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Mostrando postagens com marcador Richard Nixon. Mostrar todas as postagens
Mostrando postagens com marcador Richard Nixon. Mostrar todas as postagens

segunda-feira, 21 de maio de 2018

Nixon e Kissinger: dois cinicos ambiciosos - book review Robert Dallek

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/books/review/Lawrence-t.html?

The Odd Couple

Visionaries or cynics? Peacemakers or warmongers? Few individuals in recent times have provoked as much controversy as Richard Nixon and his partner in foreign affairs, Henry Kissinger. Admirers laud the two men for dramatically easing the cold war and sensibly recognizing the limits of American power to shape the world. Critics castigate them as Machiavellians who undertook reckless policies in the third world, often throwing American power behind brutal tyrants in elusive quests for international stability.
Robert Dallek argues for another possibility: the two men were visionaries and cynics at the same time. On first consideration, this is an unremarkable conclusion. And yet “Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power” makes a valuable contribution to the study of American policy making during the turbulent years from 1969 through 1974. Partly, it does this by transcending the stale polemics that have surrounded the study of Nixon and Kissinger. But its more significant, if not wholly convincing, achievement is to connect the unevenness of their policy-making performance with the ups and downs of their peculiar personalities. “The careers of both Nixon and Kissinger,” Dallek asserts, “reflect the extent to which great accomplishments and public wrongdoing can spring from inner lives.”
This isn’t the first time Dallek, a prolific biographer of American presidents, has challenged simplistic characterizations of public men by delving into their private behavior. In 2003, his best-selling study, “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963,” drew on long-secret medical records to describe Kennedy’s epic struggles against a variety of ailments. “Nixon and Kissinger” contains no such spectacular revelations. Indeed, Dallek’s extensive use of recently declassified material — millions of pages of national security documents, 2,800 hours of Nixon’s secret tape recordings and 20,000 pages of transcriptions of Kissinger’s phone calls — seems to have turned up nothing to revise the broad contours of either man’s life. Rather, Dallek exploits this new material mainly for the quotations and fresh details that enable him to paint rich portraits of his two subjects.
Associated Press 
Superficially, Nixon and Kissinger, who served first as Nixon’s national security adviser and then as his secretary of state, had precious little in common. The president, son of a California grocer, identified with the hopes and grievances of middle America and bristled with resentment against East Coast sophisticates. Kissinger, a German-born Jew, rose to prominence as a pathbreaking scholar of international politics at Harvard and reveled in his acceptance among the political and intellectual elite.
But fundamentally, Dallek shows, the two were remarkably alike. Both wanted desperately to leave a deep imprint on history. Both were ruthless pragmatists who disregarded decorum, principle and sometimes the law to get what they wanted. And both were insecure loners who distrusted, deceived and abused just about everyone, including each other. For these troubled men, Dallek writes, politics offered “a form of vocational therapy” — an arena where they could exercise control and find approval.
Shared neuroses led to jealousy and hostility. Kissinger privately assailed Nixon as “that madman” and “the meatball mind.” Nixon returned the favor, demeaning Kissinger as his “Jew boy” and calling him “psychopathic.” He fretted incessantly that Kissinger was getting too much credit for the administration’s accomplishments and repeatedly considered firing him. Still, Dallek writes, their common characteristics did even more to bond the two men, who formed “one of or possibly the most significant White House collaboration in U.S. history.”
Under some circumstances, Dallek suggests, their blend of ideological flexibility and monumental egotism produced bold foreign policy advances, most notably the opening of relations with Communist China in 1971-72. And he praises Nixon and Kissinger even more exuberantly for initiating détente with the Soviet Union. Agreements negotiated with Moscow, he argues, helped end the cold war by lowering Soviet hostility to the outside world and opening the country to Western influences, which ate away at Communist rule from the inside. Kissinger’s efforts to make peace in the Middle East after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war similarly laid the groundwork for a later breakthrough, in this case the landmark 1978 accord between Egypt and Israel.
Associated Press 
On other occasions, Dallek writes, Nixon and Kissinger’s cynicism and unreasonable fear of defeat interacted to produce some of the administration’s ugliest moments. Above all, the two men needlessly prolonged and expanded the Vietnam War in a disastrous attempt to stave off a Communist victory at a moment when most Americans and most of the world wanted the fighting to end. In Chile, Nixon and Kissinger conspired to overthrow the Socialist government of Salvador Allende — and to bring the murderous regime of Augusto Pinochet to power — even though they could not identify any specific way in which Allende threatened the United States. Their fear that a leftist government in Chile might inspire radicals throughout Latin America was, Dallek charges, “nothing more than paranoia.”
What’s more, Dallek presents a devastating account of irresponsibility and dysfunction within the White House as the Watergate scandal unfolded. Desperate to save their careers, Nixon and Kissinger schemed to manipulate foreign policy to distract attention from the deepening domestic crisis. When these efforts failed, an increasingly unbalanced and alcohol-fogged Nixon abandoned foreign affairs almost entirely, leaving Kissinger in charge as a sort of unelected “co-president.” At the start of the 1973 Middle East war, Kissinger delayed informing Nixon for two and a half hours because of uncertainty about the politically embattled president’s ability to cope with urgent decisions.
Dallek’s attention to personalities makes “Nixon and Kissinger” remarkably engaging for a 700-page study of policy making. But this emphasis also underlies its chief weakness: the implication that the foreign policy devised by Nixon and Kissinger lacked intellectual coherence. Curiously, Dallek fails to describe at any length the rapidly shifting geostrategic landscape that confronted the Nixon administration as it entered office in 1969 — above all, the relative decline of American power due to the Vietnam War and the Soviet Union’s attainment of nuclear parity with the United States. Nor does he adequately explore Nixon’s or Kissinger’s innovative response to this new situation. Champions of realpolitik, the two men deliberately favored cool-headed calculation of national interests over ideological consistency. Without this essential background, their decisions seem haphazard rather than parts of a strategy to shore up United States influence by cultivating a new partner in China, easing the cost of the arms race with Moscow, bolstering pro-American leaders in the third world and avoiding defeat in Vietnam.
The narrow focus on character also obscures the full extent of the two men’s failures as policy makers. To be sure, their compulsive secretiveness and paranoia contributed to the downfall of the Nixon administration, precisely as Dallek suggests. But the two failed in a more profound sense as well. Their policies, rooted in the cold calculation of American interests, generated a powerful backlash from both liberals, angered by the brutalization of the third world, and conservatives, who objected to the coddling of Communists. The liberals helped elect Jimmy Carter in 1976, the conservatives Ronald Reagan in 1980 — presidents who, despite their many differences, shared a deep hostility to the lack of moral principle at the heart of Nixon-era foreign policy. The ideas of Nixon and Kissinger, not just their characters, have languished in disrepute ever since.

domingo, 27 de setembro de 2015

What IF? A big IF: o que teria sido da China se Nixon nao tivesse ido em 1972? - The Globalist

Uma enorme pergunta dessas que podem entrar nos exercícios de história virtual, desta vez econômica. A história virtual -- que eu cultivo, tendo pelo menos três ou quatro livros da série What If? -- se dedica bem mais a episódios militares ou simplesmente políticos (golpes, revoluções, ações humanas), do que propriamente a processos econômicos, que são bem mais "pesados" para serem influenciados facilmente pelas ações humanas.
Mas no caso da abertura americana para a China -- tomada por Nixo por motivos puramente estratégicos e geopolíticos: abrir uma outra frente para enfraquecer a União Soviética, então sob a liderança já gerontocrática, mas ainda extremamente ativa de Brejnev -- ela possui enormes consequências geoeconômicas.
Muito provavelmente a China não teria empreendido seu grande caminho de volta ao capitalismo tão facilmente quanto foi com a permissão dada a empresas americanas, e estrangeiras em geral, para se instalar nas zonas econômicas especiais criadas por Deng Xia-ping na sequência dessa abertura.
Sem uma China capitalista nos anos 70 e 80, não teríamos o gigante econômico da atualidade, e o mundo seria muito, mas muito diferente do que é...
Enfim, vale a reflexão, ainda que seja só um BIG IF...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

Where Would China Be Without Nixon?

What would today’s global economic landscape look like had Nixon not gone to China in 1973?



Richard Nixon was the first U.S. president to visit China while in office.

Takeaways

  • Almost every inhabitant of China today owes a debt of gratitude to Richard Nixon.
  • U.S. relations with China from 1949 to 1972 were very similar to U.S.-Iran relations today.
  • The official Mao-era vision of the United States as the Imperialist Wolves would have remained dominant among China's decision-makers and most of its people.
U.S. relations with China in the period 1949 to 1972 were very similar to U.S.-Iran relations today. They were stuck in a rut and nobody seemed capable of finding a constructive way forward.
Had President Richard Nixon not gone to China, in February 1972, we can assume that the isolate-China policy of the United States would have persisted much longer. President Jimmy Carter might well have attempted to thaw relations, but he, as a Democrat, would have met with strong opposition from Republicans.
It was said when Nixon opened to China that only a relatively hawkish Republican could have done it. Domestic opposition to the move would otherwise have been too fierce. It would probably have been left to the Reagan Administration to change the policy, probably in President Reagan’s second term (1985-89), when a general thaw in the Cold War occurred.
In these circumstances, with a U.S trade embargo in force, the Chinese opening to the world would have been very difficult to get going. The availability of the gigantic U.S. market was essential to provide the foreign exchange needed to develop Chinese industry and agriculture.
The first burst of increased Chinese exports happened remarkably quickly after China’s government changed orientation in 1976. Exports more than tripled in five years, from $7.3 billion in 1976 to $24.4 billion in 1981 — modest figures now, but a vital source of foreign exchange then.
The further increase in exports was then rather slow until an explosion after 1987. With the United States embargoing Chinese goods in 1976-81, the initial surge would have been impossible.
Had visits by Nixon and President Gerald Ford, who went to Beijing in 1975, not taken place, the official Mao-era vision of the United States as the Imperialist Wolves would have remained dominant among China’s decision-makers and most of its people.
This might well have been sufficient to tip the scales towards triumph for the Gang of Four, doubtless quickly followed by the liquidation of Deng Xiaoping and probably the moderate Hua Guofeng, Mao’s immediate successor.
Had this happened, there would certainly have been no opening to capitalism before death of Jiang Qing, Mao’s last wife, in 1991, and probably not for long thereafter. China today would well be the impoverished, economically unimportant country it was in the later years of Mao.
Almost every inhabitant of China (and the “almost” is purely there for courtesy) owes a debt of gratitude to Richard Nixon.

Without his action, the country would today be no freer than it is and its people would be immeasurably poorer than they are. It is, however, not clear whether Americans should also raise a glass to him for this development.
Had China remained in its Maoist cave, other countries, notably India and Vietnam (if that country had liberalized without China’s example) would equally have been able to provide cheap labor and skills to multinational corporations.
Indeed, some such countries — notably Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan — may also be counted as marginal net losers from Nixon’s opening and China’s subsequent emergence. They lost business they would have otherwise obtained.
The two major gainers from China’s emergence are consumers of Chinese-made products and the multinational corporations doing one-stop sourcing from China.
A third group — multinationals selling to China — has notably failed to make adequate returns. For every one of these companies eking out modest profits in China, there are ten that have found it a bottomless pit of loss.
Textile consumers have benefited spectacularly, with prices no higher today in nominal terms than they were 20 years ago. In electronics, 20 years ago, most gadgetry was assembled in the United States and Japan. Today its cost to consumers (or in Apple’s case, to Apple) is greatly reduced by the magic of Foxconn’s Chinese production system.
Without China, sourcing in East Asia, including Foxconn’s own Taiwan, would be possible, but the cost would be much higher.
We now come to the unquestionable gainers from China’s emergence. Just read the profit statements of multinational corporations. U.S. corporate profits are at a level in terms of GDP not seen since the glory days of 1929.
Thanks to China, Apple and its confrères are able to manufacture at — what used to be called — third-world wages and sell at rarified Western prices. That won’t last forever. Indeed, Apple’s shareholders already seem to see the shadow of a coming return to normal.
However, so far the profit wave, which was caused by China’s emergence and benefited top U.S. management, investment bankers and hedge fund managers, has been greater than in any other of the world’s great booms.