ACCUMULATING PERIPHERALS

Gideon Rose has a very good article in today’s Slate on how the endgame played out in Vietnam (by way of comparison to likely scenarios in Iraq). One quibble: Rose says the major constraints on American action in Vietnam were not domestic politics, but what was achievable abroad:

And while domestic politics established the broad guidelines within which different administrations operated, White House officials had substantial leeway to set policy as they wished. The real constraints, then as now, lay not in what was saleable at home but in what was achievable abroad.

That’s true, in a sense, but it’s important to recognize that the goals of the policy itself were in part determined by domestic politics. What was “achievable abroad” depended on what we were trying to achieve abroad, which depended in turn partly on domestic concerns. LBJ consistently said that his escalation in Vietnam was driven in part by determination not to “be the guy that lost Vietnam”, which he was sure would sabotage his domestic policy objectives. This leads us to a second quibble:

From the start, the United States was fighting not to lose in Vietnam, rather than to win. In the 1960s, U.S. leaders believed that the fall of South Vietnam to communism would have terrible consequences, so they decided to prevent such an outcome by whatever means necessary.

If what the US did in Vietnam was “fighting not to lose”, what would it mean for the US to have “fought to win”? Would it have meant a ground invasion of North Vietnam? All-out strategic bombing of North Vietnamese cities? The concern at the time was that such aggression againt North Vietnam would have led to war with China, and/or ultimately to nuclear war. As with other Cold War conflagrations across the globe, the US needed to keep the conflict a proxy war, not a direct one. The basic asymmetry was that while the Communists had an effective guerrilla movement inside South Vietnam, controlling about a third of the country and holding the sympathy of much of the population, there was no such anti-Communist insurgency in the North – a fact which should be rather telling. Hanoi could plausibly claim that the Communists in the South were a domestic revolutionary movement, which in fact they were, albeit answering to Hanoi. The US was fighting that insurgency, not the North Vietnamese government which backed it. If that was not “fighting to win”, what would have been? Attacking Hanoi? Beijing? Moscow?

Other than that, it’s a good piece.