The Myth of U.S. Defeat in Vietnam's significance lies in re-exposing academia's unwillingness to even entertain the possibility of U.S. victory in South Vietnam. The questions Walton poses aren't original — not because they have been resolved, but because they have been “silenced” by being ignored.
C. Dale Walton.
The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam.
Cass Series: Strategy and History.
Frank Cass Publishers, 2002.
176 pages. $36.95.
What is provocative about C. Dale Walton’s argument in his short monograph The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam, is not his claim that the U.S. could have helped its South Vietnamese ally prevail against the guerrilla insurgency and Communist Invasion that overthrew it in 1975. Rather, it is that none of the evidence he presents or claims he makes are new. The significance of The Myth of US Defeat in Vietnam lies in re-exposing the unwillingness of academic scholarship to entertain the possibility of U.S. and South Vietnamese victory. Walton’s book suggests that much of the academic scholarship on the Vietnam war confirms the truism that it is “winners who write history.” The writing of the history of the Vietnam war, he implies, has served to consecrate the North Vietnamese victory, not uncover the mistakes and contingencies that would have permitted a more democratic Vietnam to prevail.
Walton’s broad argument is that U.S. defeat in Vietnam was brought about by policy makers’ errors in strategic judgment (usually historically justifiable he adds) about the parameters in which the war was to be fought. These imagined restraints prevented the U.S. from taking decisive action which would have, in all likelihood, stabilized the government in South Vietnam and prevented its overthrow by the communists in 1975.
Walton’s principal argument is that the U.S. government was overly concerned with the threat of Chinese intervention. This made its prosecution of the war incoherent and inadequate.
1. The Purpose of Intervention: The Johnson administration’s unsuccessful war effort came from its inability or unwillingness to resolve two incompatible objectives. First, having decided South Vietnam should be preserved, it could not decide whether U.S. military action should be used to stabilize the RVN (Republic of Vietnam), or to eliminate the enemy altogether. This led to a second, related, dilemma: should U.S. military involvement be restricted to the RVN, a policy whose objective would be the stabilization of the RVN; or should it be expanded into greater Southeast Asia, which would have had as its object the conclusion of the war? This led to a third dilemma which the Johnson administration refused to confront: should public opinion be mobilized for victory by a declaration of war against North Vietnam? Or should the war be kept a “Vietnamese affair,” and remain out of the public’s eye?
In the most interesting point of his book, Walton argues that the Johnson administration, in refusing to make its policy towards Vietnam coherent, was opting for a strategy to accommodate its political and cultural imagination. In short, an inadequate strategy, was, as far as the Johnson administration was concerned, the right strategy. Attempting to end the war by aggressive pursuit of victory might provoke Chinese intervention. However, without clear signs of US commitment to the RVN, the Southern government might collapse. Too great expansion of the war would result in a war with the Chinese. Too little might result in South Vietnam being overrun by North Vietnamese operating from sanctuaries in Laos and Cambodia. And finally, too open warfare against North Vietnam might even bring in the Soviets. Too little, the victory of the doves in congress.
2. Adequate Conflict: U.S. policy makers knew General Westmoreland’s attrition strategy would neither win the war outright, nor cause Hanoi’s strength to rapidly (and visibly) collapse. Westmoreland’s strategy was optimal from Johnson’s perspective because it enabled the war to be pursued without widening the theater of war and without declaring war against Hanoi. Its purpose was to pressure Hanoi to negotiate, not surrender. The massive (and unsustainable) U.S. presence in South Vietnam ensured that the RVN would not fall, as long as the U.S. was there. The key to success was calculating the ratio between military force applied, the degree to which China might be provoked, and the point at which Hanoi’s “will” to fight would be eroded. If this could be found, an “adequate” victory could be had.
3. Adequate Infiltration: Westmoreland knew his strategy of “Search and Destroy” could not result in victory without the war being taken to supply and infiltration routes outside of South Vietnam. Walton at this point criticizes Westmoreland for not developing the ARVN (Army of the Republic of Vietnam) from 1965-1968 into an offensive force. But here too, his criticism is muted. Westmoreland’s actions reflected, in part, his belief that a unified command structure (largely under control of Americans) would have hurt Vietnamese pride. The practical result was that by the time the ARVN began to be developed in the very late sixties and early seventies, it was too late.
4. Adequate Pursuit: Johnson’s policy towards pursuing the enemy was taken over from the Kennedy administration. Rather than contesting the North Vietnamese from Laos, the primary infiltration route into South Vietnam, the Kennedy administration signed the “Laotian accords” in 1962, guaranteeing Laotian neutrality. In practice, what this meant was that the U.S. would tolerate North Vietnamese abuse of the treaty, while restricting itself from preventing infiltration into the south by aggressively (and uselessly) insisting the treaty be upheld. This philosophy would be applied to Cambodia, until Richard Nixon came to office in 1968. Again, such willful ignorance accords with the Johnson administration's unwillingness to take military strategy seriously by the necessary expansion of the war.
5. Adequate Bombing: Walton’s critique of the use of U.S. airpower is the same as his critique of the U.S. overall military strategy. The Johnson administration’s inability to decide whether it was bombing so as to “buttress the morale of the South Vietnamese,” or “to seriously hamper enemy logistics” or to “win the war” rendered it ineffective on all counts. This too, however, proved “adequate.” The imagined threat of Chinese intervention rationalized an elaborate “calculus of pressure,” rather than a strategy aimed at victory.
6. Adequate Chinese threat: The key to Walton’s book is his argument that the threat of Chinese intervention in the war was neither probable, nor in the event it was real, of as much concern as U.S. policy makers imagined it to be. The PRC (People's Republic of China), Walton argues,
was an available bogeyman that reassured Johnson, McNamara and other U.S. policy makers who were reluctant to take robust action in Vietnam that their course was the only prudent one. Civilian policy makers consistently chose to ignore the advice of the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff) and others who argued that China’s ability to project military power effectively into Vietnam was minimal. U.S. leaders usually preferred to be highly cautious and assume that the PRC possessed enormous military capabilities and the will to fight a costly war in Indochina. They had overlearned from the experience in Korea, and did not give sufficient weight to the PRC’s many known military-political problems or realistically consider the problems that the PLA would have in projecting power into Indochina (p. 94).
Walton argues that the delusion of the “China threat” was what permitted the U.S. to continue refusing to resolve its contradictory objectives in South Vietnam. In fact the “threat” of China conveniently transformed Johnson’s waffling and irresolution into the rhetorical “calculation of force and diplomacy,” which came to be associated with Robert McNamara. The mixture of military “pressure,” political theatrics and hidden diplomacy were all a sort of alchemy believed to manifest a “secret formula” which would transform incoherence into victory.
Walton saw little chance of victory in Johnson’s Vietnam policies, but justifies their blunders because of historical misunderstanding. While the Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon administrations all made errors in formulating Vietnam policy, "these were mistakes made for rational reasons and generally in good faith." "The Kennedy administration did not want to fight a difficult war in Laos and . . .wrongly believed that South Vietnam could be defended more easily by fighting the insurgency internally." The Johnson administration adopted a graduated response primarily out of a desire to avoid a wider war in Indochina. Even the Nixon administration can be excused for not “Vietnamizing the ARVN sooner, [and] puzzling at first how to extract U.S. troops from Vietnam."
Richard Nixon was not hampered by his predecessor’s illusions, and Walton is critical of the Nixon administration’s failure to see through its aggressive and successful military policies and Vietnamization. “If Washington simply had continued to follow the logic of the [early] Nixon policy the Republic of Vietnam almost certainly would exist today.” Instead the Nixon administration adopted a “perverse” “endgame policy” resulting in South Vietnam’s defeat.
The Indochina endgame policy of the United States is not easily explainable in rational-actor terms, because it was not fundamentally based on responsible calculations of national interest and was even illogical. The United States discarded considerable tangible gains in Vietnam (including the survival of an ally that, while still weak, retained a non-communist government), as well as the intangible benefits it derived from having been a reliable protecting power, in exchange for nothing. Thus the U.S. enterprise in Indochina unnecessarily ended with public embarrassment and shame. . . when it might instead have been vindicated.
Walton’s book will hardly force the serious student of the Vietnam war to revise his or her understanding of the war’s outcome. Walton pays almost no attention to the context in which decisions are made, abstracting policy makers from their historical milieu. He artificially separates military operations in South Vietnam from their political contexts (Vietnamese and American) and fails to offer any serious objections to the most important reason given for the inevitability of U.S. defeat: the inability of the Saigon government to stabilize sufficiently to carry out the military endeavors he assumes would have altered the RVN’s fate. Finally, Walton fails to present serious alternative arguments for the reader to consider. Much of his argument consists in giving “optimistic” interpretations of material already available.
Nevertheless, Walton’s is an important book in the historiography of the Vietnam War. It audaciously exposes the limits to which political analysis of the war is useful in understanding America’s experience in Indochina. The absurdities Walton exposes are not the consequence of decisions made in the distant jungle. They belong to America — and specifically, American culture. Was it really the fear of mysterious China which drove the United States in search of the “quintessence” calculation, sacrificing tens of thousands of its own citizens fighting a war in a fashion it knew to be unwinnable?
It is more reasonable to believe that the militant divisions threatening America were not those of great Cathay, but very much American. Marco Polo in the thirteenth century imagined the “Great Khan” to be a source of stability and power, which medieval Europe lacked. Was not menacing China, to the Kennedy and Johnson administration, simply a projection, a backdrop against which America’s lack of resolution could be measured? The limits of American cultural unity during the Vietnam war, may be measured against the threat attributed to China. But this is obvious only if one takes into account America’s cultural contradictions, instead of limiting oneself to the unity implied by American political policy. It is only from a cultural perspective that Nixon’s “abandonment of victory,” makes sense. In 1973 American culture wanted out of Vietnam. “Peace with Honor” was a political afterthought.
It is as unreasonable to believe that Robert McNamara would spend his years as Secretary of Defense attempting to measure the unquantifiable “will” of the “North Vietnamese people,” as it is to believe that US Asia policy could be based upon such a chimera. McNamara’s efforts were directed to understanding a “will,” but one much closer to home: the political will of the American people. Was it not fear of internal division which drove America’s politicians to fight a war in such a way so as to mask America’s own incoherence — something barely concealed by the projection-phantasy of a looming and threatening China? It is only from the cultural perspective of America’s division that Nixon’s political choices, his “abandonment of victory,” begins to make sense. Such an analysis requires an understanding not just of American politics — its stated aspirations — but of America’s culture and history, its contradictory fears and goals. Masked by a superficial unity of political vision and rhetorical good will, America’s attitude towards South Vietnam, the ease with which it abandoned the South Vietnamese, is best understood by its own divisions, not those of the North Vietnamese.
The Myth of Inevitable U.S. Defeat in Vietnam is available on Amazon.com.
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