Vietnam War and America Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Vietnam War and America - Essay Example Was the Vietnam War a design politique of the US Government? Was it really a mistake on the part of US? Was it a ‘design’ and ‘mistake’ both? These are the questions we must consider. It will be interesting to quote noted political scientist and the author of Politics Among Nations Hans J. Morgenthau from his article in New York Times Magazine and web publication here: The address President Johnson delivered on April 7, 1965 at Johns Hopkins University is important for two reasons. On the one hand, the President has shown for the first time a way out of the impasse in which we find ourselves in Vietnam. By agreeing to negotiations without preconditions he has opened the door to negotiations which those preconditions had made impossible from the outset. By proposing a project for the economic development of Southeast Asia—with North Vietnam a beneficiary and the Soviet Union a supporter—he has implicitly recognized the variety of national interests in the communist world and the need for varied American responses tailored to those interests. By asking â€Å"that the people of South Vietnam be allowed to guide their own country in their own way.† he has left all possibilities open for future evolution of relations between North and South Vietnam. On the other hand, the President reiterated the intellectual assumptions and policy proposals which brought us to an impasse and which make it impossible to extricate ourselves. The President has linked our involvement in Vietnam with our war of independence and has proclaimed the freedom of all nations as the goal of our foreign policy. He has started from the assumption that there are two Vietnamese nations, one of which has attacked the other, and he sees that attack as an integral part of unlimited Chinese aggression. Consistent with this assumption, the President is willing to negotiate with China and North Vietnam but not with the Viet Cong. Yet we cannot have it both ways. We cannot at the same time embrace these false assumptions and pursue new sound policies. Thus we are faced with a real dilemma. This dilemma is by no means of the President's making. We are militarily engaged in Vietnam by virtue of a basic principle of our foreign policy that was implicit in the Truman Doctrine of 1947 and was put into practice by John Foster Dulles from 1954 onward. This principle is the military containment of Communism. Containment had its