Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Afghanistan and the Credibility Crock

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Afghanistan, Bay of Pigs, Biden, Central America, Cold War, communism, credibility, Cuba, Cuban Missile Crisis, Gideon Rachman, Grenada, John F. Kennedy, Laos, Lebanon, Lyndon B. Johnson, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, Reagan Doctrine, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Samuel Johnson, Southeast Asia, Soviet Union, Vietnam

Forgive me if this header makes it sound like I’m unusually ticked off. But I sort of am. Because I’ve been dealing for decades with the claim that the United States can’t set meaningful foreign policy priorities because tolerating any international setbacks of any kind would destroy its global credibility forever.

I haven’t heard this argument lately, no doubt because it’s rooted in the Cold War era, and the absence of a superpower adversary determined to engage in a full-fledged contest for global supremacy (and no, the Chinese aren’t there yet, especially when it comes to fighting proxy wars) drained it of lots of its…well…credibility as a rationale for sweeping American global activism.

Now, however, the seeming certainty of a Taliban takeover following the nearly completed U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan has brought it back (see, e.g., here and here), and it’s even less convincing than during its Cold War heyday.

As a review of U.S. Cold War history makes clear, there were actually several varieties of the credibility theory. For example, John F. Kennedy’s effort to halt the spread of Communism in Vietnam clearly was influenced by the acute need he felt to bolster his own credibility after the Bay of Pigs debacle, a performance at a summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev that he himself viewed as a dangerous flop, and a widely criticized diplomatic settlement to a conflict in neighboring Laos. In other words, Kennedy perceived an urgent need to salvage a reputation for simple foreign policy competence.

Credibility throughout the early Cold War decades in particular had an ideological dimension, too. As this study handily summarizes, U.S. leaders strongly believed that prevailing against the Soviets and Chinese required that Americans help threatened countries demonstrate to the world at large that non-Communist systems had the vigor to repel subversion and outright revolt by adherents of that creed. So establishing credibility during that period was also an exercise in global morale building. (Interestingly, echoes of this idea permeate the rhetoric of the Biden administration and other globalists on the subject of China.)

But the main version of Cold War credibility theory held any U.S. failure to resist Communist expansionism the world over would convince friend and foe alike that American declarations of resolve were shams and that American security commitments were worthless whenever push came to shove. The resulting shift in the global balance of power and influence, as U.S. allies and neutrals alike scrambled to accommodate ascendant Communist forces as best they could, would leave an internationally isolated America much weaker and poorer.

Such fears were behind Lyndon B. Johnson’s declaration that America would not “cut and run” from Vietnam because “We must meet our commitments in the world….”

They were behind Richard M. Nixon’s Vietnam-induced fear that “If, when the chips are down, the world’s most powerful nation, the United States of America, acts like a pitiful, helpless giant, the forces of totalitarianism and anarchy will threaten free nations and free institutions throughout the world.”

And they were explicitly behind Ronald Reagan’s case for his doctrine of resisting Moscow’s efforts to expand its influence in Central America, sub-Saharan Africa – and Afghanistan: “The U.S. must rebuild the credibility of its commitment to resist Soviet encroachment on U.S. interests and those of its Allies and friends, and to support effectively those Third World states that are willing to resist Soviet pressures or oppose Soviet initiatives hostile to the United States, or are special targets of Soviet policy.”

Thankfully, today’s credibility-mongers are outside of power in Washington, not inside. But these members of the globalist foreign policy Blob concentrated in the Mainstream Media, the think tank world, and some factions in Congress, are hardly devoid of influence, especially if the optics coming out of Afghanistan are ugly, as can be counted on. So it’s worth reviewing the main reasons that this form of obsessing about U.S. credibility has no claim to be taken seriously both for that reason, and because their fatal flaws remain the same, too.

In the first place, credibility-mongering falls on its face because its main animating fears have simply not materialized over any stretch of time. The fall of Vietnam, most prominently, clearly led to Communist takeovers in Laos and Cambodia, too. But in the immediate aftermath of Vietnam, no U.S. treaty allies defected into the Communist camp, or turned neutral. Even in Southeast Asia, no more dominoes topped – despite the clear lack of any American appetite to help with any resistance.

In fact, as (globalist) Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman just noted, “within fourteen years of the fall of Saigon, the cold war was over, and the west had won.”

A least as interesting, as I noted way back in 1985, successful American demonstrations of credibility have displayed little long-term value. For example, Reagan’s 1983 invasion of Grenada was a clear-cut win for the United States. But for years afterwards, Soviet- and Cuban-backed leaders and insurgents in nearby Central America continued defying his administration’s will for years afterward. Outside the Western Hemisphere, the Grenada victory did nothing to stop deadly attacks on U.S. Marines stationed in civil war-torn Lebanon. Meanwhile, many American allies viewed Grenada as more evidence that Reagan was a dangerous cowboy. Even staunch Reagan ally and close personal friend Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, was unnerved.

More important, though, as I argued in that 1985 article, given inevitable limits on American power and will, the real measure of U.S. credibility isn’t a stated determination to respond strongly to every single foreign challenge that arises, or even to try doing so. In fact, because its post-Vietnam circumstances and behavior have made those limits obvious globally, such pretensions are likeliest to have the opposite effect – to fuel doubts about American judgment and wisdom.

Rather than depending on “convincing the rest of the world that the United States will respond to all instances of aggression,” I continued, building and preserving American credibility “must depend on convincing the world that the United States will respond to some instances of aggression” based on the identification of specific interests that are regarded as important enough to defend (or to advance, for that matter, when such opportunities appear). And operationally, “this translates into an ability to use finite assets efficiently and rationally – to convey a clear sense of priorities.”

Of course, adversaries might as a result view countries or regions left off an American definition of crucial interests as tempting targets. But precisely because these would be low priorities, by definition any adversary wins in these areas would pose few if any risks to the United States.

The 18^th century British literary giant Samuel Johnson famously proclaimed that false, cynical expressions of patriotism are “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” I wouldn’t go so far as to attach that label to the credibility-mongers. But resort to  this ploy too often has been the last refuge of globalists who are completely out of any other reasons to insist on dubious forms of international activism, and the current hysteria over Afghanistan is clearly the latest example.

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Im-Politic: A Vacuum at the Heart of The Vietnam War

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1968 New Hampshire Democratic primary, 1968 presidential election, Eugene J. McCarthy, hawks, Im-Politic, Ken Burns, Le Duan, Lyndon B. Johnson, Lynn Novick, military draft, North Vietnam, Patrick Hangopian, PBS, public opinion, South Vietnam, Tet offensive, The Vietnam War, Viet Cong, Vietnam

I was planning on waiting till I saw its end to comment on the Ken Burns/Lynn Novick PBS documentary series, The Vietnam War, since analyzing anything without seeing the whole seems like a great formula for missing something important. But the episode on the January-July, 1968 period (“Things Fall Apart”) covers such a critical period, forthrightly raises so many of most painful questions generated for both supporters and opponents of the war, and then fails so completely to answer them, that this segment seems worth its own posting.

To remind, those first months of 1968 created one of the war’s major turning points; principally, they witnessed the Tet offensive shockingly launched at the end of January by North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces against a wide range of targets in South Vietnam. The ferocity and scope of the attacks seemed to discredit completely official American claims of solid progress versus the enemy, and led to levels of U.S. public backing for President Lyndon B. Johnson’s strategy dropping below critical levels, to Johnson’s stunning announcement that he would not seek a second term in office, and to the start of peace talks.

But even that description, which I tried to make as neutral as possible, can be challenged from several standpoints, and these challenges explain much of the frustration I felt watching “Things Fall Apart.”

First some truth in advertising. My strong opposition to the war dates to sometime around 1970 (somewhat later than that of many friends); I would have been a high school junior or senior at the time. Was some of it self-serving? You be the judge: I wasn’t technically a draft dodger, since I received an entirely legal, non-faked 4-F medical deferment. Also, by the time I received my very low (13) lottery number, in 1971, it seemed increasingly clear that the role of American ground troops was cresting, and there was no chance that I’d be flying over Vietnam in an air war that actually intensified. And of course, even at the conflict’s height, the vast majority of U.S. military personnel in the country were volunteers, and most of them were stationed behind the lines (though hardly out of danger).

But even though odds were my skin would have been safe had I been inducted or not, who could really be certain that American politicians would keep their Vietnamization promises over time? Moreover, I was able to avoid any service at all both through an accident of birth and thanks to family circumstances not available to so many of the young Americans who did fight and die or suffer physical and psychological wounds.

Everything I’ve learned since then about the conflict, however, has only deepened my conviction that U.S. military involvement in Vietnam was a ghastly, and in Constitutional terms, criminal mistake, which sought goals not remotely worth the sacrifice in American blood and treasure. It’s easy, consequently, for me personally to find the basic Burns-Novick narrative about early 1968 entirely convincing.

But there have so many flies in this ointment! For example, Tet no doubt was thoroughly discouraging to supporters of the war (including, at that time, yours truly). As The Vietnam War makes clear, Johnson administration assessments of the fight to keep South Vietnam in the non-communist world were invariably much rosier than circumstances warranted. In fact, just before Tet, U.S. officials were sounding especially optimistic that North Vietnamese and Viet Cong units were being “ground down,” and had lost their early momentum. How, then, could they stage attacks the length and breadth of South Vietnam, including fighting their way into the U.S. Embassy compound in Saigon, and holding out in the old imperial capital of Hue for a month?

Certainly elites, especially in the media and politics, were shaken. Certainly, it was the predominant reason for Johnson’s decision about the 1968 presidential race. But the American people? There’s considerable evidence that Tet did not suddenly convince masses of the public that it the time had come for the United States to get out. This 2008 journal article ably summarizes the polling evidence giving grounds for doubt. As Patrick Hagopian of Britain’s Lancaster University has documented, Tet-period surveys generally confirmed and solidified popular dissatisfaction that had been growing since Johnson began greatly escalating the American military effort in 1965.

Just as important, many of the war’s critics actually wanted Johnson to take off the gloves and attack the foe much more energetically – and presumably decisively. In Hagopian’s words. “The majority of Americans identified themselves as ‘hawks’ before the Tet offensive, and their number actually peaked in the immediate aftermath of the offensive, indicating a wish to strike back against the communists. The Tet offensive therefore did not just increase opposition to the war, it intensified the views of hawks who saw the options as ‘fight or get out.’”

Indeed,as Hagopian notes, in the critical March 12, 1968 New Hampshire primary that helped convince Johnson to bow out of the race because of peace candidate Senator Eugene J. McCarthy’s strong showing, “the majority of those who voted for [the grassroots challenger] were Vietnam war hawks who thought that President Johnson was not escalating the war fast enough. This was a repudiation of Johnson’s policies, but it was a protest vote by the hawks and not by people who supported McCarthy’s antiwar stance.” Burns and Novick do refer to this result briefly in The Vietnam War, but it’s treated as a mere footnote and simply left hanging.

Fly in the ointment number two concerns the on-the-ground results of Tet itself. Here Burns and McCarthy admirably embrace a view that still appears far from the conventional wisdom:  Tet was not only a devastating military defeat for the communist side. It was a devastating political defeat. For the offensive’s planners, notably North Vietnamese Communist Party chief Le Duan, expected the attacks to end the war once and for all by sparking a nation-wide revolt against the “puppet” Saigon government. Yet the South Vietnamese populace overwhelmingly stood beside its leaders. And the big domestic political change in the country brought about by Tet was the effective destruction of the southern dominated Viet Cong as a fighting – and major political – force.

The trouble for the documentary is that the Burns and Novick treatment of Tet’s impact on the South Vietnamese people in “Things Fall Apart” clashes violently with their portrayal of that nation’s leaders and their following. In all the previous episodes I’ve seen (that is, all save the first), South Vietnam’s leaders were depicted as incompetent, corrupt, and often both. Their political support, meanwhile, was dismissed as minimal, especially in the countryside that contained some 80 percent of South Vietnam’s people. Further, what the filmmakers tell viewers time and time again is that in the eyes of this highly nationalistic demographic, the Saigon government was also crippled politically by its heavy dependence on foreign (U.S.) backing, and that the American soldiers who strove to prop them up were generally seen as “invaders.”

Yet when this population had the chance to throw out these purportedly illegitimate leaders, most refused.

One possible explanation is that the Saigon government was seen as the lesser of two evils, but this is not an argument that Burns and Novick make. The filmmakers allude to public backing for neutralist and/or Buddhist leaders who favored a negotiated solution to the war, but these references never go beyond the allusion phase – at least not through the end of “Things Fall Apart.” So the South Vietnamese reaction to Tet (and this also includes the Burns-Novick description of a hitherto inept South Vietnamese military that made a major turnaround during Tet and often fought valiantly and effectively) is left as a total mystery.

As a result, also left completely unexamined is the potentially earthshaking but logical (at least) conclusion that can be drawn from these two flies in the ointment – that from a purely military perspective, U.S. leaders had a more accurate understanding of the war than is widely recognized. Specifically, after Tet, the tide on the battlefield had finally turned to a generally neglected extent, and that more persistence may well have produced a conclusion much better for the United States – and even arguably for the South Vietnamese people – than the total victory won by the North. Indeed, why had Hanoi at long last agreed to negotiations in 1968 after only a partial American bombing halt? Because it was still confident of triumphing militarily?

So how come I’m still an opponent of the war? For the reason stated above. No attainable goal in Vietnam could reasonably justify the price paid by America – more than 58,000 dead; some $1 trillion in 2011 (likely a conservative estimate); a broken, divided society; a wounded, distorted economy. Nor am I persuaded by an argument made by some revisionist scholars and other analysts – that the benefits extended well past Vietnam, and that the war is best seen as a delaying action that enabled the whole of East Asia to avoid communist rule and establish the foundations of its more recent stability and prosperity. If these were indeed products of Vietnam, the price for the United States still would have been wildly excessive, in my opinion.

But these subjects are much more deserving of public national debate than they’ve received so far, especially since the United States has found itself in several other unpopular, unsuccessful wars in spite of defeat in Vietnam, and surely stayed out of several other likely unpopular conflicts because of it. They also deserve much more discussion that devoted by Burns and Novick. The Vietnam War has been touted as a documentary that will help Americans better understand an historic episode that continues powerfully shaping the present in more ways than I suspect many recognize. Its treatment of crucial questions in “Things Fall Apart” makes me wonder whether it will even approach achieving this goal.