April 30th marked five decades to the day since America officially lost the Vietnam War.
In a new column, the Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter explains that over the past 50 years, Washington failed to learn a single significant lesson from that failure:
“Although the bruising experience in Vietnam had apparently induced a somewhat greater level of caution – at least temporarily – among Washington’s political and policy elites with respect to a few specific cases, it had not caused any reconsideration of the foundational assumptions of US foreign policy. In particular, the ‘1930s model’ still dominated elite perceptions about world affairs and America’s proper role in the international system: American opinion leaders were still obsessed with preventing the rise of ‘another Hitler.’ Closely related assumptions were that ‘appeasement’ never works, ‘aggression’ had to be stopped in its tracks as soon as signs of it appeared, and that complex, murky geopolitical struggles could be portrayed as stark conflicts between good and evil. Despite the negative consequences of the Vietnam War, those attitudes remained intact.
[…]
The painful lessons of the defeat in Vietnam have been largely forgotten, and the current generation of US policymakers is at least as reckless as any of its predecessors. The prevailing approach to international conflicts has a dreary, formulaic aspect: exaggerate the severity of the threat to both international peace and America’s security; portray Washington’s adversary as the epitome of evil; and portray any beleaguered US client as both an innocent victim and a proponent of freedom and democracy. Washington’s dishonest propaganda regarding the war between Russia and Ukraine – both corrupt autocracies – is almost a caricature of that strategy.
The litany of Washington’s military interventions and proxy wars since Vietnam – Afghanistan, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (again), Libya, Syria, Yemen, and most dangerous of all, Ukraine – all convey the extent to which US policy elites and much of the US public have remained impervious to the deeper meaning of the Vietnam debacle. As one cynical observer said to me: ‘The only enduring lesson from the Vietnam War appears to be ‘don’t go to war in a country called Vietnam.’ Such a pervasive failure of policymakers and the American people to learn more substantial lessons may be that horrible conflict’s most tragic and lasting legacy.”
To mark the anniversary of the catastrophic failure in Vietnam, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft asked a number of notable foreign policy experts, “Was the Vietnam War a mistake or fatal flaw in the system?”
Historian and US Army vet Andrew Bacevich answered:
“The United States has yet to reckon fully with the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War. Why? Because American foreign policy elites have spent the last 50 years engaged in a concerted effort to evade their responsibility for that disaster. Their success in doing so helps explain the dubious record of US policy since. Yesterday’s mistakes become the basis for tomorrow’s actions.”
Journalist Steven Kinzer also explained:
“America’s war in Vietnam was not an aberration. It reflected a key fact of American history: domestic politics shapes our foreign policy. The United States refused to accept the 1954 Geneva accord that would have settled the Vietnam question peacefully. President Eisenhower feared that doing so would, as his press secretary James Hagerty put it, ‘give the Democrats a chance to say that we sat idly by and let Indochina be sold down the river to the Communists.’ A decade later, Lyndon Johnson concluded that Congress would never approve his Great Society programs if he pulled troops out of Vietnam: ‘They won’t be talking about my civil rights bill or education or beautification. No, sir. They’ll be pushing Vietnam up my ass every time.’
Washington helped create the Cold War narrative that Americans came to accept. That narrative wound up limiting presidents’ ability to make difficult foreign policy decisions.”
There you have it. Millions of dead in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and incalculable destruction wreaked on those nations. More than 58,000 American soldiers killed, billions of dollars wasted. All for nothing. Today, the United States sells weapons to Vietnam’s still-communist government.
The only thing Washington has learned in the time since is how to better sell wars to the American people.
