Out of the Quagmire

National Review, April 7, 2003 by Michael Knox Beran

Ending the Vietnam War: A History of America's Involvement in and Extrication from the Vietnam War, by Henry Kissinger (Simon & Schuster, 640 pp., $18)

We have all heard the story. The peaceful rice farmers of Vietnam had succeeded in throwing off their French masters, and were in the midst of building a new type of agrarian society -- when the United States, in a fit of imperialist frenzy, decided to support a corrupt regime in Saigon and impose, on the uncomprehending natives, an alien vision of human life. But in spite of its genocidal tactics, taken from old Nazi manuals, the U.S. failed to conquer the resilient people. The Vietnamese expelled the invader, and returned happily to the work of implementing the principles of Lenin, principles which, Frances Fitzgerald helpfully explained, "coincided to a great degree with those of the Vietnamese peasants."

The fairy tales of Miss Fitzgerald and Noam Chomsky are still being recited today. The journalist-jongleur Christopher Hitchens recently asserted that Henry Kissinger, who did what he could to give the Vietnamese people a chance to live in freedom, is a war criminal. To have championed the cause of liberty in Indochina -- how cruelly myopic of Kissinger. Anyone who has read Fitzgerald's book, Fire in the Lake, knows that the Vietnamese people did not want to live in freedom. For it was the little-known achievement of the Vietnamese to have anticipated, by many centuries, the theories of Das Kapital. "Marxism- Leninism," Fitzgerald wrote, "accorded to a surprising degree with traditional Vietnamese notions of government and society." The rice paddies, she assured us, "had already been collectivized and nationalized before the coming of the Marxists."

Kissinger has contended with minds -- Nixon's, for example -- more formidable than Hitchens's or Fitzgerald's. In his new book, Ending the Vietnam War, he assails with satire the assumptions of the School of Chomsky, whose devotees continue to insist that acts like the American bombing of North Vietnamese supply lines in Cambodia -- an utterly orthodox military maneuver -- were diabolical in their perversity, and the cause of all the region's woe. But the purpose of this book is not to expose the puerilities of the Chomskyites; it is not the work of a man who would joust with invalids. It is, rather, an ambitious book that forces the reader to look again at the old debate about whether the U.S. ought to pursue, as unsentimentally as possible, its "national interest" in foreign affairs, or whether it ought to export its ideals.

In his 1994 book Diplomacy, Kissinger described this debate between the disciples of Teddy Roosevelt (a "national interest" man) and those of Woodrow Wilson (the adventuring idealist) as the "hinge" on which America's foreign policy swings. But it's not clear how well the "hinge" works as a guide to foreign policy. It is true that Wilson would raise his eyebrows could he see some of our friends in the Middle East today; but the architects of America's most successful overseas initiatives have usually invoked both T.R. and Wilson in their work. The Marshall Plan was an extraordinary act of idealism; by helping to rebuild Western Europe, America ensured the survival and the success of liberty in that part of the world. At the same time, however, the Marshall Plan advanced, in countless ways, the cause of American security -- perhaps our foremost national interest. Twelve years ago America went to war against Iraq in order to liberate Kuwait. We fought, of course, because it is right to resist untoward aggression. There is also a lot of oil in the Middle East.

This blend of realism and idealism has produced failures as well as successes. American policy in Indochina during the 1950s and 1960s was meant to be another exercise in promoting high aspirations in a suitably Realpolitik manner. America promised to defend a free state in South Vietnam, governed from Saigon, and to protect it from the depredations of the expansionist regime in Hanoi. At the same time the policy was part of a larger U.S. effort to frustrate the progress of Russian- and Chinese-sponsored Communism, the chief threat to American security in that era.

The policy failed. By the time Nixon became president in 1969 the American effort in Vietnam was doomed. Not even conservatives -- not even, Kissinger observes, freshly converted neoconservatives -- wanted to make a fight of it. Watching Kissinger wrestle with the causes of this failure, the reader comes to feel that the tension in foreign affairs is not so much between realism and idealism as it is between moments of opportunity and periods of muddle.

As a condition for peace, Hanoi required the dismantling of the regime in Saigon. The U.S., eager though it was for a cease-fire, could not consent to the destruction of its ally. Muddle, to be sure, but not, perhaps, insurmountable muddle. Why not simply work out a compromise with Hanoi? The Nixon administration would have liked nothing better; the problem, Kissinger shows, is that Hanoi refused to compromise. Why not, then, bring to bear on the North Vietnamese the kinds of pressure great powers typically exert on intransigent foes -- and take the fight to Hanoi? A good idea, and the Nixon administration tried: It dispatched B-52s to bomb North Vietnamese military targets (not civilian populations, as the School of Chomsky would have us believe). Contrary to popular wisdom, Kissinger writes, these bombing campaigns were effective; such progress as did occur in the peace talks with Hanoi generally followed American shows of force.