Ifwhiteamericatoldthetruthforonedayitsworldwouldfallapart

"If tomorrow the Vietnamese are communists, they will be Vietnamese communists! And this is something you never understood, you Americans."
Hubert de Marais, Apocalypse Now Redux (1979)

Defaced Great Seal of the United States, Wikipedia, 2004

This year marked the 70th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, and also the 40th anniversary of the capitulation of South Vietnam. A scant thirty year period in which the United States of America went from being unstoppable in the Western hemisphere to crumbling world power. The Vietnam debacle was one of a string of events (the energy crisis, Watergate, stagflation, etc) in the lead up to the US Bicentennial celebrations that put America on much the same stagnant footing as the Soviet Union under Brezhnev. The only reason history is more interested in the Soviet experience is because that state did eventually fall, and in doing so left the US placed for assuming the role of hyperpower. Explaining the decline of American power in the second half of the 20th Century is critically linked to the tumultuous years in South-East Asia.


To the majority of American citizens, that the United States lost the Vietnam War is, at worst, contested with a flat-out denial or, at best, the spark for a prolonged debate on semantics. This is quite unusual - the phrase 'history is written by the victors' is well known, yet the Vietnam War is the one counterexample. Vietnam was a tiny impoverished country on the other side of the world. America had a massive multimedia machine at home and abroad, and that immense propaganda effort spun with all its might the humiliating Yankee defeat into a tale of Saigon incompetence. True enough, it wasn't American soldiers that fell back all the way to the capital discarding their uniforms with NVA tanks on their backsides;  because the US had ran off several years prior under the program of 'Vietnamization' - that is to say, fighting the war had become unpalatable. In the end, though, the enduring image of the Fall of Saigon is American helicopters evacuating Americans from the roof of the American embassy. Thus, the very idea that their great country did not go uninterrupted from the Eisenhower-Kennedy white picket fence dreamland to the Reaganite perpetual daybreak is beyond comprehension for anyone raised on this media distortion of reality.

It is the failure to perceive reality that is key to understanding the eventual defeat in Vietnam as well as numerous other strategic mistakes by the United States and its allies during the Cold War. The opening quote highlights one of the core misunderstandings of the Vietnam situation - that the struggle under way was easily compartmentalised as an instance of Domino Theory. Having lost China in 1949, this theory ascribed direct Soviet involvement in anything that disadvantaged projection of American power, and so direct counteraction was called for in a triangle from Japan to India to Australia. The Viet Minh movement was only ever understood within the practical context of the war against Imperial Japan, to which the US funded them. After the Japanese defeat the French tried to reassert colonial authority in Indochina which the Viet Minh also resisted, completely in character with their resistance to the Japanese - that they were a movement of national liberation. Instead, beholden to it, reality had to conform to theory and they were demeaned as a puppet with strings leading all the way to the Kremlin and that was all she wrote.

North Vietnam and Cuba, et al, gravitated to the Second World because the global capital of the First World was neocolonial. That so many liberations movements of the era were affiliated at some level with the Soviets was that the official Soviet ideology was anticolonial. The Viet Minh declared Vietnamese independence from France in 1945 with a text that deliberately recalled the sentiments of revolutionary America and France far more than that of Russia, for it was not Russia they were appealing to. Eventually due to the situation in Korea (summoning Domino Theory) and the troubles of the more strategically important French Fourth Republic, the US turned its back on Vietnam. The 26th of July Movement in Cuba was never explicitly pro-Soviet and anti-American, nor was it communist as Fidel Castro declared while on a tour of America (no less) in 1959. It wasn't until US commercial property in Cuba was nationalised that the famous embargo began, that Domino Theory was invoked for Latin America, and that Cuba was inevitably driven into the Soviet sphere. So too does the story of the struggle against Apartheid in South Africa fit into this immense strategic blunder.

Nguyen Van Thieu with map, 1968, public domain

Just like the Viet Minh, the ANC by its very name (the African National Congress) was a national liberation movement. In writing about the struggle in Rhodesia and South Africa I argued the ANC had ended in the Soviet sphere because the West rejected egalitarianism in the global context. When Mandela took to the stand during his trial he did not invoke Das Kapital or Leninist doctrine, it was simply a call to uphold for all the Western liberal democratic rights afforded the white population. The Apartheid government framed their system as anti-communist and the Atlantic powers followed suit to find themselves on the wrong side of history (only the disintegration of the Soviet Union saved them the embarrassment of it lasting any longer). That the Anglo-American bloc continued to trade with South Africa during the sanctions of the 80s may perhaps be found in the prevailing idea of 'trickle-down' economics of the era - that excluding it from markets would impact the black poor via impacting the white elite. This altogether hinges on the idea that liberal economics is entangled with democracy, which a glance at any of the history I have just recalled might scupper. Furthermore, last year declassified records of a meeting on Northern Ireland have Thatcher reading that situation too through the Cold War Prism, in which the Irish Republican movement was viewed as 'Marxist' - in essence, through the conspiratorial worldview of the prism it was the next Soviet acquisition in the real world game of Risk.

During all this there was one astonishing moment of clarity, a genuine grasp of reality demonstrated by the Nixon administration. Purely through the principles of Realpolitik they saw through their own myth of 'world communism' as supposedly operated out of the Kremlin by exploiting the Sino-Soviet split for their own strategic ends. This was quite a quarter-century turnaround, for once the People's Republic of China was an international pariah responsible for the bulk of the Korean War. If the validity of the analysis of the Vietnamese and Cuban movements is in question, then I will address Communist China, or rather Capitalist China. The remarkable switch which the PRC underwent in the 80s led by Deng Xiaoping makes no sense if one does not recognise the Communist Party of China was in fact a nationalist movement that happened to be aligned with Moscow to achieve its aims. Though it may have defeated the nationalist Kuomintang in the civil war, their goals were largely the same - restoration of Chinese sovereignty after the 'century of humiliation'. The CPC was broader than it appears with a simple glance at its name, as both it and the Kuomintang were spawned from the 1911 republican revolution and claim the legacy of the revered Sun Yat-sen. For the purposes of political continuity, the CPC designates the official economic policy of the PRC as 'socialism with Chinese characteristics', thus ignoring the 'socialism' the true meaning is basically whatever yields results for China. Mao might have agreed ideologically with Stalin and may even have been a 'true believer' regarding his interference in the Korean War, but the CPC was always foremost the Chinese Communist Party.

Whether the Kremlin ever believed in the brotherhood of men or simply armed these liberation armies throughout the post-war era for strategic gain is irrelevant. What matters is the 'free world' did not live up to its principles. Now the Soviets had their own hypocrisies: while it may have been exporting anticolonialism against capitalist exploitation of the developing world, it was plainly operating in an imperialist manner in Eastern Europe. In practice, though, the post-war division of Europe was of a very different origin to colonialism, exactly in keeping with American implementation of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America. Just as the Western propaganda machine created a new reality for explaining the demise of South Vietnam it had previously generated a warped history of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The inconceivable scale of Soviet losses, civilian and military, from 1942 to 1945 is never truly acknowledged in the West, certainly not in media for domestic consumption. Exposed to Hollywood war films before the tricolour was raised over the Kremlin, one could be forgiven for believing America rode in single-handedly and rescued Europe from dictatorship in 1944. It did, just not the one you're thinking of. The Nazis were already headed for total defeat since early 1943 and Berlin was a lot closer to Moscow than Normandy. Paranoia of Soviet intentions thus led to a race to capture as much of Central Europe as possible before the war ended, whereas in the Pacific theatre the US rushed to end the war before the Soviets could capture as much of East Asia as they could. This mistrust of an erstwhile ally coloured everything from then on, for both sides. That they were allies was realpolitik forcing two odd states into alliance, much as the Molotv-Ribbentrop pact started the war.

With a substantial percentage of its population dead or dying from the war, the Soviet Union turned the tide with pyrrhic victory at Stalingrad and was henceforth in a prime position to end it and ensure it never happened again. An enduring safety for the Rodina meant comprehensively defeating Germany (Nazi or not) by marching all the way to Berlin and ensuring it never threatened them again. It did so by installing subservient regimes in the states between Berlin and Königsberg and annexing the interbellum Baltic states. In 1949 it secured these lands and its own from American hegemony by successfully testing its own nuclear bomb, a stabilising act according to Mutually Assured Destruction. There are rather interesting parallels between those actions and everything Israel has done since its founding in 1948. The Jewish and Russian ordeals of the Second World War prompted both to create buffer zones against hostile neighbours and acquire nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantor against a repeat of unparalleled destruction. One was denounced by the West and the other excused and facilitated by the West - further elaboration is unnecessary.

It must be concluded that the foreign policy errors of the United States during the Cold War were not entirely due to inability to perceive the world, but also unwillingness - Washington was as trapped within its own rhetoric and dogma as Moscow. Through reductive theories and conspiracy theory grade interpretations of global events, the US reacted to a scarecrow and never the true face of the changing world. It still hasn't. That is not to say there weren't KGB agents in high places, rather there were other larger forces at work. Globalisation was the storm that was reshaping the map. The end of history was approaching.

[1873; 5]