America Abroad

By Strobe Talbott

In the most eloquent passage of his Inaugural Address nearly four years ago, George Bush lamented that the Vietnam War "cleaves us still." He hoped that "the statute of limitations has been reached" and that "the final lesson of Vietnam is that no great nation can long afford to be sundered by a memory." Yet in the campaign of 1992, there it was, cleaving and sundering. Bush tried to exploit the issue, but did not introduce it. Bill Clinton did, by being the first member of the Vietnam generation to be nominated for the presidency.

It has been more than 30 years since John F. Kennedy put American advisers into Vietnam, 17 since Gerald Ford pulled the last troops out. That should be enough hindsight for a clear view of the bottom line, especially because the larger, longer conflict of which Vietnam was a part -- the great twilight struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union -- is also now over at last.

Sometimes it is not until nations understand one another's motivations that war breaks out. So it was in 1939, when Adolf Hitler finally convinced Britain and France that he meant to conquer Europe. So it was in 1990, when Saddam Hussein established beyond doubt that he wanted more than just a swatch of desert on the Kuwaiti border.

Other wars, however, arise because the combatants misunderstand each other. That was true of Vietnam. The U.S. saw the Viet Cong as foot soldiers of an international army commanded by the Soviet Union and, in the crucial early years, by China.

But Ho Chi Minh and his followers did not see themselves that way. Yes, they believed in communism, which provided them with a combination of mentality and methods well suited to prevailing in war (but not in peace): discipline and self-sacrifice, brutally enforced. They were glad to have support from Moscow and Beijing, but they were not doing Soviet or Chinese bidding. They were determined to keep Vietnam from ever again being under the control of a foreign power. They saw the Americans as successors to French and Chinese imperialists. That image of the G.I. served Ho better than America's image of the V.C. as an agent of the Kremlin served Kennedy and his three successors.

George Bush still doesn't get it. He keeps saying that the U.S. lost because "we fought with one hand tied behind our back." Nonsense. The U.S. used virtually everything it had except nuclear weapons. The U.S. lost because, in sending troops 8,000 miles from home, its government committed three errors: it exaggerated the threat posed by a monolithic, expansionist Red Menace; it overestimated the popular support and staying power of its corrupt ally in Saigon; and it underestimated the inherent advantage a guerrilla force has in fighting on and for its own territory. In short, America was thinking globally and acting locally, but getting it wrong both ways.

World communism was a chimera even before Kennedy sent U.S. advisers to Vietnam. The Sino-Soviet split began in 1960; later, Mao Zedong refused to let the Soviets send arms to Hanoi by rail across China. In 1978 Vietnam attacked the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and the following year beat back an invasion by China. This was not the sequence of events that Dwight Eisenhower had in mind in 1954 when he propounded the domino theory, the rationale for U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia. Instead, the violent feuding among the region's Marxist regimes in the 1970s and 1980s in a way anticipated the quarrels that later tore apart communist Europe.

Vietnam was a battle in the cold war -- the wrong battle in the right war, which is why the U.S. lost the one and won the other. America's lingering bitterness over that regional defeat sometimes seems more potent than its satisfaction over the recent global victory. In this campaign there has been more recrimination over Vietnam than self-congratulation over the end of the Soviet empire.

The reason is simple. Like the Civil War, Vietnam pitted Americans against each other. Even though the military engagements took place far away and long ago, the political and psychic scars on the home front will not heal. By the end of the century, Americans will probably remember the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the U.S.S.R. as they now look back on Normandy and Iwo Jima -- climactic moments in triumphs for Our Side that have passed into history.

But Vietnam will live on. Veterans of the war and of the antiwar movement may never entirely make peace with each other. In the year 2000, when they gather at conferences marking the 25th anniversary of the fall of Saigon, they will still be arguing over Khe Sanh and Kent State, Tet and the Moratorium, just as old Union and Confederate soldiers relived and refought Antietam and Gettysburg well into this century, until they too had passed into history. That is the real bottom line on Vietnam: there is no statute of limitations. The war imposed a life sentence on an entire generation.