The photographs, television images and newspaper stories make it perfectly clear: there was an urgency, a frenzy even, as the U.S. Embassy in Saigon shuttered and its diplomats and staff were evacuated, along with other military, journalists, and foreigners, as well as thousands of Vietnamese civilians, who all wanted out of the country as the North Vietnamese victors rolled into the city center.
It was April 30, 1975 — 50 years ago today — yet the nightmare left behind that day only accentuated the failure of the United States, along with the South Vietnamese army, to resist a takeover by the communists under the leadership of the North. It was not only an extraordinarily bloody chapter for Vietnam (well over 1.5 million military and civilian deaths, depending on estimates, from 1965 to 1975), but a dark episode for America, too.
Beyond the failure of Washington’s Cold War policy — that intervening in Vietnam’s post-Colonial struggles for independence was necessary to prevent the “dominoes” of communism from tumbling across Southeast Asia — more than 55,000 Americans were killed. An untold number who returned suffered lifelong injuries, impacts of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and illnesses and other symptoms due to Agent Orange and other toxic exposures.
The nation had been ruptured politically and socially over the war, a divide that one could say has never really healed.
Yet ironically, Washington’s proclivity to intervene in other countries’ affairs and to use military power as the first resort has only grown. It would seem the true lessons of Vietnam were left on that iconic rooftop from which the last helicopter left Saigon 50 years ago.
Some say after WWII, U.S. power and intervention has maintained the global liberal order and that Vietnam was a “mistake” — a one-off. Others say it was a sign that the pretense of America as the "indispensable nation” was folly from the beginning, that the Cold War had blinded us to the realities of the world and the limits of military intervention.
So we asked experts, both in geopolitics and history, what they think:
Was the failure of Vietnam a feature or a bug of U.S. foreign policy after WWII?
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Andrew Bacevich; Greg Daddis; Carolyn Eisenberg; Morton H. Halperin; Steve Kinzer; Noah Kulwin; Robert Levering; Anatol Lieven; Daniel McCarthy; Robert Merry; Paul Pillar; Tim Shorrock; Monica Duffy Toft; Stephen Walt; Cora Weiss
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Andrew Bacevich, co-founder and Emeritus Board Chair of the Quincy Institute
The United States has yet to reckon fully with the causes and consequences of the Vietnam War. Why? Because American foreign policy elites have spent the last 50 years engaged in a concerted effort to evade their responsibility for that disaster. Their success in doing so helps explain the dubious record of U.S. policy since. Yesterday's mistakes become the basis for tomorrow's actions.
Greg Daddis, director of the Center of War and Society at San Diego State University, and board member at the Quincy Institute
Americans came home from World War II with a faith in their power — and, increasingly, in their responsibility — to maintain a stable international order in the wake of such a catastrophic global conflict. That faith was coupled with fears of a growing communist threat, a threat seemingly existential to policymakers and ordinary citizens alike. These universalizing fears, coupled with a faith in military power’s transformative capacities overseas, ultimately would lead the United States to embark upon its misguided Southeast Asian crusade. Yet this wasn’t a “one-off.” Throughout the Cold War, the American policy elite committed the nation to conflicts that, far from furthering U.S. national security interests, only brought death and misery to peoples abroad. They feared the potentially toxic mixture of self-determination and communism as emerging nations grappled with new identities in the postcolonial era. And they held faith, even in the face of contrary evidence, that war created a safer global environment in its destructive aftermath.
Carolyn Eisenberg, author of “Fire and Rain: Nixon, Kissinger, and the Wars in Southeast Asia”
Lessons not learned. Absent a “truth commission” or some recognized official proceeding, the most egregious American attitudes and behaviors associated with the Vietnam War were never properly addressed. The conviction that the U.S. has a right to violently shape the internal life of foreign nations, that our “national security” depends on military dominance, and that lying to the public is a necessary feature of governance, never disappeared. Left intact was a governmental apparatus oriented to war, and procedures which anesthetized officials to the human costs of their decisions. Under the rubric of “complexity,” the sacrifice of millions of Asians and tens of thousands of American soldiers, became clouded for subsequent generations. And while adjustments were made, the habit of military intervention remained — from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere. We currently see its precipitate, from Democratic and Republican administrations, as the U.S. bombs Yemen, and enables Israel’s massacre of Palestinian children.
Morton H. Halperin is an American expert on foreign policy and civil liberties
The American military intervention in Vietnam and its failure was a bug and not a feature of U.S. foreign policy after WWII. In deciding whether to intervene in armed conflicts abroad in the period after World War II, the United States was guided by the Truman Doctrine which said that we would “support free peoples resisting subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure.”
This was a commitment to support local efforts not to replace them or to intervene in all conflicts. The United States stayed out of the Chinese civil war and ceded Soviet control of Eastern Europe while supporting the Greek and Korean resistance to communist control.
The disastrous American intervention in Vietnam should have taught us that we should only consider intervention when we are supporting people struggling for their freedom. This principle is key to understanding why the American intervention in Afghanistan was such a disaster and why we must help defend Ukraine.
Steve Kinzer, Senior Fellow in International and Public Affairs, Brown University
America’s war in Vietnam was not an aberration. It reflected a key fact of American history: domestic politics shapes our foreign policy. The United States refused to accept the 1954 Geneva accord that would have settled the Vietnam question peacefully. President Eisenhower feared that doing so would, as his press secretary James Hagerty put it, “give the Democrats a chance to say that we sat idly by and let Indochina be sold down the river to the Communists.” A decade later, Lyndon Johnson concluded that Congress would never approve his Great Society programs if he pulled troops out of Vietnam: “They won’t be talking about my civil rights bill or education or beautification. No, sir. They’ll be pushing Vietnam up my ass every time.”
Washington helped create the Cold War narrative that Americans came to accept. That narrative wound up limiting presidents’ ability to make difficult foreign policy decisions.
Noah Kulwin, writer and co-host of “Blowback” podcast
The U.S. war on Vietnam could not have ended in any way other than failure. The collapse of our South Vietnamese client; the strategic pointlessness of our air campaign; the breakdown of order among infantry, airmen and sailors; the arms industry gravy train; the list of causes is endless. But the striking resemblance between how that war failed and how wars since have failed must be observed. In Iraq, but most of all in Afghanistan. That the U.S. has lost wars in the same way for a half-century suggests a pattern — not an aberration.
Robert Levering, Executive Producer of “The Movement and the ‘Madman’”
I was of draft age during the Vietnam war. So, U.S. foreign policy was an intensely personal matter for me. I gradually became clear that I could not fight in an unjust and immoral war and decided to resist the draft and become a fulltime antiwar organizer. At the time, I thought the Vietnam war was just a horrible mistake. The Iraq and Afghan wars and the constant American involvement in conflicts throughout the world since then have convinced me otherwise. I now see the Vietnam war as only a symptom of America's systemic commitment to global military domination since World War II.
By chance, I've spent the last two weeks in Vietnam. I've been seeing the real-world implications. Among other things, I've seen the site of the My Lai massacre and a rehab center for children of the fourth generation of Agent Orange victims.
Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia program at the Quincy Institute
Tragically, the failures of the U.S. in Vietnam were due to persistent features of U.S. policymaking culture that contributed heavily to the disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan and Ukraine, and will, if not addressed, recur in future. The first is a failure to seriously study other countries. This led for many years to a disastrous blindness to the power of Vietnamese nationalism. Instead, you have ideological stereotyping, leading to a division of the world into giant blocs of friends and enemies, from the “Communist Bloc” through the “Axis of Evil” to today’s supposed “Alliance of Autocrats.” Finally, there is the unlovely combination of humanitarian rhetoric with brutal indifference to the lives of the real people on the ground that are the objects of U.S. strategy. Vietnamese, Cambodians, Central Americans, Africans, Kurds, Afghans and Iraqis have all been used in this way. Today, it is the Ukrainians’ turn.
Daniel McCarthy, vice president for the Collegiate Network at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute
The Vietnam conflict was over as a war by the time I was born in the late 1970s, but during my lifetime the Vietnam era has never really ended. Neither the superficial success of the 1991 Persian Gulf War nor the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America’s own soil erased the Vietnam experience as the defining narrative of what it means for our country to go to war under modern conditions. All our wars are still Vietnams. Our Indochinese quagmire began with threat inflation — “domino theory” — and a refusal to acknowledge that we didn’t have enough support among the people we were trying to “save” to win a war against native opponents. Threat inflation, domino theories — the latest says that if Putin takes the Donbas, he’ll surely take Tallinn then Paris then London — and ignorance of local attitudes remain the hallmarks of U.S. interventionism today, as does the use of overwhelming firepower as a substitute for rather than a plausible means to victory. Vietnam syndrome has never been cured because our leaders persist in the same behaviors that brought it on half a century ago, and they reap the same results. With every war they renew the lessons of Vietnam.
Robert Merry, author of “Where they Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians”
America’s Vietnam misadventure was not a policy aberration but a natural and probably inevitable product of the country’s Cold War mentality. By January 1949 the West had won the war’s first phase, the struggle for Europe. The continent was now fortified against a Russian invasion. But a new era quickly emerged, characterized by East Bloc efforts to probe and drive against the vulnerable colonial flanks and strategic assets of the West, in China, Southeast Asia, Korea, Egypt, and wherever Western weakness was discerned. America took the bait, but not because its leaders were fools. They were being consistent with the country’s perception of the protracted struggle they faced. In many ways, though, it was a mug’s game, forcing upon America multiple challenges at once, of Soviet choosing. But in a bipolar world on the edge of conflict, such challenges had to be confronted. That leaves execution as the big question.
Paul Pillar, non-resident fellow of the Quincy Institute and non-resident senior fellow at the Center for Security Studies of Georgetown University
The military tragedy in Vietnam grew directly out of attitudes central to the Cold War, the dominant framework of U.S. foreign policy in the half century following World War II. The Viet Minh/Viet Cong campaign was seen not for what it really was — the continuation of a nationalist, anti-colonial struggle — but instead as part of a worldwide communist advance led by Moscow and Beijing. That perception led to the erroneous assumptions underlying the U.S. military intervention, including that a communist victory would cause other countries to fall like dominoes and that a U.S. failure to show resolve in Vietnam would lead to other setbacks elsewhere in the world. The mistakes cannot be blamed on excessive optimism, since even those policymakers who held gloomy views about the intervention thought the U.S. had to make the effort. Nor can they be blamed on any shortcuts in the policymaking process.
Tim Shorrock, Washington-based journalist
The "failure of Vietnam," or what I would call the "liberation of Vietnam," was most definitely a feature of U.S. foreign policy that grew out of the aggressive Cold War tactics carried out by the Truman and Eisenhower administrations soon after World War II. This was especially true in Asia. To defeat anti-colonial, independence movements and ensure pro-American, anticommunist regimes, U.S. leaders allied themselves with a motley crew of fascists and collaborators with Japanese colonialism, starting with the far-right in Southern Korea and then Japan itself. That created the conditions for the Korean War against North Korea and Revolutionary China, which inspired Truman to block the Taiwan straits, send the first U.S. military aid to the French in Vietnam, and unleash the CIA as the cops of the world. Vietnam did not want to be part of a French or American empire. We were on the wrong side; they won.
Monica Duffy Toft, non-resident fellow at the Quincy Institute and Professor of International Politics at Tufts University
The failure in Vietnam was a feature — not a bug. American leaders have repeatedly failed to internalize history. In Vietnam — again in Afghanistan — they underestimated the power of nationalism and the resilience of guerrilla warfare. Since the rise of modern nationalism, strong states have increasingly struggled to defeat weaker opponents fighting for their homeland. These adversaries are often defending existential interests, while the United States tends to fight in peripheral theaters with few vital interests at stake. In Afghanistan, the U.S. achieved its core military objectives by December 2001 — destroying al-Qaida’s sanctuary and removing the Taliban from power. Yet rather than recognize success, the mission creeped into nation-building, committing the U.S. to 20 years of costly engagement. Vietnam and Afghanistan thus reflect a persistent flaw in U.S. strategy: conflating military victory with political transformation and the mistaken belief that foreign societies can be remade through prolonged and externally driven intervention.
Stephen Walt, board member at the Quincy Institute, Robert and Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School
Vietnam exemplifies most of the pathologies that have undermined U.S. foreign policy for decades. It was justified by threat-inflation and dubious ideas like the domino theory. U.S. policymakers were trying to use massive amounts of military force to remake a society whose history, culture, and national sentiments that they did not understand. They relied on corrupt and incompetent local clients, concealed basic truths about the war from the American people, and refused to raise taxes to pay for the war. The leaders who mismanaged this debacle were never held accountable and remained leading players in the establishment for the rest of their lives. Finally, the country learned little from this bitter experience, and repeated these same errors in Iraq, Afghanistan, and several other places.”
Cora Weiss, peace activist, organizer of the November 15, 1969 anti-war march on the National Mall
The U.S. government took on the mantle of political and military interventions after World War II. The decade long Vietnam War was one of many — not an aberration.
To diminish the likelihood and horrors of U.S. interventions, civil society must know and utilize its power. During the Vietnam War, in addition to marches to end the war, civil society provided some measure of direct relief to POWs. The anti-war movement sent me and two other women to work with the Vietnam Women’s Union to establish a channel for mail and packages to POWs. This resulted in an accurate list of prisoners, confirmed their treatment, and eventually allowed us to bring three prisoners home.
To constrain and eventually overturn America’s impulse to rule the world by force, we must put peace education into our curriculum, teach diplomacy, and embrace UNSC Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security.
