacArthur believed that he could frustrate any such effort by the use of air power. After receiving the necessary authority in a somewhat ambiguous UN resolution, MacArthur moved north, penetrating to the Yalu River valley that separated Korea and Manchuria. In November, Chinese forces intervened in great strength, forcing MacArthur to withdraw below the thirty-eighth parallel. In response, the general wanted to escalate his efforts, but Truman and the JCS opted for limited war, deciding to restore the position at the thirty-eighth parallel but not to conquer North Korea.
MacArthur then indulged in numerous insubordinate acts, arguing that limited war was no substitute for victory, a course that eventually forced the president to relieve him in April 1951. General Matthew B. Ridgway took his place, and MacArthur returned to the United States. Despite a great outpouring of sympathy from the American public, his effort to reverse national policy faded away, most Americans accepting the judgment of General Omar Bradley, chairman of the JCS, that MacArthur's call for an expanded struggle was the "wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy." The UN Command was left to regain positions near the thirty-eighth parallel and then to wage a difficult war of attrition. Negotiations designed to end the conflict began in October 1951 but dragged on until July 1953, although the UN force had gained its limited objective much earlier, a stabilized front roughly along the thirty-eighth parallel.
As the Korean War ran its course, the Truman administration and its successor, that of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, constructed a net of security arrangements in East Asia that roughly paralleled those for Western Europe and the Americas. Bilateral treaties were negotiated with Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines. The multilateral ANZUS Pact of 1951 with Australia and New Zealand extended protection to the southwest Pacific. Eisenhower's energetic secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, spearheaded the formation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization in September 1954, which extended the umbrella of collective defense to the mainland.
The Eisenhower Administration, 1953-1961
Despite the eventual success of Truman's decision to wage a limited war in Korea, the struggle became unpopular with the American people, and it was part of the political change in the United States that swept General Eisenhower, the Republican candidate, to victory in the election of 1952. He exploited distaste for the war by promising, if elected, to "go to Korea." After taking office, he did so and soon made it known that the United States might employ nuclear weapons in Korea. This initiative finally led to a truce, and the war came to an end in August 1953.
The outcome in Korea permitted Eisenhower to introduce an adjustment in defense policy known as the New Look. Seeking to reduce the costs of the cold war, he decided to strengthen the nuclear deterrent and reduce conventional forces, providing the United States with what Dulles called the capacity for massive retaliation in the event of untoward Soviet incursions on the free world. This approach presumed that the allies of the United States would emphasize conventional forces to deal with low- or mid-intensity conflicts.
Although the New Look lowered costs because weapons of mass destruction were relatively less expensive than others, it had a disadvantage. Critics argued that it reduced the nation's options in dealing with any scenario other than a high-intensity war with the Soviet Union, especially limited wars along the Eurasian rim. Proponents of preparations for land warfare argued that it gave undue emphasis to the air force and the navy and neglected the army.
President Eisenhower remained faithful to the fundamental policy and strategy for the cold war set by the Truman administration, although he made some attempts to reopen negotiations with the Soviet Union. To increase the ability to monitor nuclear armaments, he proposed an "open skies" plan that would have permitted aerial observation (overflights) of both the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets did not accept this gambit, but the United States undertook clandestine overflights of Soviet territory, using a high-altitude aircraft, the U-2, for this purpose, flying from locations in the Middle East. Eisenhower also sponsored an "atoms for peace" plan at the United Nations in December 1953, but this initiative also failed to gain Soviet support.
Eisenhower tinkered with the organization of the national security agencies, seeking to systematize the ad hoc procedures and to fill missing links that he thought characterized the existing arrangements. In 1953 and 1958 he took actions that strengthened the hands of the secretary of defense and the JCS. The service secretaries were removed from the chain of command, so that responsibility ran directly from the president to the secretary of defense to the commanders of the "unified" (multiservice) commands and the "specified" (single-service) commands, such as the Strategic Air Command.
Throughout the Eisenhower years the nation dealt with a series of challenges along accepted cold war lines. Some of these crises required deployment of military forces to the field. The failure of France to reassert its control of Indochina during the first Indochinese war (1946-1954) led to increasing U.S. support for a non-Communist government in South Vietnam. A Communist Chinese threat in 1955 to the offshore islands of Quemoy, Matsu, and the Pescadores led to increased support for the non-Communist regime of Chiang Kai-shek on Formosa. President Eisenhower strongly opposed the efforts of Great Britain, France, and Israel to remove Abdel Gamal Nasser from power in Egypt during 1956 after the Egyptian leader seized the Suez Canal, a renewal of the Arab-Israeli conflict that stemmed from the Israeli War of Independence (1948-1949). A landing force of fourteen thousand soldiers and marines was sent into Lebanon in July 1958 to help stabilize the local government. In 1959, Dulles sponsored a collective security arrangement, the Central Treaty Organization (CENTO), to replace the Baghdad Pact of 1955 in the Middle East, but it soon fell into disuse.
Of great importance during the Eisenhower years was the strong U.S. reaction to the efforts of the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev to resolve the question of Germany. Eisenhower rebuffed threats to end the four-power occupation of Berlin. A summit conference at Camp David, Maryland, in September 1959, arranged to discuss this question, came to naught, because in May 1960, the Soviets shot down a U-2 that was conducting a photographic mission deep within Soviet territory. The controversy over Berlin strengthened the U.S. commitment to the NATO alliance as a means of containing Soviet threats to Western Europe.
Kennedy and Johnson, 1961-1969
When President John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, he undertook to execute various campaign pledges that promised more aggressive and efficient conduct of the cold war. At the head of his agenda was a commitment to eliminate a "missile gap" that intelligence experts alleged had opened during the 1950s, when the Soviets were able to beat the Americans to the punch with the launching of the Sputnik orbiter in 1957. Another prime concern was opposition to the regime of Fidel Castro in Cuba, which had moved rapidly into the Communist bloc of nations. Most important, perhaps, was Kennedy's more general commitment to "flexible response," a departure from Eisenhower's New Look.
Kennedy encountered several setbacks during his early months in office. One was the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba in April by anti-Castro elements; another was the construction of the Berlin Wall in August. He could do little about the Bay of Pigs fiasco, but he responded to the continuing contest over Berlin by mobilizing a considerable number of reservists and strengthening the U.S. commitment to defend the stake of western nations in Berlin.
Of greater long-term significance were the strategic adjustments spearheaded by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. He asserted civilian leadership strongly in the Pentagon, alienating many in the uniformed services by contriving two important changes. One was the adoption of flexible response, which was intended to improve the nation's ability to conduct limited wars. Another was the acceptance of a new guideline for the deployment of the nuclear deterrent, the concept of "assured destruction." McNamara eventually recognized that it was impossible to maintain a superior nuclear deterrent indefinitely. His nuclear planning concentrated on the ability to make a retaliatory strike against the Soviet Union that would wreak unacceptable damage. The other side of this departure was acceptance of a comparable Soviet capability, a concession that made "mutual assured destruction" (MAD) possible. To stabilize the opposed nuclear arsenals, McNamara engineered a shift in nuclear targeting from enemy military installations (counterforce targeting) to centers of enemy population (countervalue or countercity targeting). This approach required rejection of plans to develop effective antiballistic missile (ABM) capabilities. Such systems would destabilize the nuclear equilibrium because they would protect civilian populations. Mutual assured destruction meant that until effective arms control and disarmament measures became feasible, each side would hold the other's population hostage. Although critics argued that MAD was immoral because of the hostage aspect, a deep and stable nuclear deterrent resulted from this adjustment. It was the result of the growing recognition on all sides that the international community must avoid a nuclear war.
McNamara moved aggressively to create a diversified nuclear capability based on a triad of delivery systems--strategic bombers, nuclear submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs)--a force sufficient to achieve the desired deterrence. New developments in the nuclear field, both qualitative and quantitative in nature, particularly the introduction of multiple, independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), complicated the process of maintaining mutual assured destruction, creating a new agenda for arms control negotiators.
Efforts to achieve stability in the nuclear arms balance presaged attempts to negotiate effective nuclear arms control and disarmament, but the first significant steps in this direction did not come until after the two superpowers became involved in the most dangerous of cold war encounters. In 1962, Khrushchev attempted to alter the strategic balance by installing nuclear missiles in Cuba. When this endeavor was discovered, Kennedy took decisive action, instituting a naval blockade to prevent the shipment of missiles to Cuba. Khrushchev decided not to attempt to run this blockade. The crisis came to an end when Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles already in Cuba in return for a U.S. agreement not to attack Castro and to remove some obsolescent missiles located in Turkey that were aimed at the Soviet Union.
There followed a certain relaxation in EastWest tensions that made possible a U. S.-Soviet test ban treaty. This agreement of August 1963 limited nuclear testing to underground sites, ending extensive pollution of the atmosphere and the seas, but this promising start did not immediately lead to other agreements because of the growing U. S. involvement in Indochina.
The hallmark of U.S. national security policies between 1945 and 1965 was continuity. Presidential leadership, initially supplied by Truman, consolidated and refined the policy of containment, the strategy of nuclear deterrence, and the maintenance of many political-military treaties and agreements with other nations to maintain a broad front against the Soviet bloc. Although Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy introduced various modifications, such as the New Look and flexible response, they did so to improve rather than to alter basic national security commitments.
Assuming the presidency when Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Lyndon B. Johnson found himself forced to concentrate on a growing crisis in Indochina. In mid-1950, during the Korean War, Truman had authorized military assistance in an unsuccessful effort to help France maintain its authority in Indochina. In 1954, after the partition of Indochina into three states--Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam--and the further separation of Vietnam into a Communist state north of the seventeenth parallel and a non-Communist state south of that line, Eisenhower and then Kennedy sent assistance to the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam to help it resist a growing insurgency within the country. The South Vietnamese dissidents received considerable support from the neighboring Communist regime in North Vietnam led by Ho Chi Minh. The Military Assistance Advisory Group (MAAG) eventually evolved into a more formal organization--the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MACV)--which sought to improve the efforts of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) to defeat the insurgents, who eventually called themselves the National Liberation Front (NLF), but were more commonly referred to as the Vietcong. The corrupt regime in Saigon, capital of South Vietnam, proved unequal to this task. Diem was assassinated in 1963, but his successors were not any more effective. By 1965 a Vietcong victory seemed quite possible.
After Johnson was elected in his own right in 1964, he decided to move from assistance to active military intervention in South Vietnam, a step deemed necessary because of indications that the Vietcong might soon achieve victory. In August 1964, after some confused naval actions in the Gulf of Tonkin, Johnson obtained congressional assent to commit U.S. armed forces in South Vietnam. This intervention was based on a notion known as the "domino theory" popularized by Eisenhower. It held that the Communist bloc would support "wars of national liberation" in Southeast Asia and elsewhere to enlarge itself at the expense of the free world. If this enterprise succeeded in Indochina, it would automatically lead to the loss of other important states in the region, including Thailand, Burma, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The fundamental war aim of the Vietnam conflict was to prevent the fall of South Vietnam, the most important of the new Indochinese states, and thereby counter the strategy of the war of national liberation in Southeast Asia.
A limiting factor in Johnson's calculations was Communist China. Subscribing to the notion that the Sino-Soviet bloc was tightly organized and controlled from Moscow, the president wanted to stop its movement into Southeast Asia but at the same time avoid Chinese intervention of the type that had occurred in Korea and led to the political destruction of President Truman. This consideration led to constraints on operations in Indochina that might trigger Chinese intervention, especially attacks on North Vietnam or Laos and Cambodia, the latter two states bordering on South Vietnam and through which ran the principal line of communications from North Vietnam to the NLF in South Vietnam.
The U.S. armed intervention in South Vietnam began early in 1965, when the first ground troops landed and took part in attacks on the Vietcong and bombing attacks were first directed against targets in North Vietnam. Johnson energetically augmented the initial commitment; at its peak in 1969, U.S. forces in South Vietnam numbered almost 550,000. The limits imposed on U.S. action in Vietnam led the MACV commander, General William Westmoreland, to devote U.S. troops to search-and-destroy operations against insurgents and North Vietnamese regulars while the ARVN undertook "pacification," the task of gaining the loyalty of the people in areas freed from Vietcong control. Meanwhile North Vietnam was subjected to bombing.
Search-and-destroy missions were usually successful, and the bombing caused considerable damage, but the insurgency sustained itself. The North Vietnamese people endured the bombing, and the Vietcong avoided decisive defeat by fleeing into Cambodia and Laos. U.S. troops were unable to interdict the movement of reinforcements, supplies, and equipment from North Vietnam to the insurgents in the south, much of it along the Ho Chi Minh trail through Laos and Cambodia. ARVN proved exceptionally ineffective in its attempts to pacify the countryside.
President Johnson spurred the buildup in South Vietnam during the years 1965-1968 despite growing indications that an early victory was unlikely, so that the struggle became "Johnson's war." An antiwar movement originally based on college and university campuses expanded as the Vietnam quagmire led to large casualty lists. Gradually, influential legislators, such as J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joined the opposition to the war. Many people who did not agree with the claim that the war was both immoral and illegal eventually opposed the struggle on pragmatic grounds, taking the view that the benefits were not commensurate with the costs. Of particular importance was growing opposition to Selective Service, as thousands of young men fled the country rather than accept induction.
In January 1968, during the Tet (lunar new year) holidays, the Vietcong abandoned its usual strategy of avoiding battle and attacked a large number of urban areas throughout South Vietnam, hoping to score a decisive victory. These were surprise operations, but MACV and ARVN soon turned the tables and scored a smashing triumph, so much so that the insurgency was crippled for several years. Its combat effectiveness had to be rebuilt almost from scratch. The image of the Tet offensive that the mass media conveyed to the U.S. people greatly increased antiwar sentiment. Although the coverage obscured the extent of the Vietcong defeat (thirty-two thousand dead), it was difficult for anyone in the administration to argue that the war was near an end, especially after General Westmoreland asked for more than 200,000 reinforcements and indicated that the war would go on for several more years.
When a maverick contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, ran well in the New Hampshire primary early in 1968, and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York also became a candidate, President Johnson decided to end the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. He announced that he would not seek reelection and that he would inaugurate negotiations in the hope of reaching a settlement. This surprising decision had important political consequences. Johnson's discredited policies helped Richard M. Nixon to defeat the Democratic nominee, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, who was forced to defend Johnson's unpopular war.
From Nixon to Carter, 1969-1981
President Nixon came into office with a mandate to gain "peace with honor" in Vietnam and with a plan to bring about a remarkable reorientation of U.S. foreign policy. Aided by his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, he decided to attempt nothing less than an end to the cold war, beginning with efforts to improve relations with China and to negotiate arms control issues with the Soviet Union. Once again, in a moment of crisis, presidential leadership in national security affairs asserted itself. Nixon, however, recognized that his new departures could not move very far until he liquidated the commitment in Vietnam. Nixon settled on an approach to the war that became known as Vietnamization. The United States would gradually reduce its commitment while South Vietnam, continuing to receive U.S. assistance, gained the ability to defend itself. Meanwhile, the United States would attempt to negotiate a reasonable end to the war.
North Vietnam, however, scenting a complete victory, refused to conduct serious negotiations, and the Saigon regime headed by General Nguyen Van Thieu made little progress in establishing its legitimacy, despite massive aid from the United States. Nevertheless, the United States began to withdraw troops in the summer of 1969 and continued to do so until by the end of 1972 only a small contingent remained in South Vietnam. Meanwhile the war continued. When Communist China became deeply involved in its cultural revolution, a violent internal upheaval that led to the overthrow of the Maoists, Nixon felt able to authorize incursions into Cambodia in 1970 and Laos in 1971, intended both to interfere with enemy command posts and communications and to encourage negotiations, but these operations did not succeed. In 1972, Nixon authorized a massive air attack on the north, to help South Vietnam resist a large-scale offensive launched by the insurgency, which had finally recovered from the Tet losses.
North Vietnam finally decided to negotiate, and eventually a cease-fire agreement was reached in January 1973, although not until the Hanoi-Haiphong area was subjected to a destructive air campaign during the Christmas season of 1972. The U.S. troop withdrawal was completed in March 1973. The American people supported the policy of Vietnamization and reluctantly accepted the long delay in liquidating the U.S. presence in Vietnam. Nixon gravely weakened the peace movement when he set up a lottery system to determine draft quotas and later adopted a plan for an all-volunteer army. The election of 1972 resulted in a landslide for Nixon over the Democratic candidate, Senator George McGovern of South Dakota, a leading opponent of the war.
The settlement did not preserve South Vietnam. The January agreement provided for U.S. withdrawal in sixty days and for steps to establish a new government for Vietnam, but it did not mandate the withdrawal of North Vietnamese troops from the south. Nixon promised to aid South Vietnam if the North Vietnamese violated the terms of the peace settlement. The president hoped to pursue the initiatives begun in 1972 to improve relations with both Moscow and Peking, but the Watergate affair soon engulfed the nation, eventually forcing his resignation. His successor, Gerald Ford, was left to preserve Nixon's remarkable initiatives in the field of national security.
Before his downfall, Nixon completed the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) and reached important arms control agreements with the Soviet Union, resuming the initiative that had produced the test-ban treaty in 1963. The ABM treaty, signed in Moscow in 1972, limited each country to two ABM sites with no more than a hundred missiles each, which helped to stabilize the nuclear balance by preserving mutual assured destruction. An interim agreement established ceilings on the number of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and submarine launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs) that could be maintained by each side. The arrangement, however, did not cover U.S. strategic bombers or MIRVs. In 1974, President Ford and Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev made further progress, accepting the Vladivostok Accords, which established a ceiling on the number of nuclear delivery systems. The Soviet Union and the United States could maintain a total of 2,400 systems, including 1,320 MIRV weapons. This agreement set the stage for another round of talks, the SALT II negotiations.
Despite the resumption of serious arms control negotiations, the cold war truce in executive-legislative conflict over national security matters fell apart. Most important was the increasing unwillingness of Congress to maintain the military services at levels proposed by the executive branch. The armed services declined in numbers from about 3.4 million at the height of the Vietnam conflict in 1968 to a little over 2 million in 1975. When North Vietnam moved against South Vietnam, Congress refused to authorize emergency assistance for the Saigon government, which finally fell in April 1975. In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, which required the executive branch to obtain legislative approval of the use of troops in overseas combat within sixty days of the commitment. Meanwhile, Congress greatly enhanced its ability to debate national security matters with the executive branch, mainly by increasing the professional staffs attached to important congressional committees and by augmenting its investigative activity, including the functions of the General Accounting Office.
Presidents Ford and Jimmy Carter (1977-1981) generally supported the Nixonian attempt to achieve détente with the Russians and the Chinese. Both encountered the post-Vietnam syndrome, a general public desire to limit U.S. commitments abroad and to impose limits on the defense establishment, discredited by the setback in Vietnam. Carter's most important achievement was the SALT II Treaty, signed with Brezhnev in June 1979, which imposed new limits on all types of delivery systems and limited the future development of ICBMs and cruise missiles. Unfortunately for Carter, strong resistance to the SALT II Treaty, especially following the seizure of U.S. hostages in Iran after the fall of the shah and the Russian intervention in Afghanistan to shore up a pro-Soviet regime, forced suspension of efforts to obtain ratification of the treaty.
The Iranian and Afghanistan crises caused Carter to abandon his earlier emphasis on détente and to assume a more energetic anti-Soviet policy. Among other measures, the administration departed somewhat from countervalue targeting, broadening its capacity to wage nuclear war. Efforts were also made to augment the available weapons systems, including a new class of nuclear submarines armed with MIRV missiles and a new ICBM, the MX missile. To deal with possible crises along the Eurasian rim, such as those in Iran and Afghanistan, Carter formed the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force. He also authorized an attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran, but the expedition was a failure.
Reagan and Bush, 1981-1992
Carter's change of policy did not prevent his defeat in the presidential election of 1980. The Republican candidate, Ronald Reagan, adopted a strong anti-Soviet theme, calling for increased defense spending to assure modernization and readiness. After his election, Reagan referred to the Soviet Union as an "evil empire" and pursued an extensive program of rearmament. He also expanded U.S. commitments overseas, seeking to move beyond the Vietnam syndrome, which had interfered with foreign policy initiatives.
Reagan's national security policies reflected a return to the high cold war mentality, which meant renewed emphasis on containment and deterrence, an end to arms control negotiations and other aspects of détente as practiced during the Nixon-Ford-Carter era, and a renewed emphasis on NATO and other arrangements for the defense of the free world. Reagan also proved willing to commit U.S. troops to threatened regions, sending troops to Lebanon and to Grenada. The first expedition, in August 1982, was marred by the loss of more than two hundred marines in an explosion in October near Beirut. The Grenada operation, also in October, was successful if inefficiently managed.
Reagan's initial policies assumed a continuing and growing threat from the Communist bloc of nations, an estimate of the situation that appeared less and less convincing after Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the Soviet Union and gradually launched his twin policies of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (structural reform). Gorbachev's extraordinary domestic initiatives revealed that the Soviet Union, far from growing in strength, was in serious economic difficulty. To permit concentration of resources on domestic problems, Gorbachev launched diplomatic initiatives that centered on arms control negotiations with the West. During his second term in office (1985-1989), Reagan responded to these initiatives and permitted resumption of the arms control process that had begun during the years of détente.
Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Soviet Union at length produced an unexpected and dramatic reaction in Eastern Europe. One by one the satellite states overthrew their Communist governments and asserted their independence from the Soviet Union. The most important development was the reunification of the two German states, completed in 1990. In 1991 the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, vastly reducing the likelihood of an attack on the NATO countries. These developments meant an end to the cold war, validating the analysis that had led Nixon and Kissinger to their efforts to move toward more normal relations with the Communist bloc of nations. The reduction of the perceived Communist threat led to important departures in national security policy during the administration of President George Bush--a return to significant reductions in defense spending and a concentration of attention on political developments in the Third World, especially in areas of interest to the United States and its allies along the Eurasian rim.
None of these areas was of greater importance during the early 1990s than the Middle East, where continuing instability threatened to cut off access to essential supplies of oil. Hostility between the Arabs and the Israelis continued to unsettle the region, as did intraregional disputes, such as that between Iran and Iraq, which produced a long war between the two states during the 1980s.
When Iraq suddenly invaded Kuwait in August 1990 and threatened to invade Saudi Arabia, the Bush administration responded energetically, supporting an international naval blockade in the Persian Gulf and building up land, sea, and air assets in Saudi Arabia. When the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, refused to withdraw from Kuwait despite concerted international pressure exerted through the United Nations, Bush obtained authority from both the United Nations and the Congress to use force. In January 1991, the coalition forces in Saudi Arabia struck at Iraq, first conducting a successful air attack on Iraqi communications and industry and then launching a surprise offensive on land that defeated a supposedly strong Iraqi army in a few days.
The short Gulf War was the first post-cold war international crisis. It demonstrated that unanimity among the great powers could produce effective collective action through the United Nations. Some dissidents suggested that the crisis might have been better resolved by peaceful methods, and others maintained that armed intervention, although successful in the short term, might ultimately prove counterproductive. For the moment, however, this reassertion of executive prerogative in national security affairs once again demonstrated the continuing importance of the presidency in deciding and guiding national security policies, although it also illustrated the significance of congressional participation in decision-making through close consultation and cooperation between the executive and legislative branches of government.
-- Trask, David F.
FURTHER READINGS
Bauer, K. Jack. The Mexican War (1974).
Bernardo, C. Joseph, and Eugene H. Bacon. American Military Policy: Its Development Since 1775 (1957).
Brodie, Bernard. Strategy in the Missile Age (1959).
Burns, James MacGregor. Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-1945 (1970).
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Source Citation: "The Presidency and the Military." Encyclopedia of the American Military. 3 vols. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1994. Reproduced in History Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. http://galenet.galegroup.com.ezproxy.bpl.org/servlet/HistRC/
Document Number: BT2318000008
