Bad History and the Vietnam Syndrome

"Bad history tells only part of complex stories."

― Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History

In the obituary for my friend Lewis Sorley, I noted that his scholarship helped Americans reframe their understanding of the Vietnam War and U.S. strategies for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, his groundbreaking 1999 book A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam blew up the facile conventional wisdom that the war was futile and foolhardy.

Sorley, who served with distinction in Vietnam, when asked about the war, would express pride in the actions of U.S. and South Vietnamese soldiers and sorrow about the outcome. He concluded from his experience and his scholarship that the war “didn't have to end that way." It is a phrase that resonates with subsequent generations of soldiers who fought in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

I suggested that, on the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon we should remember, as Bob Sorley did, the human cost that the Vietnamese Communists and North Vietnamese inflicted on their own people. We might also resolve to learn from the searing experiences of Vietnam and the more recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But it seems as if we are unwilling to learn from even our most recent wars or, maybe even more concerning, that we are studying America’s twenty-first century experiences in Afghanistan and the Middle East only superficially and learning the wrong lessons. The following excerpt from Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World will, I hope, renew meaningful discussion about the true lessons we might learn from the experiences of those wars and the Vietnam War.

…What some have called the “Vietnam syndrome” (a belief that the United States should simply avoid military intervention abroad) was the most prominent and immediate manifestation of the widely held interpretation that that war was unjustified and unwinnable. The mantra of “no more Vietnams” often muted discussion of what might be learned from that experience. The analogy to Vietnam was applied indiscriminately as well as superficially. Across the three decades following the 1973 Paris Peace Accords that ended American involvement in the war, assertions that any use of force abroad would lead to “another Vietnam” appeared in connection with military operations in Latin America, the Horn of Africa, the Balkans, Southwest Asia, and Central Asia. President George H. W. Bush declared after the First Gulf War that America had “kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” But under the guise of ending endless wars, the Vietnam analogy became conflated with Afghanistan and Iraq analogies to produce something like the Vietnam syndrome on steroids.

Simplistic interpretations of the American experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq obscure the differences in the character of those conflicts. Some interpretations point to American pursuit of “armed domination” or an effort to remake the world in America’s image. These interpretations overlook the fact that the United States and its allies invaded Afghanistan after the most devastating terrorist attack in history. And while the majority of Americans might now argue that the invasion of Iraq was unwise—or, that at least it was unwise to think regime change in Baghdad would be easy—the arguments for retrenchment do not acknowledge the consequences of America’s precipitate disengagement from Iraq in 2011 as giving rise to ISIS, or the U.S. halting withdrawal from Syria in 2019 as setting conditions for an intensification of that multiparty conflict and complicating efforts to bring about ISIS’s enduring defeat. We should be aware that simplistic interpretations of the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq cloud understanding and can be used to justify flawed policies and bad decisions. Just as the memory of America’s divisive military intervention in Vietnam, and the strong emotions that tainted many early interpretations of that war, clouded understanding and left plenty of room for manipulating the historical record, America’s understanding of more recent experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq have become more symbolic than historical; as with the Vietnam syndrome, the wars of 9/11 are used to evoke emotion rather than promote understanding.

Many who are deeply skeptical of U.S. military engagement abroad describe themselves as part of the realist school of international relations—meaning those who are skeptical of the existence of a global community and who believe the world is a chaotic patchwork of competing states. This group may self-identify as realists; however, they get the word wrong because they start from an ideologically driven approach to U.S. engagement with the world. They are against any form of military intervention abroad and for the withdrawal of U.S. forces not only from the wars in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, but also from the preponderance of other military commitments overseas. Rather than viewing the Vietnam syndrome and the overconfidence in American military technology of the 1990s as setting the United States up for the difficulties experienced in Afghanistan and Iraq, many who adhere to this school of thought argue that America’s conceit is to pursue “liberal hegemony,” an effort to to turn as many countries as possible into liberal democracies. One of the school’s proponents, Professor John Mearsheimer, alleges that America’s “crusader mentality” drives a misguided, costly, and self-defeating foreign policy designed to “remake the world in its own image.” The realist school has found common cause with those who adhere to the New Left interpretation of history, which became more influential in academia during and after the Vietnam War. The realists and the New Left have been bolstered by a large influx of cash from billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch, who share little common ground politically except their advocacy for American retrenchment. The two pumped millions of dollars into new think tanks such as the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and funded programs within existing think tanks such as the Atlantic Council and RAND. The cash and appeal to emotion gained traction despite what Professor Paul Miller described as an effort to set up and then knock down a straw man of liberal hegemony with “historically myopic, morally stunted, and strategically incoherent” arguments.

Because adherents to realism and the New Left both believe that the United States is the principal cause of the world’s problems, they argue that if the United States withdrew from competitions overseas, we would be safer. Their bywords are restraint and offshore balancing, which are meant to communicate a reduced emphasis on U.S. alliances and a diminished military posture overseas. But their views make them paragons of strategic narcissism due to their tendency to disregard the agency that the “other” has over the future course of events. In their view, the United States causes others to act; our presence abroad creates enemies; our absence abroad would restore harmony. Other states, according to this orthodoxy, only react to the United States and have no aspirations or objectives of their own. The United States, therefore, is to blame for antagonizing Russia and China, the former through the expansion of NATO and the latter through an excessive U.S. military presence in the Indo-Pacific. America, they believe, is to blame for jihadist terrorism because the offense of Americans’ presence in Muslim holy lands generated a natural backlash against us infidels. The United States is the cause of nuclear proliferation, they feel, because states like Iran and North Korea need those weapons to defend against an overly aggressive United States; a U.S. policy of conciliation with both countries would transform those states into responsible actors and even convince their leaders that they no longer need to brutally repress their own people.

These twenty-first-century realists and fellow travelers of the New Left believe that American retrenchment would not only make the world safer, but also save money that could be applied to domestic needs. But as the history of the challenges in this book makes clear, American behavior did not cause Russian and Chinese aggression, jihadist terrorism, or the hostility of Iran and North Korea. Nor would disengagement make any of those challenges easier to overcome. America would have paid a much cheaper price for maintaining a military presence on the Korean Peninsula in 1950 than the cost of the Korean War, just as sustained engagement in Iraq beyond 2011 would have cost far less than the post-2014 campaign to liberate Iraqi and Syrian territory from ISIS. It is also much cheaper to deter Russia in Europe through U.S. presence today than to restore security after aggression tomorrow. And it is easier to ensure freedom of navigation and overflight now than to fight to restore them later.

The “realist” argument for retrenchment appeals to those deeply skeptical about efforts to promote democracy—skepticism due in part to excessive hope. The promise of the 1990s was that the world was progressing inexorably toward liberal-democratic regimes and a globally harmonious system of states. Globalization would lead to the convergence of states as democratization advanced. That optimistic worldview was unsustainable. When it failed, it gave way to retrenchment and resignation. Much of the unrealistic optimism about the arc of history stemmed from the assumptions some made after the collapse of Communist authoritarian governments in 1989 that the regime changes in eastern Europe were replicable in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Yet, this thinking did not give due consideration to local context or, in particular, to political, social, cultural, and religious dynamics that complicate majority rule, the protection of minority rights, and the rule of law. It is clear that the United States can influence, but cannot determine, the evolution of the world order in favor of free and open societies. As nineteenth-century philosopher John Stuart Mill observed, “[T]he virtues needed for maintaining freedom must be cultivated by the people themselves.”16 It is also true, however—as protests in 2019 and 2020 in Hong Kong, Moscow, Tehran, Baghdad, Khartoum, Caracas, and Beirut attest— that people want a say in how they are governed.

The existence of free and open societies abroad benefits security because such societies are natural defenses against hostile, aggressive, authoritarian powers. As argued in this book, support for democracy and the rule of law is the best means of promoting peace and competing with those who promote authoritarian, closed systems. The United States and other nations should also continue to promote basic and unalienable rights as captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights approved by the UN General Assembly in Paris on December 10, 1948, while recognizing that America and its allies cannot be the guarantor of those rights. And those who self-identify as realists are right to be skeptical about the ability of international organizations to promote peace, justice, and prosperity across the globe. Because authoritarian and hostile regimes do their best to co-opt organizations like the United Nations, strong nations governed under the principle of popular sovereignty are the best advocates for the oppressed. As stated in the 2017 National Security Strategy of the United States, it is possible to recognize that a “world that supports American interests and reflects our values makes America more secure and prosperous” and to affirm “America’s commitment to liberty, democracy, and the rule of law” while also acknowledging “that the American way of life cannot be imposed upon others, nor is it the inevitable culmination of progress.”

In a 2009 essay, "The Human Element: When Gadgetry Becomes Strategy" in World Affairs, I predicted that:

the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the political debates concerning the nature and scope of U.S. involvement in those countries, have resurrected the "lessons" of Vietnam once again. Far from having kicked the "Vietnam syndrome," as President George H. W. Bush put it in the exuberant aftermath of Operation Desert Storm, it now seems possible that the memory of the Vietnam War will be forever conflated in the public imagination with the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, producing something like a Vietnam syndrome on steroids.

We owe it to the veterans of Vietnam and the wars of the early twenty-first century to study their wars, learn from them, reject bad history, and endeavor not to make the same mistakes in future. At the end of that 2009 essay, I noted that….

In the last paragraphs of his book, A Better War, Lewis Sorley relates a story from December 1975, about seven months after the fall of Saigon. New Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was away from the Pentagon. Workmen took advantage of the opportunity to refurbish the secretary's office. In doing so, they removed a large relief map of Southeast Asia that had hung on the wall during much of the Vietnam War.

I imagined that...

…if the map were still hanging there when Secretary Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon more than thirty years later, it might have inspired a healthy dose of skepticism about the latest orthodoxy predicting how U.S. technological advantages would make war fast, efficient, and decisive. That skepticism, in turn, might have generated a deeper understanding of the nature of the conflicts in which the United States and its partners remain engaged today.

Hopefully Secretary Pete Hegseth will not do the equivalent of having the maps of the Middle East and Central Asia removed from his office.

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For more on Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and strategic competence, see Battlegrounds, pp. 425-455.

For more on the Vietnam Syndrome, see “Avoiding Vietnam: The U.S. Army's Response to Defeat in Southeast Asia” by Conrad Crane.

For how the United States went to war in Vietnam under a strategy that senior military leaders knew would fail, see Dereliction of Duty.