ge in which there is a strong and binding nuclear taboo. A nation that employs nuclear weapons to attack its enemies is considered evil. Therefore, all the hegemonic power gained from atomic weapons was absolutely worthless in Vietnam. While limited success was achieved in some international arenas during the Kennedy and Johnson years, Vietnam seals the coffin on the flexible response. Gaddis agrees, saying, Vietnam was the unexpected legacy of the flexible response: not fine tuning, but clumsy overreaction, not coordination but disproportion, not strategic precision, but in the end, a strategic vacuum. The 1968 campaign was unusual in that, unlike 1952 and 1960, it provided little indication of the direction in which the new administration would move into office. In addition, the world facing the new administration of 1968 was one ripe with possibilities of new approaches. To usher in these new strategies, Nixon chooses Dr. Henry Kissenger as his national security advisor. Kissenger's conceptual approach to the making of national security policy eliminated the crisis based flexible response system. "Crises," he said, "were symptoms of deeper problems that if allowed to fester would prove increasingly unmanageable. Kissinger was one of the firsts to recognize the shift from a bipolar to multipolar world. This was a natural result of modernization, and therefore, traditional bipolar nuclear strategy began to lose importance, like Kissenger had predicted five years earlier. Before this point, United States interests were effectively met by its Pax Americana enforced on the world by U.S. weapons of war. By 1968, however, Nixon knew he had to deal with the world in a much less dynamic fashion. What Nixon and Kissenger did with their concept of a multipolar world order was to arrive at a conception of interests independent of threats. Gaddis points out, That since those interests required equilibrium but not ideological consistency, it fol...
