Which theory of IR best explains the Vietnam War. Explain Vietnam in light of a theory.?

Question

I need to write a speach on which theory of International relations best explains the Vietnam war and the events involved. I was thinking that Balance of Power explains it, but I do not really know how, and I needed some help. I also need to talk about how The Iraq War is looking more and more like Vietnam and why. Any insight would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

The Domino Theory. The Soviets would export communism to countries one by one making them fall in their sphere. Eventually the US would be surrounded by a globe of hostile nations.

Answer 2

Balance of Power is a good start. Remember that the French, although they had granted Vietnam independence, were still funneling support to the VC. So were the Chinese. Meanwhile, American leadership at the time the fighting started were heavily invested in munnitions companies, much like the leadership today is invested in oil companies. At the time of the Vietnam Conflict, the invasion of Western Europe by the Soviet Union was a viable possibilty. The Soviets watched Vietnam very closely, and were convinced by the conflict that the West could indeed survive a prolonged ground assault in Europe, thus removing this from their agenda. Unfortunately, this is not the case in the Middle East, where potential enemies continue to expand their military capabilities.

Answer 3

It would be a lots better idea to do a Google or Yahoo Search on International Relations during the Vietnam War and what led up to the war and the same with Iraq.
The two wars are very dissimilar to each other. You will get lots better results on your question.

Answer 4

My condolences on your choice of a speech. Mainly because of one word. THEORY.....
All I can suggest to you is that you read subject materials on both wars and write your own Theory as that is all most writtings are. You can't change anything that has happened in the past so everything that is written already is mostly someone elses thereoy.

Answer 5

The Vietnam debacle was the result of the Domino Theory, which held that countries would fall one by one, creatign more momentum for worldwide communism, and we could not allow that to happen.

The War was based on a bad misunderstanding of the situation. It was not really about Communism, it was about the Vietnamese people wanting to get rid of colonial occupation. Sure, they rallied under the banner of Communism, but that was secondary. We should have let them learn for themselves that communism doesn't work, but by interfering we delayed that process.

Supporters of the Vietnam War kept us there long after it should have been clear that it was unwinnable because they could not back down to Communism or it would eventually come here. All the time we wanted to get them (the South) to fight for themselves, but they wouldn't. It was called "Vietnamization".

Now we have "Iraqification". We want them to step up and keep order in their country, but they aren't doing it. Just likekVietnam. Also like Vietnam, it is based on a bad misunderstanding of the situation. Supporters of the Iraq War are keeping us in there, thinking we're fighting terrorism, but it doesn't really have anything to do with the War on Terror. "We have to fight them over there, or we'll have to fight them here." But if we pull out, Iraqis WILL NOT come here. Because, like Vietnam, the insurgency is a nationalist expression of the will of the people to get rid of a foreign occupier. Failure to see that is keeping us there in an unwinnable occupation. But eventually, like Vietnam, we will cut and run. I hope sooner, to avoid pissing away any more lives based on a faulty understanding of what the reality of the situation is.

Answer 6

Containment of the Soviet Union...and their policy as expressed in the Communist manifesto ...

Answer 7

It's very easy on the surface to attempt an IR analysis of Viet Nam and Iraq; they remain two unique IR problems. To understand Viet Nam it is imperative to remember the issue started more than 600 years ago with the French and Catholic Church invading the Indochine peninsula to "convert the hostiles." The Viet Namese had functional tribal government far advanced to those percieved to be successful by the French. While trade was a surfactant issue since the Indochine peninsula is a prime rubber producing area, conversion was the key issue.

The French colonized the area until WWII when the Vichy government felt it necessary to abdicate the territory to the Imperal Japanese Army. This began Ho Chi MInh's path on removing the Japanese; to which he was successful. Viet Nam was then caught in the post WWII Cold War void where Ho Chi Minh had to make a decision about a big brother; France, The US or Communism. Since both France and the US were embroiled in Korea, Communism quickly responded to the needs of Ho and provided him arms, money and food aid. When France tried to rid their colony of the Communists, the decline began involving Ho using techniques learned in Stalingrad to defeat the set piece battle front of the French. Read anything by Bernard Fall to further understand this, specifically Streets without Joy.

Concurrently, JFK felt it necessary to defeat Communism in Viet Nam by using a Police Action involving special advisors to develop the military. These special advisors soon turned into full bore military units after the Gulf of Tonkin episode, specifically a staged event created by LBJ staffers to foment support for increasing troop presence. As we all know, it was in the 60's when this happened; it took Nixon to extricate the US from this political failure. In essence the troops on the ground had the VC defeated during Operation Rolling Thunder but the liberals were so vehemently opposed to the war that the efforts were stopped. Ho Chi Minh admist that if Rolling Thunder had proceeded for another 72 hours they would have capitulated the entire effort to the US. Thus Viet Nam was not about balance of power, it was about closing the chapter of history on a country that had been repeatedly involved with French Colonialism and the resultant damage to existing governments including deep seated multi generational corruption. The troops on the ground had the war won, but when substantially puntive Rules of Engagement were emplaced they were one sided rules and allowed the VC to reconstitute their support and eventually defeat the South Vietnamese military in the year following our departure. One could make a strong case for micromanagement and public outcry over a police action that had no clear defined outcome causing the US to depart Viet Nam without finishing the job.

Iraq is entirely different although the left leaning pundits of most poly sci departments want to embrace the failure as another Viet Nam. Iraq was a Congressionally mandated military action involving all Constitutional powers to declare war after it had shown with clear results Saddam Hussein was not going to adhere to the UN Mandates. Whether the intel adds up or not is moot, the humanitarian crisis in Iraq was identified by Amnesty International in 2002 as one of the worst in the world.

Two critical errors were made in Iraq by Paul Bremer that leads directly into the current situation. The first was his directive not to intercede with the looting after the ground invasion giving the locals sufficient leeway to capture heavy weapons and support to develop private militias. The second was the confinement and subsequent de-Ba'athification of the military. Had Bremer remembered his history he would have known that the current German and Japanese Army was founded on the prior Nazi and Imperial Army first under the Allied Command and then migrated over to mature leadership vetted against fomenting insurgency. The case is now made that Bremer instilled the insurgency by creating a vast pool of unemployable well trained military people who found sufficient reason to beleive that the invasion would be of no benefit to them or their families.

Unlike Viet Nam, the rules of engagement are not prohibitive and the enemy is a religiously driven group of zealots looking to establish a large fundamentally Islanic state with the president of Iran as the Caliph. The group is not fighting under the same auspices as Ho Chi Minh (nation survival) but out of hate for non believers (Nazi's, Communists and JIA). Thus you cannot table a similar comparison in any manner regardless of how much the Poly Sci community would like to. The insurgency in Iraq is tied to extremism; which uses ideology and ignorance as its motivation and muse. The insurgency is limited to the familial and territorial holdings of the Mahdi Militia and the Sunni triangle. It is a movement using religion and the benefits of dying as glorious much like the Samurai code of the JIA and choice of Nazi Officers to commit suicide over capture. In order to defeat the insurgency one must first destroy the percieved value of glory through death.

There is no relative correlation. Viet Nam caused more deaths on a daily basis to US Troops and civilians than at any time in Iraq. The Iraqi government is growing from a hositle dictatorship into an emerging democracy. One can provide an overlay of the systemic insurgency that persisted in the US after the Revolution up through the first ten years after the Civil War to that of democracy emerging in Iraq and those bent against it for loss of personal gain.

in closing, the attempts to compare Viet Nam to Iraq are nothing more than attempts at discrediting the current administration on a plain readily available yet very doubtful in its authenticity. A balance of power is not an all encompassing explanation; rather it is a situation that has migrated from a liberation effort into an action where defeat of the insurgents is absolutely necessary to preclude the establishment of a far more demonic and tyrannical dictatorship based upon the Taliban style government of Afghanistan.