Experimental Blog # 195

Quotations and comments from "1999 -  Victory without War" by Richard Nixon

"In its two-hundred-year history the United States has lost a total of 650,000 lives in war. Therefore, in the minds of Americans, no rational leader could contemplate starting a war that would kill tens of millions of people."
But the leaders of the Soviet Union, which has lost over 100 million lives in civil war, two world wars, purges, and famines in this century, have a different perspective. < > While the Soviet Union has been a victim in war, its government has made victims of millions of its own people. < > they do know it can be survived."

"Our loss in Vietnam, followed by the spread of Soviet power throughout Indochina, was a devastating strategic blow to China, which suffered twenty thousand casualties in a 1979 war with Soviet-backed Vietnam that would not have occurred if South Vietnam had not been defeated by the communist North."

" .. in Hangzhou in 1972 < > we planted a three-foot-high sequoia that I had brought with me < > In October 1987 < > the tree {was} ninety feet tall. Even more significant, they said that forty thousand saplings from the tree were thriving in seven Chinese provinces."

Chapter three, "How to Deter Moscow", reveals Richard Nixon's astonishing grasp of the details of nuclear deterrence in regard to the Soviet Union. It also calls to mind Richard Nixon's reputation as a skilled poker player as a young man, and why this skill provided a significant amount of money for him at times.
Richard Nixon finished this book on January 9, 1988, his 75th birthday. By this time he had been to the Soviet Union 6 times, 3 times as a private citizen. In the next 6 years he would visit 4 more times.

"1999" refers to the end of the twentieth century. "Victory without War" might be a deliberately ambiguous statement that could apply to either the Soviet Union or to America.
"For the balance of this century and the beginning of the next, the dominant players on the world stage will be the United States and the Soviet Union." Richard Nixon repeatedly expresses this assumption and that Mikhail Gorbachev will be the Soviet leader for years into the twenty-first century.
 However, only two years after Richard Nixon had finished this book, the Berlin Wall had come down and all the countries of Eastern Europe were throwing off their communist governments. In the next 2 years, by 1992, the Soviet Union itself would be falling apart and collapsing with surprisingly little violence. It is quite possible to believe that Richard Nixon's thought provoking, and unexpected, series of 4 or 5 books had something to do with this historical outcome.

It might be that the concept of geopolitical history and international relationships, that was being constantly advanced by Henry Kissinger and his likely student, Richard Nixon, was a challenge and a rebuttal to the more old-fashioned ideas of Marxist-Leninist historical determinism. Neither Henry Kissinger nor Richard Nixon seems to have explained geopolitical history very clearly; but, perhaps geo refers to particular places on earth and political refers to the people who live in those places and everything about them. This way of looking at the world is far more complicated than Marxist-Leninist determinism. And Richard Nixon excelled at details.

"The search for meaning in life has gone on since the beginning of civilization. It will never end, because the final answer will always elude us. < > Of this we can be sure: Meaning cannot be found in sheer materialism, whether communist or capitalist. < > It is because they addressed spiritual values and fulfillment that the world's great religions - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism - have inspired people for centuries." This is the first of 3 times that Richard Nixon  refers to the world's great religions in his books, but for some reason does not include Hinduism.