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Unless the Communists remain altogether intransigent, however, President Nixon will be able to continue on the course he has set toward disengaging U.S. forces and replacing them with South Vietnamese. In the hope of obtaining peace, he has called a halt to the strategy that began in 1965 when Lyndon Johnson ordered massive increases in the U.S. troop commitment to Viet Nam. Though Johnson himself began to brake the process last year, reversing such momentum completely is difficult—all the more so because so many American lives have been invested in it. But it has become clear that such a reversal is now necessary if Nixon is to retrieve the situation in Viet Nam. Ultimately, the South Vietnamese will have to bear the major part of their own military and political burdens.