Vietnam: The Retrospect: What Are the Lessons of Vietnam?

David Fromkin and James Chace

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1985

Summary:  When the helicopter rose in flight from the roof of the doomed U.S. embassy in Saigon a decade ago, Americans hoped they had finally left Vietnam behind them. For years afterward there was a widespread effort in the United States to put the Indochina experience out of mind. In the late 1970s, Mike Mansfield, the professor of Far Eastern studies who became U.S. Senate majority leader and then ambassador to Japan, told an English radio audience:

David Fromkin, an international lawyer, is the author of The Independence of Nations and The Question of Government. James Chace is an editor of The New York Times Book Review. He was managing editor of Foreign Affairs from 1970 to 1983, and is the author of Endless War and Solvency, among other works.

When Clark Clifford replaced Mr. McNamara as secretary of defense, one of the questions he supposedly forced his associates to face was what purpose would be served by sending the reinforcements General Westmoreland requested in the wake of the Tet offensive. At that time—in the late winter of 1968—General Westmoreland still sought military victory; that, as Clark Clifford saw it, would result in an American-occupied Vietnam, something that we did not desire. What, then, did we desire? What vital national interest were we fighting in Vietnam to protect?

James Thomson, who served in the crucial years 1964-65 as an aide to the assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs and as a staff member of the National Security Council, claims that while government officials frequently asserted that the preservation of Southeast Asia was a vital American national interest, they never thought matters through to examine whether and why that assertion was true.

Is it the case that we should intervene abroad militarily only in areas vital to our national interests? Arguably, but not necessarily; Indochina does not prove the case one way or another. It does not shed any light on the question of whether or not to intervene in situations the United States can dominate easily—in Grenada, to take an obvious example, or, in 1965, in the Dominican Republic. Vietnam only raised the question of whether the American people are prepared to take on a major fight—to undergo suffering, sacrifices and casualties—if vital national interests are not at stake. And that question was raised because leading architects of America’s Vietnam policy believed that we should intervene even if national interests were not at stake.

Indeed, the American decision to intervene in Indochina was predicated on the view that the United States has a duty to look beyond its purely national interests. In this view, the United States has assumed global responsibilities that require it to serve the interests of mankind. That vision of America’s destiny was particularly manifest during the Kennedy Administration, when British and other foreign observers remarked with admiration that while in London, Paris and other capital cities, officials concerned themselves only with the parochial interests of their own countries, in Washington statesmen addressed the needs and aspirations of the human race. The decision to intervene against perceived communist aggression in Indochina was made in Washington in the name of the whole non-communist world’s need for international security and world order.

The concept of international relations upon which that decision was based derived from the failure of the League of Nations—decades before—to carry into practice its theory of collective security against aggression. By the tenets of that theory, an aggressor would back down in the face of a league united against it, and a potential aggressor would be deterred from invading its neighbor by the certainty that such a league would confront it. In the 1930s the members of the League failed to stand together in the face of one aggressive challenge after another from Mussolini and Hitler. Countries allowed themselves to be picked off one at a time. The lesson of the 1930s, which political leaders carried with them into office in the 1950s and 1960s, was that the democracies ought to make a united stand against totalitarian aggression wherever and whenever it might occur.

As former Secretary of State Dean Rusk remarked in a recent interview, "I was part of a generation that had been given heavy responsibility during and after World War II. During the 1930s we had been led down the path to a war that could have been prevented. We came out of World War II thinking that the key to preventing World War III was collective security."

A parallel lesson of Munich was that certain political regimes—Nazi Germany being the prime example—are so constituted that it is a mistake to try to conciliate them. Their voracious appetite for conquest cannot be appeased; the more that is conceded to them, the more they are encouraged to demand.

This fit well with the theory of how to deal with Soviet conduct propounded by George Kennan, writing as "Mr. X," in his famous Foreign Affairs article which outlined the strategy of containment. William Bundy, deputy assistant and assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs (1961-64) and assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs (1964-69), said in an interview a few years ago that in the early 1960s, "the theory of containment was still the dominant way of thinking." He said that in Indochina "it was essentially what we were doing. We were seeking to prevent the Chinese version of communism from expanding into the area of East Asia."

In its military version (which Ambassador Kennan often has disavowed) containment came to be a misapplication of the lesson of Munich—a lesson to which American leaders often appealed. In the 1930s, up to the time of Munich, Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy still were too weak to fight a war against the Allies; they were bluffing and would probably have backed down if their bluff had been called. But in the 1960s, the Soviet Union and China, though divided, were formidable powers. It was by no means certain that either would have backed down if confronted by an American expeditionary force, or that they would have been defeated if opposed. There were no powerful allies at our side whose strength, united to ours, necessarily would have intimidated or overwhelmed our adversaries. In these circumstances, for the United States unilaterally to send its armies into combat against communist aggression whenever and wherever it occurs was not collective and did not provide security.

It was on just such grounds that Walter Lippmann, in his book The Cold War, originally attacked Kennan’s theory of containment. Lippmann’s thesis was that the United States should select, in the light of its own interests and capabilities, the regions of the world in which it would engage itself. It should not extend itself by trying to act everywhere, and it should not allow its adversaries to dictate the time and place of confrontation.