Foreign policy of the Richard Nixon administration
President Richard Nixon and his top aide Henry Kissinger focused on the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, the Middle East, Pakistan, and major arms limitation agreements.
A major long-term goal was to reduce the tension between the United States and the Soviet Union and China, so as to better enable the détente process to work.
The goal was to limit multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle capacities and impose other restrictions on each side's number of nuclear weapons.
Nixon and Kissinger planned to link arms control to détente and to the resolution of other urgent problems regarding Vietnam, the Mideast, and Berlin through the employment of linkage.
However, there was opposition at home from Ronald Reagan and the conservatives, and Gerald Ford's weak defense of the Accords hurt his reelection chances in the 1976 United States presidential election.
The key provisions included legitimizing the current borders, and a pledge by each nation to respect the human rights and civic freedoms of their own citizens.
[23] The Chinese population presented American businesses with a large untapped market, and the Sino-Soviet split gave the United States an opportunity to play the two communist powers against each other.
Chinese leaders, meanwhile, were receptive to closer relations with the U.S. for several reasons, including hostility to the Soviet Union, a desire for increased trade, and hopes of winning international recognition.
Nixon made a point of shaking Zhou's hand, something which then-Secretary of State John Foster Dulles had refused to do in 1954 when the two met at the Geneva Conference.
The visit was carefully choreographed by both governments, and major events took place during prime time to reach the widest possible television audience in the U.S.[34] When not in meetings, Nixon toured architectural landmarks including the Forbidden City, Ming Tombs, and the Great Wall.
Americans received their first glimpse into Chinese life through the cameras which accompanied Pat Nixon, who toured the city of Beijing and visited communes, schools, factories, and hospitals.
[35] China provided assurances that it would not intervene in the Vietnam War, while the United States promised to prevent Japan from acquiring nuclear weapons.
North Vietnamese commander Võ Nguyên Giáp decided that since the American forces had left he could invade in conventional fashion and defeat Saigon's demoralized army, the ARVN.
On March 30, 30,000 PAVN troops, supported by regiments of tanks and artillery, rolled southward across the Vietnamese Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separated the two Vietnams.
There the NLF, renamed the "Provisional Revolutionary Government of South Vietnam" (PRG) was established; it welcomed diplomats from the Communist world, including Castroist Cuba, and served as one of the launch points of the 1975 invasion.
Overconfident of its military prowess, it adopted a policy of static defense that made its units vulnerable; worse, it failed to use the breathing space to reorganize and rebuilt its faulty command structure.
Without constant American bombing it was possible to solve the logistics problem by modernizing the Ho Chi Minh trail with 12,000 more miles of roads.
In March 1969, Nixon approved a secret B-52 carpet bombing campaign (code-named Operation Menu) of North Vietnamese positions in Cambodia without the consent of Cambodian leader Norodom Sihanouk.
[56] In the aftermath of the Easter Offensive, peace talks between the United States and North Vietnam resumed, and by October 1972 a framework for a settlement had been reached.
[69] Satō's firm endorsement of the security treaty and the long-awaited settlement of the Okinawa reversion question meant that two major points of contention in U.S.-Japan relations were eliminated.
[71] The following month, the government was again surprised to learn that, without prior consultation, Nixon was imposing a 10 percent surcharge on imports, a decision explicitly aimed at hindering Japan's exports to the United States, and was unilaterally suspending the convertibility of dollars into gold, which would eventually lead to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system of fixed currency exchange rates.
The political issues between the two countries were essentially security-related and derived from efforts by the United States to induce Japan to contribute more to its own defense and to regional security.
Japan further attracted American ire by renouncing support for Israel and U.S. policy in the Middle East in order to secure early relief from the embargo.
[84] As the Yom Kippur war ended in defeat, the oil-producing Arab nations, organized as the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries, embargoed oil shipments to US and Israel's supporters, causing a worldwide energy crisis and severe damage to the world economy as fuel prices rose dramatically commensurate to the sharp decline in supply.
Fuel efficiency and new supplies were urgently needed so Congress approved the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System to reach the oil fields in far northern Alaska and imposed a national speed limit of 55 mph.
They met in 1972 and the Shah agreed to buy large quantities of expensive American military hardware and took responsibility for ensuring political stability and fighting off Soviet subversion throughout the region.
In 1973 the Chilean Armed Forces under Augusto Pinochet executed a coup d'état that overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, and killed him.
The result of the coup was long term authoritarian control of Chile by General Augusto Pinochet who supported American interests and brutally crushed the left wing opposition.
[91][92] For decades historians have heatedly debated the role of the United States, focusing on four main issues: (1) Did the US attempt to spark a military coup to prevent Salvador Allende taking office in 1970?
[95] Relations deteriorated on many points, including trade disputes, defense agreements, energy, fishing, the environment, cultural imperialism, and foreign policy.
