Vietnam Trauma in American Foreign Policy

1945-75

Paul M. Kattenburg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351301862
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This study of ten fateful decisions made on Indochina between 1961-75 highlights the ascent of the civilian militarists and of strategy over diplomacy in United States policymaking and reveals the inexorably interlinked and escalating character of the decisions and the central purpose of American presidents: not to have to face the expected domestic political consequences of defeat in Indochina. As a result, we were led into a prolonged stalemate in which "acting" and the management of programs became a more important preoccupation than thinking about our purposes and values, in which analysis become wholly subjective and therefore defective, and in which decision-making occurred in a closed system which did not allow for divergent inputs.

Chapter I

The United States in Postwar East and Southeast Asia, 1945-54

1. The United States in Postwar East Asia

At the end of World War II, the United States found itself deployed over vast areas of East Asia. It occupied Japan and Japan’s former island dependencies in the Ryukyus (including Okinawa) and in the Central Pacific with very sizeable contingents of Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines. It also occupied the southern half of Korea, where the United States maintained a minor military presence until the outbreak of the Korean War in June, 1950. U.S. military forces and advisors remained on the mainland of China to assist the Chiang Kai-shek regime in its civil war against the Chinese Communists until after the failure of Gen. George C. Marshall’s efforts in 1946-47 to establish a coalition government between the Nationalists and Communists in China. When the Nationalists finally collapsed on the mainland in the fall of 1949, the remaining Nationalist forces retreated to Taiwan where the United States thereafter retained a strong offshore posture, reinforced after the outbreak of the Korean War by the interposition of the U.S. Seventh (Pacific) Fleet in the Taiwan Straits. In the Philippines, the United States as a result of the war was militarily significantly stronger in the postwar period than it had been before the war.

Our strong postwar military presence in East Asia was a new factor in American diplomacy. The Philippines, China, and Japan had been the only significant exceptions to a prolonged American policy of essentially ignoring East Asia before World War II. Even in these three countries our role had been modest. While we occupied and ran the Philippines after 1898, we promised them eventual independence as early as 1916, and began to implement our withdrawal when we established commonwealth status for the islands in 1934 and failed thereafter to fortify or prepare to defend them against the likelihood of Japanese aggression.

In China, Secretary Hay’s Open Door notes of 1899 and 1900 had not prevented the domination of the country by the imperialist powers, although they facilitated the protection and enhancement of America’s modest trading interests. Our concern before World War II in China was in essence more sentimental than strategic and was focussed on the presence of American missionaries. The volume of U.S.-China trade, despite its vaunted possibilities, remained quite small while U.S. strategic interest in the territorial integrity of China remained a matter for rhetorical affirmation rather than for interventionary action.

Even in Japan, the U.S. presence and the U.S. role remained relatively small, compared, for example, to our interest in and relations with the major European powers before World War II. After the negotiations leading to the Washington naval arms limitations agreements of 1922, we tended to rest content in the belief that Japan, despite her economic explosion in the thirties and the reiteration of her designs on the Asian mainland, would neither succeed in fully conquering China nor seek to expand further into the realms of greater East Asia.

The entire mainland of Southeast Asia was virtually virgin territory as far as U.S. foreign and strategic policy before World War II was concerned, with only a minimal concern shown for the colonies of France in Indochina, the Netherlands in the East Indies, and of Britain in Burma, Malaya, Borneo, and Singapore. Only in Thailand did the United States maintain, from about the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, a somewhat esoteric interest, focussed mainly on the presence of U.S. missionaries and a modicum of trade.

It is significant that the United States never felt the need to intervene in East Asia before World War II. Despite its historic aversion to alliance policies, it ultimately did not hesitate to come to the assistance of France and Britain in World War I, particularly after American shipping lanes and interests had been directly affected; nor did the United States hesitate to intervene repeatedly in Latin American affairs when its strategic, political, or economic interests seemed directly threatened. But even after Japan’s expansionism started in earnest with the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and of China proper in 1937, the United States kept its role one of purely rhetorical opposition. It was only after Germany had occupied France in 1940 and signed the Axis Treaty with Italy and Japan that U.S. policy began to change. The change was precipitated when Japan demonstrated her aggressive intent toward Southeast Asia by occupying substantial portions of Indochina after the fall of France in Europe.

At the end of World War II in 1945, the picture had changed drastically. The war had brought U.S. presence to East Asia in great, in fact overwhelming strength. The western portions of the Pacific, including the vast realm of the southwest Pacific and New Guinea, the Philippines, the Ryukyus, and finally Japan and Korea had all been part of the huge theater of operations commanded by Gen. Douglas Mac-Arthur during the war. From their headquarters in Washington and Hawaii, Admirals Chester Nimitz and William Halsey had spread U.S. naval power throughout the whole southern and western Pacific basins. From the China-Burma-India Theater, first Gen. Joseph Stillwell and later Gen. Albert Wedemeyer had extended U.S. military presence into southern, later central and northern China until U.S. Marines reached the Manchurian borders with the Soviet Union. Finally, from British-commanded headquarters of the Southeast Asia Command at Kandy, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), the American OSS (later to become CIA) had extended a feeble but progressively more perceptible presence to the mainland of Southeast Asia.

Thus while the United States had relatively little contact with East Asia before World War II, it found itself at the end of that war occupying a commanding, in fact, an overwhelming position in that region. With U.S. presence, and given the existing conditions and circumstances of the European colonial powers and of Japan, all of which had been fatally or near fatally weakened by the war, there went an ever-increasing extension of American influence.

Asia was no longer, as previously, remote from the American experience; World War II had brought us in, and for the ensuing three decades Asia was to become a major part of the American experience in world affairs. As we shall see, Indochina in a very real sense came to be the crunch-point, the symbolic nub, of this American experience. Symbolizing most of Asia, we had had only remote contact with its peoples and countries before World War II. The war brought us much closer to Indochina. The postwar period saw us exert growing influence and ultimately command over its destinies.

Lack of Wartime Planning

It is appropriate to signal the lack of systematic political planning with which our operations in the Far Pacific and East Asia proceeded during World War II. Although many concepts for the postwar future of Asia were discussed in the United States during the war, none came to real fruition. We entered Asia as conquering military heroes, as liberators of peoples from the Japanese yoke, but without serious concept as to the political organization and future of this vast realm of land and ocean, comprising such a high percent of the world’s population. One exception was the Philippines, to which the United States extended independence with alacrity and without afterthought on July 4, 1946.

In Japan and Okinawa, the purposes and methods of Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s occupation were also clear: to institute the constitutional, social, economic, and political reforms destined to establish in Japan the type of polity that never again would be capable of aggression against its neighbors in Asia, or of threatening the now extended security interests of the United States in Asia. Japan was first demolished, then disarmed, then democratized; in 1951 the United States signed the peace treaty with the Japanese Empire which was to enable the latter in due course to restore its economic greatness without reestablishing its military predominance. This peace was also to give the United States a permanent military presence in Japan and Okinawa through the network of U.S. military bases which survives to this day.

In China, however, the United States followed an ambiguous policy in the hesitant period of great power confrontation which ensued at the end of World War II and lasted until the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Our policy was a combination of displeasure at the corruption and neglect of the popular will demonstrated by Chiang Kaishek’s U.S.-assisted Chinese Nationalists, and of distrust and fear of the possible threat to U.S. interests represented by the ever-growing and more triumphant forces of Chinese communism led by Mao Tse-tung. In the end, the United States bowed to the realities of the Chinese Civil War, accepted Chiang’s retreat from the mainland, and set out to protect him in Taiwan. Two decades of hostile confrontation with Communist China were initiated after the rebuff of initial American attempts to come to terms with Mao. These attempts ended with the Korean War.

Our lack of planning for postwar Asia was most pronounced in Southeast Asia. It applied particularly in Indochina, where President Franklin Roosevelt’s strongly expressed and deeply felt distaste for French colonialism seemed destined to induce changes in the postwar period. If Roosevelt can be said to have had a special phobia during the war, it was his revulsion at the French collapse in Europe and at the post-1940 French role in territories like Indochina, which neither rallied to the Free French under Gen. Charles de Gaulle nor supported the Allies in their great war effort against the Axis powers. What had upset Roosevelt most was the willingness of the local French wartime commander, Adm. Jean Decoux, to allow Indochina to be used by the Japanese as a springboard for the penetration and later invasion of peninsular Southeast Asia. Roosevelt seemed determined that never again should France return to Indochina.¹

Hence it was with Roosevelt’s approbation that elements of the OSS, operating from both the China-Burma-India and the Southeast Asia Commands, began to establish liaison with the anti-Japanese guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh and his followers in the Viet Minh resistance movement during the late stages of the war. At war’s end, U.S. diplomacy was at best cool and at worst hostile to French efforts, this time mounted by de Gaulle’s government in Paris (1944-45) to regain control over their former rich possession in East Asia. Indochina was divided at the 16th parallel. British forces occupied the southern region with headquarters in Saigon and Chinese Nationalist forces responding to Chiang Kai-shek in Nanking occupied the north, with headquarters in Hanoi. As these operations proceeded after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, no real effort was made by Roosevelt’s successors or former principal deputies to give effect to the anti-colonialist sentiments that he had so repeatedly voiced during the war. Efforts by Ho Chi Minh at this time to establish serious contacts with the United States were either rebuffed or ignored.²

After Ho’s revolution succeeded in Hanoi and briefly in Saigon in August-September 1945, bringing about a rallying of all Nationalist forces under his banner, Ho Chi Minh and his Viet Minh movement were soon forced to retreat to their mountainous “secure rear bases” in Northwest Tonkin. Their southern followers were expelled from Saigon by the occupation authorities and their French hangers-on. After a period of relatively low terroristic activity, the Viet Minh rebellion began to resort to guerrilla war on a larger scale. The French gradually rebuilt their forces in-country, first under the repressive and authoritarian Adm. Thierry d’Argenlieu and later under the more reasonable Gen. Leclerc. By mid-1946, both the British and Chinese Nationalist forces of occupation were withdrawn, leaving the field clear for the French. The latter had, by early 1946, initialed agreements looking toward a peaceful settlement with the Viet Minh, which would have given the latter a key voice in an autonomous government. But the French themselves started to violate these agreements almost as soon as their ink was dry.³ The United States stood by.

A good argument can certainly be made that the first significant mistake in our postwar Indochina policy occurred as the result of our lack of systematic planning for the Southeast Asian region during World War II and our failure to give effect with force, occupation forces if necessary, to our anti-colonialist rhetoric of the war. If the French had not been allowed to reestablish their presence in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia during the year following the end of the war against the Japanese, the ensuing history of Southeast Asia and of the United States would surely have been very different. And this would have been the case whether or not we had immediately recognized independent regimes under the anti-Japanese partisan leadership of these countries, such as the Viet Minh in Vietnam.

The days of European colonialism in Southeast Asia were to be numbered; and yet the United States had neither prepared itself to fill the vacuum, nor did it appear ready to accept the native nationalisms of various political hues which were emerging in the region. As a result, the British easily regained control of their colonies; the Dutch, though with considerable difficulty, did so for a number of years; and the French slowly crept back into Indochina in a troubled atmosphere which shortly led to the first Indochina War. The latter began in December 1946 with the shelling of Haiphong harbor by French warships and did not end until the debacle at Dien Bien Phu eight years later and the conclusion of the Geneva Armistice Accords on July 20, 1954.

The Importance of Presence

The sheer fact of our overwhelming presence would become a decisive element in the future of East Asia. It induced us to adopt many of the policies that were subsequently followed, policies frequently manufactured in almost ad hoc response to the pressures of the moment, and requiring our ever-willing and ever-growing presence for their successful implementation.

U.S. military forces and the accompanying capacity for rapid movement of these forces from one part of East Asia to another, rather than any systematic plan or concept, became a major causal factor for the extended role which the United States began to play after 1945, and especially after 1950, in that part of the world.

Our presence resulted rather rapidly in the acquisition of military bases and positions in postwar Asia, including Southeast Asia. The first such bases were acquired in 1945 by right of conquest in Japan, Okinawa, Central Pacific, and Korea, and later formalized in the peace and security pacts of 1951, 1961, and 1969 with Japan and the 1954 pact with Korea; as well as by bilateral agreement with the Philippines as early as 1947, perpetuating the prewar military presence of the United States in that archipelago.

The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 caused the reinforcement and ultimately the solid anchoring of the extended U.S. role and military position throughout East Asia for at least the following two decades. The war confirmed for a long period (1950-72) an American perception of manifest destiny in East Asia and of a major role as emancipator and protector of the peoples of that region.

There followed the interposition of the U.S. Navy in the Taiwan Straits after the onset of the Korean War, and in quick succession thereafter security agreements and U.S. forces positioning on a quasi-permanent basis in Australia-New Zealand (ANZUS Pact, 1951), the Philippines (bilateral security pact, 1951), Republic of China on Taiwan (bilateral security pact, 1954), as well as the SEATO multilateral pact of 1954. The latter extended U.S. protection against “Communist aggression” directly to Thailand and in much more questionable and indirect fashion to the newly independent SEATO protocol states of South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

2. The Departure of Colonial Powers and the Emergence of Communism in Southeast Asia

The decade following World War II in Southeast Asia was marked by one factor of overwhelming importance, namely the departure of the colonial powers from the region. With the exception of Thailand, all of prewar Southeast Asia had been entirely dominated by Western metropolitan powers: the British in Burma, Malaysia (Malaya and British Borneo), and Singapore; the French in Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia); the Dutch in Indonesia (formerly the Netherlands East Indies); the United States in the Philippines.

In a very swift military movement, beginning with their penetration of Indochina in the summer of 1940 and continuing after their attack on Pearl Harbor and Singapore in December 1941, the Japanese had occupied the entire region and expelled all the colonial powers except the collaborationist French in Indochina. Even Australia had been expelled from its mandated territory in Papua-New Guinea. The Japanese held all of Southeast Asia from mid-1942 until their defeat at the hands of the United States, with minimal assistance from other Allied powers, in August 1945.

In the Philippines, despite the establishment of a pro-Japanese puppet government, the population generally and strongly resisted the Japanese, kept faith in MacArthur’s famous promise that “I shall return,” and effectively supported U.S.-led and organized anti-Japanese guerrilla activity. The returning Americans were acclaimed as heroes in 1944-45 as MacArthur, accompanied by the Philippines’ first post-independence president, Sergio Osmena Sr., returned triumphantly to Manila. Independence was achieved smoothly and peacefully in July 1946, but surviving U.S. presence in the form of military bases, substantial economic interests, and indirect exertion of political control gradually led to increasing bitterness in postwar U.S.-Philippine relations.

In Indonesia, the under-strength Dutch, returning for the most part from exile in Australia and later to be reinforced by contingents from the Netherlands proper, immediately ran into an Indonesian national revolution, symbolized by the government of a new Republic of Indonesia. Led by the prewar Nationalist hero Sukarno, who had unabashedly collaborated with the Japanese during the occupation in order to serve his own nationalistic ends, the Republic, centered on Jogjakarta in Central Java, fought the Dutch in Djakarta. A bitter war, called a “police action” by the Dutch, followed (1946-49) during which the Republic, with the support of world opinion expressed primarily in a series of United Nations resolutions and the intervention of U.N. peace-making groups, gradually expanded its base of control around Jogjakarta. It eventually established its full control of the country, taking over the capital of Djakarta in December 1949, as the Dutch slowly withdrew. By mid-1950, as the Korean War broke out, the Republic of Indonesia had become fully independent.

In Burma, the British conferred independence in 1948-49, once they had decided on a similar course for India (1947), and Burma had therefore ceased to play a significant role for Britain as buffer between India and China. Along with India, Pakistan, and Ceylon in the subcontinent, Burma emerged as a fully independent state. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter I–The United States in Postwar East and Southeast Asia, 1945-54
• Chapter II–The Effects of Containment on U.S. Policies, 1945-59
• Chapter III–The Pitfalls of Global Approaches, 1959-62
• Chapter IV–Ten Fateful Decisions on Vietnam, 1961-75
• Chapter V–Winning Without Winning, 1961-72
• Chapter VI–Losing Without Losing, 1961-72
• Chapter VII–Disengagement from Indochina, 1968-73
• Chapter VIII–Vietnam as Lesson of History, 1973-
• Bibliography
• Index