Fifty Years From Paris
Fifty years ago today, envoys of the United States, North Vietnam, and South Vietnam met in Paris to sign the document that ostensibly ended the war in Vietnam. The Nobel committee promptly bestowed its peace prize on the chief negotiators, Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho. No amount of international celebration, however, could suppress the discontent of both North Vietnam and South Vietnam with the agreement. Scarcely had the champagne flutes been drained before the longtime antagonists were fighting for dominance in the South Vietnamese countryside.
South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu had initially refused to sign the peace agreement, objecting to a provision allowing Hanoi to keep troops in South Vietnam. President Nixon convinced him to go along by pledging to assist South Vietnam if North Vietnam violated the agreement. American air power had helped South Vietnam thwart a massive North Vietnamese invasion in 1972, and it no doubt could do the same again.
What none of the Vietnamese knew at the time was that Nixon’s Presidency was about to unravel. The Watergate scandal and other presidential chicanery soon led to Congressional restrictions on executive power and then to Nixon’s resignation. In early 1975, once it was plain that President Gerald Ford would not make good on Nixon’s promise to Thieu, the North Vietnamese launched the massive offensive that wiped South Vietnam off the map.
The American abandonment of South Vietnam can be seen, on one level, as the inception of the Democratic Party’s reflexive aversion to the use of American military power. On another, it warns of the perpetual dangers that America’s mercurial politics pose to the country’s security commitments. On a third, it demonstrates America’s difficulties in maintaining popular support for friendly countries in the face of changing international realities.
All three offer insights into the most current international crisis, in Ukraine. The Paris Accords were signed right after the Democratic Party had pinned its presidential hopes on George McGovern. With his antiwar platform, McGovern won the votes of Hollywood celebrities and Manhattan newscasters, but lost the votes of moderate and conservative Democrats. On election day, he lost every state except Massachusetts.
Despite McGovern’s ignominious defeat, the Democratic Party has recoiled from military interventions ever since, except when American power could be used to advance international or humanitarian rather than national interests, as in Somalia, Kosovo, Libya, and now Ukraine. The entrenchment of the Left on college faculties has ensured continuation of the trend; aspiring Democratic politicians and pundits learn little of military and diplomatic history, topics that promote sober understanding of military force and national interests.
Republicans have regularly used Ukraine policy to belittle the Democratic Party and President Biden, after Democrats used to it bludgeon and impeach President Trump. Partisans on both sides of the aisle often care about events in Ukraine only insofar as they affect the political balance of power in the United States. Such partisanship is as old as the republic; the citizenry’s only remedy is the election of more virtuous politicians.
When President Lyndon Johnson intervened in South Vietnam in 1965, the country possessed immense strategic value. American allies were warning that a North Vietnamese victory would cause the region’s other countries to fall to Chinese-led Communism like dominoes. American intervention thwarted the North Vietnamese Army, and then precipitated the downfall of Communism in Indonesia, which together sparked China’s disastrous Cultural Revolution and ruined China’s alliance with North Vietnam.
As a result, most of the dominoes that could have fallen in 1965 were no longer in danger of toppling by the early 1970s. Preserving South Vietnam was no longer essential to America’s global containment strategy. The United States still had an interest in South Vietnam’s survival, for the loss of a wartime ally always imposes political and moral costs on a great power. A large number of Americans, nevertheless, became persuaded that the benefits no longer outweighed the costs.
The same problem of shifting valuations has begun to take hold in the Ukraine case. At the conflict’s outset, the United States had strong moral and geopolitical reasons to back the Ukrainians, and strong hopes for a swift Russian capitulation. The moral case for supporting Ukraine has remained strong, but Russian perseverance, the costly military stalemate, and American economies woes have led many Americans to question whether the United States should keep sending Ukraine billions in aid. To sustain popular support, President Biden will have to speak more persuasively than he has done to date, in addition to weathering the Congressional probes that threaten to neuter his Presidency and foreign policy just as Watergate did to Nixon.
Mark Moyar holds the William P. Harris Chair of Military History at Hillsdale College and is the author of "Triumph Regained: The Vietnam War: 1965-1968."
