From The S.F. Chronicle
By Robert Scheer

To recall the genius of Richard Nixon, that is my lesson plan for the day.

Admittedly, it is an act of desperation on my part to search that far back into the darker regions of the American presidency to find a role model that the Bushites might emulate in this time of nuclear saber rattling, from Tehran to Washington, D.C., to Pyongyang. But these are desperate times.

Both Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney are veterans of the Nixon White House, and it is tragic that they betrayed Nixon’s sensible pursuit of détente with one’s enemies, instead converting to the permanent stance of confrontation favored by the neoconservative cabal. Now, however, we might hope they have been humbled sufficiently by the Iraq disaster to re-examine Nixon’s peace diplomacy in a fonder light.

Yes, Nixon, the politician most responsible, in his early career, for stoking U.S. hysteria about the menace of “Red China,” but who later sharply reversed course as president, traveling to Beijing to drink mai tais with the dreaded Mao Zedong. In zigging, when the isolationists wanted him to zag, Tricky Dick managed to defuse decades of tension between the United States and Communist China almost overnight. This is just the sort of tack President Bush could and should take with pathetic North Korea, which finds nuclear brinkmanship its only way of receiving attention. As was seen with the decadelong taming of Libya’s once despised Moammar Khadafy, diplomacy can be muscular, and peace definitely pays. That was the essence of the Nixon Doctrine.

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