Fifty years ago this week, on April 30, 1975, Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, fell to communist North Vietnamese forces, and the world watched as helicopters rescued the last remaining Americans from our embassy. America’s longest war — up to that point — was over. It was a war — like the Korean War — fought by the United States to assist a post-World War II ally in resisting takeover by a ruthless communist regime backed by the Soviet Union and Communist China.
As Norman Podhoretz pointed out in a brilliant retrospective of the war, Vietnam, like Korea, was viewed by U.S. policymakers within the context of the larger policy of containment, formulated by the Truman administration in the early years of the Cold War.
Containment’s most effective theoretician was George F. Kennan, the director of the State Department’s policy planning staff who in 1947 explained the policy in a famous and influential article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” using the pseudonym “X.” Less immediately influential were two critics of the policy — Walter Lippmann, who leveled his criticism in a series of columns later collected into a book titled The Cold War, and James Burnham, who attacked the policy in his book Containment or Liberation?.
Lippmann wrote that the policy of containment as explained by Kennan — opposing Soviet aggression everywhere on the Eurasian landmass — would cede the strategic initiative to our communist adversaries and stretch America’s resources too thin, leading to a dangerous gap between American commitments and power, which Lippmann had identified as evidence of a failed foreign policy in his book U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (1943).
Lippmann called the containment policy a “strategic monstrosity” that “commits the United States to confront the Russians with counterforce at ‘every point’ along the line, instead of at those points which we have selected because, there at those points, our kind of sea and air power can best be exerted.”
Moreover, Lippmann considered Asia a secondary, peripheral theater where the United States lacked the “power, the influence, the means, and the knowledge” to succeed. He warned against the U.S. launching moral “crusades” to remake the world in our image.
Lippmann in the 1960s was an early critic of U.S. direct military involvement in Vietnam, predicting that it would be “futile, unnecessary, and domestically harmful.” He became a chief critic of the Johnson administration because of Vietnam, even to the point of backing Richard Nixon for president in 1968, viewing Nixon, accurately, as a foreign policy realist who would get us out of Vietnam, which Nixon eventually did. (RELATED: Walter Lippmann: From the Progressive Era to the Cold War)
Around the same time that Lippmann was criticizing containment as imperial overstretch, James Burnham wrote a Cold War trilogy punctuated by Containment or Liberation? that criticized containment as too passive and defensive to win the Cold War. Containment, Burnham wrote, was a strategy of vacillation that would end in defeat. Burnham recommended a strategy of “Liberation” or what others termed “rollback.” (RELATED: James Burnham: the Sage of Kent, Connecticut)
Burnham in the 1960s and early 1970s, like Lippmann, wrote often about the Vietnam War. Unlike Lippmann, Burnham accepted the “domino theory” as applicable to Southeast Asia. But like Lippmann, though from a different perspective, Burnham was critical of the way the Kennedy–Johnson administration waged war in Vietnam.
The United States was not winning the war, he wrote in his National Review columns, because our policymakers were wedded to the “strategic prison” of containment. We fought the war almost wholly on the ground in South Vietnam, instead of taking the war to the enemy’s center of gravity in Hanoi. As early as 1962, Burnham wrote that if the U.S. was serious in Vietnam, “we would not confine our military … activities to South Vietnam itself. We would extend our operations to Laos, Cambodia, northeast Thailand, and … to the enemy bases in North Vietnam, and in China, too.” If we weren’t prepared to do that, Burnham wrote, the war would become “senseless butchery.”
As the 1960s wore on without victory or even a plausible strategy for victory, Burnham sensed that U.S. strategy was to get out of the war with the least loss of credibility. Nixon’s Vietnamization policy confirmed Burnham’s prescience. When he heard about the terms of the peace agreement in late 1972- early 1973, Burnham declared that we had lost the war. When American forces exited the region, Burnham said, the North Vietnamese would triumph. He was right.
Burnham’s final reflection on the Vietnam War was written a few weeks after the fall of Saigon in 1975. He suggested that our defeat was a manifestation of “imperial overstretch” and worried that it could lead to a withdrawal from Asia and strategic retrenchment. Yet, he also wrote that objectively, Vietnam was a “minor affair,” which would have greater psychological effects than geopolitical ones.
Burnham, like Gen. Douglas MacArthur, thought that when you wage war, you should do so to win it. Lippmann didn’t believe Vietnam was important enough to U.S. security to fight there. The Kennedy–Johnson administration chose a middle course that cost more than 58,000 American dead in an unsuccessful effort to save an ally and contain communism.
Perhaps the best reflection on the Vietnam War came from Richard Nixon, who inherited the mess from the Kennedy–Johnson administration, ended U.S. involvement in the context of strategic triangulation with China and Russia, and recognized that Vietnamization was the only politically acceptable, though imperfect, strategy to salvage what was left of American credibility and domestic peace.
His book No More Vietnams should be required reading for students of the war and foreign policy in general. “[O]ur defeat in Vietnam,” he wrote, “tarnish[ed] our ideals, weaken[ed] our spirit, crippl[ed] our will, and turn[ed] us into … a diplomatic dwarf in a world in which the steadfast exercise of American power was needed more than ever before.”
It took Ronald Reagan, who called the Vietnam War a “noble cause,” to restore “the steadfast exercise of American power” and win the Cold War by going beyond containment as suggested by James Burnham so many years before.
READ MORE from Francis P. Sempa: