Decent interval

Evidence

Historian Ken Hughes wrote, "The proof that Nixon and Kissinger timed military withdrawal to the 1972 election and negotiated a "decent interval" comes from extraordinarily rich and undeniable sources—the Nixon tapes and the near-verbatim transcripts that NSC aides made of negotiations with foreign leaders." This is despite "the normal human reluctance to produce self-incriminating evidence", which according to Hughes explains why more details about the strategy are not known.

The first sign of the strategy appears in the Nixon tapes on 18 February 1971, Kissinger stated that after a peace agreement was concluded, "What we can then tell the South Vietnamese—they've got a year without war to build up." According to Hughes, the statement indicates that Kissinger already realized that peace would not last. On 19 March, Kissinger stated that "We can't have it knocked over—brutally—to put it brutally—before the election", justifying timing the withdrawal of troops to the 1972 American presidential election. Nixon was also privately skeptical of the Vietnamization program, which he officially stated was "a plan in which we will withdraw all of our forces from Vietnam on a schedule in accordance with our program, as the South Vietnamese become strong enough to defend their own freedom". Hughes writes that Nixon's statements on Vietnamization are unambiguously false and the program to be a "fraud".

In his first secret meeting with Zhou Enlai in 1971, Kissinger explained that the United States wanted a full withdrawal, the return of all POWs, and a ceasefire for "18 months or some period." Kissinger noted that "If the government is as unpopular as you seem to think, then the quicker our forces are withdrawn, the quicker it will be overthrown. And if it is overthrown after we withdraw, we will not intervene." In later meetings, Kissinger used the words "reasonable interval", a "sufficient interval", and a "time interval" to refer to the time that would have to pass after United States withdrawal before the aggression against South Vietnam would not result in a forceful reaction from the United States.

In discussions with Chinese and Soviet leaders, Kissinger stated that the United States would not intervene if more than eighteen months passed since a settlement. A crucial point in the negotiations occurred after the North conceded in its demand for South Vietnamese President Nguyễn Văn Thiệu's resignation; according to American intelligence, the South Vietnamese government would quickly unravel without him. On 3 August 1972, Nixon stated, "I think we could take, in my view, almost anything, frankly, that we can force on Thieu. South Vietnam probably can never even survive anyway." Kissinger replied: "We've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two." Two days before the Paris Peace Accords were signed according to chief North Vietnamese negotiator Lê Đức Thọ's proposal (8 October 1972), Kissinger told Nixon twice that the terms would probably destroy South Vietnam: "I also think that Thieu is right, that our terms will eventually destroy him."

Proponents

Historian Jeffrey Kimball supports the decent interval theory and promoted it in various books, including The Vietnam War Files (2004) and Nixon's Nuclear Specter (2015). Kimball argued that Nixon Administration adopted the decent interval strategy in the second half of Nixon's first term. According to Hughes, Kimball is "the leading scholar of the 'decent interval'".

In his book Henry Kissinger and the American Century, Jeremi Suri wrote: "By 1971 [Kissinger] and Nixon would accept a 'decent interval' between U.S. disengagement and a North Vietnamese takeover in the south. Secret talks with Hanoi would allow Kissinger to manage this process, preserving the image of American strength and credibility."

In a 2003 paper, Finnish historian Jussi Hanhimäki argued that

from the summer of 1971 to the conclusion of the Paris Agreements in January 1973 Kissinger tried to "sell" a peace agreement to his Soviet and Chinese interlocutors by stressing the American willingness to accept a "decent interval" solution: that is, the United States would not reenter the war provided that the collapse of the South Vietnamese government did not occur immediately after the last US ground troops returned home.

Hughes is very critical of the decent interval strategy:

[Nixon] forfeited America's geopolitical credibility abroad to maintain his political credibility at home. In their furtive negotiations for a "decent interval," Nixon and Kissinger revealed themselves to the Communists as craven and treacherous in their relationship with a supposed ally. They showed that they could accept the reality of defeat as long as they could avoid the appearance of it in the eyes of American voters... Nixon and Kissinger got the North to sign the Paris Accords in the first place by letting it know that it could conquer the South militarily as long as it waited an extra year or two.

According to Japanese historian Tega Yusuke, writing in 2012, decent interval "is becoming the standard explanation" because South Vietnam in fact collapsed in 1975.

Opponents

Kissinger and Nixon both denied that they had used a "decent interval" strategy. Kissinger wrote, "Nor is it correct that all we sought was a 'decent interval' before a final collapse of Saigon. All of us who negotiated the agreement of October 12 were convinced that we had vindicated the anguish of a decade not by a 'decent interval' but by a decent settlement." Both had a vested interest in keeping the "decent interval" secret. Based on newly declassified documents, in 2001 Larry Berman wrote a book, No Peace, No Honor in which he argued that Nixon actually planned for a permanent war in Vietnam, rather than a decent interval before defeat.

Mixed

Luke Nichter, a historian who studied the Nixon tapes, has argued that, before Nixon's visit to China in early 1972, the decent interval theory did not explain the fluctuating attitude of Nixon and Kissinger to the war, which had sharp ups and downs depending on casualty figures and news reports. Nichter writes, "at times they speak of desiring no interval at all other than the duration necessary to quickly withdraw troops and POWs". After the China visit, "the tenor and content of their discussions seems much closer to support for the idea of a decent interval theory". In his book The Nixon Tapes, Nichter and his coauthor write opposing "scholars [who] argue that Nixon and Kissinger's strategy in Vietnam was never more than securing a ‘decent interval'". However, Hughes considers this to be a misrepresentation because he does not know of any scholars who argue that decent interval characterized the administration's strategy throughout.

Johannes Kadura argues that Nixon and Kissinger "simultaneously maintained a Plan A of further supporting Saigon and a Plan B of shielding Washington should their maneuvers prove futile." According to Kadura, the "decent interval" concept has been "largely misrepresented", in that Nixon and Kissinger "sought to gain time, make the North turn inward, and create a perpetual equilibrium" rather than acquiescing in the collapse of South Vietnam.