American Politics: Adapting to Nixon's America

By Tom Switzer

Forty years ago, Richard Nixon acknowledged what no American president since has been willing to recognise: that US global hegemony was coming to an end.

In remarks to media executives in Kansas City on July 6 1971, the 37th president predicted “in five years, 10 years, perhaps it is 15, but in any event within our time... the United States [will] no longer [be] in the position of complete pre-eminence or predominance [and] that is not a bad thing. As a matter of fact, it can be a constructive thing.”

He said: “We now have a situation where four potential economic powers [The Soviet Union, Western Europe, Japan, China] have the capacity [to challenge] us on every front.”

“I think of what happened to Greece and Rome, and you see what is left — only the pillars,” Nixon observed sombrely. “What has happened, of course, is that the great civilisations of the past, as they have become wealthy, as they have lost their will to live, to improve, they then have become subject to decadence that eventually destroys the civilisation. The US is now reaching that period.”

Nixon’s remarks sparked no outrage at the time. Nor were they an isolated event. “What we seek,” he told the UN General Assembly in September 1970, “is not a Pax Americana or a New American Century, but a structure of peace.” In January 1972, he told Time magazine, “I think it will be a safer world and a better world if we have a strong, healthy United States, Europe, Soviet Union, China, Japan, each balancing the other, an even balance.”

I am currently at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library archives in Los Angeles, where I am researching the President's changing foreign policy views during his so-called wilderness years — 1961-67 — the period between his two runs for the White House in 1960 and 1968. There is surprisingly very little scholarship on this subject.

But I've also taken the opportunity to review the genesis of his July 6, 1971 remarks — again, something that very few Nixon scholars have highlighted. What is striking about these remarks is not just his dire warning about American decline. It's also that the speech remarks are the work of one man, alone: Nixon himself.

Like every president, especially in the post-war era, Nixon had several speechwriters. But it is clear from the relevant file in the Nixon archives that this speech is his work alone. Although the transcript suggests he spoke in Kansas City without any notes, Nixon wrote on his trademark yellow pads two multi-page drafts of his speech. He clearly devoted a lot of time and energy to this task. In his hand-written drafts, presumably penned in the days leading up to July 6, 1971, it is clear that Nixon goes to great lengths to equate America's strategic, economic and cultural problems 40 years ago with those of Rome and Greece centuries earlier.

Nixon's message is clear here: US power is past its apogee in an increasingly plural world, and the biblical injunction “Physician, heal thyself” should take precedence over any impulse to instruct and correct the world.

Such sentiments might offend the sensibilities among many liberals and conservatives today: indeed, imagine if President Barack Obama or leading Republican presidential candidates welcomed the end of US pre-eminence and the rise of global multipolarity. They'd be condemned as declinists, defeatists, and even un-American. But Nixon was merely reflecting the emerging post-Vietnam consensus: that the US no longer had the will or capacity to dominate the rest of the world.

Of course, Nixon’s prediction of the end of US global predominance and the emergence of a multi-polar world order was premature. The Cold War continued for another two decades and the US has since remained the overwhelming global hegemon. Presidents from Jimmy Carter onwards, moreover, espoused different versions of America’s mission to remake the global system, even though in practice they were compelled to retreat before the realities of a messy and complicated world.

Nonetheless, Nixon’s remarks are worth recalling at a time of great economic and cultural hardship for America. The recent brush with default has raised serious doubts about whether Americans are willing and able to pay for any activist foreign policy. Stubbornly high unemployment, record-low business and consumer confidence, gut-wrenching stock market volatility, swelling home foreclosures, skyrocketing national debt and a downgraded credit rating — all of this has chipped away at Washington’s global authority. And as the Libyan episode has recently indicated, and as the fall-out from the Iraq and Afghanistan missions shows, the US is required to be increasingly parsimonious in using its military force actively.

Meanwhile, just as Americans were in dire straits during the Nixon era, today they are experiencing a crisis in confidence. A nation whose hallmark has been a sense of irrepressible optimism and purpose is bitterly divided and uncertain as to how it should proceed. According to a recent New York Times/CBS poll [PDF], 70 per cent of Americans think the nation is heading in the wrong direction and 39 per cent say the current economic troubles are part of “a long-term permanent decline and the economy will never recover.” Obsessed by substantial short-term problems, there is little evidence of long-term strategic thinking — or of that much prized US commodity, vision.

Democrats and Republicans could do worse than reflect on Nixon's remarks four decades ago.

26 September 2011