In Search of Victory part-9

 12th February 1974,

Dear Diary,

                                    I, Henry Alfred Kissinger, am convinced that to ensure the victory of the United States of America in this ongoing cold war, our fundamental approach to international politics and diplomacy must change. We must now go beyond the communism v/s capitalism debate and must look to build allies and partnerships with countries who do not ally with the USSR even if they do not follow our ideology. This is because this cold war is not according to me an ideological battle but a power struggle and a struggle for supremacy. This is a battle essentially between the two superpowers, a sort of struggle for essential resources required to maintain the superpower status. This can be seen through our experiences in Latin America and East Asia along with the experiences of the USSR in East Europe. While we fight the Peronists and other guerrilla outfits in Latin America and the Vietnamese guerrilla in Vietnam, the USSR with the same force fights the Polish guerrilla and the Yugoslav guerrilla. This is because the support of our neighbourhood is essential and it is only through extracting resources from the weak countries in the neighbourhood can the two superpowers hope to survive. Thus what we see is not an ideological battle but a battle to gain territory by forming alliances or in other words, a geopolitical power struggle.

    With these views in mind, I began my tenure as National Security Advisor and Secretary of State to President Richard Nixon who succeeded President Kennedy based on the promise of withdrawing troops from Argentina and Vietnam and instead domesticizing those conflicts or in other words Argenitinization of Argentina and Vietnamization of Vietnam. However, these promises did not mean that the war would end or these two territories were going to be abandoned as holding onto these territories were still foreign policy imperatives for us. Therefore we adopted a policy of secrecy, whereby we deliberately lied to Congress about our actions in those countries in those countries in order to draw approval from the press. This leaves us to do what we wished to do in Argentina and Vietnam. 

    The first policy actions I took in Argentina and Latin America was to remove General Bolano as head of state in North Argentina by initiating a coup and installing General Emmanuel Garcia as head of state and to initiate a coup against President Salvatore Allende of Chile and install General Pinochet in his place. These two actions solved two problems namely that, General Garcia was more than happy to launch a war against people who opposed our policies in Argentina and exterminate the guerrilla outfit named the Free Argentina Movement while General Pinochet ended the cooperation of Chile with the Peronists of South Argentina. This eliminated one important link in the supply trail of the Peronists leaving only the Bolivian guerilla and the Paraguayan guerilla as supply links. Also with the ongoing persecution of the Free Argentina Movement, it would be difficult to transport the supplies from Buenos Aires controlled by the North to Viedma controlled by the South, therefore the supply trail had nearly ended as we thought. All we had to do now was to extend the war to Bolivia and Paraguay and not only end the supply trail completely but also to establish regimes which were friendly to ours. We continued the weather warfare campaign begun by McNamara and deployed ground forces in those areas. But surprisingly we failed to halt the supplies to South Argentina. In fact, this increased their resolve even more as we suffered humiliating defeats in our offensive action as well as heavy losses. The defeat in capturing the strategic port of San Antonio Oeste is proof of that.

    These same failures were repeated in Vietnam too where we again tried to disrupt the supply trail by attacking the Maoist guerrillas in Laos and Cambodia but failed miserably. In fact, our failure to combat the guerrilla in Hue and Hanoi show our utter failure to stop them as they continue their march towards Saigon.

    Therefore we had no option but to pull out from Vietnam and Argentina and to sign peace treaties with the Peronists and the Vietnamese guerilla. I now understand that war is beyond mere statistics, it is about the resolve of the actors involved and these actors had the resolve that we lacked.

    These failures show use the need to look beyond Latin America and East Asia and to look towards South Asia, the Middle East and Africa. That is why we must preserve our friendship with Israel and must protect them against Arab aggression. This is also why we supported the Sri Lankan government when it combated the Tamil rebels of Jaffna supported by India. We planned to send troops to the Bay of Bengal to support Sri Lanka but then the Russians got involved and we could not do it. But our intent was clear. It was that the cold war is no longer a battle of conflicting ideologies but a struggle for supremacy.