10-06-2014, 02:32 PM
David Andrews Wrote:It's situation that needs puzzling out. Nixon prosecuted the Vietnam war ferociously, which meant that more money was being spent and made in the war industry, and more opium was traded to pay for it and generate other profits. Is it because Nixon threatened to end the cash flow abruptly with nuclear weapons that he was axed? The whole point of the war was to keep it going without victory.
It is difficult to believe, however, that Nixon sought detente with Russia and China on his own initiative. However much he aspired to statesmanship, he lacked the stuff for it. And these detentes were grand-scale efforts that had to be coordinated over advance periods in diplomacy - diplomacy that deeply involved Nixon's minder, Kissinger, the Rockefellers' man. It would seem that the point of these detentes was to appease Russia and China, neutralize a nuclear response from those quarters, and keep the Vietnam war going under tripartite consent with the US.
It has to have been the nuclear weapons threat, or a combination of that and domestic Nixon threats, that made Nixon seem off the rails, a danger to the Vietnam enterprise. At the deciding point Haig, the Rockefellers' hatchet man, was put in to terminate Nixon's second administration.
Still - its difficult to see how Nixon could have not known the game plan intended for Vietnam, and not stuck with it. Perhaps his nuclear threat was rightly perceived as madness, a sweeping of the board that would disrupt all play. Perhaps the ideal of statesmanship dangled before him with the detente initiatives went to his head. Perhaps Nixon would not give in to defeat under domestic criticism as did LBJ, and Nixon's response to that pressure was to seek to score a nuclear smash victory for Nixon.
The idea of replacing Nixon with Agnew - as much as the assassination attempts on Ford - is quite indicative of the cynicism with which the presidency was regarded by the money powers. But what am I talking about - that had already been demonstrated in Dallas, 1963. Didn't Nixon understand that play?
The American Establishment was deeply divided by the war. By 1968, the Euro-centered faction wanted to find a way out of Vietnam, while the Asia/Latin America-faction wanted to stay in and win. No one wanted the war to go on forever without victory. No country can sustain that, and the public wouldn't tolerate it. Look how close the US came to revolution in 1968-71. The whole point of the war was to secure control of the natural resources and markets of Southeast Asia, plus the heroin trade. And establish a permanent US military presence to support it all. Same thing they're trying to do in Afghanistan.