Fifty years ago this month US imperialism suffered its final ignominious defeat in Vietnam with the fall of its puppet regime in the south. It was a different era then with global, and domestic politics too, shaped by the system clash between Stalinism and the capitalist West. But, argues CHRISTINE THOMAS, Vietnam still has lessons for today’s world of multi-polar geopolitics and a revival of mass struggles.
The ‘Fall of Saigon’ on 30 April 1975 marked the final chapter in a decades-long fight of the Vietnamese people for national liberation. A courageous struggle by a predominantly peasant movement in a poverty-stricken country defeated first French imperialism and then the US – the richest and most powerful nation on the planet, armed to the teeth with the latest hi-tech bombs and military weaponry. With the capture of the south Vietnamese capital Saigon by the North Vietnamese forces, and the chaotic exodus of the remaining Americans on military helicopters, the country was finally united and the Vietnamese able to determine their own future, free from imperialist intervention.
A phenomenal one trillion dollars were spent by the US in trying to defeat the Vietnamese liberation movement. Over the course of eight years they dropped one 500-pound bomb for every person in Vietnam – up to four times greater than the tonnage deployed during the whole of the second world war. Seventy percent of villages in the north of Vietnam were destroyed, 20 million tons of the chemical agent orange released, and at least two million Vietnamese killed. And yet US imperialism suffered a humiliating defeat that was to cast a shadow over its foreign policy for many years and inspire anti-colonial and independence struggles around the world.
How this was possible can only be grasped by placing the Vietnam war in the context of the world balance of forces in the immediate post-second world war period. The first US military aid for the imperialist war in Indochina (an ‘association’ of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos) was given to the French colonial power in 1950, the year of the outbreak of the Korean war and a year after Mao Zedong’s peasant army had overthrown landlordism and capitalism in China.
Both China and North Korea were bureaucratic, authoritarian regimes, mirroring that of Stalinist Russia, but by eliminating capitalism and landlordism, and breaking with imperialist subjugation, these regimes nevertheless provided an alternative social system – based on a planned economy – and a powerful model for the masses in the colonial world fighting for national liberation and against their own feudal-landlord oppressors. It was this fear of the spread of social revolution that shaped US imperialism’s policy towards South East Asia after the second world war.
Domino theory
In 1950 the US national security council made reference for the first time to what later became known as the ‘domino theory’ – that if one country in South East Asia ‘went communist’, the rest would fall like a row of dominoes. Because the Soviet Union had emerged from the second world war with its global authority strengthened, the Western imperialist powers had been compelled to accept its ‘sphere of influence’ in Eastern Europe. And military intervention against China, a nation of 541 million people, was ruled out. But the strategic and economic importance of South East Asia was emphasised by numerous US government memos, reports and studies in the early 1950s.
The region was home to several US military bases as well as a source of important commodities such as rubber, tin and oil. In particular, South East Asia was a vital source of rice for Japan – the most important country in the area, but with a devastated economy after the war, which could make it ripe for social revolution. If the smaller dominoes started to fall, it would “make it extremely difficult to prevent Japan’s eventual accommodation to communism”, pointed out one US report from the time. Vietnam on its own might not be that important to US imperialism’s economic and strategic interests but if it were ‘lost’ to the capitalist world, it was argued, it would soon be followed by Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Thailand and so on.
Not that the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin was encouraging international revolution. On the contrary, the bureaucracy was looking primarily to defend its own national interests through avoiding confrontation with the Western capitalist powers and anything that might threaten the social base of its power and prestige at home. So when the Viet Minh (League for the Independence of Vietnam) – set up in 1941 on the initiative of Ho Chi Minh and the Indochinese Communist party he had founded in 1930 – looked to the Soviet Union for direction and support in its struggle against Japanese occupation during the war, and in its aftermath, it was these national interests of the Soviet bureaucracy that prevailed.
As defeated Japanese troops left Vietnam in 1945, a workers’ and peasant uprising could have been the basis for a genuine socialist revolution, but was derailed by the Viet Minh. Following the advice of Stalin, they came to an agreement with the imperialist powers, labelled ‘democratic allies’, who occupied Vietnam (pre-revolution nationalist China in the north and Britain in the South) and then promptly handed it back to its former French colonial power. Vietnamese independence, declared by Ho Chi Minh on 25 August 1945, had lasted just four weeks, and it would take another 30 years of struggle for it to be achieved again.
Vietnam war part one
In an agreement signed on 6 March 1946 the French were to initiate a phased withdrawal of their 15,000 troops from the north and the Viet Minh pledged to stop guerilla resistance in the south. But after France bombed Haiphong in the north in October, the Viet Minh resumed the resistance in a war that was to last eight years.
By 1950 it was clear that an enfeebled French imperialism was losing its war against the Viet Minh guerilla forces, and if the French were to withdraw, the Viet Minh would end up controlling the whole of Vietnam. US financial support increased exponentially. By 1954, 80% of the funding for France’s war in Indochina was being provided by the US – the equivalent of the whole of the post-war economic Marshall Aid to Europe. And yet that was not sufficient to crush the resistance movement. Eventually, on 20 July 1954, the Geneva Agreement was signed to end the war in Indochina. Vietnam was divided, with the Viet Minh maintaining control of the north – a regime modelled on the Soviet Union and China – and US imperialism determined to maintain its influence over the capitalist south.
Elections were supposed to take place within two years to unify Vietnam and allow self-determination. In reality, those elections never took place. A 1954 memo of the US joint chiefs of staff said that “a settlement based on free elections would be attended by almost certain loss of the associated states (Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam) to communist control”. A puppet government was set up in Saigon in the south under Ngo Dinh Diem which was, according to the Pentagon papers leaked later to the New York Times, “essentially the creation of the United States”.
Following the Stalin line of not provoking Western imperialism the Viet Minh initially held back from guerilla activity in the south, but under increased attack from the Diem regime the resistance resumed, and in 1960 Ho Chi Minh launched the National Liberation Front (NLF) to unite the mainly peasant forces opposing the regime in the south and to wage a struggle for the unification of Vietnam and its liberation from western imperialism.
Supported mainly by the landlords, the social base of Diem’s corrupt capitalist regime in Saigon in the south of the country was so narrow that without US support it would have totally disintegrated. Brutal repression of anyone considered an opponent of the regime and military control of the villages led to mass opposition, including from Buddhist monks, rising up against religious persecution. Over a period of 20 months, after Diem was overthrown by a military coup in 1963, there were ten different military governments, revealing the total instability and weakness of the regime in the south.
In complete contrast, the programme and actions of the NLF – which were based on seizing land from the landlords and handing it to the peasants – secured it a mass base in the south. A secret US Congressional report from 1967 admitted that the Viet Cong (derogatory name for the NLF) “have eliminated landlord domination and re-allocated lands owned by absentee landlords and the government to the landless and others who cooperate”. As early as 1962 the NLF had around 300,000 members and soon controlled up to 75% of the countryside in the south. The NLF guerillas were not just waging a military war but a social revolution in the villages, something that was completely underestimated by most of the military and political strategists in the various US administrations that conducted the war in Vietnam.
Mission creep
US military intervention began quite tentatively with the dispatch of military advisers to train the ARV – the South Vietnamese army – secretly under President Dwight Eisenhower and then thousands more under John F Kennedy from 1961-63. But as it became increasingly clear that the disorganised and corrupt South Vietnamese army was totally incapable of defeating the NLF forces on the ground in the south, a pretext for direct US military involvement was fabricated by the Gulf of Tonkin ‘incident’ in August 1964. Fake news about an attack on a US destroyer led to President Lyndon B Johnson, who had succeeded the assassinated JFK, being granted the power to take whatever military action he considered necessary in South East Asia, without Congress having to declare war. At the same time, North Vietnamese troops entered the war in the south.
In March 1965, operation Rolling Thunder unleashed horrific systematic carpet bombing of North Vietnam, which the Johnson administration claimed would bring the government in Hanoi in the north to the negotiating table within two to six months. It didn’t. And as each new military tactic failed, the dynamic of a process initiated over 15 years previously to ‘contain communism’, and increasingly enmeshed with the need to maintain its global credibility and authority, propelled US imperialism towards escalating military intervention and ever more desperate and brutal measures against the Vietnamese people. ‘Search and destroy’ missions set fire to whole villages and created tens of thousands of refugees. The dropping of thousands of tons of nepalm burned people alive. ‘Operation Phoenix’, a CIA programme against anyone suspected of being a ‘communist’, tortured to death and killed at least 20,000 civilians. At a Senate hearing US army intelligence officers testified that they had never seen a detainee survive an interrogation.
The first US troops – just 3,500 – also arrived in Vietnam in March 1965, supposedly to defend the air bases from which the bombing was being launched against the north, but secretly authorised for combat duty. By the end of 1965 there were 200,000 troops, which forces commander General Westmoreland declared would lead to a US victory within two years. A year later, 200,000 more US troops were sent, reaching more than half a million by the beginning of 1968.
1968 was, in fact, a pivotal year in the war. On 31 January, coinciding with the Vietnamese New Year holiday, the Vietnamese national liberation forces launched the Tet Offensive – a simultaneous daring and well-organised attack on around 100 towns and cities in the south. The offensive was crushed by the US deploying the full might of its superior military power, but the psychological after-shocks on ordinary Americans, watching incredulous on their television screens, outweighed any military victory.
The war had been brought from the countryside to the cities in the most spectacular fashion; guerilla fighters had even managed to penetrate the US Embassy in Saigon. With Tet the political representatives of US imperialism lost the battle for ‘hearts and minds’ on the homefront. It was now clear to millions of Americans that the optimistic strategy that they had been sold for the last three years – that US military power would wear down the North Vietnamese and force them to capitulate, and that victory was just around the corner – had failed. They were faced with a never-ending war, in which 40,000 US soldiers had already been killed, and with no final military victory in sight.
The North Vietnamese and the guerilla forces in the south were prepared to withstand every brutality unleashed by US imperialism. As well as mass support in the countryside in the south, the whole regime in the north was geared towards resisting the US. Shock brigades of up to two million people, many of them young women, were mobilised to immediately repair roads, bridges and other infrastructure destroyed by the US bombs. Both China and the Soviet Union supplied the regime in the north with varying amounts of military aid, depending on the interests of the competing national bureaucracies, but it was the mass understanding of the Vietnamese workers, peasants and poor that they were fighting a war for national and social liberation that was central to the resilience of the Vietnamese resistance.
Ruling class divisions
The Tet Offensive sent shockwaves through American society, giving an impetus to the growing anti-war movement and widening the cracks already emerging within the US ruling class. Johnson’s approval rating halved from 80% when he first became president in 1963 to 40%. Peace negotiations were now opened in Paris. Robert McNamara, initially one of the most gung-ho in the Johnson administration, stood down as defence secretary, and Johnson eventually decided not to stand for re-election.
In the end, it was the Republican Party’s Richard Nixon who was narrowly elected president in November 1968 as the ‘peace with honour’ candidate. In June the following year he announced the gradual withdrawal of US troops from Vietnam, although another 10,000 were to die between 1969 and 1973 when the war finally ended.
However, troop withdrawal and ‘Vietnamisation’ – ie the US financing South Vietnamese troops rather than risking the lives of US soldiers, which was becoming increasingly unpopular as the death toll mounted – was accompanied by an intensification and escalation of the mass bombing campaign: ‘one last push’ that was supposed to bring about North Vietnamese capitulation. In 1970 US bombs rained down on Cambodia in an attempt to destroy the NLF’s supply lines. It was a brutal campaign that was only made public four years later in the Watergate scandal – which forced Nixon to resign, revealing that he had become more and more out of control of the capitalist establishment in his illegal persecution of anti-war and political opponents. The bombing was then followed by the invasion of Cambodia, pushing Congress into finally reversing the Gulf of Tonkin decision, and placing more constraints on presidential power: US troops could now only be deployed and the war extended with the approval of Congress.
Anti-war movement
The anti-war movement in the US was reaching its peak in 1970. In 1965, when the first US troops entered Vietnam, the protesters on most actions could be numbered in the tens. Four years later, on 15 October 1969, one estimate has 15 million taking to the streets in what was then the largest single day of protest in US history, which was exceeded again one month later. When the national guard fired on students protesting at Kent State University in May 1970, killing four and wounding nine, strikes and sit-ins spread to 400 colleges around the country.
In August 1965, only 24% of Americans considered it a mistake to send troops to Vietnam. Two years later the war still had majority support. But by 1968, public opinion had shifted decisively in an anti-war direction: 54% of people polled thought it was a mistake compared to 37% who did not. Two years later, 65% were in favour of withdrawal of all the troops by the end of the year.
Ominously for the US ruling class, the movement against war in Vietnam was fusing with the black rights movement and inner city uprisings. This was fuelled by an unjust draft system that disproportionally conscripted poor black, white and minority youth – while mainly middle and upper-class youth such as the young Donald Trump could defer or be exempted from the draft – and a level of combat deaths amongst black GIs that was double their representation in society.
In 1968, on average one body bag was being brought back to the US from Vietnam every 30 minutes. All over the country, the perception of the futility of fighting an unwinnable war was growing, stoking social resistance and finding an echo amongst the US troops on the ground in Vietnam. In 1971, more than 1,000 Vietnam veterans protested outside the White House, throwing down the medals they had won in combat. In Vietnam itself, the army was disintegrating: desertions were doubling; GIs were refusing combat duties; drug taking was reaching epidemic proportions, and killings of unpopular officers by fragging – rolling fragmentation grenades under their tent at night – was escalating.
With widening revolt at home and a collapsing army in Vietnam, the US ruling class eventually had no choice but to end the war. As historian Howard Zinn wrote “the United States had lost the war in both the Mekong Valley and the Mississippi Valley”. A peace agreement was finally signed on 23 January 1973 on the basis of the total withdrawal of US troops and the North Vietnamese forces remaining in place. Although the US continued to give aid to the regime in the south, nobody believed that the government could hold on without its military backing. Two years later the North Vietnamese entered Saigon.
Changed world situation
The Vietnamese people’s unprecedented defeat of the capitalist world’s military and economic hegemon served as a massive spur to those fighting for national self-determination and against unbearable economic and social conditions throughout Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. The united Vietnam which emerged from the war was not socialist – it was a bureaucratic planned economy, as were the regimes in Cambodia, Syria, Burma, Mozambique etc, that were formed as revolution spread throughout the colonial world. The character of these regimes was the outcome of revolutions based on the peasantry or sections of the armed forces rather than the organised working class. However, the elimination of landlordism and capitalism weakened imperialism and capitalism worldwide, strengthening the idea internationally that a different system to capitalism was possible.
The ghost of the humiliation in Vietnam was to haunt US foreign policy for many years. Most of the subsequent ‘cold war’ conflicts were fought via proxy forces, not direct military intervention. But the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, and the erasure of the model of Stalinism as a system alternative to capitalism, ushered in a totally new global order. US imperialism felt confident to exploit its advantage as the sole, unchallenged global superpower, directly asserting its economic and strategic interests, by means of military might if required. At the same time, the idea promoted by the ruling classes globally that capitalism had triumphed and was now the only possible social system was echoed by most of the leaders of the organisations of the working class internationally, using their positions to abandon or restrain workers’ collective struggle.
US imperialism’s hubris was most in evidence in its invasion of Iraq in 2003, which in the new world situation unfolded very differently from Vietnam. While the Vietnamese national liberation movement was able to develop deep social roots through its land reform, securing real popular support that allowed it to resist a brutal military onslaught lasting years, Saddam Hussein‘s authoritarian regime rested on a narrow capitalist social base that rapidly collapsed in the face of US military power.
Nevertheless, the subsequent chaos, bloodshed and ethnic conflict unleashed by ‘regime change’ in both Iraq and Afghanistan, revealed that there were limits to US global power. Now, the brief ‘unipolar‘ world of US dominance has given way to an unstable ‘multi-polar’ international ‘disorder’, characterised by economic and military conflict.
Within this volatile world situation the working class is starting to shake off the negative legacy of the collapse of Stalinism, resulting in a small but significant upturn in collective class struggle in some of the more developed capitalist countries, including in the US itself. As the economic and geopolitical crisis intensifies, workers will be increasingly forced along that road and towards building the independent organisations necessary to effectively wage those struggles and the fight for a system that could replace capitalism. And in this new era the way is now cleared for the construction of a social model based on a planned economy run via democratic workers’ control and management, rather than by a national bureaucratic elite, and with an internationalist outlook that would be an inspiration for revolutionary struggles against capitalism and for genuine socialism across the globe.
While the social, economic and geopolitical factors which led to the humiliation of US imperialism in Vietnam won’t be exactly replicated today, the lesson that mass movements can’t be suppressed by military might will be returned to again and again.