The Myth of Inevitable US Defeat in Vietnam

Dale Walton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780714651873
• eBook ISBN: 9781136339875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book offers a dispassionate strategic examination of the Vietnam conflict that challenges the conventional wisdom that South Vietnam could not survive as an independent non-communist entity over the long term regardless of how the United States conducted its military- political effort in Indochina.

1

The Temptation to
Intervene: US Policymakers and
Vietnam

Returning home after years of service in Viet Nam, I am nagged by the insistent thought that we have not yet adequately answered a plain question: What is it, exactly, that we seek in Viet Nam?

Gen. Edward G. Lansdale¹

One of the many questions related to the war in Vietnam is the matter of what reasoning motivated key US policymakers, who represented a superpower with overseas security interests and obligations that were centered in Europe, to take a military stand against communism in Southeast Asia, an area of dubious strategic value in which it was difficult to use US military advantages to maximum effect. The question is an important one: the United States made a series of commitments that eventually culminated in US forces taking an active combat role in an ongoing war of considerable size despite a traditional lack of US interest in the area.

Leaving aside the obvious point that the United States failed to prevent the communist victory in Indochina, many observers doubt the wisdom of choosing to defend South Vietnam under any circumstances and, given the known risks and difficulties inherent in such a project, question the strategic acumen of US policymakers who supported the progressive deepening of the US commitment to Vietnam. This issue is still controversial: most authors claim that the Vietnam enterprise was grossly ill-conceived from the beginning, but some still defend it as being strategically and morally justifiable.² While the question of whether the United States should have actually been in Vietnam is beyond the scope of this work, the manner in which Washington ‘constructed the war’ is not. Acting in response to the situation in Indochina, and in what they believed to be a reasonable manner, US policymakers set the parameters of the conflict in Vietnam (and unknowingly contributed to the US defeat). By exploring briefly some of the quandaries facing policymakers, particularly in the Johnson administration, it is possible to see why the United States was in Vietnam.³

The motives of US policymakers for defending South Vietnam were mixed and the strategic thinking behind the Vietnam commitment was sometimes muddy. Policymakers approached the Vietnam problem from a variety of personal perspectives and with widely varying notions as to how the war should be fought. Disagreement between civilian and military policymakers on this question tended to be strong even though their general goals were virtually identical⁴ — almost all US policymakers wanted a non-communist, stable South Vietnam and were in return willing to tolerate a communist regime in Hanoi. Moreover, it is important to note that the desire of US policymakers to guard the prestige of the United States and its role as protecting power played a vital role in Vietnam decisionmaking. Even policymakers who were dubious of South Vietnam’s strategic value did not tend to question the importance of maintaining the reputation of the United States.⁵

Indeed, after the introduction of US combat troops, the prestige and credibility of the United States as a protecting power was at stake to such an extent that, regardless of the question of South Vietnam’s strategic value, an ongoing commitment was arguably merited to avert the loss of face that would, and eventually did, result from a US withdrawal. Though such reasoning might have risked the creation of an ‘ape on a treadmill’ mentality — the fact of the initial commitment to South Vietnam justifying an ongoing, and steadily increasing, commitment to that country-Washington’s credibility as a protecting power was a serious matter. Many US policymakers believed that the reputation of the United States was a major, if not decisive, factor in determining whether or not a Third World War would be fought over Western Europe. If the United States saw the Vietnam commitment through to a successful conclusion, so it was reasoned, the Soviet Union would be impressed by American fortitude. This in turn would impact Soviet behavior in Europe, increase the credibility of the NATO threat to make first use of nuclear weapons to repulse a Soviet invasion of the West, and so forth.

Unsurprisingly, at no point was the Vietnam conflict entirely separate from the Cold War in the minds of US leaders. The situation in Vietnam was part of a world struggle against communism. Reference to this fact is important to understanding the reluctance of policymakers to annul the commitment to South Vietnam.⁶

THE PERCEIVED NEED TO INTERVENE

For the purposes at hand, it is useful to distinguish between the US financial commitment to South Vietnam and the commitment of US troops to battle against communist forces in Vietnam. The US provision of military and financial aid to South Vietnam was not particularly unusual during the 1950s and 1960s. As part of its effort to contain the spread of communism and Soviet influence, the United States provided aid to a variety of regimes throughout the world, and the degree to which the recipient states were democratic, free of corruption, and internally popular varied considerably.

During the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, the Vietnam situation was mainly exceptional because of its unusual combination of problems: the simmering guerrilla war, the unsteadiness of the South Vietnamese government, the National Liberation Front’s (NLF) inclination to undertake high-profile terrorist actions, and the perceived threat to other Southeast Asian countries. These circumstances resulted in a comparatively high-profile situation which kept the attention of US decisionmakers and the American media.

US support to the government of South Vietnam (GVN) before the introduction of combat troops was not difficult to justify in the minds of most policymakers. The financial commitment to South Vietnam in the early 1960s was not burdensome and even the provision of American advisors to the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) was not very difficult; the number of advisors was small and did not place a noticeable strain on military personnel resources. Americans were killed in Vietnam even before US forces undertook major combat operations and this did present a potentially significant domestic political problem to policymakers. Nevertheless, there was little reason to believe that the American public would not have been willing to tolerate the ongoing assignment of several thousand military advisors to South Vietnam.

The deployment of large numbers of US combat troops to the defense of South Vietnam represented a very different type of commitment from the American perspective. It was difficult for the US military to meet its personnel needs elsewhere in the world while also fighting in Vietnam, and after the experience in Korea the American public was suspicious of wars of containment at the fringes of the communist bloc in Asia. To a citizenry that took a proprietary interest in its army, sending large numbers of US troops to battle represented a very serious commitment. The Korean War had already illustrated the American public’s impatience with limited conflicts waged for vague goals. Of particular relevance to the Vietnam situation, Korea had confirmed that a communist great power might come to the direct military aid of a neighbouring minor communist power, even when such intervention meant combat with US troops.

In light of such factors, US policymakers had good reasons to choose their ground for a war of containment carefully. They had to contend with limitations on available resources — the United States was certainly not going to place its society on a war footing as it had in the Second World War — and had grounds for the belief that the public tolerance of such a war would be restricted. Furthermore, policymakers were aware that the military-political situation in Vietnam was volatile and presented the United States with many and varied challenges.

Nonetheless, despite the obvious difficulties inherent in fighting in Vietnam — an unstable Saigon government and a troubled South Vietnamese army, a North Vietnamese government with fairly solid nationalist credentials, a peasantry largely disaffected from the central government and a strong and potentially self-sustaining guerrilla insurgency, an inability to isolate the battlefield without either invading North Vietnam or occupying the territory of nominally neutral countries, and so forth — US policymakers chose to fight there rather than to pull back and wait for a later, and perhaps more manageable, communist challenge (probably in Thailand). Claims by some US policymakers to complete ignorance of the potential problems of defending South Vietnam appear questionable, if not disingenuous, on close examination.⁷ Many observers realized that the problem in South Vietnam was not strictly military and that the weakness of the South Vietnamese government presented a major difficulty for the United States.⁸

The domino theory, or perhaps more importantly the strategic-political paradigm subscribed to by those policymakers who were intellectually responsive to the domino theory, weighed heavily in this decisionmaking process. US leaders saw the expansion of communism, and with that the expansion of Soviet Union and/or Chinese power, as a threat that had to be addressed and were willing to fight under conditions that were far from ideal if circumstances so demanded. Yet at the same time, the feelings of policymakers and the public about the war were always somewhat ambivalent and the intellectual commitment to containment was tempered by a worry that the Vietnam enterprise was ultimately not worthwhile. This ambivalence was a vital dimension to the Vietnam policymaking process: concern about the expansion of Soviet power led the United States into Vietnam, but decisionmakers usually lacked the intellectual and emotional conviction that the survival of the RVN was important enough to justify the assumption of high risks.

CONTAINMENT IN CONTEXT

A popular ‘myth of containment’ postulates that during the entire period from 1947 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States chose to challenge communist power everywhere that it threatened to expand, regardless of the nature of the regime that communists threatened to replace. This image is one of a hegemonic United States rushing to plug any holes in its complex system of alliances and to exploit weaknesses within the enemy camp. But this is clearly overstated; the reality was much less neat — at times the United States displayed considerable vigor in its containment effort, and at other times its reactions to important events were belated, tepid, and uncertain.

Other than military aid and unenthusiastic political support, the United States offered little resistance to Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory over the Nationalist Kuomintang, despite the feeling of many Americans that a ‘special relationship’ existed between the United States and China. The rhetoric of John Foster Dulles aside, the United States also declined to attempt communist ‘rollback’ in Eastern Europe by taking self-liberated Hungary under its protection in 1956. Washington even allowed a communist regime to take root in Cuba. Any of these events could, in theory, have occasioned direct United States military intervention, but for various reasons US policymakers chose not to risk acts of war against communist forces (except, of course, for American organization and backing of the farcical ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion by Cuban exile forces in 1961).⁹ Yet despite taking a cautious course toward a communist government less than 100 miles from Florida, the Kennedy administration greatly deepened the US presence in South Vietnam. Essentially the same policymakers who chose to reject the possibility of changing the government of Cuba by force of American arms, a project for which many contemporary observers argued,¹⁰ and that probably could have been brought rapidly to a successful conclusion, took on — with considerable alacrity — the very difficult long-term project of providing major assistance to South Vietnam to protect that country from a communist take-over.

Whatever the real merits of the decision to defend South Vietnam vigorously, the Indochinese situation was perceived as demanding such strong action. A broad policy consensus formed around intervention in Vietnam because of accidents of circumstance, not because Vietnam was necessarily the most important or best area in which to oppose communist expansion.¹¹ In a different political context, the United States might have done little for South Vietnam and allowed that government to disintegrate, but the intellectual atmosphere that surrounded US policymakers encouraged the belief that a commitment to Indochina should be part of the worldwide effort to contain communism.¹² Despite the problems inherent in involvement in a Southeast Asian war, US policymakers were willing to intervene in Indochina and to increase their involvement with a series of steps that led eventually to large-scale US commitment to combat.

Part of the explanation for policy choices in Southeast Asia almost certainly lies in the dynamics of the US involvement. The United States first became involved in Vietnam in a limited and seemingly low-risk fashion — the provision of assistance to the French in their war against the Viet Minh.¹³ As the US involvement grew the sense of obligation to South Vietnam and the importance of Vietnam to US international prestige increased. Yet, since the Vietnam problem was a chronic condition that never commanded the undivided attention of policymakers there was a tendency to drift into an ever-greater commitment without a careful assessment of the risks, problems, or possible benefits for the United States.

This observation about the slow entanglement of the United States in South Vietnam is perhaps best described as the ‘quagmire thesis’.¹⁴ It is key to conventional explanations of how the United States became trapped in Vietnam. To a degree it is a credible explanation, especially when accompanied by discussion of how the ‘domino theory’ impacted the thinking of decision-makers and helped create an intellectual environment in which the United States was susceptible to entanglement in the war. Many policymakers believed that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by W.W. Rostow
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction: A Tangle of Myths
• 1. The Temptation to Intervene: US Policymakers and Vietnam
• 2. A People Bewildered: American Public Opinion and the Vietnam War
• 3. Mission Impossible? The Prosecution of the Ground War in Vietnam
• 4. A Theater Divided: Laos, Cambodia, and Victory in Indochina
• 5. Enter the Dragon: China, the United States, and the Conflict in Vietnam
• 6. Fettered Eagles: The Use and Misuse of US Airpower in Indochina
• 7. Endgame: Nixon’s Peace and the Abandonment of South Vietnam
• Conclusion: A Wealth of Failures
• Select Bibliography
• Index