Moyar’s book Triumph Forsaken has a deep view in Chapter 16, The Prize for Victory: January–May 1965 regarding the risk Johnson faced in considering an exit strategy from Vietnam. Moyar has written an interesting aspect of America’s effort in defending Saigon after a less-than-stellar-efforts by the South Vietnamese Army throughout 1964.
Moyar’s view is Johnson lack of strong, even overpowering reprisals against the North in 1964 opened the door to global criticism of America’s policy in fighting communist expansion.
Was global domination reaching a tipping point? According to Moyar China was America’s threat not in 1964 but in the future. Russia was clearly not a long term threat.
Stemming the tide against growing communist expansion in Southeast Asia Moyar indicates the White House was measuring the geopolitical shifts within Asia and beyond.
In chapters 13: Self-Imposed Restrictions: January–July 1964 and chapter 14 Signals: August–October 1964 Moyar illustrates a range of points for the overall failure of the South Vietnamese Army to recover from previous confrontations with the North and Vietcong.
Moyar continues to see the failure of Ap Bac in early 1963 as a defining point for America’s policy. The South never recovered according to Moyar from Diem’s assassination. Did a real opportunity to pull out of Vietnam in 1965 impact Johnson? Moyar documents his view throughout Chapter 16:
In the event of a precipitate American withdrawal from Vietnam, Johnson told his advisers on one occasion, the Southeast Asian nations would label the United States a “paper tiger,” and the United States would see its credibility plummet in the region …. Rusk informed the President on one occasion that if South Vietnam fell, the United States would lose its alliances with Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, and in addition the Chinese would dominate India, while America’s European alliances would remain intact.
During a meeting with Eisenhower in February, he read the former President a State Department message on Thailand as evidence of Vietnam’s international significance. In the message, the U.S. ambassador to Thailand described a discussion with Thai Foreign Minister Thanat Khoman in these terms: “This morning, in my first meeting with Thanat after my return, I found him in a rosy glow over the vast improvement in morale throughout Southeast Asia as a result of American and South Vietnamese [air] strikes on North Vietnam.”
Ho Chi Minh told an African diplomat that a Vietnamese Communist victory would “help the people of all nations see that they need not be afraid of the Americans,” and that “once the United States is defeated in Vietnam it will never be able to win anywhere else in the world.”
Aside from France, which doggedly called for the neutralization of South Vietnam to gratify old grudges against the United States and assert its independence, the countries of NATO supported America’s stance on Vietnam. NATO’s Expert Working Group, composed of representatives from NATO countries small and large, asserted in the spring of 1965, “It remains a vital interest of the West to prevent a Communist victory in South Vietnam which would stimulate similar developments throughout Southeast Asia.” Many NATO nations – including the two most powerful, West Germany and Britain – said that America’s willingness to defend Vietnam was a key indicator of whether America would protect its allies not only in Asia but also in Europe.
During the first half of 1965, the West Germans repeatedly stressed the importance of Vietnam and urged the Americans to hold firm. They might well have contributed militarily had not the West German constitution prohibited it. During a meeting with President Johnson in the late spring, West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard said that “Vietnam is important to most Germans because they regard it as a kind of testing ground as to how firmly the U.S. honors its commitments. In that respect there exists a parallel between Saigon and Berlin.” Chancellor Erhard further evidenced his sincerity by expressing the same views to the French, for whom such talk was most unwelcome. In mid-1965, the West German people as a whole approved of the defense of South Vietnam, with more than one half of West Germans believing that American intervention was justified.The British believed that their national interests were at stake in Vietnam, for they saw themselves as partners with the United States in protecting British and American interests in Southeast Asia against Communist expansionism …. British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and other leading members of his government expressly said that the loss of Vietnam would have highly negative consequences for Southeast Asia and hence for Britain. On April 28, 1965, Wilson told the Italian President in private that “there is no alternative to the policy which the United States is pursuing” in Vietnam. If the United States withdrew from Vietnam, he asserted, “then one country after another will start to disengage from alliance with the United States and make the best terms they can with Communist China.”
The fall of Vietnam in 1965, by itself, would not have immediately caused large numbers of countries outside of Asia to gravitate toward the Communist pole. America’s assistance to allies in other parts of the world was only one of several factors that determined the alignment of most non-Asian countries, and for some it was a factor of only minor importance, subordinate to matters of internal politics, regional affairs, or bilateral relations with the United States. The falling of the Asian dominoes and the attendant collapse of American strength across Asia, on the other hand, could eventually have done serious harm to America’s standing with its allies across the world, as it would mean a large decline in America’s total power, prestige, and resolve. It was just such a falling of Asian dominoes that was a real possibility in 1965.
The Thai government’s concern over South Vietnam had begun a steep ascent in 1964, corresponding with the steep decline in the performance of the South Vietnamese government and armed forces. During 1964, Thai officials advocated sending U.S. aircraft from Thai bases to bomb targets in North Vietnam and Laos, a course of action that the United States would eventually excute. The Thais offered to deploy 10,000 “volunteers” to Laos to counter the North Vietnamese “volunteers” who were helping the Pathet Lao, but the Laotians, who had a longstanding animosity towards the Thais, torpedoed the proposal. In 1964, though, the Thais did insert over three hundred troops into Laos on a covert basis, a deployment so prized by the Americans as to discourage them from requesting that Thailand send troops to Vietnam.
The Royal Laotian government endorsed America’s policies in Laos and Vietnam in 1965, effusing special praise for the use of American air power in both countries. Laotian leaders believed that Rolling Thunder would convince Hanoi to sue for peace and halt its meddling in Laotian affairs, and that American strikes on North Vietnamese logistical facilities in Laos, which began in April under the code name “Steel Tiger,” would in the meantime undermine Communist activities in Laos. A few weeks after Steel Tiger commenced, the U.S. ambassador to Laos reported that the Laotians “have taken great heart from our actions and have gained a new confidence in their own future.”
For Taiwan, robust military action against the Vietnamese Communists had always been the favorite item on the menu. In 1964, Premier Chiang Kai-shek had proposed an attack on North Vietnam using Taiwanese forces, with the United States providing support, but the Americans had nixed the idea, for they believed that the Chinese Communists would interpret any use of Taiwanese forces in Vietnam as a resumption of the Chinese Civil War, which could cause China to send its armies into Vietnam. In early 1965, Taiwanese officials and journalists clamored fiercely for the deployment of Taiwanese troops to Vietnam. The Americans blocked all efforts in this direction, for the same reason as before. Indicative of the importance that the Taiwanese attached to Vietnam was a speech by Taiwanese Foreign Minister Shen Chang-huan in April, in which he stated that an American withdrawal from Vietnam “would be an act of appeasement which would only further encourage the aggressors and result in a holocaust for the whole of Asia.”
An even greater eagerness to send soldiers to Vietnam could be found within the South Korean government of President Park Chung Hee, a man who in early 1965 held the view that “the Communist aggression in Vietnam is aggression towards Korea.” Since the summer of 1964, the South Koreans had repeatedly made clear an interest in sending combat forces to Vietnam, only to be told by the Americans that South Vietnam had no present need for South Korean groundunits.
In the Philippines, President Diosdado Macapagal as well as the leaders of the opposition Nacionalista Party and most of the educated population feared that the fall of South Vietnam would set the dominoes in motion toward the Philippines and gravely endanger their own national security. “The Philippines has a great stake in what is going on in Vietnam,” Macapagal pronounced in April.
Burma professed neutrality with respect to the world’s major powers in 1965, and its ruler, the socialist dictator General Ne Win, wanted to keep his country isolated from the rest of the world. In practice, Ne Win could not avoid interaction with foreign powers as much as he would have liked. He was generally more inclined to bow to the wishes of China than to those of the Western powers, yet he could never do enough to maintain the favor of the Chinese. Undoubtedly the Chinese had influenced the decision by the pro-Chinese Burmese Communist Party, in 1964, to renounce its policy of non-violence and commence armed warfare against the government.
Australia, another key U.S. ally in the struggle for Southeast Asia, was already embroiled in the conflict between Indonesia and Malaysia by the beginning of 1965, but it viewed the Vietnamese war as a greater threat to its safety. Indonesia was enjoying much less success than North Vietnam at this time and would likely remain frustrated in its ambitions unless South Vietnam fell, which would enable China and North Vietnam to apply direct pressure on Malaysia. The Australians were convinced that the Chinese, abetted by the North Vietnamese and Indonesians, sought hegemony over the whole of Southeast Asia and were likely to attain that objective if the Vietnamese Communists took South Vietnam. Australia was the first country besides the United States to send military advisers to South Vietnam. At the start of 1965, with the state of affairs in Saigon growing more desperate, the Australians urged the Johnson administration to attack North Vietnam without regard to the political instability in Saigon, and they offered to contribute a battalion of Australian soldiers for offensive actions aimed at saving South Vietnam. By contrast, they had repeatedly rejected British requests for major troop commitments in Malaysia. Lyndon Johnson was not yet ready for such actions at that time, and in the coming months he would consistently lag behind the Australians in belligerence.
New Zealand viewed its commitment in Malaysia as its principal contribution to the anti-Communist struggle in Southeast Asia. More dependent on Britain than was Australia, New Zealand wanted to avoid military ventures without the British at their side. By the beginning of 1965, New Zealand’s armed forces had already deployed 1,100 of their 7,000 troops to Malaysia. For a country with one eightieth the population of the United States, this commitment was proportionate in size to the contemporaneous American commitment in Vietnam.
If China were to become the predominant power in Southeast Asia following the defeat of South Vietnam, the Japanese would certainly feel compelled to take a more accommodating position towards the Chinese. Already, a desire for good relations with China was growing within Japanese society and some sections of the Japanese government, and Japan and China had taken preliminary steps in that direction. U.S. Ambassador to Japan Edwin Reischauer predicted in June that the defeat of the South Vietnamese government would cause a sharp rise in neutralist and leftist sentiment in Japan, resulting in a Japanese government that would break its defense agreements with the United States. The effects on America’s position in the world, he said, would be “extremely adverse.”
No one can say with absolute certainty what would have happened had South Vietnam been defeated in 1965, considering the complex interaction of many individuals with a diverse array of personalities, cultures, and limitations, and considering the powerful role of chance in human conflict. What can be said, based on analysis of the information available then and subsequent revelations, is that staying in South Vietnam in 1965 was a much more promising option for the United States than leaving, even if it meant fighting the war in the flawed way that the United States ultimately fought it. High was the probability that the fall of Vietnam in 1965 would have knocked over many dominoes in Southeast Asia. For every Southeast Asian country that was not already in league with China, the Johnson administration possessed compelling evidence that the fall of South Vietnam would lead to either an alliance with China or defeat by Communist subversives who were supported by China and its allies. The dominoes likely to fall first after South Vietnam were Laos, Thailand, Burma, Malaysia, and two countries that were already tipping forward, Indonesia and Cambodia. Confidence in the United States would be badly shaken in the Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, and India, and each of these countries would be very susceptible to neutralism or an alliance with China, some sooner than others. Australia and New Zealand could be counted upon to resist such pressures more effectively, but they would be left demoralized and faced with hostile neighbors that dwarfed them in population size.
Thus, in the event of South Vietnam’s defeat, the United States would probably lose many of its air and naval bases, and its island defense chain would likely be broken. It could lose its access to the vital Indonesian sea lanes, which by the end of the twentieth century would host forty percent of the world’s shipping. It would face a serious risk of losing its trading rights with its principal Asian trading partner, Japan, and other Asian trading partners, who together conducted roughly half as much trade with the United States as did the industrialized nations of Europe in the early 1960s, and who would overtake the Europeans as America’s most voluminous trading partners by the early 1980s …. The crumbling of American power in Asia would, in turn, decrease America’s national strength and undermine confidence in the United States across the world, thereby reducing America’s long-term ability to resist Communism on the remaining Cold War fronts in Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America, which might then lead to the termination of key alliances and to major alterations to the trajectory of both the Cold War and the competition between the United States and China in the twenty-first century.
The only way by which the United States might have retained some of its power in Asia after abandoning Vietnam in 1965 would have been to fight somewhere else in Asia. Strong evidence, however, indicated that relinquishing South Vietnam in 1965 would have required the United States to fight under even worse conditions in the next place, as the Munich analogy foretold. At the beginning of 1965, the South Vietnamese armed forces were tying down roughly 150,000 Vietnamese Communist regulars and irregulars in South Vietnam. If the South Vietnamese armed forces were eliminated, Hanoi could use the North Vietnamese Army, the Viet Cong’s forces, and newly recruited Southerners to attack or foment insurgencies in other Southeast Asian countries. Even in South Vietnam’s darkest months of 1965, no other country on the Southeast Asian mainland except North Vietnam fielded an army as strong.
Had the United States abandoned South Vietnam in 1965, it most likely would have made a stand on the Indonesian archipelago, where American air and naval superiority could inhibit the concentration of hostile land forces and the movement of materiel, rather than on the Southeast Asian mainland. Indonesia was certain to be in a close alliance with the Indonesian, Chinese, and Vietnamese Communists if South Vietnam fell, which would require, as Dean Rusk had put it, that the United States fight “a major war against Indonesia.” …. America’s prospects in a war against Indonesia, nevertheless, would probably not be much better than in a war against North Vietnam, particularly one in which U.S. forces entered Laos or North Vietnam …. For Lyndon Johnson, marshalling domestic and international support for an attack on a sovereign government absent the assistance of its native people would be even more difficult than marshalling support for a war in Vietnam, and international confidence in the United States would already be low as a result of the forfeiture of South Vietnam. Johnson probably would have permitted Chinese and Soviet military aid shipments to Indonesia by water as he did in the case of North Vietnam. Indonesia had a population of 100 million, roughly six times that of North Vietnam, and from 1945 to 1949 Indonesian forces had fought a guerrilla war that cost the Dutch colonialists 25,000 casualties and ended with their departure.
Under the conditions prevailing in 1965, it is highly improbable that any previous Cold War President would have attached less value to Vietnam or been less willing to fight there than Lyndon Johnson. In early 1965, Harry S. Truman expressed full support for Johnson’s Vietnam policy, saying that Communist aggression had to be thwarted in South Vietnam to prevent the Communist aggressors from growing stronger and moving into other countries. Eisenhower surely would have acted more strongly had he been President in the years from 1961 to 1964 and thus would not have found himself in so dire a predicament as Johnson faced in 1965; the Communists, who respected and feared Eisenhower much more than they did Kennedy or Johnson, might very well have backed off in the face of threatening behavior from Eisenhower, as they had at Korea, the Taiwan Straits, and Berlin.
Eisenhower also had a different vision of how the United States should intervene, which he would soon make clear to Johnson. Once the Johnson administration had traveled into the precarious straits of 1965 and advertised its self-restrictions, nevertheless, Eisenhower repeatedly urged Johnson to hold on in Vietnam, even if it required using U.S. ground troops under adverse conditions. Said Eisenhower to Johnson during one White House meeting, “The U.S. has put its prestige onto the proposition of keeping Southeast Asia free. Indonesia is now failing. We cannot let the Indo-Chinese peninsula go.”John F. Kennedy, a firm anti-Communist who had viewed Southeast Asia as a critical region and had expanded the U.S. troop presence in South Vietnam twentyfold, no doubt would have wanted to fight to save South Vietnam in 1965. His like-minded brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, unequivocally advocated war at this time, despite his fierce contempt for Lyndon Johnson. Of America’s commitment to South Vietnam, the younger Kennedy said in early 1965, “I’m in favor of keeping that commitment and taking whatever steps are necessary.”
Chapter 16 is well written. The shift of world domination was at stake in the mid 60s. It would test America for another ten years.