Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam book cover

Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam

Author(s): Gareth Porter (Author)

Publisher: University of California Press
Publication Date: 20 Sept. 2006
Edition: 1st
Language: English
Print length: 422 pages
ISBN-10: 0520250044
ISBN-13: 9780520250048

Book Description

Perils of Dominance is the first completely new interpretation of how and why the United States went to war in Vietnam. It provides an authoritative challenge to the prevailing explanation that U.S. officials adhered blindly to a Cold War doctrine that loss of Vietnam would cause a "domino effect" leading to communist domination of the area. Gareth Porter presents compelling evidence that U.S. policy decisions on Vietnam from 1954 to mid-1965 were shaped by an overwhelming imbalance of military power favoring the United States over the Soviet Union and China. He demonstrates how the slide into war in Vietnam is relevant to understanding why the United States went to war in Iraq, and why such wars are likely as long as U.S. military power is overwhelmingly dominant in the world.

Challenging conventional wisdom about the origins of the war, Porter argues that the main impetus for military intervention in Vietnam came not from presidents Kennedy and Johnson but from high-ranking national security officials in their administrations who were heavily influenced by U.S. dominance over its Cold War foes. Porter argues that presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson were all strongly opposed to sending combat forces to Vietnam, but that both Kennedy and Johnson were strongly pressured by their national security advisers to undertake military intervention. Porter reveals for the first time that Kennedy attempted to open a diplomatic track for peace negotiations with North Vietnam in 1962 but was frustrated by bureaucratic resistance. Significantly revising the historical account of a major turning point, Porter describes how Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara deliberately misled Johnson in the Gulf of Tonkin crisis, effectively taking the decision to bomb North Vietnam out of the president's hands.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This will be the most important contribution to our understanding of the war in Vietnam since the Pentagon Papers. I am not exaggerating or speaking for effect. Porter challenges--by and large successfully--most of the accepted views, especially on the importance of the domino theory, the belief that U.S. policy was driven by a perception of its weakness on the world scene, and the belligerence of Johnson and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy."

From the Inside Flap

"This will be the most important contribution to our understanding of the war in Vietnam since the Pentagon Papers. I am not exaggerating or speaking for effect. Porter challenges by and large successfully most of the accepted views, especially on the importance of the domino theory, the belief that U. S. policy was driven by a perception of its weakness on the world scene, and the belligerence of Johnson and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy." Robert Jervis, author of American Foreign Policy in a New Era

From the Back Cover

"This will be the most important contribution to our understanding of the war in Vietnam since the Pentagon Papers. I am not exaggerating or speaking for effect. Porter challenges —by and large successfully—most of the accepted views, especially on the importance of the domino theory, the belief that U. S. policy was driven by a perception of its weakness on the world scene, and the belligerence of Johnson and, to a lesser extent, Kennedy."—Robert Jervis, author of American Foreign Policy in a New Era

About the Author

Gareth Porter is an independent scholar on issues of war and peace and an historian of the Vietnam conflict. From 1974 through 1976, while still working on his PhD dissertation at Cornell University, he was Co-Director of the Indochina Resource Center, Washington, D.C., which carried out research on the war and lobbied for an end to U.S. military involvement in Indochina. His first book, A Peace Denied, which told the story of the negotiation and implementation of the Paris peace agreement of January 1973, was published in 1975. He edited a two-volume documentary history of the Vietnam Conflict from 1941 onward in 1979. His analysis of the political system of united Vietnam, Vietnam: The Politics of Bureaucratic Socialism, was published in 1993.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Perils of Dominance

Name: Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam
Author: Gareth Porter (Author)
ISBN: 9780520250048

Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in VietnamBy Gareth Porter

University of California Press

Chapter One

The Imbalance of Power, 1953-1965

The U.S. path to a major land war in South Vietnam was closely related to a new global distribution of power. The United States's emergence, during the Korean War, as strategically dominant vis-a-vis the Soviet Union changed the relationship between the two superpowers so profoundly that no Cold War issue remained untouched. Once it became clear that the Soviet Union could not provide a counterweight to U.S. military power, the United States had a new freedom of action, which translated into more aggressive and interventionist policies.

For decades, no distinction was made between different periods in the diplomatic history of the Cold War, because no one had noted any marked change in the fundamental relationship between the two major antagonists. Since the late 1980s, however, a few scholars have established that a key turning point in U.S. Cold War policy occurred during the Korean War and that this was directly attributable to the achievement by the United States of clear-cut dominance over the Soviet Union in strategic weapons.

Prior to that U.S. military breakthrough, the East-West balance of power was ambiguous and unstable. Both sides viewed the power balance primarily in a European context, as major powers had done before World War II. Despite the U.S. atomic monopoly from 1945 to 1949, moreover, the role of nuclear weapons in the power balance was not yet clear to either Moscow or Washington. Notwithstanding the destructive power of the atomic weapons of that period, the U.S. military did not view them as capable of destroying either U.S. or Soviet society. As late as 1949, the idea that the United States could use atomic weapons either to fight a war with the USSR or to influence Soviet behavior was still seriously questioned by many U.S. officials. Furthermore, U.S. intelligence vastly exaggerated Moscow's ability to wage war beyond its existing security sphere in Eastern Europe.

During the 1949-50 period, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, the Chinese Communists established the People's Republic of China, and the USSR at first at least countenanced and then actively supported the North Korean invasion of South Korea. Meanwhile, the PRC gave military assistance to the Communist-led Viet Minh war of resistance to the French in Indochina. This period of Sino-Soviet initiative in the Cold War coincided with the high point of fear in Washington that the USSR might launch a "global war." Many U.S. military officials and some civilians felt that war with the Soviet Union was likely and that the United States should attack first. They also believed, however, that the United States could not take such a step until the balance of power was more favorable, particularly in regard to atomic weapons and strategic bombers.

The Truman administration had decided even before the Korean War on a massive military buildup that would decisively change both the reality and the perception of that distribution of power. Secretary of State Dean Acheson later recalled that the administration's response to the Soviet atomic bomb test in 1949 was to "make a colossal effort" at rearmament, creating "real power" in order to have a "psychological impact on the Soviets." According to NSC-68, the official blueprint for U.S. Cold War policy adopted by the Truman administration prior to the Korean War, the objective of the military buildup was to create a "situation to which the Kremlin would find it expedient to accommodate itself, first by relaxing tensions and pressures and then by gradual withdrawal."

The idea that a dramatic imbalance of military power would compel the USSR to withdraw from Eastern Europe vastly exaggerated its potential impact. Nevertheless, the massive rearmament carried out during the Korean War brought about a far-reaching transformation of U.S. Cold War policy and the dynamics of U.S.-Soviet relations. No one particular moment after the start of the Korean War can be identified as the point at which this transformation was complete. Rather, the period of the Korean War marked a transition from one distribution of power to another. By late 1952, the leading U.S. military and civilian policymakers of the Truman administration were already confident that the United States held a commanding superiority over the USSR in strategic forces. That conclusion led, in turn, to a new willingness in the part of the administration to make a military commitment to Iran and to pursue a much more aggressively interventionist policy within Iran, including a possible coup against the nationalist regime of Premier Mohammed Mossadegh, despite the risk of Soviet intervention and military confrontation with the USSR. The new policy was based on the confidence that the USSR would be deterred by fear of war with the United States.

The new imbalance of power altered the incoming Eisenhower admin-istration's definition of its diplomatic objectives as well. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles believed in early 1953 that the United States was now in a far stronger position to get the Korean armistice terms it wanted "in view of our much greater power and the Soviet Union's weakness currently." The Joint Chiefs of Staff similarly believed in late 1953 that the United States was now strong enough in relation to the USSR to fully assert its rights in Berlin, whereas they believed it had not been strong enough to do so in 1948-49. "They must be scared as hell," Eisenhower said of the Soviet leadership shortly before the end of the Korean War.

U.S. AND SOVIET POWER CAPABILITIES

The U.S. achievement between 1950 and 1952 of a commanding military superiority over the USSR, particularly in strategic weapons, was made possible by the much larger, more technologically advanced, and more efficient economy of the United States. The differences between the U.S. and Soviet economies were therefore a crucial factor in the changing distribution of power during this period. In 1953, the U.S. gross national product was 2.6 times larger than that of the Soviet Union, and ten years later, it was still almost 2.2 times larger, according to a more recent estimate. Even more important, the Soviet economy suffered from a huge "productivity gap" in relation to the U.S. economy, getting only an estimated 20 percent of the U.S. output per unit of labor and capital input using Soviet domestic prices, and 45 percent when dollars are used. And the Soviet technological lag behind the United States was estimated to be twenty-five years on average across all sectors, which further increased the disparity between the economic bases of the two states. Thus an index of effective economic power, combining GNP with productivity and technological prowess, would show the U.S. economic power base in the 1950s and 1960s to have been several times greater than that of the Soviet Union.

In theory, the stark contrast in their respective power bases need not have ruled out a balance of power between the two superpowers. Nations have a certain capability to mobilize resources for national defense or the exercise of international power, based on the degree of popular understanding and support for national objectives, but also on the relative cost of the objectives to the population. An increased mobilization of resources may be achieved, as Thomas J. Christensen has shown in the case of U.S.

Cold...

View on Amazon