Ukraine War, Vietnam War
Two different countries, two different wars, two different times. And yet I keep thinking of comparisons and even parallels. Here are some of my thoughts.
(1) The US parties have switched sides since Vietnam days. At the end of the Vietnam War, it was the GOP – some members of the GOP, anyway, such as President Ford – who wanted to continue war aid for the ARVN. It was the Democrats who had originally escalated our military involvement there during the 1960s, but it was Democrats who led the drive to reduce the funding in the 1970s to the point where North Vietnam knew it could easily win. Many Republicans joined that effort, as well. You can read some of the history of the endgame in Vietnam here, but I’ll excerpt a small bit:
In January of 1973, President Richard Nixon approved the Paris Peace Accords negotiated by Henry Kissinger, which implemented an immediate cease-fire in Vietnam and called for the complete withdrawal of American troops within sixty days. Two months later, Nixon met with South Vietnamese President Thieu and secretly promised him a “severe retaliation” against North Vietnam should they break the cease-fire. Around the same time, Congress began to express outrage at the secret illegal bombings of Cambodia carried out at Nixon’s behest. Accordingly, on June 19, 1973 Congress passed the Case-Church Amendment, which called for a halt to all military activities in Southeast Asia by August 15, thereby ending twelve years of direct U.S. military involvement in the region.
In the fall of 1974, Nixon resigned under the pressure of the Watergate scandal and was succeeded by Gerald Ford. Congress cut funding to South Vietnam for the upcoming fiscal year from a proposed 1.26 billion to 700 million dollars. These two events prompted Hanoi to make an all-out effort to conquer the South. As the North Vietnamese Communist Party Secretary Le Duan observed in December 1974: “The Americans have withdrawn…this is what marks the opportune moment.”
The NVA drew up a two-year plan for the “liberation” of South Vietnam. Owing to South Vietnam’s weakened state, this would only take fifty-five days. The drastic reduction of American aid to South Vietnam caused a sharp decline in morale, as well as an increase in governmental corruption and a crackdown on domestic political dissent. The South Vietnamese army was severely under-funded, greatly outnumbered, and lacked the support of the American allies with whom they were accustomed to fighting.
The NVA began its final assault in March of 1975 in the Central Highlands. … The war officially concluded on April 30, as Saigon fell to North Vietnam and the last American personnel were evacuated.
(2) In both cases, war supporters subscribe to a domino theory – with Vietnam it involved the Far East, with Ukraine it involves the Eastern European countries that had formerly been part of the USSR, and even perhaps some portions of Western Europe. Zelensky indicated in his talk with Trump and Vance that his own domino theory involves Putin coming to US shores.
(3) One huge difference – in Vietnam, the US had expended not just US treasure but US blood. Quite a lot of it.
(4) The Vietnam hot war had gone on much longer than three years. Of course, that’s true of Russia and Ukraine, too, but until the Russian invasion in 2022 it had gone on at a much lower level.
(5) Unlike Ukraine and Russia, the Vietnam War involved parties that were not so lopsided in terms of population – unless you count the backing of China. And you should count the backing of China.
(6) Fifty years after the end of the Vietnam War we’re still arguing about whether the South could have won if we had continued with a larger amount of aid. A similar argument goes on with Ukraine now and it goes like this: does Ukraine have any chance of winning in the sense of regaining its lost territory, with US aid? Those who want to cut off military aid say no; many of those who want to continue it say yes.
(7) The Vietnam War so wearied the US that it subsequently caused many Americans to be very very wary of our own troops fighting someone else’s war, especially if that war lasts a long time. The Gulf War was short; the Iraq and Afghan wars were long, and ended with our disastrous withdrawals. The left campaigned against those last two wars from the start by comparing them to Vietnam.
(8) The Ukraine War seems to have coincided with a growing US reluctance to fund foreign wars. There’s a relatively small faction on the right among those who want to pull the plug on Ukraine who also would dearly love to do the same to Israel. Otherwise it’s the left, for the most part, who have turned on Israel.
No 4. Actually the Vietnam War started way before US involvement. It started under the French
I think for the past 9 years the Democrats (which is really the Left as there are no more moderate Ds) have it dug into their souls to be against anything Trump is for. It has nothing to do with anything else. Bring Trump, and now the GOP, down at any cost. Peace, war, economics, etc are all secondary.
physics:
That’s also the case. But they supported the Ukraine war heavily before Trump was involved.
I am praying that the betrayal of South Viet Nam by Democrats in congress in 1973 is not repeated in Ukraine by Republicans in 2025. Spite and fury against FJB benefiting Russian aggression in Europe.
There’s a lot to unpack in the parallels to Vietnam, but the Cold War element is completely missing, as well as the military power of the Soviet Union, and the “domino theory” is just not very plausible.
According to SIPRI Russia’s 2023 military spending was $126 billion USD. For this year the estimate I’m seeing is about $145 billion. The last year of the Soviet Union was $256 billion in 2023 dollars.
In 1985 the Soviet Union had 4.9 million active military personnel (not counting the Warsaw Pact satellites, just USSR), in 2024 Russia had 1.1 million. North Korea has a larger active military than Russia.
Russia would have a very long way to go just to get back to the power it had as the Soviet Union; but with their demographic challenges it will simply not happen.
Like comparing Turkey to the Ottoman Empire…
Shirehome:
Ho fought against the Japaneese (1944) before the French returned to Indochina.
https://archive.org/details/osshochiminhunex0000bart
Niketas:
And the North Koreans aren’t much to write home about. Brave, fierce, but short lived in Ukraine. At least so far. So just looking at numbers ….
The lesson I learned from Viet Nam is that there’s no helping a nation to freedom if the majority don’t want to fight for freedom. Enter George Witless Bush to declare that the only way to eliminate Islamic terrorism is with “democracy”. What an idiot! The Ukraine war is completely different. Clinton made promises to Russia that were not kept by succeeding Presidents. TAFO. Trust America and Find Out.
Smoot-Hawley. Apparently the lesson wasn’t learned.
I looked at the election this way – a vote for Harris is a vote for someone who would shank Israel and support Hamas, and a vote for Trump is a vote for someone who would stab Ukraine in the back and support Putin.
neo – “But they (Democrats) supported the Ukraine war heavily before Trump was involved.”
Huh? How? Obama is famously on record as declining to make an issue of Putin’s seizure of Crimea and Donbass in 2014. He refused to send weapons to Ukraine at that time, and weapons shipments that probably saved Zelensky’s bacon in 2022 were started by Trump in 2017. It is true that I don’t remember much Democrat opposition to those sales but it isn’t hard to find articles from the time period (like this one https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Military/2017/0928/US-giving-new-consideration-to-selling-arms-to-Ukraine.-Is-that-wise) with people raising concerns about how Putin would react.
Physicsguy is 100% right. The Democrats will oppose anything that Trump, or even most Republicans, support. If Trump praised oxygen they’d all try to stop breathing.
I agree with Christopher B and physicsguy. There is a question I’ve had for a long time – when and why did the Democrats flip on Russia? I have posted on blogs more than once, probably here at some point, “The Democrats wanted to appease Russia for 70 years. Now they’re trying to make Joe McCarthy look like a pinko.”
As recently as the 2012 election, less than 18 months before Putin first invaded Ukraine, Obama was mocking Mitt Romney’s tough-on-Russia stance with “the 80s wants their foreign policy back” and famously told a Russian “we can be more flexible after the election”. And as Christopher points out Obama kept his distance at first. It’s not clear to me Dems went whole hog pro-Ukraine until 2016 when they thought they could smear Trump with “Russian collusion”. Is it possible that their stance was determined mainly by a desire to “get Trump”? Yes, they are that crass and that cynical. Indeed one of the main reasons I quit voting Dem many years ago was coming to the conclusion that they saw national security as nothing but a political football.
Christopher B: “If Trump praised oxygen they’d all try to stop breathing”
Here’s hoping DJT will soon proclaim a new MOGA initiative.
FOAF:
Their stance was originally entirely driven by the idea that it was a way to get Trump. But many of them also believe that he is in league with Putin because they are both white supremacist thugs.
It seems that what you say neo supports the point that it was Trump who drove the Democrats Russia/Ukraine policy, not any thoughtful consideration of foreign policy one way or the other. They tolerated “white supremacist thug” Putin for many years, continuing their decades-long policy when dealing with Russian dictators. Eg Hillary’s “red reset button” as well as Obama’s statements from the 2012 campaign. If they now claim Putin is a WST it’s because associating with Trump made him one, not the other way around.
I was involved with a religious-based social justice and peacemaking group, up to national level, back in the day. When the USSR fell, we were cautioned against triumphalism. And the maneuvers to appear to have been on the right side all along were elephantine and obvious.
So, perhaps Russia could be an enemy once it quit being a communist tyranny and became a normal tyranny.
I have heard Richard’s argument, which I think is that the Democrats/left stopped coddling Russian after they gave up communism. The problem with that argument is that there is no evidence of this until nearly 25 years after communism fell there. I am still going with the switch was caused primarily by TDS.
8 great points. But missing a big trade off:
Peace or Justice? The Indo China peace came after very unjust Killing Fields.
It will be unjust for Russia to get territory, but any near term peace seems likely to require that.
The virtue-signalers that want more support for Ukraine mostly want the US govt to give that support, not they themselves.
This is especially true of the EU allies who still fail to spend 2% of their govt budget on defense, despite 10 years of Putin fear.