A Nixon Doctrine for the 21st Century

This doctrine explained how the United States would interact with its allies, specifically in Asia, according to the president's speech. It was most explicitly applied in Vietnam and, later, in Iran, but the principles might apply around the world.

The key point was that U.S. allies would take the lead fighting conventional wars, because "defense of freedom is everybody's business . . . particularly the responsibility of the people whose freedom is threatened." The U.S. would bolster its allies' defense and provide those aspects that the allies could not provide themselves, especially nuclear deterrence. The result would be to reduce the cost to the United States of its alliances, especially in terms of relatively scarce American military manpower. Motivated local troops would also be likely to understand the details of conflicts better than intervening American forces, and their knowledge of the history, the local dialects, and the local terrain might offer important intelligence and military advantages.

At a time when the United States military is again stretched by its overseas commitments, could an updated version of the Nixon Doctrine help solve at least some of America's strategic problems? The Nixon Doctrine's Cold War context is long gone, but some of the detailed circumstances confronting the United States make the comparison between 1969 and 2009 seem uncomfortably apt. And a number of experts and pundits have drawn analogies between the long, politically controversial counterinsurgency efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Nixon-era struggle in Vietnam.

Some of the tactical and operational aspects of the analogy are strained, but the fundamental strategic situation -- the challenge of working with relatively weak host governments -- remains the same as what President Nixon faced in 1969. Similarly, the United States still desires to share the burden of global defense with its more-developed allies in Europe and East Asia, and that calls for careful evaluation of how the U.S. should manage its alliances. In some cases, the Nixon Doctrine provides less useful guidance today than in the 1970s. But in other parts of the world, the principles of the Nixon Doctrine should guide American strategy today.