Stratfor.com's Global Intelligence Update - 8 May 2000
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This weekend on Stratfor.com:
China Buys the Original Soviet Carrier
Russia has reportedly sold China an aircraft carrier. If the sale
goes through,China will join the ranks of the world's power
projection navies.
http://www.stratfor.com/CIS/commentary/0005052219.htm
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Learning From the Vietnam War
Summary
At the 25th anniversary of the close to the Vietnam War all sides
have studied the conflict. Increasingly it is treated as a series
of errors and misjudgments by the United States that could have
been caught and corrected early in the conflict. But in reality the
war is a case study in the effects of grand strategy. Washington
during the Cold War embarked on a strategy of maintaining an
alliance system. Maintaining this system fostered its own logic.
And in this logic fighting the first war America would ever lose
was nearly inevitable.
Analysis
The 25th anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War and the 30th
anniversary of the tragedy at Kent State University generated a
round of reflection on the origin and meaning of the Vietnam War.
Much of it treats the Vietnam War as a series of errors and
misjudgments on the side of America.
There is certainly truth in that; this explanation, however, does
not go deep enough. The war was not an accident; it arose from the
fundamental grand strategy the United States pursued after World
War II. If Vietnam was a mistake, then the grand strategy was in
error. On the other hand, if the grand strategy worked - and in
retrospect it seems ultimately to have done so - then Vietnam as a
war was inevitable.
One of the most important and forgotten concepts of the era is the
notion of credibility. The Johnson administration argued that the
war was a test of the credibility of American guarantees and will
power. To the extent that the notion is remembered, it is treated
as an American neurosis. It was, in fact, both the root cause of
the decision to escalate the war and a rational and defensible
principle. Paradoxically, it also meant that the United States
would be defeated in the war.
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Who was America trying to impress by a demonstration of its
credibility? It was not so much Ho Chi Minh as it was Charles de
Gaulle. U.S. strategy in the Cold War was an attempt to encircle
first the Soviet Union, and then the Soviet Union and China
together, with a string of American allies. The objective was the
creation of a barrier against expansion while also forcing Moscow
and Beijing to distribute their forces on multiple geographically
diffuse fronts, decreasing their ability to concentrate for an
attack. Very early on, the United States created alliances that
stretched from the North Cape of Norway to Hokkaido in Japan.
The United States had guaranteed the security of these countries,
but the guarantees contained built-in ambiguities:
1. Since allied countries shared borders with the communist powers
the allied territories would be by necessity the battlegrounds.
2. The primary responsibility for defense would fall to local
forces, at least early in a war.
3. The United States would supply equipment and station forces - by
themselves insufficient to repel invasion.
4. The United States promised to rush reinforcements to any country
under attack in time to head off occupation.
5. In the case of Europe, American policy treated an attack on
allies as an attack on the United States - triggering a nuclear
response made necessary by NATO's lack of forces to repel an
initial attack before additional U.S. troops could arrive.
The entire alliance system depended on allies having confidence in
points four and five. If allies did not believe the United States
would place its own forces - or the United States itself - in harm's way,
then the rationality of points one, two and three was dubious in the extreme.
This set of calculations affected all the allies. But none felt the impact
more than the West Germans and NATO.
In the 1950s, Eisenhower's doctrine of massive retaliation was less
a nuclear strategy than a response to alliance concerns about the
credibility of U.S. guarantees. Eisenhower did everything he could,
doctrinally and operationally, to convince the Europeans that the
U.S. commitment to Europe was absolute and automatic; U.S.
reinforcements would be sent instantly and nuclear weapons would be
used automatically if needed to halt a Soviet attack. Stationing
U.S. forces in Europe was as much a political attempt to convince
the Europeans of a massive U.S. response as it was a military
necessity.
The problem with all the guarantees, of course, was that they meant
nothing. Whether Washington would live up to its commitments would
not be known until the moment it was necessary to honor them. The
doctrine was clear, but no one - not even the Americans - actually
knew what a sitting president would decide at the critical moment.
Thus, there was a deep uncertainty embedded in the alliance
structure that revolved around the credibility of American
guarantees.
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The Soviets attempted to exploit this uncertainty by generating
periodic crises in Europe and elsewhere; the goal was to
demonstrate the essential unreliability of American guarantees.
Berlin was the archetypal example. The Soviets forced massive U.S.
exertions to defend a strategically irrelevant asset. For the
Americans, credibility became an indivisible entity. Failure to
honor any commitment - regardless of its marginality - could
unravel the alliance.
The Soviets naturally probed at this fault line. The fault line
emerged as a fundamental issue in Europe in the late 1950s and
1960s, following the election of Charles de Gaulle as president of
France. De Gaulle argued that the European dependence on American
guarantees was dangerous. De Gaulle was completely anti-communist,
but his view was that each nation pursues its own national
interest. He argued that at the moment of truth, the United States
would certainly not risk Kansas City to defend Frankfurt or
Marseilles.
Europe, he argued, would have to develop its own nuclear deterrence
independent of the United States and an armed force independent of
the United States. If independence meant that Europe would have to
reach some political accommodation with the Soviets, this was not
only acceptable, but desirable. It would create a balance of power
between the Soviets and the Americans, increasing European power.
Ultimately, de Gaulle's arguments were not persuasive because the
United States managed to maintain its precious credibility through
the Berlin Airlift and successive crises in Greece, Turkey, Korea
and Iran. The foundation of credibility was disproportionality.
Nuclear war for the defense of Europe was, by definition,
disproportional to U.S. interests. In turn, any sign of
proportionality would immediately destroy the value of the
guarantee - and unravel the alliance.
Both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson approached the Vietnam
question from a standpoint fundamentally unconnected to Vietnam
itself. They were far more concerned with what the Germans,
Italians, Turks, Iranians and Japanese thought about American will
than they were with the particulars in Vietnam. Vietnam wasn't
about Vietnam; it was about the credibility of American guarantees
to other much more valuable allies.
Many allies opposed the war. But, paradoxically, had the Americans
said that Vietnam just wasn't worth it, everyone would have
wondered whether they were worth it. Thus, Vietnam was no accident.
It was rooted in the grand strategy of the American alliance
system. The main purpose of the American intervention was to
demonstrate the Kennedy principle, which was that we would bear any
burden in fighting the communists.
The problem we encountered in Vietnam was a massive disproportion
of interest. The North Vietnamese were pursuing fundamentally
important geopolitical interests that could have been attained
directly from the war. The United States was pursuing fundamental
geopolitical interests that had nothing to do with the war. The
North Vietnamese were engaged in total war, aided materially by the
Soviets and Chinese, who both saw an opportunity to undermine
American strength. For the United States, total war made no sense.
The amount of effort expended far exceeded the American interest in
Vietnam - but was completely insufficient to achieve victory.
Victory could not be achieved by a purely defensive war. Washington
needed forces sufficient to threaten the survival of the North
Vietnamese regime. A force capable of that would have to have been
orders of magnitude greater than what was deployed - and would have
completely unbalanced the U.S. strategic posture.
In hindsight, many would argue that the United States should have
conceded Vietnam. In order to make this case, it is necessary to
argue that in 1963, the United States would have had to announce
that it was withdrawing support for the Saigon regime - and that
this would not have destabilized its alliance system. In reality,
Gaulist sentiment in Europe would have grown and tremors would have
gone through the allies. Such an announcement would have undermined
the American record of disproportionate commitments to its allies.
This was the central dilemma. And here is the kicker. It was
ultimately easier to be defeated in Vietnam, having given it a
massive, disproportionate effort, than to have declined combat or
withdrawn without defeat. Defeat raised questions about judgment,
strategy and competence. It did not raise questions about the
willingness to defend allies. It did not threaten the grand
alliance by raising questions of credibility.
Far from being a miscalculation, a misunderstanding or a mindless
show of machismo, the war was an unintended but almost inevitable
consequence of a rational strategy that ultimately worked. If the
grand strategy made sense, then Vietnam was a war that had to be
fought. If the grand strategy could have been abandoned, then
Vietnam could have been avoided; history ultimately, though, might
have been far different. This is, of course, small comfort to the
war's many victims; the logic of history, however, is rarely kind.
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(c) 2000 WNI, Inc.
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