'Peace' and unification

Nixon’s first term from 1969 to 1973, which saw such remarkable foreign policy feats as the ‘opening to China’ and the signing of the SALT I agreement between the United States and the USSR, was constantly overshadowed by his attempts to find an ‘honourable’ end to the Vietnam War.

Meanwhile, the Nixon administration had commenced a programme dubbed ‘Vietnamization'. The basic idea was simple: the United States would gradually transfer the actual burden of the ground war to the ARVN by withdrawing its troops and simultaneously expanding its military aid. At one level, Vietnamization was a success, for the number of American troops did decline to approximately 140,000 by the end of 1971 with a concomitant decrease in casualty rates. Vietnamization thus partially removed one of the focal points of the domestic critique of the Vietnam War.

Vietnamization

President Nixon's policy of gradually withdrawing US ground troops from Vietnam while simultaneously building up the strength of the South Vietnamese armed forces. The policy was implemented starting in 1969 when there were more than half a million US troops in Vietnam; the programme of withdrawals was effectively completed in the autumn of 1972.

By 1972 it was clear that the Americans had to agree to a negotiated settlement. In fact, two sets of peace talks had been under way for years for, in addition to the official discussions that had commenced in 1968, Nixon's national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had embarked on a series of secret discussions with North Vietnamese representatives in the autumn of 1969. Both sets of talks were held in Paris but yielded few results until the second half of 1972. By that point, the continued stalemate on the ground, massive American bombing campaigns (including the so-called Christmas Bombings of December 1972), diplomatic pressure from China and the Soviet Union (on both the United States and North Vietnam), and the Nixon administration's willingness to allow approximately 200,000 North Vietnamese regulars to remain in the South combined to produce the Paris Peace Accords of January 1973. In this agreement the DRV promised not to support subversion in the South and the United States pledged to withdraw all remaining American troops from Vietnam. Kissinger and his major negotiation partner, Le Duc Tho, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize later in the year.

Paris Peace Accords

Signed on 27 January 1973, the Paris Agreements provided for a cease-fire in Vietnam, the withdrawal of remaining American troops and the return of American prisoners of war.

But the war was not truly over. The continued presence of North Vietnamese troops in the South created an untenable solution and in late 1973 the war flared up again. In this new war the Saigon government was at a decisive disadvantage. Although Nixon had made a personal promise to continue supporting South Vietnam with air power and military aid, Congress passed a series of resolutions that diminished the presidential war-making capabilities. The War Powers Act of June 1973 put strict limits on the length of time that the president could keep American troops abroad without Congressional approval, and in August Congress passed a bill that put an end to further military activity in Cambodia. Nor could Nixon, facing an all-out assault on his authority as the Watergate scandal unfolded, prevent the cuts in military aid to South Vietnam that Congress insisted upon. At the time of Nixon's resignation in August 1974, the North Vietnamese, who could count on continued Soviet (and, to a lesser extent, Chinese) aid, were already planning the final offensive against the South. Hanoi was undoubtedly further encouraged in November 1974 when Congress cut in half the Ford administration’s proposed military aid budget for South Vietnam in 1975: from $1.5 billion to $700 million.

The end of the ‘post-American’ Vietnam War was relatively quick. Beginning in early 1975 the North Vietnamese troops gradually advanced to take over a series of South Vietnam’s provincial capitals. Finally in late April the NLF and North Vietnamese troops entered Saigon, while Americans desperately airlifted their embassy staff and selected South Vietnamese officials to safety (Nguyen Van Thieu himself would live most of the rest of his life in the United States; he died in 2001 in Boston). Vietnam was finally unified and Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City (Ho Chi Minh himself had died in September 1969).

The war had been costly to all participants. The Americans lost 58,000 lives during their ‘longest war’.

Debating America's Vietnam War

Much of the historiographical debate on the Vietnam War has focused on the reasons behind American involvement in the conflict and the specific strategies and policies that led to the eventual withdrawal and communist victory. In short: why did the United States get involved in this conflict and why did Americans stay engaged for as long as they did?

One popular explanation stresses the role of bureaucratic inertia, the misreading of historical lessons and the lack of expertise on Indochina among American policy­makers. This viewpoint is exemplified, for example, in George Kahin's Intervention (New York, 1986). Others, most prominently the historian Gabriel Kolko in Anatomy of a War (New York, 1985), have stressed economic explanations. According to Kolko, the United States intervened in Vietnam because it was trying to uphold its economic dominance over the Third World.

Another major controversy has to do with the American failure to 'win' in Vietnam. Two opposing viewpoints dominate the literature. On the one hand, many have argued that the United States could have won had it followed a different military strategy. In particular, such authors as Harry G. Summers, Jr. in On Strategy: The Vietnam War in Context (New York, 1981) argued that the United States should simply have isolated and then invaded North Vietnam.Others,including the author of the most widely read survey of American involvement in Vietnam, George Herring, maintain that the strength of Vietnamese nationalism,the destructive American conduct of the war and the false premises of the containment doctrine lay at the heart of America's failure.