As war rages in Ukraine, how much has the US learned from Vietnam?

The denouement of the Vietnam War carries lessons that resonate in conflicts involving U.S. policymakers and military forces around the world. And that’s not just about winning hearts and minds and the right way to fight a limited war.

The realities of negotiating acceptable outcomes came through from a recent two-day conference on Vietnam that I attended, at which experts sharply criticized Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for essentially caving in to the dictates from Hanoi in falling for a peace agreement with North Vietnam that was doomed to failure.

Stephen Young, an attorney who worked for three years on U.S. aid programs in South Vietnam at the height of the war, described Nguyen Van Thieu, the last president of the old Saigon regime, as going “ballistic” when he heard that Kissinger had negotiated a deal with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho. Thieu’s response, said Young, “bordered on hatred” for Kissinger.

“Why was Thieu so apoplectic?” Young asked at the conference, staged by the Vietnam Center of Texas Tech University and Chapman University in Anaheim, Calif. “He and his team realized by October 1972 the nationalists had defeated the communists,” meaning the National Liberation Front (NLF) or Viet Cong.

In fact, from what I saw in Vietnam, the NLF, the southern arm of the government in Hanoi, by then had ceased to be much of a factor. You could ride in a taxi from Saigon up Route 1 to Danang and Hue, or west to the Cambodian border, or down Route 4 to Mytho and Cantho in the Mekong Delta, with not much danger of being ambushed or caught in a firefight.

Young, who runs the Caux Round Table for Moral Capitalism in St. Paul, Minn., portrayed Nixon as having been “trapped by Henry Kissinger,” a former Harvard professor with no experience in diplomacy and no first-hand knowledge of Asia. Between them, they accepted the Paris Peace Accords, in which Kissinger and Le Duc Tho agreed that North Vietnamese troops could stay where they were in the South as long as his government released nearly 600 U.S. prisoners of war.

Memories of those days flooded back as I recalled the release at Tan Son Nhut Air Base outside Saigon in February 1973, after the signing of the Paris peace agreement, of 27 prisoners held in Loc Ninh, a district town captured by the North Vietnamese at the outset of their 1972 Easter Offensive, and then the release in Hanoi in March 1973 of the last 67 prisoners, including pilots who had bailed out over the North as their planes were shot down in the “Christmas bombing” that brought Hanoi back to negotiations after dropping its demand for Thieu’s ouster. (Le Duc Tho could save that for later.)

In Hanoi on that final day, I saw soldiers in clean, new uniforms in the windows of trains crossing the Red River on the Long Bien Bridge. Kissinger, in talks with Le Duc Tho, had asked why 200 tanks were still on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In later years, he moaned that Tho had “broken his promises.”

No kidding; why didn’t Kissinger say so at the time? Now the question is how much the U.S. has learned from Vietnam. The obvious lesson is to not get involved in unwinnable wars. In Afghanistan, the decision was to let the Taliban take over, despite having equipped and nurtured a government and army. In Ukraine, fearful of going to war with Russia, the U.S. and NATO have declined to declare a “no-fly zone” against Russian planes. Better to pump in aid for heroic Ukrainian troops while Russian troops destroy towns and massacre civilians.

In Vietnam, the two American presidents who had to oversee that debacle set clear limits on the dimensions of the conflict. With the exception of the 60 days in which Nixon ordered U.S. troops into Cambodia in May and June 1970, the Americans confined ground operations within South Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson in 1968 decided not to run for the presidency again and opened talks with the North after the Viet Cong attacked Saigon, including the U.S. embassy and 36 of 44 provincial capitals, in the Tet Offensive.

John Negroponte, director for Vietnam on the National Security Council under Kissinger, noted at the Vietnam conference that the U.S. lacked “the political will” to carry out the war to a real compromise in which a residual force, supported by air power, might have been left behind. The Christmas bombing, he said, “was a one-off.” In vain, he said he advised Kissinger to talk to the South Vietnamese before striking a deal with Le Duc Tho. By the time the Watergate scandal exploded in 1973, there was no chance of reversing the tide. Nixon wanted to get out of Vietnam, then got out of the White House in August 1974, leaving Gerald Ford to watch the North Vietnamese storm to victory less than a year later.

Nixon, said Richard Filipink, a history professor from Western Illinois University, “did not believe the war was winnable” while pressuring Saigon to go along with the Paris peace deal and fostering an “impression” of maintaining the South Vietnamese government. As Hanoi violated the peace agreement with impunity, “Nixon was unconvinced of the need for immediate action,” said Navy Capt. Josh Taylor. “He made the decision not to bomb,” while Kissinger was “wishy washy,” Taylor said.

Overhanging this history, no one dares to predict the degree to which America’s nice-guy president, Joe Biden, will want to fight potential enemies — not just Russia, but also China. Like Donald Trump before him, Biden as a young man received multiple draft deferments. Now we can look back on the Paris Peace Accords and ask whether it was better to “bug out,” as the GIs used to say, or fight for “peace with honor,” as Nixon claimed he had achieved. 

Neither of those terms provides real hope for “light at the end of the tunnel,” as U.S. officials persisted in saying they were seeing in Vietnam before the lights went out.

Donald Kirk has been a journalist for more than 60 years, focusing much of his career on conflict in Asia and the Middle East, including as a correspondent for the Washington Star and Chicago Tribune. He currently is a freelance correspondent covering North and South Korea. He is the author of several books about Asian affairs.

Editor’s note: This piece was edited after publication to correct the name of Capt. Josh Taylor.