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Thank you for the write up. I never would have had the patience to wade through all that university politics myself, your summary was much punchier.
It's amazing how impactful the Vietnam War was on our culture, and that we never really dealt with it. Dave Barry once said that untangling Vietnam is impossible in America because of the conflicts between two groups: draft dodgers who didn't fight in Vietnam but supported the war (George W. Bush, Donald Trump, Joe Biden0, and veterans who served in and opposed the war (John Kerry, Al Gore, Tim O'Brien). Twenty years after he wrote that, most of those people are dead, but we never got any closer to really figuring out what we thought about it. American society has never really come to grips with what we did in Vietnam.
Who was right between the Kill 'em All Caucus who thinks that We Didn't Lose We Left; and the protestors who said we never should have been there in the first place?
Forrest Gump is an entire film devoted to relitigating the boomer generation's trials and tribulations, and of course Vietnam is a major plot; but when Forrest has to get up at the national mall and say what he thinks about Vietnam, they cut the mic.
The protestors were objectively correct about basically everything they said: Vietnam was a pointless war, Ho ho ho Chi Minh did in fact win, the dominos didn't fall, and fifty years later a Vietnam run by the same Communist Party is a close Capitalist trading partner and just on the border of becoming a direct military ally against Red China. It's hard to see how the destruction of several million Vietnamese and the incineration of billions of dollars of treasure made the world today better in any way, compared to a counterfactual in which the United States simply let North Vietnam reunite with the South without outside interference. One has to posit a lot more hypothetical counterfactual moving parts to get there, and I don't think that justifies the costs.
On the other hand, the establishment won, The Man still stands. The institutions survived and thrived, Nixon and Reagan came back. If the pinko protestors turned out to be right about everything they said with regards to Vietnam, they turned out to be wrong about a lot of other things, and anyway their tone was considered a national shame. I grew up hearing these horror stories about returning veterans being spit on in airports, and so much of the GWOT era of "Support Our Troops" and our subsequent combination of distance from and lack of criticism of the military stems from this era. The colleges and police departments that crushed the campus protestors changed their politics, but they never fell. The direct institutional heirs of all the people who committed the crimes of the Vietnam era are in power today, running the same institutions that did committed those crimes, mostly without any formal apology or real effort to avoid such mistakes in the future.
And they never really squared up what it meant to be the President of Columbia University: the campus protestors of the Vietnam era were right, they were correct, especially according to the liberal leading lights of Columbia; but what does acknowledging that mean to an ordered institution that cooperates with the same US Government that dropped the Agent Orange?
So you end up with this generation of students that have been taught that the Protestors Were Right, and that the 1968 Columbia protests were heroic, and it's really hard to come up with a fact-based argument against them; and then you have the institutional heirs to the organization who have the same incentives to restore and maintain order on campus, and the result is this mishmash of actions.
But what's telling here is that the universities completely lack even a semblance of pain tolerance. Nobody, from the president to trustees to faculty to students, seems to be willing to countenance the idea that they can tell Trump "NUTS" and just go on without federal funding indefinitely. While taking a significant haircut in terms of funding, costs, educational opportunities, etc; the Federal Government can't actually force Columbia to do anything. If Columbia really, truly said as an institution: we're a University, we take academic independence seriously, we're not going to let the federal government get involved in hiring decisions or what we teach... Then there's nothing Trump could do about it.
This was the inevitable endpoint of identity politics, a total inability to tell anyone they are wrong.
Yes, but no. The protestors (not each of them personally, but in general the movement) was part of the reason why US lost this war. And if US didn't lose the war, Vietnam could be what South Korea is now. Which is better than what it is now. So is the lost war "worth it"? Probably not, that's why it's called a lost one. But if you approach every war with the premise that you may lose and therefore you can't fight, then you lose all the wars in advance. And one of the reasons that Vietnam is now quasi-capitalist is because the US did not lose some other wars, including winning the main one - the Cold War. Did Vietnam war make the world better? No, it did not, because the good guys lost. If they didn't, it would. That happened in other places where the good guys didn't lose.
In that counterfactual the US stops fighting the Cold War, USSR still exists now, owns major parts of the world, and half of the US is thinking when we stop being so stupid and join the societal model that is clearly winning, namely socialism. I don't think it's a good future to be in. Yes, losing a war sucks. But losing all wars in advance would suck much more.
HOLY FALSE DILEMMA BATMAN
The US didn't stop fighting the cold war when China became the PRC, or when Cuba fell, or when Vietnam did in fact fall. Why would the US have suddenly given in because Vietnam went Red?
The time to make a decision in Vietnam was before Dienbienphu. After that Vietnam was always going to be united under a Vietminh regime.
Not expending national credibility on that lost cause would have made the Capitalist American system more attractive on the global stage, not less. We can tell because US prestige declined after the defeat in Vietnam!
The Sino-Soviet split was already happening before the US entered Vietnam.
What would have helped Vietnam develop significantly would have been ending the destructive war earlier, so they could have gotten along with the industrialization process and started selling me cheap workout clothing. You can tell because Vietnam today is where South Korea was 30 years ago, and Vietnam fought a series of destructive wars for 30 years longer than South Korea did.
No, you approaching it with the wrong end. The US that would willingly give up Vietnam to the reds, without trying to do anything, would also give up without trying Poland, Afghanistan, and many other things that together brought the Cold War to victory. By itself, the loss of Vietnam obviously weren't fatal - obviously! - but becoming a type of country that doesn't even try to fight may be fatal for the chances to ultimate victory.
You are comparing it to the situation where US won in Vietnam. Compare to situation where it didn't even try.
The US DID give up Poland without trying! That's a thing that really happened! Not ten years before the Gulf of Tonkin, the US failed to help the Hungarians who were ready to stand against the USSR. During the Vietnam War the US would abandon the Prague Spring to its fate. The ding to US prestige from failing to aid the Hungarians or the Czechs was small, in fact it was probably less than the debit to USSR credibility worldwide resulting from those invasions. In fact the damage done to the US was so small, you don't even remember it! The ding from losing in Vietnam was large, and the damage done by the United States' behavior in Vietnam (and the rest of Indochina) was even larger. From this we can deduce that US global prestige suffered less from scenarios in which they didn't try than scenarios in which they tried and lost.
Nope. Solidarnosc had a lot of support from the US, though it was not all in the open. Reagan lead a lot of it.
With Hungary and Czechia it was different - those were already considered owned by USSR, so it was USSR atrocities in their own space rather than the US losing to them.
If it didn't try, what "prestige" you are talking about? Prestige of doing what? Sitting in their corner of the world and silently watching as USSR eats the rest of it?
Wait, I missed something, who was Solidarnosc fighting against? Because I'm pretty sure they were fighting against a regime the US simply let walk into Poland.
You seem to be confusing different historical periods. When USSR took over Poland, there wasn't even the Cold War - in fact, most of it happened while US and USSR had been allies and fought together against Hitler. Opening that question back then would hardly be possible. However, things were much different years later, when the Cold War was in full swing.
I disagree with that historiography, the first red scare happened decades earlier. Enmity between the Capitalist USA and the USSR started with the latter's birth, or preceded it.
I don't know how you're making your assumptions about what does or doesn't impact credibility other than assuming the consequent.
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