President Nixon moved ahead with the assurance that despite all the noise of America's youthful protesters and their equally vociferous intellectual mentors, he had the full backing of the "Silent Majority" ... the Vets who turned out in huge numbers to vote him into the White House.

But this Nixon was a changed man, much different from the old staunch anti-Communist firebrand of the 1940s and 1950s.  During his eight years out of Washington he had traveled extensively around the world, met with the heads of foreign governments and had come to understand the world personally in a way few men coming to the White House ever had the opportunity to experience.  He now had a much broader vision of America's responsibilities in the world and a more subtle understanding of how to meet those responsibilities.

Nixon would actually be bringing a new foreign policy philosophy to the White House (new to the present generation of Americans anyway), a political philosophy known as "Political Realism."  This was basically a European political philosophy largely perfected by Prussian Chancellor Bismarck in the late 1800s as he skillfully assembled a new German Empire out of a large number of small German states. Bismarck employed a combination of war, diplomacy, bluff, and often deceit, without being too concerned about moral ideals in order to achieve what he wanted.  It was this lack of Idealism which thus earned this philosophy the (German) name Realpolitik. Later the German-American professor Hans Morgenthau would spell out the particulars of this philosophy in his classic work Politics among Nations (lectures while professor at the University of Geneva in Switzerland in the early 1930s, first published in 1948 and republished many times since then).  Nixon had picked up the knowledge of this philosophy along the way in his travels and visits abroad.

To help Nixon put this philosophy in place now as president, Nixon appointed Austrian-born Harvard professor Henry Kissinger as his national security advisor (and later also secretary of state).  Together they introduced a whole new look to American foreign policy, which to American Idealists (especially to the very left-leaning Liberal Idealists and to the very right-leaning Conservative Idealists) appeared totally cynical.

Political Realism would have had no difficulty in finding acceptance from either the Founding Puritan Fathers or the Founding Fathers of the American Republic, for it is a political philosophy that arises from the basic premise that man instinctively engages the world around him most powerfully on the basis of what he understands "logically" as his own (sinful) self-interest.

Political Realism is aware that man is a moral animal, in the sense that he feels compelled to justify his actions on the basis of some moral logic or moralizing of his own.  But even this moralizing is simply another aspect of his pursuit of self-interest. Morality is simply the way a person logically justifies his pursuit of self-interest, to others – even to himself.

For instance, a Realist realizes that moralizing is simply a verbal cover the individual offers up in the hope of presenting a compelling reason for others to yield to that individual's set of interests (such as a lawyer before a jury, or a six-year old before a scolding parent).  It may actually include a lot of lying or slick deception in the hope that such deceptive moralizing will shape more advantageously the behavior of others.

A Realist, in attempting to deal with others, however, must first be clear in his own mind about what, in any given situation, his self-interests truly are. He must be very careful not to confuse his own moralizing with his true self-interest, which is fairly easy to do, and which in fact is often done in history, usually with disastrous results (say for instance when Hitler himself truly began to believe the lie he put over on the rest of the German nation that he was a diplomatic and military genius).

It is also very important that the Realist try to understand the actual self-interest behind the moralizing of the others around him.  He should study life's challenges from their perspective, to try to understand how it is that others see things, and thus how they are likely to act in any particular situation on the basis of what they think they see.  A Realist should also pay close attention to the moral arguments he hears from others, not to sit in judgment as to whether they are objectively right or wrong but because they give him a better insight into how others perceive their own self-interest.

This is an important contributor to the Realist's ability to understand and anticipate the behavior of others, and to his ability to respond to the logic that others will use to give moral cover to their behavior.

The Realist also understands that self-interest is shaped tremendously by power. Power is the amount of ability a person has to actually pursue his sense of self- interest.  The more power a person has, the more a person's sense of self-interest will expand.  Little power enables only the most-humble pursuit of self-interest. Great power enables a wide ranging, domineering pursuit of self-interest.

But of course, power is a rather limited factor.  No one, no nation, has total power.  Everyone, every nation, has some power, and needs to know exactly how much that actually is.

Power in a social context is not a particular material quality, but is simply how strengths in oneself and in others are perceived.  Power is highly symbolic in nature.  Certainly there are material attributes that shape that perception: guns, bombs, size of armies, size of the industrial infrastructure, size and training of the population itself.  But of equal and usually even of greater importance are such intangibles as a reputation for power, wisdom (or lack thereof), a sense of optimism (or conversely, pessimism), and simply bravery or an inner strength willing to take on risks.  This latter element of power, bravery, is where a deep faith in or sense of higher connection with the One who controls all life becomes absolutely essential (although this idea does not play as central a role in classic Realism as it should, though most Realists do recognize the connection).

Modern Political Realism is ultimately about nations, their interests (the "national interest") and their power.  A nation must have a very keen sense of its own national interest, as well as the national interests of the other nations playing at the "game board" of world diplomacy.  A nation must also be very aware of the size and nature of its own power, material and symbolic, as well as the power of others.  In short, it (or at least its leaders) must know how to size up both itself and others.

Before a nation ventures into a new move on the game board it should do a very thorough cost-benefit analysis of the situation.  How important is this particular move?  What are the gains or benefits that will probably come from this move? How much is it going to cost the nation to make this move?  How much of its limited resource of power is it going to take to put national muscle behind this move?

Failure to get this analysis right (or worse, failure to undertake this cost-benefit analysis altogether, which sadly is often what happens, especially to Idealistic America) can bring disaster, even total ruin to a nation.  For instance, nations that exhaust themselves in a war that brings no offsetting gain have simply squandered needlessly, even foolishly, even tragically, their power.  In doing this they have left themselves vulnerable to the aggressions of a nation of growing power that is willing to test the weakened nation to see how badly that nation got depleted by its political folly.  Political nature will simply take out that nation that has self-inflicted wounds wrought through folly.

A wise nation moves cautiously in the international diplomatic/ military game.  It attempts to join forces with other nations who are pursuing similar national interests in order to combine forces and not expend drastically its own power. Sometimes it has to ally with others simply because it does not have enough power to take on a challenge by itself.  This is how Roosevelt's America and Churchill's Britain found themselves in alliance with Stalin's Communist Russia during World War Two (1939-1945).  Germany was so powerful that it necessitated this alliance to bring Germany to defeat.  They allied not because they shared similar moral codes and political cultures (although of course Britain and America certainly did).  It was simply that as long as Germany was running loose across Europe, they all shared a common national interest of defeating Germany. Period.  But once Germany was defeated, that alliance broke down (the Cold War took its place), because principally America (with Britain in support) no longer shared a common interest with Russia.  In fact at that point their national interests were in something of a natural conflict over Europe, and then soon over the entire world, as they were bound to be (as both Truman and Churchill were quick to understand after the war's end in 1945).

As odd as this may sound, self-interest can lead to some of the most charitable acts in the world of diplomacy and international relations.  For instance, after World War Two, Truman and his America expected Europe to simply put itself back together after the shooting stopped.  But within two years the Europeans had exhausted what was left of their social assets in the effort to rebuild.  Politically as well as economically they were bankrupt.  Stalin saw great advantage to his Soviet Union in this situation and called on his Communist allies in the West to thoroughly disrupt what was left of the social order in the West – to give him, through his Stalinist agents, full control of Western society.  Truman (and his Secretary of State George Marshall) immediately understood the danger this put not only Europe but also America in ... and moved to offer Europeans full economic assistance in rebuilding their societies.  The offer was extended even to the Russians if they had wanted it – which of course would have been totally contrary to Stalin's Soviet self-interest, and therefore was refused in the East.  But the "Marshall Plan" did the trick, settling things down both economically and politically in Western Europe.  But it also gave America the task of using its factories and farms (and thus jobs for Americans as well) to supply much of Europe's needs for rebuilding.  And both societies prospered enormously in the process!  That was true charity – formulated out of a strong sense of political self-interest on the part of everyone (except Stalin)!  That's also political Realism in action – in the very best of ways!

The big diplomatic challenge facing Nixon as he entered the White House was the war in Vietnam.  An attempt to arrive at a negotiated settlement through meetings in Paris between representatives of the North and the South Vietnamese governments was going nowhere, merely serving as an ongoing propaganda platform for both sides.  Meanwhile the Vietnam issue was tearing America apart emotionally.

As he approached the end of his presidency (announced in March of 1968), Johnson proposed a limitation of the American bombing of North Vietnam (Operation Rolling Thunder, pretty much in constant operation since America's full entry into the war in 1965) as a somewhat desperate "peace offering" at the Paris peace discussions.  Johnson was hurting badly and wanted some kind of "reward" for his very unsuccessful efforts to remake South Vietnam according to some kind of American social image.

This then opened up diplomatic discussions over the summer of 1968, although they ultimately went nowhere in terms of bringing the warring sides to some kind of agreement.  Then, just prior to the November presidential elections Johnson announced a complete halt to the bombing of North Vietnam – cynics pointing out that this was done solely to improve Humphrey's chances in those elections (the Vietnam war was hurting the Democrats badly).

But Nixon had already discovered this idea, and moved on the matter by secretly¹ telling the South Vietnamese President Thieu not to yield to any "peace proposals" coming from Johnson.  Actually South Vietnam had no real interest in the Johnson maneuver anyway.  Nixon promised South Vietnamese president Thieu that despite Nixon's campaign promise to the American voters of a full withdrawal of American ground troops in Vietnam if he were elected president, he would do all he could to continue support for South Vietnam by other means (American economic and air power).

Humphrey could have claimed that Nixon's intervention in the peace process was in serious violation of the Logan Act, making it highly illegal for an unauthorized civilian to get involved personally in American foreign policy.  But it was a legitimate proposal of one who was hoping to soon find himself in office: telling the South Vietnamese to not sell themselves out (actually, they were not about to do so). America was not going to abandon them.

However, in assuming the presidency, Nixon found that the task of cleaning up the Johnson mess was not going to be easy.  Nixon had no plans to just simply abandon Vietnam, but instead hoped to leave behind some kind of stable pro-Western regime in the South that would finally bring America some kind of benefit from the long, savage war.

To achieve that, he was going to have to "Vietnamize" the conflict by building up, and supporting with arms and with money, a maturing South Vietnam army (ARVN), so that it could take over the fighting duties undertaken heavily by the Americans.  At the same time, he would be withdrawing American ground troops from South Vietnam.  But he was also going to have to make it clear to North Vietnam (and to the South) that the withdrawal of these troops did not mean the withdrawal of American "interest" in South Vietnam.  Ongoing American airpower was going to replace withdrawn ground power, with even greater devastating results for North Vietnam if it continued to hassle the South.

Thus in March of 1969 Nixon ordered B-52 bombings of Communist positions in Vietnam as a clear indicator of continuing U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam. Then three months later Nixon met President Thieu at Midway Island to explain his plan for a 15-step withdrawal of U.S. troops, beginning with 60,000 scheduled to be withdrawn by the end of that year, from the 550,000 American troops stationed there at that point.  The goal was to have nearly all U.S. troops out of Vietnam by November of 1972, when Nixon would be up for re-election.

Meanwhile, during the continuing effort to bring the North and South Vietnamese sides together at the Paris peace table in order to achieve something of a "peaceful" settlement, it became quite apparent that still neither the North nor the South wanted to deal with the other.  For the pro-Western Saigon Government of President Thieu, the problem was always the North's refusal to recognize the right of the Saigon government even to exist, and the idea that the Saigon regime should share the responsibilities of governing the South through some kind of cooperative arrangement with the Communist National Liberation Front (NLF or Viet Cong).  There was no way Saigon was going to accept such an arrangement.

Nixon knew he was going to have to bring pressure to bear on both sides, allied as well as enemy, to get things moving towards a peace settlement.  The allies in South Vietnam he could lean on, and did, threatening to pull U.S. troops out of Vietnam even more quickly if the South Vietnamese did not make a more serious effort at working out some kind of deal with the North.

The North Vietnamese and NLF adversaries would also have to be leaned on, though that would take a different form.  In April of 1970, Nixon sent a huge American military force into not-so-neutral Cambodia to shut down the Ho Chi Minh Trail that had been used as a supply line from Communist North Vietnam to the Communist Viet Cong in the South (which Johnson had left alone, apparently done in order not to widen the war into neutral Cambodia).  The offensive was a success militarily, dramatically cutting off the flow from the North of military supplies to the Viet Cong in the South.  But the offensive was also designed to help the new pro-Western Cambodian regime of General Lon Nol fight the Cambodian Communists or "Khmer Rouge," operating under the leadership of the "Maoist" Pol Pot.

¹Actually it was not such a secret – as Johnson had the NSA intercepting Nixon's communications going back and forth to Vietnam and had wire-tapped the South Vietnamese embassy and even members of the Nixon presidential campaign staff.  Of course Johnson could not reveal to the American public what he knew was going on between Nixon and Thieu because he would have had to explain how it was that he knew this information.  But he did pass the information on to Humphrey, who nonetheless avoided (in part for the same reason) using the information to attack Nixon in the presidential campaign.  But so sure was Humphrey that he was destined to win the election that he was certain that the did not need to exploit such risky information.

The American departure from Vietnam needed some kind of assurance of a smooth transition to a new, stable status quo in Southeast Asia, or otherwise the whole region could fall into devastating violence.  To provide for that stability, Nixon realized that he also needed some cooperation from the Communist Superpowers, Russia and China.  The old Cold War was going to have to be reworked diplomatically.³  Thus Nixon surprised many by ending the American political boycott of the Chinese Communist government.

The "thaw" in Chinese-American relations actually began in early April of 1971, when, at the World Table Tennis Championship held in Japan, American players were invited to visit China, the first group of Americans (other than the militantly anti-White-America Black Panthers) allowed to visit China since 1949. This "table-tennis diplomacy" was followed up by a secret diplomatic mission to China by Kissinger that July.  That then opened the way in February of the following year (1972) for a well-publicized visit of Nixon and his wife to China to open formal lines of communication with Beijing, Nixon meeting extensively with Zhou Enlai and briefly with Mao in the process.

Any other president who would have attempted such a move would have been termed "soft on Communism."  But Nixon was a well-known opponent of Communism.  It was a bold move.  And it worked.  Americans generally seemed approving of the move.  And thus in May of 1973, Nixon sent something of an ambassador to head up the U.S. Liaison Office in Beijing, and China responded similarly with a permanent representative in Washington.

Americans were generally pleased with this thaw in the Cold War.  But the Democrats (who still controlled both houses of Congress) were in no mood to celebrate a Nixon political achievement of any kind.

³Nixon was well aware of the tensions growing along the Soviet-Chinese border (where the Chinese had stationed 1.5 million troops) and that in March of 1969 the Chinese had launched an attack against Russian troops at a small island in the Ussuri River, with the Russians sending tanks against the Chinese to block the Chinese move.  He also knew of other small incidents of a similar nature that had occurred in August further west along the Chinese-Russian border.

Nixon also put into effect a new set of diplomatic policies toward Russia.  With the help of Kissinger, he devised a program offering the Russians the possibility of a stepping back or détente in the nuclear arms race, and in general a great reduction of the diplomatic and military (or nuclear) brinkmanship game that the two superpowers had been playing for so long.  Thus in May of 1972 Nixon flew off to Moscow and ceremoniously initiated the new détente strategy.  It was an amazing performance.

What he was doing was "linking"⁴ the promise of détente or the end to a Cold War which had been a huge economic burden to everyone, especially to Russia and China, as a tradeoff in order to secure the promise of Russia and China to be cooperative with America as it attempted to leave South Vietnam peacefully.  Nixon was also trying to soften up the Communist coalition of Russia, China and North Vietnam, a coalition that existed largely because of the Cold War tensions between the Communists and the Americans.  In reducing those tensions he opened up old tensions that had long existed between the Russians and the Chinese, for instance, over who had the rights to certain Siberian borderlands.  He also opened old tensions between the Chinese and the Vietnamese, the Chinese long ago having pushed the Vietnamese out of southern China, where the Vietnamese had once been the original inhabitants of the area, leaving the Vietnamese resentful of their Chinese neighbors to the North.

This program of Political Realism or Realpolitik was quite a chess game.  But it worked (basically).  With something of a success in his new foreign policy, Nixon felt that the situation was stable enough so that he could bring the last of the American troops home from Vietnam.  By the spring of 1972 the original 550,000 American ground troops in Vietnam had been reduced to only about 6,000 in number.

⁴This strategy is thus termed "linkage" diplomacy – although basically it is simply old-fashioned market-place bargaining and trading, "this for that."

In November Nixon crushed the Democratic Party Candidate George McGovern (the darling of the Boomers) by a huge margin, the fourth largest percentage-wise in the history of America's  presidential elections, and the largest ever numerically! Nixon received 60.7 percent of the popular vote and won all but Massachusetts and Washington, D.C. in the electoral college vote.  The Silent Majority had given Nixon a strong vote of confidence.

Nixon now felt that he could look forward to a more relaxed second term as President. But that was not going to happen.  To a great extent this was because, although he had been overwhelmingly re-elected to the White House, the Democrats still held on to a huge lead in both Houses of Congress (56 Democrats to 42 Republicans and 2 independents in the Senate, and 242 Democrats to 192 Republicans in the House).

Nixon would soon find that working with the Democratic-Party-controlled Congress would prove to be as difficult as working with the Vietnamese.

Meanwhile negotiations had still been going on behind the scenes between the Nixon White House and the North and South Vietnamese governments.  In October, just before the November elections, Kissinger had agreed on (and Nixon had approved) a broad compromise measure in Paris, one actually that left the status of Thieu's Saigon government in question.  Under the agreement, the Thieu government would essentially have to share power in the South with a Communist regime, the Provisional Revolutionary Government or PRG representing the Viet Cong.  Thieu rejected the "compromise," feeling that Nixon had tried to sell him out behind his back.

However, after the resounding victory in the election, Nixon felt free to reshape the American proposal, strengthening the pro-Saigon terms.  But this then the North Vietnamese rejected.  Talks thus continued to go nowhere.  By mid-December the North Vietnamese broke off further talks.

And thus to bring North Vietnam back to the table, and to secure some kind of tangible results before the strongly Democratic Congress returned to session and simply legislated an end to American involvement in Vietnam (which the Democrats were in a strong mood to do), during the second half of December of 1972 Nixon ordered a massive B-52 bombing (the "Christmas bombing") of the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi and its major port city of Haiphong.

The anti-war, anti-imperialist American Liberal Left of course very predictably rose up in rage at Nixon's bombing program.

But in fact, Hanoi got the message in this show of American power, as did also Saigon, and the next month (January 1973) all sides finally signed the Paris Peace accords (although America itself did not), agreeing to respect the terms basically similar to the previous October proposal, but with the Saigon government assigned control of roughly 80 percent (and most urban portion) of the country and the NLF assigned control of the remaining 20 percent of the country.  In the bombing of the North, Nixon had made it very clear to all parties about the type of American enforcement they could expect if the agreement were not respected.

With that well understood by all parties, Nixon was hoping that America would finally have something to show for its years of trying to plant and defend a pro-Western government in South Vietnam, one that would mark the limit of further Communist expansion into the region.  Unfortunately, that's not exactly what was to follow.