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This is the legacy of Vietnam for the new generation emerging in positions of leadership in America. They are not obsessed by the debates of the Vietnam war, with which they are largely unfamiliar. They have no feelings of guilt about self-interest, which they pursue strenuously in their economic activities. But they have little knowledge of history or of national policy.

When I was in graduate school, public service was considered a high calling. In the globalized economic world, the post-Cold War generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to Washington. In part, this is due to the reluctance to enter a calling whose battles leave too many victims and which turns its political disputes into legal battles. This abdication from politics sees American exceptionalism turn? to a world that is run by more or less automatic economic forces, has been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war and

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19

in which the basic American national interest is to instruct
the rest of the world of the advantages of free trade, non-
proliferation and human rights. But when economic and military
power is coupled with condescension and righteousness,
dominance becomes grating and leadership comes to be conceived
as hegemony, which elicits resistance nearly automatically. In
a way, the emerging generation of American leaders is freed of
the legacy of Vietnam except in a fear of domestic convulsions
that recoils before decisive action and that, paradoxically by
its very ambivalence, makes those actions more necessary
(which is why the Clinton Administration has been drawn into
more military operations abroad than any previous
administration).

The basic trouble is that the post-Vietnam generation is
inheriting the vacuum created by the paralysis that the
Vietnam factional disputants have left. Economics will not

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provide a refuge. The globalized world will emerge only by way of dislocations and disequilibria that increasingly democratic publics expect their political processes to handle. And these processes are themselves in a process of transition. In many regions of the world, the nation state is breaking down either into hitherto ethnic subgroupings or by joining larger regional groupings. The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a challenge faced by no previous society.

Embarrassment to deal with them on the basis of some concept of national interest does not connote moral elevation so much as progressive paralysis. That concept of national interest would not be American if it did not derive motivation from America's democratic tradition. But it must also be prepared to face the need at some point for these questions.

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What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter
how it happens? What, to be true to ourselves, must we seek to
accomplish no matter how small the attainable consensus and,
if necessary, alone? What can we not accomplish alone? What is
essential? What desirable? What irrelevant?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy until we can
achieve true national consensus on these issues. Our political
leaders may be able to avoid addressing them during the
campaign about to begin. But the winner will not be able to
escape them once he enters the Oval Office.

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KISSINGER NEWSWEEK ARTICLE 4/16/00

Not too long ago, former President Gerald Ford and I were
reminiscing about his Presidency and our respective
experiences in government service. And we concluded that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred [with] the passage
of time. But we had shared one experience that will never lose
its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last
Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from
the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of
frenetic activity, showing images of officious aides ripping
telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying
subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the
stillness induced by [awareness] that choices are narrowing.

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The number of those involved in decisions shrinks to [the ones] still in a position to affect events, their solitude magnified because, the more severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers there are willing to assume responsibility.

Thus it was that, on that final day in April 1975, Ford and I were quite alone; he in the Oval Office, I in the Security Advisor's suite down the hall, interrupted only by the periodic phone call as the Pentagon reported the departure of each helicopter. Freed of other duties, we had become spectators of events we could no longer influence, suspended between a pain we could not still and a future we were not yet in a position to shape.

For those who [have] lived through it, any account must appear fragmentary and dominated by the perspective of wherever the author found himself as chaos concluded two? years of American efforts. For those who were spared the

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3

turmoil and the anguish, the passions will seem
incomprehensible. Written histories of Vietnam
it (has) replicated the bitter schisms that opened up during
that tragedy. Radical critics endlessly repeat their litany of
that American bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted
psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal
aberration or sublimates it to the strident anti-communism of
new converts to conservatism who, in reality, had been on the
radical side while the war was going on, and who have their
to avoid that own reason for avoiding its memory. Reluctant to come to
grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half
century, America[ns] find it difficult to draw the line
between reasons from what America did to itself during that sad
period.

I will therefore concentrate on what America did to itself
during that sad period. The real victim of that [era] was

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American exceptionalism - the faith in the universality of our values and the impact this has had on the conduct of American foreign policy.

## Entering Indo China and Leaving It

It was the so-called "greatest generation" that entered Indo China in the heyday of American exceptionalism in pursuit of the strategy with which it had stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe, restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, American strategy concentrated on stopping Soviet aggression and economic and social progress in regions under American protection to remove communist opportunities for internal upheavals.

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Though the conduct of the Cold War is often presented as if it had been based on nearly unanimous consensus, there was always significant opposition, especially in the intellectual and academic communities. They argued either that the communist threat was exaggerated, or that the United States was associating with too many questionable regimes to sustain its claim as a defender of liberty. But their critique was confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the validity of the American experience. This is unclear. Do you man the validity of the assumptions underlying the

By the advent of the Kennedy Administration, this policy was given its most sweeping formulation in the new president's inaugural address, *when he said* that the United States would "bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." There was no opposition to that open-ended policy -- in American exceptionalism?

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commitment, or to the conventional wisdom that Indo China was
an essential outpost in the defense of liberty.

In the interregnum between presidencies, President Dwight
Eisenhower recommended to his successor military intervention
in Laos if North Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month
of his inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand,
adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though
the CIA was used for covert measures). But when Hanoi opened a
supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and
intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand
US military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1962. President
Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over
five hundred thousand by the time he left office. Again, there
was no significant opposition, either within or outside the
Administration, to that massive deployment. Though later
the decision was blamed on Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's

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closest advisers - McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara and Dean
Rusk - who urged that escalation.

By the end of the Johnson Administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous American war, wearing down the adversary by attrition, could not succeed against guerrillas defending no territory and therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor could any of the non-communist countries of Indo China be called a democracy by any stretch of the imagination. For those who had made the decision to send American troops, growing emotional insecurity and self-doubt compounded the despair and doubt about the entire political process in the wake of the assassination of their hero, John F. Kennedy.

While the leaders were seized by doubt and paralysis, the critics went ever further toward challenging the very essence of American foreign involvement. The argument that the war was

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unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits escalated almost as rapidly as the American deployment. The argument soon went beyond finding an honorable way out to the proposition that, morally, there was little difference between Hanoi and Saigon. Since they saw no moral basis for the war, the critics argued that the war reflected a pursuit of what was involved was not an error in judgment but a moral rot at the core of the American way of life. The victory of the communists in Indo China, which three administrations of both parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became for the radical protest nothing less than a desirable national catharsis. The critique moved from the worthiness of America's allies to challenging the worthiness of America, not only in Vietnam but globally. Vietnam became the first war in which prominent Americans visited the enemy capital to oppose their [own] country during highly publicized visits.

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By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines had been drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication, leaving the field to the protesters or join[ing] them in the argument that extrication was being prevented, above all, by the short-sightedness and warped mentality of America's leaders.

The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods [chosen] to pursue their aims. Indeed, they considered rules of conduct to be the invention of a system they meant to overthrow. On street demonstrations and deliberate undermining of all authorities, from universities to the US government, which they blamed for America's alleged crimes, they sought to wreck any policy designed to vindicate in Vietnam the values on which America's post-World War II policy had been based. (We have [had] a small reminder of these methods in the Seattle and Washington, using a

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D.C. protests against the global economic system.) Nixon, who for all his railing against the Establishment was a product of the "greatest generation," did not have the human qualities [with which] to transcend this gulf, if indeed it was bridgeable.

But now that all the documents and records of the negotiations are becoming available, some historians will eventually be sooner or later find obliged to credit Nixon for his untiring effort to keep from compounding defeat by dishonor. To this day, the liberal critique accuses him of needlessly prolonging the war, implying that there was some honorable way out that Nixon refused to take.

But the records show without any ambiguity that the Nixon Administration offered withdrawal, starting with its first negotiations with the Vietnamese Politburo member Le Duc Tho. What the Nixon Administration would not accept was a political

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process guaranteeing a Hanoi-dominated communist government.
The records ~~we~~ show that we sought, and offered, a variety
of formulas to permit the people of South Vietnam a genuine
choice. What we would not accept - and what, until the end,
Hanoi never ceased demanding - was the abandonment of all the
millions who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors,
had thrown in their lot with the United States. Hanoi's
rejection of any [of a] variety of free choices for the people
of Vietnam ~~is~~ was the reason ~~for the prolongation of our~~
~~was prolonged~~ extrication during Nixon's first term.

In liberal and much media rendition of events, Nixon never
receives credit for having substantially carried out his
promise of extricating America from Vietnam (which no serious
observer of his record could have interpreted as involving
unilateral withdrawal): he reduced American casualties from
twelve hundred a month at the end of the Johnson

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Administration to thirty a month at the end of Nixon's first
term; and unilaterally drew down American troops from five
hundred fifty thousand to thirty thousand. And of the twenty
thousand casualties Nixon is accused of sacrificing
needlessly, twelve thousand were incurred in the first year
of his administration,
and nine thousand in the first six months, when Hanoi
cynically greeted the new Administration with a countrywide
offensive, before the Administration was even organised.

To end the self-flagellation on Vietnam is not a question of
historical justice [toward] individual presidents, but of
historical justice [toward] a national experience. Mistakes
should be debated and admitted. But when ~~they are~~ transformed
~~any~~ into assault(s) on the entire system and the good faith of all
leaders, the national purpose ultimately suffers. America owes
itself an objective assessment of that Vietnam experience,
something~~ which has not yet happened.~~

A

N

G

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The political schism was sharpened by the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened their taste for political power. After Kennedy's assassination, they sought to shape the immediate issues from the outside, in the process splitting into two groups - the job applicants and the revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed much to helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

A

## Vietnam's Legacy

over Vietnam

The split has never been healed. The fusion of ideology and strategy of the early Cold War period has been broken. Though American exceptionalism continues to be affirmed, its

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application is subject to profound dispute. Since the Vietnam
war, there have been three main currents in American foreign
policy.

- The remnants of the Cold War strategy of the 1950s and
  1960s.

- The acolytes of the *Vietnam* protest movement, who came to high
  office themselves in the Clinton Administration.

- And, a new generation that does not remember [and] has
  [not] experienced the Vietnam schism, and [now] faces a world
  radically different from both the Cold War and the Vietnam
  protest perceptions. This generation, largely focussed on
  economic issues, has not yet developed either an ideology or a
  strategy for a world radically different from that of the Cold
  War.

The Cold War policy **combined** faith in the universality of
American values **allied** [with] a strategy to preserve and

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defend the free world until the collapse of communism, which
was considered inevitable. When Under the impact of Vietnam,
liberals and intellectuals retreated from the field of
strategy and redefined exceptionalism in terms of "soft
issues" such as environment and human rights - which could be
purposed achieved without the use of military power, (meanwhile) (traditional
American strategy was vindicated by conservatives and neo-
conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on
distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on
rigorous anti-communism and extreme toughness on negotiations
dealing with strategic balance, especially arms control
negotiations. And in the Reagan Administration, against an
adversary weakened by decades of overextension, this group achieved
great successes.

But in the aftermath of Reagan, some of his disciples
emphasize the rhetorical side of his efforts at the expense of

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in

the hard-headed strategy with which he pursued the 1980s, equivalent of a containment policy. [Yet] with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the need for a national strategy adapted to the post-Cold War world has baffled many conservatives. They seem torn - especially in the neo-conservative group - between searching for [some] equivalent danger [to] the Soviet Union, in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized; or [the pursuit of] American exceptionalism in a global crusade.

But China - the target for this effort - is as yet too weak, too unideological and its potential danger too distant to allow foreign policy to be organized on this basis or reconciled with a concert of powers. And pursuit of hegemony has always exhausted any country attempting it, both domestically and, eventually, internationally. To be true to itself, America must always stand for democracy; but to shape the world, it must also be able to understand both its

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interests and their limits, and not be afraid to define
either.

By far the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is
the conclusion the liberal community has drawn from the
Vietnam war, as exemplified by the Clinton Administration. It
treats the Cold War as a misunderstanding, if not an American
creation. ~~It recoils before the concept of national interest~~
~~and shrinks before the use of power [unless] it can~~ ~~be~~
~~presented~~ [as being] in the service of some "unselfish" cause - that is
to say, no more in the interest of America than of anyone
else. On many occasions and many continents, President Clinton
has apologized for American support of past authoritarian
leaders during what he always derogatorily describes as Cold
War preoccupations. [But] where did America suppress
~~In Africa, of the continuants~~ democratic alternatives, since almost all the first generation
leaders of Africa emerged from the independence struggle? And

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why should America apologize for hostility to an Iranian
leader who took dramatic steps threatening Western oil
supplies and legalized the Communist party in the middle of
the Korean war, when there was a legitimate fear of Stalinist
subversion in many regions of the world?

The constant apologies for fifty years of American history
are matched by an uneasiness with American power. This is
illustrated by the difference between the liberal attitude
toward the Gulf war and toward Kosovo. The Gulf war was
conducted on behalf of [a] national interest (in mandating)
uninterrupted supplies of oil for America and the industrial
democracies. But it received at best lukewarm support from
Congressional liberals and the final vote in the Senate was
very narrow.

On Kosovo, the attitudes were reversed. It was the
conservatives who asked what was wanted into the national interest and the

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liberals who insisted that the absence of a purely American interest was the ultimate justification for the enterprise. But six months later, Chechnya proved that even universalists must learn the maxim that foreign policy is the art of the possible.

By the same token, the Clinton Administration's attitude is [shown by] the differential treatment of [its] two military operations in 1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling the UN inspectors placed there at our insistence. We responded by bombing for four days. But [in 1999] they bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight days even though the traditional American national interest was far less clearly involved. And in each case, the operation was undertaken with a reluctance to accept casualties that ultimately conveyed to the American public the

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absence of any vital interest. For Americans surely would not
recoil from casualties in defense of their vital interests.

What Vietnam has bequeathed to the new generation is an
exceptionalism looking for definition, and a strategy of
slogans rather than national purpose. It is not that this
generation is obsessed by the debates of the Vietnam war, with
which it is largely unfamiliar. Nor does it have feelings of
guilt about self-interest, which it pursues strenuously in its
economic activities. But it has little knowledge of history or
of national policy and hence lacks a sense of direction in the
international political arena.

When I was in graduate school, public service was considered
a high calling. In the globalized economic world, the post-
Cold War generation looks to Wall Street as mine did to
Washington. This is not only a question of financial
renumeration but, in part, is also due to the reluctance to

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enter a calling marked by battles that leave too many victims,
and which turns too many of its political disputes into
matters of criminal law. Abdication from politics threatens
~~American exceptionalism [with] an erratic reliance on a world~~
American exceptionalism [with] an erratic reliance on a world
that runs itself by more or less automatic economic forces. It
is possible to believe this because our world has, in fact,
been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war.

And in such a world, American leaders are tempted to define
national interest in terms of instructing the rest of the
world in the advantages of free trade, non-proliferation and
human rights, and to turn negotiations into attempts to
achieve compliance with an American agenda.

When economic and military power in a democracy is coupled
with condescension and righteousness, dominance becomes
~~on other countries~~ grating and leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony -
which, nearly automatically, elicits resistance. In addition,

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the legacy of Vietnam remains [in the form of] a fear of
domestic convulsions and a recoil[ing] before the decisive use
of American power. And that, paradoxically by its very
hesitations, ends up making crises more frequent (which is why
the Clinton Administration has been drawn into more military
operations abroad than any previous administration).

The post-Vietnam generation is inheriting the intellectual
vacuum created by the paralysis left by the Vietnam factional
disputants. Economics will not provide a safe haven from the
need for a national strategy. The globalized world will emerge
with
only by way of dislocations and new tensions, both within and
among societies. The nation state remains the unit of
political accountability - even while it is itself in a
process of transition. In many regions of the world, the
_nation state_ is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic
subgroupings or by joining larger regional groupings. And the

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Yet if our new generation of national leaders is embarrassed
to deal with the concept of national interest or with the
unapologetic use of power as a last resort, it will
demonstrate not moral elevation but progressive paralysis.
Certainly any concept of national interest would not be
American if it did not derive motivation from America's
democratic tradition or its concern with collective security.
But it must also be prepared to face up to some hard questions
imposed by reality.

What for our survival must we seek to prevent no matter
how painful the means? What, to be true to ourselves, must we
seek to accomplish no matter how small the attainable
consensus and, if necessary, alone? What wrongs is it

compelled by the [national interest]?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy - or be able to
meet our new challenges - until we can achieve a national
consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect
among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the

Vietnam period, that they are engaged in a common enterprise
rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may
be able to evade these [issues] during the national campaign
about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them
once he enters the Oval Office.

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essential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not compelled by the [national interest]?

~~America~~ we will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy - or be able to meet our new challenges - until we can achieve a national consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the Vietnam period, that they are engaged in a common enterprise rather than a fight to the finish. Our political leaders may be able to evade these [issues] during the national campaign about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them once he enters the Oval Office.

TOTAL P.24

3389 WORDS

Not too long ago, former President Gerald Ford and I were
reminiscing about his Presidency and our respective
experiences in government service. We agreed that the
high points have a way of becoming blurred with the passage
of time. But we had shared one experience that will never lose
its immediacy: the pain and anguish of the day when the last
Americans and a pitiful band of refugees were evacuated from
the roof of the American embassy in Saigon.

Movies and television present great crises in terms of
frenetic activity, with official aides ripping
telephones off the hook and shouting instructions to scurrying
subordinates. In reality, crises are distinguished by the
stillness induced by that choices are narrowing.

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The number of those involved in decisions shrinks to ~~the once~~ still in a position to affect events, their solitude magnified because, the more severe the crisis, the fewer volunteers there are (willing) to assume responsibility.

For those who ~~thave~~ lived through it, any account must appear fragmentary and dominated by the perspective of wherever the author found himself as chaos (concluded) two decades of a major commitment. For those who were spared the years~~ [ ] American efforts~~

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turmoil and the anguish, the passions will seem incomprehensible. And history is no help, since the writing of it [has] replicated the bitter schisms that opened up during that tragedy. Radical critics endlessly repeat their litany of

Important bloodthirsty leaders pursuing a war to satisfy twisted psychologies. The right either ignores the war as a liberal aberration or sublimates it to the strident anti-communism of

not all (not really radical) anti-communist side while the war was going on, and who have their own reasons for avoiding its memory. Reluctant to come to grips with the most traumatic experience of the past half century, Americans find it difficult to draw the real lesson from what America did to itself during that sad period.

That, however, will be my subject here. For, one of @-will therefore concentrate on what America did to itself the most important case of (during that sad period) for the real victim of that era was

Rep

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American exceptionalism - the faith in the universality of our values - and the impact this has had on the conduct of American foreign policy.

## Entering Indo-China and Leaving It

It was what has been described as the "greatest generation" that entered Indo-China in the heyday of American exceptionalism, in pursuit of the strategy with which it had stabilized the post-World War II world, rebuilt Europe, restored Germany and Japan to the community of nations and arrested the Soviet advance into Europe and in Korea. A mixture of the experiences of World War II and a philosophy drawn from the New Deal, American strategy concentrated on stopping Soviet aggression and economic and social progress in regions under American protection to remove communist opportunities for internal subversion.

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its claim as a defender of liberty. [But their critique was confined to the wisdom of specific policies, not to the validity of the American experience.]

By the advent of the Kennedy Administration, this policy was given its most sweeping formulation in the new president's inaugural address, to the effect that the United States would "pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to assure the survival and success of liberty." There was no opposition to that open-ended

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commitment, or to the conventional wisdom that Indo-China was an essential outpost in the defense of liberty.

In the interregnum between presidencies, President Dwight Eisenhower recommended to his successor military intervention in Laos if North Vietnamese pressure continued. Within a month of his inauguration, Kennedy sent Marines to Thailand, adjoining Laos. He recoiled from intervening directly (though the CIA was used for covert measures). But when Hanoi opened a supply line to South Vietnam through Laotian territory and intensified the guerrilla war, Kennedy sent sixteen thousand US military "advisers" to South Vietnam in 1961. President Lyndon Johnson escalated this commitment until it reached over five hundred thousand by the time he left office. Again, there was no significant opposition, either within or outside the Administration, to that massive deployment. Though later on the decision was blamed on Johnson, it was in fact Kennedy's

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By the end of the Johnson Administration, frustration had set in. The strategy that had worked in every previous American war, of wearing down the adversary by attrition, could not succeed against guerrillas defending no territory and therefore in a position to choose when and where to fight. Nor

we were defending in
(Could any of the non-communist countries be) Indo-China live up to the
highwest Standard of democracy.
(called a democracy by any stretch of the imagination.) For

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unwinnable and that the cost of the war exceeded its benefits escalated almost as rapidly as the American deployment. The argument soon left the plane of how to find an honorable way out to the proposition that, morally, there was little (as that Hanoi was morally superior). difference between Hanoi and Saigon, since they saw no moral basis for the war, the critics argued that pursuit of (what was involved) was not an error in judgment but a moral rot at the core of the American way of life. (The Victory of the communists in Indo-China, which three administrations of both parties had sought to prevent for nearly two decades, became for the radical protest nothing less than a desirable national catharsis. The critique expanded from the worthiness of America's allies to (challenging) the worthiness of America, not only in Vietnam but globally. Vietnam became the first war in which prominent Americans (visited) the enemy capital to oppose their (own) country (during highly publicized (visits))

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By the time Richard Nixon became President, the battle lines were drawn. The demoralized Establishment, which had launched us into the quagmire, abdicated from the task of extrication.

They left the field to the protesters, or joining them in the immediate argument that extrication was prevented, above all, by the

short-sightedness and warped mentality of America's leaders. The new administration.

The radical protesters, certain of their moral superiority, saw no need for restraint in the methods chosen to pursue

their aims. Indeed, they considered rules of conduct as the invention of a system they meant to overthrow. By street

not might be vindicated in Vietnam the values on which America's

entire post-World War II foreign policy had been based. (We have had a small reminder of these methods in the Seattle and Washington,

recently)

9

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D.C. protests against the global economic system.) Nixon, who for all his railing against the Establishment was a product of the "greatest generation," did not have the human qualities [with which] to transcend this gulf, if indeed it was bridleable.

But now that [all the] documents and records of the negotiations are becoming available, some historians will sooner or later feel obliged to credit Nixon for his untiring effort to keep from compounding defeat by dishonor. To this day, the liberal critique accuses him of needlessly prolonging the war, implying that there was some honorable way out that Nixon refused to take.

as a negotiated outcome

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11
(Proceedings guaranteeing) Hanoi-dominated communist government.

The records will show that we sought, and offered, a variety
of formulas to permit the people of South Vietnam a genuine
choice. What we would not accept - and what, until the end,
Hanoi never ceased demanding - was our simple
millions who, in reliance on the words of our predecessors,
had thrown in their lot with the United States. Hanoi's

admirant

rejection of any ~~for~~ a variety of ~~free choices for~~ the people

South

of Vietnam is the reason for the prolongation of our

Nixon does
(Anecdotal and much media tendition of events) Nixon never
receives credit for having pulled U.S. forces
out of Vietnam gradually but steadily while a negotiated
promise of extricating America from Vietnam (which no serious
compromise was being pursued.)

observer of his record could have interpreted as involving
unilateral withdrawal. He reduced American casualties from
twelve hundred a month at the end of the Johnson

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12

Administration to thirty a month at the end of Nixon's first term; and unilaterally withdrew American troops from five hundred fifty thousand to thirty thousand. And of the twenty thousand casualties Nixon is accused of "sacrificing needlessly," twelve thousand were incurred in the first year[s] and nine thousand in the first six months, when Hanoi cynically greeted the new Administration with a countrywide offensive, before the Administration was even organized.

A balanced judgment (for-end the self-flagellation) on Vietnam is not a question of historical justice [toward] individual presidents, but of truth about historical justice [toward] a national experience. Mistakes should be debated and admitted. But when they are transformed into assaults on the entire system and the good faith of all leaders, the national purpose ultimately suffers. America owes itself an objective assessment of that Vietnam experience, which has not yet happened.

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The political schism was sharpened by the intellectual community. When I was in graduate school, intellectuals rarely achieved high positions in government. If they wanted to affect policy, they had to write lengthy papers on longer-range issues. The Kennedy Administration awakened their taste for political power, and soon after Kennedy's assassination they began to shape the immediate issue from the outside. In the process splitting into two groups - the job applicants and the revolutionaries. The job applicants replicated the debates of the policymakers, and the revolutionaries the arguments of the protest movement. In either case, they contributed little to helping America overcome the tragedy of Vietnam.

## Vietnam's Legacy

The split has never been healed. The fusion of ideology and strategy has sustained us in the early Cold War period has been broken. Though American exceptionalism continues to be affirmed, its

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- The acolytes of the protest movement, who came to high
office themselves in the Clinton Administration.

- And, a new generation that does not remember [and] has
[not]-experienced the Vietnam schism, and [now] faces a world
radically different from both the Cold War and the Vietnam
protest perceptions. This generation, largely focussed on
economic issues, has not yet developed either an ideology or a
strategy for a world radically different from that of the Cold
War.

The Cold War policy combined faith in the universality of
American values (allied) with a strategy to preserve and
"contain" further
complet

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encroachments. 15
( days the free world until the collapse of communism, which
was considered inevitable. When) Under the impact of Vietnam, how-
literals and intellectuals retreated from the field of
over time, the American
strategy, and redefined exceptionalism in terms of "soft
issues" such as environment and human rights - which could be
achieved without the use of military power, ? Traditional
vindicated
not the
best
war
still upheld
American strategy was indicated by conservatives and neo-
conservatives. Always uncomfortable with commitments on
distant battlefields, the American right concentrated on
rigorous anti-communism and extreme toughness on abstract
negotiations
dealing with strategic balance, especially arms control.
( negotiations ) And in the Reagan Administration, against an
adversary weakened by decades of overextension, it achieved
great successes.

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seem torn - especially in the neo-conservative group - between
overwhelming
searching for some (equivalent) danger [to] the Soviet Union,
in opposition to which all foreign policy can be organized; or

else viriditas for democracy,
the pursuit of American exceptionalism in a global crusade,

allow foreign policy to be organized on this basis (especially if
we wish to have allies with us).
reconciled with a concert of powers. And pursuit of hegemony

Obscure

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By far the greatest challenge to American foreign policy is the conclusion the liberal community has drawn from the Vietnam war, as exemplified by the Clinton Administration. It treats the Cold War as a misunderstanding, if not an American creation. It recoils before the concept of national interest and shrinks before the use of power [unless] it can present it [as being] in the service of some "unselfish" cause - that is to say, no more in the interest of America than of anyone else. On many occasions [and many continents], President Clinton has apologized for American support of past authoritarian leaders [due to being] in Africa during what he always derogatorily describes as "Cold War preoccupations." [But] where did America suppress democratic alternatives, since almost all the first-generation leaders of Africa emerged from the independence struggle? And

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18

why should America apologize for hostility to an Iranian
democrat who took dramatic steps threatening Western oil
supplies and legalized the Communist party in the middle of
the Korean war, when there was a legitimate fear of Stalinist
subversion in many regions of the world?

The constant apologies for fifty years of American history
are matched by an uneasiness with American power. This is
illustrated by the difference between the liberal attitude
toward the Gulf war and toward Kosovo. The Gulf war was
conducted on behalf of [a] national interest (mandating)
uninterrupted supplies of oil for America and the industrial
democracies. But it received at best lukewarm support from
Congressional liberals, and the final vote in the Senate was
very narrow.

On Kosovo, the attitudes were reversed. It was the
conservatives who inquired into the national interest and the

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19

Just as symptomatic of its (now by the same token, the Clinton Administration's attitude is formation by the) differential treatment of its two military operations in 1998-99. In December 1998, Iraq inflicted a strategic defeat on us by expelling the UN inspectors placed there at our insistence. We responded by bombing for four days. But [in 1999] we bombed Yugoslavia for seventy eight days even though the traditional American national interest was far less clearly involved. And in each case, the operation was undertaken with a reluctance to accept casualties which ultimately conveyed to the American public the

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GOLDHAMMER

1001

(1)

21

entered a calling marked by battles that leave too many victims, and which turns too many of its political disputes into matters of criminal law. This complexity of American exceptionalism (with) an eristic reliance on a world that: runs itself by more or less automatic economic forces. It is possible to believe this because our world has, in fact, been freed to a large extent of the dangers of general war. And in such a world, American leaders may imagine that saving policy consists merely in national interest in terms of instructing the rest of the world in the advantages of free trade, non-proliferation and human rights, turning demands for (and to turn) negotiations into attempts to achieve compliance with an American agenda.

Such vast economic and military power in a democracy is coupled with condescension and righteousness, dominance becomes grating and leadership comes to be perceived as hegemony - which, nearly automatically, elicits resistance. Meanwhile, in addition,

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the legacy of Vietnam remains [in the form of] a fear of
domestic convulsions and a recoil[ing] before the decisive use
of American power, [and that] paradoxically, by its very
hesitations, ends up making crises more frequent (which is why
the Clinton Administration has been drawn into more military
operations abroad than any previous administration).

Thus
The post-Vietnam generation is inheriting the intellectual
vacuum created by the paralysis left by the Vietnam factional
disputants. Economics will not provide a safe haven from the
need for a national strategy. The globalized world will emerge
only by way of dislocations and new tensions, both within and
among societies. The nation state remains the unit of
political accountability - even while it is itself in a
process of transition. In many regions of the world, the
nation state is breaking down, either into hitherto ethnic
subgroupings or by joining larger regional groupings. And the

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23
proliferation of weapons of mass destruction represents a
challenge faced by no previous society.

What, for our survival, must we seek to prevent no matter
how painful the means? What, to be true to ourselves, must we
seek to accomplish no matter how small the attainable
consensus and, if necessary, alone? What wrongs is it

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24
--
esential that we right? Which are beyond our capacity or not
compelled by the [national interest]?

We will not have overcome the Vietnam legacy - or be able to
meet our new challenges - until we can achieve a national
consensus on these issues. And this requires mutual respect
among the disputants and a conviction, nearly lost in the
Vietnam period, that they are engaged in a common enterprise
rather than a fight to the finish.) Our political leaders may
be able to evade these issues during the national campaign
about to begin. But the winner will not be able to escape them
once he enters the Oval Office.

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