You leave and my wish is that you and your country will find happiness under this sky. But mark it well, that if I shall die here on the spot and in the country I love, it is too bad, because we are all born and must die one day. I have only committed this mistake of believing you.
Sisowath Sirik Matak
It was a fittingly noble, if tragically sad, epitaph for his country, his people, and himself. He was among the first whom the Khmer Rouge executed.
After we abandoned the use of power, it was seized by the North Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge Communists. Our defeat was so great a tragedy because after the peace agreement of January 1973 it was so easily avoidable. Consolidating our gains would not have taken much to accomplish—a credible threat to enforce the peace agreement through retaliatory strikes against North Vietnam and a sufficient flow of aid to Cambodia and South Vietnam. But Congress legislated an end to our involvement. It also legislated the defeat of our friends in the same stroke.
A lesson that our adversaries should learn from our intervention in Vietnam is that the United States, under resolute and strong leadership, will go to great lengths and endure great sacrifices to defend its allies and interests. We fought in Vietnam because there were important strategic interests involved. But we also fought because our idealism was at stake. If not the United States, what nation would have helped defend South Vietnam? The fact is that no other country would have fought for over a decade in a war half a world away at great cost to itself in order to save the people of a small country from Communist enslavement.
One lesson we must learn from Vietnam is that if we do not exercise power for the good, there are plenty of men like Ho Chi Minh, Le Duan, Khieu Samphan, and Pol Pot who will gladly exercise it for evil purposes. Our armed intervention in the Vietnam War was a not a brutal and immoral action. That we came to the defense of innocent people under attack by totalitarian thugs is no moral indictment. That we mishandled it at times in no way taints the cause. South Vietnam and Cambodia were worthy of our help—and the 3 million people who were killed in the war’s aftermath deserved to be saved. Our abandonment of them in their moment of greatest need was not worthy of our country.
Another lesson we must learn is that in the real world peace is inseparable from power. Our country has had the good fortune of being separated from our enemies by two oceans. Others like our friends in Indochina, did not enjoy that luxury. Their enemies lived just a few miles away up the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Our mistake was not that we did too much and imposed an inhumane war on peace-loving peoples. It was that in the end we did too little to prevent totalitarians from imposing their inhumane rule on freedom-loving peoples. Our cause must be peace. But we must recognize that greater evils exist than war.
Communist troops brought peace to South Vietnam and Cambodia—but it was the peace of the grave.
THIRD WORLD WAR
The Third World war began before World War II ended. Saigon’s fall ten years ago was the Soviet Union’s greatest victory in one of the key battles of the Third World war. No Soviet soldiers fought in Vietnam, but it was a victory for Moscow nonetheless because its ally and client, North Vietnam, won and South Vietnam and the United States lost. After we failed to prevent Communist conquest in Vietnam, it became accepted dogma that we would fail everywhere. For six years after Vietnam, the new isolationists chanted “No more Vietnams” as the dominoes fell one by one: Laos, Cambodia, and Mozambique in 1975; Angola in 1976; Ethiopia in 1977; South Yemen in 1978; Nicaragua in 1979.
Since President Reagan took office in 1981, America’s first international losing streak has been halted. But the ghost of Vietnam still haunts the debate over aid to the government of El Salvador and to the anti-Communist contras in Nicaragua. If we fail to halt Soviet support of aggression in our own hemisphere, we will have little hope of doing so when our interests are threatened in other parts of the world. We must purge ourselves of the paralyzing sickness of the Vietnam syndrome if we are to avoid other defeats in the battles of the Third World war.
Nobody wants another Vietnam. Because they fear that any U.S. intervention in Third World countries might lead to another Vietnam, the new isolationists contend that the United States has no strategic interests in the Third World that would justify the use of our military power, and that we should limit our role to foreign aid programs and diplomatic imtiatives. They are wrong.
We must be concerned with what happens in the Third World because of the enormous strategic and economic stakes involved. Two-thirds of the world’s people live in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Those countries have natural resources that are indispensable to the industrial nations of the West. United States trade with Third World countries last year was $175 billion—equal to our trade with Western Europe and Japan combined.
We must be concerned because it would be the height of immorality to stand by and allow millions of people to suffer the fate of the people of Vietnam and other Third World countries that have had repressive totalitarian regimes imposed upon them.
We must be concerned because the greatest threat to peace today is in the Third World. Since the end of World War II, there have been 120 wars in which 10 million people have been killed. Except for the Falklands in 1981 and Greece in 1947, all of these wars began and were fought in the Third World. British military strategist B. H. Liddell Hart’s famous maxim is “If you want peace, understand war.” If we want peace, we must also understand the Third World, because it is there that an incident is most likely to occur that would lead to war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
In considering the possible threats to peace in the world, the least likely is that the Soviet Union would launch a nuclear strike with their SS-20 missiles on Western Europe. Apart from the risk of retaliation, a Europe in ruins is not an attractive military prize. As Michael Howard puts it in The Causes of Wars, the Soviet Union is now a status quo power in Europe. In the Third World, however, the Soviet Union has been, even during the heyday of detente, and will continue to be an anti-status-quo power. It accepts the postwar national boundaries of Europe as formalized by the Helsinki Agreement, but it continues to support what it calls “national liberation movements” in the Third World.
We have no interest in gaining domination over Third World nations, but we have a powerful interest in preventing the Soviet Union from doing so. If we have any doubt of the strategic importance of the Third World, the Soviet Union’s actions should remove them. The men in the Kremlin are not philanthropists, and they are not fools. They are spending billions of rubles on fomenting and supporting revolutions in Third World countries and subsidizing the bankrupt economies of the regimes they have helped put in power. Except for Afghanistan, where they are attempting to suppress a counterrevolution against a Soviet puppet regime, Moscow has gained domination over nine Third World countries since 1974 without committing any troops to combat.
The question is not whether we should play a role in the Third World, but how we can do so without suffering another Vietnam. We must first examine the types of conflicts we confront.
The Korean War in 1950 demonstrated that a conventional attack across a border of a non-Communist country would bring immediate and united reaction from the United States and our UN allies. This is the least likely kind of attack we will face in the future.
Since Korea, the Soviets have gone under and around borders in a variety of ways. North Vietnam, with Chinese and Soviet logistic support, waged guerrilla war against South Vietnam until 1972, when the North Vietnamese launched a massive conventional attack across the demilitarized zone.
In Cuba and Nicaragua, the Soviet Union encouraged and eventually captured broad-based revolutionary movements in the guise of supporting so-called wars of liberation.
In Angola and Ethiopia, the Soviet Union backed up Communist leaders with Cuban proxy troops who helped them gain or retain power.
In El Salvador we are witnessing a technique similar
to that used in Vietnam—a guerrilla insurgency without broad-based popular support and with no chance to survive, much less prevail, without the logistic support it receives from Nicaragua, the Soviet Union, and Cuba.
Sometimes the Soviets spark a revolution. Other times they capture one already in place. Either way the Soviet Union wins and the West loses another battle in the war for the Third World.
Never in history has there been a conflict as broad-based and as pervasive as the Third World war. It challenges us to rethink all of our time-tested assumptions about the nature of war and aggression. If we insist upon preparing for today’s war by mounting yesterday’s defenses, we are doomed to defeat. Today the important battles are not along borders but in remote villages and small countries whose names few Americans have heard. In pinpointing aggression, it is no longer enough to look for the smoking gun; now we must look for the hidden hand. We must become more aware of the role the Soviets and their surrogates play in instigating and supporting insurgencies against non-Communist governments.
We must begin by disabusing ourselves of some popular misconceptions about how to deal with conflicts in the Third World.
At one extreme there are those who insist that if we are strong enough militarily, we will be able to meet and defeat any challenge we face. It is true that our overwhelming nuclear superiority was one of the factors that enabled us to stop Communist aggression in Korea. But with that superiority gone, the fact that we have far more accurate and powerful nuclear weapons today than those we had during the Korean War is irrelevant in Third World conflicts. Great nations do not risk nuclear suicide to defend their interests in peripheral areas. And superior conventional forces will not prevail against an enemy who wages unconventional war. Helping a government stop a violent revolution militarily without helping it deal with the economic conditions that helped spawn the revolution would buy only a short-lived victory. After one revolution was put down, another would take its place.
At another extreme are those who say that poverty is the problem, and that instead of providing military aid to ensure security, we should provide economic aid to promote progress. They are only half right, and therefore all wrong. I recall the year 1947, when President Truman asked for military and economic aid to Greece and Turkey to meet the threat of Soviet-supported Communist guerrillas in Greece. Along with those of other congressmen, my office was flooded with hundreds of postcards reading, “Send food, not arms.” We resisted the pressure and voted for the Truman program. If we had sent food only and not arms, Greece would be Communist today. The lesson of the Greek experience is that in the short run there can be no progress without security. But we must also recognize that in the long run there can be no security without progress.
Still others naively contend that diplomacy is the answer to armed conflicts in the Third World. Diplomacy cannot succeed without military power to back it up. For example, when President Carter ruled out the use of force at the outset of the Iranian hostage crisis, he weakened the effectiveness of diplomacy to resolve it. The pathetic failure of the League of Nations and the United Nations to play a significant role in keeping peace or ending wars is striking proof of the impotence of diplomacy without power.
There is too much of a tendency to see all Third World conflicts as part of the larger conflict between East and West. While the Soviet Union profits from most of them, it is not responsible for all the conflicts in the world. As one observer has pointed out, their policy is to trouble the waters and then fish in them.
A strategic consensus against the Soviet threat in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf may prove useful in some conflicts; but without the Soviet Union playing a role at all, there would still be war between Iran and Iraq, and fighting between Israelis and Arabs. The most violent and dangerous forces in the Mideast are not Communist revolutionaries taking orders from Moscow but Moslem fundamentalist revolutionaries egged on by Khomeini and Qaddafi.
It is an illusion, however, that if the Soviet Union does not play a role in a Third World conflict, our interests are not threatened. The Soviets do not have to fight to win. Whether they fight or not, wherever we lose, they win. Khomeini’s revolution in Iran had nothing to do with communism or the Soviet Union, but this does not mean that the Soviets did not benefit from it. When the Shah of Iran was driven from power, the United States lost its strongest ally in the Mideast. Had he remained in power, the war between Iran and Iraq and even the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union might never have taken place. Because a strong, dependable, pro-Western regime was replaced by an unpredictable, extreme, anti-Western one, the balance of power shifted against us and toward the Soviets. The Shah’s downfall, like the fall of South Vietnam, was in part the result of the failure of the United States, his longtime ally, to back him when he needed it most. As a result, in each case the Soviets scored an important victory in the Third World war.
Instability is the Soviet Union’s most powerful ally in the Third World war. Soviet leaders scan the globe for potential trouble spots, places where people are groping for a better way or suffering through episodes of unrest, and then find ways to make those bad situations worse. While the Soviet Union is not behind all violent revolutions, it is first in line to pick up the pieces when they are over. Instability—both the fact of it and the fact that the Soviet Union profits from it—threatens our interests, wherever it occurs in the world.
• • •
We must develop strategies to meet the Soviet offensive at three different levels: when a non-Communist nation is under attack by a Communist insurgency; when a Communist regime has already won power; and when a non-Communist nation is at peace before a revolution begins.
When a Soviet-supported guerrilla war or revolutionary war is already under way, we must not make the mistakes we made in Vietnam. Defeat can be a powerful positive force if we learn the right lessons from it, just as victory can be a destructive negative force if we learn the wrong lessons from it.
In 1969, I realized that after our experience in Vietnam the American people would be very reluctant to commit American forces to another war in the Third World. For that reason, I formulated the Nixon Doctrine. It states that in the future, unless a major power intervened in a Third World conflict, the U.S. should not commit its combat forces. We should provide military and economic aid to the target countries equal to that provided to the insurgents by the Soviet bloc, but the country under attack should have the responsibility for providing the men for its defense. If after being adequately trained and armed to defeat an insurgency a country still lacked the will and capability to fight and win, our doing the fighting for them would at best provide only temporary success. Once we left, the enemy would take over. We should never again make the mistake we made in Vietnam. The policy of Vietnamization should have been initiated at the beginning of the war rather than four years later after the United States had committed over 500,000 troops to the battle.
Some misinterpreted my announcement of this doctrine as a signal that the United States was beginning a total withdrawal from Asia and the rest of the world as well. But the Nixon Doctrine was not a formula for getting America out of the Third World; it provided the only sound basis for America to stay in and to continue to play a responsible role in helping our friends and allies defend their independence against Communist aggression.
In our military training programs, we should avoid another mistake we made in Vietnam: restructuring our allies’ forces on the American model and thereby developing great capability for fighting a conventional war but very little for fighting a guerrilla war. Armies must be equipped and trained to meet the threat they are facing. Money could be spent in far better way than in having a country like El Salvador equip itself with high-performance fighter aircraft for use against guerrillas who have no air force.
A third mistake many Americans made in the last years of the Vietnam War was failing to see that in Third World conflicts our choice is usually not between our allies a
nd someone better but between our allies and something far worse. Liberals today frequently call for the United States to break its ties with rightwing dictators. Otherwise, they claim, we will be guilty of supporting the world’s most flagrant violators of human rights. They are wrong. By any measure the most repressive governments are those of the Communists. The record is clear. Cubans are worse off under Castro than under Batista. The Vietnamese are worse off under the Communist Le Duan than under Thieu. Cambodians were worse off under Pol Pot than under Lon Nol. When non-Communist regimes were in power, the United States could at least exert some pressure to increase adherence to human rights in those countries. Now it can do nothing. We must never take a course of action that results in the fall of a government that permits some freedom and the victory of one that permits none. If there is one profound lesson to be learned from the aftermath of the Vietnam War, that is it.
Finally, we must not make the mistake of helping our allies fight the insurgency and ignoring the source of the insurgency. That is why it makes no sense to provide economic and military assistance to El Salvador without bringing pressure to bear on Nicaragua and other Soviet-bloc countries that are providing arms for the insurgents.
• • •
Helping a country prevent a Communist regime from gaining power is difficult. It is even more difficult to help anti-Communist forces in countries where the Communists have already gained power. It is tempting to boldly proclaim that we will help anyone anywhere who fights against a repressive Communist regime, but we must recognize the limits of what we can do. We must not make the tragic mistakes we made in Hungary in 1956 and at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, where we encouraged revolutions against Communist regimes and then failed to support our friends when they came under attack from superior forces. The test should be whether there is some reasonable chance for success. The anti-communist Savimbi forces in Angola, for example, would meet this test. The freedom fighters in Afghanistan also deserve support, especially because this is the only leverage we have on the Soviets to mitigate their repression in that country.
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