Peace Efforts in Vietnam PEACE WITH HONOR, OR DECENT INTERVAL? Peace E

The discussion below is focused on the problem of getting the United States out of Vietnam in an acceptable way, once American combat forces were involved there on a large scale, not with the wisdom or otherwise of the United States having gotten "into" Vietnam in the first place. The prehistory, so to speak, of the Vietnam War is a very large and important subject in its own right -- too much so to justify addressing it in some cursory way within the scope of the following discussion, beyond noting its existence as a subject area.

In order to have a fruitful peace negotiation, it is necessary first of all to have a war (or recognized threat of war, which negotiations are intended to stave off, as in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations of recent years). The second necessity is that there be some mutually agreeable terms of settlement. Each of these preconditions are considered in turn below, though due to the circumstances of American participation in the Vietnam War the second condit

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braced states ranging from Sweden or Austria, to Finland, to Tito's Yugoslavia. The first two of these were unambiguously on the Western side of the Iron Curtain, and in many respects scarcely different in the 1960s from NATO allies. (Sweden might often take an annoying diplomatic line, from the point of view of American policymakers, but scarcely more so than NATO ally France.) Finland, while subjected to an undesirable level of Soviet diplomatic influence, enjoyed Western-style internal freedoms; while the United States had no wish to see other European countries "Finlandized," it was in a vastly different class from Poland or Hungary. Yugoslavia under Tito was a Communist authoritarian state, but firmly independent of Soviet influence, and the United States found this quite acceptable as a matter of practical diplomacy however regrettable in principle. None of these European analogies is directly applicable to the possible futures of South Vietnam as seen in the 1960s or early 1970s. Yet it was possible to imagine that South Vietnam might become something comparable to a neutralist equivalent to Thailand, open to Western influence without being part of American-dominated alliance structures, or that a united, Communist V
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Some common words found in the essay are:
South Vietnam, North Vietnamese, Vietnam War, North Vietnam, South Vietnamese, According McNamara, Johnson Nixon, January February, Richard Nixon, Peace Accords, south vietnam, north vietnamese, north vietnam, et al 1999, et al, al 1999, mcnamara et, mcnamara et al, vietnam war, south vietnamese, american troops, american policymakers, al 1999 pp, united north vietnam, paris peace accords,
Approximate Word count = 5941
Approximate Pages = 24 (250 words per page)

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