Realism and Vietnam

So.  Vietnam.




While looking up articles to support this post I came across this one, which nicely sums up three of the views I knew of (the Vietnam War was a crime, the Vietnam War was justified and we were betrayed on the homefront, and that the Vietnam War was a tragic mistake brought about by U.S. leaders who exaggerated the influence of communism and underestimated the power of nationalism)...and added a fourth I hadn't heard of before.  This article makes it clear why I support the third view.  As for the new fourth one, I'm not sure I buy it.  Sure, after the fact it seems to make sense of what was going on.  For the thought processes at the time, though, it doesn't touch on a key argument used to support our involvement in Vietnam.




Namely domino theory.  The belief that if one nation fell to communists, all the neighboring nations would also fall.  The Wikipedia article linked above gives the evidence both in favor and against this theory.  Unsurprisingly, I'm most persuaded by the fact that Thailand, Indonesia, and other large Southeast Asian countries didn't fall after the 1975 end of the Vietnam War.  My opinion was probably also shaped by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which really made the communist threat seem overblown.




With regards to nationalism, it definitely seemed more important than communism in shaping Vietnamese resistance.  Ho Chi Minh's biography again sums up what I learned in college, particularly this bit:




He [Ho Chi Minh] joined a group of Vietnamese nationalists in Paris whose leaders were Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Văn Trường. They had been publishing newspaper articles advocating for Vietnamese independence...Following World War I, the group petitioned for recognition of the civil rights of the Vietnamese people in French Indochina to the Western powers at the Versailles peace talks, but was ignored. Citing the language and the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, they expected U.S. President Woodrow Wilson to help remove the French colonial rule from Vietnam and ensure the formation of a new, nationalist government.




Our feared enemy cited our own Declaration of Independence and the Wilsonian ideals of self-determination...and became further radicalized when we failed to live up to those ideals.




You could almost say we lost our power and influence because we gave up on an idealistic foreign policy.  Almost. I'm too much of a classic realist to go that far. (I really liked Hans Morgenthau's work, though I think I was a classic realist before I read Politics Among Nations).




One more thing.  No institution is monolithic.  Building up the communist opposition meant acting as though China and the Soviet Union were a single communist entity.  That's part of the genius behind Nixon's visit to China.  I am not entirely sure it was wise in the long run given current events, but I do think it's a better strategy than letting your imagination create a threat that isn't quite as perfect as we built it up to be.


I suppose it's a bit like diamonds - they all have fractures, though some have less than others.  An expert may figure out where to tap the diamond to fracture it entirely...

The Quest for Security and Predictability.

In international relations there's this theory about what causes wars.

A lot of theories, actually.  But I wanted to talk about one in particular.  There's a theory that the nations at the top want to keep their status.  So they do things to try to make themselves feel more secure.  Like England before WWI, insisting that they should have the largest navy in the world.  Meanwhile, up and coming nations are asserting themselves andwanting to have a say that is commensurate with their power.  So there's a desire to disrupt the status quo, especially if that status quo fails to recognize their gains.  (Germany, deciding to build a larger navy...which England felt threatened by, so you had a bit of a naval arms race.  Obviously a lot more went into WWI than that, but once Germany became a united country and started asserting themselves as the powerhouse they were on continental Europe it caused tension with England.)

This theory fits with a psychological study...namely that we tend to exaggerate how much something hurts us and minimize how much our actions hurt others.  Someone takes out your eye, you round up a couple of buddies to go kill the other.  Escalating the response, even though it felt natural and right to you.  Hence the reason why "an eye for an eye" was a way of limiting responses and preventing an escalation into a blood feud.

I brought it up because, bloodiness aside, I think the same feelings affect the quest for economic security.  Someone who is near the top (but not totally at the top) will do what they can to try to feel more secure.  Find some measure of safety in the world.  This gets even more confusing and messy when you consider the quite natural desire to take care of your family.  To pass the benefits on to your children.  The janissaries were a big deal partly because they were forbidden to have families.  It gave the Ottoman Turks a force that was dedicated to the state and less likely to abuse their power for selfish interests.  But it's not normal or natural for people to do that, so eventually they wound up having families anyway...and the normal incentives came into effect.  Janissaries would try to let their sons join, too.  Natural...and turned it into something that was hereditary.  Corrupt.  And an obstrution to reform.

The quest for security is sometimes at odds with what we claim are economic efficiency.  Or rather, it can create situations that make it harder and harder for those not already born to privilege to gain access to it.

This isn't meant to say it's good or bad.  For example, the book on economics I've been reading talked about sticky prices...sticky wages, more specifically.  From a human perspective it makes perfect sense to want this.  I have a mortgage.  Bills.  It would be hard to pay those if I couldn't count on at least a certain minimum income, so if my wages adjusted regularly I couldn't plan for anything. 

From an employer side, 'perfect' economics aren't always so good either.  The author brought up the economic situation in Detriot before Ford decided to raise wages for his employees.  It was a 'perfect' economy in which labor could move around as needed to where the work was...except that the business paid a lot when there was high turnover.  Constant loss of resources as you had to train new people, for example.

Heck, Rockefeller became a big deal because he tried bringing some stability to the oil industry.  The constant boom and bust made life very uncertain, you never knew if you were going to make it or implode.

So some stability is necessary...and too much can make a system ossify.  Harden the control those on the top have, prevent up and comers from having a chance.  (It really is Hope for the Flowers all over again.)

This is pretty important for some of the things I want to explore.  Do all the hedges and securities people put in place to maintain their wealth and status have a side effect of locking into place the status quo?  Does doing so open us up to greater disruption on a larger scale?


The Black Swan theory, in a nutshell. All the efforts at creating security actually reduce our resilience and the robustness of the system, making people feel more safe while actually creating a system at greater risk than ever.

Again, it's not that some group is 'good' and another is 'bad'...it's that the decisions each individual makes, the ones that seem good and appear likely to promote security in the long run...all of them can actually create risks that catch us off guard, and make things instable in the long run.