Ideologies of American Foreign Policy by John Callaghan & Brendon O'Connor

Author:John Callaghan & Brendon O'Connor [Callaghan, John & O'Connor, Brendon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780415474313
Google: HpCKDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 12456389
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2012-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

In Retrospect

Some 30 years later McNamara would produce the clearest statement of how the dominant anti-communist ideology influenced and constrained policy-making over Vietnam in the 1960s. In his account of the “tragedy” of Vietnam, In Retrospect, published in 1995, McNamara identified 11 “major causes of our disaster.” These included: that the US misjudged the geopolitical intentions of its adversaries and “exaggerated the dangers” they posed to the US; that “we viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience. We saw in them a thirst for – and a determination to fight for – freedom and democracy. We totally misjudged the political forces within the country”; that “we underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people”; and that

we did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Where our own security is not directly at stake, our judgment of what is in another people’s or country’s best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our own image or as we choose.115

Although readers of his book could be forgiven for assuming that the passage of time and Cold War were necessary to arriving at these judgements, the reality is that such arguments were being made during the war and were dismissed by McNamara and his colleagues at the time. For example, McNamara’s 1995 analysis seems to borrow from George Ball’s 1964 paper, which at the time, Ball recalled, McNamara was “dead set against.”116 In April 1966 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. wrote to Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, highlighting how; “we have consistently underestimated the power of nationalism in Asia … we have consistently construed Asia too much in terms of western ideas, models, structures and issues. We have not known enough about Asia, nor have we tried to understand the problems of Asia in Asian terms.”117 Cogent argument in opposition to the war could be found amongst the statements and writings of diplomats, academics, journalists and clergy throughout the period of escalation. For example, author of the Containment strategy George Kennan had dismissed the Johnson administration’s insistence on the global significance of taking a stand in South Vietnam in his 1966 appearance before the Fulbright congressional hearings into the war.118 Some Protestant, Catholic and Jewish clergy provided a source of moral critique throughout.119 The eminent Realist scholar Hans J. Morgenthau was a vocal critic, warning in Foreign Affairs, the house journal of the US foreign policy establishment, that:

we tend to intervene against all radical revolutionary movements because we are afraid lest they be taken over by communists, and conversely we tend to intervene on behalf of all governments and movements which are opposed to radical revolution, because they are also opposed to communism. Such a policy of intervention is unsound on intellectual grounds … it is also bound to fail in practice.120

There were, then, alternative analyses available at the time that challenged the ideological orthodoxy applied to Vietnam by the Johnson administration principals via the domino theory.

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