Vietnam Policy Research Articles

Rhetoric, reality and dissent: The Vietnam policy of the British labour government, 1964–1970

This article analyzes the interactions between Prime Minister Harold Wilson and the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary Labour party in the formulation of Britain's policy towards the Vietnam conflict. Two well-known theses about the structure and functioning of Britain's major political parties serve as the point of departure for this analysis. R.T. McKenzie ( British Political Parties) contends that the distribution of power within the Labour and Conservative parties is fundamentally similar. In contrast, Samuel Beer ( British Politics in the Collectivist Age) argues that there is greater intraparty democracy in the Labour party than in the Conservative party. The article concludes that by and large the Labour Government was a reluctant supporter of U.S. Vietnam policy. The Parliamentary Labour left consistently challenged the Government on this issue but stopped short of any attempt to oust the Government. Wilson took the opinions of the extra-parliamentary party into account but refused to be bound by them. Thus, while Labour's dissidents had a degree of influence over Britain's Vietnam policy from 1964–1970, they did not exercise veto power.

Pakistan's Public Attitude toward the United States

Except in the communist countries, the United States' image in the wor Id was fairly good when it decided to widen its involvement in world affairs after World War II. However, even in the noncommunist world certain countries and their people gradually developed an antipathy towards the United States. Before World War II there were occasional anti-American acts of violence and public protest. They increased greatly in number, scope, and virulence in the 1950s and especially the 1960s (Tai et al., 1973: 456). The latter part of the 1960s was characterized by world-wide protests and demonstrations against the United States, especially against its Vietnam policy. This antagonism led quite a number of writers to probe into the nature of the anti-American feelings, and they produced a variety of interpretations of the general hostility prevailing against this superpower (e.g., Lillibridge, 1966; Mazrui, 1969; Morgan, 1967; Nincic, 1975; Scheuch, 1970; Tai et al., 1973). This phenomenon acquired new dimensions in its intensity and virulence during the 1970s. The most recent example is that of Iran, where people have shown an intense hostility, hatred, and anger against the United States that is probably unprecedented in the era following World War II. No less surprising was the instance of the burning and looting of the U.S. embassy in Islamabad. Pakistan, a member of both the Southeast Asian Treaty Organization (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organiza-

Prediction and Foreign Policy Heritage

Stenelo, L.-G. Prediction and Foreign Pclicy Heritage. Cooperation and Conflict, XVI, 1981, 3-17. The author attempts to demonstrate that certain modes of prediction may have a conservat ory and stabilizing effect on the foreign policy of a state, and cause the foreign policy actor to accept the political heritage from previous generations of decision-makers. U.S. Vietnam policy is used as an illustrative case. The hereditary mechanisms treated are strategic evaluation systems, historical analogies, and theories such as the U.S. Domino Theory and Aggression Theory. It seems possible to discern a chain of hereditary links with the strategic evaluation systems maintaining a unifying function. Theories are less sensitive to disturbance and hence more capable of survival than single historical analogies.

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

The crime of Klaus Croissant

Klaus who? To most people in West Germany, the 1931-born liberal lawyer is the devil in disguise. In their opinion, he and his colleagues, notably Lang, Newerla, Groenewold and Str~Sbele were busy smuggling escape and attack plans from one prisoner's cell to the other or from the incarcerated heads of the Red Army Faction (RAF), popularly known as the Baader-Meinhof gang, to still fugitive soldiers of the urban guerilla while pretending to mind their own business as lawyers of the defense in Germany's most exciting post-war conspiracy trial. Popular emotions were running high: the BaaderMeinhofs, it must be known, had placed a bomb in the headquarters of the Fifth U.S.Army command in Frankfurt, killing three U.S. citizens in an at tempt to protest the American Vietnam policy and Germany's tacit support of the logistic operations needed to carry through President Nixon's bombing warfare in Indochina. But other groups had, long after Baader and Meinhof, continued the armed struggle: they had kidnapped a politician and shot a banker, an industrialist and a judge, also killing policemen and bodyguards. A few more bombing and bomb scares had officially been attributed to "the terrorists". Croissant, in the eyes of the masses, in collaboration with his colleagues masterminded the continuing guerilla operations after Baader and Meinhof had been arrested. Others defined him not as the Godfather but as the "mailman" for arsonists and police murderers [ 1]. He had "subordinated himself to the plans and goals of the conspiracy as one of its members" [2]. Notwithstanding this ambiguity in his public image Godfather or humble servant of terrorists Croissant and his colleagues had to be stopped at all costs. It was so easy and yet so difficult. Croissant and his colleagues had hardly been accepted by the court as defense lawyers for the five accused, when they were, half a year later, in 1975, excluded. It took only two weeks to pass a law providing for the possibility of the exclusion of lawyers. Information about the defense strategy was collected by periodical cell raids and continuous marl-inspection by the Secret Service. "We're not going to curb the legitimate rights of the defense", a member of Parliament said in the debate preceding this law. "We're solely aiming at lawyers pursuing their revolutionary battle

First Among Watergate Accomplices

Like Nixon, Kissinger uses the slippery phrase to sell the shoddy. "I believed in the moral significance of my adopted country," he writes, defending his zeal for Nixon's Vietnam policy. Do not all nations, all things human, possess "moral significance"? But Kissinger means to slip by another idea, a moral valuation of American power. "America, alone of the free countries," he continues, "was strong enough to assure global security against the forces of tyranny. Only America had both the power and the decency to inspire other peoples who struggled for identity, for progress and dignity." My!.

India's Vietnam Policy, 1946-1979

INDOCHINA HAS OCCUPIED the attention of much of international politics since the second world war. Vietnam has generally been at the center of such attention, from the sustained fighting begun in December 1946 between the French and the Vietminh, through the formal and forcible reunification of the country over 1975-1976, to the fighting between the communists in the region in 1979. In the event, Vietnam acquired and retains for many a symbolic value that exceeds the strategic importance of the country. The focus of study in this paper is narrower than the conflicts in Vietnam per se. Indeed, the direct object of interest is not war in Vietnam but Indian foreign policy-that is, to discuss a regional conflict not for its own sake but in order to look at the factors underlying the conduct of Indian foreign policy in respect to a crisis of international significance. For this purpose, it is useful to conceive of Indian external relations with the great powers in particular. India's Vietnam policy always operated within the context of its general foreign policy, as one would expect. Somewhat less obviously, fluctuations in its Vietnam policy can be shown to have been direct reflections of changes in its relations with major powers. Although this mesh of relations with great powers and bilateral policy towards Vietnam received its most dramatic manifestation in the 1979 Chinese incursion into Vietnam, the argument is valid for the entire period. Consideration of the last point necessitates breaking the study into time periods. The broad, chronological division is a sixfold derivative of both the internal logic of the conflicts themselves and of factors exogenous to Vietnam: the French Indochina war from 1946 to 1954; the five years following the Geneva Agreements of 1954; the years of open

Franmce's Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations

Franmce's Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations

France's Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations and The French Stake in Algeria 1945–1962

Journal Article France's Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations and The French Stake in Algeria 1945–1962 Get access France's Vietnam Policy: A Study in French-American Relations. By Marianna P. Sullivan. Westport, Conn., London: Greenwood Press. 1978. 165 pp. (Contributions in Political Science, 12.)£10.75.The French Stake in Algeria 1945–1962. By Tony Smith. Ithaca, NY, London: Cornell University Press. 1978. 199 pp.£10.50. David Dutton David Dutton 1University of Liverpool Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 55, Issue 3, July 1979, Pages 467–469, https://doi.org/10.2307/2615177 Published: 01 July 1979

Planning for Foreign Policy: A Framework for Analysis

`Avoid trivia.' Such was the advice given to George F. Kennan, first director of the Policy Planning Staff (s/P)1 of the United States Department of State by the Secretary of State, George C. Marshall. The staff was created by Marshall in April 1947 in response to perceived threats of economic collapse and political chaos in postwar Europe. Kennan and his five-man staff assumed active roles in the formulation of the Marshall Plan, attesting to their acceptance of Marshall's advice. The effects of the plan were not only to speed immediate European economic recovery, but also to lay the foundation for future European economic prosperity.2 In this situation the Policy Planning Staff had a dramatic impact on the direction of American foreign policy. The powerlessness of the staff in the formulation of United States policy in Vietnam during the early and mid-1960s provides a striking contrast. Although Director Walt Rostow instituted the National Policy Papers as strategies for developing innovative policy guidelines, his efforts went unheeded by the Secretary of State, Dean Rusk. According to many observers, the influence of the Policy Planning Staff dropped to the lowest point in its history during the 1961-6 period, and particularly with respect to Vietnam policy.3 What has made the difference between success and failure for the Policy Planning Staff over time? Why has it had an impact on policy in some situations but not in others? More generally, what does the staff's experience tell us about the conditions under which planners can influence the direction of foreign policy?

More on Inflation: Reply

The virulence and stubbornness of inflation in the United States, and indeed throughout the world, has been a nasty surpnse to most economists, certainly including me. Events of the past seven years seem to deviate markedly from the relationships, econometric and informal, inferred from previous observations. If it all happened according to an advance script of Mr. Tullock's, then he and his analysis deserve great credit and credence. l A common hypothesis, not Mr. Tullock's, is that it never would have happened in the United States if Lyndon Johnson had not opened Pandora's box. His rapid escalation of Vietnam war spending without taxes to match violated the fiscal precepts of economists of all schools, including his own advisers. It drove the unemployment rate far below anything experienced for fifteen years and far below the government's own target of 4 percent. In this unexplored territory, the Phillips curve proved steeper than expected, and subsequently the inflation entrenched by high-pressure war years proved much more resistant than expected to relaxation of demand pressure and recession. Nevertheless, the presumption would be that in the absence of Vietnam and Johnson's fiscal policy, the dimensions of our inflationunemployment problem would not be greatly different from those of 1953-1965. A second hypothesis, which complements and modifies the first, is that the structure of labor markets and of the labor force changed adversely during the sixties. Dispersion among labor markets increased; given that wages respond more to excess demand than to excess supply, an increase in dispersion adds to overall inflationary bias. At the same time the labor force, especially the unemployed, became more heavily weighted with teenagers, women, and other workers who spend more time in voluntary job search than do primary breadwinners and have less effect on wage setting. A third hypothesis is that inflation is merely one economic symptom of a general disintegration over the past seven years of the bonds of social consent and trust. Economic and political interest groups have obtained and exercised new power to enlarge and protect their members' incomes. Disillusionment with the fairness of government and of competing groups has weakened the legal, moral, and political constraints which previously held this process within tolerable bounds. Inflation arises because the powers of the various interest groups are mutually inconsistent;

Vietnam Policy Preferences and Withheld 1968 Presidential Votes

This section of the Quarterly is reserved for brief reports of research in progress, discussions of unsolved problems, methodological studies, and public opinion data not extensively analyzed or interpreted. Succinct case histories are welcomed, as well as hypotheses and insights that may be useful to other students of public opinion. Usually, material in this section will be shorter, more informal, and more tentative than in preceding pages of the Quarterly.

American Policy Toward Africa: Cause for Indictment?

In his study of U.S. Vietnam policy, The Limits of Intervention, Townsend Hoopes ruefully admitted that “nothing is more difficult to confront than the need to outgrow conceptions that have had undeniable validity—have been in truth basic reference points for thought and action involving the life of the nation. It is a difficulty that persists even when one is intellectually aware that familiar conceptions no longer fully square with the facts.” Hoopes intended his strictures to apply to the cold war tenets which for so long provided the guidelines for U.S. foreign policy. They apply with equal force, however, not only to either official policies and orientations but to the conceptions of their critics.

From the Pentagon papers: Reflections on the making of America's Vietnam policy

From the Pentagon papers: Reflections on the making of America's Vietnam policy

A Study of Bias in TV Coverage of the Vietnam War: 1969 and 1970

B ecause television is the sole source of national and world news for many Americans, the of television news coverage of the Vietnam war is a question of tremendous national importance. Nielson ratings show that over 35 million TV sets are tuned to evening news shows each night. Polls conducted in 1959, 1961, 1963, 1964, and 1967 by Elmo Roper and Associates indicate not only that TV is the primary source of news for most Americans, but that it has widened its lead over the other media as being the most believable source. Not only is the power of television enormous, but the broadcast industry is oligopolistic: Viewers must choose among three networks, and in some cases only two. For all these reasons, the question whether TV news coverage is biased assumes tremendous significance, and claims of bias in reporting of the Vietnam war have been made by opponents as well as supporters of that war. It is beyond the scope of this study to determine what fair coverage actually is; this is a matter for normative judgment. What this study does attempt to measure is how successful and worthwhile the Nixon Administration's Vietnam policy was made to appear through TV coverage in the 1969 and 1970 national evening newscasts. The concept of is key to the study. It was defined as that quality of statements of opinion or of actual or supposed fact that would influence one to support or oppose a President or his policy. The veracity of a given statement is thus independent of its as defined above, and a neutral rating on the scale measuring bias (which will be discussed later) is not ipso facto desirable,

National Interest: A Vindication

Both in the United States and in the United Kingdom the concept of national interest is, at the moment, distinctly unpopular as many citizens feel that it has been grossly abused in political action. The American case is well known. Criticism stems mainly from the disillusionment with the Vietnam policy, doubts about the underlying idea of containing communism in Southeast Asia, about the devious way in which the United States has become involved, about the slowness to accept the idea of retreat and the tortuous way in which this is now being undertaken. It is difficult to think that the American Vietnam policy has been really in the national interest, however defined. The critics justifiably ask how it is that this interest had been so frequently invoked and yet, for a long time, nobody managed to convince the public and the governors that it was being contravened. In Britain, ever since his coming to power in 1964, the Prime Minister has been repeatedly invoking national interest as a means of rallying the people to accept hardships and to castigate all those opposed to governmental policies particularly the Conservative party, the trade unions, and the industrial leaders. The constant evocations are increasingly less popular and less effective in their objective of stifling criticism. Against the background of failing economic policies and of the growing unpopularity of the Prime Minister, they make the people tired of the very notion of national interest.1 Disappointment with the abuse of the concept in political action is matched by that with its use in political analysis. It served a useful purpose in the previous generation by helping political scientists to turn from excessively idealist, Utopian ideas of foreign policy to more realist ones, but the claims made on its behalf as a tool of analysis have proved to be grossly exaggerated.

Vacating the Premises in Vietnam

Research Article| November 01 1969 Vacating the Premises in Vietnam Howard Zinn Howard Zinn Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Far Eastern Survey (1940) 9 (11): 862–867. https://doi.org/10.2307/2642229 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Howard Zinn; Vacating the Premises in Vietnam. Far Eastern Survey 22 May 1940; 9 (11): 862–867. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/2642229 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAsian Survey Search This content is only available via PDF. Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Political Efficacy and Foreign Policy Attitudes

Data for this study, which sought to explore the association between political efficacy and militaristic or conciliatory foreign policy preferences, were obtained from two surveys of Detroit adults in 1965 and 1966. Despite the expression of overwhelmingly nationalistic sentiments, perceptions of political efficacy were related to support for multilateral disarmament. Among residents with both low and high interest in world problems, however, efficacious respondents were more likely to oppose a de-escalation of the Vietnam war than persons with weak feelings of effectiveness. The strongest support for a popular referendum on Vietnam policy was centered among persons with a low sense of efficacy but with a strong interest in world affairs. Perhaps increased opportunities to influence foreign policy decisions might alter the distribution of public attitudes on international issues.

Vietnam: Endless War

A report from Washington in the New York Times of March 8 states: A State Department official who recently returned from speaking engagements at a number of universities was amazed that the students, who only six months ago were lambasting Washington for its Vietnam policy, hardly brought the subject up. Public pressure over the war has almost disappeared.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

Thailand's New Course

THERE IS A NEW flexibility Thai politics, both external and internal. The reason for this is clearly to bring Thailand more into line with changing conditions. The previous policy suited its times, at least from the point of view of a military-dominated, security-conscious, conservatively-inclined regime. There was then a community of interest between Thai governments headed by Field Marshals Phibun Songkram (i948-57), Sarit Thanarat (i958-63), and Thanom Kittikachorn (from i963) and successive United States administrations, whether Republican or Democratic. This was reflected U.S. commitments: mutual security (military and economic aid) 1950; Seato membership 1954; and the Dean Rusk-Thanat Khoman joint statement i962 of the U.S. obligation to help Thailand, regardless of the attitude of other Seato members, in case of Communist armed attack. The Thai-American was extended to the full by President Johnson's massive intervention Vietnam. It was shown by American use of Thai bases, at first not openly acknowledged by the Thais, to bomb North Vietnam and Communist-held areas of Laos. (The previous extreme of Thai commitment had been Phibun's war-time collaboration with the Japanese, admittedly as a result of force majeure; this alliance collapsed 1944, Phibun's downfall coinciding with Japan's decline.) Thus Johnson's dramatic reversal of his Vietnam policy i968-from the confident expectation of military success, revealed General Westmoreland's Four Phase plan, to the acceptance of peace talks with the enemy'-presented the Thai leaders with an entirely new situation. First, over the next few years the Thais face the prospects of United States disengagement from Vietnam and perhaps from mainland Southeast Asia. The current de-escalation of the Vietnam war cannot make sense unless it is seen as part of a policy of withdrawal (the alternative, resuming bombing the North and sending thousands more soldiers to bolster the South, is no longer feasible). Yet President Nixon has no more than two or three years which to carry out a substantial military disengagement-presumably as a result of a settlement of sorts-if he is to make a good showing at the next presidential elections. Next, there is the possibility of instability Vietnam.