Eisenhower, the Domino Effect, and Vietnam as a Just War

Eisenhower, the Domino Effect, and Vietnam as a Just War April 7, 2016

General_Dwight_D_optApril 7 marks the day when Dwight D. Eisenhower, one of our most underrated Presidents, gave a speech arguing that small nations like Vietnam mattered to American foreign policy. He talked about the “domino effect,” where one nation falls and causes instability in another nation. This idea stuck and played a major role in Americans opposing Communist take overs in small nations all over the world. Let’s recall that whenever the Communists did take over (Cuba, Angola, Cambodia, to give three examples on three continents) that human rights atrocities, sometimes historically horrible, followed.

Dwight Eisenhower was on to something and may have guaranteed a Cold War victory.

Soviet tyranny always was unstable, because the rhetoric of revolution and a giant spy state are incompatible. Socialism failed economically and Russians could only survive when the Communists tempered state socialism with large doses of capitalism. Massive crimes against humanity were covered up, but many Russians knew that millions had been murdered in the name of state favored atheism. If the free world could survive, the Soviet system was bound to experience a crisis when the generation that knew Lenin and Stalin passed from the scene.

This seventy year cycle where nations need to reboot after an important generation dies is biological and historic fact and the next generation was always going to be harsh to the Russian Revolution led by murderers, criminals, and incompetents.

Would the West survive? As Alexander Solzhenitsyn pointed out, we had our own problems. Free markets are good, but they can lead to decadence and materialism where winning is having a large bank account regardless of the values needed to get the money. A culture that celebrates Scrooge and lets Tiny Tim die will not have the antidote to the lures of socialism. A libertine society will tell the world liberty is decadence and the majority of the global population will avert her gaze.

Fortunately, revivals (like the Jesus movement of the 1960’s, the Charismatic movement of the 1970’s) and concerted attempts at building a social safety net in the public and private spheres were enough. The Soviet Union collapsed and we did not.

We must not forget, however, that this victory was not foreordained and that the political strategy that Eisenhower advanced and Democrats like John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson maintained worked. We developed alliances in the Pacific that kept small states like New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore free. These strategic partnerships cost money, but they more than pay for themselves, even today, as a means to keep the waters of the world open for business. Our NATO alliance in Europe kept even non-NATO members like Austria independent and serving as an alternative to the Soviet Union. NATO continues to keep states like Estonia free from Putin’s bullying and able to adopt an autonomous foreign policy.

We made many mistakes in this global war. Our intelligence agencies committed inexcusable deeds and we sometimes bungled “interventions.” We sometimes overreacted to threats. Vietnam was not an example. The brutal Communist regime in North Vietnam was deterred for years and the dictatorships in China and the Russia were deterred. Even though Vietnam sadly fell to tyranny in the end, the era of Soviet strength was already passing by that time. Russia and China were more on the outs thanks to the clever foreign policy of the Nixon administration and natural historic tensions. By the time Communism won in Vietnam, Reagan was just a few years away and the military pressure that the Soviet Union could not sustain.

Lenin and Stalin had changed Marx to put in place incremental revolution globally. They would pick off small states and as Eisenhower warned, move to big states. This policy failed because the West refused to allow “unimportant nations” to fall easily. Every Soviet victory was slow and the clock kept ticking on the ability of that regime to keep up with the vibrant West. West Germany became a world power while East Germany declined into a miserable protectorate. The determination of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations to keep Berlin free worked. They refused to let dominoes fall and for every Vietnam there was a Costa Rica that was kept somewhat free by American foreign policy.

Again, this is not to justify every decision that the United States and the Allies took during the long Cold War. Our intervention in Chile was not wrong, but done horribly. We ended up supporting very bad regimes that made our own policy unstable. This turned out fairly well where the transition was not stopped in places like the Philippines, but badly in states like Nicaragua. Surely the South Vietnamese were sorry to see the murders and totalitarianism begin when the North “won.” South Korea and Taiwan where we “won,” however badly, are much better off than southern Vietnam where we lost . . . even though the Vietnamese regime has been hell bent to add capitalistic elements.

Americans need to revisit Vietnam as a losing war and stop glorifying war protesters. Vietnam, as Eisenhower saw, was part of a larger war: the Cold War. Vietnam was a lost battle (horribly lost) in that winning strategy. The world is glad we won and would have been worse off if we lost.

As the Republican Party considers retreating from our successful global alliances that have led to the Pax Americana which is rapidly wiping out poverty globally, we should pause and consider the implications. Things are not perfect globally, we are not angels, but the alternatives are almost surely worse. The Republican Party must not undo what was once the bipartisan approach to foreign policy that Ike started, Nixon advanced, and Reagan implemented. President Eisenhower was not an egghead, flashy, or glib, but he was a serious leader whose wisdom made the world better. Let’s find another Ike to like.

 


Browse Our Archives