In seeking to discover the origins of American thinking about a "domino effect" in Asia, with China spreading communism and therefore closing regional markets to American business interests, the RAND analysts find only vague notions of Chinese aggression emanating from the Korean War.
"The domino principle, which probably had its origin at the time of the Nationalist withdrawal from mainland China, was at the root of U.S. policy. Although elements of a domino-like theory could be found in NSC papers before the start of the Korean War, the Chinese intervention in Korea was thought to be an ominous confirmation of its validity. The possibility of a large scale Chinese intervention in Indochina, similar to that in Korea, was feared, especially after the armistice in Korea."
This is a hard pill to swallow for anyone who has read about the Korean War, and may indeed point to something like willful ignorance on the part of the United States. When General Douglas MacArthur landed American forces at Inchon in September of 1950, part of a renewed strategic counter-offensive against North Korea, he was expected by President Truman to have in mind a National Security Council memo reminding him that the invasion of North Korea could have dire consequences and could lead to a Third World War. Inchon was still South Korea, and up to this point in time U.N. forces had not invaded North Korea.
While article 11 of the memo does allow for U.N. forces to transgress the border with the express intention of forcing a North Korean withdrawal, article 12 forbids doing so should the intent be the unification of Korea. That is, if some slippage occurs because the fighting demands taking a position over the border, so be it, but if it appears that the United States is invading North Korea, China or the Soviet Union could be unintentionally drawn into the war. If this were to occur, the United States is directed to "take the defensive" and then take steps to broadcast to the world that either China or the Soviet Union were the aggressors.
Instead, MacArthur was emboldened by a secret message from Secretary of Defense George Marshall.
"TOP SECRET - FLASH - Washington, September 29, 1950—3:55 p.m. JCS 92985.
From JCS to personal for Genl of the Army Douglas MacArthur, SecDef sends. For his eyes only. Reference present report of supposed announcement by Eighth Army that ROK Divisions would halt on 38th parallel for regrouping: We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of 38th parallel. Announcement above referred to may precipitate embarrassment in UN where evident desire is not to be confronted with necessity of a vote on passage of 38th parallel, rather to find you have found it militarily necessary to do so."
Days later, Zhou Enlai, then Foreign Minister of the People's Republic of China, met with the Indian Ambassador, K.M. Panikkar, and had him relay the following message to the Americans.
"The American troops are trying to cross the 38th parallel, to expand the war to the north. If the South Korean troops crossed the parallel the Chinese troops would not intervene. If American troops cross the 38th parallel, we would not sit idle. We would intervene. China would send troops to North Korea."
While some American intelligence analysts thought it wise to heed the warning, Secretary of State Dean Acheson along with MacArthur, the CIA, and Charles Willoughby (MacArthur's chief intelligence officer), thought that China was bluffing and would not dare intervene.
Two weeks later General MacArthur would give the orders to advance with American troops not only over the 38th parallel, but up to the Chosin Resevoir and toward the Yalu River and the Chinese border. The Joint Chiefs of Staff sent an urgent message to MacArthur asking what he thought he was doing, and MacArthur would claim that this was an example of the "military necessity" spoken of in the NSC memo - the advance toward China was ostensibly part of the pursuit of retreating North Korean forces which the South Koreans could not "handle" on their own.
Chinese forces under the People's Volunteer Army subsequently launched attacks which produced three battles at Onjong, Unsan, and Pakchon. Consulting an operational map shows just how close the Americans were to the Chinese border, delineated by the Yalu River, with a South Korean reconnaissance regiment, performing recon for the main body of American forces, advancing almost to contact with the border.
Map showing Chinese and U.S. positions. Note the Yalu river at top demarcating the Chinese/Korea border and the forward position of the South Korean recon platoon from the 7th Regiment, 6th Infantry Division
MacArthur was fired the following year, and judging by President Truman's apparent remarks about the event, the U.S. administration concurred with the Chinese that it had been the United States under MacArthur which had triggered Chinese intervention.
"I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail."
How could it be that, by the time the United States would entertain the invasion of Vietnam, some of the same people who lived through these events - in fact influenced them actively - would talk of Chinese aggression and secret Chinese control of Vietnam?
In a memo from McNamara to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, the first point illustrates a position that, it would seem, the administration knew to be false given its experience in Korea.
"US strategy. The February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China. China—like Germany in 1917, like Germany in the West and Japan in the East in the late 30's, and like the USSR in 1947—looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.
The long-run US policy is based upon an instinctive understanding in our country that the peoples and resources of Asia could be effectively mobilized against us by China or by a Chinese coalition and that the potential weight of such a coalition could throw us on the defensive and threaten our security. This understanding of a straightforward security threat is interwoven with another perception—namely, that we have our view of the way the US should be moving and of the need for the majority of the rest of the world to be moving in the same direction if we are to achieve our national objective.
We would move toward economic well-being, toward open societies, and toward cooperation between nations; the role we have inherited and have chosen for ourselves for the future is to extend our influence and power to thwart ideologies that are hostile to these aims and to move the world, as best we can, in the direction we prefer. Our ends cannot be achieved and our leadership role cannot be played if some powerful and virulent nation—whether Germany, Japan, Russia or China—is allowed to organize their part of the world according to a philosophy contrary to ours."
John McNaughton, Assistant Secretary for International Security Affairs and advisor to McNamara, would infamously outline his thoughts on the calculus in Vietnam in a report called "Plan for Action for Vietnam" in 1965 detailing American objectives and their relative weights.
"70 percent - To avoid a humiliating US defeat (to our reputation as a guarantor).
20 percent - To keep SVN (and the adjacent) territory from Chinese hands.
10 percent - To permit the people of SVN to enjoy a better, freer way of life.
ALSO - To emerge from the crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.
NOT - To 'help a friend,' although it would be hard to stay in if asked out."
The reputation of the United States today as a "guarantor" is indeed what provides it the honour of keeping a stable of some 600 military bases within the territory of other nations, and which allows it to patrol international trade routes with its naval forces. There is a risk of interpreting McNaughton, without context, as an idealist who is warning of some outrage in the press. To the contrary, McNaughton was aware that American reputation was the basis for its role as economic patron of the earth, the one nation which had the strength of arms to accord it first place among nations and to reap the benefits of "free trade".
This view is reinforced by the seldom-discussed repercussions that Vietnam experienced for its crime of winning its decades-long war of independence.
A meeting of the U.S. Congress in October 2009 outlines the punishment.
“For over 20 years, economic and trade relations between the United States and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Vietnam) remained virtually frozen, in part a legacy of the extended military conflict of the 1960s and 1970s. On May 2, 1975, after North Vietnam defeated U.S. ally South Vietnam, President Gerald R. Ford extended President Richard M. Nixon’s 1964 trade embargo on North Vietnam to cover the reunified nation. Under the Ford embargo, bilateral trade and financial transactions were prohibited.”
During the French occupation little wealth found its way to the people of Vietnam. Although feudal landlords had always plagued the Vietnamese peasantry, numerous peasant rebellions had triggered numerous land reforms. General Ho Quy Ly took advantage of a peasant rebellion in 1400 and instituted laws which distributed land to the poorest peasants and put limits on land inheritance; within seven years his regime was crushed by the Ming dynasty at the request of the landlord class. The Tay Son rebellion in 1772 briefly abolished taxation in regions under their control and redistributed land - this time defeating a Qing dynasty army that had mobilized at the request of the ruling elite, and briefly instituting a more humane regime.
When the French arrived they empowered the landlord class, introducing a new regime of serfdom. Subsistence farmers in the North were ignored and the French focused on creating a plantation economy in the South, forcing the peasants to grow cash crops like tobacco and coffee rather than food. Three percent of the wealthiest landlords owned nearly half the land, and half of the population were landless peasants. Despite claims of French civilizing, literacy rates dropped below feudal levels as school attendance plummeted, with less than fifteen percent of all children receiving an education. As of 1939 only 700 people attended university in the entire country.
Adding to these economic issues was the fact that much of the fighting against French rule during the First Indochina War took place in the North. When the country was divided, many Viet Minh who were from the South were trapped in the impoverished North. During the Second Indochina War the Americans bombed the length of the country, North and South. According to the Library of Congress’ country report on Vietnam:
“Destruction attributed to the Second Indochina War was considerable. Hanoi claimed that in the South, 9,000 out of 15,000 hamlets were damaged or destroyed, 10 million hectares of farmland and 5 million hectares of forest lands were devastated, and 1.5 million cattle were killed. For Vietnam as a whole, the war resulted in some 1.5 million military and civilian deaths, 362,000 invalids, 1 million widows, and 800,000 orphans. The country sustained a further loss in human capital through the exodus of refugees from Vietnam after the communist victory in the South. According to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, as of October 1982 approximately 1 million people had fled Vietnam. Among them were tens of thousands of professionals, intellectuals, technicians, and skilled workers.”
Researcher Adam Fforde notes:
“After 1975, as Western economists started to look at what had happened in North Vietnam after 1954, many concluded that the poverty of the area created conditions extremely unsuited to the dreams of ambitious neo-Stalinists (Fforde, 1982; Vickerman, 1986; Fforde and Paine, 1987). The French had left behind very little modern industry and, while there were a very few mines and some up-country plantations, in the main this was a region of poor peasants.”
And provides a translation of a post-war Vietnamese text:
“Industry and the artisanat also met many difficulties. Before the war [against the French] industry only amounted to 10% of the total of agricultural and industrial output. After the years of fighting, this had fallen to 1.5%.
The factories and mines had almost all either been destroyed by war or taken south by the French. The tin and zinc refineries (though very small) had been bombed by the Americans and the Japanese and, left unused, were out of operation.
Most large machinery and means of transport needed for the Hong-gai mines and the cement factory had been taken south so output had collapsed. Coal output in 1930 was 2.615 mn. tonnes but in 1955 had fallen to 641,544.
Cement output in 1939 had been 305,800 tonnes but in 1955 was 8,450. In a number of factories, such as car repairs, locomotive repairs, boat-building, printing and spinning, the machinery had been dismantled and some of the buildings destroyed. In the Nam-dinh textile mill materials and the main parts of the turbine had been taken to the south (cloth output in the north was 55,575 m in 1939 and only 8,783 in 1955).
Thus, in the newly liberated areas industry was paralysed... Nearly 100,000 industrial workers were unemployed. (Vu Quoc Tuan and Dinh Van Hoang, 1960: 15)”
By 1994 Vietnam had finally been broken, and was ready for integration into the international capitalist system. Despite a period of trade with the Soviet Union which facilitated economic growth, the fall of the USSR left Vietnam struggling.
The U.S. Congress report answers the question - “Is Vietnam a ‘Communist’ country?”:
In its present form, the GSP program excludes ‘Communist’ countries unless the President determines three conditions have been met. First, the United States must have conferred NTR status to the country. Second, the country is a member of both the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Third, the country is ‘not dominated or controlled by international communism.’ U.S. law does not provide any definition of a ‘Communist’ country. Some observers point to Vietnam’s official name—the Socialist Republic of Vietnam—and the government’s control by the Communist Party of Vietnam (Đảng Cộng sản Việt Nam) as prima facie evidence that Vietnam is a ‘Communist’ country. Other observers counter that after over two decades of doi moi, Vietnam no longer is a ‘Communist’ country in terms of its economic system. In addition, even if Vietnam was a ‘Communist’ country, according to these observers, it is ‘not dominated or controlled by international communism’ because no such entity exists following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
While the United States may have failed militarily to subjugate Vietnam, a strategy of isolation and then “integration” has achieved what so much napalm could not.
From the Office of the United States Trade Representative:
“Vietnam is currently our 17th largest goods trading partner with $58.8 billion in total (two way) goods trade during 2018. Goods exports totaled $9.7 billion; goods imports totaled $49.2 billion. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Vietnam was $39.5 billion in 2018.”