Conflict is inevitable. Nature enters into conflict as a part of its natural design. The fundamental elements of chemistry conflict. The weather is a product of competing forces. The flora and fauna conflict, more often than not, violently, and there are winners and losers. The world as we know it is the outcome of conflicts from the past, and the future is made by the conflicts of today.
The potential for conflict is infinite, but the responses to conflict are not. There can be a war, with a winner or loser. There can be a negotiation, with the competitors deciding the negotiated outcome is better than the cost and risk of a war. There can be appeasement, where one side gives in to avoid a war. And there can be deterrence, where one or both sides see the conflict, but decline to move forward to open war because the cost is too great.
In this short series, we shall look at examples of each of the outcomes of human conflict.
Negotiation
US President Richard Nixon
The world might be quite different had Richard Nixon been elected to the Presidency in 1960, rather than John Kennedy. Kennedy is who chose Lyndon Johnson to be his Vice President and so it was Johnson who took over the job in 1963 when Kennedy was killed, and it was Johnson who then made all the decisions that led the United States into the war in Vietnam. By the time Nixon was elected in 1968, the war was going badly, and deterrence had long been lost. The American media and much of the American leadership class concluded that the war could not be won in any acceptable sense, but no one had a path forward and no one wanted to be the one who took the country out and let an ally, the South Vietnamese, fall.
Nixon did a few things to set up for what was clearly his preferred path from the beginning, which was negotiation. He set the American Air Force loose upon North Vietnam with the idea that the communist North Vietnamese would be deterred from further conflict and be willing to negotiate if they suffered enough pain.
This plan worked, and the North Vietnamese entered negotiations with the Americans in 1972. These negotiations worked, and both sides determined that the negotiated outcome was better than more war. The Paris Peace Accords were signed by the American and North Vietnamese in January of 1973.
However, when Nixon resigned from office under pressure, the North Vietnamese could not be deterred from breaking the agreement. They rightly concluded that the United States would not reengage with Vietnam, and so they started the war again, and South Vietnam, in spite of having American military gear and years of training, folded. Here one can see that war, deterrence, and negotiations are fluid and can carry on simultaneously or jump from one path to the other as events unfold. Deterrence isn’t one and done.
It is worth nothing that a similar path had been taken just 25 years earlier in Korea. The Soviets and Chinese were not deterred by the American presence in Japan and aided their communist ally in North Korea to attack in the nominally free South. The Korean War followed, and it reached a negotiated settlement in 1953, placing the borders where they had been before the war and where they are today. Nixon surely thought a similar outcome was possible in Vietnam, but the protests against the war in Vietnam eroded the deterrence capacity of the US government, and the North Vietnamese rightly figured that after Nixon, no president would rest his fate in Southeast Asia again, and they were right.
Here, Nixon announces a negotiated end to the war in Vietnam. Sadly, it was only good for two years and in April, 1975, South Vietnam fell to the brutal Communists.
But, of course, peace was not to be. In April 1975, Nixon was gone and President Ford watched as this unfolded:
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