Lessons of Vietnam

Abstract

One of the most urgent problems facing the next Secretary of State is how to develop a politically oriented counterinsurgency doctrine and a Foreign Service capable of implementing it, in which top priority is put on defeating political subversion, rather than the enemy's military forces. The United States military establishment has been somewhat discredited in Vietnam, not for failing to do its job, but because the State Department has failed to face and solve the problem of political subversion. This allowed Hanoi to apply successfully Lenin's principle of "exploiting internal contradictions in the enemy camp" to divide and weaken the American and South Vietnamese societies. From mid-1963 until its subversion was arrested and partly countered in mid-1968, Hanoi exploited a serious internal contradiction created by the seizure of state power in Saigon by a self-serving cabal of North Vietnamese refugees, thus effectively denying the South Vietnamese people the right to self-determination, although this was the political basis of the American war effort. The development of a successful counterstrategy, and the personnel to carry it out, will depend on the new administration's ability to understand the enemy—thinking, strategy, and tactics—and to assert supreme political authority in future counterinsurgency efforts, whether they occur in Vietnam, elsewhere or—and the same doctrine will have application—in the United States itself.