Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam (review)

The author of important early studies of the history of the Vietnam War with a reputation for wide-ranging research and unorthodox interpretations, Gareth Porter claims in his most recent book to have overturned the dominant scholarly explanation of why the United States escalated its military intervention in Vietnam in the years from 1953 to 1965. For decades, he asserts, historians and international relations specialists failed to explain the "mystery" of U.S. intervention because their theories were "little more than the suggestion that Cold War ideology was to blame" (p. vii). According to Porter, the scholarly literature implicitly or explicitly suggested that decision-makers in Washington held fast to a "Cold War strategic doctrine about the threat of communism and the need to resist it by force if necessary" (p. vii). He maintains that scholars based their explanations on three false assumptions: (1) that a balance of power existed between the United States and the Soviet Union, (2) that presidents and their national security advisers believed that a defeat in South Vietnam would threaten U.S. security, and (3) that the domino theory guided their actions.

The reality, Porter demonstrates, was that the United States enjoyed clear superiority of strategic power over the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China. The United States surpassed both of its adversaries in nuclear strike capability, force readiness, and force projection. Awareness of this power imbalance, Porter argues, strongly influenced U.S., Soviet, and Chinese policies toward the Vietnam imbroglio "at key decision points during the period" (p. viii). Porter concludes that "it was not Cold War ideology or exaggerated notions of the threat from communism in Southeast Asia that paved the U.S. road to war in Vietnam but the decisive military dominance of the United States over the Soviet Union" (p. 259).

In developing his thesis, Porter takes aim at the key elements of what he regards as the historiographic orthodoxy. He rejects the 1970s "stalemate-machine" explanation, which posits that successive administrations believed they could not risk the domestic and international political consequences of losing a country to Communism, even though they also believed that the military and economic costs of the war in Vietnam exceeded the likely benefits of winning. Trapped in this dilemma, they sought to stalemate the conflict by escalating U.S. involvement to levels of violence great enough to avoid defeat but not great enough to achieve military victory until either the Vietnamese or the American people would become intent on ending the war regardless of the outcome. Over time, American voters did grow sufficiently weary of the war to accept defeat and withdrawal, and in this sense the "system worked."

Taking issue with this thesis, Porter contends that U.S. policymakers in fact sought victory, not stalemate. They were not caught on the horns of a dilemma, he argues. The dilemma did not exist. Arrogance of power drove them to commit the United States to a war for victory that turned out to be disastrous for both Vietnam and the United States; hence, the "perils of dominance." The system of decision-making, in his account, broke down rather than worked. Drawing on recent studies and a close re-reading of archival documents, Porter argues that all three presidents—Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson—were wary of intervening in Southeast Asia but were pressured or deceived by their foreign policy advisers. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, for example, deceived Eisenhower about Ngo Dinh Diem's decision in 1956 to cancel the national elections that had been called for under the Geneva Accords of 1954; the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) pressured Kennedy to commit more troops in South Vietnam; and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara deceived Johnson during the Gulf of Tonkin affair and joined with other advisers in urging the president to escalate the bombing of North Vietnam.

Deception did not stop...