U.S. Guarantees: The Case of Vietnam Warfare carried out by the Communist forces in northern Vietnam resulted in an agreement, in 1954, by the French colonial authorities to withdraw from the country. Determined “to prevent the loss of northern Vietnam from leading to the extension of communism throughout Southeast Asia and the Southwest Pacific” (as Secretary of State John Faster Dulles put it), the United States initiated the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty and Protocol, known as SEATO. It was intended to protect the southern portion of Vietnam (the non-Communist region), as well as neighboring Cambodia and Laos, against Communist aggression by promising that any “armed attack” upon those regions would be regarded by the United States as “endanger[ing] its own peace and safety.”(5)

The gradual escalation of North Vietnamese attacks upon South Vietnam persuaded the United States to act upon its SEATO pledge. After the North Vietnamese attack a U.S. ship in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, President Lyndon Johnson for the first time dispatched American military forces on an offensive mission against the North. Pointing to America’s obligation “to assist nations covered by the SEATO treaty,” Johnson sought, and received, overwhelming Congressional approval (466 to 0 in the House, 88-2 in the Senate) for U.S. military action in Vietnam. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution authorized the president “to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.” It was, Johnson said, “the spirit that motivated us to give our support to the defense of Western Europe in the 1940s [that] led us in the 1950s to make a similar promise to Southeast Asia” — and that promise had to be kept. After all, Johnson once remarked, to surrender Southeast Asia to the Communists meant that “we would say to the world in this case that we don’t live up to our treaties and don’t stand by our friends. This is not my concept.”(6)

As direct American military involvement in the Vietnamese war increased, so did domestic opposition to the U.S. role. By the time Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, the Vietnam controversy had engulfed American society. Mass demonstrations against U.S involvement, combined with escalating criticism by Congress and the media of American policy, challenged the Nixon administration’s declared commitment to the protection of South Vietnam. In theory, Nixon felt as strongly about America’s guarantees to the South Vietnamese as had his predecessors. “If we suddenly reneged on our earlier pledges of support, because they had become difficult or costly to carry out, or because they had become unpopular at home, we would not be worthy of the trust of other nations and we certainly would not receive it,” he asserted. But at the same time, Nixon was anxious to extricate the U.S. from that increasingly unpopular war, even if that meant risking South Vietnam’s future. Henry Kissinger, the architect of the 1973 treaty that provided for the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, was quoted in 1968 as privately remarking that “the appropriate goal of the U.S. policy was a ‘decent interval’ — two to three years — between the withdrawal of U.S. troops and a Communist takeover in Vietnam.” (7)

The terms of the treaty to which Nixon and Kissinger agreed allowed the 120,000 North Vietnamese troops then occupying portions of South Vietnam to remain where they were. The South Vietnamese vehemently protested the treaty, but to no avail. In order to persuade the South Vietnamese to go along with the agreement, Nixon guaranteed them, in writing, that America would return if needed: “You have my absolute assurance,” he wrote to the South Vietnamese leaders on November 14, 1972, “that is Hanoi fails to abide by the terms of this agreement it is my intention to take swift and severe retaliatory action.” (8) On January 5, 1973, Nixon repeated that pledge, promising that “we will respond with full force should the settlement be violated by North Vietnam.”(9) Whatever Nixon’s ultimate intentions, his guarantees were soon made moot by Congressional action: all funds for U.S military action in Southeast Asia were cut off shortly thereafter. (10) Nixon himself was forced to resign the following year as a result of the Watergate scandal, and by the time the North Vietnamese were ready to begin their final conquest of the South, the guarantees of SEATO had given way to the reality of American withdrawal, and the promises offered by Nixon had been obviated by Congress.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 5th, 2002 and is filed under series.