Thread by @SAH16928046

Nixon on Larry King Live 1990 via @YouTube

With all his faux pas and shortcomings.
#Nixon was a great statesman and a natural diplomat.
He understood the world better than most of his predecessors.
After him, the USA has not been able to mimic another leader like him in the Oval Office.
I am not being satirical.

#Nixon and his #Domino Theory in Former French Indochina turned out to be quite right.
After the Americans left the region, both #Laos and #Cambodia fell into Communists hands.
South #Vietnam fell as well.
The remarkable resemblance with Modern Day #Afghanistan.
#SVA #ANA

Especially, #Nixon and #Kissinger's views on Indira Gandhi were quite #boisterous, to say the least, in terms of explaining #geostrategy. ;)

haha...

If it ever was, #Vietnam, was a strategic geopolitical failure of #Eisenhower and his regime.
Firstly, they supported the wrong man, Diem, as the leader of the Vietnamese, who ruled with an ironclad fist from 1950-63
The #Buddhist Revolt in Vietnam brought the #Diem Regime down.

#Laos had a Pro-American monarchy.
Americans fought a secretive war inside that kingdom until the king succumbed.
The relatively peaceful transition of power from the royal family to the communist in Laos remains an exception to the rule.
Loads were sent off to re-education camp

#Cambodia, the Afghanistan of the French Indo-Chinese World, was one of the most heavily armed and supported nations within the American Camp.
They got billions in arms shipments and economic assistance.
The large no of ghost soldiers scattered away when Pol Pot forced his way in

#Laos and #Kampuchea (Cambodia) remain remarkable precedents in Modern History, where, the royals either eagerly joined the Communists, or sided with them during periods of internal strife and civil wars.
King Norodom Sihanouk, an e.g. who sided with the murderous Pol Pot Regime.

It was only later in 1979 when the Vietnamese Army, the #NVA, moved into #Cambodia to drive out Pol Pot and his brash bunch of brutes.
Brash is a polite word to what these murderous communist experimenters were doing to the ordinary Kampucheans.
Forced migrations, murders, etc.

Wherever Marxism-Leninism, or #Maoism, or any other variant of Communism, came into existence, that nation's psyche never returned to normalization.
Look at #Afghanistan, and #Ethiopia.
Both nations are still reeling from the effects of collectivization and scientific socialism.

So, #Nixon was right when he asked his foreign office and the CIA to always find out that the brutal dictator they were supporting somewhere in the Third World was or wasn't a communist sympathizer?
#Chile & Pakistan are interesting e.g.s, where the USA sided with military juntas

Read this =>
The Nixon Doctrine: A Saga of Misunderstanding
Jeffrey Kimball
Presidential Studies Quarterly
Vol. 36, No. 1, Presidential Doctrines (Mar. 2006), pp. 59-74 (16 pages)
Published By: Wiley
jstor.org/stable/27552747