20 Years Later, Vietnam Still a U.S. Watershed

It was the longest war in America’s history and, except for the Civil War, the most divisive. Perhaps even more significant, the Vietnam War was the only conflict that ended in a defeat for American arms.

All this makes it understandable why today, on the 20th anniversary of America’s ignominious withdrawal from the city then called Saigon, Vietnam casts a long shadow over the United States’ efforts to define its role in the world.

Fresh evidence of Vietnam’s persistent and disturbing legacy came this month with the publication of former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara’s memoir acknowledging that he had been “wrong, terribly wrong” in prosecuting the war.

That set off an anguished outcry from critics and veterans of the war alike and prompted President Clinton to contend that his own youthful objections to American involvement had been vindicated.

Yet amid this latest furor, scholars find reason to hope that the continued debate over Vietnam will produce a fresher and wiser approach to foreign policy than has guided the United States in the past.

For a nation that stumbled into the Indochina quagmire because of the so-called lesson of Munich and was plunged unprepared into World War II because of the supposed lessons of World War I, the most valuable conclusion to emerge from the Vietnam experience, these analysts say, is to beware of using any lesson at all from the past, including Vietnam, as a model for the future.

“I’m very dubious about the values of lessons generally if the notion is to tell us when to intervene and how to intervene,” said University of Kentucky historian George Herring, author of “The Longest War,” a chronicle of the U.S. involvement in Indochina during six presidencies, from Harry S. Truman’s to Gerald R. Ford’s. “You need to look at each situation on its merits and make your assessment in terms of that situation.”

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But within that limitation, some broad and pragmatic guidelines for American foreign policy in the post-Cold War era are emerging from the Vietnam debate. Among the principles that appear to be slowly but steadily gaining favor:

* Recognition of the limits of American military power to work the nation’s will abroad.

“There is no question that people are wary and don’t want to go through that (the Vietnam experience) again,” said John Mueller of the University of Rochester, a leading authority on public reaction to military involvement abroad. While Americans have plainly not turned isolationist in the wake of Vietnam, Mueller said, they now tend to evaluate the prospect of new ventures abroad “fairly reasonably in terms of costs and benefits.”

This coldblooded view is held not just by rebellious youth on the fringes of the political spectrum but among many solid middle-class patriots.

“It’s OK to go in where something really involves our national interest,” said Charles Bain, of New Hope, Pa., a World War II Navy lieutenant commander and retired factory manager. “But we just can’t be the caretakers of the world.”

On a recent trip to Washington, Bain made a point of visiting the Vietnam War Memorial to honor those fallen in a war that “we probably shouldn’t have gotten into in the first place.” He added: “We have to watch out for the hawks.”

* Heightened insistence on accountability and open debate on foreign commitments by political leaders who too often in the past, many Americans feel, have been highhanded or deceptive.

The public realizes that “you just can’t give government a long leash,” said Harvard University political scientist Morris Fiorina. “You have to be vigilant.”

The kind of argument that presidents often made during the Cold War--that “I have information that I can’t share with you, but I should be given a lot of latitude”--no longer works as well as it did in the past, said Duke University political scientist Ole Holsti.

“I think now there is a sense that ‘we will go along with that for a bit, but not too far,’ ” added Holsti, who periodically samples the views of more than 2,000 policy-makers and opinion shapers in the realm of foreign affairs.

* Greater sensitivity to the political, economic and cultural imperatives that shape the outlook of other nations, especially potential U.S. adversaries.

America’s gross underestimation of the tenacity and commitment of its Viet Cong and North Vietnamese foes points to the need “to be more attuned to the local dynamics of situations overseas,” said the University of Kentucky’s Herring. “In the past, we’ve looked at foreign policy in terms of broad Cold War abstractions, without understanding the historical circumstances in each country.”

Relearning this lesson, Herring said, cost the lives of dozens of U.S. troops in Somalia in 1993, after the United States committed its forces to a peacekeeping mission without a full understanding of the deep-rooted tribal loyalties and rivalries underlying the struggle between that country’s warlords.

Similarly, University of Michigan analyst Ted Hopf, author of “Peripheral Visions,” a study of U.S. attempts to deter aggression in the Third World, contends that the George Bush Administration would have been less surprised by Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait if it had tried to put itself in the shoes of Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein and his cohorts.

“Those people in Baghdad saw Kuwait as an artificial construct on their southern border which was sapping them of their oil supplies,” Hopf said. The Iraqi regime, he contended, viewed its territorial dispute with Kuwait in terms of its own interests, “not as an issue of violating a sovereign border or a threat to Western oil supplies that would provoke a U.S. response.”

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Whatever conclusions are ultimately drawn about the lessons of Vietnam, the consequences of that war--with its 58,000 American deaths--are still apparent.

Even the U.S. success in the Persian Gulf has not diminished the significance of Vietnam, most analysts say. Indeed, they argue that the Bush Administration’s conduct of Operation Desert Storm, with its clear and limited military objective and strong support from an international coalition--factors absent during the Vietnam era--demonstrated the continued impact of that war.

“Bush basically had to talk from the beginning about the Gulf not being another Vietnam,” said the University of Rochester’s Mueller. “And there was a very strong guarantee (that) if it had turned out be another Vietnam, he would have been clobbered politically.”

Perhaps the most conspicuous legacy of Vietnam is a heightened skepticism not only about foreign policy but about government in general, even among Americans too young to have experienced that trauma firsthand. Though many of his students were born after the fall of Saigon, Harvard’s Fiorina points out that they were still raised in an environment marked by low public confidence in government.

“They have very low expectations for government,” he said. “They say things that would have been considered cynical if they had said them years ago, but what they say is based on things that they read in the newspapers every day.”

Their attitude will last, he predicted, “until such time as government acts in a truly positive and impressive way to regain their trust, and I don’t see that happening right now.”

One reason for this negativism is that the conduct of the Vietnam War seems to have contravened the view Americans had long cherished of their country as always acting abroad out of high principles and lofty motives. This concept had been nurtured in modern times by such rhetoric as President Woodrow Wilson’s World War I pledge to “make the world safe for democracy” and President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World War II commitment to “The Four Freedoms.”

By contrast, Northwestern University political scientist Benjamin I. Page points out, a recent survey conducted by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that nearly three out of five Americans agreed with the proposition that the Vietnam War was not “just a mistake” but rather “fundamentally wrong and immoral.”

Given this sour outlook on Vietnam, it is no wonder that political leaders have been having a hard time replacing the Cold War consensus on foreign policy--a consensus based on confidence in U.S. power and on faith in its objectives.

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“If you look at the great issues of the immediate postwar era, like NATO and the Marshall Plan, they all had support from the cores of both major parties,” said Duke’s Holsti. “The old idea that politics should stop at the water’s edge is no longer true.”

That placid notion was demolished by the escalation of the war in the 1960s. Vietnam tore the Democratic Party asunder, shortened Lyndon B. Johnson’s tenure in the White House and--together with the Watergate scandal, which was engendered in part by divisions over Richard Nixon’s pursuit of “peace with honor” in Vietnam--ultimately unraveled Nixon’s presidency.

Nowadays, disharmony and partisanship abound in the foreign policy arena. As a prime example of the transformation, Holsti cites the behavior of Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas, front-runner for the Republican 1996 presidential nomination.

In the wake of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, Dole argued that Congress had no business questioning Republican President Bush’s authority to dispatch troops to the Persian Gulf. But three years later, with Democrat Bill Clinton in the Oval Office, he questioned the new President’s right to send forces to Haiti without congressional endorsement.

Even within each party, agreement is hard to find. Clinton’s difficulty in getting Democrats to support a range of contemplated foreign policy initiatives involving nations ranging from Haiti to Bosnia-Herzegovina has contributed to the unsteadiness that, critics say, marks his conduct of foreign affairs.

Meanwhile, Republican presidential contenders bicker about the proper extent of U.S. involvement in the world, with Indiana Sen. Richard G. Lugar championing the internationalist view while, on the opposite side, columnist Patrick J. Buchanan denounces free trade and the United Nations.

One factor that contributed to this acrimony and ferment was the breakup of America’s longtime Cold War adversary, the Soviet Union, which simply by its existence defined and focused U.S. policy before and after Vietnam.

“In the post-Cold War period, we are just groping our way, looking for some sort of lodestar to guide us,” said Michigan’s Hopf. “But there is none, because there is no Soviet Union.”

Nevertheless, Hopf believes that the United States’ victory in the Cold War, which came in spite of its previous defeat in Vietnam, demonstrates that prowess on such Third World battlefields does not necessarily count for very much.

“One lesson of the Cold War is that the United States is a hell of a lot more powerful than the United States thinks it is,” Hopf said. “Consequently, the need to demonstrate that power in parts of the Third World does not exist.”