The Vietnam War- Were more problems created than solved?

Clem Stone

March 8th, 1965: Lyndon B. Johnson, president of the USA, has just sent troops into Vietnam. March 29th, 1973: President Nixon has just withdrawn his last military unit from Vietnam. What have the Americans achieved?

Going into the Vietnam War, America's main goal was to eradicate communism in North Vietnam. Since the end of World War II, the whole word had been divided into communist and capitalist blocs; this rivalry was known as the Cold War. The Americans and the Soviets never went to war directly. It was more a case of proxy wars, especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. However, the superpowers (the USA and the Soviet Union) would occasionally launch smaller wars of their own. For example, the invasion of Afghanistan, launched by the Soviet Union in 1979, and, most importantly, the American War in Vietnam.

In a school today, it is not uncommon to assess the success of a piece of work by first asking “what went well?”, then asking what could have gone better - “even better if”. In the case of the Vietnam War, essentially nothing went well and no problems were solved for the USA. Moreover, a whole new list of problems emerged for the USA.

One such problem was the US economy, which was severely damaged after the war. President Johnson was unable to raise taxes to pay for the war, driving the American government to unleash a harsh cycle of inflation. The USA, and the wider world, faced double digit inflation. It was Gerald R. Ford who made the most progress against inflation, of recent presidents. He managed to cut the figure in half, taking it from 11% in 1974 to 5.8% in 1976. Despite this figure, he did it with the longest and deepest recession since pre-World War II times. The annual rates of inflation were below 3% in 1967: the USA had not had these stable (below 3% annual increase) prices for 14 years. The inflation spiral stemmed from an outsized federal budget deficit and an overheated economy. President Johnson had ambitions to fight the war and begin new programmes, but did not have the necessary funding for either. The Nixon administration then attempted to reduce inflation by slowing down the economy, although it did not have much impact and prices began to rise again.

The Vietnam War also had detrimental effects on the US military’s morale for a certain amount of time. The military morale dropped as a result of the tense atmosphere and the harsh nature of the war. Some of the frustrated American soldiers violently lashed out against the Vietnamese, while some took their anger out on their own military leaders. Not only did the war lower US military morale, it also undermined the US commitment to internationalism, perhaps because the Pentagon had increased enemy casualty figures in order to cover up the fact that the country was engaged in a military stalemate.

The Vietnam War deeply divided Americans politically, having collateral effects on the Republicans and numerous consequences for the Democrats.The 1968 election was a crucial turning point for the Democratic Party. The aftermath of the war caused the Democrats’ united, confident, and longstanding commitment to the spread of liberal values throughout the world to erode, causing diffidence and hesitancy in the international arena within a time of growing discontent within the party. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson were unsuccessful in the Vietnam War, creating the conditions for a revolt within their party. As a result of these conditions, Hubert H. Humphrey’s candidacy in 1968 was doomed and Democrats turned against liberal assertiveness for the next quarter century.

Still today, the people of America remain deeply divided over the conflict’s meaning. A recent survey found that 53% of people believe that the war was a ‘well-intentioned mistake’, while 43% believe that it was ‘fundamentally wrong and immoral’. It was also the first ever broadcast war, meaning that people across the world truly realised the real horrors of war, turning many American civilians against the American government and army.

As well as affecting America, the war certainly took its toll on Vietnam. One of the biggest consequences of the war was that 2,000,000 innocent Vietnamese civilians were killed, a large number of them being children. One of the most notable massacres of civilians and horrific examples of violence in Vietnam was the My Lai massacre. On March 16, 1968, American troops occupied the village of My Lai, killing almost all of the village’s women, children, and old men. The massacre consisted of 500 deaths, including young girls and women who were raped and mutilated before being killed by the American soldiers. For a year, the American military covered up the truth of the event before it was reported in the American Congress in Washington, subsequently sparking a firestorm of international outrage.

Arguably the most notorious way in which civilians were harmed was through the use of ‘Agent orange’. Agent orange was a chemical that severely burnt people’s skin. It is believed that Agent orange affected 3,000,000 innocent people, including at least 15,000 people born after the war with serious birth defects. Exposure to Agent orange is also believed to be the cause of an abnormally high amount of miscarriages, skin diseases, cancer cases, and congenital malformations dating from the 1970s. It came out at the end of the war that 18 million gallons of herbicide containing dioxins had been sprayed on some 6 million acres - around 1/7 of South Vietnam’s total land area. As well as the use of ‘Agent orange’, the American military also dropped a large number of bombs on innocent Vietnamese settlements and villages; in fact more bombs were dropped on Vietnam during the war than on Germany and Japan combined in the whole of World War II. Not only did these bombs affect Vietnamese civilians, they also had deleterious effects on Vietnamese land. These bombs destroyed a significant amount of canals and dams that were installed by Vietnamese peasants to irrigate their farmland, as well as creating massive craters in the rice paddies and hillsides. By the end of the war, there was an estimated number of 21 million bomb craters in South Vietnam. Researchers Arthur H. Westing and E. W. Pfeiffer wrote in the Scientific American magazine that “From the air some areas of Vietnam looked like photographs of the moon.”

Overall, I would ultimately agree with the claim that ‘Wars between states create more problems than they solve’. This is due to the fact that if one was to use the Vietnam War for reference, it would provide evidence that as well as creating problems for Vietnam and brutally killing many innocent people - many of them children - it also created a significant amount of problems for America. Furthermore, America failed to achieve its goal of eradicating communism in South Vietnam.

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