US-Vietnam Conflict & Unipolar-Multipolar World Social Sciences Essay

US-Vietnam Conflict & Unipolar-Multipolar World 1
US-VIETNAM CONFLICT & UNIPOLAR-MULTIPOLAR WORLD
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US-Vietnam Conflict & Unipolar-Multipolar World 2 US-Vietnam Conflict & Unipolar-Multipolar World
1. WHY WAS THE US UNABLE TO WIN THE VIETNAM CONFLICT?
Typically, conflict is central to rise and fall of nations. The US, a world superpower, has been engaged in several key conflicts for different strategic purposes including, yet not limited to, assertion of military/political influence; elimination of potential military, political and/or economic anti-US hegemony; and supporting allies to fend off existing and/or potential threats. In Vietnam, US has a mixed, if not a failed, intervention still lingering in US memory decades on. The US had clearly a superior military power to communist forces in South Vietnam and, for that matter, local forces. A combination of factors contributed, however, to an unprecedented damage not only to US war casualties yet, more critically, to US pride as a superpower. If anything, Vietnam War is, in hindsight, a case in point of a major world power’s failure to invest military, political and diplomatic assets wisely in order to achieve victory in a war easily winnable should a more judicious approach to war had been adopted. For one, justifying war in a remote country has, more or less, been a mainstay in US politics. The justification of US failure to achieve victory in Vietnam War cannot, however, rely only on grounds of remoteness. The US has, in fact, gone to war in numerous instances in remote places – including, most notably, in Europe during WWII – only to change war power balance dramatically in favor of one or more allies. To justify why US was unable to win Vietnam War needs, however, a closer analysis of historical context, geopolitical landscape and forces at play defining course of war. This paper aims, accordingly, to explain if and when possible why US, superior as was militarily and politically, failed to achieve victory in a winnable war by exploring underlying factors, forces at play and geopolitical dynamics prior to, during and after conflict.
US-Vietnam Conflict & Unipolar-Multipolar World 3 The Vietnam War was a materialization of a bipolar world. Developing into a full-scale “hot war,” Vietnam War was a battlespace US and USSR competed over against a background of
global dominance. In justifying war, any war, politicians, military planners, national security advisors and intellectuals mobilize domestic and global public opinion in order to “sell” war and, once initiated or engaged in, sending forces to remote lands becomes a matter of national unity. Similarly, Vietnam War was sold by major intellectuals, including most notably Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington, as a matter of authority in US foreign policy and governing institutions in late 1960s and early 1970s (Gawthorpe, 2018). That is, war, including Vietnam War, according to Huntington – and, by extension, a long string of intellectuals – was a means to an ultimate end of global hegemony and dominance. The on-ground realities in Vietnam and beyond proved, however, n...