--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SHAFR/H-Diplo Conference Report (Report #5)
2004 Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR)
Conference, University of Texas at Austin and the LBJ Library

"Kissinger's Shadows" (a multi-panel report)

Panel 11: Richard Nixon Confronts the World [1]

"The Year of Europe' and Recurring Crises in Transatlantic Relations"
Fabian Hilfrich, Institut fuer Zeitgeschichte

Chair and Commentary: Bernd Schaefer, German Historical Institute

Panel 22: Henry Kissinger and U.S. Foreign Policy in an Era of Transition

Chair: Anna Nelson, American University [2]

"Kissinger and Triangular Diplomacy"
Jussi Hanhimaeki, Geneva Graduate Institute

"Kissinger and Germany"
Holger Klitzing, University of Heidelberg

"Kissinger and Europe"
Klaus Larres, University of London

Commentary: William Burr, National Security Archive

Panel 47: 'Soft Power' during the Nixon and Kissinger Years:
Intellectual and Cultural Foundations of Diplomacy [3]

Chair: Robert D. Schulzinger, University of Colorado

"Setting the Stage for Nixon: The Crumbling Cold War Consensus and the
Rise of Neo-Isolationism"
Erin Black, University of Toronto

"Credibility, Power, and Nixinger Foreign Policy"
Todd Bennett, Office of the Historian, Department of State

"Kissinger and the German Past"
Thomas A. Schwartz, Vanderbilt University

Commentary: Jeremi Suri, University of Wisconsin
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SHAFR/H-Diplo Commentary by Bernd Schaefer, German Historical
Institute, Washington D.C.,
<mailto:bschaefmd@yahoo.com>bschaefmd@yahoo.com

On the first day of the conference, Fabian Hilfrich from the Foreign
Ministry Branch of the Berlin-based Institute for Contemporary History
talked about the Nixon/Kissinger-proclaimed "Year of Europe" of 1973/74
and its effects on transatlantic relations. Based mostly on German
documents reflecting intra-European discussions, Hilfrich defined the
enterprise as "antagonistic" from its overture, "designed to reign in a
more independent Europe and to reassign to it its regional place in an
American-dominated West." He called the period between Henry
Kissinger's "Year of Europe" address of 23 April 1973 and the signing
of the "Declaration on Atlantic Relations" in Ottawa on 26 June 1974 as
a "crisis in transatlantic relations rivaling that resulting from
France's withdrawal from NATO's integrated military structure in 1966."
Adversarial negotiations provided a short-lived boost to European
integration, but ultimately national interests in Europe prevailed, and
no unification against U.S. interests occurred. Kissinger's diplomatic
style of bilateralism, backchannels, and linkage, worked well with
America's adversaries, Hilfrich asserted, but failed with the Europeans
who considered themselves allies and were therefore much less thrilled
by this approach. The speaker attributed mainly those reasons to the
initiative's "failure," despite Kissinger's version that Watergate had
undermined Nixon's prestige and "seeped into every nook and cranny of
the project." Comments by Bernd Schaefer from the German Historical
Institute and the audience commended Fabian Hilfrich for his
well-researched piece. Though it remained subject to debate whether
Nixon and Kissinger's reasoning behind the project, that being to
reinvigorate the transatlantic alliance against domestic protectionist
and isolationist impulses, was just rhetorical cover for the Europeans.
The simple fact of an American-announced "Year of Europe" demonstrated
how (Western) Europe mattered, and how it was Nixon and Kissinger's
pronounced self-interest to maintain vital transatlantic relations in
the wake of challenges from Europe.

In a broader sense, Klaus Larres from Royal Holloway at the University
of London re-addressed this issue the next day in his paper on
"Kissinger and Europe." He started with the assumption that during the
Nixon administration's early years Europe hardly mattered, and "on the
whole European allies were taken for granted." Washington was too
distracted by geopolitical concerns, but this changed when "trade
competition and economic jealousy" seemed to indicate "the gradual
emancipation of Western Europe from American tutelage," a challenge
"Washington was not prepared to accept." During Kissinger's foreign
policy reign, Larres asserted, increasing American "pre-occupation with
its own economic competitiveness and global standing pushed the leading
EC governments" into closer cooperation. Nixon's Security Adviser, and
later Secretary of State, viewed Western Europe from "a purely
bilateral nation state basis within the Atlantic framework," preferring
a "confederate" to a "federalist Europe" to ensure "continued American
influence." According to Larres, the Nixon administration expected a
"largely docile" Europe and therefore was very much irritated with West
Germany's self-assertiveness in the pursuit of its Ostpolitik. In this
framework, the "Year of Europe" figured as an attempt "to improve US-EC
relations while safeguarding Washington's leadership." Concluding, the
speaker defined Kissinger's years in power as "the beginning of the end
of the age of transatlantic patience," both sides "were increasingly
feeling that they didn't need each other quite as much as hitherto." In
his commentary, William Burr from the National Security Archive laid
out some basic goals of U.S. foreign policy during the Nixon/Kissinger
years, defining one of them as "avoiding a European geopolitical
realignment or commercial blocs that could weaken U.S. power." In
Larres's very well-argued paper, Burr only missed a greater emphasis on
Western Europe's decision-making and its own doubts over
supra-nationalism. Also, he noticed a slight tendency to "overlook the
degree to which Nixon and Kissinger took seriously U.S. security
obligations to NATO Europe" and their will to fight for this conviction
in Congress.

In his presentation on "Kissinger and Germany," Holger Klitzing from
the University of Heidelberg focused on the National Security Advisor's
attitudes towards Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik following the SPD/FDP [4]
electoral victory of October 1969. He outlined how Kissinger, and his
close aide Helmut Sonnenfeldt, were perceived as the ultimate experts
on German affairs in the Nixon Administration. They certainly were in
that context, but it is a different question how this extended to
contemporary German society. Their notions of the FRG (West Germany)
were shaped, as Klitzing showed, by historically grounded, skeptical
views of Germans in general, fear of German nationalism and domestic
instability, and concerns about the firmness of a commitment to the
West. Kissinger constantly intended to appear just "as German as the
Germans" with regard to unification (maybe without wanting to see both
Germanys' lack of practical means to actually unsettle the post-1945
European order). His worries over how Bonn would run Western detente
independently from the U.S. were evident in internal administration
settings during 1969/70, but they were largely superseded when he
became intricately involved in negotiating the 1971 Quadripartite
Berlin Agreement. Thus, Holger Klitzing contended, "Ostpolitik proved
to be the necessary catalyst in order to facilitate substantial
American-Soviet rapprochement, which was stalled in other areas like
Vietnam, SALT, and the Middle East." William Burr's comments on this
thoughtful essay based on primary sources suggested further
incorporation of historiographical discussion, like whether and how
German reunification was redefined through Ostpolitk, or whether the
latter merely ratified the "status quo" or was "basically
transformative in his purposes."

Thomas Schwartz from Vanderbilt University attempted on the third day
of the conference "to understand a puzzle" about Henry Kissinger with
regard to his, allegedly "cold-blooded," perceptions of the German
past. Though Kissinger consistently rejected notions of his childhood
persecution and emigration shaping his political views, Schwartz found
it nonetheless intriguing to look at how Germany's attempts "to
overcome the past" affected the American academic-politician's Cold War
realism, and how he approached the German question once he advanced
into power. Drawing on Kissinger's May 1952 stint in Germany as a
consultant to the Psychological Strategy Board, Schwartz revealed the
former's deep pessimism about Germany's future conveyed in his
commissioned report based on interviews with Germans. With their
emphasis on the "soft power" of cultural and academic change, however,
the report's findings also reflected Kissinger's constant worry over
the U.S. losing German support during the Cold War. This "foreign
policy concern," Schwartz explained, was always dominant over any
"concerns specific to Germany's Nazi past, the Holocaust, or issues of
lingering anti-Semitism." Though Kissinger's approach seemed
"consistent with hard-edged realism," his awareness of a need to
cultivate change within German society and internationalize its elites,
contained "contradictions, reflective of both the strengths and
limitations of realism in its approach to international relations."  In
his commentary, Jeremi Suri from the University of Wisconsin at Madison
concurred with the highly reflective paper's insistence on the
psychological role of memory in personal life, though Kissinger would
still come across as very insecure when talking about the relevance of
his past. Suri emphasized Kissinger's deep distrust in any German
government rising expectations. Paradoxically, he noted, there are
surprisingly few assessments by the same man about the nature of the
Soviet threat.

Jussi Hanhimaeki from the Graduate Institute of International Studies
in Geneva examined the impacts of Henry Kissinger's so-called
"triangular diplomacy" on conflicts in the so-called Third World,
exemplified in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani war over East Bengal, and the
1974-76 civil war in Angola establishing a Marxist government following
the departure of Portuguese colonialists. While he credited the
"triangular" venture as a useful asset in negotiations with the Soviet
and Chinese, Hanhimaeki wanted to demonstrate the limits of this
diplomacy in other world regions and "thus a central flaw in
Kissinger's overall foreign policy architecture." He defined it as a
"preconceived rationale that did not do justice to the many regional
conflicts." In effect, in "a series of tragedies" people in many
regions "became linked to [Kissinger's] 'reshuffling of the deck' known
as triangular diplomacy." In the Indo-Pakistani case, the speaker
defined the American 'tilt' towards Pakistan essentially as a 'tilt'
towards China to save triangular diplomacy. If this, otherwise dubious,
test case at least strengthened Kissinger's geopolitical approach, the
Angolan conflict "crushed American hopes that the Sino-Soviet
confrontation would translate into U.S. advantage in the third world."
Angola, according to Hanhimaeki, "became the theater" where the failure
of U.S. attempts to bring order to international relations "was
crystallized." On the other hand, it laid the "ground work for a new
Soviet globalism." In turn, this Soviet overreach had "the unintended
consequence of bringing about the ultimate goal of American post-war
foreign policy: the collapse of the Soviet Union." William Burr
commended Hanhimaeki's well-argued and persuasive paper, but raised
doubts about the effects of Soviet foreign policy on the eventual
downfall of communism. He also voiced skepticism about Soviet "power
projection capabilities" to resemble a "globalism" comparable to the
United States.

Nixon and Kissinger's intention to score domestically with an
innovative foreign policy approach was presaged by the "crumbling Cold
War consensus" in the United States discussed in the paper by Erin
Black from the University of Toronto. Pleading for link developments
beyond artificial limits of presidential terms, she analyzed the
pre-1969, Vietnam-triggered, debate over the "proper" U.S. role on the
global stage in the wake of extensive use of American power and the
loss of international standing. Spearheaded by Democratic Senators
William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield, this public discussion amounted
to "neo-isolationism" in the eyes of Presidents Johnson and Nixon.
Black suggested, however, "that the ideational content of various
aspects of Nixon's foreign policy suggests an affinity with the general
rethinking of America's role in the world that had been driven by
Fulbright and company." Drawing on Nixon's statements before his
election, as well as on his Guam-announced "Nixon Doctrine," she saw
remarkable similarities between the President and his Senate critics
concerning the need for re-thinking America's role in the world.
However, thinking in notions of "pride," "honor," and "face-saving,"
Nixon and Kissinger were not willing to "take it to the next level and
rethink the nature of America's power itself." According to Black, the
major difference between Nixon and Fulbright rested "in the weight each
man attached to the ingredients of power and credibility."

With her conclusions, Erin Black seamlessly set the panel stage for
Todd Bennett from the Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of
State [5] who astutely reflected on "Credibility, Power, and Nixinger
Foreign Policy." In stark contrast to 1962, defined by Nixon and
Kissinger as a "zenith" of American Cold War power, the White House
officeholders from 1969 on perceived the "most serious credibility
crisis" the U.S. faced during the Cold War. Quagmire in Vietnam,
domestic economic downturn, and a different strategic balance,
indicated in Nixon and Kissinger's eyes American vulnerability to a
Kremlin taking greater risks and willing to "openly challenge the
United States." With ABM deployment, SALT treaty, and "seeking an
honorable exit" from Vietnam, in effect, broadly speaking, using
American power, Nixon and Kissinger believed to have "stemmed the U.S.
credibility crisis" by the end of their first term. For Bennett,
"credibility served as a key determinant of [Nixon's] national security
policies." As "the impression of reliability, believability, stability,
resolve, strength, vigor, authority, and leadership that inspires
confidence in allies and dissuades adversaries," it would serve as the
"psychological dimension of (inter)national power that […] resides at
the crux between strength's hard and soft variants." Such conceptions,
concluded Bennett, "depend as much upon impressions as upon military
hardware," but, in the end, "U.S. credibility, or incredibility, is in
the eye of the beholder." In his comments, Jeremi Suri rejected a
simple dichotomy between hard and soft power. He credited their
connectivity with bridging gaps between diplomatic-political and
cultural history. It would require soft psychological decisions to
deploy hard power.

Session chair Robert Schulzinger from the University of Colorado
summarized his impressions, based on tapes and telcons of the Nixinger
period, in describing the two political actors' mindset this way:
"There are enemies everywhere, and you better get them before they get
you."  Though Schulzinger emphasized the notable exception of Nixon and
Kissinger's attitudes towards Chinese leaders, and how it was their
foreign policy becoming the only endeavor they received unqualified
praise for - at least at home, the conference reporter dares to comment
in conclusion.


Bernd Schaefer, German Historical Institute Washington D.C.,
<mailto:bschaefmd@yahoo.com>bschaefmd@yahoo.com

Editor's Notes:

[1] Two additional papers from this panel not discussed in this report
are "Richard Nixon Confronts the Persian Gulf, 1969-1972" by Tore
Tingvold Petersen of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology
and "The Nixon Administration and the Spanish Democratic Transition" by
Pilar Ortuna-Anaya of Georgetown University.

[2] Anna Nelson replaced Warren Kimball (listed in the printed program)
as chair.

[3] Eileen Scully (listed in the printed program) withdrew.

[4] SPD- Social Democratic Party of Germany, socialist party of the
German political left and led in 1969 by Willy Brandt.  FDP- Free
Democratic Party, liberal/neo-liberal party; junior coalition partner
with the SPD from 1969-1982.  Although small, the FDP has held the
balance of power in the Bundestag for much of the FRG's history.

[5] The views expressed in Todd Bennett's paper and presentation do not
necessarily reflect those of the US State Department or the government
of the United States.

For a complete listing of all sessions at SHAFR 2004, the conference
program may be viewed at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/shafr/program/.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright (c) 2004 by H-Diplo, all rights reserved.  For any proposed
use, contact the H-Diplo Editors at h-diplo@h-net.msu.edu or the
H-Diplo article discussion coordinator, George Fujii, at
gfujii@umail.ucsb.edu.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS