The Vietnam War was a struggle between North and South Vietnam in which the USA was directly involved in the defence of the South, and which had severe repercussions both on the politics of South-East Asia and on US domestic politics. Civil war in Vietnam had been developing since the French withdrawal from Indo-China in 1954 following the humiliating military defeat of the French forces at Dien Bien Phu. The ensuing peace settlement set up two states, North and South Vietnam, with the North governed by the nationalist leaders of the anti-French campaign who were also, but incidentally, communist. The South was theoretically democratic, though corruption was rife, much of the population indifferent to who ruled and from the outset reliant on US economic and military aid. Military aggression by the commu-nist North led to President John F. Kennedy’s decision in 1961 to allow US military advisers to fight with the troops they were training, and the involvement continued to escalate through the remainder of his presidency and into the Johnson and Nixon presidencies. The point at which the US effort shifted from aid to outright warfare was in 1965, when an alleged attack on US naval units by the North Vietnamese allowed Johnson to persuade Congress to pass a resolution, the ‘Gulf of Tonkin Resolution’, authorizing a major troop deployment. At first the war appeared to be going well for the USA, but the sudden outbreak of unsuspected Northern forces throughout South Vietnam in 1968, the Tet Offensive, which very nearly took control of all urban centres, shook American self-confidence. Widespread opposition to the war in the late 1960s and the polarization of opinion on the issue weakened American commitment. The deterioration of the military situation in favour of the North Vietnamese and mounting congressional opposition to the war forced President Nixon to commence withdrawal of US troops in 1969.
By August 1972 the last US combat troops were withdrawn and in January 1973 a ceasefire was implemented. In 1975 the North Vietnamese army successfully invaded the South and captured its capital, Saigon, requiring the evacuation of remaining US personnel.
Apart from the tragedy of the war for the Vietnamese themselves, the war dominated American political life for nearly a decade and cast doubt on the willingness of the USA to intervene again in a military confrontation with communist forces. Indeed as late as the Gulf War there was a clear hesitancy on the part of the Pentagon to risk involvement. The USA clearly had in mind the analogy between the Soviet Union’s failure in Afghanistan and its own Vietnam failure when forced to make war in Afghanistan as part of President George W. Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ of 2002. The ease with which US-supported forces did prevail may have finally laid the Vietnam Ghost to rest.
The Vietnam War also contributed to the abuses of executive power which culminated in the Watergate crisis. The long-term consequence was to weaken American morale and self-image so much that President Ronald Reagan was able to be elected in 1980, and re-elected in 1984, on a programme that deliberately set out to build up US military might and restore to the USA a sense of being an invulnerable superpower. The resulting arms race contributed to the demise of the Soviet Union through the pressure exerted on its economy. It is, therefore, arguable that precisely because the USA ‘lost’ the war in Vietnam, it ultimately ‘won’ the cold war.
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