The Legacy of Defeat in Vietnam
Gerald Ford was somewhat premature when he said in 1975 that "the war in Vietnam is receding into history", for it refused to recede in the Second Gilded Age, but correct when he observed that the government "cannot conduct sustained overseas combat without substantial citizen support and clearly stated objectives." Although he criticized the War Powers Act of 1973 for severely limiting the power of the executive to act in a crisis, he nevertheless stated the limits of the Post-Vietnam Consensus accurately and succinctly: he was part of the Never Again club on Vietnam.
In 1989, Bush, Sr. also called for a revival of bipartisanship in American foreign policy, that had existed in the Middle Cold War period between the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and although a new consensus did in fact exist after 1973, it was a purely negative one, placing restrictions of American foreign policy and military intervention that still held to some degree even after the bombing of the Twin Towers in 2001. As it turned out, the PVC itself was perhaps the final lesson of Vietnam, the lesson of what should not be done, and as much as Reagan or any other Second Gilded Age president, Bush, Sr. was bound by those limits, and indeed, brooded over them.
For dissenters and revisionists like Noam Chomsky, the lesson of the war was that the American empire failed after years of immense effort to extend its hegemony to Vietnam. It was a war of American aggression, not fought for reasons of national security, but to preserve the capitalist system and Western control of the Third World. During the Cold War, while the United States maintained the old empire (of inner empire) it had long since carved out in Latin America, it expanded its rule to Africa, Asia and the Middle East, always and everywhere combating "the threat that the rabble might enter the public arena." For revisionists, the Cold War was "just a particular phase in the five hundred-year Euroipean conquest of the world"-with the role of the colonies and peripheral areas "to provide services for the rich."4 In opposition to revisionism, Dean Rusk, countered that "economic policy is the orphan of national decision making" and that national security was the mainspring of foreign policy", a position which Chomsky and other revisionists attempted to refute. In the years 1973-2001, to be sure, with the U.S. pushing continually for trade agreements like NAFTA, business interests seemed to be front and center in foreign policy in a way that had had been nearly so evident during the Cold War.
In 1973, the mood of the country was one of defeat, alienation and decline, made even worse by Watergate and the OPEC oil embargo. As Gary Gerstle put it, "having lost a war, America now lost its international economic supremacy and the capacity to deliver affluence to its people." Even in 1973, though, defeated in Vietnam and its morale shattered at home, the United States government was still willing and able to lift its little finger and have the CIA overthrow the government of Salvador Allende in Chile. It was also able to keep aiding South Vietnam long after public and congressional support dried up, but no revisionism from the right in the future would ever succeed in making it a popular war or a heroic Lost Cause. Nor during the Second Gilded Age would the country fight anything but short, decisive, blitzkrieg-style wars, with minimal casualties and maximum use of air power, and any conflict that gave the appearance of turning Vietnam-like, such as Somalia or Lebanon, was quickly abandoned. The war in Iraq obviously violates this Post-Vietnam Consensus, with clear consequences for the administration that began it.
