Vietnam and Ukraine: Is the Establishment Warning Us?

One of my favorite publications is Foreign Affairs, published by the Council on Foreign Relations. I call it “the Establishment talking to itself.” Most of it is just cheerleading for the Establishment view. But they also publish counter-views, which can be revealing. You don’t have to pay to see what they’re up to. You can subscribe to their newsletters for free, getting the gist of their main articles. And you get a couple free reads a month.

They just went back to 1969 to republish a telling article, “A Viet Nam Reappraisal: The Personal History of One Man’s View and How It Evolved,” by Clark Clifford. FA’s intro reads – note the parallels to the Ukraine War:

Each Sunday this summer, we’re sharing an essay from the archives that provides a rare first-person account of history as it unfolded. This week, we’ve chosen a 1969 essay by Clark Clifford, who served as secretary of defense under President Lyndon B. Johnson, and turned from a staunch defender of the Vietnam War into a leading advocate of de-escalation. Clifford chronicles the transformation of his thinking, tracking “the intimate and highly personal experience of one man” as he “plodded painfully from one point of view to another, and another, until he arrived at the unshakable opinion he possesses today.”

A consummate Cold War-era Washington insider and presidential adviser, Clifford had long supported U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He had been in the room with Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson as they escalated American participation in the conflict throughout the 1950s and 1960s, fueled by the fear that a communist victory in South Vietnam would prompt the fall of other countries in the region. In 1968, with U.S. casualties mounting and public support for the war effort flagging, Johnson appointed Clifford to his cabinet and charged him with reevaluating the country’s position on Vietnam.

Once in the job, Clifford quickly had to confront the realities of a bloody guerilla conflict and hazy U.S. war aims. One of his realizations was that none of Vietnam’s neighbors were sending troops in support of South Vietnam: “If the nations living in the shadow of Viet Nam were not now persuaded by the domino theory, perhaps it was time for us to take another look.” Clifford’s concerns deepened as he witnessed the U.S. military increase its deployments without any clear endgame. “‘Will 200,000 more men do the job?’ I found no assurance that they would. ‘If not, how many more might be needed—and when?’ There was no way of knowing.” 

By the time of writing, in 1969, Clifford was out of office, but the war in Vietnam was still raging. In the pages of Foreign Affairs, Clifford urged Washington to withdraw, writing that “American military power cannot build nations, any more than it can solve the social and economic problems that face us here at home.” U.S. forces would not leave Vietnam for another four years—by which point more than 58,000 U.S. soldiers and as many as two million Vietnamese civilians had died.

So far, no American forces have died in Ukraine. But that easily could happen as the Ukraine military’s ongoing offensive continues to falter.

Clifford was, as FA notes, “A consummate Cold War-era Washington insider and presidential adviser.” He was what’s known in Washington parlance as a “fixer.” He moves in and out of the public and private sectors, solving problems, sometimes in a shady way, while racking up a fortune. He also works well with the other party. Others in recent decades have been Bob Strauss and Leon Panetta for Democrats and Jim Baker and George Shultz for Republicans.

You might remember how, during the “hanging chad” crisis in the 2000 election, Baker swooped in to Florida and arranged for local GOP officials and the courts to make sure Bush II won. He also was the second half of the (Jimmy) Carter-Baker Commission of 2005, which recommended much tighter election rules than have prevailed in recent elections.

In 1969, Clifford could critique the war because a Republican administration had come into office, and LBJ’s War became Nixon’s War. Nixon should have just bailed on the war. As with LBJ, Nixon and his National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger – who just turned 100! – believed there was no way the war could be won. Then they should have ended it. Instead, although Nixon did wind down the war, it took four years and continued to rip up the country and destroyed his administration, while killing thousands more American boys and hundreds of thousands more Vietnamese.

But here’s Clifford himself from 1969:

Viet Nam remains unquestionably the transcendent problem that confronts our nation. Though the escalation has ceased, we seem to be no closer to finding our way out of this infinitely complex difficulty. The confidence of the past has become the frustration of the present. Predictions of progress and of military success, made so often by so many, have proved to be illusory as the fighting and the dying continue at a tragic rate. Within our country, the dialogue quickens and the debate sharpens. There is a growing impatience among our people, and questions regarding the war and our participation in it are being asked with increasing vehemence.

Views on Viet Nam have become increasingly polarized as the war has gone on without visible progress toward the traditional American military triumph. There remain some who insist that we were right to intervene militarily and, because we were right, we have no choice but to press on until the enemy knuckles under and concedes defeat. At the other extreme, and in increasing numbers, there are those who maintain that the present unsatisfactory situation proves that our Viet Nam policy has been wrong from the very beginning. There are even those who suggest that our problems in Viet Nam cast doubt on the entire course of American foreign policy since World War II. Both schools share a common and, as I see it, an erroneous concept. They both would make military victory the ultimate test of the propriety of our participation in the conflict in Southeast Asia.

I find myself unable to agree with either extreme.

Said like a consummate Washington insider. Again, notice the parallels to today’s Ukraine quagmire. Clifford also had witnessed how Nam chewed up the previous election. A peace candidate, Sen. Eugene McCarthy, almost won and New Hampshire, forcing LBJ to quit the race. Then another peace candidate entered and would have won the nomination, but was shot – Robert F. Kennedy.

His son, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now is gaining traction in the 2024 race. Biden’s people can see that. Then there’s Trump, saying he could end the war in a day. The Orange Monster is out there, like a golem in some Hollywood horror flick, implacable, unstoppable even after two indictments with more coming. If the war starts going badly, more and more Americans in 2024, as in 1968, are going to be demanding peace.

Meanwhile, most of Trump’s Republican rivals – Pence, Haley, Christie, Scott – are attacking him for being weak on Russia, while blasting Biden for not helping Ukraine enough. Although DeSantis, the leading rival, remains enigmatic. But Trump, whatever you think of him, seems to be the only one warning of the chance of nuclear war, which definitely is real. Renowned reporter Seymour Hersh just posted a story on how real it is: “PARTNERS IN DOOMSDAY: As Ukraine begins a counter-offensive and Biden's hawks look on, new rhetoric out of Russia points to a revival of the nuclear threat”

If you can’t get it for free, his Substack is worth the subscription fee. He writes:

Biden is believed by some in the American intelligence community to be convinced that his re-election prospects depend on a victory, or some kind of satisfactory settlement, in the Ukraine war. Blinken’s rejection of the prospect of a ceasefire in Ukraine, voiced in his June 2 speech in Finland that I wrote about last week, is of a piece with this thinking.

Putin should rightly be condemned for his decision to tumble Europe into its most violent and destructive war since the Balkan wars of the 1990s. But those at the top in the White House must answer for their willingness to let an obviously tense situation lead into war when, perhaps, an unambiguous guarantee that Ukraine would not be permitted to join NATO could have kept the peace….

Meanwhile, there has been an escalation in rhetoric about the war and its possible consequences from within Russia. It can be observed in an essay published in Russian and English on June 13 by Sergei A. Karaganov, an academic in Moscow who is chairman of the Russian Council on Foreign and Defense Policy. Karaganov is known to be close to Putin; he is taken seriously by some journalists in the West, most notably by Serge Schmemann, a longtime Moscow correspondent for the New York Times and now a member of the Times editorial board. Like me, he spent his early years as a journalist for the Associated Press. 

One of Karaganov's main points is that the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine will not end even if Russia were to achieve a crushing victory. There will remain, he writes, “an even more embittered ultranationalist population pumped up with weapons—a bleeding wound threatening inevitable complications and a new war.”

The essay is suffused with despair. A Russian victory in Ukraine means a continued war with the West. “The worst situation,” he writes, “may occur if, at the cost of enormous losses, we liberate the whole of Ukraine and it remains in ruins with a population that mostly hates us. . . . The feud with the West will continue as it will support a low-grade guerrilla war.” A more attractive option would be to liberate the pro-Russian areas of Ukraine followed by demilitarization of Ukraine’s armed forces. But that would be possible, Karaganov writes, “only if and when we are able to break the West’s will to incite and support the Kiev junta, and to force it to retreat strategically.

“And this brings us to the most important but almost undiscussed issue. The underlying and even fundamental cause of the conflict in Ukraine and many other tensions in the world . . . is the accelerating failure of the modern ruling Western elites” to recognize and deal with the “globalization course of recent decades.” These changes, which Karaganov calls “unprecedented in history,” are key elements in the global balance of power that now favor “China and partly India acting as economic drivers, and Russia chosen by history to be its military strategic pillar.” The countries of the West, under leaders such as Biden and his aides, he writes, “are losing their five-century-long ability to siphon wealth around the world, imposing, primarily by brute force, political and economic orders and cultural dominance. So there will be no quick end to the unfolding Western defensive and aggressive confrontation.”

As happened in the U.S. Civil War and World War II, minor skirmishes at the beginning of a war can turn into cataclysms. This time with nuclear weapons.

But perhaps Clark Clifford’s warning from the past can start us moving away from Armageddon.