During a visit to Vietnam in September 2015, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking of the American War in Vietnam, acknowledged “The war that took place here half a century ago divided each of our countries and stemmed from the most profound failure of diplomatic insight and political vision.”
The Vietnam War was an outgrowth of the loss of French control over its colonial territories in southeast Asia (French Indochina) and the containment policies of the Cold War, including the “domino theory”.
With the assistance of Chinese communist forces, in 1954 North Vietnam had defeated the forces of the French colonial administration. Thereafter, it wished to consolidate the entire country into a single communist regime, modelled after those of the Soviet Union and China. The North Vietnam plan was resisted by the South Vietnamese, which wanted alignment with, and requested support from, the West – to which the United States alone responded.
The United States gradually escalated its limited involvement of financial and military to France, and military advisors to South Vietnam to troop deployment in 1965. By 1969, more than 500,000 U.S. military personnel were stationed in Vietnam. In 1973, a peace treaty was negotiated by US National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger with the leaders of North Vietnam (1973 Paris Peace Accords). U.S. combat units were withdrawn in 1973, and in 1975 South Vietnam fell to a full-scale invasion by the North. U.S. diplomatic relations with Vietnam were restored only 20 years ago.
Your task is to evaluate Mr. Kerry’s conclusion that the Vietnam conflict was a failure of diplomatic insight and vision. In your paper, include as a minimum, the following events and factors:
a. Assess the outcome of the Geneva Accords of 1954, which settled the first Vietnam war involving the French, its temporary partition of the country and the plan for national elections to decide the future of the nation as a unified Vietnamese state.
b. Describe the effect of the military initiatives of the North Vietnamese, and the assistance of the Soviet Union and China in providing weapons, supplies and advisers to the North. Explain the gradual escalation of U.S. military involvement in the 1960s and the ultimate decision by the United States to seek a peace treaty.
c. Identify and assess the geopolitical and military assumptions by the various US administrations. What military, political, cultural and/or societal aspects of North and South Vietnam were arguably not sufficiently considered or appreciated by U.S. decision makers?
d. Explain the reasons for the fierce opposition to the war that developed in United States and its impact on the U.S. Congress and on American society generally. What were the implications on the conduct of the war and the diplomatic peace negotiations?
e. Identify and assess as many of the factors as you can why the United States, led by the Nixon Administration in the 1970s, decided to pursue a negotiated settlement. Include the methods of diplomacy used, the key participants and the difficulties encountered. What were the terms of the peace treaty and the reasons for the ultimate outcome for South Vietnam?
f. Noting the scale of the military and civilian casualties on all sides, what are the diplomatic and strategic lessons learned from the Vietnam war?