Conservative Realism and Vietnam

Modern Age: A Conservative Review. ^ | May 2025 | Francis P. Sempa

[CondoleezzaProtege]

April 30, 2025 marked the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon and America’s ultimate defeat in the Vietnam War...Many conservatives supported the Vietnam War because it was a war against communism and a regime supplied and funded by the Soviet Union and Communist China.

The American left opposed the war mainly because its members viewed America as the aggressor in the conflict, while praising the revolutionary regime of Ho Chi Minh...

There were a few conservative realists who, to their credit, opposed the Vietnam War early on for practical, not ideological, reasons.

- Harry Morgenthau
- Walter Lippmann
- George F. Kennan

The United States, Lippmann wrote, was not a “global fire department appointed to stop communism everywhere.”

In the post–Cold War era, the United States abandoned conservative realism by intervening in the Balkans in the 1990s, expanding NATO, and fighting “endless wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan and a global war on terror to spread democracy throughout the world. We promoted the notion of an “Arab Spring” in the Middle East, which only spread terror and chaos. We sponsored a “color revolution” in Ukraine and publicly urged Ukraine’s admission to NATO, which produced the worst aspects of Russian nationalism and imperialism, as George Kennan predicted it would.

We have gone abroad in search of monsters to destroy against the sound advice of conservative realists. Fears of World War III have grown. Let's hope it's not too late.

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TOPICS: History; Military/Veterans
KEYWORDS: conservative; foreignpolicy; realism; vietnam

[CondoleezzaProtege]

Nixon understood - that even an imperfect “peace” in Vietnam would free the United States to pursue more important global interests.

[kawhill]

“President Johnson campaigned in the 1964 election with the promise not to escalate the war. “We are not about to send American boys 9 or 10,000 miles away from home to do what Asian boys ought to be doing for themselves,” he said.” How did that workout LBJ?

[ansel12]

While Nixon fought the war through both of his presidential terms, it was the democratic left that kept cutting him off from a position of strength in Vietnam and let South
Vietnam fall.

[Mark]

I left there before the fall and a lot of people made a lot of money supplying all of the equipment needed to fight that war.

[DIRTYSECRET]

John Kerry profited off it politically.

[dfwgator]

And yet history classes teach that Nixon started the war, as if LBJ never even existed.

[dfwgator]

“I was told if I voted for Goldwater, we’d have riots in the streets, and we’d get in a long unwinnable war. Well I voted for Goldwater, and darn if they weren’t right!”

[dfwgator]

The American left opposed the war mainly because its members viewed America as the aggressor in the conflict, while praising the revolutionary regime of Ho Chi Minh...

[Fedora]

“There were a few conservative realists who, to their credit, opposed the Vietnam War early on for practical, not ideological, reasons.

- Harry Morgenthau
- Walter Lippmann
- George F. Kennan”

None of these were conservative. Henry Morgenthau funneled money to Stalin and the Chicoms at the behest of Soviet agent Harry Dexter White. Walter Lippmann started his career as part of the Soviet-friendly Dupont Circle Salon and was close to Soviet agent of influence Felix Frankfurter. Kennan was a disillusioned Stalinist who became anti-Soviet but retained his basic liberal orientation—during the Vietnam protests, he joined forces with anti-war Senator J. William Fulbright, who was being monitored for contact with the Soviet embassy. The rest of the article has similar issues.

[griswold3]

Thanks.