Michael Lind is the author of “Vietnam: The Necessary War.”
In
the decades after the departure of the last U.S. combat troops from Vietnam in
March 1973 and the fall of Saigon to communist North Vietnamese forces in April
1975, Americans have been unable to agree on how to characterize the long,
costly and ultimately unsuccessful U.S. military involvement in Indochina. To
some, the Vietnam War was a crime
– an attempt by the United States to suppress a heroic Vietnamese national
liberation movement that had driven French colonialism out of its country. To
others, the Vietnam War was a forfeit, a just war needlessly lost by timid
policymakers and a biased media. For many who study foreign affairs, the Vietnam
War was a tragic mistake brought about by U.S. leaders who exaggerated the
influence of communism and underestimated the power of
nationalism.
Another
interpretation, a fourth one, has recently emerged, now that the Vietnam War is
history and can be studied dispassionately by scholars with greater, though not
unlimited, access to records on all sides.
The
emerging scholarly synthesis interprets the war in the global context of the
Cold War that lasted from the aftermath of World War II to the fall of the
Berlin Wall in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. In this
view, Vietnam was neither a crime, a forfeit nor a tragic mistake. It was a
proxy conflict in the Cold War.
The
Cold War was the third world war of the 20th century – itself part of what some
have called the Long War or the Seventy-Five Years’ War of 1914-1989. Unlike the
first two world wars, the Cold War began and ended without direct military
conflict between the opposing sides, thanks to the deterrent provided by
conventional forces as well as nuclear weapons. Instead, it was fought
indirectly through economic embargoes, arms races, propaganda and proxy wars in
peripheral nations like Vietnam.
The
greatest prizes in the Cold War were the industrial economies of the advanced
European and East Asian nations, most of all Germany and Japan. With the
industrial might of demilitarized Japan and the prosperous western half of a
divided Germany, the United States could hope to carry out its patient policy of
containment of a communist bloc that was highly militarized but economically
outmatched, until the Soviets sued for peace or underwent internal reform. The
Soviet Union could prevail in the Cold War only if it divided the United States
from its industrialized allies – not by sponsoring communist takeovers within
their borders but by intimidating them into appeasement after convincing them
that the United States lacked the resolve or the ability to defend its
interests.
For
this reason, most crises of the Cold War, from the Berlin Airlift and the Cuban
Missile Crisis to the Korean and Vietnam wars, occurred when the United States
responded to aggressive probing by communist bloc nations with dramatic displays
of American resolve. The majority of these tests of American credibility took
place in four countries divided between communist and non-communist regimes
after World War II: Germany, China, Korea and Vietnam.
In
an internal Johnson administration memo of March 1965, Assistant Secretary of
Defense John McNaughton emphasized credibility as the most important of several
U.S. objectives in Vietnam:
In a speech the following month, President Johnson stressed America’s reputation as a guarantor: “Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of America’s commitment, the value of America’s word.”
In a speech the following month, President Johnson stressed America’s reputation as a guarantor: “Around the globe, from Berlin to Thailand, are people whose well-being rests, in part, on the belief that they can count on us if they are attacked. To leave Vietnam to its fate would shake the confidence of all these people in the value of America’s commitment, the value of America’s word.”
Full-scale
war was avoided despite repeated crises involving divided Berlin and Taiwan,
where the remnant of China’s Nationalist government took refuge after the 1949
victory of Mao Zedong’s communists in China. The Cold War soon turned hot in
divided Korea and Vietnam.
What
Americans call the Vietnam War was the second of three wars in Indochina during
the Cold War, in which the United States, the Soviet Union and the People’s
Republic of China intervened in shifting patterns of enmity and alliance. None
of these would have occurred in the form that they did if Mao’s communists had
not come to power in China in 1949. Although the regimes in Moscow and Beijing
were enemies of one another by the end of the Cold War, in the conflict’s early
years the triumph of the Chinese communists created a powerful Sino-Soviet bloc
that opposed the United States and its allies around China’s periphery: Korea,
Taiwan and Vietnam. Direct Chinese military intervention in the Korean War
ensured a bloody stalemate rather than reunification of the peninsula under a
non-communist regime. At the same time, indirect Chinese and Soviet support in
the First Indochina War (1946-1954) helped Ho Chi Minh’s communists drive the
French from their former colony.
Only
a few years after the Geneva Accords in 1954 established the 17th parallel as
the boundary between Vietnam’s communist north and non-communist south, the
Hanoi regime resumed war by means of infiltration and southern insurgents. After
the conquest of the south in 1975, Communist Party historian Nguyen Khac Vien
admitted, “The Provisional Revolutionary Government was always simply a group
emanating from the DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam). If we had pretended
otherwise for such a long period, it was only because during the war we were not
obliged to unveil our cards.”
The
assassination in 1960 of South Vietnam’s dictator, Ngo Dinh Diem, created
anarchy that led to rising U.S. involvement – starting with advisers under
President Kennedy, then turning to bombing and ultimately large-scale ground
forces under Johnson. In 1964, the Johnson administration won congressional
passage of the Southeast Asia Resolution after the Gulf of Tonkin incident,
using as a pretext for U.S. military intervention the confrontation in which
North Vietnam fired on the USS Maddox. The number of American forces peaked in
1968, when more than half a million U.S. troops were waging war in South
Vietnam, as well as bombing North Vietnam and taking part in incursions into
Laos and Cambodia. At great cost in American and Vietnamese lives, the attrition
strategy of Gen. William Westmoreland succeeded in preventing the Saigon regime
from being overthrown by insurgents. The Tet Offensive of January 1968,
perceived in the United States as a setback for American war aims, was in fact a
devastating military setback for the north. Thereafter, North Vietnam’s only
hope was to conquer South Vietnam by means of conventional military campaigns,
which the United States successfully thwarted.
In
the United States, public opinion grew opposed to the costs in blood and
treasure of the controversial war. President Richard Nixon sought to achieve
“peace with honor” by combining a policy of “Vietnamization,” or South
Vietnamese self-reliance, with a policy of détente with the Soviet Union and
China, in the hope that the communist powers would pressure the north into
ending the war. His strategy failed. Following the Paris Peace Accords of 1973,
U.S. combat forces were removed, and the south, deprived by Congress of military
aid, was invaded by the north. In 1975, upon uniting Vietnam under their rule in
1975, the victorious heirs of Ho Chi Minh imposed Marxist-Leninist
totalitarianism on the south and helped their allies win power in Laos. The
Third Indochina War soon followed. Mao’s heirs in China viewed communist Vietnam
as a Soviet satellite on their border, and in early 1979 China invaded Vietnam
in a brief war, following the 1978 Vietnamese invasion and occupation of
Cambodia, during which Vietnamese communists ousted the Chinese-backed regime of
the murderous Pol Pot.
Of
the three great powers that intervened in Indochina after the ouster of France
in the 1950s, the Soviet Union gained the most. By backing Hanoi, Moscow
simultaneously obtained an ally on China’s border and reasserted its leadership
of international Marxism-Leninism. The former U.S. base at Cam Ranh Bay became
the largest Soviet military installation outside Eastern Europe. In “The Soviet
Union and the Vietnam War” (1996), Russian historian Ilya Gaiduk wrote,
“Inspired by its gains and by the decline of U.S. prestige resulting from
Vietnam and domestic upheaval, the Soviet leadership adopted a more aggressive
and rigid foreign policy, particularly in the Third
World.”
But
in December 1979, only months after China was humiliated in its brief war with
Moscow’s Vietnamese ally, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. That decade-long
conflict proved to be Moscow’s Vietnam.
Just
as the Soviets and Chinese had armed and equipped Vietnamese opponents of U.S.
forces in Vietnam, the United States and China – now allies against Moscow –
armed and equipped the insurgents who fought the Soviet occupiers of
Afghanistan. The Soviet war in Afghanistan was the third major proxy war in the
Cold War.
In
1989, the year in which the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War effectively ended,
the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, as the United States had withdrawn
its troops from Indochina a decade and a half earlier.
The
United States lost the proxy war in Indochina but prevailed on a global level in
the Cold War. The USSR not only lost the Cold War but ceased to exist in 1991.
The discredited secular creed of Marxism-Leninism has survived in only a few
dictatorships, including China, North Korea and Vietnam.
As
the narrative of the 20th century is interpreted, historians are regarding the
Vietnam War in a global context that spans decades and concludes with the fall
of the Soviet Union. No matter their differences of perspective, they will
define the Vietnam War as the Cold War in Indochina.
The
interventions of the United States, the Soviet Union and China turned civil wars
in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia into proxy wars. This provides an answer to those
who claim that the United States, by its intervention, mistakenly turned a pure
civil war in Vietnam into part of the Cold War. The United States shared its
belief that Indochina was a major theater in the global Cold War with the Soviet
Union and China. In “Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace
in Vietnam,” Lien-Hang T. Nguyen writes, “While Moscow hoped to see Soviet
technology defeat American arms in Vietnam, Beijing wanted to showcase the power
of Mao’s military strategy on the Vietnamese battlefield.”
There
is no evidence that Ho Chi Minh or his successors ever envisioned the kind of
neutrality that Yugoslavia’s communist dictator Josip Broz Tito pursued during
the Cold War. On the contrary, the North Vietnamese communists identified
themselves with the main communist bloc of nations, sought to maintain the
support of the Soviets and the Chinese alike, and by the end of the Cold War had
turned their country into the Soviet Union’s major Asian
ally.
Was
South Vietnam too marginal an interest to justify a U.S. war in the 1960s and
1970s? To this day, the United States garrisons South Korea and provides arms to
Taiwan. If you consider that in today’s world, the United States could go to war
if China attacks Taiwan and almost certainly would go to war if North Korea
attacks South Korea, the use of U.S. military force to defend South Vietnam
against North Vietnam at the height of the Cold War seems less puzzling. Indeed,
a U.S. decision in the 1960s not to try to avert a communist takeover of South
Vietnam would need explanation.
Viewing
the Indochina wars as Cold War proxy wars, along with the conflicts of that era
in Korea and Afghanistan, answers one set of critics: the realists. It also
provides an answer to other critics who claim that the United States should have
been more aggressive toward North Vietnam. In 1978, Adm. William Sharp wrote,
“Why were we not permitted to win? In my view, it was partly because political
and diplomatic circles in Washington were disproportionately concerned with the
possibility of Chinese and Soviet intervention.”
The
late Col. Harry Summers Jr. argued that the United States allowed itself “to be
bluffed by China throughout most of the war.”
Undermining
this critique is the fact that China and the Soviet Union played a much greater
role in the Vietnam War than Americans realized at the time. Fifty percent of
all Soviet foreign aid went to North Vietnam between 1965 and 1968. Soviet
anti-aircraft teams in North Vietnam brought down dozens of U.S. planes.
According to former Soviet colonel Alexei Vinogradov, “The Americans knew only
too well that Vietnamese planes of Soviet design were often flown by Soviet
pilots.”
China’s
indirect role in Vietnam was even more massive and critical. It is now known
that in a secret meeting between Ho Chi Minh and Mao in the summer of 1965,
China agreed to enter the war directly if the United States invaded North
Vietnam. As it was, China’s indirect involvement in Vietnam was its greatest
military effort after the Korean War. According to Beijing, between 1965 and
1973, there were 320,000 Chinese troops assigned to North Vietnam, with a
maximum of 170,000 – roughly a third of the maximum number of U.S. forces – in
the south at their peak. On Sept. 23, 1968, Mao asked North Vietnamese premier
Pham Van Dong, “Why have the Americans not made a fuss about the fact that more
than 100,000 Chinese troops help you building railways, roads and airports
although they know about it?”
Historian
Chen Jian concludes that “without the support, the history, even the outcome of
the Vietnam War, might have been different.”
Nobody
can ever prove that the People’s Liberation Army would have fought U.S. troops
directly if the United States had invaded North Vietnam. But the depth of
China’s involvement in the war suggests that U.S. policymakers were being
prudent, not pusillanimous, when they worried that China would send troops to
fight directly in Vietnam as it had done in Korea. Reviewing the evidence,
historian Qiang Zhai concludes, “If the actions recommended by (Col. Harry)
Summers had been taken by Washington in Vietnam, there would have been a real
danger of a Sino-American war with dire consequences for the world. In
retrospect, it appears that Johnson had drawn the correct lesson from the Korean
War and had been prudent in his approach to the Vietnam
conflict.”
From
today’s perspective, the Vietnam War looks less like a senseless blunder on the
part of the United States than like a replay of the Korean War in a different
region with a different outcome. Elsewhere in Asia, including the Philippines,
Malaya and Indonesia, communist insurgencies were defeated by local governments,
sometimes with the help of British or French advisers and combat troops. It may
be that those insurgencies failed, while communist regimes survived in part of
Korea and unified Vietnam, because of one factor: the absence of a land border
with post-1949 communist China, which provided material support, manpower and
deterrence of a U.S. escalation that might risk wider war with
China.
Ever
since the fall of Saigon, Americans have sought to draw lessons from Vietnam,
but some have been short-lived. In the late 20th century, U.S. policymakers and
military strategists, hoping to put the memory of Vietnam behind them, focused
on swift, high-tech warfare against technologically advanced adversaries – only
to painfully relearn forgotten lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan about
counterinsurgency and nation-building.
In
the aftermath of Vietnam, the United States sought to put Asian conflicts behind
it. But the recently announced “pivot” away from the Middle East toward Asia is
widely viewed as an American strategy of containing China, with which the United
States fought bloody proxy wars in Vietnam and Korea in living memory. In a
Sino-American conflict in the 21st century, Vietnam might even be an American
ally.
As
a historical event, the Vietnam War is an unchanging part of the past. As a
symbol, it will continue to evolve, reflecting the values and priorities of
later generations. In discussing and debating the nation’s most controversial
war, Americans would do well to remember the words of the poet T.S. Eliot:
“There is no such thing as a Lost Cause, because there is no such thing as a
Gained Cause.”