The New Democrat

“On April 30, 1975, as North Vietnamese troops captured Saigon, helicopters rescued the last remaining Americans from the roof of their embassy in South Vietnam – an unforgettable manifestation of the ignominious U.S. defeat in the war in Southeast Asia that cost more than 58,000 American lives. Between 1962 and 1975, James Burnham frequently devoted his fortnightly column in National Review to a geopolitical analysis of the war in the context of the larger struggle between the West and the Soviet Union. Looking back at those columns forty years after the end of the war makes for interesting reading because Burnham, more so than any other contemporary observer of the war, mostly got things right.

Born in Chicago in 1905, Burnham, the son of a railroad executive, studied at Princeton and Oxford in the 1920s, taught at New York University from the 1930s (when he temporarily embraced Marxism) to the early 1950s, worked as an analyst for the OSS during World War II and as a consultant to the CIA in the early Cold War years, authored 12 books, and served as a columnist and editor at National Review until sidelined by a stroke in 1978. He died at the age of 82 in 1987.

In his best-known books – The Managerial Revolution, The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism, Containment or Liberation?, and Suicide of the West – Burnham portrayed the U.S.-Soviet struggle as a zero-sum contest for world supremacy, similar to the first two world wars of the 20th century. In fact, in the first sentence of The Struggle for the World Burnham called the U.S.-Soviet conflict “The Third World War,” which later became the original title of the National Review column that he began writing in September 1955. In 1970, he changed the title of his column to “The Protracted Conflict.”

Burnham understood that because of the unprecedented destructive power of atomic weapons, the Third World War probably would not be waged by direct mass armed clashes between U.S. and Soviet military forces in the principal geographic theaters of Europe and the Far East, but instead would likely be fought in peripheral regions and involve proxy forces of one or the other contestant. Indeed, one of his main criticisms of the U.S. policy of containment was that it failed to address indirect political and military aggression committed by Soviet proxies in the less-developed world – the precise challenge faced by the U.S. in the Vietnam War.”

Source:The Diplomat

I think the lessons of the Vietnam War are obvious. Don’t engage in a war you’re not prepared to or will do what it takes to win. It’s the Old Colin Powell doctrine of you go in with full force or you don’t go in. I’m paraphrasing there, but that is very close. So that would be one lesson, but another one would be don’t try to do for another country what they aren’t willing to do for themselves. Don’t fight other people’s wars especially when they aren’t willing to fight for themselves. The only player in the Vietnam War that was prepared to win was what use to be North Vietnam. The South was corrupt and expected America to win the war for them.

America took a half-assed approach to the Vietnam War. President Lyndon Johnson especially was more interested in looking tough on communism and not having the Right on his back when it came to foreign policy and national security. So he went in to Vietnam with bombs and a lot of personal and we took a lot of casualties, but since he was also playing politics with the war knew that there were only so many casualties that Americans were willing to take especially for fighting someone else’s war. And didn’t go into Vietnam strong enough to actually defeat the Communists and conserve the country for the Democratic but corrupt South.

The lessons from the Vietnam War are the same for the Afghan War and the War in Iraq that America was also involved in. That you can’t fight someone else’s war and expect to win when they are willing to fight for themselves. And hopefully the campaign to destroy to destroy ISIS won’t have the same lesson. That Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan, the Syrian rebels will step up to the plate and do what they have to defeat ISIS themselves with America’s help. Because Americans won’t be willing and are unable to win a war for someone else at this point that they aren’t willing to win themselves.