After the conclusion of World War II, the U.S. very quickly shifted its focus to opposing communism around the world.  The primary battle was fought in the form of a cold war against the Soviet Union, but the U.S. was also intent on preventing any small pockets of geography from succumbing to the ideas of communism.  From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, this focus was directed squarely on Vietnam and southeast Asia. The American intervention in Vietnam was justified by the “Domino Theory”, a phrase coined by President Dwight Eisenhower, which proposed that if any country were allowed to go communist, others in the region, and potentially across all of Asia, would fall in turn, like dominos.  To combat this domino effect, U.S. military leaders and politicians argued that the U.S. must take drastic measures to ensure no other countries, particularly in southeast Asia, were taken over by communist regimes.

Indochina (modern-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) had been colonized by the French since 1887.  In 1940, the Imperial Japanese took control of the region, but were forced to withdraw after their defeat in World War II in 1945.  The Vietnamese, then free of Japanese rule, were once again colonized by the French, who had maintained operational control during the Japanese rule.  America had always neglected to support the French colonization, but after the war ended in 1945, President Harry Truman began providing aid and assistance to the French, who were struggling to recolonize the country thanks to an independence movement known as the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh, a communist who had studied under Lenin in the Soviet Union, and who would eventually become the figurehead for the communist movement in Vietnam.

In 1954, the French were finally defeated and the country was split into two halves, with the communists led by Ho Chi Minh taking control of the north.  The south was ruled by Ngo Dinh Diem, a Roman Catholic who had opposed both the French and the communists. The U.S. supported Diem and provided him assistance against a growing insurgency from the North, which had visions of controlling the entire country.  However, America eventually soured on Diem and President John F. Kennedy tacitly supported a coup in 1963 that deposed and killed Diem just three weeks before he was himself assassinated. The overthrow of Diem, who was accused of oppressing the Buddhist population, but who maintained relative stability, kicked off a series of weak and ineffective leaders in the South that would plague their efforts to stave off the communist revolution.

While the U.S. had sent a handful of advisors and Green Berets to support the South Vietnamese against the Northern communists during the Kennedy years, 1964 marked the beginning of America’s full-fledged commitment to the Vietnam War.  In August 1964, the USS Maddox destroyer warship was allegedly attacked by a North Vietnamese patrol boat in the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. In response, the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized the president to “take all necessary measures, including the use of armed force.”  This incident is now widely believed to have been a hoax and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara admitted in the 2003 documentary The Fog of War that the attack from the North Vietnamese did not in fact occur.  However, at the time the alleged attack was used as the ultimate casus belli for American intervention.  In February 1965, President Lyndon Johnson began bombing North Vietnam and a month later, launched Operation Rolling Thunder, a continuous three-and-a-half-year bombing campaign.

The North Vietnamese insurgency was led by the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) and the Viet Cong.  While they had some elements of a traditional military, the North Vietnamese fought largely a guerrilla style of warfare, something the U.S. was unaccustomed to and had little experience fighting against.  The Americans tried many tactics during the war, including persistent bombing campaigns in the north and the use of Agent Orange, a deadly chemical weapon used to expose the hidden North Vietnamese guerrilla fighters in the forests where they hid, and which has had devastating long term health consequences for the Vietnamese people as well as U.S. Veterans.  The Americans and their South Vietnamese allies scored many military victories in the terms that they were most often measured in, total death count. Nearly 1.1 million North Vietnamese fighters were killed during the war, compared to just over 58,000 U.S. fighters and many U.S. officials, including Army general and commander of U.S. forces during the war William Westmoreland, believed that if the Americans could simply out-kill their enemies, they would eventually win the war and defeat communism in Vietnam.  The casualty ratio between the U.S. and its enemies was regularly cited as evidence that the war was progressing favorably, however, this simply wasn’t the case, as the North Vietnamese persisted relentlessly regardless of the casualties that continued to pile up. 

The Americans also attempted to “win the hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese people, as President Johnson often put it, by attempting to win the popular support of the civilian population.  The idea was that if the Americans could earn the support of a large portion of the Vietnamese people, they could quash the communist movement through popular will. This theory failed primarily because the citizens of a country are always more likely to support their own countrymen than a foreign invader, especially in a country that has been colonized by foreigners for nearly 100 years, as the Vietnamese were by the French.  The hearts and minds strategy was also completely at odds with the rest of America’s broader strategy, which involved relentless violence and bombing that killed nearly two million civilians during the war. The idea that the U.S. could win the support of the civilian population while they were massacring that same population in outrageous quantities was simply illogical.

After over eight years of fighting, the U.S. withdrew its final troops from Vietnam in March, 1973.  Two years later, the South Vietnamese capital of Saigon fell to the communists. Although the U.S. could have theoretically stayed in Vietnam and continued to fight, the ineptitude of the war effort had become painfully obvious and public opinion at home had grown strongly against the war.  The communist rule that ensued was brutal, especially for those who had fought against the North in the war, many of whom were forced into re-education camps. However, by the mid-1980s, the Communist Party began to initiate economic and political reforms that provided more freedom to its people and integrated the country with the world community.  The domino theory did not play out, as communist rule in Vietnam did not lead to an outbreak of communism throughout Asia. In fact, the United States achieved far more success in diminishing the presence of communism around the world in the late 1970s and 1980s by brokering peace with communist governments in Vietnam, China, and the Soviet Union than it did in war and brinkmanship, which had been the prevailing anti-communism strategies during the first few decades of the Cold War.

The Vietnam War led to numerous consequences at home, including a PTSD epidemic among veterans, thousands of dead service members and broken families, increased political tensions, and an estimated $168 billion of war expenditures that contributed to the economic recession of the mid-1970s.  All of this occurred while nothing was accomplished in the way of defeating communism and helping the people of Vietnam, who to this day suffer consequences from the destruction of their country and the devastating environmental effects of Agent Orange. The war, that was sold on false pretenses and a lie about the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, and extended far past the point when American public opinion turned against it, is the second longest war in American history, recently surpassed by the war in Afghanistan, and the signature U.S. foreign policy failure of the second half of the twentieth century.