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The pitfalls of 'impeachment diplomacy:' Lessons from Nixon in Trump's foreign trip

Watergate undermined Nixon's 1974 Middle Eastern mission, with far-reaching consequences.

Gregory Korte
USA TODAY
President Nixon walks with Saudi King Faisal in in Saudi Arabia in June, 1974. Nixon traveled to the Middle East on a goodwill trip intended to continue mediation that helped to end the recent attack by Egypt and Syria on Israel.

Corrections and clarifications: A previous version of this piece incorrectly spelled the first name of Roham Alvandi, author of Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah.

JERUSALEM — In late spring of 1974, Washington newspapers were crammed with headlines about Watergate and impeachment. But President Nixon was 6,500 miles away in Saudi Arabia, in the middle of an ambitious 10-day, seven-stop foreign trip.

His ill-fated mission — derided by critics as "impeachment diplomacy" — holds a lesson for President Trump: While successes in foreign policy can help distract from troubles at home, domestic problems can also spill over into foreign policy and have long-reaching consequences.

"Though incumbent presidents don't like to admit it, their domestic travails  — and their scandals in particular — can seriously impact their ability to conduct an effective foreign policy," says historian Andrew Scott Cooper, author of The Oil Kings: How the U.S., Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East.  "Leaders in the Middle East are no doubt studying President Trump's difficulties and trying to gauge how far they can push him and what they can get away with."

Presidents often turn to foreign policy when there's trouble at home. Nixon made just one foreign trip in 1973, but visited 10 countries in the months before his resignation in 1974. Ronald Reagan met with Pope John Paul II in the midst of the Iran-Contra hearings in 1987. Bill Clinton visited Israel and Palestinian territory even as the House considered impeachment in 1998.

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Trump's Russian controversy comes much earlier in his presidency — a time when most presidents are still focused on getting a domestic agenda through Congress. And while the imbroglio has yet to reach a Watergate-like roar, talk of impeachment has reached a steady murmur.

Trump fired FBI director James Comey earlier this month in a move often compared to Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre." After lawmakers' cries of possible obstruction of justice, the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to take over the ongoing FBI investigation into links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government, which U.S. intelligence agencies blame for the hacking of email accounts belonging to the Hillary Clinton campaign and other Democratic political organizations. Meanwhile, a current high-level White House official is drawing the scrutiny of federal investigators in that investigation. And White House lawyers, according to CNN, have begun researching impeachment "just in case."

It's against that backdrop that Trump has embarked on the first foreign trip of his four-month-old presidency, having waited longer to travel overseas than any president since Lyndon Johnson. Three of President Trump's first destinations – Saudi Arabia, Israel and Belgium – were also among of President Nixon’s last.

Cooper argues that Nixon's domestic troubles undermined his attempts at diplomacy in the Middle East, and his June, 1974 trip only seemed to make things worse. Nixon had spent years cultivating a relationship with the shah of Iran with arms deals and side deals on petroleum, both as a check on communism and a hedge on Saudi Arabian oil. But Nixon had become a political liability to the shah, who refused to see him on his Middle Eastern tour.

That move forced Nixon further into the arms of Saudi King Faisal, who gave Nixon an unequivocal statement of support. Anyone opposed to Nixon — inside or outside the United States — is only interested in "the splintering of the world," he said.

"What is very important is that our friends in the United States of America be themselves wise enough to stand behind you, to rally around you, Mr. President, in your noble efforts, almost unprecedented in the history of mankind, the efforts aiming at securing peace and justice in the world," Faisal told Nixon.

Privately, however, Faisal sensed Nixon's weakening negotiating position and didn't give the president what he most wanted: relief from high oil prices. Even more, Faisal was emboldened to push Nixon on Israel, demanding a complete return of Jerusalem to Arab control.

Nixon went on to Israel (by way of Syria), where former Prime Minister Golda Meir fêted him at a state dinner. "As President Nixon says, presidents can do almost anything, and President Nixon has done things that nobody would have thought of doing," she said. (Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi used similar language Saturday to praise Trump as having "a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.")

But as well received as Nixon was by foreign leaders, the trip was largely seen as a failure at home. "The picture that he wanted to project, of significant movement toward peace in the Middle East and a new relationship between the United States and the Arab world, has become clouded with controversy," wrote newspaper columnist Crosby Noyes, who coined the term "impeachment diplomacy" to describe the effort.

The events of 1974 trip are still reverberating through the Middle East today.

"Watergate undermined the shah's confidence in Nixon and U.S. leadership in the Cold War," says Roham Alvandi, author of Nixon, Kissinger and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War. "But more importantly, Watergate marked the beginning of a decline in U.S.-Iran relations. Not only did Nixon resign in disgrace, but his policy of partnership with Iran was also discredited. Increasing criticism of the Shah in Washington emboldened his opponents, contributing to the Iranian Revolution."

Trump is just the latest president to have to deal with the aftermath of those events: Iranian sponsorship of terror, its nuclear program, and the continuing impasse on Israeli-Palestinian peace process. In two days in Riyadh, he shored up the U.S.-Saudi relationship with business deals, arms sales and softer rhetoric on the Muslim faith.

And, for at least a few days, he's had the company of convivial foreign leaders to shield him from questions from the press.

"He may receive a sympathetic hearing from his friends in Riyadh and Jerusalem," Alvandi says. "But like Nixon, he will have to return home to face the music."

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