Reconsidering Revolution

When Richard Nixon promised the American people a “generation of peace,” most radicals chuckled and sneered. It’s a dogma with the Old Left and a tradition with the New that sooner or later, in one way or another, a revolution is coming to the United States, an upheaval that will sweep away not only the likes of the president but also the imperial order on which his pledge is apparently based. Of course, radicals argue endlessly about when and how this revolution will come, but almost all agree that it is on the way.

However, despite the rhetorical flourishes, the president apparently meant what he said. He told an interviewer, long before the rest of us had seen the light at the end of that famous tunnel, that he was convinced Vietnam would be America’s last war—“Yes,” he said, “the very last one.” I believe it’s time radicals stopped snickering and considered these assertions, because the odds are that he’s closer to being right than we are.

Consider, for a beginning, the fact that Nixon’s foreign policy over the past three years all but admits: that it was the U.S. that was the major destabilizing influence among the “superpowers.” It was our Cold War paranoia that kicked off and sustained the arms race; it was our anticommunist crusade that built bases and toppled governments all around the world; and it was our arrogance that perpetrated one of history’s dirtiest wars just to prove we could maintain our “interest” in an obscure Asian nation. The administration has backed away from and downplayed all these positions, admitting that the Chinese and their Peoples’ government exist, cutting the losses in Indochina, and replacing containment with trade.