1

Cold War Axioms Relating to the Duality of Richard Nixon

Omar Alansari-Kreger

As the Cold War approached a peaking period the last thing any power wanted
was to capitulate to a peace agreement at the hands of a fourth rate power. American
meddling in Vietnam began immediately after the French reasserted their colonial power
over their possessions in Indochina. From there the world was broken into geo-political
fragments where both superpowers analyzed their comparative strengths and
weaknesses. The designs of the Cold War were one of attrition in the sense that one
wanted to dominate the other. Nixon did not want to go down as the first president that
agreed to a peace agreement with the communist bloc because that gesture alone
would undermine the hegemonic legitimacy of the United States. History shows that this
happened before the Soviet Union was confronted with a similar international situation
which later arrived in the form of Afghanistan.
The facts still stand; the Vietnam War was unwinnable from its earliest onset,
tens of thousands of American servicemen died for absolutely nothing, and everything
the United States tried to protect fell entirely through the cracks. The aftereffect caused
even greater humiliation to the United States as a direct result of its military first
diplomacy later mindset; however, Nixon was allowed to walk away without answering
for his sabotage of the peace agreement arranged under the Johnson Administration.
That was treasonous because Nixon did not have the right to intervene in official
channels in order to exclusively manipulate it; the act of the latter is a blatant act of a
manipulative crony bent on the proliferation of their own power complex. Unfortunately,
Nixon saw himself as the edification of the United States and felt justified in following
through with what he saw was best for the nation; wait a second, isnt that what a
benevolent dictator does?
It seems that Nixon desired to use Vietnam as a template to combat the domino
effect all over the world; beneath those circumstances the United States would
establish a militarized presence at the request of an embattled pro-American
government fighting an internal war against its own communist insurgency. The CIA did
just that, but if the North Vietnamese were pummeled into submission American military
intervention worldwide would have been more out in the open in the aftermath; after the
Nixon era the same tactics continued, but were carefully swept under the rug under a
pseudo culture serving the so called greater good. In this regard, open exposure
specifically refers to the manner in which an international situation is conveyed to the
American public. The hurrah culture of American military muscle gradually faded after
2

World War Two nostalgia started to dwindle from the American psyche; that was largely
due to the generational paradigm shift that arrived in the form of the Baby Boomers.
Secrecy would have continued, but perhaps that would have jump started the
vision foreseen by the New American Century decades later? Nixon failed because he
thought he had extraordinary powers that went above and beyond any element of
constitutional law; he was reprimanded not as a power hungry thug, but as a defeated
visionary that caught an oppositional bullet at the wrong place at the wrong time.