Thomas Schelling at a meeting of 12 prominent Harvard professors with Henry Kissinger in May 1970, just after Nixon had announced the invasion (though not the secret bombing) of Cambodia: As we see it, there are two possibilities: Either, one, the President didn’t understand when he went into Cambodia that he was invading another country; or two, he did understand. We just don’t know which one is scarier. As Greg Grandin​ points out in Kissinger’s Shadow, from which I got this quote, Kissinger/Nixon’s justification for invading (and secretly bombing) Cambodia was to ferret out the “sanctuaries” that this neutral country was providing to the enemy in Vietnam. Today, that doctrine is widely accepted among America’s ruling and chattering classes: no “safe […]