The Vietnam War (1964–73) was a traumatic
event for the US with a divided nation los-ing more than 48,000 dead and
300,000 wounded. The US only intervened after the former colonial master in
Vietnam, France, pulled out in 1954 after losing the battle of Dien Bien Phu to
the northern, communist, national liberation army (NLA). In 1955 it was agreed
at an international conference in Geneva to divide Vietnam into a
communist-controlled north and a ‘‘free’’ south Vietnam. After a few years of
uneasy truce, the communist guerrilla movement in the south (the Vietcong as
the Americans called them) became more active, winning support and controlling
large swathes of the countryside.
Presidents
Kennedy and Johnson increased the number of US troops in Vietnam in the hope
that, together with the South Vietnamese army, they could defeat the
charismatic North Vietnamese leader, Ho Chi Minh, the NLA, and the Vietcong,
thus preventing a communist takeover not only of South Vietnam but all of
Southeast Asia. American strategists contended that if South Vietnam fell to
communism, then other countries would fall like ‘‘dominoes.’’ As American
casualties mounted during the late 1960s, without any sign that the US was
winning the war, there were massive student protests around the US. The
domestic turmoil did not help President Johnson who, after a poor performance
in the New Hampshire primary, announced that he would not seek re-election in
the 1968 pre-sidential election. Richard Nixon won the election narrowly on a
pledge to end the war (Nixon 1981). He sent his national security adviser,
Henry Kissinger, to negotiate a peace agreement with North Vietnam, while
simultaneously and secretly widening the war to neighboring Cambodia.
As
the peace negotiations dragged on for several years, the bitter fighting
continued with consequent widespread domestic opposition to the war in the US. Eventually a ceasefire agreement was signed that
permitted all American forces to leave Vietnam in January 1973. Two years
later, with President Nixon having in the meantime resigned in disgrace over a
domestic political scandal (the Watergate affair that involved concealing a
break-in at Democratic party offices), the war finally ended with the fall of
Saigon resulting in victory for the North.
The
fall of Saigon signified an ignominious American defeat that left scars for more
than a generation. It showed that massive protests could bring about a change
of policy although some argue that the protests actually lengthened the war as
they inhibited American leaders from using all means (nuclear weapons, invading
North Vietnam) that might have won the war (Garfinkle 1995). It also showed the
influence of the media as Vietnam was the first television war. Democrats and
Republicans alike bore responsi-bility for the failure to understand that the
National Liberation Front had wide appeal in the south and that military force
alone could neither subdue nor win the minds and hearts of the population. The
US bombing of Vietnam and associated atrocities brought wide-spread
condemnation around the world and caused considerable, lasting harm to America’s
image abroad. At home, the term ‘‘Vietnam syndrome’’ entered the vocabu-lary,
meaning that the US should never again engage in military conflict far from home
without clear, viable, political objectives, public support and an exit
strategy for the military.
There
were various stages of the Cold War that resulted in periods of high tension
and periods of de´tente between the US and the Soviet Union. One of the most
dangerous periods was the ‘‘thirteen days’’ of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962
when President Kennedy faced down the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, over
the issue of Soviet missiles being installed in communist Cuba (R. Kennedy
1966; Allison and Zelikow 1999). One of the most significant periods of de´tente
was during Richard Nixon’s presidency when the US engaged in several rounds of
arms control negotiations with the Soviet Union (Kissinger 1979). The Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan in 1979 gave rise to a further period of confrontation with the
US supporting groups in Afghanistan fighting to restore the country’s
independence. (This policy would later come back to haunt the US as it armed
the Mujaheddin resistance whose numbers included Osama bin Laden. When the
Soviet Union pulled out in 1989, the US did not provide any significant economic
assistance to Afghanistan and it dissolved into semi-anarchy allowing the
Taliban to take control.) There was also renewed tension in Europe lead-ing to
the installation of short- and intermediate-range nuclear weapons on both sides
of the Iron Curtain and the US and the Soviet Union boycotting the respective
Olym-pic Games in Moscow in 1980 and Los Angeles in 1984.
In
1985, however, the accession to power in Moscow of Mikhail Gorbachev opened the
prospect for an end to the Cold War. He withdrew Soviet forces from
Afghanistan; stated that Moscow would not use the Red Army to support communist
governments in Eastern Europe; and his policies of glasnost (openness) and
perestroika (economicreform) led to fundamental changes in the Soviet Union.
President Reagan, who bran-ded the Soviet Union ‘‘the evil empire,’’ also
contributed to the collapse of the Soviet
system by being ready to launch a new space arms race (star wars),
something he knew that the bankrupt Soviet economy could not
afford (LaFeber 2002). Strangely, the US was not directly involved in any of
the seminal events that led to the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin
Wall in November 1989, the ‘‘velvet revolutions’’ in Eastern Europe, and the
collapse of the Soviet system in 1990–1. The end of the Cold War was a
demonstration of the new-found importance of ‘‘people power.’’ Indeed the US,
and its huge, expensive intelligence agencies, had failed to predict the sudden
collapse of communism. It was rather a stunned Washington that surveyed the new
post-Cold War world, free from the Soviet threat (Beschloss and Talbott 1993).
Many
wondered how the US would react after it was suddenly deprived of the enemy that
had dominated US foreign policy thinking and structures for over forty years.
Perhaps because the collapse of communism came so quickly, and perhaps because
President George H. W. Bush was such an establishment figure, there was no
questioning of the continuing rationale for the Cold War national security
structures that had been established back in 1947. There were no substantial
changes either to the military or to the
intelligence services. There was no re-organization of the NSC, the State
Department, and other executive branch agencies. Nor was there any real
pressure from Congress or the public to do so. According to one member of the
Bush administration, ‘‘there were too many vested interests in maintaining the
status quo.’’ Even the think tanks found it difficult to adjust to the new world
that was no longer black and white but different shades of gray. The US had
established a small army of Cold War specialists, Russian linguists, Red Army
analysts, nuclear deterrence theorists, professors of communism, agents and double-agents.
They had devoted their life to the Cold War. What would they do now?
 was a traumatic event for the US with a divided nation los-ing more than 48,000 dead and 300,000...){kind=link}
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