One need only look at the names given by
various groups to what could more neutrally be referred to as the 'second'
Indochina conflict, in order to realise that there have been a diversity of
perspectives on what caused and sustained it. Vietnamese objecting to perceived
U.S. encroachment have referred to it as – among other names – the “Anti-U.S.
War of Resistance for National Salvation,” whereas Americans popularly united
(or dissented) under the less rallying banner of the Vietnam War.[1]
The name of the conflict also alludes to its legacy from the First
Indochina War, and – somewhat more piercingly, even if it seemed to escape the
attention of many U.S. policymakers at the time – the fact that the Vietnamese
already had much more invested in this long-term struggle than did the
Americans when they escalated their presence in the early 1960s.[2]
As fascinating as the logistics involved
may be, this discussion will instead view what motivated both sides through the
lens of ideology. Did the grounded concerns of national identity versus
colonial ambition enjoy greater sway than the struggle between more abstract
notions of capital and Marx- and Lenin-inspired peoples' revolution?
A byproduct of historical record-keeping is
that the American position has enjoyed much greater scrutiny than the
Vietnamese. It seems no less inevitable that abstract ideologies will attract
mostly the attention of the elite, which resolves us to a narrower matter: the
primacy of the adversaries' small cadres of decision-makers versus their
supporting or dissenting populations.
By its end, this essay seeks to establish
that separating the nationalist roots of the conflict from the Communism that
America hoped to contain is impossible,
and – at least partly in consequence of this – that the struggle for national
identity and sovereignty grounded the conflict more than did an opposition
between capitalism and communism. To do this, it will proceed through a few
salient concerns: some of the ways the stage was set for the conflict many
years before – for example – the well-known (and now known to have been
falsified) incident in the Gulf of Tonkin, the characters and outlooks of some
of the different people or groups in a position to influence the course of the
war, and – before drawing some general conclusions – how Nationalism was key to
the success of the Communist regime in Vietnam.[3]
While it is difficult to say that the war
would otherwise not have taken place in the absence of certain events, it would
be remiss not to highlight – since one of the professed policies of the U.S. in
pursuing the war was to hold back the falling dominoes of communist
insurrection – some developments that worked to strengthen the Communist forces
in the country. Perhaps supporting him in the manner Lenin allegedly likened to
providing the rope that would later hang them, the U.S. sent advisers and
supplies (through the CIA-forerunner the Office of Strategic Services, the OSS)
to the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh when the Japanese had invaded Vietnam in
1943. Later, in 1954, the Viet Minh victory driving out the French was a great
boon in nationalists’ eyes to Ho Chi Minh’s status.[4]
Ho
Chi Minh was a veritable enigma, and this is an impression you could plausibly
argue he intended to cultivate to allow himself to present a different face to
potential financiers. For example, on one occasion when probed by someone who
had vaguely heard that the Viet Minh was Communist, he would deflect with the
non-answer that “the French called all Annamites Communists.”[5]
He inspires mutually nigh-incompatible aperçus from historians: Lind considers him as owing “little to Vietnamese tradition, and almost
everything to his foreign models, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao,” whereas Buzzanco concluded that he “had hoped to develop strong ties with America, had never
been particularly close to Stalin, and though supported by Mao, held a
traditional Vietnamese distrust of China.”[6] After “years of
struggling” to understand his character, Tảng was convinced that “the Leninism [Ho Chi Minh] espoused was an
accretion that served the cause of Vietnamese nationalism.”[7]
Whether Ho Chi Minh’s loyalty to Leninism was genuine or merely a ruse to retain
a line of credit from the Comintern is a distinction that history seems to
vindicate as not requiring a difference, though – unless you consider him an
opportunist – it may have occasionally induced dissonance due to the conflict
between nationalism and communism’s inherent internationalism. One occasion he
seems to appease the Comintern was after a complaint that establishing a
Vietnamese Communist Party promotes “narrow national chauvinism” by renaming it
the Indochinese Communist Party.[8]
That the nationalists
in the South could cooperate with the Americans at least hints that attitudes
towards them were by no means uniform across the country. Prior to the war they
had been assured that “the U.S., in sharp contrast to
France, recognized the sovereignty of the State of Vietnam as extending all
over Vietnam.” It can be surmised from similar statements being made by
the American Secretary of State John Foster Dulles to the French Prime Minister Pierre
Mendès France that this was not mere posturing on the part of the United States.
In an attempt to discredit the nationalism of those in the South and to
whitewash their own allegiance to communism, the North painted the South as a
puppet of their backers, the U.S., who they further proclaimed as having
“colonial designs” on the country. In a brilliant riposte to these portrayals,
Dommen points out that “if the amount of
assistance were taken as the measure of the relationship, [North Vietnam] qualified
as a colony in 1954 more fully than [South Vietnam], considering the massive
Chinese aid to the [North] during the war, which the [North] kept secret, and
the full extent of which only became known after the war from Chinese archival
sources.” Together,
these appeals from the various stakeholders put in high relief the popular
demand for national unity and if not ill will then at least the people’s
indifference to communism.[9]
When Tảng states that “the Geneva agreement was like a warning shot, signalling
that Vietnamese nationalism had now become hostage to the ideological and
geopolitical conflicts of the great powers,” he doesn’t seem to grasp the
near-tautology.[10] To assert
its identity, a nation must find how
it differs from every other; to interact with the others as a unique entity on
the world stage it must find its position on that stage. The pre-existing
conflict between capitalism and communism made it near inevitable that a country
boasting a strong communist bloc would be drawn in to the larger battle (think
Cuba, Germany, and Korea). The (admittedly schizophrenic) body politic held
itself hostage, a gun from the Chinese in one hand, a gun from the Americans in
the other. Ho Chi Minh had appealed to two U.S. presidents – President Wilson
in 1919 and President Truman in 1945 – requesting assistance bringing
“constitutional government, democratic freedoms, and other reforms to the
Vietnamese” in the first case, and in the second called for help in “obtaining
independence from the French.” It was this failure of the most powerful nation
of the West to respond to his nationalist pleas that Ho himself attributes to
his Leninist leanings. Nationalism was at the genesis of Ho’s affiliation with
communism. It must be remembered, however, that his and other movements only
persist while the masses support them. To attribute more definitively the
ideological origins of the conflict, it is necessary to probe wider Vietnamese
society. John Kerry, who was then a Lieutenant and is now a Senator, testified
after returning from Vietnam that “the conflict between the Vietnamese was ‘an
effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any
colonial influence whatsoever, but also we found that the Vietnamese whom we
had enthusiastically molded in our image were hard put to take up the fight
against the threat we were supposedly saving them from. We found most people
didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy.’” Among the
intellectuals (who ironically were able to arise as a group largely due to the colonial system),
hostility towards capitalism could be understood as a reasonable response to
the exploitation of locals by foreign businesses. Rausch argues that, even if
nationalism and communism are not compatible ideologies, communism was able to
succeed because many in these groups saw as interlinked national liberation and
alternatives to capitalism.[11]
This
discussion set out to examine the roots of the second conflict in Indochina,
and more specifically whether the struggle for national identity and
sovereignty was more decisive in sparking and fanning the hostilities than was
the divide between capitalism and communism. Drawing from background material
spanning a number of decades before the war and some time during it (different
starting points can be selected; the falsified attack off the Northern coast of
Vietnam is a fair choice of epoch), most attention was paid to the situation
and attitudes of Vietnamese, both within the leadership and the masses. This
was guided by assuming that the most important stakeholders in the conflict
were those in their homeland. From this material, it was concluded that not
only among the masses but even among the communist and non-communist leadership
in Vietnam, the main driving force in the struggle was the pursuit of national
unity.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Tảng
Trương, Như, David Chanoff, and Van Toai Doan. A Vietcong Memoir. New
York: Random House, 1985.
Secondary Sources
Buzzanco,
Robert. Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999.
Crossley,
Pamela K., Lynn H. Lees, and John W. Servos, Global Society: The World Since 1900, 3rd ed. Boston:
Wadsworth, 2012.
Dommen,
Arthur J. The Indochinese experience of the French and the Americans:
Nationalism and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. Bloomington,
Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001.
Ford,
Harold P. “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam,” Central Intelligence Agency Center for the
Study of Intelligence, last updated 27 June 2008, accessed 12 August 2012,
https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/vietnam.html.
Kimball,
Jeffrey P., ed. To Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of American
Involvement in Vietnam. New York, 1990.
Lind,
Michael. Vietnam, the necessary war: a
reinterpretation of America’s most disastrous military conflict. New York:
Free Press, 1999.
Rausch,
Joseph A. “The Significance of Nationalism for the Spread of Communism to
Vietnam and Cuba.” Master's thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, 2011.
[1] Jeffrey P. Kimball, ed. To
Reason Why: The Debate about the Causes of American Involvement in Vietnam (New
York, 1990), 3.
[2] Harold P. Ford, “Why CIA
Analysts Were So Doubtful About Vietnam,” Central Intelligence Agency Center
for the Study of Intelligence, last updated 27 June 2008, accessed 12 August
2012, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/97unclass/vietnam.html.
[3] Pamela K. Crossley, Lynn H. Lees, and John W. Servos, Global Society: The World Since 1900, 3rd
ed. (Boston: Wadsworth, 2012), 363-364.
[4] Ibid., 310-311; Arthur J. Dommen, The Indochinese experience of the French and the Americans: Nationalism
and Communism in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana
University Press, 2001), 93-94; Ford, “Why CIA Analysts Were So Doubtful About
Vietnam.”
[6] Michael Lind, Vietnam, the necessary war: a reinterpretation of America’s most
disastrous military conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999), 2; Robert
Buzzanco, Vietnam and the Transformation of American Life (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1999), 17.
[7] Như Tảng Trương, David Chanoff, and Van Toai Doan, A Vietcong
Memoir (New York: Random House, 1985), 71-73
[11] Joseph A. Rausch, “The Significance of Nationalism for the Spread
of Communism to Vietnam and Cuba,” (Master's thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State
University, 2011), 45-47, 49.
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