Vietnam Lessons Learned From the American Experience

Vietnam

Lessons learned from the American experience of the Vietnam War.

Vietnam has been called America's first and only completely 'lost' war, even though it was never officially declared to be a war at all. The clumsy diplomatic relations which characterized American involvement in Vietnam from the beginning were a harbinger of troubles to come. The roots of the conflict can be traced to the aftermath of World War II, when French-backed forces seized control of Vietnam in the South while Ho Chi Minh's Viet Cong seized the North. Even after the French were driven out, the U.S. thought it could successfully bolster the fanatically anti-communist Catholic leader Ngo Dinh Diem, despite Diem's lack of popularity amongst his own people and the taint of colonialism that all European powers harbored in the eyes of the Vietnamese. "In December 1960, Diem's opponents within South Vietnam -- both communist and non-communist -- formed the National Liberation Front (NLF) to organize resistance to the regime. Though the NLF claimed to be autonomous and that most of its members were non-Communist, many in Washington assumed it was a puppet of Hanoi" (Vietnam War, 2012, History.com).

Rather than assess the real situation on the ground in Vietnam or act as an objective broker between the two sides, the United States instead emerged as a partisan in this complex civil war. The United States must learn the dangers of such an action, given that it is still embroiled in a similarly factionalized conflict in the Middle East, and many factions exist of which the U.S. must be wary: simply because one group is aligned against a particular terrorist group because it is Sunni rather than Shiite Moslem does not mean it has the same interests as the United States, nor does it necessarily mean that it is democratic in its intentions.

Another lesson to be learned from Vietnam is the dangers of autocratic presidential leadership in domestic politics. One of the reasons that the Vietnam conflict was never officially declared a war was the secretive fashion with which it was waged. "Congress soon passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Johnson broad war-making powers" and effectively neutralized constitutional provisions that gave Congress the ability to have oversight as to how defense funding was managed (Vietnam War, 2012, History.com). At this time period in American history, the military-industrial complex was rapidly expanding, as was the power and scope of agencies such as the CIA and the FBI, which operated with little accountability and under a veil of secrecy. This shows how without checks and balances as the Founding Fathers intended, the administration of U.S. foreign policy can quickly become abusive and show tunnel vision in terms of the perceived threat (there was a theory that communism was like a contagion or a set of dominoes, and once one nation 'turned red' its neighbors would follow, regardless of the particular internal politics within the nation).