Lessons of Saigon: Beware the Idee Fixe
South Vietnam fell 49 years ago today. Despite the Domino Theory, which US intelligence didn't believe in, communism did not spread like wildfire as a result.
It was 49 years ago—April 29-30, 1975—that Saigon fell to the North Vietnamese. I remember, as a kid, watching the last U.S. personnel and thousands of at-risk South Vietnamese being airlifted out of the country to waiting ships by helicopter—the largest such evacuation in history, and quite a stunning sight to behold on black-and-white TV.
It was an ignoble defeat after a decade's effort in which 58,220 Americans were killed—equivalent to about 20 Sept. 11s and almost 10 times the U.S. fatalities in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars that followed. How could it have happened? And what might we have learned?
It happened, or at least lasted so long, because of an idee fixe—an obsessively rigid notion that should probably be reexamined but which the victim, as if by a witch's hex, cannot escape. The concept was popularized by the 19th century French composer Hector Berlioz in his "Symphonie fantastique," in which the protagonist's recurring musical theme represents an obsessive thought or idea that haunts him throughout the piece.
The idee fixe can infect policymakers as well—and in the case of Vietnam, it was the "Domino Theory." This was a geopolitical concept popularized during the Cold War era, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, which sought to resolve the First Indochina War between France and the communist Viet Minh forces led by Ho Chi Minh. The theory posited that rises and falls in democracy were contagious, and that if one country in a region came under the influence of communism, then neighboring lands would follow suit, like a row of falling dominoes.
The Domino Theory was used by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations as the philosophical undergirding of the massive commitment to propping up the corrupt, authoritarian, and unpopular regime in South Vietnam. The fear was that if South Vietnam fell to communism, then neighboring countries in Southeast Asia would also succumb, destabilizing the region and providing the Soviet Union and China with strategic advantage.
In fact, the USSR and Communist China were rivals, and Vietnam was highly suspicious of Beijing because of its long history of resisting Chinese occupation and interference (preceding, of course, the French colonization of the modern era).
One indication that things were more complicated should have been that Ho Chi Minh, the leader of North Vietnam, sought U.S. support in the early years of Vietnam's struggle for independence, fighting both the Japanese and the French.
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