America and Vietnam: The Unending War

George C. Herring

From Foreign Affairs, Winter 1991/92

Article preview: first 500 of 6,167 words total.

Summary:  The summary victory over Iraq was hailed by no less a figure than President Bush as a once-and-for-all elimination of the 'Vietnam syndrome' -- which shows how powerful was the memory of that defeat even 15 years after the fall of Saigon. Addresses thre questions (1) why the USA invested so much in contesting communism in Vietnam (2) why its efforts failed -- even today, US explanations tend to assume that it could have been 'done right', overlooking now as then the formidable disadvantages facing US policy (3) the economic and political consequences of the defeat for the USA.

George C. Herring is Professor of History at the University of Kentucky, and recently a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at the University of Otago in New Zealand.

By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!" So said President George Bush in a euphoric victory statement at the end of the Gulf War, suggesting the extent to which Vietnam continued to prey on the American psyche more than fifteen years after the fall of Saigon. Indeed the Vietnam War was by far the most convulsive and traumatic of America's three wars in Asia in the 50 years since Pearl Harbor. It set the U.S. economy on a downward spiral. It left America's foreign policy at least temporarily in disarray, discrediting the postwar policy of containment and undermining the consensus that supported it. It divided the American people as no other event since their own Civil War a century earlier. It battered their collective soul.

Such was the lingering impact of the Vietnam War that the Persian Gulf conflict appeared at times as much a struggle with its ghosts as with Saddam Hussein's Iraq. President Bush's eulogy for the Vietnam syndrome may therefore be premature. Success in the Gulf War no doubt raised the nation's confidence in its foreign policy leadership and its military institutions and weakened long-standing inhibitions against intervention abroad. Still it seems doubtful that military victory over a nation with a population less than one-third of Vietnam in a conflict fought under the most favorable circumstances could expunge deeply encrusted and still painful memories of an earlier and very different kind of war.

To put the Vietnam War in perspective three questions must be addressed. Why did the United States invest so much blood and treasure in an area so remote as Vietnam and of so little apparent significance? Why, despite its vast power, did the United States fail to achieve its objectives? What were the consequences of the war for Americans-and for Vietnamese?

II

The question of causation in war is always complex, and with Vietnam it is especially so. America's direct involvement there spanned the quarter century between the February 1950 decision to aid France in suppressing the Vietminh revolution and the fall of Saigon in April 1975. The commitment expanded incrementally, from economic and military aid to France during the first Indochina war, to support for an independent South Vietnam after the 1954 Geneva conference, to the commitment of U.S. combat forces in 1965. America thus went to war not from a single major decision but from a series of separate, seemingly small decisions over a period of fifteen years. Amid this complexity, it is necessary to single out the common threads, the modes of thought that determined the fateful course chosen.

In the broadest sense U.S. intervention in Vietnam resulted from the interaction of two major phenomena of the post-World War II era: the dissolution of colonial empires and the start of the Cold War. The rise of nationalism and the weakness of the European powers combined at the end of World War II to destroy a colonial system that had been an established feature of world politics ...

End of preview: first 500 of 6,167 words total.