Vietnam Reappraised

Vietnam Reappraised 1 s:What are the primary political lessons of Vietnam? Hoffmann: There are two principal political lessons of Vietnam. The first one concerns the relation of ends and means, and it is a lesson that can be learned not by the Vietnam experience only. There are some interesting comparisons with China after World War II. If one sets for oneself a very difficult political end, one has to determine very carefully that the means at one’s disposal can reach that end. On the other hand, if the means turn out to be insufficient, one must be clear that the means that might be effective in reaching the desired end are politically acceptable to the American people, and that they do not create any external risks that far exceed the importance of the stakes in the area. Lesson number one is that U.S. means, excessive as they were from all kinds of viewpoints, were never sufficient to oblige North Vietnam to cease and desist its involvement; the means that might have theoretically obliged the North Vietnamese to cease and desist, had the United States been willing to commit them, would have created for the United States real external dangers with potential adversaries and in relations with allies. Moreover, to harness those means to that task would have probably been unacceptable to a large fraction of the American public, because those means would have entailed either the annihilation of the North Vietnamese or a full-scale invasion . The second lesson, which is of equal importance, concerns not the North, but the South. That lesson tells us that one’s success in reaching one’s end depends almost decisively on the solidity of the political base on which one operates. That is the major difference between the American commitment made in South Korea and the situation that the United States faced in Vietnam. To a very large extent, the American effort in South Vietnam was Stanley Hofiann Samuel P. Huntington Ernest R. May Richard N . Neustadt Thomas C. Schelling Stanley Hoffmann is Douglas Dillon Professor of the Civilization of France, and Chairman of Harvard University‘s Center for European Studies. Samuel Huntington is Frank G . Thomson Professor of Gmernment and Director of Harvard’s Centerfor International Affairs. Ernest May is Professor of History, and a member of the core faculty of the Kennedy School of Government. Richard N . Neustadt is Lucius N . LiftauerProfessorof Public Administration at the Kennedy School of Government. ThomasC. Schelling is Lucius N. Littauer Professor of Political Economy at the Kennedy School. International Security, Summer 1981 (Vol. 6 ,No.1)0162-2889/81/010003-24 $02.5010 @ 1981by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 3 international Security I4 based on the gamble that somehow, by having the right kinds of policies, the United States could oblige South Vietnam to coalesce and to become something like a nation and a state. A correspondence between McGeorge Bundy and myself in 1965dealt with precisely this theme. One sub-lesson is that it is impossible to get a nation that is not a nation at the outset to coalesce, if the kind of war one wages destroys it in the process. The political foundationsof the military effort need to be strong. If they are rotten, the likelihood that one will build them up with a war in progress is quite low. Huntington: The two political lessonsof the Vietnam experiencethat I would emphasize do not differ greatly from those of Professor Hoffmann. One political lesson that we have learned is that we have to be more discriminating about the interests that we commit ourselves to defend by military force. The United Statesbecame involved in Vietnam in part because we were indiscriminate. Surveys of U.S. public opinion since Vietnam show that people now draw sharp distinctionsbetween differentparts of the world in terms of what we will defend by force. There are extraordinarily high levels of support, at least at the moment, for defending Western Europe and Japan, a rather mixed picture as far as the Persian Gulf and the Middle East is concerned, and relatively little support for the use of U.S. military...