Lessons to Be Learned by the American Experience of the Vietnam War

Vietnam War Lessons

Lessons to Be Learned from the Vietnam War

The United States officially ended the war in Vietnam four decades ago, but the shadow of Vietnam looms in American consciousness still today. The war and its legacy continue to affect American society and its engagement with the rest of the world. For a historian, the important question about the Vietnam War and its legacy is the following: what lessons can be learned from it? The Vietnam War can offer several lessons if we analyze it closely. One can learn lessons about America's diplomatic negotiations with other countries, Presidential leadership, and how understanding the culture of the foe can be crucial to the war effort.

Reading Moss (2010) clearly demonstrates that the United States lacked proper diplomatic strategies during the Vietnam War. Partly burdened by the mission of fighting Communism everywhere and partly because of arrogance that came with enormous power America had inherited from World War II, American leaders believed they needed to militarily defeat Vietnamese Communists and that it would be relatively easy to do so. At the beginning of the war, American civilian and military leaders could not imagine that they could be defeated by a tiny Third World guerilla force with all the might at their disposal. Because of these reasons, American leaders did not work hard on a diplomatic level. They tried to negotiate with the Soviet Union and China, wrongly assuming that those two powers could control Vietnamese communists, but did not give negotiations a chance in dealing with Ho Chi Minh -- the same man who admired the Declaration of Independence and had previously pleaded to American Presidents for help. This lesson teaches us that the importance of diplomacy should never be downplayed.

Closely related to diplomatic failure during the Vietnam War was the wrong Presidential conduct. This is especially true in assessing the legacies of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. These two Presidents kept deceiving the American public. They continued to assert that America was winning the war although they knew that it was not true. They both held on to the foolish principle that they cannot become "the first American President" to lose the war. While attempting to bring American victory is laudable, one must first and foremost be realistic and be able to rationally analyze the events. Presidents Johnson and Nixon made a huge mistake by refusing to admit America's mistakes in Vietnam. They continued to fight an unwinnable war just because they did not want to look like "losers." In reality, however, both leaders turned out to be bigger "losers" by not admitting their mistakes in time. This history lesson suggests that rationality and realism -- not arrogance and delusion -- should define Presidential leadership.

Finally, the Vietnam War teaches us important lessons in cultural and social contexts. The most important among these perhaps is that not understanding the culture of the enemy may be fatal. Moss (2010) makes it clear that the United States did not understand the Vietnamese culture. Americans viewed their enemies as Communists who were part of the "international communist conspiracy." Ho Chi Minh and his followers were indeed Communists but they were also nationalists. Ho and his associates skillfully used Vietnamese nationalism and even xenophobia over their old and new enemies (China, France, the United States) to mobilize the masses, while American leaders thought Vietnamese Communists could be controlled by the Chinese. Americans thought that North Vietnamese leaders were Soviet puppets, but the Vietnamese skillfully used Soviet-American rivalry for their own advantage (Moss, 2010, p. 358). Instead of understanding the Vietnamese culture and long traditions, American leaders tried to understand them through the prism of anti-Communist struggle.