Vietnam and the Imperial Powers

...The accent of national freedom is similar...

...And its wealth as a technically competent nation reinforces this disinterest...

...It makes technical partners of ideological foes...

...Theoretically, we are in Vietnam to teach that lesson...

...Strengthened by the affinity of two advanced and affluent nations living in a poor world, the partnership became a mutual policy-albeit uneasily pursued-of "peaceful coexistence...

...Lenin's ideal of a multi-national federation, "United Socialist Soviet Republics,' overcame Russian parochialism...

...We speak of "the nation's right to self-determination" in justifying our support of the southern part of Vietnam...

...The most important of the similarities involves the common anti-imperialistic dogma...

...THINKING ALOUD Vietnam and the Imperial Conflict By Reinhold Niebuhr The war in Vietnam and, more particularly, the recent hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under Chairman J. William Fulbright, have brought into focus at last the third dimension of the global struggle for power among the world's supernations...

...Today, retribution is being sought in Peking's new anti-imperialist imperialism...

...This phase in Soviet Communism began when the Soviets transmuted a traditional society into a modern industrial state with technical competence sufficient to challenge the Western world and the U.S...

...Moscow is not really interested in world revolution...

...Our increasing military involvement has made it impossible for the United States any longer to ignore Communist China...

...Ho is fighting a "war of national liberation," as defined and justified by Russian and Chinese Communism...

...Though the Vietcong is nothing but the arm of Communism in the South, it probably controls more villages than the junta Army...

...Their power is usually the product of combined economic and military force...

...The Third "Empire" of China was an imperial nation centuries before the nations of Europe came into being...

...The difference is that Wilson conceived the imperial enslaving power as monarchism and militarism, and exempted our nation from both...

...But we betray our naievete by failing to discriminate between the aggressive militaristic nationalism that threatened the autonomy of European nations and the present curious amalgam in China...

...Then, with Stalin and World War II, the Russian language and nationality came into clear focus...

...We were too secure in the armor of our democratic righteousness to realize that we, as the strongest capitalist nation, inheriting the remnants of the French empire, were arch imperialists by Communist doctrinal definition...

...Marshall Ky's difficulties underline the hazards of attempting to encourage democracy and integral nationhood in a community where regional and religious differences are not disciplined by a tradition of national loyalty...

...The non-Communist minority in the South consisted of a privileged group of Mandarins, Catholic in faith...

...This awareness of a triangular imperial conflict was postponed because our static anti-Communism had reduced international politics simply to a contest between the USSR and U.S.A...

...for the accents were drawn from Woodrow Wilson's and Lenin's analogous dogmas of national liberation...

...as a more vivid symbol of imperialism than the moribund French power which perished with the defeat at Dienbienphu...

...Western Europe proved almost immune to Communism, not only because of the Marshall Plan and the absence of the Red Army, but also because its free communities had long since taken measures to correct feudal injustices by various internal equilibria of power...

...Because Russia's national safety requires nuclear partnership with the U.S...

...This difference between Communist and liberal dogmas puts us at a special disadvantage in countering Ho Chi Minh's authority in North Vietnam...

...Since the revolution against the Diem regime, a series of Army juntas furnished a facsimile of government...

...Ho Chi Minh's distrust of the giant China, for example, is a symbol of the critical attitude of all subject or smaller nations toward the professed anti-imperialism of hegemonous nations...

...Only recently has the third imperial nation made itself felt...

...Is not this combination also found in all hegemonous nations...

...by a sense of mission which makes us the champions of "self-determination" and international legality in our own eyes but subjects to the charge of "militaristic aggression" our own attempts to teach the Chinese that "aggression does not pay...

...The Vietnam window on the struggle between three imperial nations should demonstrate the irrelevance of claiming to teach that "aggression must be resisted...

...The Buddhist leaders, who only recently charged that Ky was a "stooge" of America, petitioned President Johnson to overrule Ky because he violated his early promise of free elections and now predicts that the Junta will rule for more than a year...

...The second lesson or problem will then confront these rich and unconsciously allied imperial nations, Russia and America...

...In any case, the disjunction between the Soviet national interest and the Communist imperial creed has been completed...

...Thus the struggle in Vietnam, this strange civil war of an obscure nation in the former French empire, has engaged the crucial interests of all three imperial powers...

...Imperial nations are always concerned with ideological prestige, although the ideological component of prestige may be more or less unconscious, as it is in modern free nations like the U.S...

...But Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge, who was present at the fall of the Diem regime (and incidentally drew criticism from the Catholics for harboring the suppressed Buddhist monks in our Embassy) is not enthusiastic about a precipitate road to democracy in a budding nation that lacks all the overarching loyalties necessary to mitigate regional and religious divisions...

...But, with the exception of Czechoslovakia, these nations were traditional feudal economies in structure, ripe for redemption through the Communist dogma...

...Their role in sustaining the guerrillas increased the latter's tenacity to the point that Defense Secretary McNamara could justify the massive U.S...

...But it is more important that we distinguish between Russian and Chinese interests and avoid needlessly forcing potential enemies into the struggle against us...

...It is an ironic fact that Ho Chi Minh and our State Department have similar attitudes toward national independence...

...It can no longer be in the vanguard of the revolution despite the jeers of the Chinese and its own residual Marxist faith...

...The Chinese, therefore, may be right...

...In many other ways, too, Vietnam reveals the complex interactions between national interests and imperial ideologies...

...Russia reveals an even more fascinating conjunction and subsequent disjunction of national interest and imperial ideology...

...These two nations, of obvious imperial proportions and both possessing an arsenal of dread nuclear weapons, confronted the world with a choice between nuclear catastrophe or cooperation...

...This cultural and economic achievement against concerted internal Communist opposition not only made the revolutionary dogma irrelevant but also furnished enough military power, particularly by means of NATO, to resist the military encroachments of the Soviet Union...

...Moscow was indeed embarrassed by the struggle between America and China...

...In doing this they must discriminate between the traditional interests of China, an ancient imperial nation, as expressed in its relations to its neighbors, and its modern revolutionary creed, which would sow revolution in all continents...

...We will not comprehend the full irony of the conflict of these three imperial powers in little Vietnam without analyzing not only the absolute differences between Communist and democratic ideological systems, but the strange similarities that mark the assertions of contradictory dogmas...

...His "national liberation" slogan was meant for the whole, not a part, of the nation...

...intervention on the grounds that a 10-to-l ratio over the guerrillas was required to repress them...

...and he was quite prepared to regard the U.S...

...What are we to do...

...Spurning the Stalinist assumption that only an industrial proletariat could overthrow the traditional order, Mao Tse-tung mustered an army of peasants and finally, in the "long march" vanquished Chiang Kai-Shek's corruption of Sun Yat-Sen's democratic dream...

...he adopted the new creed because it seemed to solve the problem of the disparity of wealth and poverty in China's traditional culture, and also the foreign problem of avenging the humiliation of 19th century European imperialism...

...A third phase of this relation is the currently proceeding disjunction of the Soviet national interest and imperial Communism...

...Our pretension that our partitioned shred of a small nation was really a "democracy," was refuted in the bloody army revolt which ended the Ngo family's Diem regime...

...The world may have forgotten that Russia acquired its industrial capital by Stalin's brutal collectivization of the farms, and that Communism, contrary to its Utopian dreams, has become a way of pressing wealth out of the poor to make the nation rich...

...The difficulty such juntas are likely to encounter in elections is peasant uninterest in the objectives of the war...

...Our own polemics against the new China have relied heavily on ignorant analogies between the present confrontation with China and our earlier experience with Nazism, from which we believe we learned that "aggression must be resisted...

...Some of the peasants are Buddhists, who oppose the military, and most of the rest are either neutralists or secret confreres of the guerrillas...

...In the 19th century this proud country was humiliated by Western imperialism, exploiting freedom of commerce in the so-called "treaty ports...

...and the new "religion" had the merit of absorbing even the Moslem Asian Republics...

...A second phase in the relation of the national interest to the new imperial Communism was Russia's achievement in building an empire of Eastern European satellites...

...Though Ho's reputed pro-Russian attitude may come in part from his Russian training, his distrust of China undoubtedly derives more importantly from his recognition that China is capable of merging the new creed of Communism, which ordains national liberation for subject nations, with the age-old tradition of imperial China...

...We have more important lessons to learn than we have to teach...

...Those of us who looked with disfavor on the U.S...

...Russia has become one of the pillars of peace and a partner of Western civilization...

...being drawn into the quagmire of the Indochinese peninsula, are quite willing to let the shrewd man in the White House sweat over these problems engendered by power without influence...

...When it took the place of a traditional religion, Eastern Orthodoxy, Communism provided a cement of cohesion for a multi-national state...

...Our imperial position makes it important not to yield to Vietcong terror and abandon Vietnam...

...We inherited not only the odium left over from French imperialism but the additional odium incurred by capitalist imperialism...

...But China's relation to and domination over small neighbors such as Tibet, are informed by a traditional animus...

...To be sure, the force of the Red Army, and in some cases a common Slavic ethnic loyalty, supported this absorption...

...Communist dogma, however, makes capitalism the source of imperialism...

...But meanwhile, as the Vietnam war made clear, the Communist camp was being divided by an increasingly bitter struggle between Russia and China...

...They also underscore the embarrassing position of the United States, which prides itself on its democratic and non-imperialistic virtues...

...The fact is that the peasant economy of the South, indeed of the whole nation, lacks both the technical and cultural prerequisites of democracy...

...The peasants of the South were either neutral or the covert allies of the Vietcong, perhaps because they found it difficult to choose between Mandarin or Communist bosses...

...They must become more resolute pillars of peace, doing all they can to alleviate Chinese hysteria and revolutionary zeal and to help backward nations achieve technical competence...

...We only hope that a way will be found for us to "save face," or more exactly, to prevent the Communist takeover of a small nation, after we have spent so much money and blood trying to prevent this eventuality...

...Yet neither we nor the Russians could overcome the mood and animosities of the Cold War, and the two giant nations continued to see themselves as leaders of their respective blocs of "free" or Communist countries...

...The one accused the other of "revisionism," and China became the seat of the "old believers" in the revolution against injustice and "capitalistic imperialism...

...If the complexity of this problem induces weariness or skepticism, we can find encouragement in the reverses suffered by China in Ghana and Indonesia...

...Hence wars of liberation are fought against capitalism as well as imperialism, which Lenin defined as the last stage of capitalism...

...The ideological element in the current world struggle was conceived during World War I, when the Communist revolution succeeded in gaining lodgement in Russia as the traditional society collapsed...

...These reveal that Peking's universal revolutionary threat has been over-estimated both in China and among its adversaries-Communist and democratic...

...One of the most important achievements of the late President Kennedy was to capitalize on this tentative convergence of interests by negotiating the limited Test Ban Treaty...

...it is derived from a continental economy, with technical competence obviously the source of the nuclear arsenal and the wealth of both...

...in both the USSR and U.S.A...

...and political enemies of ideological allies...

...Ho Chi Minh has an added advantage as Communist boss of the North...

...He acquired his prestige in the war of liberation against the French imperialists...

...Meanwhile, the recalcitrant Ukraine was absorbed in the "Union...

...Even what the West considers rudimentary democratic forms may not be within the reach of South Vietnam, as governments of other small nations of the peninsula, Laos and Cambodia, bear witness...

...We had fought our own war of independence against British imperialism, and once we achieved a continental economy, overt expansionism became unnecessary (Our only lapse being the Spanish-American War...

...although somewhat hesitantly, it offered missiles to North Vietnam in an effort to preserve rapidly dwindling Soviet prestige among the Communist parties of Asia...

...When President Johnson equates our hegemony in NATO with cooperation and internationalism, and represents our Vietnam involvement as an effort to establish democracy there, one can understand the critical attitude of the French both past and present toward the cant of "Anglo-Saxons...

...When President de Gaulle is cynical about the idealistic pretensions of the U.S., both in Vietnam and in NATO, is he not expressing his understanding of this point...

...It is certainly shown in the nations of the so-called free world, which claim no obvious empire but possess a common ideology...

...The Buddhist peasants had no reason to be loyal to them...

...Perhaps it should be noted at this point that imperial nations (following a functional rather than a traditional definition) are those which have enough power to extend their control or even merely influence beyond their boundaries and which profess a supranational ideology-religious, moral or economic-that justifies to themselves and their allies the extent of their dominion...

...Mao was a nationalist before he became a Communist...

...China's modern dynamism, so greatly feared by Russia and the liberal West, is animated by a modern revolutionary Marxism often effective in poor continents and subject nations...

...The Western world was slow to acknowledge that technical competence could be acquired by backward nations without the aid of Western economic and political institutions-although we might have learned this in the 19th century, when Japan acquired technical competence without the guidance of either capitalism, Communism or democracy...

...by an imperial resolve to establish a democracy in a culture which lacks all prerequisites for self-rule...

...In China, as in Russia, a traditional culture without a vigorous industrial middle class had no power or ideology to mitigate the disparities of landed wealth and peasant poverty...

...With Mao's victory a third imperial power was born, for China had developed a distinctive Communist ideology that was independent enough and expressed the national interest enough to challenge the Soviet variety of orthodoxy as a revisionist heresy...

...The situation in Vietnam gave the Chinese occasion to assert that the Soviet Union, according to Leninist dogma the very seat of Communist authority, was really a "stooge" of the capitalist imperialists...

...That revolution both created a dogmatic revolutionary ideology, and accentuated the democratic ideology in Western Europe, where after World War II the free and open societies successfully resisted Communism...

...The climactic chapter was written when the Chinese Communists rejected the Russian invitation to its Party congress, giving a brutal rejoinder that accused the Russians of virtually being the allies of American imperialism...

...Perhaps we could overrule him covertly...

...Ho Chi Minh's ambiguous attitude toward China, his dependence upon but also his distrust of it, reflects the fact that China is an imperial nation and ideological empire...

...Thus history moves on...