Looking at the Vietnam War differently. Not a war, but as a campaign in the Cold War.

In a thread just below I noted the Vietnam War as a lost American war.  Now, in a somewhat contrarian fashion, I"m going to urge us to look at Vietnam in another way.  Not as a war at all, and not as an undeclared "conflict", but rather as a campaign in a larger war, that war being the Cold War.  If looked at that way, the war wasn't nearly as clearly lost, and arguably may have been a success.

Why did we go into Vietnam in the first place?  The question has been posed again and again as if it is a mystery, but the early statements on why we went in, and the early criticizm of the same, remain the most accurate analysis. We went into Vietnam not for the sake of the Republic of Vietnam, but because we feared what would happen if we didn't go in.  Even at that, it wasn't primarily our fear at first, although we shared it, but an Australian fear. The Australian fear, however, was not without reason. We feared that if Vietnam was lost, it would act as the first in a row of Southeast Asian dominoes, falling one after another, to Communism.

Because that didn't happen, it is argued, that view was absurd.  But it wasn't absurd at the time, and in retrospect, it might have actually be right.

Consider the world, as perceived in the West, in the first two decades after World War Two, rather than how it is looked at now. The US came out of the Second World War with the Bomb, the only nation that had it, and only the US and Canada had fought the war without any mainland damage to our contries.  The US and Canadian economies were strong, and the US economy effectively dominated the world. Things were looking good in 1945 and 1946.

Then, in 1947 the shocks started coming.  We had thought the Soviets were our friends and sort of naively believed, contrary to all evidence, that they were democrats at heart.  It became pretty apparent, fairly soon, that where the Red Army had liberated in 1944-1945 it was going to remain, and the Eastern nations that were occupied by the Soviets were going to be Communist countries for the most part (there were some exceptions).  The Soviets decided that Berlin ought to be theirs and made a dedicated effort to acquire it via blockade, bringing the world to the brink of a Third World War in-spite of the U.S. Atomic bomb monopoly.  The Red Chinese prevailed in the Chinese Civil War in 1947.  The British and Commonwealth nations, who had already fought against the Communist in Greece in 1945 started fighting them in Malaysia in 1948.  

In that same year, sparked in part by revelations revealed by a super secret U.S. Army intelligence program started during World War Two, the United States Congress started investigating domestic Communist infiltration into the U.S. government and to everyone's stunned surprise a Communist cell was found to have done so, even including State Department employees, Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White (the latter of whom was not a Communist, but a "fellow traveler") who had positions of influence in the U.S. government late in World War Two.  In 1949 the Soviet Union surprised everyone by detonating their first atomic bomb, ending our nuclear monopoly.  In 1950 espionage was shown to have included individuals who were part of the American nuclear program, thereby allowing the Soviets to develop an atomic bomb as quickly as they did. That same year Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, which the US, and the United Nations, intervened in as the Korean Peninsula seemed to be a dagger pointed at Japan.  A near United Nations victory was turned into a stalemate when Red China intervened to prevent a North Korean defeat..

The French, even while fighting in Korea, were fighting their own war in Indochina, although the fight was a mixed one, designed in no small part to keep their colonial interests there.  They were defeated soon after the Korean War leaving the Vietnamese portion of Indochina split in two, in a Korean like fashion, with a Communist north and a non Communist south.  Soon, a Communist guerrilla campaign developed there.

Given all of this the question we so often hear about Vietnam; i.e., should we have stayed out of it, might be a false question.  The real question I think is would it have been impossible to stay out of it?  I don’t think so, if we place the war in the context of its times.

 

This is why that’s my suspicion.

If we go back to the end of World War Two, as we did above, we’d find that the first Western effort against a Communist force came in the British effort in the Greek civil war.  The UK was aware of the danger posed by Communism before the US was, and at that time the US basically felt comfortable enough with its wartime view that the Communists weren’t really that much to be concerned about.  The British went right from that effort into the Malayan Emergency, which was a Commonwealth backed effort that saw at least Australia and Rhodesia also commit some troops. 

The awakening really came for us when the Nationalist Chinese lost the Chinese Civil War, which we just weren’t anticipating.  That massively increased the territory on the globe dominated by Communism and at fist the USSR and PRC were at least outwardly friendly to each other.  No sooner had that occurred, with all sorts of domestic repercussions in the US about “who lost China” than the USSR risked a third world war over control of a city, Berlin.  Those events got us engaged.  As soon as that seemed resolved North Korea invaded South Korea.

The importance of the Korean War, in terms of the Vietnam War, cannot be overstated.  There’s really no way to imagine North Korea invading South Korea without the PRC standing right next to it.  Had the Nationalist won the Chinese civil war I can’t imagine the USSR giving license to North Korea to invade the South.  Just too risky if the Western Allies resisted it.  But with the great mass of China backing up North Korea geographically things were different. And that worked out for North Korea in that even though their invasion of the South ultimately failed, Chinese support kept North Korea around.

This brings us back to the "Domino Theory", which was that the if any nation in Southeast Asia fell they'd all fall, one after another.  The general theory is that they'd fall all the way to India, in all likelihood.

It’s easy to dismiss the Domino Theory now, although erroneously in my view, but at the time dominoes really were falling.  One giant one fell, China, and another one, South Korea, nearly tipped over almost immediately thereafter.  With that history, with Communist insurgencies breaking out all over South East Asia, and with a big huge Communist neighbor behind nearly all of them, geographically, starting in 1947 things looked pretty darned grim. 

And not only in our view, but in the view of nearly every Western nation.  The UK had been in nonstop combat against some Communist force since before the end of World War Two up through 1954, and at least Australia had been involved in two wars against Communist forces by the end of 1954.  The French had been involved in two such wars, one in Indochina, and had actually sought our aid there, but the British vetoed it (we were reluctant) as they felt, probably rightly, that the French had a hard time distinguishing the difference between a war against Communist insurgents and a war against French colonialism, with the latter being doomed even if the two efforts were mixed.

Looking at it that way, with Communist insurgencies breaking out everywhere in Asia, with the potentiality for more breaking out where they hadn’t already, and with a lot of the insurgencies seeming to be successful, it’d be hard to imagine Western nations regarding any of the wars as mere local affairs without global implications.  A person might ask “why Vietnam” but the answer might just be that it was Vietnam’s turn.  The British and Australians had already fought one war against Communist in Southeast Asia and it reasonably looked like not putting the fire out where it broke out would make things worse.  Indeed, it almost certainly would have.  The Australians were, for their part, urging the US to take action in Vietnam before we did.  And in terms of the big Communist powers, China and the USSR, Vietnam did have a good deep water port which was strategic enough that the US had attacked it from the air, during WWII, when the Japanese occupied it.

The question almost would have been whether to draw the line in Vietnam or somewhere else, with all the other somewhere else’s being increasingly bad choices.  I don’t really see how the war could have been avoided.

And maybe the war, if considered a campaign in the Cold War, the campaign worked, although it certainly wasn't an unqualified success.  It would have been, rather, a type of extraordinarily long, and unintentional, delaying action.

The goal of a war like this wasn't to win it, in and of itself.  It was to keep a region of the globe from falling to a radical movement that conceived of itself, from day one, as a global millennial movement which would not only prevail, inevitably in its view, over the entire planet, but which conceived of itself as the final stage in history.  Indeed, often missed in the story of the Cold War is that the first rift in the Communist world, the split between Trotsky and Stalin, had been over whether or not the Soviet Union had to bring the Communist revolution to the globe immediately.  Trotsky argued that it absolutely had to.  Stalin argued that Marxism allowed for a start with "Socialism in one country."  Trotsky would have assaulted the Soviet Union's neighbors, immediately, in the name of the world revolution.  He failed, of course, and ended with an ice pick in his head, but even at that the argument was in part about the speed of the global pace of Communism, not that it had global ends.

Looked at that way, then, the Western wars against Communist here and there were really individual campaigns in the Cold War. The major powers never went after each other in a total war, like World War Two, but they did fight in their Cold War in regional conflicts where they felt they had to, or where it was to their advantage to.  The Soviet Union put down a German uprising in East Germany in the 1940s and it put down uprising in Hungary in 1958 and Czechoslovakia in 1968.  It also fought a low grade guerrilla war on some of its own territory post World War Two.  And, as prior to WWII, it sponsored Communist guerrillas elsewhere.  The Red Chinese, after 1947, invaded the territories to its west and fought border wars with India and Pakistan in the 60s,.  And it also sponsored Communist movements elsewhere.  And of course the West fought where it felt it had to as well, as noted above.

The Vietnam War did serve to arrest Communist expansion beyond Indochina.  The North Vietnamese were backing Communist forces in Laos as early as 1953 but that’s as far as it went and the country held out.  The fight was on, however, for South Vietnam by the late 1950s.  At the same time, guerrilla movements existed in Cambodia and  Thailand.

Had Indochina simply fallen soon after the French departure, or in the mid 1960s, it’d be hard not to imagine serious fights breaking out in Thailand or other regional countries, all of which we couldn’t have avoided.Indeed, one such war was already on, that being the one in Malaysia. The struggles in Laos and Cambodia have to be considered too.  Indeed, while its popular to criticize the “Domino Theory,” I think the Vietnam War really proved it.  North Vietnam was communist, the South did fall after we withdrew our support, and Cambodia and Laos also went.  Cambodia crawled back out first, but what a horror it endured.  I don’t know what the situation is in Laos today, as its seemingly always obscure. 

Anyhow, had the war not been fought as long as it was, I wonder if Thailand would have gone under too.  It did fight in Vietnam,  but in some ways I wonder if the war didn’t end up being a bit of a delaying action for Thailand.  And a person can speculate from there.  Now, people commonly will state that the theory was disproved as that domino and the ones next to it didn’t fall, but if the RVN had not been supported and had fallen in, let’s say, 1966, would Thailand have been able to resist similar Communist efforts?  Or would we have just ended up in a similar war there or some other locality?  I suspect we would have.

Looked at that way, the Vietnam War becomes a big campaign in the larger Cold War, which we did win.  Perhaps Giap won the campaign, but in the end, we did win that war.