Vietnam and Asia

I have expressed at greater length my view of Mr. McNamara's book in the London Times Literary Supplement of 9 June 1995. That review focuses on three points: the meaning of the engagement in Southeast Asia for the balance of power in all of Asia; the meaning for the tactical conduct of the war of giving the North Vietnamese “the priceless asset of a protected logistical sanctuary” in North Vietnam and Laos, to quote General Maxwell Taylor; and a view of the performance of the South Vietnamese that differs from the view McNamara quotes with approbation from an American official: President Nguyen Van Thieu and Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky were “the bottom of the barrel, absolutely the bottom of the barrel” (p. 186). Here I look forward. I develop for the first half of the next century one central implication of the judgment in the TLS review; namely, that this was a war about the balance of power in all of Asia and that that balance will be of great interest to a good many countries, including the United States. On the occasion of this review, I shall thus draw only one lesson; but that lesson depends on a particular view that I do not share with McNamara, who draws some eleven lessons from our national experience in Vietnam at the end of his book In Retrospect.