CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 31
Disaster and Détente: The Cold War, Vietnam, and the Third World, 1961-1989

Chapter Summary
Chapter 31 continues the survey of the Cold War, begun in Chapter 29, and carries the story from the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in 1961 to the end of President Reagan’s term in 1989. As can be seen in the discussion of U.S. foreign policy during this period, the containment doctrine, formulated during the Truman administration, continued to be the guiding force behind American foreign policy from the Kennedy administration through the Reagan administration. Furthermore, the action-reaction relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union that was so much a part of the early Cold War persists into the 1961 to 1989 period.
In its quest for friends in the Third World and ultimate victory in the Cold War, the Kennedy administration adopted the goal of nation building, to be accomplished, for example, through the Alliance for Progress and the Peace Corps as well as through the techniques of counterinsurgency. Such methods perpetuated an idea that had long been part of American foreign policy: that other people cannot solve their own problems and that the American economic and governmental model can be transferred intact to other societies. Historian William Appleman Williams believed that such thinking led to “the tragedy of American diplomacy,” and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., refers to it as “a ghastly illusion.” The idea is further evidenced in the CIA’s intervention in the Congo (Zaire) from 1960 to 1961 and in Brazil from 1962 to 1964.
Despite the strategic superiority of the United States over the Soviet Union in 1960, President Kennedy’s presidential campaign was based, in part, on the false premise that the Eisenhower administration had allowed a “missile gap” to develop between the United States and its arch-rival. Once elected, President Kennedy oversaw a significant military buildup based on the principle of “flexible response,” and his policies and actions in the field of foreign policy were shaped by his acceptance of the containment doctrine and his preference for a bold, interventionist foreign policy. His activist approach not only helped bring the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in the Cuban missile crisis but also led to a significant acceleration of the nuclear arms race—a trend that continued through the administration of Kennedy’s successor, Lyndon B. Johnson.
The authors trace the course of American involvement in Vietnam from deepening U.S. involvement during the Kennedy administration to the collapse of South Vietnam in April 1975. This discussion is based on the thesis that disaster befell the United States in Vietnam because of the U.S. belief that it had a right to influence the internal affairs of Third World countries. This theme runs through the discussion of United States involvement in Vietnam in several variations: the United States decision to sabotage the Geneva accords (see Chapter 29), United States support of the overthrow of the Diem regime, Johnson’s view of Vietnam as a “damn little pissant country,” the arrogance of power on the part of the United States, and Nixon’s “jugular diplomacy.”
Several subthemes remind us of the sources of the Cold War, discussed in Chapter 29. It is within this context that the authors state: “Overlooking the native roots of the nationalist rebellion against France, Washington officials took a globalist view of Vietnam, interpreting events through a Cold War lens.” And in a review of the material we find that the following sources of the Cold War discussed in Chapter 29 fit the war in Vietnam:

1. The unsettled international environment at the end of World War II encouraged competition between the United States and the Soviet Union. Empires were disintegrating (France’s attempt to reinstate its authority in Indochina ended in disaster at Dienbienphu); nations were being born (Ho Chi Minh attempted to create an independent Vietnam); and civil wars were raging within nations (the National Liberation Front emerged against Ngo Dinh Diem’s South Vietnamese regime).
2. United States fear of the Soviet system led to economic expansionism (the United States recognized Southeast Asia as an economic asset) and globalist diplomacy (Southeast Asia seemed vital to the defense of Japan and the Philippines).
3. United States officials exaggerated the Soviet threat because of their belief in a monolithic communist enemy bent on world revolution. (American presidents from Truman through Nixon failed to recognize the nationalist roots of the problem in Vietnam. Instead, they saw Ho Chi Minh as a Communist and Vietnam as an “Asian Berlin,” and they accepted the tenets of the domino theory.)

In the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Americans began to debate its causes and consequences. Just as they had disagreed over the course and conduct of the war, they were now unable to reach any real consensus on its lessons for the nation.
Although a great deal of energy was expended on questions relating to the Vietnam War during Richard M. Nixon’s presidency, Nixon considered other foreign policy matters, especially the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, to be more important. In an attempt to create a global balance of power, Nixon and Henry Kissinger (Nixon’s national security adviser and later his secretary of state) adopted a “grand strategy.” By means of détente with the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, Nixon and Kissinger sought to achieve the same goals as those of the old containment doctrine, but through accommodation rather than confrontation. Despite détente, the United States still had to respond to crises rooted in instability. Nowhere was the fragility of world stability via the grand strategy more apparent than in the Middle East, where war again broke out between the Arab states and Israel in 1973. While the Soviet Union and the United States positioned themselves by putting their armed forces on alert, OPEC imposed an oil embargo against the United States. Kissinger was able to persuade the warring parties to agree to a cease-fire; OPEC ended its embargo; and, through “shuttle diplomacy,” Kissinger persuaded Egypt and Israel to agree to a United Nations peacekeeping force in the Sinai. But many problems remained, and the instability of the region continued to be a source of tension between the United States and the Soviet Union.
President Nixon believed, just as previous presidents had believed, in America’s right to influence the internal affairs of Third World countries. It was out of this belief and the concomitant belief that the United States should curb revolution and radicalism in the Third World, that Nixon accepted the Johnson Doctrine in Latin America, as evidenced by the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile.
As Nixon and Kissinger sought world order through the grand strategy, global economic issues highlighted the differences between the rich and poor nations of the world and heightened the animosity of Third World nations toward what they perceived to be the exploitive industrialized nations of the world. The United States, the richest nation on Earth, exports large quantities of goods to developing nations as well as importing raw materials from those nations. This important trade, along with America’s worldwide investments, in part explains the interventionist nature of United States foreign policy, a policy accepted and continued by Presidents Nixon and Gerald Ford, and by their foreign-policy overseer, Henry Kissinger. Therefore, during the Nixon-Ford-Kissinger years America’s global watch against forces that threatened its far-flung economic and strategic interests continued.
When Jimmy Carter assumed the presidency in 1977, he and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance at first pledged a new course for the United States. However, this course was challenged by Carter’s national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, by Democratic and Republican critics, and by the Soviet Union, which reacted in anger and fear to the human rights aspect of Carter’s policies. The Cold War seemed to have its own momentum. Despite the Carter administration’s successful negotiation of the SALT-II Treaty and its achievements in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, it was overwhelmed by critics at home, the Iranian hostage crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The grain embargo, the 1980 Olympics boycott, and the Carter Doctrine all seemed more reminiscent of the containment doctrine and the sources of the Cold War than of a new course in American foreign policy. Furthermore, the excesses in which the United States had engaged in the past in its attempts to create stability, protect American economic interests, and contain the Communist threat rained down on the Carter administration in the form of the Iranian hostage crisis. In this crisis America’s missiles, submarines, tanks, and bombers ultimately meant nothing if the lives of the hostages were to be saved. But many Americans wished for a return to the immediate postwar world, a world in which the United States had a monopoly on economic and military power. In this spirit of nostalgia, the electorate chose Ronald Reagan as its president in the 1980 election.
Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 marked a return to foreign-policy themes rooted in America’s past and reminiscent of the early days of the Cold War. As a result, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union deteriorated and arms talks between the two nations broke down. The questioning of U.S. intervention in Third World nations, so apparent in the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam disaster, was absent in the Reagan administration. Fearing communism, Reagan simplistically blamed unrest in the world on the Soviets, failed to see the local roots of problems, and formed alliances with antirevolutionary regimes, which tended to be unrepresentative. American relations with the Third World during the 1980s evoke memories of the sources of the Cold War, of the containment policy, and of attempts to protect American economic interests against the force of revolutionary nationalism. Therefore, in the name of protecting private American companies, the Reagan administration rejected the Law of the Sea Treaty. In the same vein, American policies toward El Salvador and Nicaragua recall phrases used to describe American policy in previous eras; and Reagan’s desire for victory rather than negotiation, seen especially in his policies toward Central America, brings to mind the early years of the Kennedy administration. However, since the Kennedy years the American people had been through the traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, and the power of Congress, relative to that of the president, had increased. Therefore, Congress in the mid-1980s was much more willing to play an active role in foreign policy decisions than it had been in the 1960s. But Congress, reflecting the debate among the American people over the nation’s policy toward Nicaragua, vacillated between ending aid to the contras in mid-1984 and again extending aid in 1986. During the period when aid was prohibited, the executive branch of the government, through the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency, acted to circumvent the will of Congress. These actions came to light in 1986 in the Iran-contra scandal, a scandal that deeply wounded Ronald Reagan’s ability to lead during his last two years in office.
From this discussion of the Iran-contra scandal, the authors turn their attention to continuing problems in the Middle East, the problem of terrorism against United States citizens and property, America’s ill-fated 1983 mission in Lebanon, and to a discussion of Congress’s ability to force the Reagan administration to alter its policy of “constructive engagement” toward South Africa. At the close of the 1980s major problems continued to face the United States in the Third World.
Public concern over the Reagan administration’s anti-Soviet stance and propensity toward confrontation led to international concern and to massive support for a freeze in the nuclear arms race. Public pressure, combined with other forces, led to a resumption of arms talks in 1985. In the same year Mikhail Gorbachev assumed power in the Soviet Union. Perhaps President Reagan was right when he said that he was “dropped into a grand historical moment,” because under Gorbachev’s leadership the Soviet Union undertook an ambitious domestic reform program and Soviet foreign policy underwent significant changes. These dramatic changes helped reduce international tensions and, in 1987, led to a Soviet-American agreement to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe.



Learning Objectives
1. Examine, evaluate, and discuss the consequences of the defense and foreign policy views, goals, and actions of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
2. Discuss Cuban-American relations from 1959 to October 1962; explain the causes, outcome, and consequences of the Cuban missile crisis, and evaluate President John Kennedy’s handling of the crisis.
3. Examine and evaluate the events and decisions that led to deepening United States involvement in Vietnam from 1961 to 1965.
4. Discuss the nature of the Vietnam War, the characteristics of American soldiers who served in the war, and the war’s impact on those soldiers.
5. Explain the factors that contributed to the emergence of anti-Vietnam War sentiment and protests within the United States.
6. Discuss the course of the Vietnam War from 1965 to 1975; explain the war’s impact on Southeast Asia and American society; and discuss the debate in the United States over the meaning of the American experience in Vietnam.
7. Explain the theories on which the Nixon-Kissinger “grand strategy” was based; examine and evaluate the policies and actions inspired by those theories; and examine the international crises and issues that placed the grand strategy in jeopardy.
8. Examine, evaluate, and discuss the consequences of the defense and foreign policy views, goals, and actions of the Carter administration.
9. Examine, evaluate, and discuss the consequences of the defense and foreign policy views, goals, and actions of the Reagan administration.
10. Discuss the activities that constituted the Iran-contra scandal, and explain the scandal’s impact on the presidency of Ronald Reagan.



Chapter Outline
I. Introduction
Developing countries became entangled in Cold War diplomacy because both America and the Soviet Union wanted them as allies. The Third World altered the bipolar nature of the Cold War.

II. Kennedy’s Nation Building, Arms Buildup, and the Cuban Missile Crisis
A. Nation Building and Counterinsurgency
Based on the concept of nation building, the Kennedy administration initiated aid programs to help developing nations through the early states of nationhood. The concept of counterinsurgency was the tactic used to defeat revolutionaries in Third World countries friendly to the United States.
B. Military Expansion
John Kennedy vowed to improve the military, and his “flexible response” sought ways to fight any kind of war.
C. Berlin Wall
Kennedy rejected Soviet demands concerning Berlin, and he vowed to defend West Berlin. The Soviets responded by building the Berlin Wall to stop the flow of Eastern Germans into the more prosperous Western zone.
D. Bay of Pigs Invasion
Kennedy inherited the Bay of Pigs invasion plan, but he ordered that no Americans be directly involved. The April 1961 invasion was a disaster.
E. Cuban Missile Crisis
Russia provided military assistance to Cuba and placed nuclear missiles on the island. Discovery of these missiles in 1962 sparked a frightening episode of brinkmanship.
F. Kennedy’s Handling of the Crisis
Critics assert that Kennedy courted disaster in the way in which he handled the crisis.
G. Aftermath
The crisis led to some easing of Soviet American tensions. However, the Soviet pledge to catch up in the nuclear arms race increased tensions.

III. Johnson and Americanization of the War in Vietnam
A. Nuclear Proliferation Treaty
Johnson signed a non proliferation treaty in 1968, but Vietnam meant that Cold War tensions would continue.
B. Kennedy’s Legacy in Vietnam
Kennedy sent more than 16,000 advisors to Vietnam. Diem created problems because of his oppressive policies and his persecution of Buddhists. The CIA urged South Vietnamese officers to overthrow Diem, and they murdered him in 1963.
C. Tonkin Gulf Incident
Despite flimsy evidence of attacks on American ships, in 1964 Congress passed the Tonkin Gulf Resolution giving Lyndon Johnson authority to wage war on North Vietnam.
D. Bombing Campaigns in Laos and Vietnam
In 1964 stepped-up bombing of Laos. After the Vietcong attacked the American airfield at Pleiku, Johnson ordered Operation Rolling Thunder against North Vietnam.
E. Troop Strength
Johnson decided to increase U.S. ground forces in Vietnam in July 1965. U.S. troop strength peaked in 1969 at 543,400.

IV. Vietnam: Escalation, Carnage, and Protest
A. My Lai Massacre
A gruesome atrocity occurred at the village of My Lai, where Americans killed some 500 civilians.
B. American Soldiers in Vietnam
Many Americans in Vietnam just tried to survive their tours of duty in a brutal and inhospitable environment.
C. Growing Antiwar Sentiment
Protests at home grew along with the military escalation in Vietnam, but Johnson vowed to continue the war.
D. McNamara’s Doubts
McNamara became convinced that continued bombing would not win the war.
E. Tet Offensive
The Vietcong and North Vietnamese offensive in 1968 ended in an American victory, but many people came to believe that the war could not be won.
F. Dollar/Gold Crisis
Rampant deficit spending to finance the war caused Europeans to redeem dollars for gold, providing further pressure on the Johnson Administration to end the war.
G. Johnson’s Exit
On March 31, 1968, Johnson announced a halt to the bombing of most of North Vietnam, asked Hanoi to begin negotiations to end the war, and announced that he would not run for reelection.

V. Nixon, Vietnamization, and the Impact of America’s Longest War
A. Invasion of Cambodia
Richard Nixon announced that the United States would help those nations that helped themselves. In Southeast Asia this doctrine meant “Vietnamization” of the war by replacing Americans with South Vietnamese troops. In 1970 Nixon announced that American and South Vietnamese forces had entered Cambodia. This action sparked violent protests in the United States.
B. Cease Fire Agreement
In 1973, America and North Vietnam agreed to withdraw American troops, return POWs, account for MIAs, and recognize a role for the Vietcong in South Vietnam.
C. Costs of the Vietnam War
More than 58,000 Americans and a million and a half Vietnamese died in the war. The conflict cost the United States almost 200 billion dollars, and it delayed improved relations with other nations.
D. Debate over the Lessons of Vietnam
Hawks claimed the war taught that the military should be allowed a free hand; doves insisted that losing the war showed the dangers of an imperial presidency.
E. Vietnam Veterans
Post traumatic stress disorder plagued thousands of veterans, causing them fears and anxiety.

VI. Nixon, Kissinger, and Détente
A. SALT
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger sought détente that would recognize Soviet American rivalry while creating cooperation through negotiations. The United States and the Soviets signed the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks treaties, which limited ABM systems for each nation to two sites and imposed a five year freeze on the offensive missiles each side could possess.
B. Opening to China
Nixon extended détente to the People’s Republic of China, and he made a historic trip there in 1972.
C. War in the Middle East
When Egypt and Syria attacked Israel in 1973, OPEC stopped oil shipments in an effort to gain American support for the Arabs.
D. Chile
Nixon plotted covert actions against Salvador Allende, while continuing to deny it.
E. Containing Radicalism in Africa
Nixon viewed the white minority governments in Rhodesia and South Africa as bulwarks against communist inspired radicalism.
F. United States in the World Economy
American interventionism reflected a dependence on raw materials from abroad and the importance of foreign investments. Threats to investments, materials, and markets made intervention appear to be a viable option.
G. Economic Competition with Japan
Economic relations with Japan deteriorated as an influx of Japanese imports caused the United States to suffer from an unfavorable balance of trade.
H. International Environmental Issues
In 1972 the U.S. participated in a U.N.-sponsored environmental conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

VII. Carter, Preventive Diplomacy, and a Reinvigorated Cold War
A. Carter’s Divided Administration
Jimmy Carter suffered from indecision and from squabbles among members of his administration, hampering his attempts to advance human rights.
B. SALT II
The SALT II Treaty further limited nuclear weapons, but the treaty stalled when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. In the Carter Doctrine, the President promised to defend the Persian Gulf militarily from any Soviet invasion.
C. Camp David Accords
Jimmy Carter helped ease tensions in the Middle East by negotiating an accord between Egypt and Israel.
D. Iranian Hostage Crisis
In 1979 Iranians stormed the embassy in Teheran and took a number of hostages. The United States unfroze Iranian assets and promised no further intervention in Iran in January 1981, and the hostages were released.
E. Panama Canal Treaties
Carter signed treaties with Panama that turned the Canal Zone over to Panama in the year 2000 and allowed the United States to defend the Canal Zone after that time.

VIII. The Ups and Downs of Reagan’s World
A. Law of the Sea Convention
The Reagan Doctrine announced that the United States would openly support all anti-Communist fighters. A supporter of free-market capitalism, Reagan rejected the 1982 United Nations’ Convention on the Law of the Sea, which dealt with offshore resources. Furthermore, Reagan believed an intensive military buildup would thwart the Soviet threat.
B. Intervention in El Salvador
Reagan considered the revolution in El Salvador a case of communist aggression, and, citing the domino theory, he persuaded Congress to fund the government there.
C. Contra War in Nicaragua
Reagan, afraid of Nicaragua as a Soviet client, worked to topple the Sandinista regime. The CIA trained rebels, mined Nicaraguan harbors, and blew up merchant ships.
D. Iran Contra Scandal
The Reagan administration sold arms to Iran and sent the profits to anti Sandinista forces, in violation of the law.
E. U.S. Interests in the Middle East
The troubled Middle East was strategically and economically important to the U.S.
F. Crisis in Lebanon
Reagan sent troops to Lebanon, where a terrorist attack killed 241 American servicemen in Beirut in 1983.
G. South Africa
Reagan struggled with South Africa’s racist policy of apartheid. Because of public pressure, Congress passed economic restrictions against South Africa in 1986.
H. Third World Indebtedness
Indebtedness of Third World nations caused economic instability and political unrest throughout the Third World, and had an adverse economic impact on the United States
I. Debate over Nuclear Weapons
Reagan’s search for nuclear superiority sparked a worldwide debate and appeals for a freeze in the nuclear arms race. Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev agreed that they should limit weapons but could not reach an accord because Reagan wanted the Strategic Defense Initiative.
J. Gorbachev’s Reforms
Gorbachev worked to modernize the Soviet economy and to liberalize the political system, which eased tensions.