Vietnam never ended:
Kramer, Steven Philip
Foreign Policy VIETNAM NEVER ENDED THE DEFECTIVE HEART OF U.S. POLICY THE CENTRAL problem of American foreign policy today is that America has never come to terms with the significance of the...
...The way we deal with it will greatly influence the future of the hemisphere...
...no rules will stop leaks if even those who serve in government have lost faith in the institution...
...The anti-war movement, which had attained massive proportions and come to represent the sentiment of the majority, never succeeded in forcing the government to accept its position...
...The U.S...
...In the aftermath of Vietnam, the making of foreign policy, necessarily the task of the executive but also a concern of Congress, had been undercut by generalized skepticism and distrust...
...One reason is that the short-range solution which spontaneously evolved to deal with the Vietnam trauma was silence...
...STEVEN PHILIP KRAMER...
...Yet for many, lucid understanding of Central America is rendered impossible by the phantasmagoria of Vietnam...
...Many nations have suffered defeats more grievous...
...Vietnam had produced deep and conflicting passions, passions which had threatened to rend asunder the nation...
...The denouement of Vietnamization could hardly leave a good taste even in the mouth of the war's opponents...
...The bloodbath in Cambodia, the harsh nature of rule in "liberated" South Vietnam seemed proof to them that we had sacrificed a good cause to a bad, or at the very least, abandoned our friends to ruthless enemies...
...But the nightmare still clutches us in its embrace...
...Similarly, they began to question whether the real threat to world peace came from the United States or from the Soviet Union, whether America's greatest contribution to world peace might not be simply to avoid involvement on foreign shores...
...We shall not be able to deal rightly with Central America until we are able to deal with Vietnam...
...The problem will not be remedied by tinkering with the mechanism...
...rather than the culminationof the movement, it proved its demise...
...Many still thought the war should have been fought, others that if it was fought, it could and should have been won...
...the election instead turned into a rout...
...Yet in the following decades Frenchmen assessed what had gone wrong, and from their reflections emerged a society both stronger and more democratic which survived the German onslaught of 1914...
...Instead, there are many mutually contradictory myths, held by different groups, embodied in the functioning of our major institutions...
...Secondly, the circumstances under which the war ended were equivocal...
...The McGovern candidacy was expected to at least initiate a thoughtful debate on the condition of America...
...Vietnam began, and Watergate completed, a process by which Congress, the press, and much of the American public came to doubt the sincerity of our presidents and worry about the concentration of power in the hands of the executive...
...there is not even a common myth on which we can agree...
...one day we would wake and it would be forgotten...
...In 1870, an inept French government blundered into a war for which it was unprepared, was defeated militarily, and immediately collapsed...
...Likewise, those who favored continued support for South Vietnam were not convinced that our involvement was wrong, nor did the fall of Saigon, under the circumstances, convince them otherwise...
...These passions were to be left in peace...
...never withdrew on the grounds that it should not have been in Vietnam...
...Moreover, the anti-war movement, heterogeneous though it was, had a general desire not only to end the war but also to reform the political and social structures believed to have brought it about...
...The contradictions between these mutually exclusive myths produce paralysis...
...Efforts to continue the war by a provisional government came to naught, a civil war ensued, two of France's departments were lost to the Germans, a heavy indemnity imposed...
...There is no common understanding of what Vietnam meant...
...The reflexes born of Vietnam have come to permeate the working of our political institutions...
...No genuine national dialogue has taken place to clarify what happened in Vietnam...
...We are now facing the problem of Central America...
...Vietnam was like a bad dream...
...Proponents and opponents of our policy alike argue their case on the basis of Vietnam analogies, convincing no one because there is not one Vietnam analogy, but many...
...Why has the United States not been able to come to terms with the Vietnam experience...
...POLICY THE CENTRAL problem of American foreign policy today is that America has never come to terms with the significance of the Vietnam war...
...it withdrew because of "Viet-namization...
Vol. 110 • December 1983 • No. 21
