"However we got into Vietnam, whatever the judgment of our actions, ending the war honorably is essential for the peace of the world. Any other solution may unloose forces that would complicate prospects of international order."

-Henry Kissinger in Foreign Affairs, January 1969.

If there were a single apt image for Henry Kissinger's role in Vietnam, it would be one of the global diplomat clinging to stability, maintaining order, concerned with honor and prestige. And it is in Vietnam that the Nixon-Kissinger policy has reached the limit of its logic and faced the acid test.

There was once a time when the war was not a Nixon-Kissinger enterprise, when it was something the new Administration had inherited and-so it seemed-was publicly committed to dissolve. But with the extension of the ground fighting into Cambodia, Laos, and briefly, North Vietnam-as well as the drastic escalation of air attacks all over Southeast Asia-the war has become very much an ingredient of Nixon-Kissinger policy. And it is a policy that originated not in the bowels of the Pentagon, not in an overweening bureaucracy's forward thrust, but in the clearly visible diplomatic ambitions of the President and his aides.

To begin with, there was the survival of the regime in Saigon. It was a regime that past American policy-makers had installed and then sworn to uphold, and though the new American leaders probably had little real use for General Thieu-and were suffering the domestic consequences of what little use they had-they also felt it essential that no American policy precipitate the collapse of the South Vietnamese regime. For that would impugn their honor and damage their credibility, and those were concepts that did not come cheap to them. And in the absence of the regime's guaranteed survival-a guarantee which Hanoi and the NLF adamantly refused to extend-the only American recourse would be the use of sheer physical might, coupled with the threat of additional force if their opponents did not give in.

Kissinger is fond of calling himself the "Walt Rostow of peace by negotiations"; but in his diplomat's creed, negotiation is merely another tool to enforce one's will, a tool to which overtures, threats, and finally the use of force itself are all fixed as perpetual adjuncts. Kissinger's early advocacy of negotiations, his expressed belief that a compromise could be reached with Hanoi and the NLF, were rooted in the assumption that the overpowering weight of the U. S. military stood behind America's negotiators at every step of the way. And in a situation of fixed objectives-that of the NLF and Hanoi, to bring about a revolution in their country, and that of Washington, to uphold the Saigon regime-the use of force would be bound to increase.

In fact, the very nature of U. S. involvement in Southeast Asia had made the repeated use of force inevitable. For the American mission in Vietnam had long been a calculated, cynical enterprise; despite claims of protecting a "legitimate" government from aggressive Communism, the American goal there had become a frankly neocolonial one. For Kissinger, revolutionary ideology-no matter what its justification-was at best irrelevant and at worst harmful in the context of international conflict; to him, revolution meant not a change in the human condition but a clouding of the prospects for stability.

And so when an American administration dealt with a revolutionary power, Kissinger believed it should attempt to eliminate the ideological element of the struggle by forcing its opponent to behave in more traditional terms. For it was a cardinal rule of balance-of-power diplomacy that when countries entered the international arena, they acted like nation-states. They were compromising, malleable, and-for purposes of conflict-ideologically "clean." They became supple and entered negotiations when threatened with-or confronted by-the use of force.

But with a truly revolutionary liberation force, the United States-in spite of all the military machinery at its disposal-could reach no understanding or mutual trust; her outlook, her diplomacy, her negotiating language were all alien to such a force. And in the absence of common ground, the only way to draw an ideological renegade down to one's level was with the ever-increasing threat and use of force.

IN FACT, Kissinger has constantly underestimated the resistance power of Hanoi and the NLF by failing to take account of their politics and ideology. His calculation of the opponent's strength has long assumed a willingness on the opponent's part to accept a compromise solution and forsake deeply-held, legitimate political and social goals. But if the roots of his failure lie in his application of great power diplomacy in a situation that consistently repudiates it, Kissinger has also been intimately involved in the physical escalation of the war.

For the past two and a half years, his office has supervised the flow of war material in and out of Vietnam. He himself has become a crucial figure in setting defense spending and manpower levels, often overruling Cabinet officials on these matters. And last, he has also dealt in grand military strategy; not that he decides on whether this or that village should be napalmed, but ideas for implementing each of the major escalations have come from Kissinger's office. And he is more acutely aware than most that there are many civilian deaths in a hard-fought guerrilla war.

There was a time, just before his accession to office in January 1969, that many of Kissinger's academic colleagues-as well as many in the government-assumed that he would rapidly seek to extricate the United States from the Vietnam war. They should have known better; Kissinger had been hard and cynical on the issue all along.

As soon as the war had begun in 1961, Kissinger became an enthusiastic supporter of the American intervention, believing it necessary for the United States to demonstrate its power in that tender spot on the globe. In 1965, he began consulting for the State Department on the government's pacification program, and remained a conventional hawk until 1966, when he traveled to Vietnam at the request of Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge. As a result of that visit, he decided, as one colleague later put it, "that the thing was un-do-able," and he became convinced of the U. S. need to withdraw.

But he determined then that any American withdrawal would have to meet two requirements: first, that it not cause the collapse of the Saigon regime soon after withdrawal, for otherwise, America's international (and domestic) standing would lose; and second, that the withdrawal have as little adverse effect as possible on the decision-making structure of this country, that particularly the Presidency must be preserved as the leading formulator of foreign policy. In concrete terms, that meant that neither Congress nor public opinion could be allowed to coerce the United States out of Vietnam.

ON THE surface, Kissinger believed that America's withdrawal could best be pursued through negotiation. Part of this belief doubtless sprang from what one colleague later called a "David Susskind syndrome," the notion that on first meeting one's opponent face to face the conflict could rapidly be solved; but Kissinger's optimism was borne of a deeper attitude that the NLF and the North Vietnamese, dedicated revolutionaries though they were, would one day be responsive to the overwhelming power of the American military, that they could be threatened and-if necessary-beaten into submission.