Vietnam: Overview

Introduction

The years from 1945 to 1975 found Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia, wracked with war and conflict. These conflicts occurred internally, regionally, and internationally, and led to repercussions that were still felt decades later. The reasons for the Vietnam War, the manner in which it was conducted, and public reactions to it continue to be debated, especially in the US. After the US military withdrew from Vietnam in defeat in 1973, its involvement remained one of the most polarizing issues in contemporary American history. The war defined a generation, left a lasting mark on the culture, and demonstrated the power of public opinion in affecting a country’s leadership and direction.

The US leadership during that period, which encompassed three administrations, viewed the involvement in Vietnam as a matter of express importance for the balance of world power between communists and noncommunists during the Cold War. Rather than fighting the Soviet Union directly, the US fought a proxy war against its influence in that region.

Although decades of conflict had a cataclysmic effect on Vietnam, perspectives on the involvement of the US were not common in Vietnamese society. The conflict, which initially started as a war of independence against French colonial powers, became a war of resistance against US aggression. With victory in 1975, North and South Vietnam were united under communist rule, and the country struggled to realize its goals of modernization, social order, and economic justice. Despite a shift toward more positive relations between the US and Vietnam into the first decades of the twenty-first century, the involvement of the US in the Vietnam conflict continued to cast its long shadow over US foreign policy, especially as it related to modern conflicts.

Understanding the Discussion

Cold War: A conflict between communist and noncommunist countries, particularly the US and the Soviet Union, that began after World War II and endured until the collapse of the Soviet Union. It has been termed a cold war because the two superpowers never entered into direct military conflict with each other.

Colonialism: The exertion of political and economic control of one state over another state or region, often for the purpose of economic gain.

Communism: A sociopolitical philosophy evolved by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that became a major revolutionary force for building state structures in the twentieth century. Its aims are classless societies, abolition of private property, and common ownership of the modes of production and its products.

Polarize: To cause divergent opinions on a topic.

POW/MIA: Acronyms for “Prisoners of War” and “Missing In Action.”

Proxy War: A war fought through intermediaries. The US and Soviet Union fought several proxy wars during the Cold War for fear of fighting each other directly with nuclear arms.

Soviet Union: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a political entity that lasted from 1922 to 1991. The government and the economy were centralized and informed by communist philosophy. Officially atheistic, the Soviet Union was also one of the most repressive regimes in history. It was one pole of international power during the Cold War.

History

The colonies of Indochina’s fight to end French rule began in 1946 and ended with French defeat eight years later. Vietnam came out of that war for national independence as a country partitioned into communist North Vietnam and noncommunist South Vietnam. To stop the spread of communism from North to South, the US began supporting South Vietnam. By the end of the 1950s, this arrangement had proved untenable because of growing dissatisfaction with the government of South Vietnam and widespread southern support for communism. War broke out between the North and South in 1959.

US involvement in the situation, however, escalated in the early 1960s when the Kennedy administration, wary of Soviet support for liberation movements in developing countries, decided to counteract the expansion of this influence. US military advisors believed that the people of South Vietnam would be unable to withstand the North Vietnamese communist forces known as the Viet Cong. The US thus renewed support to South Vietnam, which included the giving of armaments. Some commentators have argued that US involvement at this stage was essentially idealistic and part of its commitment to maintaining international order after World War II.

Under the subsequent administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and, then, Richard M. Nixon, the US was quickly pulled into the intensifying conflict as it became a target for attacks within Vietnam. Air strikes on North Vietnamese positions were followed by the deployment of ground troops in the mid-1960s. Despite these measures, the US never made an official declaration of war.

By the late 1960s, it had become apparent to the US that it could not achieve a military victory. Negotiations failed to produce a resolution, and secret US bombing campaigns on Viet Cong positions in Cambodia and Laos widened the war. Finally, in 1973, an agreement was signed that called for a ceasefire, the withdrawal of US forces, and self-determination for South Vietnam. US aid to the South continued until it was stopped by Congress in 1973. Two years later, the South fell to communist forces, and the country was united as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam in 1976.

Reactions to the war in Vietnam transformed US society. Protests began during the mid-1960s and grew in size over the course of the war. University campuses became hotbeds for dissent, and draft dodging (avoidance of mandatory conscription into the military) increased. Protesters were often considered anti-American for voicing their dissent.

The antiwar movement gained widespread support in the American counterculture as well as among religious groups, foreign observers, and public intellectuals associated with the left, such as Noam Chomsky, Susan Sontag, and Howard Zinn. Incidents in the war that further galvanized the movement included the US military’s use of Agent Orange, a toxic defoliant; the Mai Lai Massacre, in which US soldiers slaughtered several hundred Vietnamese civilians; and the carpet-bombings of Cambodia and Laos. A 1970 protest at Kent State University ended in bloodshed when National Guardsmen fired on protesters, killing four students and wounding several others.

At that same time, general public support waned. This erosion of support has been attributed to mounting American casualties, images and reports from the war zone, and a growing sense that the war was futile, immoral, and impossible to win, despite official pronouncements to the contrary. The decrease in support was mirrored in US combat forces, who deserted in increasing numbers and were eventually granted clemency.

An event in 1971 that further eroded public support and damaged the administration of President Nixon was the leaking of a seven-thousand-page document, now known as the Pentagon Papers, to the New York Times. These papers cast a poor light on US military decisions in Vietnam and revealed that it was involved in Vietnam earlier than had been previously known. Legal attempts to have publication cease on grounds of national security failed, and an indictment against Daniel Ellsberg, who had leaked the material, was dismissed by a federal court.

Many American citizens felt a sense of national shame regarding the war, and discussions of it were often avoided. Soldiers returning to the US, expecting to be respected for their service, commonly had difficulty reintegrating into society and suffered feelings of isolation. Among their more acute problems were physical disabilities, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and drug addiction.

US experiences in Vietnam led to numerous works of history, memoir, fiction, and film. Born on the Fourth of July (1976), by Ron Kovic; A Rumor of War (1977), by Philip Caputo; and The Things They Carried (1990), by Tim O'Brien are three popular works that describe the experiences from a soldier’s perspective and demonstrate the ongoing resonance of the subject in the US. A spate of controversial films, including The Deer Hunter (1978), Apocalypse Now (1979), and Platoon (1986), cover similar ground. Later, in 2003, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris would release The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. McNamara, secretary of defense for Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, had long been silent about his perspective on Vietnam. The documentary, combined with the memoir he had released in 1995, expresses the confusion over the war’s legacy and the ongoing attempts to understand it.

An estimated 3.2 million Vietnamese, 2 million Laotians and Cambodians, and 58,000 Americans died in the conflict. Following its end, however, Vietnam itself prospered significantly. Its brand of communism brought peace, stability, and prosperity and allowed it to engage and benefit from other noncommunist countries. This led some to suggest that the Vietnamese model of engagement serves as an example for other countries that seek to engage with ideologically dissimilar partners.

Relations between the US and Vietnam began to improve in the mid-1990s following an official announcement of normalization in 1995. Sticking points, such as the POW/MIA issue, were largely overcome, and in 2006 the two countries signed a comprehensive bilateral trade agreement. In 2008, the US began to develop a bilateral investment agreement between both countries, and the following year it became Vietnam’s leading investor with $3.8 billion invested in the first four months of the year. Vietnam soon became one of the United States’ largest export markets.

Evidence for the war’s lingering effect appeared in contemporary politics. During the 2004 presidential campaign, the war was an issue for both candidates, Democratic senator John Kerry and President George W. Bush. Kerry’s service record in Vietnam and his later stance against the war were debated. For Bush, the issue was whether his family’s influence had helped him evade conscription. In the 2008 US presidential elections, Republican senator John McCain’s experiences as a POW in Vietnam also became campaign, media, and pundit fodder, with even Vietnamese having mixed feelings about McCain and this past chapter of their history.

The year 2015 marked fifty years since the end of the US military involvement in Vietnam and twenty years since the two countries had normalized diplomatic relations. John Kerry, then US secretary of state, visited Vietnam to commemorate the occasion, and the Vietnamese leader Nguyen Phu Trong made an unprecedented trip to Washington to meet with US president Barack Obama. The two countries forged stronger ties in the face of a perceived regional threat from China, especially in the South China Sea near Vietnam, and in the crafting of the twelve-member Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. The US, nevertheless, continued to pressure Vietnam on human rights issues such as freedom of expression.

Vietnam Today

Into the 2020s, US involvement in Vietnam remained a dynamic topic, with several schools of thought. Some argued that the US should have stayed the course because victory was near and South Vietnam needed support. These commentators tended to chastise those who protested the war and were instrumental in turning public opinion. They also argued that the threat from communism was real and had to be countered; the enemy was not Vietnamese nationalism but Soviet influence.

Antiwar supporters, on the other hand, viewed the conflict as an extreme misuse of power and an act of imperial aggression that was then mirrored in subsequent US-led wars. The international perspective generally inclined toward the latter view. In Vietnam itself, the war was considered both a tragedy and part of the struggle to forge an independent, communist-oriented nation.

Meanwhile, relations between the US and Vietnam had only strengthened. In addition to ongoing cooperation in efforts to clean up chemical contaminants used in Vietnam during the war, such as the Agent Orange remediation project for the Bien Hoa Air Base launched in 2019, the two countries made further commitments to partner in areas from economics to the climate and security. US president Joe Biden and Vietnamese leader Trong made such commitments even more official with the designation of a comprehensive strategic partnership, a marked rise from 2013's comprehensive partnership, in 2023.

At the same time, the US involvement in the Vietnam conflict remained relevant to foreign policy, including in wars undertaken in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. This became especially apparent upon the final withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. The US-led war in Afghanistan, which had begun in 2001 following the deadly terrorist attacks—linked to the Afghanistan-based organization al-Qaeda—on New York's World Trade Center buildings, had often drawn comparisons to the Vietnam War as it surpassed the former conflict as the longest war in US history. Both wars involved the US attempting to intervene militarily to exert democratic influence in a foreign country ruled by antithetical political ideologies and wracked by civil unrest. Therefore, the end of US combative military presence in Afghanistan, and the retaking of power from the US-backed government by the Taliban shortly after, inspired more commentators to discuss the similarities, differences, lessons, and legacies of such involvement.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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