American policy in south-east Asia under Eisenhower had come to rest on the dogma that a non-communist South Vietnam was essential to security, and that it had to be kept in the western camp if others in the area - or perhaps as far away as India and Australia - were not to be subverted. So, the United States had become the backer of a conservative government in part of Indo-China. President Kennedy did not question this view and began to back up American military aid with ‘advisers’. At his death there were 23,000 of them in South Vietnam, and in fact many of them were in action in the field. President Johnson followed the course already set, believing that pledges to other countries had to be shown to be sound currency. But government after government in Saigon turned out to be broken reeds. At the beginning of 1965 Johnson was advised that South Vietnam might collapse; he had the authority to act (given him, thanks to careful political management, by Congress after North Vietnamese attacks on American ships the previous year) and air attacks were launched against targets in North Vietnam. Soon afterwards, the first official American combat units were sent to the south. American participation quickly soared out of control. In 1968 there were over 500,000 American servicemen in Vietnam; by Christmas that year a heavier tonnage of bombs had been dropped on North Vietnam than had fallen on Germany and Japan together in the entire Second World War.
The outcome was politically disastrous. It was almost the least of Johnson’s worries that the American balance of payments was wrecked by the war’s huge cost, which also took money from badly needed reform projects at home. Worse was the bitter domestic outcry that arose as casualties mounted and attempts to negotiate seemed to get nowhere. The better-off young (among them a future president) sought to avoid conscription and Americans gloomily contemplated at home on their television screens the cost of a struggle viewable in their homes as no other war had ever been. Rancour grew, and with it the alarm of moderate America. It was small consolation that Russia’s costs in supplying arms to North Vietnam were heavy, too.
More was involved in domestic strife over Vietnam than the agitation of young people rioting in protest and distrust of their government, or the idealism of conservatives outraged by ritual desecrations of the symbols of patriotism and refusals to carry out military service. Vietnam was bringing about a transformation in the way many Americans looked at the outside world. In south-east Asia it was at last borne in on the thoughtful among them that even the United States could not obtain every result it wanted, far less obtain it at any reasonable cost. The late 1960s brought the end of the illusion that American power was limitless and irresistible. Americans had approached the post-war world with this illusion intact. Their country’s strength, they believed, had, after all, decided two world wars. Beyond them there stretched back a century and a half of virtually unchecked and unhindered continental expansion, of immunity from European intervention, of the growth of an impressive hegemony in the American hemisphere. There was nothing in American history that was wholly disastrous or irredeemable, hardly anything in which there was, ultimately, failure, and nothing over which most Americans felt any guilt. It had been easy and natural for that background to breed a careless assumption of limitless possibility. Prosperity helped to carry it over from domestic to foreign concerns. Americans easily overlooked the special conditions on which their success story had long been built.
The reckoning had begun to be drawn up in the 1950s, when many Americans had to be content with a lesser victory in Korea than they had hoped for. There had then opened twenty years of frustrating dealings with nations often enjoying not a tenth of the power of the United States, but apparently able to thwart her. At last, in the Vietnam disaster, both the limits of power and its full costs were revealed. In March 1968 the strength of the rising opposition to the war was shown clearly in the primary elections.
Johnson was moving to the conclusion that the United States could not win. He was ready to restrict bombing and asked the North Vietnamese to open negotiations again. Dramatically, he now also announced that he would not stand for re-election in 1968. Just as the casualties of the Korean War won Eisenhower election in 1952, so the casualties of Vietnam, on the battlefield and at home, helped (with the presence of a third candidate) to elect another Republican president in 1968 (only four years after Johnson won a huge Democratic majority) and to re-elect him in 1972. Vietnam was not the only factor, but it was one of the most important in finally dislocating the old Democratic coalition.
The new president, Richard Nixon, began to withdraw American ground forces from Vietnam soon after his inauguration, but peace-making took three years. In 1970 secret negotiations began between North Vietnam and the United States. There were further withdrawals, but also renewed and intensified bombing of the north and its extension to Cambodia by the Americans. The diplomacy was tortuous and difficult. The United States could not admit it was abandoning its ally, though in fact it had to do so, nor would the North Vietnamese accept terms that did not leave them able to harass the southern regime through their sympathizers in the south. Amid considerable public outcry in the United States, bombing was briefly resumed at the end of 1972, but for the last time. Soon afterwards, on 27 January 1973, a cease-fire was signed in Paris. The war had cost the United States vast sums of money and 58,000 dead. It had gravely damaged American prestige, eroded American diplomatic influence, had ravaged domestic politics and had frustrated reform. What had been achieved was a temporary preservation of a shaky South Vietnam, saddled with internal problems which made its survival unlikely, while terrible destruction had been inflicted on the peoples of Indo-China, of whom three million died. Perhaps the abandonment of the illusion of American omnipotence went some way to offset these costs.
It was a real success to have disentangled the United States from the morass and President Nixon reaped the political benefit. The liquidation of the venture had followed other signs of his recognition of how much the world had already changed since the Cuban crisis. The most striking of these was a new policy of normal and direct American diplomatic relations with communist China. It came to a climax only in 1978, but two dramatic earlier events had preceded even the making of the Vietnam peace. In October 1971 the UN General Assembly had recognized the People’s Republic as the only legitimate representative of China in the United Nations, and expelled the representative of Taiwan. This was not an outcome the United States had anticipated until the crucial vote was taken. The following February, there took place a visit by Nixon to China that was the first visit ever made by an American president to mainland Asia, and one he described as an attempt to bridge ‘16,000 miles and twenty-two years of hostility’.
When Nixon followed his Chinese trip by becoming also the first American president to visit Moscow (in May 1972), and this was followed by an interim agreement on arms limitation, the first of its kind, it seemed that another important change had come about. The stark, polarized simplicities of the Cold War were blurring, however doubtful the future might be. The Vietnam settlement followed and this can hardly have been unrelated to it; Moscow and Peking both had to be squared if there was to be a ceasefire. China’s attitude to the Vietnamese struggle was, we may guess, by no means simple; it was complicated by potential danger from the USSR, by the United States’ use of its power elsewhere in Asia, notably in Taiwan and Japan, and by older memories of the strength of Vietnamese nationalism; its Indo-Chinese communist satellite could not be trusted. Once seen by China as one of her tributary peoples, the Vietnamese looked back on a long history of struggle against Chinese as well as French imperialism. In the immediate aftermath of the American withdrawal, too, the nature of the struggle going on in Vietnam was more and more clearly revealed as a civil war over who should rule a reunited country.
The North Vietnamese did not wait long to settle the matter. For a time the United States government had to pretend not to see this; there was too much relief at home over the liquidation of the Asian commitment for scruples to be expressed over the actual observation of the peace terms that had made withdrawal possible. When a political scandal forced Nixon’s resignation in 1974, his successor faced a Congress suspicious of what it saw as dangerous foreign adventures and determined to thwart them. There would be no attempt to uphold the peace terms of 1972 insofar as they guaranteed the South Vietnamese regime against overthrow. Early in 1975 American aid to Saigon came to an end. A government which had lost virtually all its other territory was reduced to a backs-to-the-wall attempt to hold the capital city and lower Mekong with a demoralized and defeated army. At the same time, communist forces in Cambodia were destroying another regime once supported by the United States. Congress prevented the sending of further military and financial help. The pattern of China in 1947 was being repeated; the United States was cutting her losses at the expense of those who had relied on her (though 117,000 Vietnamese left with the Americans), and the North Vietnamese army entered Saigon in April 1975.
Such an outcome was doubly ironic. In the first place it seemed to show that the hardliners on Asian policy had been right all along - that only the knowledge that the United States was in the last resort prepared to fight for them could guarantee the post-colonial regimes’ resistance to communism. Secondly, the swing back to isolationism in the United States was accentuated, not muffled, by defeat and disaster; those who reflected on the American dead and missing and the huge cost now saw the whole Indo-China episode as a pointless and unjustifiable waste on behalf of peoples who would not fight to defend themselves. It was arguable, though, that better relations with China mattered much more than the loss of Vietnam.
As 1980 drew nearer many Americans were confused and worried; national morale was not good. Vietnam had left deep psychic wounds as well as helping to feed a counter-culture at home which they found frightening. In the 1960s, the first voices of note had raised the alarm over environmental dangers; the 1970s had brought the oil crisis and a new sense of exposure at a moment when, for the first time, America’s Middle Eastern ally, Israel, no longer seemed invulnerable to her enemies. The disgrace and near-impeachment of President Nixon after a scandalous abuse of executive power had eaten away at confidence in the nation’s institutions. Abroad, the behaviour of other allies (themselves worried and confused by American disarray) seemed less predictable than in the past. For the first time, too, Americans’ confidence in the promise their nation had always been believed to hold out for mankind faltered in the face of what looked like blunt rejection by much of the Islamic world.
The situation was indeed not easy to read. Yet the American democratic system showed no sign of breaking down, nor of not meeting many of the country’s needs, even if it could not find answers to all its problems. The economy had, astonishingly, been able to continue for years to pay for a hugely expensive war, a space exploration programme that put men on the moon, and for garrisons around the world. True, the black American’s plight continued to worsen, and some of the country’s greatest cities seemed stricken by urban decay. Fewer Americans, though, seemed to find such facts as worrying as their country’s supposed inferiority in missile strength to the Soviet Union (it was to be an issue in the presidential election of 1980). President Gerald Ford (who had taken office in 1974 on the resignation of his predecessor) had already had to face a Congress unwilling to countenance further aid to its allies in Indo-China. When Cambodia collapsed and South Vietnam quickly followed, questions began to be asked at home and abroad about how far what looked like a worldwide retreat of American power might go. If the United States would no longer fight over Indo-China, would she, then, do so over Thailand? More alarmingly still, would she fight over Israel - or even Berlin? There were good reasons to think the Americans’ mood of resignation and dismay would not last for ever, but while it lasted, their allies looked about them and left uneasy.