A strategic lesson from our warming relations with Vietnam

President Joe Biden’s Vietnam trip this weekend, at which he proclaimed Vietnam’s elevation to the status of “comprehensive strategic partner,” is an achievement worth celebrating. It is a major step forward for the president’s effort to build partnerships and alliances intended to isolate China and coordinate efforts against it.

Yet it should also give us pause. Vietnam’s Communist government was once so feared that, for at least two decades, the United States was willing to spend vast sums, kill countless people and subject our own armed forces to tens of thousands of casualties to stop it in its tracks. The “Best and the Brightest,” to borrow a title from David Halberstam, were all in agreement that this was something we had to do. Halberstam’s ironic term referred to Washington’s civilian and military leadership and the nation’s top national security elites. They clearly were wrong.

Communist Vietnam was never a threat to U.S. interests; now our two countries are good friends. The question we analysts must now ask is what we might be getting similarly wrong today. 

The mistakes made by the Best and the Brightest reflected their ignorance of the region and of Vietnamese nationalism. They reflected the dangers of groupthink. They reflected what happens when viewing complex situations through polarizing lenses that divide between “good and bad” and “friend and foe,” as if everything was either one thing or the other. We made similar mistakes in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when we launched the so-called Global War on Terrorism, which featured several blinkered misadventures (Iraq, Afghanistan) and prompted military efforts across the globe that all tended to betray similar tendencies toward ignorance and black-and-white thinking.

It is imperative that those of us in the national-security world scrutinize our present commitments and consensuses. Are our Best and Brightest once again getting it all wrong? 

The Global War on Terror persists, albeit in a brainless zombie mode, animated perhaps more by bureaucratic inertia and path dependency than any real will. Extant programs with money earmarked to fund them are fantastically difficult to terminate. Now we are more preoccupied by Russia and the war in Ukraine, and, of course, China. 

The Ukraine war appears hard to argue with: Russia’s invasion in 2014 and the full-scale invasion of February 2022 were naked acts of aggression on the part of a revanchist regime eager to reassemble an empire that shattered like Humpty Dumpty, to the joy of its former imperial subjects. Which of course does not mean we should refrain from asking ourselves at every step if we are getting it all wrong, or where the conflict might be leading us. 

China is another matter. The fact that China, too, is a revanchist, revisionist power eager to assert itself and shape geopolitics to its liking is beyond dispute. The question is what to do about it. Until not too long ago, the Best and the Brightest thought the best way was to boost trade with China and, in effect, invite China to eat our lunch and then steal the recipes and buy the restaurant. This was the official policy of several presidents from Reagan to Obama. Some disputed this policy, but they were marginalized. Then, suddenly, beginning toward the end of the second Obama administration, the Best and the Brightest had a change of heart and reversed their position. 

Now we are told the government must muster a grand strategy aligning all aspects of U.S. national power to contain the Chinese and strengthen a coalition against them, of which Vietnam is a prize member. The Republican Party, once the champion of the “let them eat our lunch” strategy in the name of free trade and too much faith in liberalism’s triumph, now preaches protectionism and hammers Biden for being insufficiently hawkish. Because being anti-China has emerged as one of the few areas on which both parties agree, one can expect to see competitive China-bashing in the coming election season. Whichever party wins, U.S. China policy will be antagonistic. 

Rather than propose an alternative policy, I simply wish analysts, pundits and policymakers to remember Vietnam, and think hard about how to avoid past mistakes and get this right. Groupthink is little different from mob think. We are unlikely to have any more of a nuanced understanding of China or the Indo-Pacific than our forebears did during the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administrations.

The stakes could not be higher. Let’s disavow jingoism and try thinking for once. 

Michael Shurkin is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center.