Fighting the last war: The 'Vietnam syndrome' as a constraint on United States foreign policy, 1975--1991

This dissertation is a study of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” a history of the continued power of the Vietnam War experience as a complicated symbol of previous American foreign policy and its effects on later policies through four presidential administrations. In the wake of the Vietnam War, the American cold war consensus lay in tatters and different Americans drew different lessons from the Vietnam experience, which affected debates over later policies. This dissertation focuses on specific episodes that evoked the Vietnam experience and featured struggles over its meaning. These episodes are the fall of Saigon, the Mayaguez crisis, and the Angolan civil war for Gerald Ford; Iran and the fall of Somoza in Nicaragua under Carter; Central America, Lebanon, and Grenada for Reagan; and Panama and the Persian Gulf War under George Bush.; Detailed treatment of these episodes illustrates several themes concerning the aftereffects of the Vietnam War. First, the simple definitions of the “Vietnam Syndrome” as an inappropriate, neo-isolationist drag on American foreign policy or as only a problem for quaking liberals do not hold, for the Vietnam experience affected Americans across the ideological spectrum. Thus, I argue that the syndrome can best be understood as the contentious fight to define the meaning of the Vietnam War in the conceptual space where the American cold war consensus once stood. Secondly, the Vietnam War functions ubiquitously and flexibly throughout the period as an analogy for contemporary policy debates. And thirdly, the ways in which presidential administrations dealt with the syndrome changed over time, culminating in the creation of a conceptual space under Reagan and Bush, within which contemporary military commitments could go forward, provided they did not run up against the limits of public opinion created by Vietnam. However, the success of some Reagan and Bush military commitments on their own terms does not indicate the end of the “Vietnam Syndrome,” for Reagan-Bush policies can best be seen as accommodations to, rather than transcendence of, the limits of the syndrome. Thus, the “Vietnam Syndrome” has outlived even the Persian Gulf War, which was fought with its demise in mind.