Nixon had campaigned on a secret plan to end the war in Vietnam, and he believed at his inauguration that he was well on the way to fashioning the outlines of a strategic plan that would enable him to extricate American troops from Vietnam, win a release of American prisoners of war, and preserve the non-communist government of South Vietnam's President Nguyen Van Thieu.
In contrast to skeptical anti-war critics, Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and other policy-makers believed that achieving their goals in Indochina would have a critical bearing on the global influence of the United States. If they were perceived to have abandoned a client and ally, they felt, American credibility would be undermined on issues ranging from nuclear arms to Mideast politics.
The plan included Vietnamization, de-Americanization, international diplomacy, and negotiations with the Vietnamese communists in Paris--all coupled with what Nixon referred to in one of his memoirs as "irresistible military pressure."
Nixon and Kissinger believed that by offering detente, they could persuade the Soviet Union to lever the North Vietnamese into being "reasonable" at the negotiating table. And by detente they meant more than a simple matter of relaxing tensions. As Raymond Garthoff (1985) put it, detente was a "strategy to contain and harness Soviet use of its increasing power" by enmeshing it in "a web of relationships with ... the United States, a web that he [Nixon] would weave."
But the benefits of detente would not become available unless Moscow used its influence to help Washington reach a Vietnam settlement. "We should be hard and pragmatic in dealing with the Soviets," Nixon told French President Charles de Gaulle in February 1969. He believed Soviet influence would be pivotal because "85 percent of (North Vietnam's) weapons came from the Soviet Union." (Page, Jacobs & McAvoy, 2002).............
