Stanley Hoffmann

VIETNAM AND AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

The postwar record of American foreign policy is, on the whole, a record of success - so much so that one of the senior advisers, and chief ideologue, of the President, has been able to forecast a future almost entirely in accordance with America's vision of a moderate, "pragmatic" world. (1) But he also presented Vietnam as the last battle, the last obstacle before Erewhon; and Vietnam, to put it candidly, has been the most spectacular failure in postwar American policy.

The question which the Vietnam fiasco raises is both crucial and difficult to answer. Has Vietnam been an accident, an aberration, an exception, or - as Walt Rostow's preaching would have us believe, and as so many "revisionists" assert - has it been a logical and necessary development in American foreign policy? If they are right, then our failure there should oblige us to revise drastically our whole policy, to follow a totally new course in the future and also to reexamine more critically our past successes so as to find in them the germs of our later failure. If they are wrong, then the only lesson of Vietnam is that we applied valid concepts clumsily, and that in future interventions we ought to be more careful about the means and strategy we use to reach our goals.

My own contention is somewhere in between. On the one hand, Vietnam is an extreme case: the most inappropriate terrain for the application of concepts that have proved fertile and adequate elsewhere. On the other hand, the very attempt, indeed the massive and often frenzied effort, at pursuing goals, applying notions and devising strategies that turned out to be irrelevant, self-defeating and dangerous, in so unrewarding an area, with such persistence in wishful thinking and self-delusion, tells us a great deal about what ought to be discarded in the future. It reveals flaws that come from the depths of our political style

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and machinery, but had never been so clearly brought to light
in any previous operation. An extreme case that is an
aberration teaches little; an extreme case which is at
the margin, in the sense of disclosing either a logic or
a set of contradictions that are not apparent in run-of-
the-mill cases, and of forcing one to make explicitly
choices that are normally made without much thought or pain,
can perform the same functions as an ideal-type: it is an
intensification, an enlargement of normally blurred features.
Vietnam is like a blow-up of many of our flaws.

I will not examine here those aspects of our Vietnam policy
that illuminate the weaknesses of our decision-making
process; this has been done elsewhere. I will focus on
the substance of the policy itself.

# I

1. The central problem does not lie in the *nature* of America's objectives. The idea that a majority of the South Vietnamese people does not want to live under Communist rule and ought to be allowed to choose its form of government, the goal of a united and stable regime in South Vietnam, the objective of proving that an armed minority using the ideology and techniques of "national liberation wars" and supplied from outside the limits of the country it tries to seize can be defeated - so as both to protect the majority in the country and to prevent the diffusion of the movement, the goal of assuring other Asian governments of America's concern for their security, the idea of preserving a balance of power in Asia, of "buying time" for the countries situated around China: these were all worthy ends. The central problem of American policy - of any policy - is the relevance of its ends to specific areas: the more ambitious or ideological a policy, the more

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indispensable it is to analyze the realities of each area with critical rigor before applying to it one's concepts or preconceptions, for otherwise the statesman will trip into the pitfalls of irrelevance, "adventurism" or unreality. Our own policy was, of necessity, ambitious due to our very role as a superpower; and it has, if not an ideology, at least a set of principles and dogmas such as resistance to aggression, attachment to self-determination, opposition to forceful Communist takeovers, etc. ... The tragedy of our course in Vietnam lies in our refusal to come to grips with those realities in South Vietnam that happened to be decisive from the viewpoint of politics.

What was determining, or operational, was not the inchoate and unorganized opposition of a majority of its people to a Communist take-over. It was, and remains, the inability of this majority to pull itself together sufficiently to resist a determined attempt by the Vietcong to seize power, in a conflict whose stakes are both a social revolution (in a society whose traditional order is crumbling and whose leaders have been unable to replace that order with an effective and legitimate one) and the completion of a movement of national unification undertaken over 20 years ago against the French and interrupted in 1954. It is the failure of the leadership in South Vietnam to establish a legitimate and authoritative government capable of rallying and mobilizing the energies of the people, of appealing to the villagers' desire for security, of providing the citizens with the incentives and means of self-defense, of establishing procedures for the redress of grievances. The root of the tragedy is the demonstrated absence in the South of the capacity for sustained self-government, for which there is no substitute. In its absence, the controlling factor is not the fact that the Vietcong constitutes only a minority,

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but the fact that it constitutes the only national movement that cuts across religious and social lines. We have refused to recognize both the *uniqueness* of this situation by comparison with the other guerrilla or revolutionary wars that we have known intimately, and the *similarity* of the predicament of the outside power in a situation such as this with that of the French both in Indochina and in Algeria. If we want, in the future, to avoid new Vietnams, we must find out *why* we have refused to recognize what, to this writer, has been, ever since the beginning of our involvement, the decisive and blindingly obvious facts.

Part of the answer lies in our fear of the consequences of recognizing reality. To acknowledge South Vietnam's inability to provide for its own, non-Communist "political development" would have meant resigning oneself to a Communist take-over by force, or after a face-saving negotiation. In the eyes of our policy-makers, this would have meant a betrayal of the non-Communist majority, a victory for the most militant part of the world Communist movement, a demoralization of the other non-Communist governments of Asia, an encouragement to armed minorities, etc. Two points should be stressed. One, our fears of the unpleasant or disastrous consequences of reality have led us to try to deny and reverse it so as to avoid those effects, instead of trying to attenuate them; this, in turn, will have to be explained. Two, our own vision of those results revealed an overestimation of the "domino effect," an underestimation of the purely domestic reasons for the potential triumph of a Communist movement in South Vietnam - reasons that did not exist to any comparable degree elsewhere and that made of this case a perfectly unsuitable model for other "national liberation movements," in Asia or (as Régis Debray has recognized) in Latin America. In other words, our fear of the consequences was magnified by our very tendency to misinterpret reality; had we understood it correctly, then the effects would have

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appeared to us less catastrophic. Thus, we must look
beyond and behind that fear.

Another, deeper, part of the answer lies in a certain
form of ignorance that I would call the shock of non-
recognition. Our understanding of South-Vietnamese
society was poor, the expertise at our disposal limited.
In such circumstances, we tended to distort our analysis
by reducing South Vietnamese uniqueness to elements that
seemed familiar and reassuring - to features that we had
met and managed elsewhere. All those traits were indeed
present in the picture, and we have been clinging to them
mentally; yet in the total picture, they have turned out
to be far less important than all the other, disturbing
traits whose ominous meaning we have tried to deny by
repeated rhetorical exorcisms. We have exaggerated the
possibility of reaching our final objectives, by invoking
two analogies. One has been the Korean analogy; to be
sure, in both cases we have a mixture of civil war (one
was a war among Koreans, the other a war among Vietna-
mese) and aggression (the crossing of the 38th parallel
by the North Koreans, infiltrations into Laos and the
South despite the 1954 Geneva agreements, first by return-
ing Southerners who had gone North after Geneva, later
by North Vietnamese supplies and units). But these simi-
larities were quite superficial. The war in Korea was a
conventional war; the way in which Pyong Yang tried to
dominate Seoul was invasion. The fragmentation of South
Korean politics, the backwardness of the South Korean
economy, the authoritarianism of Syngman Rhee might have
eventually provided the Communists with opportunities
for insurgency in the South; but their very resort to
invasion threw those chances away and consolidated a
regime and a society that showed at once their aptitude
to rally under attack, and have shown later a remarkable
capacity for self-government, change and growth. One reason

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why the Korean Communists resorted to invasion and
found no help in the South was that the cause of nationa-
lism, the appeal of self-determination had been clearly
captured by the South Korean regime; it was Pyong Yang,
in those days, that looked like a puppet. In Vietnam
Diem had a claim on nationalism, and did a superficially
effective job of governing in the early years, when it
was Hanoi's efforts at total control in the North that
were producing revolts and refugees; but his social
policies, his police, his methods, his entourage and his
aloofness paved the road to insurgency; after him, the
whirlwind of shaky governments and the growing involve-
ment of the United States gave a kind of monopoly of
the nationalist image to Ho-Chi-Minh, who could hardly
be called anyone's puppet.

The other analogy was that of countries in which Communist
insurrections had been defeated: Greece, the Philippines,
Malaysia - all of which had shown that a determined and
well organized minority can be brought under control by
a divided society, riddled with hates, corruption and
factional strife. However, the analogy was misleading in
one decisive respect: in none of these cases had the
insurgency reached such levels, and the threatened regime
fallen to such depths, that the minority appeared defeatable
only by a colossal foreign intervention. Our superficial
emphasis on similarities made us neglect a quantitative
difference that amounts to a qualitative one: the difference
between a society and polity that manage - with limited
foreign help and with domestic means that may be rough
but are effective - to pull itself together and to meet
the challenge, and a society and polity that literally
have to entrust their survival to a foreign trustee. We
have forgotten that in the cases to which we have pointed
for hope, the threatened regime finally won because it
was able to appeal to the population's national conscious-
ness, to provide it with security, and to present the

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Communists as agents of outside powers; Magsaysay also
stole much of the Communists' appeal as social reformers.

We have blundered through failure to analyze
rigorously enough the conditions for large-scale in-
surrection. We were used to seeing in Communist move-
ments mere branches of a central trunk. We refused to
believe that large masses of people could willingly
embrace Communism for essentially local reasons - i.e.
we had refused to learn from the Chinese precedent. We
did not want to admit that the fusion of Communism and
nationalism achieved by Ho-Chi-Minh had survived the
phase of fight against the French. We mistook the
presence in the South of distinguished, but unorganized
non-Communist nationalists for evidence of the good
nationalist standing, and therefore of the representa-
tive character, of the Saigon regimes. We have been
incapable of distinguishing a sect from a party, a
clique from an organization, a group of intellectuals
or politicians with tiny clientele from a political move-
ment, a police force, officer corps and set of rich
merchants from a political class. We have tended to
attribute South Vietnamese chaos to a combination of
Communist disruptiveness and reversible South Vietna-
mese mistakes (such as Diem's way of applying the strate-
gic hamlet idea). We failed to realize that those "mis-
takes" were, so to speak, doubly of the essence: they
were the inevitable product of a narrowly based, unrepre-
sentative, insecure and artificial regime deeply suspi-
cious of or removed from its own people, and they pro-
vided the Communists with a cause and opportunities for
disruption that allowed them to reach proportions un-
known in all the other cases. The proper analogy ought
to have been Chiang's China - but Chiang's China was too
huge for us to have had any illusions about our capacity
to "save" it from Mao; and yet the very precedent of
China must have somehow led our officials to want to do

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for Saigon, what we could not do for Chiang - something
that turned out not to be feasible here either; for
what has defeated us is not the physical size of the
area (our consolation in the case of China) but the very
nature of the issue. Our "loss of Cuba" made us move in-
to the Dominican revolution; there, we prevailed, be-
cause that revolution turned out not to have reached yet
in any way the proportions of Castro's insurgency in,
say, the last months of Batista. Our "loss of China"
made us step into South Vietnam, and we have not prevailed.

At the time when we were faced with the choice between
letting South Vietnam fall to Communist subversion, and
massive intervention to "save" the Saigon regime, the
very terms in which we saw the alternatives indicate
that the chances the South Vietnamese regime had had of
defeating the insurgents on its own (or with minimal
help) according to those rules of counter-insurgency laid
down by Sir Robert Thompson were gone (3): the "clear
political aim," the respect for the law, the good admi-
nistration, the priority to the defeat of political sub-
version (rather than the guerillas), the close contact
with the people, the effort to destroy the enemy's infra-
structure, the ability to protect the population and
look after its needs, the avoidance of a large conventio-
nal army whose operations would be self-defeating, all of this
had been neglected or played down. We failed to recognize
how all these errors differentiated the case of Saigon
from those we had invoked, and resulted from that very
inability to provide South Vietnam with the rudiments
of nationhood which the various regimes in Saigon had
demonstrated (in sharp contrast with Hanoi). The long-term
interest of the Saigon leaders may have been reform for
survival. But its nature was such that drastic reform
would have eliminated it as surely as a Communist sweep:
this, too, had not been the case in Athens or in Manila,

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although it was Batista's and Chiang's. In the short
run, Saigon's interest was *not* to reform, and to let
us fight for its survival. We were led by our mis-
reading of reality to believe that our intervention
could somehow bring to South Vietnam all that had
failed to grow there in the years of our mere "advice."

2. Thus we come to the other great failing of our policy. An optimistic and simplified reading of reality served as the basis for our *hybris*: if the situation in South Vietnam was serious mainly for the very reason that triggered our intervention (i.e. Communist mischief), it was easier to believe in our capacity to save South Vietnam: for we saw, hopefully, our task as saving it from its enemies, instead of seeing our task, hopelessly, as saving it from itself.

Our misreading of reality and our selfconfidence have
fed one another in a vicious circle of ever-increasing
delusions. What the South Vietnamese could not do for them-
selves, we could not do for them; but our self-confidence
has misled us into thinking both that we could and that
they would do it with us; and our need to cling to our
illusions has led us, for years, to analyze the evolution
of the war with an optimism that it took the Tet offen-
sive to begin to shatter, but which sprang from our initial
misreading: the Korean analogy helped us misjudge the Viet-
cong's strategy (and call enemy defeats his failure to
reach objectives he did not have), the Greek or Philippino
analogy helped us misjudge the "progress" of South Viet-
namese political and economic development.

Our *hybris* is that old "illusion of omnipotence" denounced
by Brogan, which I have analyzed elsewhere in some detail. (4)
In South Vietnam, our faith in our talent for *fixing* has
taken several forms. One has been our belief in the
possibility of bringing insurgency into control, and its
North Vietnamese directors to their knees, by the massive

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exertion of mechanical power, without realizing either
that, short of invasion and occupation, airpower alone
was not likely to defeat North Vietnam, or that the degree
of guerilla "immunity to the direct application" of our
military power was high, and that we were indeed up against
the 'Asian birthrate,' in a Sisyphean contest with the
manifestations of insurgency (search-and-destroy) that
left its roots intact. This has been pointed out so often,
and so frequently cited as an example of our fondness for
military or hardware solutions to complex problems - our
"engineering" approach to politics - that one would feel
almost ashamed of mentioning it again, were it not both
the most blatant demonstration of our misreading of
reality, and a symptom of another, deeper form of our
hybris.

On the one hand, not only were we encouraged in our
double escalation of the war (in the South and in the
North) by the Korean analogy, but we have also acted as
if our massive despatch of troops and our air war were
going to be able to turn what was essentially a colossal
insurgency into something more manageable by us - a conven-
tional war that we would win through what Herman Kahn has
called an "attrition-pressure-ouch" strategy, (5) aimed
at breaking Hanoi's will and at forcing the enemy in
the South into increasingly costly battles. This can
be read only as an attempt at changing reality by acting
as if it did not exist: as if we could both impose our
rules of the game on our enemy on the ground, and turn
into a predominantly "Northern" war what was still at
heart an insurrection in the South (helped, to be sure,
by the North, but neither so decisively as to collapse
even if the "will of Hanoi" had snapped, nor, most im-
portantly, by means easily susceptible to our kinds of
pressure).

On the other hand, we had been warned by all kinds of

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experts about the irrelevance of conventional war
machinery to insurgency situations. We thought that we
would overcome its tactical disadvantages by ingenious
innovations in technological gadgetry, which would
increase mobility and our firepower. But mobility,
while capable of thwarting enemy moves and making
enemy bases insecure, is no substitute for pacification
(seize-and-hold). Moreover, both mobility and firepower
increase destructiveness and disruption. In letting ourselves
be swayed by the advantages rather than by the disadvantages
of our kind of might, we have shown again the combination
of a wishful reading of reality (i.e. a permanent under-
estimation of the damage we do, a refusal to see the
fundamentally political character of the struggle) with
a conviction that the people would, so to speak, forgive
us our destructiveness - by contrast with, say, that of
the French in IndoChina and Algeria - because they would
realize that it was a necessary evil inflicted upon them
for the sake of their protection - as in the case of our
bombings of France in 1943-44. This is the *hybris* of
believing that others will interpret our deeds in the
light in which we see those, and that our intentions
cancel out our acts; it matches our illusion that the
South Vietnamese intention of remaining non-Communist
amounts both to the willingness and capacity to organize,
and to the acceptance of any act of war against Communism.
Whether we could ever have made the South Vietnamese
people look at us as their defenders against insurgents
who are - after all - their Kin is a big question, although
one *could* argue that different tactics and a less obtru-
sive presence might have helped us put all the blame for
disruption on the Vietcong and Hanoi. But the very scale
of our operations has made this a moot point - and a
smaller scale might have proved ineffective sooner.
Another form of *hybris* shows in our belief that we could
do what no other nation has done - build someone else's

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nation, create a stable society and polity elsewhere,
in the midst of a large-scale war. "Pacification" is,
of course, not only compatible with counter-insurgency
operations but an indispensable complement to them,
and their ultimate target. But pacification is, in any case,
very difficult to achieve once the military operations
reach a certain level: the clash between search-and-
destroy and hold-and-protect becomes unbearable when,
say, relocation for greater security gives way to the
mass production of refugees. Moreover, (as one well quali-
fied expert, Moshe Dayan, has written) pacification must be
undertaken by the native country; indeed, it must be an
undertaking of the villagers themselves, under the protec-
tion of the military and with the help of the government.

Pace Herman Kahn, there is more to pacification than good administration, and to begin with it must be self-admission. Out of hybris, we failed to understand that, as Americans, we simply could not play this role, - being, to quote Dayan again, (6) not mere foreigners but strangers, whose very presence undermines the standing of the people they came to defend, and, indeed, that the more we tried to be the "pacifiers," the more we undermined any capacity the South Vietnamese people and government might have had in this connection, as well as their self-respect.

Yet we paid lip service to the notion that pacification
was their affair. But out of our misunderstanding of
reality, we failed to see that the South Vietnamese regime
and military both could not and would not be the right
agent for this: they could not, because of the lack of
confidence of the people in a regime that had too often
proved ineffective or repressive or corrupt, and they
would not, because they never showed enough confidence in
their own people to entrust the villagers with the authority and the means (military and financial) to provide
for their self-defense. The villagers were thus left in a
kind of physical, administrative and emotional no man's
land, torn between identification with the Vietcong

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which they respect but fear and identification with a regime for which they have no respect. And whatever normalization of local life could be achieved in this no man's land - in the absence of any self-identification with the regime - is regularly disrupted by the Americans, whether they come as temporary administrators or as warriors.

Our faith in omnipotence has expressed itself in our conviction that we could "win" this war, not merely *with* but to an increasing extent *for* the South Vietnamese - without a true understanding of what "winning" means in such a context. Our first instinct, or reflex, has been to look for victory in military terms - with the help of body counts and victories won ever closer to, and recently in, Saigon. We have, over the years, learned that this is not the only or the most significant index, and we have spoken of "winning the hearts and minds" of the people, but our power to raid has always been greater than our power to hold and our lack of experience in this sort of a war has deprived us of handles, tools, techniques, organizations, which would anyhow have been effective only if they had been used by the South Vietnamese. We have been too easily satisfied with appearances of pacification, the fragile without asking ourselves whether the schools built would stay open, or whether the population under control was truly loyal. Our *hybris* has consisted of not taking seriously, or not applying to us, Raymond Aron's warning: in a revolutionary war, the insurgents win if they do not lose, the defenders lose if they fail to win; we have interpreted our failure to lose as a victory, and their failure to win as a defeat. We have, in the process, misread not only the realities of South Vietnam but our own.

If there was ever any chance of success after our decision to intervene more massively than up to 1963, it depended on two factors. One was our capacity to incite the South Vietnamese regime to broaden its base, to include all

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those anti-Communist leaders with a respectable nationalist past who served as our alibis (in our belief that their country really wanted to be saved from Communism), and to reform ARVIN so as to make it truly a national army. But here, we have been inhibited both by that merciless reality we had tried to ignore, and by ourselves. On the one hand, we always wondered whether any reform and recquipment of ARVIN would not ultimately benefit our enemies rather than improve its will and ability to fight, and whether any significant broadening of the Saigon regime would not weaken its own determination - i.e. whether the anti-Communist majority was truly resolved to do battle with the Communist minority, and would not prefer to deal with it in negotiations that we feared would ultimately lead to a Communist take-over because of superior Communist cohesion and resolve. We wondered whether there was really more than a militant but unpopular and narrow (hence necessarily unstable or dependent) minority that wanted to do battle. On the other hand, we were also deterred by one of our qualities which both tempers our hybris and makes it even less justified: our reluctance, when we intervene, to act as if we had the right to push our protégés around and do more than advise them. Somehow, we realize our limitations and become humble, when faced with the stark need to take extensive measures of political and social reform in friendly territory; although it is more accurate and fair to say that we are stopped less by our ignorance (vide our extensive interventions in defeated Germany and Japan) than by our credo and principles: respect for self-determination, in the country that we came to defend, even when there are only shallow, indeed self-defeating forms of self-determination. Thus, our pride of omnipotence stops, so to speak, at our client's doorstep; which makes our conviction that we could clean house for him even more extravagant. For we end up having all the disadvantages of

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colonialism, and none of the advantages.

Another condition for improbable success was time - time to convince (if one would not coerce) the South Vietnamese establishment to change its course, time to relieve the insurgency to certain areas while the rest of the country convalesces out of the war and of its awful side effects, time to instil in the villagers a sense of confidence and identification with Saigon, in the city dwellers a sense of being the citizens of a genuine nation. But, once more, our lack of experience in these realms buttressed our somewhat hectic approach to world affairs: however often the frustrations of the years brought to our leaders' lips the litany of calls to patience and fortitude, the frenzied need for quick results to reassure a nation that reacts badly to defeats and uneasily to protracted, inconclusive conflicts brought on our officials in South Vietnam a constant pressure for quick results, and to our briefings and communiqués a constant flow of comforting statistics thoroughly devoid of meaning in the context of a longterm operation. Our impatience both fed our *hybris* and defeated it.

There was another manifestation of our sense of omnipotence: our whole policy, and the terms in which it has been presented, made sense *only* if we achieved that final victory (the battlefield or in a negotiation to save our enemies' faces). Everything was predicated on success. We failed, in so tricky an operation, to protect ourselves against possible failure; we left ourselves no room for maneuver, or for the sort of elegant retreat that does not look like an admission of failure. We have repeatedly burned, or let the South Vietnamese regime, burn bridges behind us: by destroying or jailing political opponents to it who could have been of help to us had we wanted to change our course, by discarding possibilities of negotiation at a time when the military balance was more favorable to us. We have encouraged other Asian regimes to stake their safety on

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our presence in Vietnam, without realizing that this way
of buying time for them could easily become an alibi for
their neglect of those domestic factors that could kindle
an insurgency on their soil far more surely than a victory
of Ho-Chi-Minh on his. We failed to realize that their
taking seriously our conviction that we were their main
shield could lead them to revulsion against us if we did not
succeed. But, in the meantime, it serves as an excuse for
us to persist in trying to do the impossible, because "other
Asians want us to stay on;" we made thereby the consequences
of eventual failure far more critical than they might have
been, had we understated the general significance of Viet-
nam instead of trumpeting its cosmic importance. But the
more we have needed success to justify our investment,
the more we have exaggerated the effects of failure, and
the resort to false analogies: oversell was not a sales-
man's trick but a trapped man's need.

Above all, we have constantly rationalized the damage and
disruption we inflicted on the country, and explained
away the corruption and mismanagement of the Saigon regime,
by the argument that our final victory would prove the
ruins worthwhile, allow the scars to heal, and cure the
traditional diseases of Vietnamese society. It is indeed
true (alas) that in many other cases, as in Korea, success
retroactively vindicated horrors and inequities. But in
Vietnam, the more atrocious the evils, the more we have
had to put all our hopes on success, which became the
only justification for an intolerable process; and the
more success became the only tolerable outcome, the
higher the price one has had to pay (or inflict) in
order to try to succeed. The two great extenuating cir-
cumstances of war's moral outrages: final success, and
a certain proportionality of means to ends, have both
been war casualties here. The worst aspect of our *hybrid*
has been our assumption of the right to "destroy in
order to save" in conditions where "salvation" was never
likely to begin with, and has been made even less likely

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by our presence and methods.

II

1. It is becoming fashionable, among men who at one time or another supported the American effort in Vietnam, to assert that a different strategy could have produced better results. It is my contention that this is not the case: this was never a "winnable" contest. As long as our presence was small, conditions in South Vietnam — first, Diem's neglect and distortion of the requirements of counter-insurgency, later the chaos that followed his assassination — brought the insurgents very close to victory. Our intervention on the ground made sense in the perspective of thwarting an impending _forcible_ Communist take-over and negotiating rapidly a _political_ solution that would have given to the non-Communist South Vietnamese a last chance and framework to prove their worth, and to the Communists a chance to win by means of the ballot. (7) But this "scenario" — which has finally become our last resort, except that officially we continue to beat around the bush and look for ways so to sweeten the pill as to change its nature — would have required a deliberate effort at reforming the Saigon regime; and it would have been far more credible if it had come _before_ instead of _after_ America's failure to achieve a military victory, the failure to "pacify" the countryside, the demonstration of domestic disunity and the systematic attempt at strengthening and legitimizing the Thieu-Ky regime. In any event, such a political solution could never have been more than a framework within which the non-Communist South Vietnamese, with their backs to the wall, might have _tried_ to save their country from Communist rule.

There was a great difference between intervention-for-

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extrication and the kind of intervention-for-victory
that we chose. One, its failure makes the costs of
extrication higher, and, in my opinion, the chances of
survival of a non-Communist South Vietnam far worse,
due to the disruption which the war has inflicted and
which, far from providing the non-Communists with belated
opportunities for organization, must have laid the ground-
work for the totalitarian encadrement of sullen and
destitute masses, ready for revolution but alienated from
anything Saigon stood for. Also, the possibility of orga-
nizing a coherent coalition of non-Communist leaders
after the lacerations of jail or exile and the lassitude
of war is pretty slim.

Two, intervention-for-victory ensnared us in a network
of traps and dilemmas we were foolish first not to see
and later to court. To send a small army (say, up to
100,000 men) seemed too little for victory. To send an
army capable of holding once and for all the liberated
countryside (and given the fundamental need for paci-
fication, holding was far more important to us than to
our foe) would have required an effort we never really
contemplated. To send a large army, yet one much less
huge than this was to create insuperable strategic
problems. To keep our men in enclaves sacrificed what
we deemed our main assets (mobility and firepower),
along with the countryside. To send them to fight
guerillas in the countryside would have meant far
worse attrition for us than for them and given great
opportunities to North Vietnam's main forces. To
concentrate on fighting the latter meant focusing most
attention on the conventional aspects of the war, and
neglecting the villages and pacification. In trying
a melange of the second and third strategies, we have
ended with the worst of all worlds: the North Vietna-
mese forces have not been broken, the countryside has
been lost, and while our mobility has kept us stabbing
in the dark, the enemy has succeeded both in preserving

19.

most of his sanctuaries and in depriving us of security
in ours.

Other sets of dilemmas have affected our policy toward
Hanoi. In order to "break Hanoi's will," we would have
had to bomb much closer to China, to close Haiphong,
perhaps to invade the North; but effectiveness on the
spot (in addition to being of debatable relevance to
the final stake: control of the South) collided with the
needs of prudence at large: our purpose, allegedly, was
to avoid World War Three, to contain China, to convince
Russia of its interest in such containment - not to
destroy the regime in Hanoi, to promote a larger war,
to provoke China's entry into it, and to oblige Russia
to demonstrate more militantly its solidarity with a
small Communist state. Thus, we chose prudence, at the
cost of effectiveness. In our choice, however, we again
produced the worst of all worlds: we put enough pressure
on Hanoi to make impossible the reintroduction of exter-
nal restraints on North Vietnam (comparable to Soviet
and Chinese pressure in Geneva in 1954), and to reenforce
the North Vietnamese national resolve and regime. But a
combination of calculations of prudence and miscalcula-
tions of strategy (due to the misapplication of concepts
derived from mixed-interest conflicts to one that was
far closer to a zero-sum game) led us to apply our
pressure so gradually as to allow the other side to ad-
just.

We also got the worst of all worlds in our relations
with the South Vietnamese. Too reticent to take over
those functions which they were mismanaging but which we
know how to manage (be it garbage collection, or health
services), reluctant or incompetent to reform areas
of blatant corruption or brutality, unwilling to appear
in control of the political process, we have neverthe-
less been saddled in the eyes of many - in South Vietnam
and elsewhere - with responsibility for a client who

20.

would be swept away without us. At the same time, the Americanization of the war has worsened the client's condition: by providing the insurgents with a cause that is now both national and social, i.e. by reducing the difference between the second and the first Indo-China wars, and making this one appear as the mere prolongation of the earlier one; by discouraging many non-Communists (in the villages or in the cities) from actively opposing the Communists on the side of the Americans; by introducing into an old, fragile and backward society a technological Frankenstein that completed the Communists' job of fostering insecurity and disruption (but *they* hope to be the beneficiaries, and are playing their game, whereas ours ought to have been the opposite); by thus bringing not merely physical but social destruction to the people we came to protect - and it is no solace to say that this is true in any war, given the special political nature and stakes of *this* one.

Caught in a lasso from which we could not escape, we could only tighten the noose through our twisting and squirming. If the anti-Communist majority failed to organize and unite because of Vietcong and North Vietnamese mischief, the situation was hopeless because the elimination of this mischief required both the demonstration of South Vietnam's society and the political and social success of pacification which our acts of war precluded. If this lack of organization was inherent in South Vietnamese society, our task was hopeless because wither the reform of that society would fail to take place as long as it was entrusted to its present leadership, product and beneficiary of its corruption, or else reform would have to be undertaken by us, and we neither knew how nor wanted to take over. We were in a vicious

21.

circle: in such a war, there can be no genuine pacification without security, but the search for security against so obstinate and omnipresent a foe could not but interfere with pacification, and one ended up with neither pacification nor security.

The verdict is somber: we have fought a war for objectives that were unreachable (the exemplary defeat of a large "national liberation movement," the restoration of our version of the Geneva agreements, a stable South Vietnam with a non-Communist regime, the preservation of international stability by sticking to the partition line agreed upon between the great powers). The more those objectives eluded us, the more we have escalated our means, without realizing that the means we used made our goals even more unreachable and destroyed any chance there might have been of getting near them. As in previous total wars, the escalation of the means has led to an emotional and ideological escalation: for the greater the war machine, the losses, the woeckage, the more one had to justify them in terms of the vital importance of the stakes - thus making retreat so much more painful, since military deescalation will have to be accompanied by a kind of deescalation of the stakes: an operation that may well leave deep traces both in a public whose consent to future involvements may be affected by the leaders' having cried wolf too often and too loud, and among Asian leaders whose earlier admiration for our stamina may lead to a mixture of horror for our excesses and distress at our failure to deliver goods we had proclaimed so essential to us and to them. The more we escalated the stakes, the higher (and more erroneous) were the expectations we created at home and abroad.

2. In this predicament, our original mistakes and the

22.

need to succeed made us grasp every illusion in the wind,
and delude ourselves instead of facing the stark reali-
ties of South Vietnamese disaster and American *hybris*.
Thus, we have pointed to facts that were true yet irrele-
vant as a way of comforting ourselves about our mission.
We have demonstrated Hanoi's grip over the NLF in order
to confirm our views about aggression, but we failed to
see that the controlling facts were not Hanoi's control
but the Vietcong's achievements and the connection bet-
ween the civil war and the struggle for national unifica-
tion. We have stressed the totalitarian character of North
Vietnam, the post-1954 flow of refugees to the South, and
thus justified our commitment to a free government for the
South; but we failed to note that in an area where Western
democracy is unknown, the efficiency of Hanoi's regime,
its sense of purpose and the remarkable discipline and
commitment of its population were the decisive features:
in the battle of symbols, we were fighting the steely
image of a united and dedicated North with the misty
mirage of a future model South. We have taken solace from
the Southerners' failure to rally around the Viet Cong,
yet the decisive features here were, one, that the South-
ern politicians who refused to go over to the NLF also
refused to lead, or were prevented from leading, the
South, and two, that the urban population that did not
rise when the Vietcong came to the cities nevertheless
provided the Vietcong with at least some help in orga-
nizing infiltration, and with the negative protection of
secrecy; even *passive* support for us would not be enough
to insure final victory in this kind of a war.

Sometimes, we have grasped at myths. One of them has
been the great success of the elections in September 1967.
Whatever progress they have represented on the long and
tricky road to self-government, we should not conceal
from ourselves either the fact that they were marked by
irregularities that go far beyond tolerable, Western-
type corruption, or the fact that the dominant branch

[10]

23.

of the Saigon regime is not the Assembly but an Executive
whose representative character is small, or the fact that
both the Assembly and Executive display South Vietnam's
actual fragmentation for more than its potential unity.
Another myth is that we may now turn many of our respon-
sibilities back to the South Vietnamese - it is a myth in
the sense that if we turn them over to the present Saigon
regime, we are in all likelihood going to accelerate the
decomposition of our protegés, and find that all the
reasons that led us to rush in in 1965 operate even more
strongly half a million men, God knows how many ruins and
casualties and three years later; whereas if we turn over
those responsibilities to an enlarged and improved regime
in the South, that regime may negotiate with the Vietcong
terms of settlement that, at worst, could be far removed
from those we still seem to hope to achieve in Paris, and
at best, could have been obtained less bloodily some years
ago. It would be a myth to believe that because of the
military "stalemate" our foes might accept a kind of piece-
meal solution (of local accommodations and cease-fire zones),
as if the significance of a stalemate in this sort of
asymmetrical war were the same as in Korea, as if there
were truly organized political forces on both sides of the
"stalemate;" as if Communists were interested in a partition
of South Vietnam, and as if one could avoid the crucial
issue of ultimate control. It would anyhow be another myth
to believe that we can achieve by negotiations with Hanoi
what we have failed to win on the battlefield - the guaran-
tee of a united, non-Communist independent South Vietnam,
in which Communists would be disarmed and reduced to the
position of a minority political party as in Greece.

And it was (or should I write *is*) a myth to believe that
what we were engaged in was nation-building. This was
both an illusion fed by a social science imbued with engi-
neering pretensions, and an ideological justification for the
less savory aspects of our role. In the first place, no
state can do more than create or restore the conditions

24.

in which another nation's citizens can take the political,
economic and social measures that will provide the nation
with a sense of community, adequate institutions and essen-
tial services. In the second place, whereas a war is often
the crucible of national consciousness, internal peace is
the requisite for nation-building. The disruptions of civil
war may create the conditions for future nation-building:
by sending to the cities large amounts of peasants in search
either of a refuge or of a better income, by weakening the
hold of the traditional family, of village notables, of
regional, religious or ethnic separatisms, by enriching
certain "modern" classes and impoverishing other groups,
etc... But out of such upheavals can come either final
chaos, or nation-building; and the chances of the latter
depend on the success of pacification, or on the advent of a
negotiated peace. The destruction of an old building, the
scattering of bricks and stones, the delivery to the
construction site of cement, mortar and sand, are not to be
confused with the construction of a new edifice: on some
sites, nothing ever gets built. We have too often confused
the side effects of war with the labors of peace.

Finally, we have grasped at another, familiar kind of re-
assurance, which could hardly be suspected of being an
illusion or a myth, since it is (or so it seems to us) the
short-hand translation of hard facts: statistics. As long
as the quest for certainty in the realms of essential uncer-
tainty remains within the bounds of social science, one
can marvel without indignation. But when the same falla-
cies become props of policy, irony is not enough. We have
copulated with figures, and discovered at the end that it
was incest, for the figures were all too often not the
offspring of external achievements but the creations of
our own phantasies. We have forgotten, first, that many of
the statistics that comforted us were false, partial or
suspect in their origins; secondly, that even the believable
figures had to be interpreted, and were meaningless out
of context: thus, figures about the percentage of the

25.

population controlled by us, or about the miles of
roads returned to safety, or the number of incidents,
could either mean progress toward pacification and
victory, or indicate a temporary shift in enemy stra-
tegy - such as his regrouping for the Tet offensive.
One always comes back to our original sins - ignorance
of the context, and excessive self-confidence.

### III.

If we want to draw some lessons from this story, let us
distinguish those that apply primarily to Vietnam, and
the broader ones.

1. In Vietnam, all the reasons that we gave for fighting the war now ring hollow. Some of them were never really relevant. We have exaggerated the role of China in this conflict, and the degree to which a victory for Hanoi would mean an expansion of China's power and prestige: "it is hard to see how any likely outcome in Vietnam will ... speed up China's long and difficult effort to become a great power ... China's power in Asia is dependent much more on factors other than what happens in Vietnam."(8) We have also exaggerated the domino effect of "national liberation" movements: they break out only where there are objective and subjective conditions of serious discontent, administrative and social neglect, ethnic or religious grievances, class inequities, and they do not reach the proportions of a civil war unless the degree of decomposition or inadequacy of the polity is very high. The chances for a Communist domination of such movements depend very largely on the Communists' aptitude at capturing the nationalist symbols. Thus, the two main deterrents are - positively - domestic attention to and reform of legitimate grievances, and - negatively - careful American abstention from too close an identification with threatened regimes, which could deprive them of

26.

their claim to represent their nations.

Many of the reasons we have given, while impressive, either have become irrelevant or cannot anymore be used as arguments for the war. The notion that our failure to save South Vietnam from a Communist takeover would, by itself, have a domino effect in South-East Asia, weaken other governments and make them eager to appease their Communist neighbors is not false. But the force of the argument has never been sufficient to allow us to prevail in Vietnam, and indeed the argument required that we prevail at a reasonable cost: the higher the costs of our involvement, the more disquiet in Asian countries, not only because of the spectacle of the ruins accumulated by our protection, but also because of the likelihood that so massive (and frustrating) an effort would never be tried again. When a German politician praised the American undertaking because of his conviction that "what the Americans do for South Vietnam they would do for us," the only likely reactions are a mixture of shudder and disbelief. The lesson learned by other Asians from our policy may well be that, rather than leaning too closely on us, they ought to placate our foes, instead of relinquishing to them the causes of nationalism, anti-imperialism and anti-White racism.

The argument that our effort in Vietnam was necessary to weaken China's position and improve Russia's within world Communism also had some strength. Once again, however, the policy followed failed to serve the goal. China's weakening, while obvious, can hardly be attributed to us: a combination of domestic turmoil and diplomatic clumsiness explains it. But insofar as we are concerned with China's view of the way in which national liberation movements can effectively tie down the world's greatest power, neutralize its nuclear arsenal and carry forward the struggle against imperialism, the spectacle of our entrapment in Vietnam - "the fly that captured the fly-

27.

paper" - can hardly be said to have disproved Marshal Lin Piao: as Professor Reischauer has written, if our goal was to demonstrate that such movements do not work, we have lost. As for the Soviets, whose enthusiasm for such movements has indeed been limited, our behavior has obliged them to display their solidarity with and support to North Vietnam, and it is only with the reversal of America's policy - not through its pursuit - that a chance for their playing a moderating role reemerges.

Finally, the argument about the need to establish a balance of power in Asia has evolved favorably for reasons largely independent of our stand in Vietnam, and connected with the fact that (besides China) only in Vietnam have Communism and nationalism been fused. Thus, the upheaval in Indonesia had to do with a nationalist revulsion against the Chinese and a China-inspired Communist party - and with the desperate instinct of survival of the Indonesian military, whom it is hard to imagine willing to let themselves be slaughtered but for America's stand in the jungles of Vietnam. Secondly, America's policy can hardly be said to have contributed to a balance of power in Asia. I have said earlier what I thought of our "buying time" argument: if the main threat to "free Asia" is internal disruption (supported, to be sure, from outside but triggered and sustained by domestic factors), our military enterprise only diverted attention and (as in Thailand) resources from the "nation-building" tasks in Asian countries. In Europe, a balance could be established largely by military means, both because the threat was primarily military, and because the polities, economies and societies could absorb, and provide a largely stable basis for, those military means. In Asia, neither the nature of the threat nor the nature of the societies justifies a transposition. There, the imbalance between America's might and the local friendly powers is such that a massive American military presence could only lead to a disastrous mixture of domination and disruption. Even if there were a serious threat of

28.

Chinese (or Communist Vietnamese) invasion of neighboring countries, the answer could not simply be the stationing of large quantities of American troops: for the political, economic and social implications would be such as to open the way for internal wars while we were trying to plug holes at the borders.

2. We have thus reached the broader implications of our Vietnam experience. They can all be summarized in one formula: from incorrect premises about a local situation and about our abilities, only a bad policy can follow. Our policy in Vietnam has been exemplary in the sense of providing a complete catalogue of all the mistakes that can result from false premises. Let us proceed to three imperatives, and two final lessons.

A first imperative is to examine with greater rigor and depth each of the situations of trouble in which our intervention is at issue. This means that

a) we must shift from a vision of the world which gave at least implicitly priority to the notion of an external threat (spread across borders either by blatant means of outside intervention or invasion, or else by devious techniques of subversion) to an understanding of the domestic priority, i.e. of the fact that the opportunities open to our foes as well as to us depend on the internal realities of the various areas. This is why, for instance, there is no universal, standardized model of "national liberation": it was not the Maoist model that worked in Cuba, and the Cuban one failed in Bolivia. It was China's neglect of these domestic realities that has led to various setbacks; yet both in China's and in Russia's ideological pronouncements (for reasons that have to do with the focus

29.

and message of Marxism-Leninism) there is much more
awareness of those domestic priorities than we have
shown. Whatever reservations one may have on specific
proposals he made throughout the years, one must pay
tribute to George Kennan for his constant understand-
ing of this point. The "internalization" of conflict
results from the excessively high costs of conventional
war, from the fact that the stakes of world politics
are, more and more, the shaping of domestic societies,
and from the phenomena of social mobilization which
make the waging of foreign policy increasingly depend-
ent on internal support, images and institutions.
Consequently, the policy-maker needs to find in the
works of theoretically oriented social scientists not
merely broad generalizations about the internatiónal
about political development, but more particular and
differentiated theories that attempt "to account for
the policy-relevant variation among"(9)cases.

b. We must learn to distinguish much more carefully between types of interventions. We are primarily used to contests in which "winning" means imposing our strategy on an adversary in open battle. We also have some experience of waging successful, swift and superficial coups. We have much less of the kind of intervention we found ourselves ensnared in on behalf of the Saigon regimes: an asymmetrical fight against a foe who obstinately refused to play our game, while being inventive and flexible enough to adapt his tactics to our presence; who succeeded in keeping the initiative even while we thought that our forays - on the ground and in the air - meant that it was ours; in a territory and over stakes that made of "winning" merely the gradual by-product of military control, social change, administrative and political reform, institutional creation and organization. We must learn in particular to distinguish between two kinds of interventions: marginal ones (which does not mean unimportant: they can be decisive) that allow

30.

a threatened society to deal with its problems in a way that strengthens its cohesion but does not jeopardize its autonomy and self-respect, and interventions that are so *massive* that they are counter-productive, either because they weaken the assisted partner (by spreading corruption, disrupting his administration, or his economy), or because that partner lacks the institutional ability and social cohesion without which our intervention will be in vain. There is no substitute for area expertise, historical knowledge - and the kind of informed judgment that allows one to separate a hopeless case from a merely difficult one. There is, in this respect, at least one clear message from Vietnam: when a regime that is oppressive, or ineffective, or both is faced, not with an ordinary insurgency, but with a movement that is both superbly organized and capable of mounting an effective government and a social revolution in the areas that it holds, the chances of reversing the trend are very poor. It would be as foolish to mistake every rebellion for a genuine social movement, as it is to mistake every political leader for an authentic force. The key issues are those of the roots, the organization, the appeals; we must learn to distinguish movements that are broad, effective and legitimate from pseudo-movements. Once again, the ability to discriminate is a prerequisite of policy, and requires in turn a social science more interested in asking the key questions of historical sociology than in collecting swamps of data.

A second imperative is to reexamine critically the limits of our power. This does not mean indulging either in an orgy of self-doubt or in a repudiation of an ungrateful outside world that resists our good intentions. It means assessing more realistically:

31.

a) the limits in the present international system of the kind of power that we have in greatest amounts: military and economic. Having written abundantly on this topic elsewhere, (10) I will merely sum up my point here: the new conditions of the use of force, the rise and strength of the nation-state, the heterogeneity of the system reduce considerably the direct ability of any major power to shape the world according to its wishes. There is an excess of the power to deny over the power to achieve gains. In other words, our greatest impact comes through creating conditions in which the forces on which we count - the defenders of the status quo or the champions of moderate reform - can work: through military deterrence and various kinds of assistance. But these forms of help can not succeed in denying all enemy gains, for they are not capable either of preventing him from exploiting at our expense (and through similar techniques of assistance, ranging from military and diplomatic) regional inter-state disputes (as in the Middle East), nor are they capable of transforming an internal situation as hopeless as Vietnam. Moreover, when our deterrence and assistance succeed in consolidating non-Communist regimes, there is no guarantee that these regimes will use their own power in ways that will please us, as we found out in various parts of the world.

b) The specific limitations that our history, our style and our institutions impose on our effectiveness. It is imperative that we know ourselves better. To be sure, one could argue that our massive resort to technological power in Vietnam results precisely from our exploitation of what we know to be our greatest asset. But this has to be weighed, not only against our ignorance of local realities that vitiated this asset, but also against our neglect of some serious psychological weaknesses: an overbearingly self-confident approach to complex

32.

problems; a tendency to reduce them to mere issues of
management, without questioning the realism of the
ends and therefore the adequacy of the means; an acti-
vism that conflicts with the needs for prudence and
patience, and often reduces our associates to the posi-
tion of subordinates and makes them resentful of our
protection and of their dependence; an underestimation
of the way in which other people's history and customs con-
dition their reactions to present issues; a lack of under-
standing of social revolutions, of the kinds of violent
movements that develop when there are no procedures of
peaceful change and that are often not led by the kinds
of elites with whom Americans are comfortable: a lack
that results from our own experience of no such revolu-
tion, and makes us reserve our sympathies to non-Commu-
nist, purely nationalist ones; (11) also - last
but not least-a tendency, when challenged, to be far
more concerned with proving ourselves than with finding
out whether our objectives are worthwhile or reachable,
and whether our involvement serves them adequately. For
what has been most striking in Vietnam is our way of
turning that intricate contest (in which, by our own
admission, we are not fully in control even of our side)
into a test of our resolve, competence and moral and
material superiority. This is an old, and not a disgrace-
ful feature. But precisely because of its importance in
our make-up, it should make us careful about getting in-
volved, if not only in confrontations we can win so as
to avoid the self-lacerations of defeat (this would
not be a very realistic imperative), at least only in
confrontations that are so essential as to justify this
heavy investment of our pride.

A third imperative, following from the first two, is pre-
cisely to redefine more carefully our national interest in
the international competition. Again, I will refer the

33.

reader to another piece of writing, (12) and make only a
few remarks here:

a) for several reasons, we must learn to distinguish
between two kinds of threats to "stability" (a much
abused notion). On the one hand, there will arise in
scores of countries risks of internal disruption that
may be helped from abroad yet correspond to domestic
realities. We must learn to live with such perils and
to accept violent social and political change - even
if private American interests happen to be the tar-
gets, even if Communists should occasionally be the
local beneficiaries, and Communist powers the likely
allies of the local winners. For there will never be
any manageable international system if our statesmen
pretend to play the role of cosmic Metternichs; and
unless the consequence of those upheavals would be to
put into power regimes hostile to us in important
countries, such changes would not seriously endanger
our position in the international competition. As for
a revolutionary Communist take-over in countries that
are of great importance in the world balance of power
(by which I mean, not the nuclear balance, which seems
safely in the hands of the two superpowers, but the
conventional military balance and even more the far
less tangible diplomatic one), while it would undoubtedly
be a blow to American interests and a source of interna-
tional instability, it is hard to see how the United
States could prevent it (would we have tried to over-
throw a Communist regime in Indonesia?) We can only
provide such countries with assistance to help them
consolidate their internal cohesion, and avoid providing
Communist or pro-Communist forces there with a cause
through our excessive involvement. On the other hand, we
should be concerned with the *external* implications of
*internal* changes; we should be especially interested in
preventing domestic disruptions from engulfing the

34.

major powers, and domestic revolutionary regimes
from exporting their recipes by force. Our national
interest in the moderate management of conflict
ought therefore sometimes (as in inter-African
conflicts) to lead us to promote formulas for inter-
national or regional localization and neutralization,
and in other places (as in Southeast Asia, where the
threat comes from Communist regimes) to encourage us
to promote regional efforts at self-defense against
risks either of invasion or of military interference
with communications, under an American guarantee or
with as unobtrusive a military assistance on our part
as possible. Similarly, in Vietnam, our effort now
ought to bear on the distinction between the settle-
ment of the internal issues (which should be left as
much as possible to the various factions of South Viet-
namese) and the solution of the external implications
of South Vietnam's self-determination (such as the
withdrawal of foreign troops, neutralization of the
country, the conditions of eventual unification of
Vietnam, the guarantee of the borders in the area,
and the immersion into this process of as broad a
section of the international community as possible).

b) we must learn to establish a hierarchy of interests, of which the separation described in the previous paragraph is but one example. We must be guided by the following considerations. One, not every part of the world is of the same importance to us: it depends largely on two sets of factors - the intrinsic importance of the country or area, in resources, population, political influence and (as in the case of Israel) abundance and intimacy of ties with us, and also its importance to our main adversaries (i.e. whether or not it constitutes a major stake for them). Two, even in countries or areas that are important to us, we may have a hierarchy of concerns. Whereas one could argue that in all such instances we have an interest in pre-

35.

serving them from outside aggression, the scope of our interests beyond this one must vary from case to case; in particular, a prudent foreign policy must beware of turning into a major stake the internal control of a highly unstable polity that we are badly equipped to preserve and reform.

In Vietnam, although a Vietcong victory was important to Peking as a test of its doctrine, such a victory was never tantamount to Peking control; therefore, the area itself should not have been deemed essential to us, to begin with. Moreover, the nature of the threat there was such as to justify a deliberate effort on our part to *minimize* the importance of domestic control, and to concentrate our efforts on the external aspects. For here lies one important lesson: in present day confrontations, when the superpowers for obvious reasons engage only a small part of their military resources, tests of will are resolved less on the basis of the ratios of military might, than on that of the "balance of interests as manifested in the relative capacity of the opponents to convince each other that they will support their positions with war if necessary." (13) Let us apply this to Vietnam; our escalation in the South and in the North was an attempt to convince Hanoi and the NLF of our determination to support our position massively. But we failed to convince them that what was at stake - the control of South Vietnam - was of such overriding importance to us that we would pay for it the price of sacrificing more important American interests - such as our interest in avoiding heightened tension with Russia, and war with China; in avoiding a depletion of our military forces in Europe; in avoiding a domestic crisis over escalation: interests that would have been threatened, had we decided that denying the enemy control of Saigon was worth either even greater efforts at trying to "win," or a perpetuation of an indecisive war. We failed to convince them because, as we discover the depth of our earlier illusions, we failed to convince ourselves: after

36.

the long and bloody detour of an escalation that was an
escape from unsavory realities, they prevailed when we
understood that the only way out of the lasso was an end
to the war. On his side, the enemy succeeded in convinc-
ing us of his determination: for we came to realize that
within the limits of escalation which were tolerable to
us, he could continue to fight for stakes that were in-
finitely more central to his existence and raison d'être,
than our stakes were to ours. So we gave up the fiction,
backed by an impressive display of force, that Vietnam
was like the Wilderness of the international civil war;
and the enemy imposed on us the reality of his resolve
and of the difference between our power to destroy and
our power to create.

There is one final lesson from Vietnam that ought to be
remembered when the issue of intervention arises again.
In international affairs, the normative requirements of
political order and the normative requirements of ethics
do not always coincide: not all moderate international
systems, not all world empires have been based on or have
dispensed justice. But it is both the moral duty and the
political interest of statesmen to avoid policies that
compound political and moral error, political inefficiency
and ethical ugliness. In Vietnam, our political and our
moral roads, paved with good intentions, have led to hell.
That same inadequacy of our means to unreachable object-
ives, that same tendency of the means to make the goals even
more illusory, which have marked the political course of the
war, also justify moral condemnation. For the ethics of
foreign policy behavior is an ethics of consequences; no
policy is ethical, however generous its ends, if success
is ruled out; and no policy is ethical if the means corrupt
or destroy the ends, if they are materially out of propor-
tion with the ends, if they entail costs of value greater
than the costs of not resorting to them - three precepts
violated by our conduct in Vietnam. The ethics of foreign

37.

policy must be an ethics of self-restraint: our moral
duty coincides with our political interest. From neither
point of view can one support any policy of universal
intervention; here again, prudence on the one hand, the
ethical judgment on the ends and on the relation of means
to ends on the other converge.

By definition, political interest and moral duty in poli-
tical affairs can be defined only case by case, and
general guidelines are of little help. But the extreme
case of Vietnam gives one a good, if tragic idea, of the
kinds of things that cannot be brought off and should not
be undertaken; of the bad effect of letting general prin-
ciples and familiar techniques of action be sloppily
applied without sufficient consideration of the special
circumstances of the case and of the special disabilities
of the actors. The saddest aspect of the Vietnam tragedy
is that it combines moral aberration and intellectual
scandal - and yet maybe we should be impressed by the
rather rare fact that in a world where these two sets of
values: those of moral action and of political effective-
ness are often far apart, they have been reunited in so
exemplary an instance ...

SH:cc

5/21/68

38.

1) Cf. Walt W. Rostow's speech at the University of Leeds, Feb. 23, 1967.

2) Cf. James Thomson's searching essay in the Atlantic, April 1968. See also my *Gulliver's Troubles*, or the Setting of *American Foreign Policy*. (N.Y., 1968), Part 3.

3) See his book, *Defeating Communist Insurgency*, and his article in *Foreign Affairs*, April 1968.

4) *Gulliver's Troubles*, part 2; *The State of War*, (N.Y. 1965), Chapter 6.

5) *Can we win in Vietnam*, Chapter 6.

6) *Unpublished article.*

7) To argue now that a peaceful Communist victory through elections was always an acceptable solution to us makes one wonder why did not try to negotiate on such a basis sooner - and why we remain so ambivalent about any Communist participation in a post cease-fire, interim government.

8) Donald Zagoria, "Who's afraid of the domino theory," *NY Times Magazine*, April 21, 1968.

9) Alexander L. George, "Bridging the gap between scholarly research and policy-makers: the problem of theory and action," Rand Document, May 8, 1968. The implications of Vietnam for social science and for its relation to policy deserve a separate study.

10) *Gulliver's Troubles*, Part 1.

11) Cf. U.S. reticence toward the French resistance, in World War Two.

12) *Gulliver's Troubles*, Chapter 10.

13) Robert E. Osgood and Robert C. Tucker, *Force, Order and Justice*, (Baltimore, 1967), p. 152.