In the absence of hard news it is difficult to say whether President Nixon has been able to extort more favourable terms from Hanoi. But the rest of the world will not bother about it. It will only heave a sigh of relief that the terror bombing of North Viet Nam has come to an end and that it can at last look forward to an early cease-fire in the south. It does not even care if the prospects of genuine peace still remain somewhat bleak.
The world has been sick of the war in Viet Nam for many reasons. The war has for long been an exercise in genocide. It has been a shameful affair inasmuch as the greatest military power in the world has used all its power to bring a small and poor country to its knees. It has made no sense, particularly since the Geneva agreement of 1954, even from an anti-communist point of view.
The whole adventure was misconceived from the very start. The US had nothing to gain from stepping into the shoes of the departing French, propping up the detested Diem regime, preventing the reunification of the country under the terms of the Geneva accord and, finally, by fighting the war from 1965 onwards. On the contrary, it had everything to gain from exercising a wise restraint in an area so peripheral to its vital interests. To put it at its lowest, it would have avoided the damage it has done to its own image in its effort to frustrate an essentially nationalistic revolution in Viet Nam.
Sino-Soviet Split
It is an irony of history that the United States stepped up its intervention in Viet Nam in the early ‘sixties just when the split between the Soviet Union and China had come out into the open and it did not have the slightest justification for continuing to raise the bogey of a united international communist movement. As it happened, the regime in Saigon was also rapidly disintegrating at the time. Thus if Presidents Kennedy and Johnson had wanted they could have ended America’s involvement in the struggle for power in South Viet Nam without any loss of face. Who could have blamed them for refusing to come to the aid of feuding and corrupt generals busy conspiring against each other and amassing vast personal fortunes?
Perhaps President Kennedy did not have enough time to appraise the new situation resulting from the assassination of President Diem on the one hand and the Soviet debacle over Cuba and the Sino-Soviet controversy on the other. But President Johnson had no such excuse, specially after fighting and winning the election on a peace platform in 1964.
By then it was clear that the Sino-Soviet dispute was as much nationalistic as it was ideological and that it was tending to split and demoralise communist parties all over the world.
In fact one more bogey had been laid by that time. It was clear that the newly independent countries of Asia and Africa were quite capable of looking after their interests in dealing with communist powers and did not depend entirely on American power and assistance to prevent communist take-over bids. As far as South Viet Nam was concerned, the generals, who had murdered President Diem, were in no position either to work together or to win the support of the people.
But instead of taking a hard look at the changed international scene and adapting his government’s policies, he perpetrated a fraud on his countrymen by provoking some minor incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin, blowing them out of all proportion and persuading Congress to give him unlimited powers to wage war in Viet Nam in 1965 in the name of protecting American lives in the area. Why did he do it?
Warped Thinking
On the face of it, his thinking had been so warped by the rhetoric of the cold war that he could not just grasp the import of the Sino-Soviet discord or its impact on the communist movement all over the world. Many American officials, diplomats and intellectuals, too, had deluded themselves into believing that the revolutionary mantle had passed from the Russians to the Chinese, that while the former had become a status quo power, the latter were out to disrupt peace and order by inciting and supporting the so-called wars of national liberation, that Viet Nam was the test case and that it was necessary to defeat the Hanoi-supported insurrection in the south in the larger interest of convincing Peking that it would not be allowed to get away with its plans.
This distorted view of Chinese intentions vitiated American decisions under President Johnson who fell for the domino theory as easily as its author, the late Mr. John Foster Dulles. But that cannot be the whole story, specially after 1965 when the Indonesian communist party, the biggest and most influential in Asia after China’s, was decimated and China itself was convulsed by a major crisis. Indeed, by the summer of 1966 it was difficult to find any worthwhile expert in the United States who believed that China was an expansionist power or that the North Vietnamese regime was a Chinese puppet.
There is no mystery, however, about Mr. Johnson’s or Mr. Nixon’s policy in Viet Nam once the world grasps the fact that US objective all along has been as much to preserve the status quo, however unjust, unnatural and unstable, and establish Pax Americana as to contain communism. It is the North Vietnamese people’s great misfortune that the three facets of US policy coalesced in America’s dealings with it. Thus they have had to suffer the worst bombing in history not only because they are communists and have threatened to upset the regional status quo by taking over the south and extending their influence to Laos and Cambodia but also because they have had the audacity to challenge a Pax Americana in their part of the world.
In the past the desire to contain communism and the wish to establish a Pax Americana reinforced each other. This means that since the two main communist powers now cancel each other out through their interminable quarrels and seek friendly relations with the West, partly out of economic necessity and partly in order to be able to sustain their hostility against each other, it is in a sense logical that the drive behind Pax Americana should lose some of its impetus. The economic challenge by Japan and West Germany should also reinforce the resulting trend in American thinking and policy.
There has, indeed, been a strange reversal of roles. As Mr. Gareth Stedman Jones points out in his article “The History of US Imperialism” in New Left Review, “While the Americans police the world … Germany and Japan … have expanded dramatically under the American military umbrella and now compete in American markets.” Indeed, Mr. Nixon and Mr. Kissinger themselves are deeply concerned and wish to tackle this problem partly by improving relations with Moscow and Peking.
Invisible Empire
That is not all. To quote Mr Jones again, “The invisible empire of the United States has disappeared, and in its place stands a conspicuous military machine raining destruction upon Viet Nam. The old American fear of the professional soldier has been largely realised by the consequent growth of the military-industrial complex. History has turned full circle. The territorialism so despised by the bourgeois empire-builders of the north is now being practised on a massive scale throughout the world by a southern-dominated standing army.”
Having turned full circle, history has to move again. A settlement in Viet Nam should facilitate this process. But for domestic as well as international reasons, the United States cannot turn its face on militarism and resume its quest for an invisible empire all over again. On the contrary, Soviet power will continue to lend legitimacy to the military-industrial complex as far into the future as one can look and so will the decline in the political power and influence of the so-called eastern establishment within America.
Moreover, so long as Washington remains as hostile to changes in the status quo as it has been all these years, it will have no choice but to depend on its military prowess to protect it.
On this reckoning, while it will be wrong to suggest that an era in American policy will come to an end with the termination of direct US military involvement in Viet Nam, Washington cannot indefinitely evade the compulsion to realign the many pieces on the chequerboard of its policy.
The Times of India, 17 January 1973