‘The Vietnam Syndrome’ and the end of the post-‘Sixties’ era: Tropes and hegemony in history and policy

Abstract

This article explains a shift in American culture and politics through an examination of the ‘Vietnam Trope’, a culture structure that conditioned debates on the use of US military power. Specifically, the trope indexes competing explanations in hermeneutically dissimilar narratives: (1) a liberal/neoconservative iteration depicting a progressive foreign policy and (2) a realist/radical articulation that doubts the ability of the US power to shape the world. The ‘Vietnam’ trope captured and organized the anxieties of American military officials and policymakers who confronted a world transformed by ‘the Vietnam War’ and the events of ‘the Sixties’. In the 1980s and 1990s, the trope provided the cultural logic that facilitated the eventual rehabilitation of US military power so that, by the new millennium, preemptive war and protracted global counterinsurgency became possible. Bringing the cultural methods of trope analysis to the historical sociology of hegemony, this article shows that cultural structures are both responses to specific historical moments and the systems of meaning that help shape future outcomes. Empirically, this trope analysis is based on a reading of the shifting uses of the expression ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ in the New York Times and an analysis of the evolution of historical scholarship on ‘the Second Indochina War’.