Alejandro Jenkins
Updated November 13
PhD in Physics, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) (Graduated
2006)

After seeing France humiliated in Indo-China, how come the US did not
reason that Vietnam would be an unwinnable war?

Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy
and Johnson, summed it up clearly during his interview for the
documentary film The Fog of War, which came out in 2003:

“In the Cuban Missile Crisis, at the end, I think we did put ourselves
in the skin of the Soviets. In the case of Vietnam, we didn't know them
well enough to empathize. And there was total misunderstanding as a
result. They believed that we had simply replaced the French as a
colonial power, and we were seeking to subject South and North Vietnam
to our colonial interests, which was absolutely absurd. And we, we saw
Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it as: a civil
war.”

President John F. Kennedy and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara in
the White House Cabinet Room, 1962. Source: Wikimedia

The objective of the US intervention in Vietnam was to stop the spread
of Communism in Asia. It certainly didn’t intend to replace France as
the colonial ruler of Indochina.

Bear in mind that, immediately after the end of World War II, the Soviet
Union had effectively colonized a large part of Europe by installing its
troops there and promoting the takeover of power by the local Communist parties, which it came to control completely. China had similarly
established control over the northern half of the Korean peninsula and
then attempted to take over the whole peninsula by force, only to be
pushed back by the US-led intervention in the Korean War (1950–53).

It was not irrational for the US, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to
see its role in Vietnam as similar to its earlier role in Korea. As
McNamara noted in later life, however, the problem was that the
authorities in the US had failed to appreciate that Ho Chi Minh’s drive
to unify Vietnam under his Communist rule was seen by many Vietnamese as essentially a nationalist struggle against foreign imperialists and
their Vietnamese allies.

Ho was far from being a simple tool of the Chinese Communist Party, in
the way that most Communist leaders in Eastern and Central Europe were
just tools of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Even more
importantly, Ho was not seen by many Vietnamese as a tool of the
Chinese. In The Fog of War, McNamara also relates how he visited Vietnam
in 1995, after relations between the US and Vietnam thawed with the
demise of the Soviet Union. Talking about the belief among the military
and political leaders of the US, during McNamara’s tenure as Secretary
of Defense, that the Vietnamese Communist forces were the pawns of
global Communist expansionism in the context of the Cold War, Nguyễn Cơ Thạch, a former Vietnamese Foreign Minister, told him:

“Mr. McNamara, you must never have read a history book. If you'd had,
you'd know we weren't pawns of the Chinese or the Russians. McNamara,
didn't you know that? Don't you understand that we have been fighting
the Chinese for 1,000 years? We were fighting for our independence. And
we would fight to the last man.“

The US could probably have prevailed in fighting off the Communist
takeover of South Vietnam (as it had prevailed in fighting off the more formidable Chinese army’s attempt to take over South Korea), if it had
fully committed to the war. But, by the late 1960s, political support
within the US for intensifying the war in Vietnam had been eroded too
far. Many ordinary US citizens who opposed Communism had started to
wonder, quite reasonably, why they ought to keep spending the national
treasure and sending their young to be killed in order to defend one of
the sides in a civil war in some poor, very distant country.

26.8K viewsView UpvotersView Sharers
37 comments from Brian Good and more

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)