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I signed off last week with the promise of more to come on the risk to American credibility worldwide of a U.S. failure, or even, as Secretary of Defense Gates suggested, a perceived failure, in either Afghanistan or Iraq. Gates has declared that either one would be “disastrous.” I was in the process of examining the impact of the U.S. defeat in Vietnam in the 1970s as a useful tool in assessing that claim.
It is clear that America’s final defeat in Vietnam in 1975 was anything but disastrous to U.S. standing in the world. Why was that the case, especially given the fact that the event combined with several others of the decade to give an appearance to many of us (myself prominently included) that the nation’s prospects were anything but bright?
One explanation is that the United States was fortunate in the nature of its primary enemy, the Soviet Union, a military behemoth at the moment flush with foreign exchange from the export of oil and natural gas, but declining in leadership of the communist camp and ideological appeal in the Third World, burdened by a stultifying political and economic structure and huge military spending, and led by aging, unimaginative men. This was not fully apparent at the time, even to Western experts on the Soviet Union, a point that should remind us to be wary of overestimating our enemies in the present.
Another explanation is that American leaders did not overreact to their circumstances. On the one hand, they did not lash out at enemies in an attempt to make up for the nation’s setback(s). The administrations of Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter resisted numerous temptations to take military action that might have embroiled the United States in other quagmires. On the other hand, they did not retreat from a position of international leadership. Drastic cutbacks did not occur in American defense spending, nor did the United States seek to withdraw from or weaken its commitment to alliance partners. The two exceptions to the latter generalization, Taiwan and South Korea, turned out to be more apparent than real. In the first case, the U.S. withdrawal from its military pact occurred in the context of the normalization of relations with China, a determined and powerful enemy of the Soviet Union, and it was qualified by a statement of the principle that any settlement of the division of the country should be by peaceful means, a none-to-subtle message that an attack by China on the island would induce a sharp response. In the second case, when President Carter tried to withdraw all U.S. ground troops, key elements in the national security bureaucracy and Congress mobilized to force him to retreat.
A third factor is that America’s key alliance partners in western Europe and Japan had nowhere else to go. They had a much better chance of deterring a Soviet attack and maintaining their economic prosperity through their alliances with the United States than alone. In the end, they understood that abandonment by the United States of Vietnam said little about its commitment to its most powerful and strategically important allies.
A fourth factor is the general health of the American economy, which after the early 1970s had little to do with the U.S. role in Vietnam, but which had much to do with the ability of the United States to project a strong image abroad. Important keys to that health was the degree of American dependence on foreign sources of energy, the location of those sources, and their price. While the United States was slow to adjust to OPEC’s new aggressiveness, beginning in 1973, and probably suffered more from that delayed reaction for the rest of the decade than it did from its abandonment of South Vietnam, by 1983 it had significantly reduced its dependence on oil from that source, in part through a strong move toward more fuel-efficient cars and the development of sources of oil and natural gas elsewhere. That trend had reversed itself by the late 1980s, but it made no immediate difference because by that time oil prices had sharply declined. Meanwhile, the increasing growth of high technology industries had provided another source of U.S. economic (not to mention military) strength.
Finally, and also largely in response to pressure from OPEC, the United States became far more active diplomatically in trying to resolve issues between Israel and its enemies. That effort led to Isreal’s settlement with Egypt, a breakthrough of considerable strategic importance, and gave the United States the image of honest broker among significant populations in the Middle East.
No two historical events or circumstances are identical, of course. Some of the differences between the 1970s and the present actually appear to advantage the United States now over then. For instance, there is no military threat to American interests abroad comparable to that of the Soviet Union in the 1970s; and the technology available today to help reduce U.S. dependence on foreign energy, while far from adequate, is well in advance of what existed in the earlier decade. On the other hand, the absence of the Soviet threat today makes management of America’s alliances a good deal more difficult, and a substantial reduction in U.S. dependence on foreign energy, even from the Persian Gulf area, will take considerable time. In addition, the foreign indebtedness of the United States and its domestic economic condition are a good deal worse than they were in the 1970s. If the Soviet threat has disappeared, economic competition has become much more threatening, although its multiple sources reduces somewhat the overall implications.
What the comparison with Vietnam and the 1970s does is to caution us against panic, and hopefully the use of such words as “disastrous” to characterize the stakes of specific challenges such as Iraq and Afghanistan. There are things we can and should do to reduce the odds of defeat in those two cases, but there are also limits to the resources we can afford to invest in them to avoid that outcome. And while we are striving to do just that, there are others things we can and should be doing to strengthen ourselves down the road, whatever our success or failure in current wars. Two immediately come to mind, based on the experience of the 1970s: get serious about moving toward energy independence and adjust our position toward Israel and the Palestinians in an effort to regain our earlier reputation.
Credibility is a tricky concept, with different meanings and implications in different circumstances. Yet if our past experience with credibility is any guide, its significance in relation to Iraq and Afghanistan will be determined no more by the outcomes there than by our actions at home and in other places. In the midst of the Chinese offensive against the United States and its allies in Korea in late 1950, an event that in itself was a huge blow to American credibility and threatened to get worse, George F. Kennan wrote a memo to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, with whom he was not on the best of terms:
In international, as in private, life what counts most is not really what happens to someone but how he bears what happens to him…. Almost everything depends from here on out on the manner in which we Americans bear what is unquestionably a major failure and disaster to our national fortunes. If we accept it with candor, with resolve to absorb its lessons and to make it good by redoubled and determined effort … we need lose niether our self-confidence nor our allies nor our power for bargaining, eventually, with the Russians {sic}. But if we try to conceal from our own people or from our allies the full measure of our misfortune, or permit ourselves to seek relief in any reactions of bluster or petulance or hysteria, we can easily find this crisis resolving itself into an irreparable deterioration of our world position–and of our confidence in ourselves.
Robert Gates and others determined to avoid defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan would do well to take this advice to heart, not only in striving to develop favorable solutions in those places but in working to develop policies elsewhere that can compensate for potential failures there. In the end, the self-discipline and sophistication of the American people in addressing the energy issue is likely to have a more enduring impact on American credibility worldwide than ambiguous outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Tags: Afghanistan, iraq, Jimmy Carter, Vietnam
William Stueck
William Stueck is Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Georgia. He is currently writing a history of U.S.-Korean relations. He is the author of, among other works, Rethinking the Korean War (Princeton University P, 2002) and The Korean War: An International History (Princeton U, 1995).