The Vietnam War.

by Joel Sokolsky - Thursday, 17 September 2020, 9:17 AM

The Vietnam War was one of the key and defining events in the Cold War. Was this a war of
containment or was this a continuation of the nationalist decolonization struggle on the part of the
Vietnam people? The behaviour and decisions taken during the war are revealing about how states
conduct their foreign policy.

Forty-six years after its ignominious conclusion in April 1975, the Vietnam War still haunts America.
Truly, as has been said, ‘‘there is no exit from that war.’’ There is the view that President Johnson only
agreed to escalate in Vietnam because this was the advice given to him by the "Kennedy people" whom
he inherited. Johnson was worried that if he did not stand firm in Vietnam he would be unfavourably
compared to President John Kennedy who was known for his toughness as demonstrated in the Cuban
Missile Crisis. Johnson did not want to go down in history as the President who "lost" Vietnam to the
Communist just as President Harry Truman was accused of losing China in 1949. There is still a debate
about whether President Kennedy was about to disengage from Vietnam when he was
assassinated. Ironically, as the war dragged on, it was some of those very Kennedy people led by Robert
Kennedy, who would champion the anti-war movement.

Henry Kissinger once noted the irony that the US escalated in Vietnam order to send a message to the
USSR and China that America would live up to its policies of containment and deterrence, but then did
not escalate further out of fear that it might trigger a wider conflict with the USSR and/or China. Yet
having made the commitment, and sacrificed so much blood and treasure, the United States, again for
the sake of its global credibility, could not just walk away.

As the Pentagon Papers would reveal, during the discussions on whether or not to escalate, Presidential
adviser George Ball argued that what the US might gain in terms of its credibility with allies and
enemies, it might lose in terms of the world's assessment of American judgement. Ironically, again, as
the US became more deeply entangled in Vietnam, its allies, those whom Washington wanted to
impress, did come to doubt American wisdom. On the benefits and pitfalls of "credibility" see, Brands et.
al, Credibility Matters attached.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/03/obama-doctrine-goldberg-free-rider-
credibility/473616/

https://foreignpolicy.com/2015/01/06/the-credibility-addiction-us-iraq-afghanistan-unwinnable-war/

https://csbaonline.org/uploads/documents/Credibility_Paper_FINAL_format.pdf

There is also the view that what originally lead the United States into the Vietnam quagmire was what
the great U.S. Senator J. William Fulbright, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would
later call the "arrogance of power". This was an excessive hubris on the part of American leaders,
Republic and Democratic, that the United States had the power and the moral justification to intervene
at will around the globe. (See, J. William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power (New York. Random House,
1967). Interestingly, this outlook was noted by the Canadian Ambassador to Washington, Charles
Ritchie, in 1962:

…they are all cocksure here, all the leading officials-Ball, Acheson, Rusk, McNamara, and so on,
right down the line. And at the top, in the Presidency, there is no humility, no self-doubt. The
cast of thought in Washington is absolutist. It is true that there are a number of incompatible
Absolutists, often in embattled struggle with each other, but all are Absolute for America, this
super nation of theirs which charges through inner and outer space engine by its inexhaustible
energy, confident in its right direction, the one and only inheritor of all the empires and the one
which most fears and condemns the name of Empire, the United States of America, exhorting,
protecting, preaching to and profiting by-half the world.

Charles Ritchie, Storm Signals: More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971, Toronto, McClelland &
Stewart, 1983, p. 75

Following the triumphal conclusion of the Cold War, whose strategies of containment had drawn the US
into the South East Asian quagmire, and in the glow of the lightning success of the first Gulf War,
President George H.W. Bush declared that the US had kicked the Vietnam syndrome. In the decade that
followed, seemingly at the ‘‘end of the history,’’ when America bestrode a new world, intervening at will
with its unequalled military might, it was hard to argue with this conclusion. But after two decades of
inconclusive and bitter war following the attacks of 11 September 2001, the ‘‘lessons’’ of Vietnam have
again found their way into debate about the purpose and efficacy of America’s still unmatched capacity
to apply military force far from its shores.

However, debate and serious doubts about the direction of American policy in Vietnam were constantly
being voiced by the ‘‘best and brightest’’ in Washington (some of whom had gotten the US into Vietnam
in the first place) from the beginning of the conflict. Even as the US was escalating its military
operations, it was simultaneously seeking (unsuccessfully) to find a way to avoid a wider war. As Robert
Dallek notes in his work on President Kennedy and his advisors, ‘‘By 1968, McNamara understood how
mistaken he, Johnson, Rusk and the Joint Chiefs had been in their assumptions about Vietnam. He
became overtly morose about the war and began pressing Johnson to do whatever possible to end the
conflict as soon as possible.’’ (1) In the end, after four more years of bombing, an incursion into
Cambodia, and a titanic shift in American public opinion, the US essentially just left.

How could the US have gotten it so wrong, or did it? There is the argument that when South Vietnam
finally fell to Communism in April 1975, the international situation was much different than it had been
in the early 1950s when the US first became involved in support of France and in 1965 when it began to
build-up American forces. Would a Communist victory in those early years have in fact led to more
“dominoes” falling in South East Asia, undermining America’s global position and calling into question
the credibility of containment and deterrence and US security guarantees? The fall of South Vietnam
was followed by the murderous Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. However, the US position in Asia,
and its alliances there, remained strong, and they would stay so until the end of the Cold War and the
final victory. Was Vietnam a necessary “holding action” at terrible cost?
(1) Robert Dallek, Camelot’s Court: Inside the Kennedy White House (New York: HarperCollins, 2013),
430–431.

A fictional, though somewhat accurate account of how the Vietnam decisions were made is given in the
movie. "The Path to War":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTzy82HAqFk