Word: nixon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rescued downed U.S. aircrews, gathered military intelligence and fought the communists to a stalemate. The effort was for many years the CIA's largest covert operation, until the agency funded the mujahedin against the Soviets in Afghanistan. In 1969, Richard Helms, director of the CIA, told President Richard Nixon that Vang Pao had 39,000 troops engaged in active fighting. But casualties were so bad, he wrote, that Vang Pao's forces were using teenagers as young as 13 to fill their lines. This massive effort was hidden from the American public for years. It became known as the secret...
...negotiating with Iran's mullahs while the blood of Iranian protesters is still fresh on their hands. And "reconciliation" with the Taliban, while necessary for the U.S.'s eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan, might be a horror show for Afghan women. It is worth noting that while many historians applaud Nixon's retreat from global containment, his decision to cozy up to dictators in Beijing, Moscow and elsewhere elicited revulsion from Americans on both left and right...
...Obama's foreign policy, in fact, looks a lot like Richard Nixon's in the latter years of Vietnam, which sought to scale down another foreign policy doctrine - containment - that had gotten out of hand. And Nixon's experience offers both a warning and an example: pulling back from your predecessor's overblown commitments can be vital. The risk is that it can make you look weak or immoral, or both...
...deal. Similarly, the Taliban have little incentive to break with al-Qaeda so long as they feel they're gaining momentum in the Afghan war. It will be hard for Obama to win at the negotiating table what he can't win on the battlefield. After all, despite Nixon's intricate diplomacy with Moscow and Beijing, neither communist superpower helped him where he wanted it most - in preventing a U.S. defeat in Vietnam...
...best precedent for all this is what Nixon did in the late Vietnam years. For roughly two decades, the U.S. had been trying to contain "communism" - another ominous, elastic noun that encompassed a multitude of movements and regimes. But Vietnam proved that this was impossible: the U.S. didn't have the money or might to keep communist movements from taking power anywhere across the globe. So Nixon stopped treating all communists the same way. Just as Obama sees Iran as a potential partner because it shares a loathing of al-Qaeda, Nixon saw Communist China as a potential partner because...