jan 1, 1973 - Paris Peace Accords end U.S. involvement in Vietnam war

Description:

detente: The easing of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Nixon administration, which was achieved by focusing on issues of common concern, such as arms control and trade.

As protests continued at home, Nixon pursued his goal of “peace with honor.” Negotiations to end the war had begun in Paris in May of 1968, when Johnson was still president. With both sides avoiding agreements that looked like defeat, and each accusing the other of negotiating in bad faith, the Paris peace talks dragged on for years, as the war grew even bloodier. Nixon knew, however, that a U.S. military victory was unlikely and that the Paris talks represented the surest route to an American exit.



Nixon wanted not just “peace” but also “honor,” which meant ending the war on terms favorable to the United States. He hoped to achieve those favorable terms via both diplomacy and a shift in military tactics. First, he sought détente (a lessening of tensions) with the Soviet Union and a new openness with China. Nixon reasoned that by thawing relations with these two communist adversaries, which supported North Vietnam against the U.S.-backed South, he could strike a better deal at the ongoing peace talks in Paris. In a series of meetings between 1970 and 1972, Nixon and Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev resolved tensions over Cuba and Berlin and signed the first Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I), the latter a symbolic step toward ending the Cold War arms race. Nixon was heavily influenced by his national security advisor, the Harvard professor Henry Kissinger, who regarded the Soviet Union not as an ideological foe to be resisted at every turn but as a traditional geopolitical rival with whom compromises were possible. Taking Kissinger’s advice, Nixon sought to break the impasse that long kept the United States from any productive relationship with the Soviet Union.

Nixon took the same approach to China, and in 1972 became the first sitting U.S. president to visit that country. In a weeklong trip heavily covered by the press, the president pledged that the two nations — one capitalist, the other communist — could peacefully coexist. This was the same Nixon who had risen to prominence in the 1950s by railing against the Democrats for “losing” China and by hounding Communists and fellow travelers in the United States. Indeed, the president’s impeccable anticommunist credentials gave him the political cover to travel to Beijing. Praised for his efforts to lessen Cold War tensions, Nixon also had tactical objectives in mind: he needed to end the war in Vietnam without appearing to lose it, and he hoped that better relations with the Soviet Union and China would aid in this objective.


American officials conferring with a Chinese foreign minister on their way to Beijing, China, in 1972 with President Nixon. Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security advisor, is seated second from left. On this trip, Nixon became the first sitting president to visit mainland China, part of a larger easing of tensions between the United States and the major communist powers — the Soviet Union and China — in the early 1970s

To accompany his pursuit of détente, Nixon shifted American military tactics. In April 1972, in an attempt to strengthen his negotiating position, the president ordered large-scale bombing raids against North Vietnam. A month later, he approved laying explosive mines in North Vietnamese ports, something Johnson had never dared to do. Neither tactic worked: supplies from China and the Soviet Union still flowed in, and the communists fought on.

With the 1972 presidential election approaching, Nixon sent Kissinger back to the Paris peace talks, which had broken off in 1971. In a key concession, Kissinger accepted the presence of North Vietnamese troops in South Vietnam. North Vietnam then agreed to an interim arrangement whereby the South Vietnamese government in Saigon would stay in power while a special commission arranged a final settlement. With Kissinger’s announcement that “peace is at hand,” Nixon got the electoral boost he wanted and won reelection. The agreement was then sabotaged by General Nguyen Van Thieu, the South Vietnamese president. In response, Nixon, in an all-out bid to force an end to the war, unleashed the two-week “Christmas bombing” of the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong, the most intense of the entire war. Historians disagree over the bombing’s impact on negotiations, but on January 27, 1973, the two sides signed the Paris Peace Accords.

Nixon hoped that South Vietnam’s Thieu regime might survive, propped up by massive American aid. But Congress was in revolt against the war and cut back aid to South Vietnam. In March 1975, North Vietnamese forces launched a final offensive, and by the end of April, Vietnam was finally reunited. That outcome was a powerful, and tragic, historical irony. The American involvement in Vietnam had begun in 1954, with Eisenhower sending money and advisors to South Vietnam just as the Diem regime refused to honor the unification vote mandated in the Geneva Accords. Two decades later, the outcome was essentially what that unification vote would have produced. In other words, America’s most disastrous military venture had not mattered. It had not changed the geopolitical outcome in Vietnam. However, although the Hanoi regime called itself communist, it refused to be a satellite of any country, least of all China, Vietnam’s ancient enemy.

The price paid for the Vietnam War was steep. Those Vietnamese who had sided with the Americans lost jobs and property, spent years in “reeducation” camps, or fled the country. Millions of Vietnamese had died in the war, which included some of the heaviest aerial bombing of the twentieth century. In bordering Cambodia, the maniacal Khmer Rouge, followers of Cambodia’s ruling Communist Party, took power and murdered 1.7 million people in bloody purges. More than 58,000 Americans had given their lives in Vietnam, and 300,000 had been wounded. On top of the war’s $150 billion price tag, it inflicted internal wounds on the country; Americans were increasingly divided, with less confidence in their political leaders.

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