United States in the Vietnam War
United States involvement in the Vietnam War began shortly after the end of World War II in Asia, first in an extremely limited capacity and escalating over a period of 20 years. The U.S. military presence peaked in April 1969, with 543,000 American military personnel stationed in Vietnam.[1] By the conclusion of the United States's involvement in 1973, over 3.1 million Americans had been stationed in Vietnam.[2][3]
The U.S. involvement in Vietnam began due to a combination of factors: the U.S. war with Japan in the Pacific, domestic pressure to act against communism after the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong's pledge in 1950 to support the Viet Minh guerrilla forces in the First Indochina War against France's colonial rule, and the indecisive conclusion of the Korean War.[4] However, Stalin and Mao's offer of support to the Viet Minh changed the battlefield dynamic and geopolitical character from an independence struggle to part of the Cold War. In September 1950, the U.S. started to supply the French.[5] From 1950 until 1954, the United States poured more than $3 billion into the war, bankrolling "more than 80 percent of its material costs" over the four-year period.[6] From the 1950s the Domino theory of geopolitics was prominent in U.S. foreign policy thinking. Thus it was feared that communism would spread to neighboring countries unless checked, the overall aim being to prevent communist domination in South-East Asia.[7]
The conflict resulted in 58,279 U.S. military personnel deaths before the official end of U.S. combat operations in 1973.[8] As of 2019, it was estimated that approximately 610,000 Vietnam veterans are still alive, making them the second largest group of American military veterans behind those of the war on terror.[3] The war's lasting impact has been portrayed in the thousands of movies, books, and video games centered on the conflict.[9]
Reasons for U.S. intervention in Vietnam[edit]
The Fear of Communism[edit]
A major factor that led President Lyndon B. Johnson to intervene into Vietnam militarily was the fear of communism due to Cold War tensions with communist countries such as China and the Soviet Union. South Vietnam was very important to the U.S. in Asia with it being perceived as a western democratic state. After the intervention of Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong in the Indochina War, the U.S. was fearful of a repeat of the Korean War. Also, if the U.S. intervened, this would have increased the likelihood of China giving military support to the USSR and North Vietnam.[6] But, more importantly, the prevalent threat of communism drove President Truman and his advisers to intervene in Vietnam due to the domestic pressures to oppose and defeat communism and the fear of the consequences if communist expansion continued.[40]
Lyndon B. Johnson's role[edit]
A great deal of the blame for U.S. failures in Vietnam has been cast on Lyndon B. Johnson by historians. His decision making was motivated by a variety of reasons, including his personal fear of appearing soft on communism, but also his fear of engaging America in another stalemate like the Korean War.[41] It is largely agreed upon that Johnson inherited a complicated situation from his predecessor, John F. Kennedy. Consequently, Johnson faced a difficult situation regarding whether the costs of intervening outweighed the benefits. In essence, America had reached the point of no return. The pride of America and the pride of Johnson as a strong President means that the individual actions and responses of Johnson in Vietnam are somewhat responsible for the failures resulting from U.S. intervention. Johnson himself did not want to appear weak against communism as he feared the backlash from the U.S. public and his Republican rivals. However, he also did not want to engage America in a costly and humiliating war. Discussing Vietnam with Senator Russell in May 1964, he expressed serious concerns about countering guerrilla tactics, the likely ineffectiveness and probable domestic political impact of conducting a bombing campaign in the north, and a number of other factors.[42] Whilst these challenges would have been faced by any President in office at the time, it is ultimately Johnson's individual decisions and attitudes that brought America into the Vietnam War. Historians have been sympathetic towards Johnson's situation, but others believe that the inevitability of war and Johnson's trapping by previous Presidents like John F. Kennedy is a dubious proposal. Fredrick Logevall believes there were choices available to him debate and fluidity was more of a reality than a Cold War consensus as key figures such as Senator Richard Russell Jr. opposed the war: "exact numbers are hard to come by, but certainly in the Senate a clear majority of Democrats and moderate Republicans were either downright opposed to Americanisation or were ambivalent".[43]
Robert Dean says Robert Mcnamara recognises that Johnson could have avoided war in his 1995 memoirs. Dean believes "the basic explanation McNamara offers is that the Kennedy and Johnson policy makers were blinded by their own rigid anti-communist ideology".[44] Arnold R. Isaacs says that there was limited public pressure to escalate war whilst his political position was already safe because of an electoral vote of 486 in the 1964 presidential election. Isaacs says that engaging in the war would be more damaging politically to Johnson and the Democrats than disengagement because an expensive war meant Great Society reforms would be damaged. According to Isaacs, the view that Johnson was pushed into war by external factors like public pressure and political necessity can be hard to justify and was instead part of the masculine urge to solve international conflicts with war and "that if enough planes could drop enough bombs on a backward Asian country, victory must follow".[45]
Laos or Vietnam?[edit]
According to Seth Jacobs, during the 1950s and 1960s, there was a conceptualisation of Asian nations across a hierarchy of good and bad within the American imagination, which affected US policymakers view of how intervention would materialise. Jacobs states:
Jacobs writes that Eisenhower and later Kennedy both "reduced the Lao to a set of stereotypes: childlike, lazy, submissive, unfit to fight the free world's battles".[47] Therefore, Kennedy was dissuaded from sponsoring a military intervention in Laos and instead compromised with the Pathet Lao communist forces, which Jacobs argues meant that Kennedy felt he had to intervene elsewhere in Southeast Asia in Vietnam and that the dovish attitude towards Laos was antithetical to the hawkish outlook towards Vietnam. Jacobs argues that Kennedy viewed the Vietnamese people more able to fight communism than the "unfit Lao". Jacobs argues the "American statesmen and the American media constructed a putative Lao national character that differed from South Vietnam's and that made Lao chances of withstanding communist pressure appeal negligible".[48]