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"Vietnam: Setting the Stage"

Presentation by Peter W. Rodman to the Conference on the Real "Lessons" of the Vietnam War

Center for National Security Law
University of Virginia School of Law
Charlottesville, VA, Friday, April 28, 2000

(From 1969 to 1977, Mr. Rodman served as a member of the National Security Council staff and a special assistant to Dr. Henry Kissinger.)

I would like to comment, if I may, on the price we paid for losing in Indochina. By "we," I mean not only the United States but what we used to call the free world, and the international order as a whole.

Dominoes

Everyone made fun of the "domino theory" in those days. In the wake of the fall of Saigon it was eagerly pointed out that no other dominoes fell (other than Laos and Cambodia). Arthur Schlesinger and others made much of this.(1)

But that was really a short-sighted analysis.(2) For one thing, it was really China that saved our bacon in Southeast Asia. It was China that bolstered Thailand and exerted its influence in Southeast Asia, in its own interest, to counter Hanoi’s influence and Moscow’s influence. (By then, the United States had brought China into the game on its side in the Cold War.) So we lucked out.

The price was paid, however, in the first instance, by the peoples of Indochina. The Khmer Rouge were a client of China in those days, China being somewhat less scrupulous than we in its choice of clients. So, while Arthur Schlesinger may have been comfortable with this outcome geopolitically, a few million Cambodians may have a grievance.

But that analysis is incredibly short-sighted for a broader reason. The five years after 1975 were a period in which American credibility collapsed and this contributed to a time of global instability:

• American abdication in Indochina was followed by our abdication in Angola at the end of the same year, as a brazen Soviet/Cuban military intervention in Africa was allowed to tip the balance in the Angolan civil war. Congress cut off any U.S. involvement, even a small covert action, to prevent this. The next few years saw the Soviets and Cubans intervening freely in other crises in the area, from Ethiopia to South Yemen to Afghanistan. This was an unprecedented expansion of the Soviet Union’s global reach and boldness of intervention.

• The unraveling of Indochina even figured briefly in causing the temporary breakdown of an Egyptian – Israeli negotiation that Henry Kissinger was conducting in March 1975. Israelis saw the United States as failing to keep its promises to embattled allies on the other side of the world, just as we were asking Israel to take additional security risks for the sake of peace. A cartoon in the Jerusalem Post portrayed a Southeast Asian scene. In the background, two large areas are in flames, one labeled "Vietnam," the other, "Cambodia." In the foreground, amid similar devastation, a mother smiles sweetly to her child and says "…and then came a clever man from America and brought us peace…."(3) The negotiation was put back together a number of months later, but it is not hard to document the impact that Indochina had in Israel in March, when this Egyptian negotiation broke down.(4)

• By February 1976, at the 25^th Soviet Party Congress, Leonid Brezhnev hailed the great victories of Soviet clients in Indochina and Angola and concluded that the global "correlation of forces" was shifting in favor of socialism.(5) It was a period of Soviet self-assurance and boldness.

Now, this can’t all be blamed on Vietnam. There was also a global economic recession in the West resulting from the 1973 energy crisis, and there was Watergate at home undermining executive authority. But they all fed each other.

In Europe, too, there was a profound demoralization fueled by the energy crisis, the seeming growth of Soviet power, and a pervasive sense of Western weakness. It was reflected in the growth in political strength of Communist Parties in Western European countries (France, Italy, Spain, Portugal).

Maurice Couve de Murville, who had been de Gaulle’s foreign minister, rose in the French National Assembly in May 1976 to deplore what he saw as a major destabilization of international politics – which he attributed in the largest part to the American collapse. The world was "in turbulence as never before," Couve said. Some pointed to the menacing growth of the Soviet Union to superpower status, he said. That was real, but not really new:

[T]his instability might well be thought to originate much more in the American crisis caused by the defeat in Vietnam and the incredible Watergate affair. The credibility of the United States throughout the world has suffered a serious blow. Above all, the American people’s loss of confidence in its leaders, embodied every day in the systematically negative positions of the Congress in Washington, have led to a sort of paralysis of power…

Both of these – Soviet power and the American crisis – are true, and spectacular.(6)

That is how it was. Of course, things recovered later. But that’s how it was then. Historians of the future will need to examine the great reversal of fortune that occurred between 1975 and 1985. That’s a great story in itself. But we’re talking here about the low point – 1975.

Credibility

"The credibility of the United States throughout the world," Couve de Murville said. The world "credibility" was made fun of, too, in those days. When this concept was invoked by American leaders, as it often was, the rebuke was that this was just a synonym for their personal vanity and misguided stubbornness. We would only be better off if we abandoned Indochina, some said.

Credibility is an intangible. It means our adversaries’ willingness to believe our warnings. It means our allies’ willingness to believe our promises. (Witness the Israelis, as I mentioned, in 1975.) But American influence depended on such an intangible – and it suffered immeasurably after Vietnam.

Years later, the crisis leading up to the Gulf War of 1991, Saddam Hussein invoked the retreats in Vietnam (and Lebanon) as proof that America could be defeated. In a speech in February 1990, he declared: "Brothers, the weakness of a big body lies in its bulkiness.…[W]e saw that the United States as a superpower departed Lebanon immediately when some Marines were killed, the very men who are considered to be the most prominent symbol of its arrogance.…The United States has been defeated in some combat arenas for all the forces it possesses, and it has displayed signs of fatigue, frustration, and hesitation…."(7)

A few months later, Saddam invaded Kuwait. As the crisis intensified, America’s defeat in Vietnam featured prominently in Iraqi rhetoric. On August 29, Saddam warned the Americans that if they fought Iraq, "it will be a greater tragedy for you than Vietnam….God is on our side…."(8) It was a constant theme in the Iraqi media.(9) Journalist H.D.S. Greenway heard the same from Iraqi officials: "In Baghdad, just before the war broke out, almost every official I met mentioned that the United States could not endure a protracted war, as attested to by the American failure in Vietnam. This impression was reinforced by the Reagan Administration’s pullout from Beirut in 1983 after the Marines were bombed in their barracks."(10) In July 1990, when American ambassador April Glaspie had told Saddam that the United States opposed Iraqi military action against Kuwait, Saddam had replied with another oblique but unmistakable reference to Lebanon and Vietnam – citing America’s inability to take casualties in a conflict.(11)

Ambassador Glaspie was later criticized for the weakness of her protestations. Yet the truth of the matter is that even if she had had more ferocious "talking points" to deliver, Saddam would not have believed her. That is the literal meaning of credibility (or its absence). Based on his assessment of American resolve in Vietnam and Lebanon, Saddam ignored the words and judged the strength of the commitment behind them. His assessment was wrong, it turned out. But the price we paid for the loss of credibility was the need to earn it again by war.

And we’ll probably have to re-earn it again in Iraq.

Wrong Lessons

This brings me to my last point: the wrong lessons that some people have drawn from Vietnam.

The generation of anti-war protestors are now in power in the Clinton Administration, and there are many from the same cohort in Congress. What many of these people have concluded from the Vietnam experience is that American is unworthy; that there is something morally questionable about America using its military power decisively; and that only the most humane and selfless goals justify the use of our power, not anything as crassly selfish as our national interest.(12)

This is, of course, ironic, to say the least. At the historic moment of the vindication of Western values, when the Communist evil is as discredited as it can be, we have an Administration that goes around apologizing for American foreign policy during the Cold War.

When Vietnam taught us the futility of incremental uses of force, or of gradualism, and the necessity to use force overwhelmingly and decisively when one uses it, we have an Administration that uses only pinpricks against Saddam Hussein after he kicked out the UN inspectors who were standing between us and a chemical or biological weapons capability in his hands. Or the incredible "delicacy" of the Kosovo air war, killing civilians in great numbers over 78 days because of a reluctance to act more decisively on the ground.

It is an Administration that (despite the Kosovo exception) feels strongly that the use of American power without authorization from the UN Security Council is illegitimate.

The good news is that the Vietnam generation has overcome the taboo against the use of force. The bad news is that they are unwilling to use it except where it is untainted by any American interest. And their inhibitions about using force have paradoxically led to an extraordinary proliferation of inconclusive and protracted interventions. Perhaps it has something to do with credibility.

The other good news is that Mr. Clinton is discrediting this kind of self-denying, self-hating policy coupled as it is with unfocused humanitarianism. Sam Donaldson kept asking, during the Bosnia and Kosovo crises, "Where’s our national interest in this?"(13) Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert gave a foreign policy speech recently, emphasizing the importance of American national interest as the criterion for our military involvement overseas.(14)

So, realism seems to be making a comeback. Where it seemed to have been discredited after Vietnam, which triggered a great burst of Wilsonian moralism, now Clinton is discrediting Wilsonianism.

The Gulf War showed that the public is not paralyzed by the Vietnam syndrome. With good leadership, the country understood the high stakes involved. It’s our political class that is still paralyzed, or at least still hobbled by the intellectual confusion of the Vietnam era.

Needless to say, we won the Cold War, after America recovered its bearings in the 1980s. This was the great reversal of fortune I mentioned, between 1975 and 1985. But the legacy of Vietnam is still with us, in some quarters, and weakens us.

Thank you.

Notes

(1) E.g., Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., "Make War Not It: Vietnam, the Revised Standard Version," Harper’s, March 1982, p. 72.