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During the India-Pakistan War, the United States linked the fate of its ally in that war to the credibility of US power. Gender provided the language in which President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger conceived of US credibility, a credibility constructed by and through clearly gendered language. Employing a gender-sensitive lens drawing on post-structural feminist analysis, this article analyzes recorded conversations in which Nixon and Kissinger allowed risk-intensive policy measures to harden into serious policy options, in order to appear “tough” and as if they were “coming off like men” [sic], at the height of the 1971 conflict. Nixon and Kissinger’s conception of US credibility produced a highly unstable, dangerous basis for conducting a foreign policy that aspired to maintain the balance of power between the US and the Soviet Union.