cold war consensus

cold war consensus

The containment policy was supported by an essentially bipartisan consensus in Congress. Relations between the policymaking and the intellectual communities were professional and assumed to be based on shared long-term goals. But roughly coincident with the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the national consensus began to break down. Part of the reason was the shock of the assassination of a young President who had called on America to fulfill its idealistic traditions. Though the assailant was a Communist who had sojourned in the Soviet Union, among many of the younger generation the loss raised questions about the moral validity of the American enterprise. The Cold War had begun with a call to support democracy and liberty across the world, reinforced by Kennedy at his inauguration. Yet over some time, the military doctrines that sustained the strategy of containment began to have a blighting effect on public perceptions.

The gap between the destructiveness of the weapons and the purposes for which they might be used proved unbridgeable. All theories for the limited use of military nuclear technology proved infeasible. The reigning strategy was based on the ability to inflict a level of civilian casualties judged unbearable but surely involving tens of millions on both sides in a matter of days. This calculus constrained the self-confidence of national leaders and the public’s faith in their leadership. Besides this, as the containment policy migrated into the fringes of Asia, it encountered conditions quite opposite to those in Europe. The Marshall Plan and NATO succeeded because a political tradition of government remained in Europe, even if impaired. Economic recovery could restore political vitality. But in much of the underdeveloped world, the political framework was fragile or new, and economic aid led to corruption as frequently as to stability. These dilemmas came to a head in the Vietnam War.

Truman had sent civilian advisors to South Vietnam to resist a guerrilla war in 1951; Eisenhower had added military advisors in 1954; Kennedy authorized combat troops as auxiliaries in 1962; Johnson deployed an expeditionary force in 1965 that eventually rose to more than half a million. The Kennedy administration had gone to the edge of participating in the war, and the Johnson administration made it its own because it was convinced that the North Vietnamese assault into South Vietnam was the spearhead of a Sino-Soviet drive for global domination and that it needed to be resisted by American forces lest all of Southeast Asia fall under Communist control.

In defending Asia, America proposed to proceed as it had in Western Europe. In accord with President Eisenhower’s “domino theory,” in which the fall of one country to Communism would cause others to fall, it applied the doctrine of containment to thwart the aggressor (on the model of NATO) and economic and political rehabilitation (as in the Marshall Plan). At the same time, to avoid “widening the war,” the United States refrained from targeting sanctuaries in Cambodia and Laos from which Hanoi’s forces launched attacks to inflict thousands of casualties and to which they withdrew to thwart pursuit. None of these administrations had vouchsafed a plan for ending the war other than preserving the independence of South Vietnam, destroying the forces armed and deployed by Hanoi to subvert it, and bombing North Vietnam with sufficient force to cause Hanoi to reconsider its policy of conquest and begin negotiations. This had not been treated as a remarkable or controversial program until the middle of the Johnson administration.

Then a wave of protests and media critiques—culminating after the 1968 Tet Offensive, in conventional military terms a devastating defeat for North Vietnam but treated in the Western press as a stunning victory and evidence of American failure—struck a chord with administration officials. Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of the Singapore state and perhaps the wisest Asian leader of his period, was vocal in his firm belief, maintained to this writing, that American intervention was indispensable to preserve the possibility of an independent Southeast Asia.

The analysis of the consequences for the region of a Communist victory in Vietnam was largely correct. But by the time of America’s full-scale participation in Vietnam, Sino-Soviet unity no longer existed, having been in perceptible crisis throughout the 1960s. China, wracked by the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, increasingly regarded the Soviet Union as a dangerous and threatening adversary. The containment principles employed in Europe proved much less applicable in Asia. European instability came about when the economic crisis caused by the war threatened to undermine traditional domestic political institutions.

In Southeast Asia, after a century of colonization, these institutions had yet to be created—especially in South Vietnam, which had never existed as a state in history. America attempted to close the gap through a campaign of political construction side by side with the military effort. While simultaneously fighting a conventional war against North Vietnamese divisions and a jungle war against Vietcong guerrillas, America threw itself into political engineering in a region that had not known self-government for centuries or democracy ever. After a series of coups (the first of which, in November 1963, was encouraged by the American Embassy and acquiesced in by the White House in the expectation that military rule would produce more liberal institutions), General Nguyen Van Thieu emerged as the South Vietnamese President.

At the outset of the Cold War, the non-Communist orientation of a government had been taken—perhaps overly expansively—as proof that it was worth preserving against Soviet designs. Now, in the emerging atmosphere of recrimination, the inability of South Vietnam to emerge as a fully operational democracy (amidst a bloody civil war) led to bitter denunciation. A war initially supported by a considerable majority and raised to its existing dimensions by a president citing universal principles of liberty and human rights was now decried as evidence of a uniquely American moral obtuseness. Charges of immorality and deception were used with abandon; “barbaric” was a favorite adjective. American military involvement was described as a form of “insanity” revealing profound flaws in the American way of life; accusations of wanton slaughter of civilians became routine.

The domestic debate over the Vietnam War proved to be one of the most scarring in American history. The administrations that had involved America in Indochina were staffed by individuals of substantial intelligence and probity who suddenly found themselves accused of near-criminal folly and deliberate deception. What had started as a reasonable debate about feasibility and strategy turned into street demonstrations, invective, and violence. The critics were right in pointing out that American strategy, particularly in the opening phases of the war, was ill-suited to the realities of asymmetric conflict. Bombing campaigns alternating with “pauses” to test Hanoi’s readiness for negotiation tended to produce stalemate—bringing to bear enough power to incur denunciation and resistance, but not enough to secure the adversary’s readiness for serious negotiations.

The dilemmas of Vietnam were very much the consequence of academic theories regarding graduated escalation that had sustained the Cold War; while conceptually coherent in terms of a standoff between nuclear superpowers, they were less applicable to an asymmetric conflict fought against an adversary pursuing a guerrilla strategy. Some of the expectations for the relationship of economic reform to political evolution proved unfeasible in Asia. But these were subjects appropriate for serious debate, not vilification and, at the fringes of the protest movement, assaults on university and government buildings. The collapse of high aspirations shattered the self-confidence without which establishments flounder.

The leaders who had previously sustained American foreign policy were particularly anguished by the rage of the students. The insecurity of their elders turned the normal grievances of maturing youth into an institutionalized rage and a national trauma. Public demonstrations reached dimensions obliging President Johnson—who continued to describe the war in traditional terms of defending a free people against the advance of totalitarianism—to confine his public appearances in his last year in office largely to military bases. In the months following the end of Johnson’s presidency in 1969, a number of the war’s key architects renounced their positions publicly and called for an end to military operations and an American withdrawal.

These themes were elaborated until the Establishment view settled on a program to “end the war” utilizing a unilateral American withdrawal in exchange only for the return of prisoners. Richard Nixon became President at a time when 500,000 American troops were in combat—and the number was still increasing, on a schedule established by the Johnson administration—in Vietnam, as far from the U.S. borders as the globe allows. From the beginning, Nixon was committed to ending the war. But he also thought it his responsibility to do so in the context of America’s global commitments for sustaining the postwar international order.

Nixon took office five months after the Soviet military occupation of Czechoslovakia, while the Soviet Union was building intercontinental missiles at a rate threatening—and, some argued, surpassing—America’s deterrent forces, and China remained adamantly and truculently hostile. America could not jettison its security commitments in one part of the world without provoking challenges to its resolve in others. The preservation of American credibility in defense of allies and the global system of order—a role the United States had performed for two decades— remained an integral part of Nixon’s calculations. Nixon withdrew American forces at the rate of 150,000 per year and ended participation in ground combat in 1971.

He authorized negotiations subject to one irreducible condition: he never accepted Hanoi’s demand that the peace process begin with the replacement of the government of South Vietnam—America’s ally—by a so-called coalition government in effect staffed by figures put forward by Hanoi. This was adamantly rejected for four years until after a failed North Vietnamese offensive (defeated without American ground forces) in 1972 finally induced Hanoi to agree to a cease-fire and political settlement it had consistently rejected over the years. In the United States debate focused on a widespread desire to end the trauma wrought by the war on the populations of Indochina, as if America was the cause of their travail. Yet Hanoi had insisted on the continued battle—not because it was unconvinced of the American commitment to peace, but because it counted on it to exhaust American willingness to sustain the sacrifices. Fighting a psychological war, it ruthlessly exploited America’s quest for compromise on behalf of a program of domination with which, it turned out, there was no splitting the difference.

The military actions that President Nixon ordered, and that as his National Security Advisor I supported, together with the policy of diplomatic flexibility, brought about a settlement in 1973. The Nixon administration was convinced that Saigon would be able to overcome ordinary violations of the agreement with its forces; that the United States would assist with air and naval power against an all-out attack; and that over time the South Vietnamese government would be able, with American economic assistance, to build a functioning society and undergo an evolution toward more transparent institutions (as would occur in South Korea).

Whether this process could have been accelerated and whether another definition could have been given to American credibility will remain the subject of heated debate. The chief obstacle was the difficulty Americans had understanding Hanoi’s way of thinking. The Johnson administration overestimated the impact of American military power. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Nixon administration overestimated the scope for negotiation. For the battle-hardened leadership in Hanoi, having spent their lives fighting for victory, a compromise was the same as defeat, and a pluralistic society was nearly inconceivable. The resolution of this debate is beyond the scope of this volume; it was a painful process for all involved.

Nixon managed a complete withdrawal and a settlement he was convinced gave the South Vietnamese a decent opportunity to shape their fate. However, having traversed a decade of controversy and in the highly charged aftermath of the Watergate crisis, Congress severely restricted aid in 1973 and cut off all aid in 1975. North Vietnam conquered South Vietnam by sending almost its entire army across the international border. The international community remained silent, and Congress proscribed American military intervention. The governments of Laos and Cambodia fell shortly after to Communist insurgencies, and in the latter, the Khmer Rouge imposed a reckoning of almost unimaginable brutality. America had lost its first war and also the thread to its concept of world order