This study will first argue that the United States should have been involved in Vietnam, will then argue that the United States should not have been involved, and will conclude with a summary of the arguments.
The United States should have been involved in Vietnam because it was necessary for the leader of the Free World to take a stand against Communism in a vitally strategic area of the world.
In the Boettiger-edited Vietnam and American Foreign Policy (published in 1968 and therefore covering only part of the war), Scalapino contributes an essay entitled "We Cannot Accept a Communist Seizure of Vietnam."
Writing in 1966, Scalapino writes, with respect to the United States and Vietnam, that "We face a challenge in Asia similar in its proportions to that which we faced in Europe 20 years ago . . . Only in 'the Asia-Pacific area' are we confronted with the immediate necessity of joining with others to create a political equilibrium---participating in the establishment of a balance of power if peace is to be underwritten" (Boettiger, 1968, p. 109).
Scalapino highlights an important point which was lost in the Vietnam War and in the accompanying debate which raged in the United States with respect to the validity and wisdom of American involvement in that war. That point is that the United States never sought to take over Vietnam, either South or North, but rather sought merely to allow the people, insofar as it was possible in that troubled and underdeveloped nation, to determine its own destiny.
Scalapino emphasizes this political goal and its underlying idealism when he writes that "Our general political support in Vietnam should be oriented less around a man, and more around a pattern of political evolution. The immediate thrust must be toward a mixed military-civilian Government, a working coalition of moderate elements from which can be drawn acceptable leaders and, eventually, a dominant party that can enlis...