Not Even Past

How the United States Ends Wars

David Fitzgerald, David Ryan, John M. Thompson, David Fitzgerald, David Ryan, John M. Thompson

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781789202250, 9781789202151
• eBook ISBN: 9781789202168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Offers essential perspectives on the Cold War and post-9/11 eras and explores the troubling implications of the American tendency to fight wars without end.

"Featuring lucid and penetrating essays by a stellar roster of scholars, the volume provides deep insights into one of the grand puzzles of the age: why the U.S. has so often failed to exit wars on its terms."— Fredrik Logevall, Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs, Harvard University

Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan: Taken together, these conflicts are the key to understanding more than a half century of American military history. In addition, they have shaped, in profound ways, the culture and politics of the United States—as well as the nations in which they have been fought. This volume brings together international experts on American history and foreign affairs to assess the cumulative impact of the United States' often halting and conflicted attempts to end wars.

From the introduction:
The refusal to engage in historical thinking, that form of reflection deeply immersed in the US experience of war and intervention, means that this cultural amnesia is related to a strategic incoherence and, in these wars, the United States has failed in its strategic objectives because it did not define, precisely, what they were. If Vietnam was the tragedy, Iraq and Afghanistan were repeated failures. The objectives and the national interests were elusive beyond issues of credibility, identity, and revenge; the end point was undefined because it was not clear what the point was. What did the United States want from these wars? What did it want to leave behind?

Part I

Vietnam

The historian George Herring famously described the American War in Vietnam as the “unending war.” Certainly, its aftermath lingered long in the minds of policymakers and the broken bodies of those who fought the war alike; American and Vietnamese culture and the Indochinese landscape were marked by the experience. But if the war remained alive in the American imagination, it was not for lack of trying on the part of policymakers to turn the page.

As Robert K. Brigham notes in his chapter, the Ford administration declared the Vietnam War “finished, from an American perspective” even as the remnants of the Thieu regime attempted to hold off the final North Vietnamese advance into Saigon in April 1975. The Korean War—in which negotiations and trench warfare dragged on for two years after the war reached a stalemate in the summer of 1951—provided a harbinger of the American inability to come to terms with a result short of complete victory, but the extent to which policymakers were unable to coherently articulate their vision for an exit from Vietnam is striking.

As Sarah Thelen demonstrates in her chapter, the Nixon administration made no attempt to make a case to the American people for their policies, instead turning to appeals to nationalism to provide political cover for their actions. Nixon and his aides struggled to balance the demands for more troops and resources to strengthen the military situation, the need to project strength in the negotiations while ensuring that they continued, and to simultaneously quiet domestic dissent and rally support. Nixon’s solution was not to make a substantive case to the American people for either “victory” or a comprehensive vision for a peace that would end the war, but rather to rally his own supporters around issues of identity and nationalism and reflexive support for the president regardless of policy.

The strategy was effective in the short term, but in the longer term it both failed to build an effective consensus for the eventual peace agreement and helped to create a toxic political environment, the consequences of which would be felt in the United States for decades to come. The strategy evinced a duality in US culture that is unsustainable in the medium to longer term. At one level the narrative is brought to closure, even as the culture, all too silently, struggles with its lingering effects. Thus, the United States does not get to deal with the strategic implications of defeat. The need to move on stunts any significant reflection or discourse on the strategic implications on decisions for war, especially wars of choice. Instead, the interactions between US culture and the US executive are muted conversations that occasionally blow up over questions on military intervention but are ultimately confined to how better to do it next time, rather than more serious strategic reflections on whether intervention and war are necessary or effective instruments of US foreign policy.

If Richard Nixon left behind a metaphorically toxic political atmosphere, then Ed Martini’s chapter demonstrates the literally toxic consequences of the American war for Vietnam. In enumerating what was left behind by the United States, Martini shows us the long-term devastation of human and environmental health caused by contamination from Agent Orange and other herbicides. Not only that, but the Vietnamese were faced with the difficult tasks of political and economic reconstruction of a divided country and a massive humanitarian crisis. What is striking about this analysis is that in turning the page on the war and ignoring their obligations and promises of reconstruction aid that they agreed to in the Paris Peace Accords, the United States effectively continued the war by actively resisting Vietnamese sovereignty and independence.

Thus, the tragedy was that even as the United States turned inward and refused to reckon with the consequences of their exit from Vietnam and as policymakers attempted to turn the page on the conflict, that very act of turning the page prevented reconciliation and prolonged hostility, and it meant that Vietnam continued to suffer. The carelessness with which the United States ended its war in Vietnam speaks to the ways in which it was relatively insulated from the consequences of the war, even in defeat.

Despite the best efforts of policymakers, the Vietnam War’s hold on the American imagination did not end when the last helicopters left the rooftop of the embassy compound in Saigon. As David Kieran demonstrates, the consequences of the war continued to reverberate in American culture. Focusing on the figure of Secretary Robert McNamara, one of the key architects of the war, Kieran examines the 2003 release of Errol Morris’ documentary The Fog of War and coverage of McNamara’s death in 2009. He uses those two moments to argue that they reveal how the contested, malleable legacy of the Vietnam War continues to shape political discourse in the United States. The chapter shows how wars do not simply end in American culture, as their meanings remain unstable and competing remembrances serve different contemporary agendas. As Kieran argues, the Vietnam War continues to provide “a language and a set of ideas for advancing competing—and often oppositional—ideas about US foreign policy.”

Indeed, in his chapter on the strategic implications of America’s involvement in Vietnam, Robert K. Brigham demonstrates that these ideas equally affected policymakers, even those who wished to move on from Vietnam. In his history of the Vietnam syndrome, Brigham argues that particular ways of remembering the war had a stark impact on US foreign policy formulation and shows that ghosts of Vietnam haunted various administrations, up to and including the Obama White House. The lessons of Vietnam were inescapable, and few policymakers would embrace open-ended military commitments without a clear exit strategy. And yet these exit strategies were never clearly defined in terms of US objectives or in terms of the outcomes they sought in the local and regional context. The exit was thought of more in culturally myopic ways that related to the ability to get out as opposed to leaving the situation behind. There have been few positive outcomes. Despite the official narratives of turning the page, the wars linger; they have devastated the countries.

In Nothing Ever Dies, his examination of the ways in which the American War in Vietnam has been remembered, Viet Thanh Nguyen calls for “an unbounded empathy that extends to all, including others.”¹ As the authors of these chapters make clear, empathy was lacking in the American withdrawal from Vietnam, as it was denied to the Vietnamese and even, at times, fellow Americans. This unwillingness to understand the Other and fully reckon with the implications of American defeat in Vietnam had profound and negative consequences for US foreign policy in the war’s aftermath.

Note

1. Viet Thanh Nguyen, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 272.

Chapter 1

The Importance of Being Popular

Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Domestic Support for the Vietnam War

Sarah Thelen

"Once on the tiger’s back we cannot be sure of picking the place to dismount,” warned George Ball in 1964. Although not his intended audience, President Richard M. Nixon and his national security advisor Henry Kissinger could certainly attest to the truth of Ball’s warning by the time Nixon announced the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. Their efforts to extricate the United States from the Vietnam War highlight a painful reality of ending wars, namely, that it is not enough to simply desire an end to a conflict; instead anyone wishing to do so must balance competing and often contradictory demands from military, diplomatic, and domestic audiences. This is particularly true in a participatory democracy such as the United States, in which presidents have tremendous latitude but do not make policy in a vacuum.

Seeking to end US involvement in Vietnam, Nixon and his aides struggled to balance demands for more troops and resources to strengthen the military situation, the need to project strength in the negotiations while ensuring that they continued, and the need to simultaneously quiet domestic dissent and rally support. Congress, a coequal branch of government with the power to fund or defund presidential priorities and more susceptible to domestic political pressures, further complicated the already delicate calculus—as did Nixon’s determination to win reelection in 1972.

Although both Nixon and Kissinger publicly rejected the suggestion that domestic politics shaped their approach to the US war in Vietnam, their private discussions and memoirs underscore the ways that the three were interrelated. The rest of the country, too, recognized the connections between what one New York Times journalist described as the negotiations’ three broad fronts: Nixon’s need to counter North Vietnamese military and diplomatic initiatives, secure the cooperation of their South Vietnamese allies, and ease domestic pressure from both hawks and doves.¹ In presenting the final agreement to the American public, Nixon insisted it created “the right kind of peace” on all three fronts and thanked the American people for their support and refusal to “settle for a peace that would have betrayed our allies, that would have abandoned our prisoners of war, or that would have ended the war for us but would have continued the war for the 50 million people of Indochina.”²

Of course, war did continue for the people of Vietnam and Cambodia for many years after US troops left, and even before January 1973 many in the antiwar movement worried that the Paris agreement would have just that effect. At the same time, Nixon’s supporters were delighted and looked forward to putting the Vietnam War behind them. This contrast between optimism and pessimism reflected long-standing domestic divisions over US involvement in the Vietnam War. That these hardened as US troops returned home and that the US role in Vietnam declined reflects Nixon’s decision to focus attention on the president’s supporters, the so-called silent majority. In doing so, Nixon avoided having to make a substantive case for his Vietnam War policies but also lost the chance to ensure broad support for the eventual peace.

That Nixon would make this choice was almost inevitable given his own political background and lessons learned from the political travails of his predecessor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Having benefited from Johnson’s failed efforts to counter the antiwar movement, Nixon faced the same problem in 1969 that had stymied Johnson: the decisions most likely to result in a military or diplomatic victory in Vietnam were the ones least likely to result in a political victory at home. Faced with the diplomatic, political, and military challenges of the Vietnam War, Nixon opted to focus on a battle he thought he could win: the war for domestic public opinion. Rather than seek to unite the nation, Nixon and his aides adopted a divide and conquer approach to domestic public opinion. Not only did they work to isolate and undermine the antiwar movement—a story told ably elsewhere—but they sought to rally supporters to embrace the president’s policies simply because they were the president’s.³

This new group of active supporters would in turn serve as an important domestic counterpoint to the antiwar movement and would, White House aides hoped, eventually neutralize the Vietnam War as a domestic political issue. Doing so was of vital importance for Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, as both men recognized that domestic opposition had the potential to constrain their policy choices for the Vietnam War.

Worse yet, the North Vietnamese were careful students of US politics and delighted in reminding Kissinger of domestic criticism during the meetings in Paris. In recollecting the negotiations and, more broadly, most of Nixon’s first term, neither Nixon nor Kissinger could ignore public opinion in their calculations and policymaking. Even before taking office in January 1969, Nixon observed that although “a significant percentage of the public favored a military victory in Viet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I. Vietnam
• Part II. Iraq and Afghanistan
• Part III. The Cultural and Strategic Costs of War in the Early Twenty-First Century
• Index