Vietnam, Iraq, Ukraine: The Persistent Failure of U.S. Foreign Policy

Understanding the limits of U.S. power abroad.

As we approach April 30, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Vietnam War and the fiftieth anniversary of the fall of Saigon. My younger brother is married to a Vietnamese lady whose father was an officer in the army of South Vietnam. While he was captured by the advancing North Vietnamese Army and put into prison, his wife and children (including my infant sister-in-law) managed to flee by boat and eventually make their way to America. The following photograph is representative of what she and her mom and siblings went through.

Guys like my sister-in-law’s father fought hard against the communists, and they took heart that the Johnson administration gave U.S. military support to their cause. However, the trouble for the Republic of Vietnam was that its corrupt and faction-riven government was unable to counter the communist message that the Americans were, like the French before them, imperialists who didn’t really care about ordinary Vietnamese people, but wanted to exploit the resources of their beautiful and fertile country.

Many South Vietnamese families with property sent their sons to school in France, Switzerland, or the U.S. to get them out of harm’s way in Vietnam. This was the equivalent of privileged American men of fighting age getting college deferment from the draft. I was reminded of this when I read a report in the French paper Le Monde that many wealthy Ukrainians have left the country are are now living in their villas in the south of France.

In a 2017 Op-Ed in the New York Times, military historian Kevin Boylan wrote the following:

But Johnson … knew that he faced a paradox. As long as the war in Vietnam didn’t demand too much of them and they believed that victory was just around the corner, most Americans would support it. But if Johnson admitted publicly that South Vietnam could not survive without a full commitment by the United States, he knew that support would crumble.

And so, like other presidents before and after him, Johnson tried to conceal the bleak realities of Vietnam from the American people and deliberately misled them about the war’s likely duration and cost.

Perhaps the key lesson of Vietnam is that if the reasons for going to war are not compelling enough for our leaders to demand that all Americans make sacrifices in pursuit of victory, then perhaps we should not go to war at all. Sacrifice should not be demanded solely of those who risk life and limb for their country in combat theaters overseas.

Note that President George W. Bush made the exact same miscalculation in Iraq in 2003, while President Joe Biden made the same miscalculation in 2022 when he encouraged Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to choose war against Russia instead of at least trying the path of diplomacy.

The American people are, generally speaking, supportive of wars abroad as long these wars don’t demand too much sacrifice from them. A successful U.S. foreign policy requires fully acknowledging and accepting this reality.

The USA is blessed by large oceans to the east and west—patrolled by the largest navy in history— while militarily weak countries lie to our north and south. It has therefore been persistently difficult to persuade the American people that they are threatened by the likes of the North Vietnamese Army, the Iraqi Army under Saddam Hussein, or the Russian Army today.

Occasionally the U.S. government may flood the zone with propaganda and succeed in generating an initial burst of enthusiasm for military adventures abroad. However, as the war drags on without the quick victory that was promised, we Americans grow weary and question why exactly we are involved in the quarrels of people who live over 5,0000 miles away.

The loud insistence that the particular aggressor is “just like Hitler” works a bit at first, but even that trick has now lost much of its luster. Gone are the Ukrainian flags that were displayed on so many homes in my affluent neighborhood in 2022. The fervent solidarity the owners felt with Ukraine has faded over the last three years.

It’s a remarkable fact that President Bush learned nothing from Vietnam and President Biden learned nothing from Vietnam and Iraq. I hope that President Trump will be more wise.

How can U.S. foreign policy be improved so that it does good in the world instead of blundering around and getting people killed? The process must begin by correcting Washington’s credibility problem. No one in his right mind can believe a word that comes out of Washington. When Washington insists that admitting Ukraine to NATO is purely for “defensive” purposes, why should Russia—a country that suffered catastrophic invasions in 1812 and 1941—believe this? I am a taxpaying American citizen and my family has been in this country since the 1630s, and I don’t believe a single word that comes out of Washington.

To recover its credibility, Washington will probably need to get rid of its entire foreign policy establishment—especially the so-called Neocons—who haven’t gotten a single thing right in the last sixty years of blundering.