In the hall of the Vulcans.

• Author: Lieven, Anatol
• Position: 'Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama' & 'A Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan' - Book review

Marvin Kalb and Deborah Kalb, Haunting Legacy: Vietnam and the American Presidency from Ford to Obama (Washington, pc: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 355 pp., $29.95.

Dov S. Zakheim, A Vulcan's Tale: How the Bush Administration Mismanaged the Reconstruction of Afghanistan (Washington, De: Brookings Institution Press, 2011), 320 pp., $32.95.

Four decades on, Vietnam remains America's only major lost war. As prominent journalists Marvin and Deborah Kalb write in their new, quite gripping historical survey, this is a memory that has haunted U.S. policy makers ever since. Indeed, the defeat remains critical to the calculations of the Obama administration as it tries to extricate the United States from Afghanistan while preserving at least the appearance of some success--and the avoidance of obvious failure.

Yet the effects of Vietnam were in fact deeply paradoxical: America's position in the world changed little and in some ways was better for the war. In Indochina, victorious Vietnam was contained by Beijing. Meanwhile, the memory of the war meant that, very fortunately, Washington did not plunge itself into direct military interventions in developing nations in far-flung lands, which would have brought no gains, only further costs--and more bitter domestic divisions. It is true that the Soviet Union was emboldened and took advantage of the collapse of the Portuguese colonial empire in Africa more aggressively than it might otherwise have done, but this proved utterly irrelevant to the overall balance of power. The USSR collapsed, largely through the colossal military overstretch of its strategic competition with the United States.

The results of Vietnam for American thinking were of course much deeper. The Kalbs show how every subsequent U.S. decision on the use of force has been colored by the Indochina adventure--whether by a desire to avoid further costly entanglements or by a desire to "exorcise the ghosts of Vietnam" through the (vigorous and successful) wielding of hard power. It is true that after every successful U.S. military operation since 1975, parts of the media have raised the cry that "Vietnam is finally behind us." So far, they have always been wrong.

Ironically, while thinking about the lost war all the time, Americans also did not think about it nearly enough. This was most glaringly true of the U.S. armed forces. Rather than seriously considering how to do counterinsurgency better, the military essentially decided that it would never do it again. Never mind that America's enemies also have a role in deciding where and when Washington fights--and that the constitutional decision to wage war lies with the president and Congress of the United States, not the chiefs of staff. If they really object to a policy, senior officers have no recourse but to resign. In 2002-03, despite deep misgivings, many senior officers signally failed to let go...