The Kissnger Qiestion Essay Example for Free

The Kissnger Qiestion EssayThe Vietnam contend resulted in the deaths of 1.5 million to 3 million Viet namee and other Indochinese and 58,000 Americans. It was the catalyst for Richard Nixons self-induced disgrace. Henry Kissinger compete a pivotal role in guiding Americas foreign polity as the warfare torn nation reeled under the loss of one president to assassination and another to fraud. The Vietnam warfare singed the conscience of the world and Kissinger found himself where foreign policy and field of study auspices converged. National Security adviser is the one that builds the most strategic meetings at the highest levels of US administration. External and internal threats to the nations security and well being should be calculated well in advance otherwise the entire cloth of security planning lies in shreds. in that location must yield been some constructive and sensible proposals to forefend the Vietnam fiasco. Its fair to ask what alternative course Americas critics would have followed. Some serious people argued for cope withdrawal, on the grounds that the war was already lost.Some have argued that Nixon, after taking office, should have tell that the situation in Vietnam was far worse than he had thought, blame it on the Democrats and seek a take with the North Vietnamese like the one that was ultimately reached. Meanwhile, the argument goes, Nixon could have used tough grandiosity at home to appease the foreign policy makers. Whether the approach would have worked cant be known, entirely had it worked, it certainly would have been preferable to what happened instead.Once in office, Kissinger and Nixon said they were seeking peace with awarding the abandonment of our South Vietnamese allies would be a dishonorable betrayal and would undermine our believability in the world. America ended up abandoning them anyway. level(p) overlooking for the moment how the whole thing turned out, the peace with honor formulation was riddled w ith flaws. And the South Vietnamese regime was known to have been fumbling and hopelessly corrupt. In writing about the importance of our allies in South Vietnam, Kissinger conks minimal anxiety to the Vietnamese people but a great deal to South Vietnams president Nguyen caravan Thieu, calling him a great patriot and a dauntless leader.McNamara and Kissinger, not unlike some American presidents, including Nixon, had myopic affinity for strongmen like the Shah of Iran, Philippines president Ferdinand Marcos. A student of Metternich, the 19th-century Austrian statesman, Kissinger was a practitioner of the realist (or realpolitik) civilize of diplomacy, which places emphasis on the states interests and the use of military government agency to achieve them, and he best-loved to deal with the strong leaders of nation-states who could deliver. The US administrations complicity in the 1963 overthrow of South Vietnams leader General Ngo Dinh Diem conferred legitimacy on the North Viet namese claim that the South Vietnamese government was illegitimate.Ironically, when all this was happening in Vietnam, the rest of the world could only look and expect. Even the Nobel ordering that conferred the peace prize to Kissinger made almost no mention of the American lives lost during the Vietnam War, and none of the item that USAs pursuit of what many saw as a patently hopeless cause may have damaged Vietnam permanently.To see the US side of the story, Nixon had a peculiar governing style. He hated to give direct orders and sometimes issued orders he hoped or expected would not be carried out. He had an aversion to tilt among his advisers. And after Vice President Spiro Agnew said in one meeting that the South Vietnamese, with American support, should encounter two North Vietnamese sanctuaries in Cambodia rather than just one, as had been proposed, Nixon agreed. But, according to Kissinger, Nixon was so vexed that Agnew had staked out a more hawkish position than his o wn that he excluded Agnew from the next meeting on the war.Even Kissingers colleagues are portrayed as politically astute Mel Laird, secretary of defense, to be slippery. Though, Laird was often proved expert about the likely public reaction to proposed U.S. actions. Unfortunately, the men surrounding the president were accomplished charmers, masterly manipulators in a field where manipulation was the job requirement.The Vietnam War was not without its tragicomic aspects. There was the futile function for the elusive COSVN, supposedly the North Vietnamese military headquarters in Cambodiaand a leading rule for U.S. military incursion into Cambodia in 1970. The South Vietnamese troops and their American advisers found only leave huts. Nevertheless, USA describes the attack as a success, leading to the capture of documents, arms and ammunition, which, according to Karnow, were quickly replaced. There was also the raid by American commandos on the Son Tay prison in North Vietnam, w hich was believed to hold American prisoners of war but turned out to be empty. U.S. intelligence had said the prison was closed.The war did infuse sacrifice, though not entirely based on moral lines. Historians omit several pertinent matters or deals with them in triumphs of understatement. The two senior members of the National Security Agency, Anthony Lake and Roger Morris, quit in 1970 in quetch over the expansion of the war into Cambodia.And as for the national upheaval and constitutional crisis that was Watergate, Nixon felt unappreciated for his fret to withdraw troops, that antiwar sentiment touched Nixon on his rawest nerve and that he saw enemies all around him and so engaged in methods of all-out political combat. Thats it. No mention of Nixons enemies list of the ashen Houses hiring a goon squad (the plumbers) to conduct break-ins or of Kissingers supplying names to the FBI for wiretaps of his own aides and of journalists, to trace leaks about the war.Vietnamese peop le had to face brutalities of warring factions and deceit of their power hungry leaders. Many years on, we still cannot confidently classify the leaders who could have been true to the national cause or the people of Vietnam. Some critics persisted in believing that given enough time and resources, Americas Vietnam policy would have succeed. In 1975, after Ford had taken office as president with sole bait to prevent Saigons collapse was additional money from Congress to fund the war effortan annexation that Congress was resisting. The denial of the money may well have sped the collapse of the South Vietnamese government, but how long it could have been sustained is another matter.If leaders truly continued to believe in enforcing the showcase of government, one is forced to conclude that USA would have deluded the world. Kissinger and Nixon were in a bunker of their own, clinging to the false contract of Vietnamization, holding to a misbegotten concept of national honor and raili ng at the wars opponents. Great nations have the intent to make the right decisions in critical circumstances. Unfortunately, the reputation of USA is blame to carry the fact that they failed to take a timely decision in Vietnam.ReferencesJohn Prados, LOST crusader The Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby, Oxford University Press, 2003