August 2006 Newsletter

Review of Gareth Porter’s Perils of Dominance
By Anne L. Foster, Indiana State University

At first I thought Gareth Porter’s new book was going to be the latest entry in the long line of publications asking, essentially, “why Vietnam?” The title suggests as much, and the introductory material Porter presents reflects his sense that existing interpretations of the U.S. military commitment to Vietnam do not fit the facts as he understands them. Porter has also spent much of his career thinking and writing about the nature of the U.S. involvement with Vietnam. After reading the book, however, I began to think it is instead one of the first entries in what will probably be a long, although probably less long, line of “why Iraq?” publications. Given the book’s lengthy period of gestation, it clearly began as an attempt to ask why the United States went to war in Vietnam, but Porter realized that his subject would be useful for understanding the decision to go to war in Iraq as well.

Each time a new article or book appears on the U.S. war in Vietnam or on the broader topic, increasingly popular now, of U.S.–Vietnamese relations, it occurs to me that there may be enough of these studies. We now have a wide range of approaches to the subject, profound knowledge about the creation and implementation of U.S. foreign and military policies, growing knowledge about the policies of U.S. allies and of Cold War rivals, and the beginnings of greater knowledge about what went on in the governments of Vietnam. A high percentage of the leading scholars in U.S. foreign relations currently research or have written seriously in the past on the Vietnam War era. An abbreviated list would include Lloyd Gardner, Fredrik Logevall, Robert Buzzanco, Robert Shulzinger, Robert McMahon, Marilyn Young, Mark Bradley, Robert Brigham, David Anderson, George Herring, Sandra Taylor, Seth Jacobs, Mark Lawrence, and Gary Hess. And the subject remains compelling to a new generation of scholars. Many of those listed above were born during the war and do not have the compelling personal connection to it that older scholars do.[1]

As I read each new study, however, I am struck by the vibrancy of the intellectual exchange in this field, which seems to attract able, creative scholars. These scholars have been in the forefront of some of the most exciting trends in the history of foreign relations: they have led the way in focusing attention on the international history of the war, in studying Vietnamese policies (once it became possible to conduct research in Vietnam), in exploring the cultural aspects of the relationship between the United States and Vietnam, and in thinking seriously about the effect of the war on the United States and about what the creation and implementation of U.S. policy reveals about the country more generally. Their scholarship has also been motivated by a hope that policymakers will learn from what most scholars believe was a tragic mistake, and many of them explicitly attempt to teach the lessons of the war while at the same time producing history of great integrity.

Porter’s book shares some of these strengths. He has creatively used theory from international relations about the relationship between peace and the balance of power in the world and, as in the case of Vietnam, war and the imbalance of power. The argument he makes, briefly, is that the United States held vastly more military power than its rivals during the 1950s and 1960s, and this imbalance of power emboldened U.S. national security officials to call for war in Vietnam. They believed that the United States would win and that there would be no cost to intervention. Porter claims that, contrary to popular perception, what kept the United States from full military commitment until the mid-1960s were the fears of three successive presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, that military power would not be effective in Vietnam. He argues that these presidents did not desire war in Vietnam, but that the national security bureaucracy wanted it and maneuvered deftly and persistently to get it. On a broader level, he concludes that foreign policymaking in the United States is dysfunctional and undemocratic, since the elected leader of the country was unable, in three successive administrations, to get the bureaucracy to carry out his wishes. This dysfunction is directly linked to the global imbalance of power, since it gave (and in the post-Cold War era still gives) national security officials irrational confidence. Clearly, Porter fits directly into that admirable tradition of creative and skilled Vietnam War scholars who are motivated by a strong desire to promote a more democratic and peaceful U.S. foreign policy.

The question of “why Vietnam?” still lingers, however. Porter persuasively argues that there was a global imbalance of military power during most of the 1950s and 1960s. He provides ample evidence that many U.S. policymakers were at least at times emboldened by this imbalance of power and shows that they applied analysis that was informed by their assessment of that imbalance to the situation in Vietnam. But does he shed light on “why Vietnam?”

Porter pursues what has now come to be a somewhat old-fashioned approach, focusing on what happened in offices in Washington, D.C., almost to the exclusion of what happened anywhere else in the world. And to the extent that Porter is interested in foreign capitals, those are Beijing and Moscow, not Hanoi and especially not Saigon. If he is correct, of course, there is little that either government in Vietnam could have done to change U.S. policy. Indeed, the government that receives the least attention in his book, that of the Republic of Vietnam, perhaps did the most to push the United States toward war, albeit inadvertently. Porter’s narrative demonstrates that whenever officials from the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) explored possible negotiations or a neutralist solution, the U.S. national security bureaucracy went into high gear to do whatever it took to stop them.

Yet that example demonstrates one of the ways in which Porter does not help us better understand “why Vietnam?” All the participants in the conflict, but especially both governments in Vietnam, could have done more to shape the course of U.S. policy there. The RVN could have insisted on pursuing negotiations and could have invited the United States to leave, as many U.S. officials feared they would. The Democratic Republic of Vietnam could have pursued the case for the 1956 elections more strongly in the United Nations, creating a difficult public relations situation for the United States. I raise these examples not to engage in counterfactual speculation, but to show that whatever the thoughts of U.S. officials about the degree of U.S. military power, it had to be usable and effective in the eyes of the United States and, to a lesser degree, its allies and even its enemies.

Porter’s analysis of the nature of Cold War and post–Cold War foreign policy is incisive and disturbing in its implications. Yet while it does suggest why Vietnam was likely to become a military conflict, it does not show why it actually became a military conflict. Porter demonstrates convincingly, often using novel analysis and impressive research, that the national security bureaucracy believed war was a good solution in Vietnam. Was Vietnam the only place they perceived the benefits of military action? One suspects not, especially since covert military operations did take place around the world during these years. The U.S. operation in Indonesia in 1958 is one example. So the notion of a global imbalance of power and of a national security bureaucracy arguing for war does not help us understand “why Vietnam?” It helps us understand the likelihood that the United States would pursue military options when many in the nation and across the globe saw political and diplomatic solutions as possible and preferable.

Porter does not look for the answer to “why Vietnam?” in U.S. domestic politics or in Vietnam itself, although he does hint that both are more important than the space they have been allotted in the book would indicate. On the domestic front, he insists that Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson all wished to avoid war, based on their insightful analyses of the situation in Vietnam and their sense of the inappropriateness of military solutions for what was essentially a political problem. This will probably be the most controversial part of the book. It will be a rare reader who will be prepared to accept the argument for all three presidents. Many will agree about Eisenhower, though not all. Adherents will drop away as the story reaches Kennedy, and their numbers will shrink further in the Johnson era. Most readers will find it difficult to overlook the fact that each president acquiesced in, accepted, or even promoted a major expansion of the U.S. commitment, military and nonmilitary, to the Republic of Vietnam.

To the extent that Porter answers the question of why these presidents turned against their own ideas about the right policy for Vietnam, he argues that each president was outmaneuvered by his national security team. Perhaps so, but presidents can discipline unruly national security officials, even fire them. None of these presidents did that, partly because Vietnam was rarely their highest priority or even their highest foreign policy priority. More important, however, the presidents, especially Kennedy and Johnson, were afraid that they would be accused by political rivals (and maybe even some supporters) of being soft on communism and allowing another country to be “lost” to communism. The presidents sometimes talked about the impact of the loss of Vietnam on allies, but more often those arguments were used by national security officials to persuade the presidents to take action. What the presidents feared was a domestic backlash. So Eisenhower allowed John Foster Dulles to undermine the Geneva Accords, John F. Kennedy approved a major commitment to the counterinsurgency war in South Vietnam, and Lyndon B. Johnson approved the bombing of North Vietnam and then committed U.S. ground troops to combat. Each time, the most convincing argument was not the one deployed by the national security officials about the effect that a failure to act would have on U.S. relations with countries in the region or close allies elsewhere. The most convincing argument was the one the presidents made to themselves about their political futures. It was particularly convincing for Kennedy, in the aftermath of accusations that he had not responded effectively to the Soviet presence in Cuba, and for Johnson, since Richard Nixon was already promising to hold his feet to the fire on Vietnam. The national security bureaucracy did not succeed because U.S. foreign policy was undemocratic. It succeeded because the presidents always had to think about the next election.

Vietnam itself provides another answer to “why Vietnam?” As Porter suggests in the last few pages of his book, the global imbalance of power may constrain the states that are a rung or two below the most powerful nation, but the least powerful nations do not feel the same constraints. They may have a lot to lose in a relative sense, but they also have more chances to succeed. Their absolute power is so minimal that they cannot make much difference as a part of the global power balance. More important, the global power imbalance that Porter analyzes so well is merely a military power balance. Small states like Vietnam understood well, and medium-rank states like the People’s Republic of China (PRC) understood even better, that military power is not the only efficacious kind in international relations. So Porter’s long and persuasive analysis about the effect of the global imbalance of power on the major powers, emboldening the United States and constraining the Soviet Union and the PRC, does not apply to either Vietnamese government. Vietnamese officials did have to analyze the effect of their actions on all the great powers and decide whether they could tolerate those effects, but they were not constrained by the global balance of power in the same way.

Vietnamese leaders, both North and South, understood that their struggle did not occur in isolation. As scholars like Mark Bradley have shown so convincingly, long before World War II, Vietnamese who wanted independence were weighing various ideologies and carefully considering which countries might support them and which might stand in their way, just as anticolonialists of all political persuasions were single-mindedly pursuing their goal. It is of course one of many ironies of the U.S. war in Vietnam that Soviet leaders had long considered Ho Chi Minh politically unreliable because they believed he was more committed to his nation than to the cause of international socialism. They understood that the developing Cold War had limited Ho’s options after 1945, but they understood equally well that he would pursue the course he believed would lead to a unified and independent Vietnam.[2] Ngo Dinh Diem also proved to be a less malleable client than the United States would have liked. His reputation as a nationalist is more compromised than Ho Chi Minh’s, but he too pursued policies that infuriated the United States when he believed they were for the good of his nation. Vietnamese leaders from both the North and the South were careful about not unnecessarily provoking the United States, especially in ways that might lead to military invention, but they were not constrained from taking the necessary steps toward their goals in the way that the Soviet Union and the PRC were constrained by the global imbalance of power.

Why Vietnam? One could say that there are many answers. There was an unfortunate convergence of factors that contributed to the U.S. decision to go to war: domestic anticommunism, the global imbalance of power, Cold War ideologies, a lack of understanding of Vietnamese history and culture, the Vietnamese determination to have full independence, and each president’s powerful fear of stepping away from South Vietnam. At bottom, however, there is just one answer: the United States decided it could not tolerate an independent and unified Vietnam that had chosen its own form of government.

[1] Even by the typical standards for the field of U.S. foreign relations, the list includes remarkably few women.

[2] Ho Chi Minh was a dedicated communist but an even more dedicated nationalist.