The View from Right Field

Kent State at 50 – Three Days Late

With Covid-19 being all the news all the time, other things get missed.  The 50th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University on May 4 was one of them, at least for me.

I was a senior at Eastern Illinois University in 1970.  When President Nixon gave his speech on the Cambodian incursion on April 30, 1970, it seemed reasonable to me.  Protestors said he was expanding the war.  I figured that, since the North Vietnamese were already in Cambodia, attacking South Vietnam from bases there, you couldn’t say we were expanding the war into Cambodia.  The war came to Cambodia when the North Vietnamese moved in.

The “Silent Majority” Speech: Fifty Years On

Fifty years ago today, Richard Nixon gave his “Silent Majority” speech, one of his most famous speeches and source of his, almost certainly, most famous phrase.  Unlike presidents today, and before, President Nixon wrote the “Silent Majority” speech himself and came up with the phrase, “the silent majority,” himself.

For the speech itself, see here:

Evan Thomas, former Newsweek editor and best-selling author, notes that President Nixon’s approval rating went up from 52% to 68% after the speech.  For Mr. Thomas’s comments on the speech and more about President Nixon, listen to this podcast from the Richard Nixon Foundation.

For more on the Silent Majority speech, see Pat Buchanan, Nixon aide and speechwriter, here and this article/video from the Nixon Library and Museum. 

A Few Comments on Where We Are Going With Our Defense Policy

An article in last week’s Economist, “Bringing out the big guns,” described the shift in direction that is taking place in the U.S. military as it “prepares for life after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  Some of the changes are good and necessary.  Others are more questionable.  Let me quote some sections from the article and then comment on them.

“In January 2018 the Trump administration published its National Defence Strategy (NDS).  Officials lamented that nearly two decades of whack-a-mole against insurgents and jihadists had eroded the country’s military edge, resulting in exhausted and under-trained units armed for the wrong enemy.  So the NDS decreed that America would henceforth focus on ‘long-term, strategic competition between nations’ – namely, China and Russia.”

If the military was “exhausted and under-trained,” it was because it wasn’t big enough and was not given enough money for the task(s) it was being asked to do under the George W. Bush and Obama administrations.  It is understandable that the military can be stretched for some period of time.  Emergencies happen and the military has to respond.  But to be stretched for almost two decades is a choice – a choice to not properly fund the military.  And to continually ask the people in the military to do more than they should have to do because you don’t want to spend more money on defense is wrong.

America’s Future Foreign Policy: “The Jungle Grows Back” – Do We Care?

Dr. Robert Kagan has written a fascinating book on the future of American foreign policy: The Jungle Grows Back: America and Our Imperiled World.  His main points are laid out in this excerpt available at Amazon.com:

“The American-led liberal world order was never a natural phenomenon.  The past seven-plus decades of relatively free trade, growing respect for individual rights, and relatively peaceful cooperation among nations – the core elements of the liberal order – have been a great historical aberration. … Our own era has not lacked its horrors …. Yet by historical standards…, it has been a relative paradise. … The great Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union ended peacefully, a historical rarity. … Since the end of the Second World War the world has also enjoyed a period of prosperity unlike any other …. Since 1945, some four billion people around the world have climbed out of poverty. … But all this has been an anomaly in the history of human existence. The liberal world order is fragile and impermanent. Like a garden, it is ever under siege from the natural forces of history, the jungle whose vines and weeds constantly threaten to overwhelm it. …

“The Post,” Richard Nixon, and an Historical “What If”

As a movie, The Post is going to be a blockbuster.  But you expect that with any movie starring both Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep (in alphabetical order).  As history, however, it leaves a little to be desired.  First, it was The New York Times, not The Washington Post, that had the scoop on the Pentagon Papers, and it was the Times, not the Post, that was sued by the Nixon administration.  The Supreme Court case is, after all, New York Times Co. v. United States.  However, it could be that the Times’s newsroom did not have a role for Ms. Streep, while the Post did.

Second, I have yet to see the movie, but I hope it makes it clear that the Pentagon Papers were about how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations misled the public about the Vietnam War.  The Pentagon Papers were not about Richard Nixon.  In fact, according to Henry Kissinger,¹ there was sentiment among some political types in the Nixon White House to let the Pentagon Papers be published to show how Kennedy and Johnson had messed up Vietnam.  Obviously, President Nixon did not take that approach.

Could the Vietnam War Have Made a Difference? Consider South Korea and Taiwan.

We returned from a trip to Southeast Asia earlier this month.  Vietnam was on the itinerary, and things seem to be going well in Vietnam from an economic point of view.  According to The Economist, Vietnam has moved into the ranks of “middle income” countries.  There has been quite a change in Vietnam since 1995 when relations with the U.S. were normalized.  Given everything that has happened, people may wonder if the Vietnam War really made a difference.  The U.S. and Vietnam have reasonably close relations.  (We’re pretty much on the same side vis-à-vis China in the South China Sea.)  Vietnam’s economy is growing.  Maybe it really didn’t matter how the war ended.  Especially since the South Vietnamese government back then was a corrupt dictatorship.

But is that true?  Consider another way of looking at things.  Maybe it’s not so much where South Vietnam was, and what kind of government it had, in 1972 that is the question.  Maybe it’s where South Vietnam would be today if it had survived – and succeeded in its fight against the North Vietnamese.

Colin Kaepernick and the National Anthem: A Bit of Baseball History

I am a little late on the Colin Kaepernick brouhaha, but then it is perhaps not too late to bring a little history to questions like this.  The question, of course, is standing for the National Anthem before sporting events – or, rather, the playing of the National Anthem before sporting events.  The National Anthem is always played before sporting events.  Baseball games.  Football games.  Just about everything.¹  So it is a big deal when some player won’t stand or pay attention during the Anthem.²

But the point is the Anthem hasn’t always been played before baseball games.  I remember the Chicago Cubs didn’t play the Anthem before games in late 1950s and early 1960s.  (I can’t speak to before the late 1950s; I wasn’t there – or at least I don’t remember.)  They would play it for holidays, like Memorial Day or the Fourth of July, but not for regular games.  It was only when our involvement in Vietnam started to increase in the mid-1960s that Philip Wrigley began having the National Anthem played before all games.  Obviously, it is standard now (and Wayne Messmer always does a fantastic job when he sings for the Cubs), but it is perhaps useful to remember that it wasn’t always so.
---------
¹ It’s not played before high school or college tennis matches; at least not at the ones I have been to.
² I am always impressed by the respect that foreign baseball players show while the National Anthem is played.  I mean, if you are from the Dominican Republic, etc., it’s not your anthem.  But they always stand there respectfully.

Will Sending 450 More Advisers to Iraq Do Any Good?

The Obama administration announced Wednesday that the United States will be sending more troops to Iraq.  The news reports about the announcement made it sound like this is a big deal.  It’s not – at least in terms of making a difference in what will happen in Iraq.  Even if it was double the 450 additional advisers and trainers we’re sending, it still wouldn’t make much of a difference.  There are several reasons for this.

First, in terms of the training we will be providing, it looks like what we are giving Iraqi recruits is a few weeks or months of training.  That’s not enough time to make a new recruit into a reliable solider.  In any case, the key to an effective fighting force is leadership, and leadership takes more than weeks or months to develop.  It takes years.  One of the reasons the Iraqi forces fled Ramadi is that their leaders left first.  (Also, exploding Humvees could be pretty scary.  Before anybody talks about somebody not having a “will to fight,” I would suggest they stand up to an exploding Humvee with no way to stop it or fight back.)

Vietnam and Iraq: 40 Years On From April 30, 1975

Forty years ago Thursday, the United States left Vietnam.  The pictures of people climbing up ladders to helicopters on the roof of the American embassy are iconic.  It was a triumph for some, and a disaster for others.  I am not going to get into that argument today.  Rather, I wanted to present a tentative thought on our approach to wars like Vietnam – and Iraq.

I think there is, arguably, some symmetry between our experiences in Vietnam and Iraq.  In Vietnam, the policies and strategy of President Johnson and General William Westmoreland did not work.  General Westmoreland thought we could beat the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese by firepower.  We could win a war of attrition against an enemy who didn’t seem to care about the number of its casualties.  (Sigh.)  President Johnson both exercised too much control over things like how we bombed of North Vietnam and didn’t pay enough attention to how things were going in South Vietnam.

When General Creighton Abrams took command in March of 1968, things changed.  General Abrams’ “One War” strategy started to work.  General Abrams understood that security of the population was the key and that going after the enemy’s supplies was an important part of winning this kind of war.  By 1972, the situation in South Vietnam had improved.  The North Vietnamese launched a three-pronged offensive in late March, the so-called Easter Offensive, but the South Vietnamese, with U.S. advisers and bombers, beat them back.  The South Vietnamese held.

Electing Presidents With Foreign Policy Expertise

Megan McArdle writes that “America rarely chooses presidents from among its ranks of foreign policy experts.”  I don’t disagree with her.  Our last several presidents have been good examples of this.

However, we have, in recent memory (or at least in my memory), at least twice elected presidents who knew what they were doing in foreign policy and succeeded in it.  First, Richard Nixon.  He opened the door to China.  He secured arms limitations agreements with the Soviet Union.  And he just might have succeeded in Vietnam if his own failings in Watergate had not enabled those who wanted us out of Vietnam, regardless of what happened to our South Vietnamese allies, to get what they wanted. 

Second, and even a better example: George H.W. Bush.  He drew a line in the sand when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, and he followed through on it.  But he also knew when to stop, and he did.

More importantly, George H.W. Bush, along with people like Helmut Kohl, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft, helped achieve something that nobody expected or even seriously dreamed of before they did it.  As Ms. McArdle notes: