U.S. foreign policy needs to get over its fear of instability
Henry Kissinger, a realist like Kennan, had been a skeptic of the Vietnam War as an academic. As a member of the Nixon administration, he supported vigorously prosecuting the war while negotiating the withdrawal of American troops. But in his private conversations with Richard Nixon, he revealed that he did not believe in the central logic that had guided American intervention. It didn’t really matter if South Vietnam fell, he told Nixon, and as long as it happened “a year or two” after U.S. troops were gone, the American public wouldn’t “give a damn.” South Vietnam did fall, and it caused a humanitarian tragedy, but in the long run it did not cripple the United States. Only a few minor dominoes fell to communism in Asia, and 10 years after the fall of Saigon, the Reagan administration was negotiating from a position of strength with the Soviet Union. By 1989, the Berlin Wall fell.
