Going to war might seem like the most expedited course to
achieving geopolitical aims, even when they in actuality predominately
economic in nature. To the extent that the Cold War was from the American
standpoint a means of keeping capitalism from succumbing to socialism (i.e.,
the state rather than private industry owning the means of production), the
American involvement in the civil war in Vietnam was a waste of effort, not to
mention lives lost. For the feared “loss” of Vietnam to communism turned out
only to be temporary.
“In the early years of a united Vietnam, the government
pursued disastrous experiments with collectivized farms and bans on private
enterprise. The country’s leaders changed course around the time the Soviet
Union collapsed, embracing the market economy, a pillar of the very system they
had fought to defeat.”[1]
The Soviet command-economy, based on quotas of goods rather than supply and
demand, was quite inefficient, and thus weak. It didn’t take long after the
Soviet Union’s collapse for the Vietnamese government to the Communist ethos of
conformity and the shunning of ostentatiousness that came with it.” Saigon, “a
free-wheeling bastion of capitalism before 1975, . . . returned to its roots
with vigor.”[2] Like
water flowing downhill, business interests resurfaced and came out on top.
In retrospect, was the Vietnam War worth it for anyone? (source: CNN)
The Vietnam-war policies of the Johnson and Nixon
administrations appear in contrast to have been efforts going upstream, against
the current, with Saigon ending up falling to the North Vietnamese after Nixon’s
resignation. Roughly 58,000 Americans and as many as three
million Vietnamese died in the “conflict,” which “on some level,” according to
the New York Times, was “about keeping Vietnam safe for capitalism.”[3]
As it turns out, the angst was for naught. All the swimming upstream was for
naught. With a bit of patience and faith in free enterprise (as well as the
power of money, given human nature), the Americans could have obviated war. The
interests of American business would have had the last laugh even without the
cashing-in by the defense-contractors during the “conflict.” War itself—the
urge to force an issue rather than let it play out with facilitating foreign
policies—may be over-rated, and thus over-relied on by clutching hands that are
impatient and trigger-happy.
[1]
Thomas Fuller, “Capitalist Soul Rises as a City Sheds Its Past,” The New York Times, July 21, 2015.
[2] Ibid.
[3]
Ibid.
