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October 1973: Nixon’s decision to resupply Israel

Note: This article was written and published before Hamas’ brutal attack on Israel on October 7, 2023.

“500 tanks!” exclaimed Henry Kissinger. The national security advisor-cum-secretary of state did not want to believe what he was hearing from the Israeli Ambassador Simcha Dinitz as he recounted the losses sustained by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) during a meeting at the White House on October 9, 1973. It had been three days since Egypt and Syria launched a two-headed assault against Israel, and now, it dawned on Kissinger just how serious the latest Middle East crisis had become.

Kissinger and the rest of Richard Nixon’s administration faced a decision with titanic consequences. Should they send a flagging Israel the tanks, jets, and other weapons it needed to win the war? Or let the belligerents duke it out as is? The president and his administration chose the former. For the Israelis, this was a deliverance that could have come from God himself. Simply put, America’s resupply saved Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir standing with president Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger outside the White House. — Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir standing with President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger outside the White House. The photo was taken about ten months before the Yom Kippur War. Source: Library of Congress

The whole of the U.S. government was caught unawares by the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, also termed the October War. As has been the case many times in American history, the intelligence was wrong. “Israelis do not perceive a threat at this time from either Syria or Egypt,” the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv reported to Washington on October 1. Yet the threat was all too real. The two Arab states, which Israel had trounced six years earlier in the Six-Day War, resolved to smash Israel and recover the territory they had lost: Egypt, the Sinai Peninsula(and Gaza), and Syria, the Golan Heights.

Egypt and Syria attacked at 2:00 p.m. on October 6, which that year fell on Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. The IDF scurried to beat back the onslaught. At first, its defenses were to little avail. Arab tanks, infantry, and planes ravaged the Israelis’ lines. They lost men and military assets left, right, and center.

To the northeast, Syria took the southern Golan and threatened to roll on into the Sea of Galilee and the rest of northern Israel. To the southwest, the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and penetrated Israeli positions. Things took a grisly turn on October 8. Israeli losses kept on mounting while the country neared its breaking point. Celebrated general and future Prime Minister Ariel Sharon later called it “the black day” of the IDF.[1]

All the while, Washington debated how it should respond. Israeli requests for supplies came in earnest once it became apparent that, unlike in 1967, this would be no easy victory. Washington’s dilemma was not easy. It feared that a resupply would alienate the oil-rich Arab states. Another variable was the Soviet Union’s resupply of Egypt and Syria, both Moscow proxies. Should the United States respond in kind, the two nuclear-armed superpowers might stumble into war themselves. The stakes were immense.

Evacuating Israeli wounded from the southern front, 10.6.1973.
Courtesy of IDF and defense establishment archive, photo no. **8320/298**, by Avi Simhoni

Many in the administration favored withholding weapons. This was especially so of Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger and the rest of the Pentagon. “Our shipping any stuff into Israel blows any image we may have as an honest broker,” argued Schlesinger.

So began a contentious back and forth between Schlesinger, who feared the consequences of resupply, and Kissinger, who feared the consequences of the reverse. Kissinger was fed up with the Pentagon’s resistance to resupplying the Israelis. “They are anxious to get some equipment which has been approved and which some SOB in [the Department of] Defense held up which I didn’t know about,” he groused to White House Chief of Staff Alexander Haig, also a proponent of a resupply, by phone.[2]

*Henry Kissinger visits President Nixon at the White House. Source: Library of Congress*

For his part, Nixon authorized providing all the military aid requested by Israel with one caveat. The U.S. government could not be openly complicit in the resupply lest the rest of the world find out. The Israelis would have to collect the weapons themselves from a base in Virginia. “The original order from President Nixon was,” Schlesinger recalled decades later, “‘Give them anything they want as long as they pick them up in El Al [the Israeli flag carrier] aircraft or chartered aircraft.’”

The Department of Defense did not like this one bit. Kissinger later wrote that Pentagon officials were happy “to drag their feet” and stop the Israelis from picking up the arms. “The Pentagon was not cooperative,” remembered Ambassador Dinitz, who said he could not get a meeting with Schlesinger until October 11, five days after the war started.[3] By October 8, the administration realized the existing arrangement was insufficient for the increasingly desperate Israelis. For the IDF to prevail, it needed vast quantities of American weapons. Nixon, who insisted that Israel “not be allowed to lose,” greenlit a major resupply plan on October 9 that he believed would ensure Israel’s survival.

Ambassador Dinitz and the Israelis were grateful. “All your aircraft and tank losses will be replaced,” Kissinger told him as he relayed the president’s decision. “We will get the tanks in even if we have to do it with American planes.” The resupply was on.

An M60 tank is unloaded from a U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-5A Galaxy in Israel during "Operation Nickel Grass" in 1973. — *An M60 tank is unloaded from a U.S. Air Force Lockheed C-5A Galaxy in Israel during “Operation Nickel Grass” in 1973. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

With his directive, Nixon came to the Jewish state’s rescue. The decision was not as clear-cut as it may seem in retrospect. He defied recommendations by his Department of Defense and many others in the Federal bureaucracy who were convinced that the resupply was not in America’s economic and political interests. Despite his own anti-Jewish prejudice, Nixon considered Israel a vital pillar of America’s global strategy. He could not forsake it. If Israel were to fall, the Soviets would chalk up another win in the zero-sum game of Cold War geopolitics. “We will not let Israel go down the tube,” Nixon vowed then.

Orchestrating the resupply proved difficult in practice. At first, the administration planned to airlift the materiel via civilian airliners. Yet no private insurers would assume the risk of sending them into a war zone. Richard Perle, then a chief aide to the ardently pro-Israel Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), remembered meeting with a teary-eyed Ambassador Dinitz when he heard by phone that there would be no chartered flights.[4] The resupply was in doubt again.

With civilian planes off the table and all other contingencies exhausted, the administration realized that it had no option but to provide military planes. The president was frustrated by his administration’s failure to get supplies to the Israelis, who were quickly running out of ammunition. “Do it now!” Nixon barked as he ordered the use of military aircraft.[5] In his memoirs, the president recalled urging his administration to “send everything that can fly” to Israel.[6] The airlift, alternatively called Operation Nickel Grass, was underway.

Over the ensuing month, C-5 and C-141 transport jets from the Air Force delivered 22,395 tons of supplies to Israel, stopping to refuel at Lajes Air Base in the Azores on the way. Thanks to indefatigable airmen, the planes would fly more than 500 missions over the course of the airlift. Navy ships and their sailors ferried more supplies by sea. The American resupply matched and surpassed its Soviet counterpart. One of the greatest operations of its kind in history, it was a herculean effort by the U.S. military to provide Israel with the tools to win the war.

Israeli airplanes are cropping supply. Courtesy of IDF and defense establishment archive, photo no. **891610/11**

The resupply was a godsend for the Israelis. American largesse helped them turn the tide of war, especially in the Sinai. Bolstered by the arms it so desperately required, the IDF repulsed the Egyptian offensive before launching one of its own. Egyptian resistance melted away as the Israelis crossed the Suez Canal and advanced within 99 kilometers of Cairo. On the other front, the Israelis retook the Golan. Israel had won when the war ended on October 25. It did not have to cede any territory to the Arabs. It nonetheless paid a steep price in the form of 2,656 dead and thousands more wounded.

There is little doubt the resupply was essential to the Israeli victory. The IDF was shellshocked and depleted, its supplies dwindling perilously. American arms arrived at just the right time. “Without our airlift, Israel would be dead now,” Kissinger said amid the fighting. Golda Meir, the intrepid Israeli prime minister, wrote in her memoirs that “it undoubtedly served to make our victory possible.”[7]

Had Nixon and his people not come through, there’s no telling what would have happened to the Israelis. They had been staring at their defeat if not destruction. The Arabs were poised to recover the lands they had lost in 1967. Abba Eban, then Israel’s foreign minister, later acknowledged that before the resupply, Israel awaited a cease-fire solidifying the Arabs’ gains. “This would have meant that the Egyptians and Syrians had won the first round of the war,” he wrote.[8] The second round might have been even worse for Israel. A decimated IDF would likely not have been able to defend its territory. Arab leaders, who had a long track record of pledging to “throw the Jews into the sea,” could have had the opportunity to make good on their promise.

It turned out that the Israelis would not be thrown anywhere. They kept control of the Sinai and the Golan. Doing so allowed them to trade the former for peace with Egypt at the end of the decade, based on the land-for-peace formula. That agreement was also a diplomatic triumph for the United States. Once an ally of the Soviet Union, Egypt became a key American partner. Washington’s influence in the Middle East grew as Moscow’s weakened.

*Carter, Sadat, and Begin at the Peace Treaty Signing, March 26, 1979. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

To be sure, the United States incurred short-term costs because of the resupply. Most notably, Arab members of OPEC retaliated, embargoing the sale of oil to the United States and other countries backing Israel. They wielded the oil weapon in hopes of forcing Washington to back down. It did not work. Despite facing a quadrupling of the price of a barrel of oil, the Nixon administration and the American people would not be bullied. The resupply continued.

Nixon’s resupply was perhaps the greatest contribution any American president has ever made to Israel. His decision, which scholars and journalists to this day have not fully appreciated, was enormously consequential. To it, Israel likely owes its existence. Consider what has become of the Jewish state in the years since. Israel has come a long, long way since the Yom Kippur War. Today, it is among the wealthiest countries on earth and a global leader in advanced technology. It boasts a formidable conventional military and a nuclear deterrent to boot. It has full relations with six Arab countries, and that list may soon get longer. It is home to vibrant institutions that, whatever their faults, are the most democratic of any in the Middle East. Nixon’s resupply made all that possible.

October 1973 has much to teach us about our current moment. As malignant powers threaten their neighbors worldwide, Washington should follow the Nixon administration’s example. We should not stand by while our foes devour our friends. The resupply is also a reminder of the primacy of national interests. Nixon’s resupply was no act of charity. He may have, in his heart of hearts, wanted to help the Israelis, but he decided with his head. The resupply was what was best for American security and prosperity. Like all other countries, the United States pursued its aims and ambitions, not those of another.

This year, as Israelis commemorate the semicentennial of the Yom Kippur War, they are bound to remember the heroism and sacrifice of those who fought and died for their homeland. And well they should. Israelis are a proud, self-reliant bunch. They do not like counting on others to solve their problems. All the same, they ought to recognize that the United States rescued their country in its hour of greatest peril.

Daniel J. Samet is a Doctoral Candidate at the University of Texas at Austin and an America in the World Pre-Doctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins SAIS. He is completing his dissertation on U.S.-Israel defense relations. Some of the material in this article has been adapted from Daniel’s upcoming dissertation.

[1]. Ariel Sharon and David Chanoff, Warrior: The Autobiography of Ariel Sharon, 2nd Touchstone ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 303.

[2]. Transcript of Telephone Conversation, October 7, 1973, 9:35 a.m., Henry A. Kissinger Telephone Conversation Transcripts, Chronological File, Box 22, 7 Oct 1973, 8, Richard Nixon Presidential Library.

[3]. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 486.

[4]. Author interview with Richard Perle, May 10, 2023.

[5]. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982), 514.

[6]. Richard M. Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1978), 927.

[7]. Golda Meir, My Life (New York: Putnam, 1975), 431.

[8]. Abba Eban, Personal Witness: Israel through My Eyes (New York: Putnam, 1992), 533.

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Rethinking American Grand Strategy in the Asia Pacific

By More than Providence: Grand Strategy and American Power in the Asia Pacific Since 1783. By Michael J. Green. Illustrated. 725 pp. Columbia University Press. $45.

by Jonathan R. Hunt
University of Southhampton

First Published by The Imperial and Global Forum (October 23, 2017).

Otto von Bismarck once remarked that the United States was blessed: “The Americans are truly a lucky people. They are bordered to the north and south by weak neighbours and to the east and west by fish.” Thanks to this geographic grace, George Washington could call for freedom from “entangling alliances” in his farewell address. This distance has also bred a strong undercurrent of parochialism and chauvinism in American culture. From these two impulses has emerged the conceptual DNA of American foreign relations in the form of two dichotomies—exemplarism versus interventionism; cosmopolitanism versus exceptionalism—lending form and structure to debates about how a democratic people should manage their affairs in an often unkind, even hostile, world.

In his sweeping and authoritative account of United States grand strategy in the Asia Pacific, Michael J. Green reminds us that Americans have long regarded this maritime expanse – from the Aleutians to Cape Horn in the Western Hemisphere across to Australasia and Sakhalin in the Eastern — as integral to defending their ‘empire of liberty’. Nineteenth-century policymakers from Thomas Jefferson and Matthew C. Perry to Henry Seward and John Hay sought to pry open these watery frontiers to American influence (and conquest) so as to stave off any threats that might overleap the Pacific Ocean. Their twentieth-century successors, Alfred Thayer Mahan and Teddy Roosevelt, George Marshall and Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson and Harry Truman, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, George Shultz and Ronald Reagan, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, among others, have fought to keep the Pacific an American lake – for now.

Green brings scholarly and policymaking credentials to this tour d’horizon. Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., and an associate professor at Georgetown University (not to mention the Asia hand in George W. Bush’s White House), he is supremely qualified to narrate and appraise more than two centuries of decisions, processes, and events. On a hemispheric tableau teeming with squadrons, legations, missionaries, gunboats, marines, emissaries, island chains, and good intentions, he paints a United States government in pursuit of a “distinct strategic approach” that would guarantee “that the Pacific Ocean remain[ed] a conduit for American ideas and goods to flow westward, and not for threats to flow eastward toward the homeland.” (5)

The Alaska Purchase, 1867. Left to Right: Robert S. Chew, Secretary of State (USA); William H. Seward; William Hunter; Mr. Bodisco, Russian Ambassador; Baron de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner; Fredrick W. Seward (via Wikimedia Commons)

Green charts this strategic disposition from the Articles of Confederation to Obama’s pivot to Asia, dividing the chronology into four eras when a rising power—the United States, Japan, the Soviet Union, and China—convulsed the region’s politics. American assertiveness waxed as European empires toggled from New World outposts to Asian colonialism in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. In short order, Jefferson’s greater Louisiana brought on James Monroe’s enunciation of an American protectorate in its hemisphere, John Tyler’s extension of that Monroe Doctrine to the Sandwich Islands (Hawai’i to natives Polynesians), and William Seward’s purchase of Alaska (dubbed his ‘ice box’), before the Civil War cut short the Pacific ambitions of Lincoln’s secretary of state.

This section is rich in geography and personality, acquainting readers with a century-long campaign to seize “stepping stones,” most pivotally Hawai’i, in the Pacific, introducing swashbucklers like Captain David Porter, whose piratical voyage to the Pacific in the War of 1812 foreshadowed the fusion of mercenary and military aims that would become the country’s modus operandi, and keeping a running tally of plenipotentiaries (of uneven quality) who served in an ever more prostrate Qing China. Green’s treatment of dusty concordats such as the 1858 Treaty of Tientsin, in which the United States pledged its “good offices” to Beijing in dealings with rapacious British, French, and Russians after the second Opium War, and the 1868 Burlingame Treaty, which recognized Chinese eminent domain over its whole territory, is welcome. He is sharp on the strategic contours of these many-sided rivalries; yet, while alive to the noxious influence of Anglo-Saxonism in nineteenth-century American culture, his tendency to treat republican virtues as more significant in U.S. foreign policy than Manifest Destiny chauvinism yields a handful of errors and omissions.

Green’s heroes are, above all, republican realists, high priests at the altar of the balance of power who still find ways to promote democracy, the rule of law, and free trade in the wider world. Thus, his hinge is fin-de-siècle power couple are Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan—the quintessential man of action married to the man of ideas. The latter expounded a strategic theory based on naval bases, sea lanes, and deep-water armadas; the former built a Great White Fleet to enforce it. The tendency to view America’s holdings in the Pacific, mostly insular takings such as Guam, Hawai’i, and the Philippines, as incidental rather than intrinsic to American power leads Green to paint the Bull Moose in overly Mahanian hues, emphasizing his naval leadership and power-balancing after the 1905 Russo-Japanese war while downplaying his protectionism and colonialism. What passed for strategic élan in Washington, after all, in Manila simply looked like another instance of imperialism. He is on firmer grounds in his treatment of John Hay’s push for trade reciprocity in China, contesting Wisconsin School members who deem the Open Notes clear evidence that the United States was (and remains) a capitalist octopus in ravenous search of pliant markets.

“AND, AFTER ALL, THE PHILIPPINES ARE ONLY THE STEPPING-STONE TO CHINA” – cartoon from Judge Magazine showing Uncle Sam with the “tools of modern civilization” using the Philippines as a stepping stone to China, ca. early 1900s (via Wikimedia Commons)

His appraisal of Asia policy from Teddy Roosevelt to cousin Franklin is scathing, and for good reason. Wilson sold out Korea and China’s Shangdong province to Japan for his League of Nations, before Calvin Coolidge, Warren Harding, and Herbert Hoover retracted U.S. power after Teddy’s ally, Henry Cabot Lodge, nixed an American role in the league. Green includes a revealing vignette about American interwar finance, as William Straight and J. P. Morgan sought Chinese debt before the crash of October 24, 1929, put paid to their schemes. For Green, the Department of State’s willingness to accommodate Japan, whose militaristic expansions would upset the (perhaps excessively) elegant Washington Treaty, violated Mahan’s signature insight—playing sides against one another to avert a peer regional competitor from arising. Although the Japanese Co-Prosperity Sphere bore this warning out, he dismisses too perfunctorily the alternatives that Franklin Roosevelt’s Asianists—Lawrence A. Lowell, Joseph Grew, Stanley Hornbeck, and John Von Antwerp MacMurray—put forth. After all, MacMurray’s call to retrench at the Second Island Chain prefigured modern realists like Barry Posen, whose 2014 Restraint contends that the United States would best observe Mahan’s dictum by re-drawing its defense lines further west while retaining command of the commons. (To be fair, assured nuclear retaliation has now nullified whatever existential threats had existed.)

What happened after the United States sanctioned Japan for yet another massacre in China in 1940, after seven years of turning a blind eye (par for the course in the Guernica decade), was the country’s first fair fight in the Pacific. Green is too credulous that Hiroshima and Nagasaki won the war (Tsuyoshi Hasegawa shows that the Soviet declaration of war was equally if not more decisive), but his verdict that Roosevelt and Truman failed to leverage Chester Nimitz and Douglas MacArthur’s military triumphs on behalf of a grand strategy that would deliver post-war security is devastating. When the Soviet Union switched from wartime ally to geo-ideological adversary, U.S. officials overlooked the Kuomingtang’s weakness and Mao Tse-Tung’s zeal; as a result, they held out on China serving as a fourth United Nations policeman. This even as Chiang Kai-Shek’s battle lines crumbled, in part for lack of American support (apart from a woefully inadequate 900 military advisors), leading to the loss of China and setting in train a series of events that would culminate in the militarization of containment in Korea and the Americanization of the war for peace in Vietnam.

The Cold War tested American grand strategy in ways new and old, first with proxy wars fused to anticolonial struggles, and then the Soviet Union’s massive naval build-up in the 1980s. Next to old chestnuts such as the extent of continuity in personnel and policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations is the conspicuous omission of the former’s obsession with China’s nuclear-weapons program (its first nuclear test was on October 16, 1964); even though it was nearly a decade before Beijing fielded a survivable arsenal, the first Asian nuclear-weapon state was a game-changer, catalysing the Vietnam War, severely constraining U.S. military options once there, and helping usher the People’s Republic into the United Nations. Likewise, there is a clear and disturbing hierarchy of liberal values for Green, with genocide ranking far lower than free trade. When he supports the contention that “noble cause” advocates make that the war helped cauterize communist insurgencies in Indochina, Malaysia, and Thailand, for instance, he glosses over the 500,000 Indonesians estimated dead in the mass killings that shepherded the Suharto dictatorship into power in Jakarta.

Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai. It was the first trip made by an American president to the nation, 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Nixon earns plaudits as an unsentimental president who ended twenty-five years of non-recognition between the most powerful and most populous nations on Earth; but Reagan, who convinced Japan to serve as an “unsinkable aircraft carrier,” (405) invested massively in the U.S. Navy, and midwifed democracy movements in the Philippines, South Korea, and Taiwan, receives the lion’s share of praise. In Green’s telling, his emphasis on security and stability afforded strongmen like Ferdinand Marcos and Park Chung-hee the leeway to sanction free elections. Reagan’s application of military, ministerial, and moral instruments to a coherent strategy in the region affords a case study for wedding power to principle effectively. Green also holds it to offer lessons for the newest and most challenging contender for regional pre-eminence: The People’s Republic China.

The final section dovetails with a set of vigorous debates now gripping Washington and Asian capitals. Can the United States and China resolve differences without military recourse as Beijing stakes its position in the South China Sea and Senkaku islands? Will America’s hubs-and-spoke network of alliances survive as China’s wealth and power cast a spell over neutrals and allies alike? Can Washington nudge the alphabet soup of multilateral institutions toward trans-oceanic rather than intra-regional orientations, especially now that the Trans-Pacific Partnership is comatose? Will the U.S. join the Beijing-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or acquiesce to the PRC’s “One Belt One Road” initiative of ports, highways, railways, and pipelines? Will Washington and its partners succeed in embedding Beijing as a stakeholder in the global rules-based order or will it shear off its sphere of influence from the norms and institutions that expedited its return to greatness?

Bill Clinton garners high marks for his strategy of engaging and balancing China, a two-pronged approach that George W. Bush and Barack Obama would adopt. And while Donald Trump’s beleaguered and inept administration has so far proven less unorthodox than anticipated on trade, Green’s emphasis on island chains, aircrafts carriers, and strategic sea-lift when compared to human rights, labour, immigration, and cultural dialogue yields a deafening silence on the centrifugal forces now eviscerating what once passed as bipartisan consensus on the importance of engagement in the Asia-Pacific for the security and prosperity of the United States.

Also by Jonathan Hunt on Not Even Past:

1986 Reykjavík Summit between Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev
Iran’s Nuclear Program and the History of the IAEA
Review: The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy

Foreign Policy from Candidate to President: Richard Nixon and the Lesson of Biafra

By Roy Doron

On November 19, 2016, President Barack Obama, speaking on the transition of power to Donald Trump said “once you’re in the Oval Office … that has a way of shaping … and in some cases modifying your thinking.” The 2016 election will undoubtedly be remembered as one of the most unconventional and even bizarre elections in American history. When Trump emerged victorious, he did so on a platform that promised to rethink virtually every aspect of American foreign policy, from free trade agreements to environmental treaties. Though the scope of Trump’s promises are unprecedented, his election was not the first time a candidate openly challenged U.S. foreign policy goals.

Richard Nixon campaigning (via Wikimedia Commons).

On September 8, 1968, Richard Nixon, then Republican candidate for president, issued a statement calling on the United States to take a central role in intervening in the Nigerian Civil War and the growing humanitarian catastrophe that was unfolding in secessionist Biafra. Titled “Nixon’s Call for American Action on Biafra,” the candidate called the Nigerian government’s war against Igbo secessionists a genocide and demanded that the United States take a leading role in stopping what he termed “the destruction of an entire people.” “While America is not the world’s policeman,” he declared, “let us at least act as the world’s conscience in this matter of life and death for millions.” (Kirk-Greene, 334-5). But the clarity of the candidate’s call to arms soon had to confront the realities of the office of President. The demands of America’s Vietnam-era foreign policy forced Nixon to abandon his personal sympathy for Biafra.

Many in the United States and in Nigeria and Biafra saw candidate Nixon’s statement as a call for active intervention in the war, which by the end of 1968 had turned increasingly in Nigeria’s favor. Nigeria’s civil war began when Biafra declared independence on May 30, 1967 after a protracted crisis that included two coups and ethnic violence that claimed the lives of thousands, mostly Igbo from Nigeria’s southeast. Though Biafra enjoyed several early successes, the war quickly turned into a protracted blockade against the Igbo heartland, with thousands of civilians dying every day from starvation and disease in the beleaguered enclave that Biafra had become.

Children receive a food ration in Nigeria in 1968 (via Wikipedia Commons).

To counter the military losses, the Biafran leadership embarked on a global public diplomacy drive spearheaded by MarkPress, a Swiss public relations firm owned by the American William Bernhard, calling the blockade and ensuing starvation genocide. MarkPress’ access to global media outlets helped the Biafrans garner significant attention in an already chaotic year in world history. The Tet offensive in February 1968 created a seismic shift in American support for the war in Vietnam, turning the majority of the population against it for the first time. This was followed by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy only two months apart; the latter’s occurring in the middle of a tumultuous election campaign. In Europe, student protests in Paris almost brought down Charles De Gaulle’s government, while a Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August ended Alexander Dubcek’s “Prague Spring.” However, with nightly news broadcasting images of starving children directly into homes around the world, many groups rallied to the Biafran side, with protests in cities around the world and benefit concerts featuring Jimi Hendrix and Joan Baez.

The Prague Spring was part of the global crisis of 1968 (John Schulze via Flickr).

These efforts, however, had little effect on government policies, because the Nigerians and their allies in the Organization of African Unity (OAU), eager to prevent a repeat of the Katanga Crisis in Congo, blocked most deliberations on the war in the United Nations, insisting that the matter was an internal African one. Biafra, led by the eloquent and charismatic Colonel Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, sought to use the humanitarian crisis to create a global outcry that would force Nigeria to come to terms with the secessionists and guarantee Biafra’s independence. Failing that, Ojukwu hoped for internationally recognized relief corridors that would be protected from the Nigerian military. However, any large scale international intervention would require either a ceasefire or a demilitarized zone. For the Nigerians, led by General Yakubu Gowon, any agreement for relief was preconditioned on Biafra renouncing secession and the ending of the war. In fact, despite frenetic efforts at two hastily convened OAU peace conferences in May and August 1968, the sides could not agree on either an end to the war or on any agreement to address the humanitarian concerns.

In the United States, the Lyndon Johnson administration was inundated with demands to help Biafra but could do little but support relief efforts led by the Red Cross, Joint Church Aid and Caritas. Walt Rostow, Johnson’s National Security Advisor, summed up the administration’s effort by saying “we are doing everything we can, which is very little.” Nixon’s statement, coming from a candidate that most believed would win the election in November, gave hope to many on the Biafran side that a new American administration would take a more active role in helping the beleaguered secessionists. For Ojukwu and Biafra, Nixon the candidate was a friend and they hoped that President Nixon would continue to be one.

Biafran leader Chukwuemeka Ojukwu (via Logbaby).

Though Nixon was personally sympathetic to Biafra, once he became president he could do very little to change the course of the conflict or to influence humanitarian efforts beyond what Johnson had done before him. In fact, like Johnson, Nixon attempted to assist in convening another round of peace talks, but, according to Nigerian historian George Obiozor, during a visit to London in February 1969, Nixon sacrificed his commitment to Biafra in order to secure British support for America in Vietnam. Nixon continued to personally support Biafra, despite his inability to translate it into policy. In one briefing document, he wrote in the margins “I hope Biafra survives!”

Candidate Nixon’s comments on Biafra showcase the limitations of a serious presidential candidate’s ability to transform foreign policy once they arrive in the White House. Many in Biafra hoped for a more interventionist United States and Nixon’s election gave hope for Biafra to hold out well into 1969, until it became clear that Nixon’s policy would closely mirror Johnson’s. When the war ended on January 15, 1970, the death toll, by most accounts, had reached a million people, most from the humanitarian crisis, and helped create organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières. Though the effects of Nixon’s 1968 comments cannot be quantified, his inability to translate them into policy illustrates the limitations of even the world’s most powerful executive.

Roy Doron (UT Austin History PhD, 2011) is an Assistant Professor of History at Winston-Salem State University. He is author, with Toyin Falola, of Ken Saro-Wiwa, part of Ohio University Press’ Short Histories of Africa and a forthcoming history of the Nigerian Civil War with Indiana University Press.

Sources:

H. M. Kirk-Greene, Crisis and Conflict in Nigeria: A Documentary Sourcebook (1971).

George A. Obiozor, The United States and the Nigerian Civil War : An American Dilemma in Africa, 1966-1970 (1993).

Peeping Through the Bamboo Curtain: Archives in the People’s Republic of China

By Kazushi Minami

History is a contested area of politics in any country. Particularly so in China, where the Chinese Communist Party defines the national history. In the 1980s, in a period of reform, China started to open up its archives and archivists generously helped researchers find documents they needed. The Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive used to be a mecca for historians of Chinese foreign policy. Then in the early 2010s the new Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, abruptly introduced much tighter restrictions, presumably because of the international dispute over the territoriality of the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. Now, the Foreign Ministry Archive is virtually closed, and historians have turned to provincial and municipal archives scattered throughout China. Between the fall of 2015 and the summer of 2016, I visited seven Chinese archives as part of my dissertation research on Sino-American bilateral exchange in the 1970s and witnessed the Chinese politics of history in motion.

Guangdong Provincial Archive (via author).

Each Chinese archive has its own rules and regulations. The Shanghai Municipal Archive, for instance, has relatively liberal policy and scholars can read and transcribe anything they can find in the on-site computer database. They even allow visitors to photocopy documents—but not any document. In my case, the Shanghai Archive usually denied photocopying of foreign policy related materials, including reports of American visitors after Richard Nixon’s February 1972 trip to China. Chinese researchers told me that the archival staff would not give us any physical document on a potentially sensitive topic with their official stamp on it. The Guangdong Provincial Archive, once a must-go place for historians, now has a much more restrictive policy and researchers cannot even look at most documents produced in the 1970s. Documents on seemingly harmless issues, including the American track and field delegation in 1975, are no exception. Considering Guangzhou’s proximity to Hong Kong, China’s gateway to the Western world, the Guangdong Archive’s stringent policy detracts much from the scholarship on history of Chinese foreign relations.

Although foreign scholars usually travel to large coastal cities like Shanghai and Guangzhou, Chinese archives in the remote hinterland sometimes possess surprisingly richer collections. Such was the case with the Shaanxi Provincial Archive in the ancient city of Xi’an. Unlike other archives, the Shaanxi Archive has made available most documents of the Office of Foreign Affairs, which administered hundreds of American visitors in the 1970s. Whenever Americans traveled to Xi’an, the Chinese hosts meticulously planned their itinerary and activities for propaganda purposes. They took American visitors to communes, factories, and schools to show off their socialist achievements, which did impress many Americans who were fed up with social ills back home, including racism, sexism, poverty, inflation, unemployment, and juvenile delinquency.

Richard Nixon shakes hands with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai while on a visit to China in 1972 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Among various targets of archival restrictions in China, the history of culture illuminates the sensitive politics of the past. All the archives I visited had tight restrictions on documents of the Office of Cultural Affairs in the 1970s. One archival assistant explained to me that this was because “the old policy was different from the current policy.” During the Cultural Revolution, the notorious Gang of Four, who pursued leftist radicalization of Chinese foreign and domestic policies, controlled a large part of cultural life in China. For instance, Jiang Qing, Chairman Mao Zedong’s wife and the leader of the Gang of Four, used famous revolutionary ballets “The White Haired Girl” and “Red Detachment of Women” to drum up support for her radical agendas. The politicization of Chinese culture, therefore, makes it difficult for us to dig up documents on China’s cultural exchange with foreign countries in the 1970s.

The Red Detachment of Women ballet premiered in 1964 (via Wikimedia Commons).

All restrictions notwithstanding, Chinese archives still hold numerous sources that reveal how the Chinese masses saw the United States, their deadliest Cold War enemy, in the 1970s. In the wake of the Nixon trip, communes, factories, and schools throughout China held study meetings, where government officials justified the sudden turn in Chinese foreign policy as a tactical move to defeat the United States in the future. Chinese people, however, remained unconvinced of the virtue of making friends with “the U.S. imperialists” that they had fought in Korea and Vietnam. In the late 1970s, when China embarked on the so-called four modernizations in agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology, Chinese people—scientists at universities or peasants in the countryside—enthusiastically embraced the assistance of the United States. Nevertheless, they never completely shook off the long-held suspicion of the United States, as seen in another round of study meetings after the normalization of bilateral relations in January 1979.

Today, there is no sign of an immediate relaxation of Chinese archival policy. It will be years, if not decades, before we gain even partial access to the Foreign Ministry Archive, let alone the Central Archive of the Chinese Communist Party. Chinese provincial and municipal archives, however, still offer valuable materials that help us understand Sino-American contacts on the eve of the reform era.

Kissinger’s Shadow, by Greg Grandin (2015)

By Clay Katsky

Tickets to “An Evening with the Honorable Henry Kissinger” at the LBJ Library’s Vietnam War Summit sold out in less than one minute. The attention that Kissinger continues to command in 2016 could be linked to the premise of Greg Grandin’s new book. Grandin, a history professor at NYU, portrays the former National Security Advisor and Secretary of State as extraordinarily influential on U.S. foreign policy before, during, and after leaving office. But from the author’s unambiguously leftist point of view, Kissinger’s legacy is anything but honorable. While Grandin cites his most positive achievements, opening China and stabilizing relations with the Soviet Union, the book’s main contention is that Kissinger’s worldview and access to power led him to create a new imperial presidency “based on even more spectacular displays of violence, more intense secrecy, and an increasing use of war and militarism to leverage domestic dissent and polarization for political advantage.” Kissinger brought the old national security state into the post-Vietnam War era.

Kissinger relaxes at the LBJ Presidential Library before his public appearance on Tuesday, April 26, 2016 at The Vietnam War Summit. Courtesy of the LBJ Library : photo by David Hume Kennerly.

Starting with Kissinger’s legendarily long Harvard undergraduate thesis, Grandin seeks to uncover the ideas, insights, and assumptions that influenced his theories on diplomacy and drove his desire to fashion a new world order based on a balance of power. In focusing on Kissinger’s own writings, the book combines intellectual and diplomatic history. And it offers something new by examining Kissinger’s unique mixture of realism and idealism, which Grandin labels a kind of “imperial existentialism” in which conjecture is more preferable for action than fact because hard facts can be polarizing. Most historians have labeled Kissinger an arch-realist, yet Grandin insists that his more philosophical writings stressed the importance of conjecture in decision-making. In tribute to Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kissinger exalted decisiveness above all else: “In reaching a decision, he must inevitably act on the basis of an intuition that is inherently unproveable. If he insists on certainty he runs the danger of becoming prisoner to events.” But Grandin’s link to Cheney’s 1% Doctrine, which he describes as the United States taking action as if mere threats are forgone conclusions, seems tentative and is based on little evidence. Kissinger had hoped that showing strength in Cuba would lead to bolder foreign polices and legitimize American power, but in office his agenda shifted to preventing a decline in American prestige stemming from the pull out of Vietnam.

Kissinger being sworn in as Secretary of State by Chief Justice Warren Burger, September 22, 1973. Kissinger’s mother, Paula, holds the Bible upon which he was sworn in while President Nixon looks on. Via Wikipedia.

According to Grandin, power and prestige were crucial elements in Kissinger’s perception of American security interests. Consciousness of power comes from a willingness to act, and he believed the best way to produce willingness was to act. But nuclear weapons complicated Cold War power dynamics because leaders were afraid to use them. Taking stock of Kissinger’s early academic career at Harvard, Grandin points out that in 1956 he wrote that the more powerful the weapons “the greater becomes the reluctance to user them.” Strength turned to weakness. But Grandin’s emphasis on the future statesman’s earliest writings freezes his worldviews in the 1950s. This in spite of the fact that Kissinger’s early musings on limited nuclear warfare later evolved into his belief that action in small wars in marginal areas could produce enough awareness of power to break the impasse of nuclear power. In this regard, Kissinger saw Southeast Asia as more of an opportunity than a burden. But Grandin doubts his escalation in Vietnam was based on any geostrategic reasoning. Like détente it served a more domestic purpose and, therefore, he brands the extensive bombing of Cambodia as both Kissinger’s most heinous crime and his most enduring contribution to U.S. foreign policy.

In terms of its legality, the bombing set an important precedent for U.S. warfare because it targeted a neutral country. Kissinger justified violating Cambodian sovereignty by citing the need to destroy Communist “sanctuaries” along its border with Vietnam. Grandin links such logic to more recent attacks on terrorist “safe havens,” from George W. Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan in 2002 to Barack Obama’s extensive use of drone attacks in Pakistan and Syria. Although Kissinger fell out of favor with the conservative establishment when Reagan began hammering him on détente, this connection is based on good evidence. Desperate to distance itself from talk of power balances and American decline, the New Right began to show Kissinger the door in the late 1970s. But Grandin explains that Kissinger’s defense of the Vietnam War and his arguments for escalation into Cambodia had already become deeply embedded in the ideology of Republican establishment. While Reagan distanced himself from the Secretary of State during his 1976 presidential primary campaign, by 1980 Kissinger was back speaking at the Republican National Convention.

Kissinger’s legacy in the realm of diplomacy is the focus of the book’s second half. Looking at other parts of Asia, Grandin examines his encouragement of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor and his ambivalence towards selective genocide in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Turning to Africa, he exposes in great detail Kissinger’s support for apartheid governments, and in terms of the Middle East, he blames him for locking the United States into a perpetual crisis by vehemently pursuing American hegemony in the region. Kissinger’s impact was global, spanning “from the jungles of Vietnam to the sands of the Persian Gulf.”

Meeting in the Oval Office between Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ismail Fahmi, 31 October 1931. Via Wikipedia.

Grandin’s most interesting chapter is domestically focused and intellectually based. The Church Committee inaugurated a new era of foreign policy oversight that Kissinger described as “a merciless congressional onslaught.” Congress’ season of inquiry into matters of national security during the 1970s produced a new relationship between secrecy and spectacle. According to Grandin, the spectacle of continuous congressional hearings nullified the need for secrecy partly because oversaturation leads to public indifference. And when important controversies become mere visual entertainment, public attention fades as crimes are turned into procedural questions or differences of opinion between political parties. Further confusing the issue, arguments over whether the ends justify the means usually leave the hawks in Congress in agreement, and so for the general public such inquiries often act to justify both sides. For his contribution, Kissinger is described as a master at reframing controversial policies into technical matters. But Grandin’s conclusion that Kissinger decided to go covert with the coup against Allende in Chile because Congress was breathing down his neck over Vietnam seems circumstantial. Still, his insight into the parallel nature of secrecy and spectacle fits well anecdotally – in the following decade, Reagan’s full-scale invasion of Grenada smacks as a distraction from the covert wars being carried out in Central America.

Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet shaking hands with Kissinger in 1976. Via Wikipedia.

Kissinger’s Shadow connects the sustained American militarism and the increased political polarization that followed the end of the Cold War. Grandin convincingly argues that Kissinger’s influence on U.S. foreign policy has reverberated into the twenty-first century. While he might rely too heavily on a career’s worth of Kissinger’s writing as ammunition to attack him with, the author’s bias against the now elder statesman does not nullify the facts that he presents and most of his interpretation of those facts. The support that many Americans continue to give to a broad policy of intervention and perpetual war may have started out as a product of the superpower rivalry, but Kissinger’s enduring popularity has allowed such machinations to transcend the Cold War.

Greg Grandin, Kissinger’s Shadow: The Long Reach of America’s Most Enduring Statesman (Metropolitan Books, 2015).

You may also like our collection of essays on US Presidents and Mark Battjes’ recent review of David Milne’s Worldmaking: The Art and Science of American Diplomacy (2015)

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