ABSTRACT
Richard Nixon ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1968 as the centrist candidate between Ronald Reagan, to his right, and Nelson Rockefeller to his left. For the student of US foreign policy, the ideological imprimatur of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger is easy to discern and relatively undiluted by departmental input or bureaucratic wrangling. In centralising decision-making to such an extent, Nixon limited the capacity for foreign policy to emerge as the consequence of compromises between the vested interests of different government departments. Nixon’s political and personal experiences had left him with something of an ambivalent relationship to the democratic process and a self-image as an outsider, removed from the East Coast establishment. Nixon had long understood the importance to the US economy of access to raw materials in the developing world. US foreign aid was an important instrument in promoting stability under authoritarian rule but one that Nixon was capable of justifying in terms of American exceptionalism.
