The Columbia History of the Vietnam War by David L. Anderson

Author:David L. Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History/Military/Vietnam War
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2011-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

Richard Nixon had run for the office of president in 1968 claiming to be, among other things, a peace candidate. Secretly, however, he intended to deploy several military, diplomatic, and political stratagems that he believed would pry concessions from the Communist side, thereby preserving the Saigon government into the indefinite future and, ipso facto, sustaining U.S. great-power credibility as well as his own presidential credibility. His was a strategy of selective but dramatic escalation for the policy purpose of disengaging with “honor”—that is, forcing a peace on American terms. North Vietnam’s and the southern guerrillas’ determination to throw out neoimperial foreign occupiers, reunite Vietnam, and revolutionize Vietnamese society on their terms, however, meant that Nixon’s strategy and policy required the United States to pay a price for continuing the war that a critical mass of Americans thought too high. At least half, if not most, of the American people, along with a substantial number of political, economic, and opinion leaders, did not believe that the cost in lives, treasure, and social harmony was worth the effort—especially because they did not understand or agree with their government’s abstract arguments in favor of persisting in Vietnam. In addition, decision makers would not or could not tell them how and when the war could be brought to a successful conclusion, and most dissenting Americans believed that the means used to wage the war were immoral. Although Nixon disagreed, he well knew that wars can be sustained indefinitely only with the willing cooperation of a majority of the population. Even hawkish supporters in Congress and the citizenry grew increasingly concerned about the costs of this seemingly interminable conflict.47

But Nixon could not bring himself to abandon the goals that had led him and the United States into the quagmire. Like many other American policymakers before, during, and after the war, he was trapped in a counterrevolutionary mind-set of global reach. It was a mind-set reinforced by great-power hubris, sustained by political and bureaucratic pressures, and rationalized by a worldview that placed all matters in the context of America’s Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union and the threat that revolution posed to the expansion of “free enterprise.”

Although a product of this foreign-policy culture, Nixon’s psychology added an unpredictable, chaotic element to the standard American formulas for war and diplomacy. His faith in the virtues of struggle, force, “mad” threats, and secret diplomacy, for example, encouraged him to believe that he could win the objectives he sought in Vietnam despite the conflict’s intractable realities that others had recognized much earlier. His emotions and moods influenced the escalatory tactics he chose, such as the bombing and invasion of Cambodia, the invasion of Laos, and the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong. Even his diplomatic “carrots” were accompanied by the “sticks” of military and economic threat.

In all this, he was aided and abetted by Henry Kissinger. Despite their personality differences and their strained, unequal relationship, both Nixon and Kissinger considered themselves “realists” and thus assumed that nation-states existed in

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