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| Airstream by Ralph Goings, 1970 |
In this post, I will quote from ‘Power Shift: The Rise of the Southern Rim and Its Challenge to the Eastern Establishment’ (1975) by Kirkpatrick Sale. "The pattern of Richard Nixon's foreign policy was set early in 1969 at a meeting of the National Security Council staff in the west wing of the White House. The new president made very clear to the men assembled that he himself was going to be the boss of the country's foreign policy - domestic policy can run by itself, as he used to say, but foreign policy needs a presidential hand - and that he would be using Henry Kissinger, head of the NSC staff, rather than William Rogers, Secretary of State, as his right-hand man. Then he launched into a furious assault on the State Department and its handling of foreign policy, an attitude he no doubt carried with him from his McCarthyite days, and finally declared that it was going to be the president's own staff in the White House that would take charge of foreign policy in the new administration, not those "striped-pants faggots" in the State Department. His audience was stunned, as well it might be, but it was privileged at least to be given such a revealing portrait of the Nixon mind and its attitude toward American foreign policy: Nixon saw himself as the great international wheeler-dealer, he intended to build up his own bureaucracy whose loyalty and obeisance he could always check, and he would be giving no power to the snobbish Eastern Ivy Leaguers he imagined infested Foggy Bottom. That was the first indication, but it would not be the last, that the Cowboy Strategy operated just as much in foreign as in domestic affairs. Take Vietnam. As tragic as it seems, there is little doubt that Nixon prosecuted that war for four years and several million lives, in spite of the fact that he knew he could not prevail, because he did not want to do anything that looked like acknowledging the humiliation of American defeat - thus losing him the support of the superpatriots of the Southern Rim and threatening his reelection in 1972. Cowboy Strategy called for the elaborate machismo of military might to disguise the awful truths that America's army could not fight, its money could not triumph, its power could not conquer. Cowboy Strategy meant accompanying every demonstration of peace-seeking with massive demonstrations of warfare - hence the saturation bombing of Hanoi just before the visit to Peking, the mining of Haiphong before the summit meeting in Moscow, the Christmas bombing of Hanoi before the final cease-fire. Cowboy Strategy meant postponing the final defeat until after the 1972 elections and then accompanying it with such elaborate shenanigans around homecoming soldiers and released prisoners of war that it could be given, at least in receptive quarters of the Southern Rim, the guise of victory. Cowboy Strategy mean pumping enough money and materiel into South Vietnam to support Thieu even after the cease-fire, following Kissinger's oft-stated goal that there should be "'a decent interval' - two to three years - between the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a Communist takeover in Vietnam." Dean Acheson, a wily yankee, with antennae carefully tuned toward Nixon's strategy, perceived all this in the last weeks before his death. As recounted by fellow yankee Emmet John Hughes, he laid bare the Nixon "rationale" for the protracted war: The essence of this rationale argued that the nation's reactionary right would rise in wrath against a hasty retreat, and the disengagement therefore had to be artfully "staged" to blur the truth and avoid the backlash. "Kissinger sums up White House motivation in one pithy phrase," the former Secretary of State explained. "He says we must at all costs avoid an orgy of recrimination." Thousands of Americans were killed during four years of a military withdrawal staged to appease militant patriots and to protect the President's political right flank. It was because of this prolongation that the first serious cracks began to show themselves in the wall of support which the business community and its followers had erected before 1968. Both Northeastern and Southern Rim capitalists, of course, wanted to keep Southeast Asia open for the American empire, and both therefore hoped to pacify Vietnam. But there were certain costs that the yankee community wanted to avoid, and as the balance of payments grew steadily worse, as inflation kept mounting, as the social dislocations at home became ever sharper, and as the futility of the operation grew more apparent, more and deeper cracks appeared, more Wall Street businessmen joined the ranks of the polite dissenters. Nixon, ever the politician, sought to keep the revolt from growing by his detente visits to Russia and China and his staged announcement that "peace is at hand" just before the 1972 elections, and that was enough - along with the business world's antipathy to George McGovern - to put almost the entire capitalist spectrum in the Republican camp in 1972. But this early sign of a split in the business ranks should have been a clear signal that the Cowboy Strategy was playing too fast and loose with the yankee vision and that perilous times were ahead. Nor was Vietnam the only evidence of the fabricated bellicosity of this strategy. Nixon continually delighted in rattling his nuclear weaponry - remember it was he who described himself to the Pope as the most powerful man in the world, and made it sound like a threat - and in reminding less fortified nations (India, the Middle East, Japan) that they were at the mercy of American might. Even his posture with the Soviet Union, though it could unbend for occasional treaties which Nixon saw as being in American interests, was arrogant and pugnacious, born of the essentially Cold War attitude (which he shared with the Metternichian Kissinger) that global diplomacy was a perpetual power struggle which always necessitated a show of strength and a presumption of treachery. Hence, to prove to Russia more than anyone else that America was not a pitiful, helpless giant: the vehement prosecution of the Vietnam War, the mobilization of troops after the Soviet-backed invasion of Jordan, the abandonment of SALT talks after their political purpose had been served, the recurrent deployment of American fleets, and the military alert during the Yom Kippur war. As literary critic Alfred Kazin has put it in his romantic way: "The drives, the "battle" that Nixon proudly says is "always with me," the necessity to obliterate an opponent rather than to persuade him, the computerized, militarized football-stadium language that vindictively brings all loyalties down to the "team" as the corporate ego in which a man may find his necessary virility, the lack of any cultural ties outside the overwhelming monoliths of American power - these are the "operabilities" behind Nixon's Mein Kampf, born of mid-century American toughness and drive and planetary megalomania fascinated by and envious of Soviet ruthlessness. Bit by bit our old scruples have been eroded by a new value system that recognizes no truth that is not part of what is "operable."" After the settlement of Vietnam, the linchpin of Nixon's cowboy foreign policy became the economic penetration of foreign markets, most especially for cowboy interests. The administration poured millions of dollars into the Middle East, sent its CIA operatives as ambassadors to Iran and Lebanon, and expended enormous diplomatic energy for a cease-fire, all in order to protect the long-range interests of the oil internationals, old and new. It let the traditional alliances with Europe fall into shambles, earning the enmity of virtually every government on the Continent, while it concentrated instead on openings to the Pacific (China, Southeast Asia) and the Caribbean, especially for the new overseas operations of technical and aerospace runaway plants. It badgered Japan to get better protection for the textile industry, nurtured Russia to get better markets for the agribusiness sector, coddled Greece for the protection of shipping and oil interests, and cultivated the Middle East for its reinvestments of "petrodollars" into American real estate, banking, and defense products. But above all, the administration finally got America caught up with the rest of the world in its relations - especially its trade relations - with Russia and China. True, the detente with Russia and the opening to China seemed to be a dangerous defilement of the Cowboy Strategy - and indeed both stirred up considerable passion among the Far Right in the United States - but in fact they were both carefully, almost surgically, limited to the establishment of markets and investments to the benefit of American, especially cowboy, capital. Not at any point did they threaten any of the interests that the cowboy ideology held dear: despite the arms agreements with Russia, there was no limitation whatsoever in the production of weaponry of the relative superiority of American power; despite normalization with China, there was no withdrawal from Southeast Asia or Pacific military posts except in Vietnam. Ultimately it seemed that most cowboys agreed with the businessman in a cartoon of the time who argued, "They may be atheistic Red Chinese Communists, but I can't help thinking that there's 800 million potential consumers over there." The reason for the American penetration of these new markets was put with disarming frankness by Alfred Wentworth, head of the Chase Manhattan Bank office that opened up in Moscow in 1973, a yankee who certainly understood cowboy principles: "The Soviet Union" - he should have added China as well - "is the last great undeveloped market for the U.S." Certainly yankee businesses could take advantage of those markets - Nixon, after all, was never one to deny opportunities to American business of any stripe - but the importance of opening them up under the Nixon aegis is that the cowboy industries could share in the bonanza as well, and, insofar as their success depended on government favors, could generally count on being given the larger shares. Particularly important this when it is remembered that in an earlier era, before the cowboy challenge had been mounted, yankee firms swarmed all over Europe, developing hegemonic markets that outsiders could not break - but here at last in Asia and Russia was a chance for the newcomers. Trade with China was only in its infancy when its American midwife was forced from office in 1974, but even so the preeminent role of the Southern Rim was clear enough. Cotton exports had reached the point where the United States stood as China's largest foreign supplier, enjoying annual sales of nearly $400,000, and the State Department expected them soon to amount to "as much as a quarter of the U.S. cotton crop"; tobacco sales, though insignificant in total world-wide trade, started off at some $150,000 a year and seemed encouraging enough to cause several Carolina plants to reorient part of their operations toward this market; fertilizer plants, a product of the Rim's agribusiness know-how, were eagerly sought by China for its vast agriculture, with the first $70 million factory scheduled to be built by a Texas firm; and total contracts from the Chinese for the American construction industry, according to an American official, stood at no less than $1 billion by 1973. An indication of the cowboy clout here was the composition of the executive board of the high-level business council formed in 1973 with American government backing "to promote American trade with China": seven of them were certifiable yankees - David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan, Donald Kendall of Pepsico, and the like - but they were outnumbered by the ten bona-fide cowboys, ranging from David Packard of Hewlett-Packard to Anthony Bryan of Texas's Cameron Iron Works. That just would not have happened ten years before. Trade with Russia has, of course, been far greater in volume and sales - about $9 billion per year through the 1970s, but the same pattern emerges there, too. To be sure, there have been hundreds of firms outside the Southern Rim which have taken advantage of the new relaxations of the Nixon era and moved in with everything at their disposal; the Kamaz truck complex, for example, put together by Chase Manhattan Bank in 1972, is almost totally a yankee enterprise, and a $270 million one at that. At the same time, however, a whole range of new corporations, some not even in business when the West European market opened up after World War II, were quick to embrace this new opportunity for overseas expansion and for a slice of the potentially multibillion-dollar Russian market. Cook Industries, the Memphis grain dealer, has been the beneficiary of some $20 million worth of the grain trading with the Soviet Union; Dresser Industries of Dallas had done $27.5 million worth of business by the middle of 1974 and confidently predicted quadrupling of its volume within a few years; Texas Industries, Cameron Iron, and M. F. Kellog, three diverse Texas businesses, all won contracts for sales to or plants in the Soviet Union in the 1970-73 period; and Occidental Petroleum of California has signed an enormous $20 billion fertilizer deal with the Soviet Union involving the construction of a 1,500-mile pipeline, the shipment of Florida phosphates, and the development of ammonia plants over the next ten years. And still the plum of the whole Soviet-American detente has yet to fall. So far the Russians have indicated willingness to go ahead with two massive natural gas schemes, one piping gas to Black and Barents Sea ports, the other to the Pacific - both of which are to be constructed and operated by cowboy consortiums. The Black-Barents scheme would be operated by El Paso Natural Gas (Texas) and Occidental Petroleum (California), and would be constructed by Bechtel (California) and Williams Brothers (Oklahoma) - the size of that deal is estimated to be around $10 billion just to start with; the Pacific operation would be operated by Tenneco and Texas Eastern Transmission, would be built by Brown & Root (all Texas) - and that would have an initial cost of $15 billion. Everything has been held up on the American side, and not even Nixon's pressure was able to force Congress into the trade agreement guaranteeing these investments in the Russian wastelands; still, since the ultimate product - natural gas - is badly needed in the American economy, one of the two schemes is almost certain to be approved. Look at that: and without any striped-pants faggots, either. In retrospect, it may be that Nixon's greatest contributions will in fact have been in the area of foreign affairs, though not for the reasons ("a generation of peace") he predicted. If the end to American imperial hegemony over the world is supplanted by a new penetration of the markets in both semi-developed (Russia) and developing (China) countries, if "neo-imperialist" arrangements are in fact struck allowing a non-national kind of exploitation of world resources, and if upstart American industries are placed in a strong position in the fight for these considerable treasures, then the Cowboy Strategy will have achieved its most lasting effect in the transformation of American foreign policy. Quite clearly, for good or ill, the Nixon Administration was one of the most important in the history of the American republic. It began a process of rearranging priorities that had been settled, or so it was thought, for the previous half-century at least. It was the embodiment of new power, new money, new influence, new dynamism. It attempted to establish a new structure for the American Presidency, a new reordering of the American economy, a new design for American power. And it did so with a brashness, an imperiousness, a force, that eventually betrayed it into bestirring its rivals into action."
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