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The prevailing approach to international conflicts has a dreary, formulaic aspect: exaggerate the severity of the threat to both international peace and America’s security; portray Washington’s adversary as the epitome of evil; and portray any beleaguered US client as both an innocent victim and a proponent of freedom and democracy.

The only thing Washington has learned in the time since is how to better sell wars to the American people.

https://mailchi.mp/libertarianinstitute/this-week-at-the-libertarian-institute-olhmx6gn9t-5848831-7hv9eay4br-5850237?e=de2d0eded6

-Kyle Anzalone

April 30th marked five decades to the day since America officially lost the Vietnam War.

In a new column, the Institute’s Ted Galen Carpenter explains that over the past 50 years, Washington failed to learn a single significant lesson from that failure:

“Although the bruising experience in Vietnam had apparently induced a somewhat greater level of caution – at least temporarily – among Washington’s political and policy elites with respect to a few specific cases, it had not caused any reconsideration of the foundational assumptions of US foreign policy.  In particular, the ‘1930s model’ still dominated elite perceptions about world affairs and America’s proper role in the international system: American opinion leaders were still obsessed with preventing the rise of ‘another Hitler.’  Closely related assumptions were that ‘appeasement’ never works, ‘aggression’ had to be stopped in its tracks as soon as signs of it appeared, and that complex, murky geopolitical struggles could be portrayed as stark conflicts between good and evil.  Despite the negative consequences of the Vietnam War, those attitudes remained intact.

[…]

The painful lessons of the defeat in Vietnam have been largely forgotten, and the current generation of US policymakers is at least as reckless as any of its predecessors.  The prevailing approach to international conflicts has a dreary, formulaic aspect: exaggerate the severity of the threat to both international peace and America’s security; portray Washington’s adversary as the epitome of evil; and portray any beleaguered US client as both an innocent victim and a proponent of freedom and democracy.  Washington’s dishonest propaganda regarding the war between Russia and Ukraine – both corrupt autocracies – is almost a caricature of that strategy.

The litany of Washington’s military interventions and proxy wars since Vietnam – Afghanistan, Lebanon, Grenada, Panama, Kuwait, Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan (again), Libya, Syria, Yemen, and most dangerous of all, Ukraine – all convey the extent to which US policy elites and much of the US public have remained impervious to the deeper meaning of the Vietnam debacle.  As one cynical observer said to me: ‘The only enduring lesson from the Vietnam War appears to be ‘don’t go to war in a country called Vietnam.’ Such a pervasive failure of policymakers and the American people to learn more substantial lessons may be that horrible conflict’s most tragic and lasting legacy.”

To mark the anniversary of the catastrophic failure in Vietnam, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft asked a number of notable foreign policy experts, “Was the Vietnam War a mistake or fatal flaw in the system?”

Historian and US Army vet Andrew Bacevich answered

See the rest here

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