Only the Strong by Tom Cotton

Author:Tom Cotton [COTTON, TOM]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

A Democratic Tragedy

Vietnam didn’t have to turn out the way it did. America could have won in Vietnam early and at very low cost if Kennedy hadn’t given the communists a supply route in Laos and decapitated the South Vietnam government. America still could’ve won early, albeit at somewhat higher cost, if Johnson had used overwhelming force against North Vietnam early in his administration. Instead, Democrats sacrificed victory, satisfied with merely looking tough in the short run.

When Richard Nixon became president, our military was finally allowed to fight without one hand tied behind its back and it achieved our objectives. We pressed our advantage against the communist guerrillas in the south, who had suffered severe losses during their Tet Offensive in 1968, and essentially destroyed them as a fighting force. And facing ever greater pressure on the battlefield, North Vietnam began peace talks, which concluded in early 1973. All this occurred during the period of Vietnamization of the war, with our troop levels declining from 475,000 in 1969 to 24,000 in 1972. Nixon secured the peace in part with his personal assurances to the South—and threats to the North—that America would return if the North renewed its attacks. For a while, the South seemed to maintain the upper hand militarily, but Watergate badly damaged Nixon politically and the liberal Democratic Congress refused further military aid to South Vietnam. Abandoned by the party that had gotten America into the war, Saigon fell in April 1975.

These glimpses of what might have been underscore why Vietnam was a tragedy: not because we fought, but because we didn’t fight earlier, smarter, and harder. Ronald Reagan called the Vietnam War “a noble cause.” Reagan was right: Vietnam was a noble cause and a necessary war to protect America’s vital national-security interests.

First, Eisenhower was right about the domino theory. Laos and Cambodia fell to communists alongside South Vietnam. These communists then committed genocide on a horrific scale. And while no other dominoes fell in the region, no less a statesman than Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore explained that the main reason the rest of Southeast Asia didn’t fall to communism was because America had fought in Vietnam. America’s humiliation in Saigon did, however, embolden the Soviets and their Cuban proxies across the globe in the second half of the 1970s. War and communist revolution in Afghanistan, Angola, Nicaragua, Grenada, and elsewhere occurred in the shadow of an American helicopter fleeing Saigon.

Second, Vietnam is and always will be invaluable strategic territory in Asia. This is a simple geographic fact. South Vietnam holds a commanding position on the South China Sea and just above the Strait of Malacca, two of the most critical waterways in the world. Vietnam is also the gateway to the rest of Southeast Asia—the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and Australia—which is why the Japanese prioritized it in World War II. Just imagine how different our struggle with China would look today if South Vietnam was, in effect, another South Korea: a dynamic capitalist economy offering ready access to American ships, aircraft, and troops.

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