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In his new book, Ilya Gaiduk reveals that the Soviet Union put little pressure on North Vietnam to negotiate; in short, America’s diplomatic efforts to involve the USSR in finding a solution to the Vietnam war were a waste of time.  A review of The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War.

The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War
by Ilya V. Gaiduk
Ivan Dee Publishers, Chicago (1996)
Hdbk., 299 pgs.
ISBN: 1566631033

During the Vietnam war, American policymakers went to extraordinary lengths imagining the objectives and processes of Communist North Vietnamese political and military strategy. United States Defense secretary Robert McNamara, architect of US military strategy from 1961-1968, believed that the North Vietnamese were his logical counterparts and attempted to demonstrate to them through a policy of graduated violence that theirs was an illogical cause. McNamara imagined that the North Vietnamese were like a sort of supercomputer and having decided that his opponents were “Big Blue,” resolved to be the Gary Kasparov who would bring them to concede defeat. US military pressure on the Democratic Republic of Vietnam escalated under McNamara’s tenure from the “slow squeeze,” designed to demonstrate to the Communists what lay in store for them if they didn’t negotiate; to an increasingly desperate “fast squeeze,” as the North Vietnamese refused to pay any attention. Richard Nixon, replacing Johnson in early 1969, had little of Lyndon Johnson’s patience, but continued to abide by McNamara’s belief in the DRV as a sort of fantastic calculating machine. When Nixon ordered the invasion of Cambodia in 1971, he announced to Americans that the US was about to capture “COSVN,” the command center, or microprocessor, of all communist operations in South East Asia.¹ 

In recent years, attempts have been made to “anchor” the “supercomputer” theory by reinterpreting the events of the war. For example, the North Vietnamese General Giap’s indecisive moves around the Marine base Khe Sahn in 1968 have been imagined to be part of a deeper plot to “lure” US forces away from the coast, thus leaving South Vietnam’s cities vulnerable to the Tet Offensive.²  The timing of the February 7, 1965 North Vietnamese attack on Pleiku was imagined to have been a “direct order from Hanoi” to escalate the war — part of a strategy to thwart peace. In fact it was an attack by a local VC commander and not connected with Hanoi’s larger strategy.³  By attributing a superior logic to the Vietnamese commanders, the rationale for the war’s loss becomes a matter of incomplete data. Had we known what the Vietnamese were really up to. . . 

The most prolific efforts to elicit communist strategy have been directed towards “communist documents.” Cobbling together the few available (and often misleading) communist sources, several scholars have spent a great deal of energy “discovering” in them a “deeper logic” which might account for US defeat. The most determined effort to elicit “Communist intentions” from North Vietnamese sources is Ang Cheng Guan’s Ending the Vietnam War: the Communists’ Perspective. Ang Cheng Guan strings together a wide range of quotations from communists and former communists and interprets them from the vantage point of a “calculated communist victory.” Taken individually, most quotes from Vietnamese communist sources tend to resemble prophecies akin to those found in the I Ching. For example, no matter what information is given to DRV leader Lee Duan, he invariably insists that it can only mean that victory is near and military efforts (and causalities) must increase. One more push!⁴  In recent years historians have frequently agreed with the victorious Communists that Lee Duan’s willingness to sacrifice his people was a sign of “the indominatable will of the Vietnamese people to resist colonialism.” Ang Cheng Guan’s book provides a less sanguinary reason for the DRV’s victory: the DRV won because it out-thought the US.

One might honestly have assumed that Ilya Gaiduk, in his book on US and Soviet international diplomacy The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War, would have adopted the “supercomputer” perspective of recent scholarship. Kissinger, convinced that military escalation alone would not get Hanoi’s attention, sought to enlist the USSR to make the logic of defeat more explicit. While the Johnson administration had imagined it might work with the Soviets in bringing the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table, the Nixon administration attempted to force them to use their influence on Hanoi by playing off China against them. The increasing complexity of Nixon’s approach to Vietnam might at least have made for a more exciting story.

Unfortunately, Gaiduk’s book offers little by way of diplomatic drama.  While repeatedly insisting that the USSR wished for a “peaceful solution in Vietnam,” Gaiduk reveals it did next to nothing to pressure the DRV to negotiate by way of limiting the shipment of weaponry.  The USSR’s principal concern, Gaiduk argues, was maintaining its leadership in the socialist world. In fact it could so little afford to let China lead in promoting Revolutionary activity around the world that immense quantities of aid requested by the DRV were given with full knowledge they would be wasted. American overtures for peace were met with words of sympathy, countered with requests for an American “bombing pause” (to permit the USSR “room to negotiate”), and nothing more. In short, America’s diplomatic efforts to involve the USSR in finding a solution to the Vietnam war were a waste of time.

Gaiduk’s book rests on several dubious assumptions. First, he assumes that the Soviets were justified in effectively bankrolling the war effort because of their need to “dominate the world socialist movement.” The burden of bringing about peace falls, in his view, on the Americans. Had the Americans stopped the bombing of the DRV, this would have give the Soviets an excuse to cut back on military aid. Nixon’s escalation was “pointless,” he argues: the USSR could simply increase aid further. He concludes by arguing, bizarrely, that US involvement in Vietnam helped facilitate in world opinion the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

Gaiduk doesn’t consider the possibility that the USSR showed little restraint in supplying the DRV because it had nothing to gain from “peace.” It cost the USSR nothing to “sympathize” with US peace efforts and a substantial amount to supply the DRV with military supplies which would be wasted — which is what it did. Gaiduk understands this to mean that the USSR’s real intentions must have been peaceful.  In fact the only evidence that Gaiduk provides that indicates that the USSR urged the DRV to negotiate seriously about anything was when it first appeared that Nixon would come to office in 1969; and after Nixon’s China initiative. The USSR appears to have believed that in both situations the US might have been willing to show resolve. From my reading of Gaiduk’s evidence it would appear that the USSR was happy to accommodate the US’ “supercomputer” fantasy about its Communist opponent. Its role was to facilitate the US in talking itself out of any serious military strategy which might have resolved the Vietnam conflict.

In his recent memoir From Enemy to Friend: A North Vietnamese Perspective on the War, North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin offers blunt reflections on the war. He writes that “it defies imagination that the US could send troops into Cambodia” yet never cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail. This would have logistically ended the war.⁵  He also expresses astonishment that the US never invaded the North. It would have “been a grievous blow to Hanoi for it would have forced Hanoi to think twice before sending troops south and thus relieved tremendously the North Vietnamese pressure on the southern theater. . .the face of the war in the South would have changed dramatically.”⁶  Tin is astonished at the degree to which the US imagined China and the USSR would intervene to protect the DRV. “The Americans were wrong in their assessment of the possibility of direct intervention by the Soviet Union, and especially by China in the Vietnam conflict.”⁷

While Tin’s observations should be taken with the proper historical skepticism, the most important point he makes is never directly set forth: how much of the Vietnam war was simply the American imagination inventing monsters for itself? What Tin writes would have been “common sense” for the average GI or even American: Invade the north, cut off the Ho Chi Minh trail, and talk tough to the Soviets — what could be more simple? There was little need for “intelligence” or “diplomacy” to arrive at these conclusions.

Gaiduk’s book suffers from the fact that there is obviously a great deal more to his story than he has been able to access. There is almost no information available of DRV decision making (assuming it exists) and much remains, apparently, unavailable from the perspective of the USSR.  Nevertheless, the Soviet Union and the Vietnam War would have been more interesting had Gaiduk simply assumed the old “supercomputer thesis:” he would then have needed to entertain possibilities such as those Tin brings up. Did not one Soviet policymaker imagine the US might invade the North? If so, this might have made for meaningful negotiations. Instead he adopts the monolithic thesis that the Soviet Union needed to “preserve socialist leadership,” which tells us about as much about the USSR’s role in the Vietnam war as the “indominatable fighting spirit” of the DRV tells us about how they won it.

The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War is available on Amazon.com.

Endnotes

[1]see Andrew Krepinovich, The Army and the Vietnam War (Johns Hopkins, 1988).

[2] Krepinovich makes the case for Giap without evidence. A better account is in Phillip Davidson, Vietnam at War: 1946-1975 (Oxford, 1991).

[3] Robert McNamara, Argument without End (New York: Public Affairs, 1999), pp. 216-217. 

[4] See Bui Tin, From Enemy to Friend: A North Vietnamese Perspective on the War (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2002), p. 69. Tin writes elsewhere: “Le Duan and Le Duc Tho were perhaps the most illusion-fed leaders at the time. They gave orders from afar without any apparent understanding of the losses our side encountered: ‘On Forward,’ they kept shouting.” (p. 70). Lee Duan appears to have been one of those leaders willing to fight to the last of everyone else’s life.

[5] Tin, pp. 75-76.

[6] Ibid., p. 159
[7] Ibid., p. 38.