How and why did America get it so wrong in Vietnam?

As far as the Viet Minh (and later, the Vietcong) were concerned, they were fighting a war of independence against imperialists. When WW2 came to an end in 1945 the Viet Minh in Hanoi declared Vietnamese independence. The French had other ideas, however, and wanted to resume as colonial masters as they had been before the war. So, the Viet Minh, having helped to fight off the Japanese, set about fighting the French for control of their country. The Americans, who had, of course, themselves fought the British for the right to govern themselves, were at first sympathetic. And Ho Chi Minh, in a clever ploy, had courted their support by including extracts from the American Declaration of Independence in the Vietnamese declaration.

The American position changed, however, when China fell to the Communists led by Mao Zedong in 1949. Mao started to help the Viet Minh in their fight against the French and America came to see the danger that, if they didn’t draw a line in the sand in Vietnam, all of south-east Asia might fall under Communist control (this is the beginning of the Domino Theory). Consequently, the Americans funded the French war effort to the tune of $500 million a year ($1.4 billion in total), and helped the French set up a non-Communist government in Saigon in the south of the country.

With American aid, the French were able to maintain the war against the Viet Minh. And they did so for seven years but when, in 1954, the Viet Minh scored a spectacular victory, the French a fatal defeat, at Dien Bien Phu, the French sought a way out of Vietnam. In the peace talks that followed, held in Geneva in 1954, the country was, like Korea, divided into north and south (as we have already noted, at the 17th Parallel) until national elections could be held with a deadline for the elections set at two years. However, this time, unlike Korea, there was the strong likelihood that Ho Chi Minh and the Communists would win them. However, though America may have criticised Stalin for not allowing free elections in Eastern Europe after WW2, and Kim Il Sung for not allowing free elections in Korea, they were not going to allow South Vietnam to fall to Communism. So America threw their support behind Ngo Dinh Diem, a corrupt and unscrupulous despot, a man totally out of touch with the Vietnamese people, a man who imprisoned and executed legitimate opponents to his regime, but a man who had one all-important credential: he was fiercely anti-Communist. From this point on, bit by bit, America got ever more deeply involved in Vietnam until it found itself fighting a war it was unable to win.

And America would pay a heavy price. The war killed 58.000 troops and another 300,000 had been wounded. And when the peace talks were over and prisoners-of-war had been exchanged, there were still 2,400 American soldiers left unaccounted for. It also meant that President Johnson’s ‘Great Society’, aimed at eliminating poverty and racial injustice, had to be scrapped. The war had cost $120 billion and America couldn’t afford both the reforms and the war. American society was bitterly divided by the war.

Now you might detect a pattern here: Syngman Rhee in South Korea, corrupt but fiercely anti-Communist, Batista in Cuba, corrupt but ready to look after American interests, and now, Diem in South Vietnam, corrupt but fiercely anti-Communist. You might also compare Fidel Castro with Ho Chi Minh, both nationalists first, Communists second.

So how did America make such a horrendous blunder?

Some argue that America, in the wake of the “loss” of Eastern Europe, in the wake of the “loss” of China was blinded by Communism. This had been evident in domestic policy with McCarthyism and the witch hunt for Communists in the American administration and right across American society, including Hollywood, in the early 1950s. In truth, it had always been so. If your school opts for the American Depth Study you will learn about the ‘Red Scare’ between 1919 and 1921.

America also showed a frightening level of ignorance with regard to the history, culture, and politics of the Vietnamese. China and Vietnam had traditionally seen each other as rivals not allies. And the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would invade Vietnam in 1979 after Vietnam had itself invaded and occupied Cambodia, ending the murderous rule of the Khmer Rouge there.

Similarly, the PRC and the Soviet Union were not as cosy as the Americans had thought. The Soviet Union and the PRC were at loggerheads throughout the 1960s. In late 1968 Mao is reported as seeing the Soviet Union as the PRCs main enemy. It is thought that for a time the two countries had more nuclear missiles pointed at each other, than they had targeted on America.

To balance this, however, some of those dominoes did topple: Laos and, as we just mentioned, Cambodia. And the Vietcong were aided by the Soviet Union and the PRC. But was China in a position to assert itself across south-east Asia in the 1950s? It had only just come into being following a long and bitter civil war and it only involved itself in the Korean War when its own borders were threatened. Was the Soviet Union capable of doing so either? It was still recovering from a life-and-death struggle with Nazi Germany.

So, given that nothing in history was inevitable, and people always have choices: Did successive American leaders make the wrong choices with regard to Vietnam? Could they have reached an accommodation with Ho Chi Minh? And should they have backed Diem’s corrupt regime? Interesting stuff.