U.S. Involvement in Vietnam

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,

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ng to support such elections and by taking over the imperialist war which had been waged previously by the French against the poor and war-weary Vietnamese. As we read in Herring, Vietnam "was to be reunified (according to the Geneva Accords of 1954) by elections scheduled for the summer of 1956 and to be supervised by an international commission . . . " (Herring, 1986, p. 41). Instead of supporting such elections, the United States immediately proceeded to undermine the entire process: "Warning that Geneva had been a 'disaster,' . . . the National Security Council . . . recommended the use of 'all available means' to weaken the infant Vietminh regime in northern Vietnam . . . (Herring, 1986, p. 44). In fact, the United States was simply continuing its imperialist policies in Vietnam, which had previously consisted of strong support for the French in their war against the people of Vietnam. The United States, up to the point of the French defeat in 1954, had been paying for most of that French military effort. When the United States moved into a more active role after 1954, it was merely an inevitable part of the process, a passing of the imperialist torch from the French to the United States. Even if we accepted the arg
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Approximate Word count = 2488
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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