University of Virginia Library

American Objectives Differ In Vietnamese War

"It's a Long Way from 1965," reprinted from
The Economist, 2-8 November, 1968.

The biggest advantage the Americans possess in
Vietnam is the fact that they do not need, and
never have needed, to win this war in the way
most people use that word. Their necessary objectives
do not include the occupation of North
Vietnam, or a change of regime in Hanoi, or even
the wholesale destruction of flight of the mixture
of southern guerrillas and North Vietnamese
conscripts who make up their enemy's army. It is
the North Vietnamese, and the communists in the
south, who will not have won unless they achieve
that sort of thing the other way round. For the
Americans it is enough to prevent them. The
Americans will have won the war, in the sense that
matters to them, if the final ceasefire leave South
Vietnam with a government of virtually any shape
or colour except a Marxist one that has seized
power without having demonstrated that a majority
of South Vietnamese want it.

There is a danger, as the negotiators in Paris
struggle through the tangle of problems in the
search for a breakthrough, that people will forget
where the wood lies among all those trees. It is
clear that the Paris talks have reached a moment of
decision. President Thieu of South Vietnam said
this week that he would not fall into the "trap" of
recognising the National Liberation Front. This
does not necessarily mean that he would refuse to
negotiate with its representatives if they were
admitted to the Paris talks as a part of a joint
communist delegation; but it does mean that it is
going to be harder for his own government to
insist on a separate seat at the Paris table. North
Vietnam has repeated this week that the
Americans cannot make any conditions for stopping
the bombing of the north. This does not
mean that the North Vietnamese may not silently
do something that amounts to meeting the
Americans' terms immediately after the Americans
have called off the last bombers; but it does raise
the suspicion that this reciprocal action - a
withdrawal from the demilitarised zone, and the
rest of it - might be cancelled as soon as the
North Vietnamese felt that it would be impossible
for the Americans to start the bombing again. The
moment is coming when President Johnson will
have to make a choice between a risky compromise
and a continuation of the fighting.

Reasons for Conflict

If he chooses the compromise, and the negotiations
then get down to the guts of the matter, it
is important that he should remember why he is in
Vietnam at all. It is worth recalling, once again,
the reasons for the Americans' intervention in
1965. Their main aim was not to preserve the
status quo in Vietnam itself. President Ho Chi
Minh could have been allowed to put his men into
power in Saigon, and then absorb southern Vietnam
into his own communist state, if that would
have been the end of the matter. It would have
meant death for a large number of South Vietnamese,
including peasants who opposed the collectivisation
of their land, just as it did in North
Vietnam between 1954 and 1956. But it might
have been cold-bloodedly possible to say that no
important western interests were affected if the
communists' war-aims had stopped there. The
trouble was that General Giap and Marshal Lin
Piao were saying that, for both North Vietnam and
China, the Vietnam war was a test of what could
be done in other countries; and their point was
rammed home by the fact that five insurrections in
other south-east Asian countries were being helped
by one or the other of them. The Americans took
the point. If a stable dividing line was to be drawn
anywhere between communist and non-communist
Asia, which would give the area as much of a
chance of peace as the dividing line in Europe has
given the Europeans since 1945, it would have to
be drawn in Vietnam.

The situation in southern Asia has changed in
several important ways since 1965. China has
temporarily taken itself out of the world by its
cultural revolution. Indonesia has pulled itself
back from the brink of a communist coup d'etat.
North Vietnam has been so battered by the war
that it has fewer resources to spare for revolutionary
expansion. No doubt these things make it
harder than it would have been in 1965 for Asia's
communists to exploit a victory in Vietnam. But
they have given no reason to think they would not
try to. And the effect of an American capitulation
in Vietnam on the thinking of politicians all over
the region would be immeasurably greater now
than it would have been when the American
commitment to Vietnam was a matter of a few
thousand advisers. On balance, the judgment must
be that Vietnam remains the swing-point of
south-east Asia. As Saigon goes, so go Vientiane
and Prom Penh and, a little later, quite possible
Bangkok and other capitals too. Things may have a
different look by 1975, if Chairman Mao and
President Ho are succeeded by men who put their
own countries' economic development above the
missionary urge. But until the succession to Mao
and Ho has actually happened it will be a mistake
to treat Vietnam as a special case, unrelated to the
fate of the rest of Asia.

Saigon Isn't Prague

What this means for the negotiators in Paris is
plain enough. If the aim of the bargaining is to
reach agreement on some sort of non-Marxist
government for South Vietnam - which does not
mean just the present government - it is necessary
to make sure that what starts our non-communist
in 1969 is still that way in 1975 and has not been
violently up-ended in between. The Czechoslovaks,
remembering in this bitter anniversary year what
happened to their coalition government in 1948,
will testify to that. It is no part of any conceivable
American president's policy to put Saigon in the
way of becoming another Prague. The Americans
have little way of becoming another Prague. The
Americans have little or no room for manoeuvre
on this point. But, short of putting the local
communists in a position to do what Mr. Gottwald
did in 1948, the Americans do have quite a lot of
room for manoeuvre about the shape of the
postwar government in Saigon. This is the advantage
of the fact that their aim in this war is a
strictly limited one. A limited war is hell for the
soldiers. It is not exactly easy for the diplomats,
who have to cope with politicians in Saigon who
have their own position to defend. But it does
mean that the purpose for which the United States
went into Vietnam can be accomplished on terms
that mean less than an across-the-board defeat for
the communists, and that the communists therefore
have an interest in negotiating.

Electoral Communism?

It is even open to the Americans to contemplate
the possibility of the communists getting
themselves legally voted into power at some time
in the 1970s. This is where the Americans are
different from the Russians. The Russians said, in
Pravda on September 26th, that they would not
allow a communist country to leave the communist
system, presumably even if a majority of
its people said they wanted to. In fact it is pretty
unlikely that the communists can command the
support of anything like a majority of South
Vietnamese for a policy of running South Vietnam
the way North Vietnam is run. A great many
people in South Vietnam want the war to end. A
lot of them have been dissatisfied with the
governments they have had since the late 1950s.
There are relatively few who, knowing what
happened in the north after 1954, would deliberately
choose a Marxist system of government
for themselves. The Americans can probably afford
to take the risk, provided the communists are
not running the election machinery and the army
and the police. The risk will grow smaller in the
1970s if the governments of China and North
Vietnam pass into the hands of relatively moderate
men. It is one mark of the superiority of the
western system over the communist one that is
allows the governed a substantial element of
choice, even on fundamentals. It is a superiority
that the Americans need not be afraid to give rein
to it the south-east Asia of the 1970s.

Rudiments of a Free System

There are the makings of a political system in
South Vietnam that can offer its population; a
higher standard of life, and a freer one, than
anything the communists can offer. The hard-nosed
men around Vice-President Ky have been
dismissed, or demoted, or shunted to one side.
President Thieu and his new prime minister Mr.
Huong, perhaps with the support of the recently
returned General Minh, make up the first government
since the early days of President Diem that
can claim a reasonably broad base of genuine
popular support. They can afford to show more
self-confidence than they are letting themselves
show at the moment. They can probably even
afford to give the communists a precisely defined
place in the country's political life.

With the end of fighting, and the aid that
would then pour in from a relieved America,
South Vietnam in the 1970s would beyond much
doubt join the chain of other economic success-stories
- Hongkong, Taiwan, South Korea and
Singapore - that have sprung up on the eastern
seaboard of Asia in the 1960s. They all happen to
be pluralist, that is non-Marxist, economies. And a
successful pluralist economy is the only basis the
world has yet discovered for a successful pluralist
political life: that is, for democracy. The problem
is to define the place allotted to the communists in
a peace settlement so that they cannot, while this
is going on, haul Vietnam back into the dead end
of a Marxist dictatorship. If the Americans can
manage that they will have accomplished what
they set out to do.