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.

There are those who believe that the United States did select Vietnam as Lippmann would have wished—as a region in which our interests were vital or as a battlefield particularly favorable to our side. If so, then those in our government who selected Vietnam on this basis were considerably wide of the mark in their judgment. Most policymakers, however, did not see us as choosing Vietnam but saw Vietnam as choosing us—we were drawn in because of communist aggression.

While opponents of the Vietnam War often assume that its outcome proved to the public that Lippmann was right—when the heaviness of the price was brought home to the American people, they refused to go on paying it because they did not deem Indochina vitally important—that view is still contested. Senator Robert Kasten (R-Wisc.), stressing the analogy between El Salvador and Vietnam in the spring of 1983, said:

The Vietnam analogy is certainly popular with opponents of the administration. ‘No more Vietnams’ is their battle cry. By this, they mean that the United States should remain inactive in the face of blatant acts of aggression by the Soviet Union or its Cuban and Nicaraguan surrogates. But what must be remembered is that in reality Vietnam represents a successful case of Soviet aggression and the imposition of a brutal tyranny over the people of Vietnam and Kampuchea. I agree that there should be ‘no more Vietnams’ and that the United States must do what is necessary to prevent a repetition of that horror.

What Vietnam proved, in this view, is that the consequences of communist aggression are so terrible for the people who fall under communist rule as a result of it, that the United States always and everywhere must act to prevent blatant acts of aggression by the Soviet Union and its surrogates.

This view rests on the premise that we have a moral duty to act. The troubling aspect is that moral judgments are not always universally shared. They often are subjective matters of conscience. There are many who view it as immoral for one country, if unprovoked, to intervene in the affairs of another. There were many who judged America’s Indochina war to be morally wrong. It is feasible for the United States to pursue a policy grounded in morality only if the moral issues in question are ones upon which Americans are agreed. The doctrine of global military containment—to the extent that it rests upon a moral duty—is vulnerable precisely because the moral values at issue are matters of dispute.

Closely allied with the theory of global containment is the so-called domino theory, according to which Southeast Asia was a region such that if one country fell to communism, the effect would be to knock down the countries around so that they would fall to communism too. C. L. Sulzberger of The New York Times employed a different metaphor and pictured America’s Asian and Pacific allies as being caught in a giant nutcracker between Red China and radical Indonesia. Lyndon Johnson frequently told visitors to the White House that if we did not take our stand in Vietnam, one day we would have to make our stand in Hawaii. Opponents of the Vietnam War have assumed that this theory too—indeed, this theory above all—was fatally discredited by the results of the war. It is a decade since the war came to an end, and communist landing craft still have not been sighted off Honolulu.

Some of those most involved in sending American troops to Vietnam, however, argue that this is precisely because America won its anti-domino, anti-nutcracker victory two decades ago. Up until 1965, leaders of the domino countries—Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand and even India—are said to have privately told the American government that it was vital for the United States to stay the course in Vietnam so as to save them from being crushed between China and Indonesia. In 1965-66 the arms of the nutcracker fell off: a new anti-communist government took power in Indonesia and destroyed the communist party in that country, while China withdrew from world affairs and concentrated her energies on the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution. In his 1967 memorandum, Secretary of Defense McNamara stated that, "To the extent that our original intervention and our existing actions in Vietnam were motivated by the perceived need to draw the line against Chinese expansionism in Asia, our objective has already been attained." His successor, Clark Clifford, toured Asia and found that the domino leaders were no longer vitally concerned about Vietnam, and he asked, "Was it possible that we were continuing to be guided by judgments that might once have had validity but were now obsolete?"

More recently, McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, has summarized the history of these events by stating that, while Vietnam may have seemed "vital" until 1965, "at least from the time of the anti-Communist revolution in Indonesia, late in 1965, that adjective was excessive, and so also was our effort." In this view, then, President Johnson’s major military commitment to the Vietnam conflict was undertaken in the very year that it began to be unnecessary.

What, then, should the President have done? Having learned in 1966 that the enlarged war to which he had just committed the United States suddenly had become unnecessary, should he have recalled the American armies and brought them home? Would that not have inflicted a damaging blow to American prestige? Would it not have destroyed the world’s belief in American reliability and steadiness? It is an axiom of statecraft that a great power trapped in a difficult or ultimately untenable position ought to persevere as long as possible in order to preserve the credibility of its other international commitments. That was the position adopted by the Johnson Administration and also by the incoming Nixon Administration in 1969.

Henry Kissinger writes in his memoirs,