Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 1 (Spring 2000)

 

Vietnam: The Necessary War
By Michael Lind. New York, The Free Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Robert Jervis

 

Michael Lind nicely summarizes his argument as follows: "The Vietnam War was a just, constitutional and necessary proxy war in the Third World War that was waged by methods that were often counterproductive and sometimes arguably immoral" (p. 284). These claims, refreshingly unusual in academic circles, are made clearly and forcefully. More a set of individual essays than a unified book and aimed more at the interested public than at specialists in international affairs, the book will be most interesting for those who did not live through the Vietnam War and so are unfamiliar with the justifications made for fighting it.

Lind's central claim is that it was necessary for the United States to fight in Vietnam because, as American leaders claimed, not to do so would have encouraged Soviet and Chinese pressures throughout the globe. The much-scorned domino theory is in fact correct, because states tend to join with the strongest and most successful power rather than to balance against it. Thus the years after the U.S. defeat witnessed the "worst nightmares [of the war's defenders]: the United States in retreat around the world before an advancing Soviet empire, the near collapse of the NATO alliance over doubts about U.S. credibility, and a proxy war between the United States and clients of the Soviet Union and Cuba in Nicaragua, a Soviet satellite on the North American mainland" (p. 26). Those who find Lind's description accurate will find great merit in this book; others will be more skeptical. Not only do I think he has greatly exaggerated Soviet gains in the 1970s, he has misunderstood their causes and made a fundamental error in arguing how this explains why the United States had to fight in Vietnam. To the extent that increased Soviet boldness in the 1970s was a reaction to Vietnam at all, it did not grow out of the American defeat, but out of the U.S. public's reaction to the war, something outside of most versions of the domino theory. Had President Lyndon Johnson chosen to accept defeat rather than use U.S. ground forces, the domestic reaction would have been much less, and it is far from clear that the Soviet Union would have embarked on the adventures that so disturb Lind.

Like most defenders of the war, Lind believes it was badly fought. But unlike them, he does not think that fewer restraints would have led to success. Instead, Lind endorses the views of those who argued for more effective counterinsurgency efforts. But his analysis here is even more superficial than in the rest of the book. He realizes that the war was lost because the U.S. public would not pay the price that was necessary to win and argues that "the key variable in the U.S. strategic/political equation that the United States had to control was U.S. casualties" (p. 261). Unfortunately, in a war one's casualties are strongly influenced by the actions of the enemy as well as oneself.

In the book's most interesting chapter, Lind argues that the lines of division over the war were not between liberals and conservatives, young and old, or Democrats and Republicans, but rather between cultural and geographic areas, with the war being "disproportionately opposed by blacks and Jews and by white Protestants in New England and regions such as the upper Midwest, the northern Prairie and the Pacific Northwest" and being disproportionately supported by white Southerners (p. 107). Furthermore, Lind argues, these divisions between interventionism and isolationism long pre-date Vietnam and exist today. There is something to this, but Lind neither musters appropriate public opinion data nor discusses apparent anomalies, such as New England's support for intervention in the World Wars.

Lind does a nice job of showing the gullibility and double standards of many of the war's critics. He also notes, correctly I believe, the gulf between the academy and the country at large in their views about the cold war and the nature of American society. But it will take a more thorough and carefully-reasoned treatment to open a serious dialogue.

Robert Jervis
Columbia University