Vietnam Syndrome
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The Vietnam Syndrome is a term used by people with conservative and right-wing politics in the United States to describe US foreign policy after the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War. It is part of a conservative polemic on US foreign policy, and is primarily used in public political rhetoric.
The term Vietnam Syndrome was used by conservative Americans to describe what they saw as an undesirable pacifism on the part of the American public and the US government.
After the Vietnam war many political pundits believed that the public of the United States would oppose all future wars, due to the association of war in general with the specific social chaos, division and combat deaths of the Vietnam war. Conservative pundits believed that the public should not have held this view.
In response to the public reaction against war after the Vietnam war, conservative Americans made two claims. Firstly, that the Vietnam war could have been won, but that the home front had stabbed the Armed Forces in the back. Secondly, after the Vietnam war was over, some conservatives recognised that the opposition to the Vietnam war had been legitimate. These conservatives held that while opposition to the Vietnam war was legitimate, US involvement in future wars as a matter of principle should not be opposed.
Many conservatives believed that the US government acted in response to the perceived public opinion against war. According to this view, the US government avoided diplomatic and military intervention in the affairs of other states. By taking a passive foreign policy, conservatives argued that the US government avoided inflaming a public opinion which was biased against war.
It is the combination of an apparently passive US government foreign policy, an absence of wars and military interventions, and a public opinion apparently biased against war which conservatives dubbed the Vietnam Syndrome. As with many political descriptions which arise from the practice of politics, the term is not clearly defined in academic works, but was rather defined as a matter of convention and usage.
From the 1980s, key figures in United States conservative politics have repeatedly claimed that the Vietnam Syndrome has been "kicked". This claim is usually made after the United States has prosecuted a war that was seen by the US public to have been militarily or politically effective. The claim that the Vietnam Syndrome has been kicked means that members of government believe public opinion impediments to waging wars are no longer present.
For example, President George Bush claimed in 1991, after the Persian Gulf War, that "the ghosts of Vietnam had been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert." And yet when eighteen American soldiers were killed in the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, Bill Clinton quickly withdrew all US forces from Somalia.
Diplomat Richard Holbrooke called this event the emergence of a new "Vietmalia syndrome," one later reflected in Clinton's extreme reluctance to use military force in Bosnia.
It should not be confused with the Vietnam Veteran's syndrome or post-traumatic stress disorder.
External links
- George C. Herring's essay '9/11/01: The End of the Vietnam Syndrome?' (http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/0072417552/)