Fifty years since the triumph of national liberation forces, Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber explores the true story of the Vietnam War — not as a tragedy of American overreach but as a triumph of Vietnamese resistance.

Fifty years ago today, on April 30, 1975, the world watched as helicopters fled the rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon and the Vietnamese flag was raised over the city — a moment widely described in the United States as “the fall of Saigon” but known across much of the world as its liberation. In this episode of Confronting Capitalism, recorded for the anniversary of that world-historic event, Catalyst editor Vivek Chibber speaks to Melissa Naschek to unpack the true history of the Vietnam War: the imperial motivations behind US intervention, the myth of South Vietnam as a sovereign nation, and how the Vietnamese people — not just the American antiwar movement — ultimately brought the war to an end. As Chibber argues, Vietnam’s victory was not just a military one but a moral and political defeat for empire, with lessons that remain vital for understanding US foreign policy today.

You can listen to this episode of Confronting Capitalism in podcast form here and subscribe to Jacobin Radio to get all future episodes here.

Melissa Naschek

Today we’re going to be talking about the Vietnam War because we’ve got this anniversary.

Vivek Chibber

April 30 is the fiftieth anniversary of what’s known as the fall of Saigon, but actually it’s the liberation of Saigon. Globally it was seen as a world-historic event. I remember the day it happened because my parents and their friends were celebrating. And in fact, it was a celebration around the world, because this tiny little country in Southeast Asia, after thirty years of unceasing warfare against the most powerful countries on Earth, both France and the United States, had emerged victorious. It was quite significant, I think, for an entire generation back then. It’s a good reason to get into it today again and analyze it and commemorate it.

Melissa Naschek

Why, fifty years later, are we still talking about the Vietnam War? Why is it so important?

Vivek Chibber

I think it’s important for several reasons. First of all, there is this generational shift coming where the student antiwar movement and the people in the antiwar movement outside the universities are now quite old. And some of them are around; some of them are not around. As long as they were around, there was this living historical memory, not only of the war, but what it took to end the war and the ways in which it changed the culture of the United States. But it changed global culture as well.

And it was a memory of the criminality of what the United States did. A criminality that was not confined to Vietnam but has been repeated over and over again in many parts of the world and continues to be today. So on the one hand, it’s important for us living in this country to memorialize not just what the United States did to another country, but the resistance of that country and the importance of that resistance to American aggression and before that to French aggression.

It was one of the great moments in twentieth-century history, a moment that lasted thirty years. Also, I think it’s a window into the dynamics of imperialism in the postwar era. Many of the elements of those dynamics are still present today in American aggression abroad, but so are the contradictions of that aggression that were present then present today.

The failures of the United States in Vietnam were in many respects repeated in Afghanistan and repeated again in Iraq. And one of the tasks, I think, of a serious left is not just to moralize and condemn the criminal actions of those times — even though that is absolutely important — but it’s also to draw lessons from it, both about what it takes to successfully resist in this era, and also lessons about what the motive forces behind American actions abroad are and the constraints on those actions. Vietnam brings all these concerns together in a way that’s very instructive.

Melissa Naschek

Let’s start off with a quick timeline to provide some important markers for the events leading up to the Vietnam War and then the Vietnam War itself.

Vivek Chibber

There are actually two Vietnam wars that unfolded in the postwar era. One is called the First Indochina War. Vietnam was known as Indochina, and it was a colony of France from the mid-nineteenth century onward.

So the First Indochina War was essentially, starting in 1946, the Vietnamese rising up against French colonialism. And that stretches to 1954 with the Battle of Dien Bien Phu — a historic, absolutely pivotal moment in the twentieth century. It’s one of the most heroic episodes of the century, when the Vietnamese defeated a much, much more well-armed and well-trained French force in Dien Bien Phu, which marked essentially the end of French domination of Indochina. That’s about a ten-year period.

It was an extraordinary testament to what dedication and commitment can do. In the First Indochina War, the Vietnamese fought for ten years against France. Then in 1954, there was this conference in Geneva, part of which was dedicated to the future of Indochina, which included Vietnam. And that starts the slow but steady involvement of the United States in that region.

So from 1954 all the way to 1975, it becomes an American war, starting slowly in the first decade and then with increasing intensity from the early ’60s onward. In the mid ’60s, of course, you start getting loads and loads of American soldiers.

Melissa Naschek

That’s interesting because I think the way the Vietnam War is framed in popular history, and definitely what I remember learning in school, is that the war started with Lyndon B. Johnson, and that he’s the one who kicked things off in the mid 1960s.

Vivek Chibber

American soldiers invaded Vietnam en masse under LBJ. But the massive bombing of the South, American advisors, American armaments, all of that started ten years prior to that and even before. So it wasn’t an American war until, say, 1955. But from 1955 onward, it’s basically the United States that’s driving the train over there.

When you look at it from a Vietnamese standpoint, if you were born in 1945 Vietnam, the first thirty years of your life — you didn’t know a day of peace. And it was under the aggression of Western powers that you had to suffer through this. And I want to explain how it was Western powers. This was not, as is often told by right-wing historians, a civil war that the United States intervened in.

It was a war for liberation against imperialism essentially: first colonialism and then American imperialism. So it’s something that, for an entire generation, everybody who was progressive in the Global South but also in many parts of the Global North saw as not just a Vietnamese struggle, but as their own struggle. It was a formative influence on the postwar left.

Melissa Naschek

Why did the US even get involved in Vietnam in the first place?

Vivek Chibber

The stock argument is that the United States got involved because it was in a global battle against communism. And after 1954, the nation of South Vietnam slowly but steadily had to defend itself against outside aggression from North Vietnam, which had been taken over by a communist party.

And so, as the Communists infiltrate and start waging an insurgent campaign in the South, which is an affront to its autonomy and its sovereignty, it reaches out for help to the United States, and the US comes in to preserve South Vietnamese freedoms.

Melissa Naschek

So in that story, the United States is just a great hero that came in to save the everyman living in South Vietnam.

Vivek Chibber

That’s the standard story. The actual story is very, very different.

In the actual story, when the Vietnamese rise up against French colonialism in Indochina, there is no South Vietnam. There is one Vietnam, to use a somewhat anachronistic term. And the rebellion against French colonialism encompasses both the North and the South.

The French fight back but lose. Now as it happens, the nucleus of French military power is more in the South by this time than in the North, even though the French headquarters had been in the North. The Vietnamese Communist Party led by Ho Chi Minh, which was often referred to as the Viet Minh, had its military stronghold in the North.

So in Geneva in 1954, there is a negotiation over the terms of French withdrawal from Vietnam. And of course, Ho Chi Minh and the Communist Party come in and say, “You’re going to get out, and we are now going to be the new republic of Vietnam.” That’s not what they called it, but it was going to be a new nation. There were going to be popular elections, and the Vietnamese Communist Party expected to come into power.

The problem was, the United States could not and did not want to see this eventuality for a variety of reasons. The main reason was that after, as it were, “losing” China in 1949, it didn’t want to “lose” Vietnam.

Melissa Naschek

Was that part of the domino theory?

Vivek Chibber

That was the stated reason. Now, let me make a side note here. The domino theory is what American politicians, statesmen, and military leaders trotted out as a public justification for their growing involvement in Vietnam.

Melissa Naschek

Can you quickly explain what the domino theory was?

Vivek Chibber

That’s a metaphor that says that communism is like a contagion. And when it infects one country, it spreads over the borders into neighboring countries, which then fall to communism like dominoes. It’s an unstoppable force once it goes into a certain region. So if you want Southeast Asia to be insulated from the communist threat, the communist virus, you can’t let it enter anywhere. You can’t let it consolidate anywhere because the other ones will go too.

Like most metaphors, it’s just supposed to convey a broad sense of what they’re worried about. Because the real question is, all right, suppose Vietnam was to come under the authority of a communist party. By what mechanism are you going to say that it automatically spreads elsewhere? It isn’t literally a disease. It’s not like malaria.

What you are saying when you’re saying it’s going to spread is that other neighboring countries will also have similar movements and similar rebellions, and their authorities and their elites will also fall to communism. That at least gives it more precision. But the question again is, well, why would they?

It’s not like everyone suddenly becomes sleepwalkers and because there are communists over the border, the elites in, say, Indonesia or in Malaysia or Thailand lose their senses, and while they sleep at night, the communists come in like aliens and take over their bodies or something like that, right? What’s the mechanism by which [communism spreads]? The mechanism has to be that peasants and workers in other countries will be inspired by what they see happening in Vietnam, and it’ll boost their morale, and perhaps Vietnam will give them material support, and it’ll strengthen them in the balance of power in these other countries.

Melissa Naschek

God forbid the peasants or working class feel like they have some political power within their own states.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah, but that is the worry they have. So let’s translate that: the worry, supposedly, is that if the Communist Party comes to power in Vietnam, it’ll strengthen the hands of communists elsewhere.

The question is, did they actually believe that? You can find lots of statements by John F. Kennedy, by LBJ, by their advisors to this effect, and certainly I think they were worried about the consolidation of the Communist Party in the region. But did they actually believe that the simple fact that communists have come to power, either elected to power or having taken power in one country, means they will spread elsewhere? It’s not by any means clear that this is the case.

They did have one other concern that many historians say — and I would agree with this — was probably a stronger worry. It wasn’t the specter of communism. What they were more worried about was countries opting out of the network of alliances that the United States was cobbling together in that region.

Melissa Naschek

So is imperialism the prime motive force?

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. What they were worried about was not that other countries would lose their freedoms to communists or that the other countries would become hostile to America per se. Their central concern in East Asia was Japan. Just like we had talked about in the NATO episode, I had said Germany was their central concern in Europe.

The United States needed to rebuild Germany in Europe. It needed to rebuild Japan in East Asia. In the 1950s, this became especially important because, with the Chinese Revolution, Japan became a node of capitalist accumulation and a bulwark against the rise of communist economic and political might.

Now, two things: One is that Japan, if it’s going to be rebuilt economically, will have to have as part of its rebuilding the reintegration of parts of the economy in that region that had played a central role for Japanese wealth prior to 1945.

Prior to 1945, Japan had built something called a “co-prosperity sphere” in East Asia where Southeast Asia — and also its colonies in Northeast Asia, Korea and Taiwan — were integrated into a Japanese growth pattern where they traded a lot with Japan. They provided raw materials, but they also consumed Japanese goods. So the US design was that now that it’s rebuilding Japan, all these regions have to be reintegrated into the Japanese orbit economically and politically.

If Vietnam came under communist rule, the United States wasn’t so afraid that it would become a dictatorship, or that it would align with China per se. It was afraid that Vietnam would strike its own foreign policy in which it would decline to integrate itself into the Japanese orbit and might very well choose to integrate with the Soviet Bloc or with the Chinese economically.

Melissa Naschek

What’s interesting about that is that the concern is not a typical imperial or colonial concern. It’s more about this question of who is in an alliance with who, and how do we influence who they are influenced by.

Vivek Chibber

It’s not America trying to impose colonialism. It is empire in the sense that the United States is acting imperialistically to constrain Vietnamese autonomy and freedom of action — to make sure that the decisions they make diplomatically, geopolitically, economically are the decisions that are aligned with American designs. And the American design was what?

It wanted to replace regional powers with its own domination, both in East Asia and in Europe, in which it would have lieutenants. Japan would be the American lieutenant. Germany and France would be American lieutenants in Europe. Everything would go through the United States. This was called a “hub-and-spokes” model. So Japan and Germany would be rebuilt, but they would never have their autonomous spheres again. Everything would go through the United States.

The problem with the Vietnamese revolution was that, if it’s successful, it’s not so much that other countries will fall like dominoes to communism. It’s that other countries will take inspiration from a successful nationalist endeavor and decide on a neutral path. This was called “the specter of neutrality.” The US wasn’t so much worried about a communist Vietnam per se, but the fact that a communist Vietnam wouldn’t participate in this global attempt to isolate China, isolate Russia, and rebuild Japan as the American outpost in East Asia, as a center of accumulation, as a center of economic growth. Instead you would get a new source of life support for the rivals of the United States, which are China and the Soviet Union.

So it’s not that different from the domino theory. They’re quite similar theories, dominos falling and neutralism. And you can see in the internal documents, people going back and forth: sometimes invoking the domino theory, sometimes invoking the specter of Vietnamese neutrality.

Melissa Naschek

I can see, though, why they chose the domino theory as the public-facing one. I don’t know how well “the specter of neutrality” would have sat with the American public. [Laughs]

Vivek Chibber

You can’t say to the public, “We’re going to go in and invade this country and kill millions of them because they might decide to be neutral.” [Laughs] “They might decide to be Switzerland in Southeast Asia.” So no, you have to say that you’re preserving freedoms from communism.

The reason I’m stressing neutrality is that there’s a level of otherworldliness, of magical thinking involved, when you say, “If one country goes a certain way, all the others will go too,” regardless of what their internal situation is, regardless of what the balance of forces is. But you can imagine how, even a bourgeois country, a noncommunist country like, say, India or Indonesia, might say, “We’ve decided to be neutral.”

What’s interesting in the Cold War is that the United States hated neutralism as much as it hated a country going communist. And the reason is that it was never a global attempt to constrain or contain the Soviet Union, as the official ideology insisted. The official ideology of the US was one of containment, that we’re just trying to stop Soviet aggression and keep them contained. Actually, the Cold War was an aggressive expansion of American power in which the goal wasn’t to contain the Soviet Union but to squeeze it — to squeeze it to the point where there was either internal instability or a long-term decline.

It sounds like a subtle distinction, but it’s a very important one. If you’re containing somebody, as long as they don’t expand, you’re cool with it. But if you’re trying to squeeze them, simply stopping their expansion isn’t enough. You want to keep expanding into their territories as much as possible.

The Cold War was fundamentally, from the American side, an expansionist, aggressive movement, not simply a defensive posture to keep the Soviets contained.

What they’re seeing in Vietnam is the possibility of a shift toward neutrality and neutralism. The reason they think it might expand abroad, and that it’s important to not have a demonstration effect in Vietnam, is that nearby in Indonesia, there’s also a very strong communist party. The Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) is very strong, and there’s a strong thrust toward neutralism over there as well.

It may or may not have gone communist, but it could very well, under the banner of Indonesian nationalism, have adopted a more neutral stance. And that to the United States was probably more dangerous, less acceptable, than a communist takeover per se. So from 1954 to 1965, it was really worried about this.

Melissa Naschek

Let’s talk about the war itself and the US attempting to win in Vietnam and epically failing. What were some of the biggest challenges that the United States faced while intervening in Vietnam?

Vivek Chibber

The single biggest challenge it faced was that there was no such thing as South Vietnam. That’s the single biggest thing. And this is a very interesting sleight of hand.

At the conference in Geneva, everybody said, “Vietnam is going to be liberated from France. We’re going to agree to that.” But France said, “In order for us to get out, you’re going to have to give us a couple of years. And in those couple of years, we’re going to be stationed in the South.”

So they cut Vietnam in half at the seventeenth parallel and put in place a short period of time, two years, after which you were going to have national elections and the French would be gone. And as a result of those elections, whoever won would be the new government of independent Vietnam.

Melissa Naschek

Sounds fair enough.

Vivek Chibber

It sounds great. The problem was Americans’ own intelligence and the Vietnamese intelligence suggested that if there were elections, Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese Communist Party would win about 80 percent of the vote.

Melissa Naschek

That’s a lot! [Laughs]

Vivek Chibber

Yeah, which means it is by far the most popular organization in the country, and it will run the country. The United States had already decided it’s not going to let that happen.

So the moment it signed the agreement, the US started to figure out ways to renege on it. It finds an ostensibly nationalist leader in the South named Ngo Dinh Diem, and it appoints Diem as the new prime minister of the country, the new leader of the country. And lucky for the United States, Diem himself decided in 1954 he was never going to let elections happen, because he knew he’d lose. So the US found its man. This is a person who signs an agreement saying, “Yes, there should be elections” but then immediately decides, no, he’s not going to let it happen.

Melissa Naschek

Serendipity to find somebody who cares as little about democracy as the United States.

Vivek Chibber

First of all, it finds a man who has no interest in elections. The second thing it does is — remember, there was the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO, in Europe. Now it sets up something called the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, SEATO.

The point of SEATO was ostensibly to guard Southeast Asian countries against aggression. There’s two funny things about this. One is, aggression also meant internal aggression, which was explicitly designed to create an excuse to invade Vietnam against the communists.

The second thing was that this so-called Southeast Asia Treaty Organization had eight members, only two of whom were actually from Southeast Asia, the Philippines and Thailand. The other signatories were actually mostly colonial powers: the United States, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. And the eighth was Pakistan, which is not only not Southeast Asian, it’s actually about as close to being Southwest Asia as possible, because it’s bordering Iran. They couldn’t get the Southeast Asian countries to sign.

Why did the US create this organization? It created it because — once it’s created and it’s created this fictional entity called South Vietnam — now if the North says, if the Communist Party says, “Hey man, the two years are over, we should have elections,” and if it decides, upon finding America not allowing the elections, that it is going to militarily impose their will, now you can say the South’s been invaded by the North. And this treaty, the SEATO, obliges us to defend this fictional entity called “the South.”

Melissa Naschek

So would you characterize this as one of the earliest attempts by America to institute regime change in another country?

Vivek Chibber

It’s a new kind of imperialism at this point. In the nineteenth-century colonial era, European or American powers came into certain countries and just took them over. In the twentieth century, this is kind of off the table after 1945. It’s off the table. The constraint now is, you’ve got to find a local henchman who can come in and be your stooge, who can be the person who does your work for you. So you’re absolutely right that this is a new kind of thing that imperialism is doing.

The problem is that, in Vietnam, French colonialism had the peculiar property of not really allowing much of a domestic ruling class to emerge under its rule, which is not typical. All over Asia, all over Africa, domestic elites had either already existed and been harnessed to the colonial project as local lieutenants, or [colonial powers] had incubated them.

In Vietnam, neither of those two happened. So who’s going to be the local henchman who’s going to carry out your work for you? It’s just not clear. So when the US appoints Diem in the South in 1954, the problem they face is that he does not represent a local ruling elite. He has no ties to them. He has no political base.

Melissa Naschek

So it’s not even that there was a legitimacy crisis in the sense that people were rebelling against the ruling class. It was that they had no members of the ruling class who actually represented them.

Vivek Chibber

No, and this is important because it’s unlike, say, China, when it fought against Western imperialism in the 1920s and 1930s. It did have a nationalist party in the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek, who were an alternative to the Communist Party. However weak the Kuomintang was and however corrupt it was, it was there.

In Vietnam, the only legitimate nationalist force in the 1950s is the Viet Minh, the Communist Party. And it has enormous support, not just in the North but also in the South. French intelligence in 1955 estimated that somewhere between 60 percent and 90 percent of villages in the South had their sympathies with the Communist Party.

So what’s happening is, they appoint Diem. Diem is not only not the leader of a deeply rooted class anchored in the countryside and anchored in the villages, he has very little social support. Now he’s tasked with, in a certain amount of time, overshadowing, overcoming the influence of the Communist Party. But how is he going to do that? Who does he represent?

The first step is that he says, I’m not going to have elections because the communists will win. Now this presents Ho Chi Minh with a real dilemma. What he should have done was to say, “You agreed. And if you’re not going to agree, we’re going to take up arms again.”

What they do instead is they say, “Ok, we’re going to give you some more time to come around.” And they embark on what you might call a policy of appeasement. Essentially what they’re trying to do is find ways of politically outmaneuvering Diem so that they can, through some kind of peaceful road, displace him in the South.

Melissa Naschek

And they’ve already fought, at this point, a decade-long war against the French.

Vivek Chibber

The reason they are following this policy is they know that if they move militarily, they’ve given the United States license to come in and invade. And they know that this means a new war.

I should also say the Soviets and the Chinese completely sold them out at this point. Both the Soviets and the Chinese essentially told them, “If you start fighting, there’s not much we can do for you.” The reason is, at this moment in the global Cold War, the Soviets didn’t want to mess with the United States. The US was orders of magnitude more powerful militarily in the mid-1950s than the Soviets were. China had just come out of its own revolution and then the Korean War; it didn’t want to do anything.

So Ho knew that he wouldn’t get much support and he would be taking on, now, the global power. He tells the Communist Party in the South to cool their heels and to not take up arms. This is important because in the meantime in South Vietnam, Diem has to try to build his own base so that this fictional entity called “South Vietnam” can be turned into a real nation, a real country. But how’s he going to do it? He has no support.

He says, “I’m going to build support by trying to win over the peasantry.” So he has this land reform, but the land reform is not only a complete failure — it actually makes things worse for them than it was before the land reform. Why? Because the Communist Party had already undertaken at least a partial land reform in the South. What Diem does is he reverses that land reform, and he ends up giving a lot of land back to the old landlord class.

So he loses all peasant support. But he then loses landlord support because, in the course of undoing the old land reform and redistributing land, what he does is — because he needs to build a support base, he doesn’t trust the landlords. He gives a lot of the land to his own cronies, his own family, and he’s Catholic, so he tries to create a new Catholic landlord class. So the old landlord class now is also pissed at him. He’s pissed off the peasants; he’s pissed off the landlords.

Melissa Naschek

What a bizarre strategy! [Laughs]

Vivek Chibber

It gets worse. Then he also doesn’t trust the army.

The only support base he has left now is the army. He also doesn’t trust them. So what he also does is start filling key military positions with his cronies.

Melissa Naschek

So he was a historically bad dictator.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. He was a dictator but not a stooge. I called him a stooge, but he’s not a puppet. He was his own man. I’m bringing this up because there’s a trend in Vietnam historiography now among newcomer historians to try to kind of rehabilitate the man. And that’s partly because as the older historians are fading away and that radicalism of the New Left is fading . . . diplomatic history tends to be the most conservative of all the different fields of American historiography. So not surprisingly, diplomatic historians are naturally gravitating toward Diem and the American position.

Their rehabilitation of the man has been to say, “The Left always thought he was nothing more than a stooge of American empire, but actually he was his own man. He had his own designs. He had his own vision,” which is in fact true. And this was the problem for the United States. If he had just been a stooge, it could have just knocked him over and put somebody else in his place. The problem was, it put this guy in power. He likes having power, but he has no idea how to go about wielding it.

So the US is stuck. It’s got this guy Diem. He has alienated every class in Vietnam, but he won’t let go of power. So now, from 1955 to 1960, it’s stuck with him, and he’s making things worse and worse and worse.

Melissa Naschek

I’m getting flashbacks to the last couple years of the Biden administration right now.

Vivek Chibber

[Laughs] This is all to say, because he has no knowledge of how to do it — and no intention after a while of doing it — what ends up happening is, he gives up trying to win support among the peasantry. He basically says, “I’m just going to use brute force to try to outmaneuver the incredibly popular Communist Party in the South.” And he essentially starts this ethnic cleansing campaign where he says, “If I can’t outmaneuver them in the villages, I’m going to take all these South Vietnamese villagers and displace them, physically remove them from their villages and set up new villages.” This was called the “Strategic Hamlet Program.” And he essentially ethnically cleanses hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.

What this does, then, is takes the entire Vietnamese countryside and turns it into a revolutionary force against him. And now the United States has to deal with the fact that this dude is not just hated by everybody in the country, but he’s become an active recruiter for the Communist Party. The Communist Party is now getting stronger and stronger and stronger.

So by 1959, 1960, what’s happening is, in the North, the Vietnamese have to give up this policy of appeasement, because, unless they start taking up arms in the South against Diem, the South is just going to go off on its own, and it starts ignoring Communist directives. They were in danger of losing the Southern Communist Party party cells. So in ’59–’60, they start actually now moving the military battle into the South, which is — they were right — this is what the US is waiting for.

And starting from 1960 onward, under Kennedy, you see the United States starting to bomb the crap out of South Vietnam and move more and more and more military advisors into the country. And this is what slowly turns into, by the mid ’60s, Lyndon B. Johnson’s war.

The point is, by the time Johnson sends in the troops, you’ve already had years and years of bombing, of ethnic cleansing, of a massive refugee population, of covert operations by the CIA. And even though Diem himself is overthrown and killed in 1963, it doesn’t change a thing. By 1962, the whole project of trying to have nation-building, create a South Vietnam, win some kind of credibility and legitimacy for this fictional nation-state — it’s gone.

By 1962–63, it’s just the military solution, and it unloads on the Vietnamese people. How much does it unload? The United States, in those years between 1960 and 1973, dropped more bombs on this tiny country than all the bombs dropped by all the powers in World War II put together. In fact, it was more than twice the amount. It physically annihilated this country because it wanted to determine its own path.

Melissa Naschek

I want to take a look at the domestic front of the Vietnam War because there was a massive antiwar movement that was very public and had very direct impacts on the current events and politics of their day. Why did this war provoke such a strong reaction in America?

Vivek Chibber

For a long time, it didn’t. If you look at the polling data and activist protests and such — if you look at the polling data in the early 1960s, all the way into, I would say the mid ’60s, ’64–’65, probably the majority of the population, at least in the polls, expressed support for American involvement in Vietnam.

Now, there’s debate around this. There’ve been some political scientists who have said that there’s an overestimation of how much public support there was in the polls — and that could be true. But I think it’s definitely true that there was no street-level protest against the war all the way into the mid-’60s. Noam Chomsky likes to say that, all the way up to 1968, if you tried to have a demonstration against the war in Boston or in places like that, there’d be more counterdemonstrators than there would be demonstrators.

So public opinion starts to change in ’67, I would say. And then the Tet Offensive, which is in the middle of 1968, is when you see public opinion really start to shift. And that’s because the Tet Offensive came as a real shock.

What was the Tet Offensive? Tet is the Vietnamese New Year. And from ’65 to ’68, Johnson had been telling the population that the war is going great, even though the press was saying it’s not. But at least the president was expressing optimism.

What happened in the Tet Offensive — and it was designed by the Vietnamese to do this — it was a massive military offensive in South Vietnam in many cities at the same time. Nobody, not even Johnson and his advisors, had expected a show of strength at this level. And even though the Vietnamese incurred enormous losses, it was a huge blow to the morale of the American military and then, through the press, to the American public.

Melissa Naschek

Going back to the potted standard narratives, the big analysis of why this provoked such a strong reaction was that it was so well covered in the media and also it was one of the first wars where they showed actual footage of day-to-day combat in Vietnam. What do you make of that?

Vivek Chibber

The scholarship shows that it definitely played a role. Although it’s interesting. What the quantitative studies of media coverage of Vietnam show is that it was actually pretty flat throughout the period, and it occupied only a decent but not great proportion of the media and its news coverage globally. So I think that, in historical memory, the role of the media has been exaggerated somewhat.

The more important factor was that, by 1967, a kind of fatigue had set in in the public toward the war. And that made it ripe for something like the Tet Offensive. The fatigue then transformed into a decision that this is just not going to happen; this is not going to go well.

So it’s not that the antiwar movement changed public opinion. It’s probably more accurate to say that the antiwar movement expressed public opinion and then sharpened it. I think one should see the antiwar movement as an expression of a national pessimism about the war rather than something that educated the public on the evils of the war.

Melissa Naschek

Do you think that the public’s disdain for this involvement, or as you phrased it, fatigue, had anything to do with the draft? Because one of the memorable media highlights of the domestic reaction to Vietnam is people burning their draft cards.

Vivek Chibber

For sure. Although the people burning the draft cards, I think, were more in the student movement than outside it. But by 1969, I think the number was something like 40,000 men a month being drafted into the Army. So that’s not a small number.

Melissa Naschek

What’s the distinction between the antiwar movement and the student movement?

Vivek Chibber

This is an interesting point. The two are often taken together. The antiwar movement was a much broader phenomenon than the student movement.

It started outside the student movement. And just like the civil rights movement, all the way into, I would say, ’67–’68, it was mostly the old left and the civic associations, some church groups: there were the [groups that] comprised the antiwar movement.

The students slowly get going from 1965 onward and gather steam. But here’s the important point. At no point from the late ’60s onward was the student movement really very popular outside the universities.

In fact, what the polls show is that probably somewhere around 80 percent of the public had a negative view of the student movement. In other words, only about 20 percent of the public actually favored the students and the university takeovers and things like that.

Melissa Naschek

Was that because of different tactics employed or different approaches to how to end the war? Why was there such a strong distinction in public opinion between the two?

Vivek Chibber

Remember in 1967–’68, universities were still pretty much a haven for upper-middle-class and elite people. They were not yet fully mass institutions. The mid-to-late 1960s is really when the growth of American universities is starting to take off. And it’s in the ’70s that you see it really burgeoning.

So the antiwar movement really gets going from ’68 onward. And from that point on, it plays an important role. There’s good scholarship now by historians on LBJ, on Richard Nixon, and the extent to which they were worried about the movements. They definitely were. I don’t think you can say that the movements caused the end of the war.

By ’68–’69, the elites don’t want the war anymore. They’re all trying to figure out how to get out of it, because it was the Vietnamese people who ended the war. It was not the antiwar movement.

Basically the degree of struggle and sacrifice of Vietnam made it clear, you’re not going to win this war. It’s just not going to happen. And then the question was, “Do we want to keep taking the flack domestically from an increasingly unpopular war? Do we want to hazard that in a situation where it’s probable we’re not going to be able to win it?”

So by ’68–’69, you see the presidents and the military advisors saying, “We need to figure out a way out of this thing.” So the antiwar movement plays an important role for other reasons, I think, and we can get into that. But I don’t think you can say it ended the war.

Melissa Naschek

Can you talk about what the other reasons are?

Vivek Chibber

The antiwar movement did two things. First, it transformed the political class’s sense of what it can get away with in its foreign policy. Nixon did us the favor of being such a horribly corrupt and such a dictatorial president until Donald Trump came along.

The association of Vietnam and Nixon was very deep. And because of that, in the political culture, there was a tremendous revulsion to the kind of aggression that Kissinger and Nixon were associated with.

So the first thing it did was discipline the political class about what it could get away with. And really, from 1975 all the way to the turn of the century, when the United States engaged in foreign aggression, it did so clandestinely.

Melissa Naschek

Can you talk a little bit more about the long-term impact of domestic resistance to the Vietnam War?

Vivek Chibber

One impact was that it drove American aggression underground, you could say. After the end of the Vietnam War, the next zone of engagement was Latin America, especially Central America. In Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua —

Melissa Naschek

Chile?

Vivek Chibber

Chile was earlier of course, and there the United States helped, and of course in ’73 had played an important though not decisive role, I think, in the Chilean coup.

What happens in the ’80s, though, is that the United States actively tries to foment counterinsurgency in Central America. And then in Nicaragua, after the revolution of 1979, it funds, fuels, and arms what are called the Contras, which was the counterrevolutionary mercenary army in Nicaragua. It funneled them their arms but had to do it clandestinely because Congress wouldn’t allow it. And that’s what gave rise to what’s called the Iran-Contra scandal, where Ronald Reagan was caught using funds to send arms illicitly to the Contras in Nicaragua.

All this happens because of what’s called the Vietnam syndrome: that after the Vietnam War, they were not going to send American troops abroad, which is what they would have wanted to do if they weren’t so fearful of the public. So that’s one long-term change.

And Iraq was supposed to solve these problems. One big motivation for the invasion of Iraq was that it would once and for all show that the United States is not only the sole superpower after 1989, but it can go in and kick ass and not worry about the collateral fallout like in Vietnam. And that didn’t go so well. The second change that’s profound is that it changed American culture in a very deep way.

Melissa Naschek

The c-word.

Vivek Chibber

Yeah. [Laughs] There was a confluence in the 1960s of the civil rights movement and the movement against the Vietnam War. And both of them had one very important impact, which is: the civil rights movement forced Americans to recognize the humanity of black Americans, that they had to be treated as equals, be vested with full rights, and in so doing be treated as humans the same way as whites were.

What the antiwar movement and Vietnam did was implant a kind of cosmopolitanism in American culture, where now it’s not just Americans of different colors who are vested with full respect, but other human beings outside the country.

You could not take part in a movement against the Vietnam War without recognizing the common humanity that you shared with the Vietnamese. And in so doing, it was a profoundly, I would call it civilizing fact for the American public, where you’re not only saying we don’t have the right to kill other people in other countries, but it also instills a respect for the other country, for their culture, the ways in which they live their lives. And you want to give them the freedom to live their own lives.

But that also means that when they come to your country as immigrants, you will give them the freedom to live their culture in this country. My mother came to this country in the mid-1970s in small-town Ohio. She fully benefited from that transformation of the culture, where as an Indian, she felt with her peers that her Indian-ness was respected. This is in Midwest, small-town Ohio, in what was essentially a working-class town, which twenty years prior to that would have been a very different scene.

It was the antiwar movement that instilled this respect, and I think we’re still benefiting from that. American culture was profoundly shaped, transformed by the antiwar movement’s implantation of a respect for the people that their ruling class was annihilating. It’s something to be very proud of, if you’re an American. And we still are living the consequences of that.

That was a long-term impact of the antiwar movement. So even though it didn’t end the war, its participation in the resistance to the war ended up having two very long-term effects. It chastened and disciplined the foreign policy establishment as to what it can do, and it brought a degree of humanity to the broad culture, which is very important in the evolution of the broader nation.

Great Job Vivek Chibber & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.

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