Foreign Policies of President Richard Nixon Richard Nixon was president in a time that America was involved in many foreign affairs. He was mostly successful when it came to these foreign policies in large credit to Vietnam, policies in China, and an overall positive look towards foreign policy. Richard Nixon was seen as a hero when he finally signed the Paris Peace treaty which ended America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Nixon had many attempts of ending the war in Vietnam including bombing communist supply lines to Cambodia and continuing to bomb North Vietnam.1 These attempts had failed so he realized he would have to find another way out of the war if the North would not surrender. He then made a public statement claiming that his strategy was a combination of negotiating and “Vietnamization”, where he funded the training of South Vietnam and provided weapons so that they could support themselves.2 This was strongly approved by America because this allowed American troops to start coming home. Even after American troops started to come however things were not solved. Nixon planned on having all troops back home within 18 months and to do this he set up a settlement between North Vietnam and South Vietnam and told North Vietnam that a violation would lead to a military confrontation by the United States. He backed this up with the Christmas bombings of 1972. The Paris Peace treaty was then signed later the next month, January 23, 1973.3 Nixon’s policies in China were effective enough to rebuild relations with China and start the limitations on the growth of nuclear arms. Throughout the 1950s, the relationship between the Soviet Union and China weakened and there began to be border clashes. Once Nixon saw this deterioration, he took advantage of it by sending “diplomatic feelers” to China.4 Nixon took the first official step towards rebuilding the relationship with china when he took an unprecedented trip to Beijing in February 1972.5 Subsequently, this lead to an immediate improvement with the U.S.S.R. and Nixon was then able to meet with Soviet premier, Leonid Brezhnev, in Russia. This made Nixon the first president to visit Moscow. The Soviet leader and Nixon both signed the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and an Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty. These treaties did not end the arms race, but they paved the way for future pacts which sought to eliminate arms. Nixon also negotiated and signed agreements on science, space, and trade. Most historians today believe that China is what Nixon is most remembered for when it comes to foreign policy. Nixon always had a goal of making foreign policy his strong point and his ambitions to do so allowed him to be successful in foreign policy. Although he was a militant opponent of Communism, Nixon saw opportunities to improve relations with the Soviet Union and establish relations with China.6 Also, Nixon wanted to ease the Cold War tensions and hoped to build relations with Moscow and Beijing so that he could leverage North Vietnam to end the war.7 This can attribute to his success because it showed how Nixon didn’t want to sit back and ignore the tensions created by the Cold War, but rather he wanted to build relations in order to gain power/leverage in that region. Going into office, he had a plan of how to keep foreign policies under secure control in the White House. Part of this plan was to keep the assistant for national security affairs, Henry Kissinger, close by his side for all of his work so he could use the National Security Council to concentrate power in the White House.8 These two worked so closely throughout his