Is the current accepted view that all the deaths in the Vietnam war were in vain?

Great Debates
103

I’m not sure economic capacity is a useful metric in determining the validity or invalidity of the domino theory, particularly the local economies of the nations involved. North Vietnam’s economy was pretty much irrelevant in determining the outcome of the Vietnam War, as was the South Vietnamese economy. On the one side the war was fought with the US war economy, and on the other with China and the USSRs. The Soviets and Chinese were able to match every US escalation of the conflict by escalating their own supplies of war materials to North Vietnam. The final offensives of the war, the abortive Easter Offensive in 1972 and the final fall of South Vietnam in 1975 were both carried out by North Vietnamese forces utilizing conventional Soviet doctrine and equipment, meaning massed artillery barrages and large numbers of tanks.

US strategic bombing of the North led to Hanoi becoming the most heavily defended city against air attack in the world in terms of numbers of SAM sites and AAA batteries curtesy of equipment supplied to them from the USSR and China during the mid-late 1960s. Both the failure of the ARVN to stand up to the VC in open battle prior to direct US military involvement and the failure of Vietnamization of the war under Nixon demonstrated that military aid to the ARVN absent direct US involvement wasn’t going to keep South Vietnam from falling, no matter how much military hardware the US supplied to the South Vietnamese.

With your ‘worst case’ of the Thai and Burmese dominos falling, I wouldn’t count on it stopping there, and again the local economy of the nations involved would be pretty much irrelevant to the equation. Malaysia already had a communist insurgency that the British dealt with in the Malayan Emergency from 1948-60, but it reignited in 1968 and lasted until 1989. The Emergency (so called because the British didn’t want to call it a war) is often compared to Vietnam both in terms of similarities (the British used Agent Orange, internment camps, collective punishment and there were atrocities ala My Lai) and differences. One of the primary differences is that the Malayan communists had no source of outside support due to a lack of a land border to a friendly communist country, something that Thailand falling to the communists would have solved neatly.

Indonesia also had serious problems with communism, the Communist Party of Indonesia having 3,000,000 members in 1960, a problem that was ‘solved’ quite brutally with mass killing in 1965-66 which

According to the most widely published estimates at least 500,000 to 1.2 million people were killed,[3]: 3 [4][5][7] with some estimates going as high as two to three million.[15][16] The atrocities, sometimes described as a genocide[17][2][3] or politicide,[18][19] were instigated by the Indonesian Army under Suharto. Research and declassified documents demonstrate the Indonesian authorities received support from foreign countries such as the United States and the United Kingdom.

It isn’t hard to imagine a resurgence of communism in Indonesia following a fall of Thailand and Malaya (and likely Singapore as well) providing if not a land border but a short water crossing for supplies from neighboring now communist countries.

None of this is to say that I think the domino theory was valid in its own right (I don’t), but running with your argument of it working and continuing to tumble the Thai and Burmese dominos, there’s no reason to think it would have stopped there. Nor is there, in my estimation at least, much reason to think that the level of economic development in the local dominos would have made much difference since the local economies wasn’t fighting the wars, the superpowers of the Cold War’s economies were. The USSR might have had lines for all manner of basic commercial goods from food to clothing that led to its eventual fall decades after Vietnam, but it also had no problems producing mountains of war materials up until the day it collapsed.

104

I think the ppint is that if someone wants to apply the economic development theory in a realistic way, a country that developed enough economically before their neighbors turned communist would have an easy enough time fighting for hearts and minds when people can see the benefits of capitalism. However this also means you can’t just assume that every domino would fall if the US wasn’t willing to create a quagmire to delay the spread of communism – other economies would develop by the time the dominoes “naturally” without a massive US intervention.

105

Rostow: “Both the NICs (New Industrial Countries) and the ASEAN members roughly quadrupled their real GNP between 1960 and 1981. They were, socially and politically as well as economically, quite different countries than they had been when Southeast Asia went through the crisis of 1965.” GDP growth is importance in and of itself, but it also proxies for a lot of other things according to this view.

I agree that supply lines make a huge difference. It’s true that Thailand and Indonesia has a strong Communist insurgency: I lack the military knowledge to assess whether such guerrillas had significant chance of toppling their governments. I find it difficult to believe though that accelerating South Vietnam’s collapse by 5 years would have made a significant difference in their success. A 10 year acceleration? Beats me.

106

I don’t think that’s a particularly useful view though. Its simplistic and completely ignores the reasons why communist revolutions/insurgencies happened and why they either succeeded or failed in the first place and replaces it with the half-baked ‘logic’ that such revolutions and insurrections only can only flourish in poorer countries and erroneously concludes by induction from that false foundation that sufficient wealth immunizes countries against them.

How well did that theory work out in Vietnam, to point out the elephant in the room? Having a free marketplace and capitalism did nothing to prop up the government of South Vietnam or make it appear any more legitimate in the eyes of its citizens or those of its brother Vietnamese divided and separated in the North. The government of South Vietnam was viewed by the communists as lacking in legitimacy and an extension of the colonial government foisted upon it for decades under the French, briefly the Japanese, and in their view America. All of the economic growth in South Vietnam, economic aid packages from the US and ‘hearts and minds’ efforts by the US didn’t and wasn’t going to change that.

107

I think it’s also worth considering just what effect being stonewalled by western capitalists might have on any developing economy, whether communist or otherwise. If the US and its allies want a developing country’s economy to fail, I’m pretty sure they will see to it that it fails. Do communist nations fail to achieve economic growth because they are communist, or do they fail to achieve growth because they are cut off from the wealthiest markets by the designs of other nations?

Let us not commit the *Arendtian fallacy of presuming that a revolution’s success or failure must hinge on purely internal considerations.

*As part of a course on early American legal history, I had to read Arendt’s On Revolution. It was pretty infuriating.

108

I believe the thinking was that Vietnam never achieved takeoff, unlike Thailand and Malaysia.

But sure, let’s compare Vietnam to other southeast Asian countries in 1980.

GNP Per Capita:

Thailand 670
Malaysia 1620
Vietnam NA

Oops, no data. They did list Vietnam as a low income country and Thailand and Malaysia as middle income countries. They seemed to think Vietnam was ranked between Burma (170) and Mali (190). Let’s look at some other developmental metrics:

Adult Literacy

Thailand 84
Malaysia NA
Vietnam 87

Hrm. Not going well for Rostow. Ok, let’s look at life expectancy

Thailand 63
Malaysia 64
Vietnam 63

Erp, howsabout looking at an average index of food production per capita? 1969-71 = 100. This would show growth in productivity in the agricultural sector

Thailand 128
Malaysia 116
Vietnam 107

Ok, that’s a pretty big differential, but it hardly establishes the sort world-shattering difference that Rostow appears to allege. If the World Bank had a decent grasp of Vietnam’s unreported GNP, then perhaps Rostow had a point. But given the other metrics, methinks his case needs some fleshing out.

The varied data above also gives a sense of why Rostow’s takeoff hypothesis never quite attained altitude within developmental economics. It’s interesting but elides a lot.

Cite: World Development Report 1982
https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/1fb7a6bf-0ab0-523e-9044-c6fcf7be08e3/content

Also link to Cecil’s take on the Vietnam war:

It’s because they’re Communist. Embargoes on the Soviet Union were leaky. China growth started in 1980s not because of lowered trade sanctions (didn’t happen) but because they curbed collectivist agriculture.

109

What does this, or anything else in your post have to do with the price of tea in China? You are looking at data for Vietnam from 1980 and onwards. I asked about South Vietnam during the years of its existence, when it was ostensibly a free-market capitalist democracy, and before anyone points out its many failings in that description, those failings apply equally as well to all of Rostow’s New Industrial Countries, ASEAN members, or Tiger cubs, all of which were equally flawed democracies, free-markets and capitalist economies. Vietnam’s economy failed to take off during the 80s due to the decades of war, half of it no longer being a US client, and the united whole no longer being a Chinese client but rather a rival, and the USSR no longer having as much of an interest in propping it up now that the war was over.

Again, none of what Rostow or you wrote addresses what was the actual cause of the fragility and weakness of the South Vietnamese government: it was not viewed as legitimate in the eyes of most of its citizens, it was viewed as a continuation of the puppet colonial governments Vietnam had been forced to endure for decades. And again, no amount of economic aid packages from the US or military intervention by the US to fight the war that the South Vietnamese government was incapable of winning was going to fix that.

The Cecil article also completely misses the point and is entirely tone-deaf. Vietnamese communists weren’t going to entertain being bribed to stop fighting. The very idea is ludicrous on its face. Would you seriously entertain the question of the efficacy of say, bribing Putin to stop the war in Ukraine? Do you imagine that there is an actual dollar value that would cause him to stop the war and quit the part of Ukraine Russia has occupied?

110

You are straw-manning. Rostow doesn’t argue that free market = perfect, or that free market = able to resist communism, or anything else about free markets. He is not a market fundamentalist. His whole framework divides countries into undeveloped, developing, and developed. Vietnam was solidly in the first category. Malaysia was a middle income country. Thailand transitioned between category 1 and category 2 between 1960 and 1980. Also, I don’t think he argued during the 1960s that economic aid packages would automatically guarantee development (and if he did, he was wrong - some did argue something similar during the 1950s admittedly).

That’s McNamara’s c.1990s argument, not directly contested by Rostow, who sidesteps the issue by making it about ASEAN. Which did develop, but needed military shelter via a fight in Vietnam according to this view. Domino theory (which neither of us fully buys into apparently). Sure, Vietnam was hopeless, but it kept the region in a holding pattern until ASEAN could stand up on its own. Which it did. This ignores nationalism again, and the fact that the communist bloc fractured in Asia after 1975 because of… nationalism.

111

This thread has been going on for a little while yet I still can’t comprehend what an alternate view to the one expressed in the OP could possibly be. We achieved none of our goals, and those goals didn’t even make sense. We had no idea what was going on there, we believed Vietnam was a domino being pushed over by China when they were actually toppling for the Soviets, Vietnam hated China, and China wasn’t thrilled with them either. We didn’t even realize the USSR and China were at odds with each other at the time. South Vietnam could barely be called a country, just thugs who had taken control of Saigon. The estimates most favorable to the south showed barely a majority of South Vietnamese people wanted a separate country from the north, and it was more likely a minority. Everybody that died in that war did so in vain. There is no reasonable alternative point of view.

112

In what possible way am I straw manning? I am asking how this notion that the economic development of a country is the sole determinant in whether a country is vulnerable to falling to communism actually works, when it clearly doesn’t, in the case of Vietnam itself. In response, you’ve provided economic data on Vietnam from 1980 and onwards, which is rather useless in determining Vietnams economic vulnerability to communism considering it had already fallen to communism in 1975 after a decades long war. One may as well look at the current economic situations in Germany, Japan and Italy to try to determine their economic ability to win the Second World War. Its rather past the ‘use by’ date.

And again, you are providing economic data and even now continuing to talk about Vietnam as a single entity, when I asked about South Vietnam. The fact that Vietnam was artificially divided into two when the French left followed by Diem’s refusal to allow national elections is what created South Vietnam and guaranteed that the communists would seek to reunify the country by force. The level of local economic development of Vietnam, South, North or as a whole was entirely irrelevant to that.

That McNamara finally publicly acknowledged reality in the 1990s when he was facing his end on this mortal coil and worried about the fate that awaited him when he went to meet his maker doesn’t make reality ‘McNamara’s argument c.1990’. The fact that you and Rostow need to sidestep ‘the issue’ i.e., reality and make it about ASEAN is rather telling. Eisenhower was aware that this was the reality of the situation back in the 1950s. To reiterate his quote I provided earlier in the thread:

I am convinced that the French could not win the war because the internal political situation in Vietnam, weak and confused, badly weakened their military position. I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly 80 per cent of the populations would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bao Dai. Indeed, the lack of readership [sic] and drive on the part of Bao Dai was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for. As one Frenchman said to me, ‘What Vietnam needs is another Syngman Rhee, regardless of all the difficulties the presence of such a personality would entail.’

113

Alternative view: “We won the Vietnam war. If the US didn’t escalate in 1965, Thailand, Burma, Indonesia, and eventually Malaysia would have fallen to the Communists. That didn’t happen. Thailand was a far stronger country in 1975 than it was in 1965. It just needed a little more time to continue the growth process it started in 1960. Sure Vietnam itself was a low-income undeveloped clustermuck (it only achieved takeoff around 1983) . But the war was about global communism, not about the particular country.”

That’s my presentation of Rostow’s perspective. I consider it unproven. But evaluating it means stepping aside from questions regarding the military finesse of ARVN or the eventual success of Northern Vietnamese forces. You need to look at the internal situation of other members of ASEAN, especially Thailand, how they were affected by the Vietnam conflict and how they would have been affected by a South Vietnamese collapse in, say, 1968. Or whatever year you want to counterfactual.

114

Neat trick. Just shift the goalposts after the ball has fallen short and call it a touchdown with a 2-pt conversion.

Did the US lose in Vietnam? Of course not! It kept Thailand from becoming a communist state.

Did the South lose the Civil War? Of course not! If it hadn’t fought the good fight, Lincoln would have declared himself dictator for life, and southern heritage would have been eradicated by them damn Yankees.

Did the British lose the American Revolution? Of course not! They pushed back Arnold’s invasion of lower Canada and kept Canada for the crown.

ETA: and I do understand you are attempting to represent a third party’s view as you see it.

115

I think evaluating is simple. Our military involvement in Vietnam and neighboring countries following our failure to help them free themselves from French imperialism was the primary factor in the history of those countries and nothing we did with the military would make it better in any way, save for leaving. Then look what happened.

There is no legitimate alternative view.

116

I agree. But while we’re swatting at less-than-legitimate alternate views, I’m reminded of one I heard from a Vietnam vet living in denial during a Vietnam/Afghanistan/Iraq discussion panel (which I previously ranted about elsewhere on this board). His pet theory, based on friend of a friend tales, was that the US intervention in Vietnam did not merely prevent other Asian countries from falling to Communism, but that it actually prevented WWIII, because the Soviets saw the awesome firepower the US was unleashing in and around Vietnam and so was dissuaded from sending tanks into West Berlin. Or some-such pet theory.

Like it or not, the US lost the war in Vietnam, and the losses were actually worse than being merely in vain: even if the US had won, the outcome would have been a travesty, as the people of Vietnam clearly did not want to be yet another US client state. They were losses in a cause that was always unworthy of their lives. It’s a war the US deserved to lose, because the people of Vietnam deserved to have a government of their choosing, not ours. At the very least, we can take solace that with the US defeat, the people of Vietnam finally got what so many of them died fighting for. It’s just that none of them ever should have had to die fighting for it. They had a right to it, and the US intervention in Vietnam was calculated to deprive them of that, because the American leaders didn’t like the choice that the people of Vietnam were going to make.

117

I think that’s going too far in the other direction. The people of South Vietnam were not given an opportunity to choose the government they wanted after Americans left. South Vietnam was invaded by North Vietnam and the North imposed its government upon the South.

I also don’t feel South Vietnam was doomed to be an American puppet state. I don’t consider countries like South Korea, Japan, Germany, Italy, Mexico, or the Philippines to be American puppets. I feel that the people of South Vietnam would have been better off if America had been able to win the war.

118

Interesting side note: there were tactical nukes on the ground in Vietnam. I have a friend who was special forces who personally delivered a Mark 54. I have seen photos of him in freefall with it between his legs.

119

I recall an interview with— I think it was Giáp, who said that at the time there was at least some concern that nuclear weapons might be used against them at Điện Biên Phủ. Wikipedia says that under Operation Vulture these could have been delivered by American B-29s, B-36s, B-47s and carrier aircraft from the Seventh Fleet. Nixon and Dulles were all for it, but Eisenhower decided against it, for several reasons.

120

It’s not goalpost moving because domino theory was espoused from the very beginning. The perspective also ties in well with Rostow’s takeoff theory of economic development published in 1959-1960.

Separately, I’d like to correct something I claimed upthread. I said Vietnam took off in the early 1980s. Early 1990s would be more accurate. Not that it matters. Reforms started in the mid-1980s (dated to Dec 1986). Cite: Vietnam's export-led growth model and competition with China | Cairn.info

Thirdly, one of many elephants crowding this room is that collective agriculture and communism were doomed to fail, whatever the US did militarily. Which is not to say that the authoritarian crew running the show couldn’t have persisted indefinitely: I believe they could, until they couldn’t. See China and Russia.

Conventional wisdom: We lost Vietnam.

Rostow: Look at the bigger picture: we won.

CW: Bigger picture says communism would have collapsed on its own.

Rostow: Not that big!

121

Taking a bit of a cursory look at Rostow, his advice to presidents during the Vietnam War seems to indicate he actually thought it could be won (in the way most people would define that) and was actually extremely optimistic that despite his ostensible theory that undeveloped economies were the real threats to fall to communism, he thought the will of the North Vietnam would be broken by overwhelming firepower and the South Vietnamese people would reject communism while the entire country was being blown to smithereens on his advice.

For example (from wikipedia):

It really seems like a goalpost move to me for someone who believed that US involvement could save the entire region to then declare victory because only 3 countries fell to communism and a war he consistently advocated escalating was just a delaying tactic.

122

::Zombie Rostow rises from the dead, insisting there was no Vietnam War, only a special operation.::

That wiki entry about Rostow during the Johnson years was wild. I’m changing my vote to, “Goalpost moving.” Sort of. Protecting ASEAN was a war aim, but so was protecting the South Vietnamese regime.