Cases in International Relations

Pathways to Conflict and Cooperation

Glenn P. Hastedt, Donna L. Lybecker, Vaughn P. Shannon

• Editore: CQ Press
• Anno: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781483320991
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Categoria: Relazioni internazionali

Students love good stories. That is why case studies are such a powerful way to engage students while teaching them about concepts fundamental to the study of international relations. Cases in International Relations helps students understand the context of headline events in the international arena. Organized into three main parts—military, economic, and human security—the book's fifteen cases examine enduring and emerging issues from the longstanding Arab-Israeli conflict to the rapidly changing field of cyber-security. Compatible with a variety of theoretical perspectives, the cases consider a dispute's origins, issue development, and resolution so that readers see the underlying dynamics of state behavior and can try their hand at applying theory.

1	Pathways to Conflict and Cooperation

To the casual observer, world politics can seem to be little more than a series of random headlines that appear with little or no warning. Reality is more much complex. Events such as the terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001; the collapse of the Soviet Union; Western intervention to help remove Muammar Gaddafi from power; and the financial crisis in Greece all have long histories. They will also shape future events in ways that we may not anticipate.

Simply put, problems and opportunities such as these exist in pathways of conflict and cooperation that states travel down during the course of conducting their foreign policies. These pathways are defined by two sets of dynamics. The first has its roots in the structure of world politics. Here, we look to such features as the distribution of economic, political, and military power; the stability of the system; the underlying values of the system; and the presence of nonstate actors. The second set of dynamics has its roots in the way in which foreign policies are made. Key factors here include the world views and personalities of leaders, the structure of the decision-making process, domestic political influences, and bureaucratic competencies.

The pathways of conflict and cooperation created by these two sets of dynamic forces, one rooted in the structure of the international system and the other in foreign policy, do not predetermine the outcome of events. Understanding world politics is not a matter of connecting dots. It is a matter of identifying the key features of the pathways being travelled, assessing the influence of those pathways, and making informed judgments about the direction events might take. Case studies provide an effective way for us to study these features and begin to understand them. By examining the pathways the actors took in a particular event and, with the benefit of hindsight, assessing the influence of their choices, we can come to understand the judgments made at the time that led to the direction taken and begin to apply what we’ve learned to current events.

Consider the pathway that led the United States into the Vietnam War. During World War II, Vietnamese communist leader Ho Chi Minh was a valuable American ally in the struggle to defeat Japan, and President Franklin Roosevelt was sympathetic to his vision of establishing Vietnam as an independent state after the war and not having it return to the status of a French colony. With the end of the war, however, all of this changed. By 1952 the United States was providing France with $30 million in aid in its efforts to defeat Ho Chi Minh and reestablish colonial control over Indochina. By the end of 1953, that amount had increased to $500 million. This change in outlook and policy came about largely as a result of the structure of world politics, namely the development of Cold War political and military competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. At this time the focal point of this competition was Europe, which had been the central battleground of World War II. The United States needed France to join a European defense system to help contain communist expansion into Western Europe. Southeast Asia had not yet become a Cold War battleground, as the key area of competition there was China, which in the early 1950s was not considered to be a major political or military power. The price France extracted for its support in Europe was American support for its war in Indochina.

Yet American support did not help France hold Vietnam. With its forces surrounded and facing imminent defeat at Dien Bien Phu, France called on the Eisenhower administration to send in troops. Eisenhower refused, in part because of the financial cost of doing so, and France began to withdraw its forces. That exit became official with the signing of the 1954 Geneva Peace Accords, which created a “provisional demarcation line” at the 17th parallel, dividing Vietnam in two parts, and scheduled a 1956 election for the ruler of a single Vietnamese state. Ho Chi Minh’s communist forces controlled three-fourths of Vietnam at the time, but they withdrew north of the 17th parallel as agreed. The United States did not sign the agreement but pledged not to use force or the threat of force to disturb it. Yet just six week later, the United States, along with France and Great Britain, created the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) to halt the spread of communism—a goal that affected the status quo in Vietnam. Although Vietnam was not a member of SEATO, a provision of the treaty extended its protection to the “free people under the jurisdiction of Vietnam.” With this wording, the United States made the first move to create two Vietnamese states instead of one unified state, as agreed to in the Geneva Accords. It was not long thereafter that the United States supported Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam. It also supported Diem’s argument that since South Vietnam had not signed the Geneva Accords, it did not have to hold elections in 1956. The temporary truce line was now unilaterally defined as a permanent boundary. Once more, the United States’ political and military power, as well as its worldview on the threat of communism, steered the decision-making process behind these actions. By 1960, 1,000 U.S. military advisors were stationed in South Vietnam.

Getting into Vietnam was only one event along the pathway of conflict and cooperation that took the United States through some fifteen years of war until a peace agreement was reached in 1973 and Saigon fell to Hi Chi Minh and his forces in 1975. Along this pathway a series of decisions was made regarding how to define and redefine American interests, what actions to take in order to realize these interests, how to respond to North and South Vietnamese actions, and how to construct an exit strategy from the war. Our first inclination is to think of the Vietnam War entirely in terms of a conflict among countries and ideologies. But what becomes clear when we take a step back and look at it more closely is that the pathway the United States travelled included both episodes of conflict and cooperation. And, as noted above, all along this pathway the structural features of the international system and the nature of foreign policy-making shaped the actions taken. The Vietnam War is not unique is this regard. Very few aspects of foreign policy and international relations consist entirely of conflict or cooperation. In most cases both can be found. We return to the case of Vietnam to examine how U.S. interests were defined, the actions taken to realize those interests, and how the United States chose to respond to the opposition and seek a resolution.

When John Kennedy was elected president in 1960, his primary attention was on Laos, not Vietnam. The Laotian civil war underway was waged between pro-U.S. and pro-Soviet factions, and Kennedy hoped to establish Laos as a neutral country in the Cold War competition between the United States and Soviet Union. This aim redefined U.S. interests in Vietnam from a primary goal of containing the spread of communism to one of establishing a cooperative working relationship with the Soviet Union. From Kennedy’s perspective, for this new relationship to succeed, the Soviet Union had to see that there was no real possibility of spreading communism to Southeast Asia. Accordingly, stopping the spread of communism to South Vietnam was not an end goal in Kennedy’s foreign policy but a key first step in making Laos neutral and establishing a basis for cooperating with the Soviet Union. Standing in the way of this strategy was the fact that the U.S-supported South Vietnamese government was having difficulty defeating communist guerrilla forces. To address this problem, Kennedy began sending combat troops to South Vietnam.

A U.S.-Soviet neutrality agreement on Laos was signed in 1962, but it soon unraveled and the civil war resumed. U.S. attention focused once again on stopping the spread of communism to South Vietnam. Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon Johnson, continued the policy of sending troops and expanded U.S. actions to include the bombing of North Vietnam. The global system in which Johnson made his Vietnam decisions was different from that in which Kennedy had operated. With each passing year, China was considered a more powerful and influential political and military force in Asia. China often disagreed with the Soviet Union and thus had to be viewed as an independent actor, not as one of the Soviet Union’s subservient allies.

The key event in this escalation was a disputed attack on U.S. naval vessels in the Gulf of Tonkin. This attack provided the political basis for a U.S. congressional resolution authorizing the use of “all necessary force” to prevent further aggression from North Vietnam. Operation Rolling Thunder, a massive and sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam, soon followed, along with a substantial increase in the number of U.S. forces in South Vietnam. By 1967 over 485,000 troops were stationed there. The escalation did not produce the desired results. In January 1968 North Vietnam launched the Tet Offensive, a nationwide assault on South Vietnam that succeeded in penetrating Saigon. The attacks did not achieve their objective of defeating U.S. forces, but they succeeded in demonstrating the degree to which U.S. policy had failed and showcasing the dim prospects for U.S. victory. At the same time, a large antiwar protest movement was gaining strength in the United States and deeply dividing the American public.

As more and more U.S. troops were committed to Vietnam and as U.S. casualties grew, a gradual change in U.S. goals also took place. By 1967 a secret Defense Department memo defined U.S. goals as 70 percent avoiding a humiliating defeat, 20 percent keeping South Vietnam from falling to China, and 10 percent to permitting the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better way of life.

Like Kennedy, Richard Nixon looked at Vietnam in terms of the bigger issue of U.S.-Soviet (and now also Chinese) cooperation. Détente—Nixon’s cold war foreign policy strategy of increased cooperation—required reducing the U.S. presence in Vietnam and ending the war. To this end, the Nixon administration adopted a policy of Vietnamization, through which South Vietnam would take on the bulk of the fighting, and entered peace talks in Paris with North Vietnam. The Paris peace talks, which began in 1969, were not the first attempt at cooperation between the two sides. The Johnson administration had begun holding discussions in 1968, and, some two years before, there had been a Polish-Italian peace initiative that received tentative support in the United States and North Korea. Known as Operation Marigold, it collapsed as a result of continued U.S. air strikes against North Vietnam.

Fearing that North Vietnam would take advantage of Vietnamization and try to militarily defeat South Vietnam before its military forces could stand up and fight effectively in the absence of U.S. support, Nixon stepped up U.S. bombing of the North and supported an invasion of Cambodia, which had provided safe passage for North Vietnamese troops and supplies headed to South Vietnam. This escalation failed, and North Vietnamese forces came through the demilitarized zone separating the Vietnams in spring 1972. This action prompted the United States to reengage its fighting forces in Vietnam—a re-Americanization of the war—to avoid South Vietnam falling to the communists.

In early December 1972, the peace talks collapsed in Paris as South Vietnam objected to the terms of an impending agreement. North Vietnam had become increasingly isolated from its Soviet and Chinese allies, who now also valued the prospect of détente with the United States. Nixon, aware of the rift between North Vietnam and its supporters, responded by unleashing a massive bombing of the North to demonstrate U.S. resolve to both sides. Talks resumed as 1972 ended, and a peace treaty was signed on January 23, 1973. Two years later, in March 1975, the North Vietnamese military and South Vietnamese communist forces launched an attack on South Vietnam. Caught off guard by the offensive, South Vietnamese forces provided little resistance. Saigon quickly fell. Vietnam was now one country, and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

The pathway of conflict and cooperation that the United States and North Vietnam travelled did not end with the peace treaty and the reunification of Vietnam. It has continued, although with a new set of constraints and opportunities. A twenty-two-year period of limited engagement ensued between a reunified Vietnam and the United States. Not until 1995 did the United States, under President Bill Clinton, reestablish diplomatic relations with Vietnam. It would be another two years before a U.S. ambassador was stationed there. Points of conflict far exceeded those of cooperation during this period, even though resolving the issues dividing the two countries required cooperation. For its part, Vietnam sought economic recovery aid it believed was promised to it by Nixon as part of the 1973 peace agreement. It also sought compensation for the damages inflicted on its population by the U.S. military in its bombing campaigns against North Vietnam that used Agent Orange, a chemical warfare agent. The United States demanded an end to Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of Cambodia and sought Vietnamese help in locating soldiers identified as prisoners of war/missing in action (POW/MIAs).

By the 1980s the constraints on normalizing U.S.-Vietnamese relations had become less pronounced as Vietnam removed its military forces from Cambodia and adopted a more pragmatic economic position that permitted increased foreign investments and opened Vietnam to foreign trade. These mutually beneficial transactions brought about more frequent and positive interactions between the two countries and helped lay a foundation for greater cooperation between them. Relations improved to the point that President Ronald Reagan sent a special envoy to Hanoi to discuss POW/MIA issues. Today, the United States is Vietnam’s largest export market and one of its largest sources of foreign direct investment. Both countries are participating in negotiations to establish a regional free trade system in the Pacific, and both are suspicious of Chinese intentions in the South China Sea. Yet points of conflict between the two remain, including U.S. concerns for human rights in Vietnam and suspicions by conservatives in the Vietnamese Communist Party that U.S. foreign policy’s long-term goal is to remove them from power. Current relations between the countries, however, are now more balanced than they were in the mid-twentieth century.

Few could have imagined the way in which this pathway unfolded. In looking back at the events that occurred along the way, from the United States first coming to the aid of France in its bid to retake control over its colonial empire to its opening relations with a united communist Vietnam, we can see how the structure of world politics and the dynamics of foreign policy decision-making influenced policy decisions. As is always the case, the influence of these two forces was not constant over time, with one sometimes being greater than the other, but they were both always present. The United States aided France out of a concern for containing the Soviet Union’s influence in Europe, a decision rooted in the emerging Cold War that dominated the structure of world politics. Later decisions were influenced by a desire to work cooperatively with the Soviet Union within this largely conflictual global structure, first by seeking to create a neutral Laos and later in advancing détente. Today we see the influence of the global system in U.S. and Vietnamese efforts to improve relations, with the common goal of containing the spread of China’s rising influence in Asia. At the foreign policy decision-making level, such factors as a concern for the economic cost of the war, rising negative public opinion, and a desire to avoid humiliation all played key roles in U.S. policy toward Vietnam.

Case studies such as this brief one on Vietnam are valuable not only for the information they provide but because they can serve as a starting point for asking critical thinking questions, which are found at the end of each chapter. For example, with regard to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, we might ask which U.S. president faced the most difficult decision regarding Vietnam. There may be no correct answer since the choice made will depend on how you define difficult. The response requires you do more than name a president. You need to explain why, and that requires consideration of both the structure of world politics and the role of the foreign policy process in decision making. One possible answer would be that President Eisenhower made the most difficult decision by not sending in U.S. troops, thus allowing France to be defeated and risking that Vietnam would fall to communism; many would argue that the later conflict was his fault.

We might also ask questions about how the U.S. experience in Vietnam helps us to understand similar foreign policy problems. For example, how common is it that the goals of U.S. foreign policy change during a conflict, as was the case after 1967 when involvement in Vietnam deepened? A few moments of reflection on events since Vietnam would reveal that the situation the United States faced is one that has repeatedly confronted c...