Ferguson, Kennedy, Kissinger, and Vietnam: A Fresh Look

Ferguson’s detailed biography provides a window into the context of policies and people who led the US into full-blown engagement in Vietnam. He provides evidence from Kissinger‘s early academic writings involving Kantian philosophy and nineteenth century diplomacy, but continuing much later, that his subject was not the one-dimensional realist some have taken him to be. Ferguson emphasizes that Kissinger in fact embraced idealist ethics, thought Prince Metternich to be backward-looking, and had serious reservations about the thrust of Bismarck‘s power politics… Ferguson's analysis of Kissinger's record on Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations shows that, while he critiqued the implementation of the general war strategy, he never opposed it. Both Ferguson and Kissinger ignore evidence that Kennedy was shifting his position on Vietnam and that significant intra-Vietnam peace talks were taking place in 1963. Such omissions provide a false perception of historical alternatives... Ferguson's assessment shows that Kissinger's and the United States' expectations for what could be achieved at the negotiation table in 1967-68 were unrealistic–a major critique of Kissinger and Nixon's conduct... Kissinger's justifications for staying in Vietnam were usually geopolitical rather than grounded in a thorough understanding of what was going on the ground, and his view of power relations, at least during the 1950s and 1960s, paid insufficient attention to nonaligned countries' contributions to international stability. Furthermore, Kissinger considered maintaining US credibility to be a nearly independent reason for sustaining the war effort. Credibility arguments, on the other hand, operate best when its proponents are otherwise headed in the right direction. The US security architecture would survive the post-Vietnam conclusion that troop commitments would be severely constrained, just as it had survived concessions to avoid nuclear war over Berlin or Cuba. The Kissinger-Nixon approach to Vietnam was marred by bad judgement rather than an excess of or deficiency of foreign policy realism.