Posted on 02/25/2003 9:18:04 AM PST by mrustow
Toogood Reports [Tuesday, February 25, 2003; 12:01 a.m. EST]
URL: http://ToogoodReports.com/
For over forty years, America pursued the foreign policy, first developed in an anonymously penned, 1947 article by George Kennan (as "X," in what was probably the most important article ever published in the journal Foreign Affairs), of the "containment" of Soviet communism. One of the factors that made containment workable was the very bifurcation of the world that the policy addressed. A world without an Iron Curtain, is a world without containment.
Containment Theory was heavily influenced by World War II, in which Nazi Germany toppled one European country after another.
Soon after Containment Theory was adopted by the Truman Administration, one of its implications – the "Domino Theory" – took on a life of its own. According to the Domino Theory, a political variation on the ancient "slippery slope" argument, if a government was toppled by communism, it would in turn topple neighboring governments, leading eventually to communist world domination.
Containment/Domino Theory's supporters tacitly held to the deeply pessimistic expectation that once a nation fell to the communists, it would stay that way.
At the time, socialists, communists, and most conservatives believed in the "Domino Theory." The socialists and communists believed in it, because they believed in the Marxist theory of history, according to which socialism was inevitable. Many anti-communists (including conservatives) believed in it, because they thought that liberal democracy, with its division of powers, was ill-equipped to fight a system that imposed total unity through total oppression. Some parties sought to help the dominoes fall, others to keep them upright.
Some observers, particularly those with little sense of history, now find it easy to sneer at Domino Theory. At the time, however, the theory offered great explanatory power, few people disagreed with it, and few thinkers offered credible alternative theories. And as we shall see, the theory still has great explanatory power.
In 1995, former secretary of defense Robert McNamara announced in his memoir, In Retrospect, that he had secretly known, during the Johnson Administration, that we could not win in Vietnam, and needed to pull out. On February 28, 1968, McNamara resigned from the Defense Department, to run the World Bank. Since he had said nothing, and done nothing to make such observations public in 1968, or at any other time during the war, and 41,000 American boys died after he resigned from Defense, many people who heard or read McNamara's 1995 statement considered him a mass murderer.
In a 1995 talk at Harvard, McNamara granted that long after Vietnam was lost, many old geopolitical hands never stopped believing the war had been worth all the cost in blood and treasure, to slow down communist imperialism.
"Now, where is such high cost justified? [Kennedy/Johnson secretary of state] Dean Rusk, who was a dear friend of mine, an outstanding patriot, a servant of our country in war and peace, until he died... believed the answer to the QUESTION were the costs justified, he goes, 'Yes.' And I believe that many geo-politicians living today, including Walt Rostow, for example, who was President Johnson's National Security Advisor, and including that extraordinary Prime Minister of Singapore, Lee Kwan Yoo, I believe many of these geo-politicians would agree with Dean Rusk today, say the costs were justified.
"And the reason they would say that is that they conclude that without U.S. intervention in Vietnam, the communists ... both Soviet and Chinese, would have spread farther through South and East Asia, and would have taken control of Laos and Cambodia and Thailand and Malaysia, Indonesia, and perhaps even India. And some would go further and say that in that case the USSR would have been led to take greater risks attempting to extend its influence crossing into Western Europe and they might even have tried in the Middle East to take control of the oil producing nations. Now, I don't share those judgments....
"But, having said that, I want to stress that the danger of communist aggression during the four decades after World War II, during 1950's, 60's, 70's and 80's was very real and very substantial."
So, McNamara disbelieved Rusk, Rostow, Yoo & Co. ... and having said that, he believed them. How about that, for covering your butt?
In retrospect, McNamara felt that we never had a chance in Vietnam, because although he believed in the Domino Theory at the beginning of U.S. intervention, he didn't believe the South Vietnamese were capable of defending themselves, and both conditions needed to be fulfilled, in order for American intervention to make any sense.
About the same time as McNamara, the father of Containment/Domino Theory, George Kennan, also developed a case of acute 20/20 hindsight regarding Containment/Domino Theory, but as with McNamara, there is no evidence of Kennan ever having displayed foresight during the 1960s.
Observations as to the impossibility of our succeeding in South Vietnam may sound so obvious today to young people and tenured academics, as to beg the question as to why we ever considered intervening there. The answer is that there was nothing obvious about the observations at the time, or at least no clear policy conclusions that could be drawn from them. Americans (and not just Americans) who observed the world, tended to jump back and forth between two mutually contradictory positions: 1. We were living in an "American Century" as Time magazine publisher Henry Luce had put it in a famous, widely circulated 1941 editorial: "It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world," and 2. That communism was an ineluctable force that could perhaps be withstood, but not toppled.
Communism seemed to many people unbeatable, though one did not express such pessimism publicly. I recall as an 11-year old in 1969 or so, and remarking to a classmate after school that we couldn't beat the Soviets, because they had such perfect unity. Well, words to that effect.
Rather than talk about the South Vietnamese Army's lack of heart, Americans expressed awe of the Viet Cong guerrillas operating in South Vietnam, who never quit. People tended to interpret the VC's relentless will to fight as being based on their absolute belief in communism. I think, however, that the VC were simply stone killers who believed in nothing in particular, but that totalitarianism – any brand will do – encourages those in power to be conscienceless stone-killers. The totalitarian ideology imbues its followers with a belief in their own omnipotence, which derives from the apparent omnipotence of their state. (Apparent, that is, until proven otherwise.) The American observers who said that the VC did not value life – Vietnamese or American – were right. The South Vietnamese soldiers, on the other hand, did not want to die.
The American pessimism was not new: Between the world wars, fascists, Nazis, and communists all informed the world that free societies had no chance at beating dictatorships; the latter had unity of purpose and resoluteness, while the former were crippled by the indecisive discussion societies (legislatures) that ran them. (The most famous such critic was fascist (but not Nazi) German political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), the Mephistopheles of the Modern State, who did his bit to help topple the Weimar Republic (1919-1933), the "republic without republicans," with a series of brilliant pamphlets and books, including Political Romanticism, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, Political Theology and The Concept of the Political.)
And so, I believe that it was possible to recognize the apparent contradiction between belief in the Domino Theory, and a lack of faith in a nation's will to beat the communists, and yet still opt for war. The alternative was to fold in the face of the communist juggernaut.
America and Britain triumphed over the Axis powers in World War II, but only with the help of the most genocidal dictatorship of the 20th century, the Soviet Union. The notion that a free society is always at a disadvantage in confronting a dictatorship persisted through the Cold War confrontation with communism, and retains its vigor today, in Islam's war against the West.
To comment on this article or express your opinion directly to the author, you are invited to e-mail Nicholas at adddda@earthlink.net .
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