The background to defeat

At the end of World War II, the British army occupied the southern part of Vietnam, which returned under the control of the French government in 1946. The northern part of the country, initially occupied by Chinese troops, was later left to the Viet Minh, led by Ho Chi Minh. Paris's immediate goal, however, was to reunify the region into a single nation; France therefore decided not to recognise Hanoi, it declared the virtual unity of Vietnam under Bao Dai's control, and with the bombing of Haiphong, began military operations against the North.Footnote ¹¹

French policies were supported by Washington which, in spite of its traditional anti-colonialism, was willing to back a European colonial power in Indochina as a means to defending the ‘free world’ from the ‘communist threat’.Footnote ¹² Indeed, according to NSC document 64 of February 1950, this region was considered a strategic area for the defence against communism in Southeast Asia. The document stated that were only one of the states in the region to fall under the Soviet or Chinese shadow, the whole of Southeast Asia (at the time, Thailand and Burma were the two main US concerns) would become a periphery of the communist world. With this document, the so-called ‘domino theory’ became fully formed. Therefore, it is no surprise that, as early as 1953, more than 40 per cent of French military expenses were met by the US;Footnote ¹³ the domino effect could only be blocked at the outset, given that once the first domino fell there would be no possibility of stopping the other pieces toppling.

Despite Anglo-American efforts, the failure of such a strategy became tragically clear in the spring of 1954, when Northern Vietnamese troops attacked the French military base of Dien Bien Phu. From the beginning of the siege, the French had recognised that their defeat was inevitable and so they decided to accept the Russian proposal to hold a peace conference in Geneva in April. A final agreement was reached in July of that same year – two months after the capture of Dien Bien Phu by the army led by General Giap – and this sanctioned the division of Vietnam into two countries, along the seventeenth parallel.Footnote ¹⁴ The agreement also avowed that elections would be held within two years to decide on the future reunification of the country.

However, in view of the importance Indochina had in the framework of the new American foreign policy doctrine, the US could not accept any negotiations on Vietnam. They decided, therefore, not to take part (at least officially) in the Geneva Conference and, after October 1955, to support Ngo Dinh DiemFootnote ¹⁵ in eliminating the 1956 referendum.Footnote ¹⁶ Such a goal was easily attained, but at an extremely high political cost. The consequences emerged swiftly: a broad and heterogeneous oppositional movement against the Diem government began to challenge the viability of the regime. This movement was formed by Buddhists, peasants and, above all, communists from the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NFL), whose armed wing Americans derogatorily nicknamed Viet Cong.

It was in those years that Morgenthau's interest began growing for a region over 10,000 miles away from the American continent, but which was becoming one of the central issues of American foreign policy. In 1955, during a six-week journey to the Far East, he visited Vietnam as an observer for the Department of Defense. The direct experience of the tyrannical policies of Diem's regime immediately convinced him that the country was at serious risk of civil war. In an article published in the Washington Post in February 1956, titled Background to Civil War Footnote ¹⁷ and whose content later turned out to be prophetic, Morgenthau grimly warned that Diem's repressive measures would push the Vietnamese, and in particular, the peasants, into the hands of the communists. He described Diem as ‘a man whose genuine moral fervor is beyond question, yet who acts with a craftiness and ruthlessness worthy of an Oriental despot’, who was likely to give ‘to his people little to choose between the totalitarianism of the north and his own’.Footnote ¹⁸ In the following passage Morgenthau recalls his thoughts after visiting Vietnam:

The fallacy of universalism: the failure of containment in Asia

Morgenthau's opposition to the Vietnam War would be principally expressed in a series of articles published from 1961 to 1965. After this period, he wrote mostly about the destructive effects of the war on American domestic politics and on the role and functions of intellectuals in society.

The origins of his opposition to US intervention in Indochina can be traced to two articles published in 1950, where he clarified the difference between the political conditions in Europe and Asia, and the subsequent need to undertake appropriate actions for the two different contexts.Footnote ²⁰ In his view, Washington had decided to intervene in Indochina on the basis of foreign policy principles implicit in the Truman doctrine and put into practice from 1954 by the then Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, that is, the military containment of communism on a global scale.Footnote ²¹ Such a choice, which would clearly and undeniably have proven to be successful in Europe, was doomed to failure given that the situation in Southeast Asia was so profoundly different from the European one. According to Morgenthau, the US should have responded with resolution to the Soviet's territorial ambitions in Western Europe, since Moscow was a power with intrinsically imperialistic objectives and, thus, had to be treated as such. On the contrary, in Southeast Asia a genuine national revolution was taking place, in which the aspirations of a number of oppressed populations – among which the Vietnamese – were largely ahead of Marxism, and had little or nothing to do with the international communist threat.Footnote ²² Here is his description of the origins of the insurgency in the South:

Only if communism had been an instrument of the imperialism of a foreign power, such as the Soviet Union or China, would it then represent a threat for the national interest of the US. The American foreign policy instead was guided by the idea that the conflict in South Vietnam was a war by proxy of the North, planned by China and the Soviet Union. Washington regarded the events in Berlin, Korea and Saigon as part of a single global strategy, set up by the communist leaders of Moscow and Beijing. Despite the undeniable military help by the North to the insurgency in the south, the war could not simply be ascribed to a foreign aggression.Footnote ²⁴ The American military intervention in Vietnam represented, in his eyes, the wrong answer, since world communism did not play a primary role in the region. In this way, the US were not waging war against a country, but against a universal ideological principle.

In such a situation, an indiscriminate and universal application of the containment policy to two extremely different regions could but fail, since it was applied to a different context from the one within and for which it had been devised.Footnote ²⁵ The crucial choice for the US was between a ‘crusade-like’ foreign policy, justified by universal ideological principles, and a realistic foreign policy, aiming at limited objectives and having the national interest as its priority:

Morgenthau's critique of the American ideological opposition to all communist governments comes directly from ideas developed in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics and Politics among Nations. In the former, he argues that the fallacy of rationalism lies in erecting limited experiences into absolute principles and in deriving from those principles solutions capable of universal application.Footnote ²⁷ In the latter, he warns about the perils of the crusading spirit typical of the political religions of his time, whose universalistic aspirations inevitably led to counter-productive wars.Footnote ²⁸

To these two fallacies Morgenthau, consistently with the arguments articulated in his famous ‘six principles of realism’, offered the national interest as the guide for US foreign policy.Footnote ²⁹ In his opinion, in the first stage of the Cold War the US had been able to identify amongst their interests, those requiring a full-scale military effort (Western Europe), those requiring limited military effort (Korea) and those warranting no effort whatsoever (the liberation of Eastern European countries). By the same token, they should have understood that Vietnam, a small country in a remote Asian region, required no military intervention: Saigon was neither Berlin nor Havana, a difference that had to be acknowledged in the hierarchy of American priorities.Footnote ³⁰

Furthermore, Morgenthau underlined how Vietnam, historically, had never been pro-Chinese, and the probability that it would become such, based on communism, was extremely low. The Chinese regional hegemony in Southeast Asia forced communist governments – such as Hanoi, and non-communist governments – such as Cambodia, to strive for Chinese benevolence. But both governments were far from being pro-Chinese. On the contrary, the threat represented by the hegemony of Beijing would intensify disputes between those countries, which could then be exploited by Washington.

Morgenthau remarked that it was American foreign policy which was responsible for transforming the Chinese threat to the national independence of Asian countries into ‘China as the protector’ against Western imperialism. ‘Acting on the principle of the lesser evil, as they see it, the governments of Southeast Asia prefer the risk of Chinese domination – which they have not yet experienced – to the known ravages of civil war under Western auspices’.Footnote ³¹ The emphasis, due to the domino theory, on communism as the universal enemy, blurred the differences and conflicts amongst the various communist countries. If American foreign policy was guided by a universal ideology, then all communist governments were to be dealt with in the same way, but in so doing, Washington forced such governments to behave in the same way. China was traditionally an enemy of Vietnam, and Hanoi would become a satellite of Beijing only if the US forced it to: whether Ho Chi Minh would become Asia's Tito, therefore, depended also on Washington's policy.Footnote ³² In other words, Morgenthau thought that American foreign policy was contributing to the creation of the very enemy it claimed it was fighting.

Moreover, in the light of the Chinese-Soviet conflict, giving priority to the policy of active opposition to communism in Asia did not contribute to one of America's vital interests: the containment of China.Footnote ³³ Not only was Vietnam a marginal country in the broad strategy of the Cold War, but it was also one which could be used against the real threat to the US in the region, namely, Chinese expansion. On that point, American and Soviet national interests coincided: containing Chinese expansionism through a regional balance of power. Indeed, as historian Victor Funnell noted, the Soviets, unlike the Chinese (prone to a prolonged war and against compromise),Footnote ³⁴ had put pressure on the North Vietnamese government to seek a diplomatic solution to the conflict.Footnote ³⁵ As one of the two main military suppliers of North Vietnam, the Soviet Union also had the concrete possibility of setting up negotiations with Ho.

One of the major difficulties of American foreign policy was its inability to find an alternative to the simplistic and erroneous dichotomy between globalism and isolationism. In an article published in July 1965, meaningfully titled Globalism: The Moral Crusade, he suggested the need to identify and implement policies made up of ‘subtle distinctions, complex choices, and precarious manipulations’,Footnote ³⁶ which might not grant an easy and immediate victory, but would save the US from what would later be remembered as the ‘Vietnam quagmire’. Washington, in his view, had abandoned every caution-inspired attitude and embraced policies with a counter-revolutionary meaning, to the extent that, a few years later, he would define the US, with reference to its role in the Chilean coup, as ‘the foremost counterrevolutionary power on earth’.Footnote ³⁷

The intangible roots of political order: South Vietnam as a civil war

The negative judgement on the universalistic interpretation of the containment policy was just one of the objections to US foreign policy in Indochina. The fact which the American administrations had failed to understand, at least not until 1962 – when it was already too late – that the main reason for rising communist strength in South Vietnam was related to the distance between Diem's regime and the population, marked another crucial mistake by the American leadership. In Morgenthau's opinion, Washington was dealing with a genuine civil war, rather than with the classic consequences of a foreign aggression.

Initially, as he himself acknowledged, Diem had been able to restore order, partially balancing the economy and destroying the power position of the sects that infested the country.Footnote ³⁸ In spite of his historical merit of embodying and organising resistance against communism in Vietnam,Footnote ³⁹ Diem was a sort of Oriental despot, who suffocated internal opposition, violated fundamental individual liberties and arbitrarily decided on summary executions: ‘Here is a man who as a statesman lives by his opposition to Communism, but who is building, down to small details, a replica of the totalitarian regime which he opposes’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Furthermore, in the perception of a significant part of the population, President Diem was nothing but a puppet controlled by the Americans, in the same way as Bao Dai had been controlled by the French. In so doing, Washington was failing in appealing to the ‘minds’ of the Vietnamese people.

The regime was detested and opposed by almost the entire population, save for the oligarchy protected by the President's own Praetorian Guard. The main cause for the political and military instability in the south was, in Morgenthau's opinion, the status quo defended by the US.Footnote ⁴¹ The strength of the NLF was determined by a lack of loyalty on the part of the administration and army, and by the peasants' support given to the guerrilla.Footnote ⁴² The latter was indeed more of a political problem than a military issue. Consequently, the social and political roots of the civil war in the south had to be targeted first and foremost. In other words, the main reason for the insurgency was Diem's failure in not being able to develop a real social base for the regime.

In Morgenthau's opinion, the insurgency in the south was primarily a nationalist anti-colonial revolution and the response should not be one of military containment. The alternatives before the US were ‘not the support of the status quo as against the support of the revolution, but rather revolution under non-communist auspices as against revolution under communist auspices’.Footnote ⁴³ The US, instead, had identified itself with a regime that suppressed the popular aspirations and channelled, in this way, the aspirations for change into communist hands. According to the Realist scholar, anti-revolutionary policies per se were doomed to fail in a revolutionary age. Washington should have provided another alternative to Vietnam by demonstrating through the visible qualities of its own society what this other alternative was.Footnote ⁴⁴ In his own words: ‘The US, far from intervening against revolutions per se, has therefore to intervene in competition with the main instigators of revolution – the Soviet Union, Communist China and Cuba – on behalf of revolution’.Footnote ⁴⁵ The US had to escape the fatal identification with the status quo and needed to become an advocate of change.

Applicable to the Vietnam case, in such remarks, we find Morgenthau's theoretical reflection on the social elements at the basis of political order, which is in stark contrast with that vision, often wrongly associated with his way of thinking, which reduces order to the sheer monopoly of force. In his view, political order is not solely based on ‘bayonets’ – with which, also according to no less a master of military art than Napoleon, ‘one can do anything but sitting on them’ – but also on the concrete social forces which renew the decision at the basis of the political system. At the root of order there is a ‘moral consensus’ which, in his opinion, may be strengthened but not created by sheer material force. As Morgenthau unambiguously wrote in Politics among nations:

In his view, political stability depends upon certain political and social preconditions that make military policies inconclusive at best. The idea that the Vietnamese insurgency could be stamped out by military means was nothing but an illusory belief. Guerrilla could certainly be defeated without the active support of the indigenous population, but only by wiping out the population itself. Moreover, history has shown that few powers have been able to assert themselves by the use of force alone, least of all those supporting liberal-democratic values.Footnote ⁴⁷

While Morgenthau's view of international politics tends to be portrayed as a theory which consistently stresses the physical elements of power, it nevertheless emphasises the primary role played by ideational variables such as ‘moral consensus’ and ideology. Clearly, this was not an absolute criticism of the use of force. Quite the opposite: the objections arose from the awareness that the use of force can be more effective when it is limited and used with moderation. As he had already stated in Politics among Nations, ‘a maximum of material power does not necessarily mean a maximum of over-all national power’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Meaning, military capabilities do not fully account for the concept and reality of political power. The former is only a component of the latter, whose nature is highly multi-dimensional and context-dependent.Footnote ⁴⁹ What follows, he felt, is the need to expand all the elements constituting political power, that is, not just those strictly related to military capabilities, but also intangible components such as ideology and culture. Indeed, the US failed in relating its vast material power to the ultimate goal of establishing a legitimate government in the south.

For Morgenthau, American foreign policy did nothing but weaken social support for the new regime, driving the South Vietnamese population into the arms of the communist guerrilla. He was therefore rejecting the army's emphasis on military operations and advocating policies aimed at winning over the population to the government's cause.

The road to no return

When John F. Kennedy became President in 1960, the number of South Vietnamese officials murdered by the guerrilla had reached roughly 2,300.Footnote ⁵⁰ While the Democratic President himself was in line with the previous Eisenhower administration on the relevance of Vietnam for the policy of containment – a position Kennedy had consistently held for at least a decade,Footnote ⁵¹ the new administration understood that the war in Indochina was far from being a conventional military conflict. Indeed, vice President Lyndon B. Johnson would declare, after visiting the country in May 1961, that the real threat was not represented by the ‘Communist challenge […] but [by] hunger, ignorance, poverty, and disease’.Footnote ⁵² Accordingly, two goals guided the new Kennedy administration: promoting the necessary internal political and economic reforms – in order to increase the legitimacy of the pro-American regime – and Vietnamising the protection of the South, so that the country could become (virtually) autonomous in defending itself against the communist guerrilla.

Once Kennedy realised that Diem would never agree to sweeping political reforms, he finally accepted the removal of the Vietnamese President as a political necessity. Diem was overthrown and murdered in November 1963, with a coup headed by General Nguyen Khanh. Nevertheless, the renewal of the South Vietnamese political leadership would not in itself bring about the desired effects. Such a change, as Morgenthau would observe, had occurred too late: the population's discontent was such that the new Saigon government could consider itself lucky if, among the ranks of the army, the troops had just deserted and not joined the Viet Cong.Footnote ⁵³ The brutal rule of Diem's government had indeed completely discredited the anti-communist struggle.

On the coup Henry Kissinger wrote that in ‘retrospect, the last moment at which America could have withdrawn from Vietnam at tolerable – though still heavy – costs would have been either just before or just after Diem was overthrown’.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, neither Kennedy, who would be murdered three weeks later, nor his successor Johnson would accept the disengagement from Indochina. Although there is always a gap between rhetoric and practice, in the case of the Kennedy administration the distance between doctrine and political action reached extreme levels.Footnote ⁵⁵ While the strictly military solution was being considered as no longer viable, decisions aimed at a progressive escalation of the conflict were being taken. Firstly, 8,000 additional troops were deployed. Secondly, because the international credibility of the US was at stake, Washington refused negotiations based on the previous Geneva Accords. The original goal (defence from communism) had therefore become secondary; when in principle the Kennedy administration acknowledged the viability of a political approach to the Vietnam quagmire,Footnote ⁵⁶ it chose, contradicting those very premises, to persist with the military solution.

The political problems of peace and order in Indochina were militarised and tackled by the creation of the Green Berets, the deployment of new arms and more soldiers. When Kennedy became President, the number of American troops in Vietnam was around 900 units; when he was murdered, in November 1963, it had already exceeded 16,000, with more soldiers on the way.Footnote ⁵⁷ Between November 1963 and July 1965, Washington, under the presidency of Johnson, undertook complete control of military operations in Indochina and in so doing the American commitment to preserve an independent and non-Communist South Vietnam became total. In a four-year span – from the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution Footnote ⁵⁸ of August 1964 to 1969 – the US would deploy over half a million soldiers to the region.

In February 1965, the conflict had begun to spread, with bombings in North Vietnam. In March of the same year, those bombings had transformed into a high intensity campaign, code-named Rolling Thunder.Footnote ⁵⁹ Two months later, the Johnson administration decided to couple the bombings in the North with an attrition strategy (search and destroy) in the South, aimed at weakening the NLF. Even though CIA reports had immediately suggested the ineffectiveness of the new military strategy, the army's focus on firepower and bombing went ahead for the next three years.Footnote ⁶⁰ Needless to say, the bombing in the North and the attrition strategy proved unsuccessful; both failed at destroying the enemy's military resources and at breaking the enemy's will to continue the war.

The military displacement of politics: the shortcomings of military rationalism

The new American strategy drew inspiration from cost-benefit models such as the one devised by Charles Wolf of the Rand Corporation for the Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense, which, in turn, was based on the theory of coercive bargaining theorised in those years by the Economics Nobel Prize winner Thomas C. Schelling.Footnote ⁶¹

Such a strategy, which was adopted from 1965, was based on the idea that the enemy does not have ‘absolute’ preferences, but preferences which can be manipulated through coercive policies. In particular, it was assumed that Hanoi and the NLF, like any other actor, would behave rationally, thereby following the two rational principles of damage limiting (behaviour based on fear of the consequences) and profit maximising (behaviour based on considerations of gain).Footnote ⁶² As Charles Wolf and his co-author Nathan Leites went on to declare in the years that followed, their model did not take into account elements such as moral strength, devotion to the cause, and self-sacrifice, since the only relevant element in the model was the manipulation of costs and benefits produced by coercion.Footnote ⁶³

As we now know, such a strategy did not achieve the expected results. As pointed out by Morgenthau, it failed because it applied rational models typical of Western economic culture to populations who did not think and act in terms of cost-benefit principles.Footnote ⁶⁴ The paradigm of universal rationality applied to Indochina proved the grain of truth present in his critique of scientism and rationalism offered twenty years earlier in Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. Here he argued that political and military issues should not be seen as technical problems without regard for political context. In discussing the roots of American failure in Vietnam, Morgenthau makes an explicit reference to the main argument of this book: ‘I have argued elsewhere at length against the pseudo science of politics which endeavors to reduce the political sphere to an interplay of quantitative factors and which ends up by banishing politics altogether. The new theories […] are in truth not so much theories as dogmas. They do not so much try to reflect reality as it actually is, as to superimpose upon a recalcitrant reality a theoretical scheme that satisfies the desire for thorough rationalization’.Footnote ⁶⁵

A policy such as body count, which was used to measure enemy losses, was in his view an example of the tangible failure of the scientific-quantitative approach to military strategy: national liberation was so important to Hanoi and the NLF that it made death and destruction secondary variables.Footnote ⁶⁶ By neglecting the nationalist and moral aspirations of a significant part of the Vietnamese population, military rationalism paradoxically produced irrational outcomes. Leites and Wolf themselves had admitted the following in a telling passage of their Rebellion and Authority: ‘Unfortunately, the contest between R [Rebellion] and A [Authority] is often as much a contest in the effective management of coercion as a contest for the hearts and minds of the people.’Footnote ⁶⁷ And for the latter struggle, the cost-benefit approach had no solutions to put forward:

What really matters, as Morgenthau declared, is not the number of enemies who die on the battlefield, but the concrete conditions and the morale of those who survive and who are ready to shoulder their guns again.Footnote ⁶⁹ Clearly, when thinking about politics and war, numbers cannot be dismissed, but quantitative analysis should not replace political judgement, which is inherently qualitative.Footnote ⁷⁰ Intangible and imponderable elements such as moral strength, temperament, thirst for victory, and faith in one's objectives play a primary role in determining victory in guerrilla settings. Because power should not be mistaken for the mere mechanical use of available material resources, and because war ‘consists of far more than totalling up statistics’,Footnote ⁷¹ the quantity of bombs and bullets deployed in a conflict is far from being sufficient to fully explain its final result. This was particularly true for Asia because in this continent, as he pointed out in his book In Defense of the National Interest, the US were involved ‘in a struggle of ideas; a struggle for the minds of men’.Footnote ⁷² A primary interest in the mechanics of guerrilla warfare provides useful information for the military (the instrument of politics), but not for politics itself or for those who must conduct the conflict on the basis of the social and political forces at the roots of war.

Vietnam represents the paradigmatic situation in which those with an overwhelming military superiority may be defeated by a more motivated enemy, capable of shouldering much higher losses. As Pham Van Dong, the North Vietnamese Prime Minister, also declared, the US would lose the war because more Vietnamese than Americans were willing to die for their own nation.Footnote ⁷³ Hanoi's endurance threshold was not only much higher than Washington's, but even identifiable with the acceptance of mass sacrifice or, in other words, with the extermination of a significant portion of their population. And in Vietnam mass killings grew more and more frequent and, according to Morgenthau, also became an inevitable outcome of American counterinsurgency warfare:

Indeed, while the traditional aim of coercion is psychological – it must convince the enemy to obey our will – in Vietnam, physical elimination of the enemy became the very object of militarily operations.Footnote ⁷⁵

The timeless wisdom of Morgenthau's realismFootnote ⁷⁶

More than three decades after the fall of Saigon, it still remains difficult to clearly assess what went wrong in Vietnam. While nearly everyone agrees on the obvious point that the war in Vietnam went badly for the US, differences of opinion still proliferate.Footnote ⁷⁷ However, it does seem that much of Morgenthau's criticism proved correct. First of all, as he had suggested, the war could not have been won unless at a price that Washington was not willing to pay. In spite of the fact that American military withdrawal took place in 1973 and the invasion of the South by North Vietnamese troops occurred only in April 1975, the failure of the American strategy actually materialised in January 1968 with the Tet Offensive, which was a massive assault organised by the North against southern cities. Although, in strictly military terms, the Tet Offensive had been a terrible failure for Hanoi, it nevertheless proved its will and determination to continue the war. As Richard Nixon would admit several years later, ‘with the Tet Offensive […] it was no longer a question of whether the next President would withdraw our troops but of how they would leave and what they would leave behind’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The beginning of the end became manifest when, after the Tet, General William Westmoreland requested 200,000 additional soldiers to continue the attrition campaign. President Johnson rejected the request and later sought a diplomatic solution with Hanoi: the Paris peace talks began in May that same year.

Secondly, as Morgenthau had anticipated, the American withdrawal from Vietnam would create conditions for radical conflicts between communist countries, and not the strengthening of communism in Asia. The withdrawal of American armed forces from Indochina showed the failure of the universal and indiscriminate application of the containment policy. Although the reunification of Vietnam in 1975 was followed by communist victories in Cambodia and Laos – thus seemingly confirming and providing support for the domino theory – the simplistic identification of victory of communist countries and victory of communism would nevertheless emerge in the years immediately following. Despite Chinese and Vietnamese rhetoric of ‘comrades plus brothers’ and the common goal of ending American presence in Indochina, four years after the fall of Saigon Beijing and Hanoi went to war with each other. ‘If ever there were proof that the chief force at play in Southeast Asia was nationalism rather than communism’, writes American historian Richard Crockatt, ‘then the aftermath of the war provided it’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Thirdly, Morgenthau's reflection on the roots of political order proved correct, not only because the militarisation of the American strategy largely failed in building a viable government in the South, but also because of the techniques adopted by the communist guerrilla to acquire the support of the population. Violence was only one of the means used by the NLF to convince peasants to embrace the nationalist cause, and it should also be noted that it was rarely used indiscriminately. In order to achieve its political and military hegemony, the guerrilla employed a mix of socio-economic reform, ideological indoctrination and nationalistic propaganda – what the Vietnamese called dan van.Footnote ⁸⁰

Finally, as he had predicted, the excessive rationalism and scientism of the American military strategy had catastrophic consequences on the conduct of war. On this point military historians Williamson Murray and Geoffrey Parker have concluded that under ‘the tutelage of secretary of defense Robert McNamara the American military would fight the war in Vietnam entirely on the basis of statistical indices: numbers of enemy dead and wounded, numbers of battalion-days in combat, tons of bombs dropped, tons of cargo moved through the ports. The lists seemed endless, and all proved essentially meaningless in judging the progress of war.’Footnote ⁸¹

The elements expounded so far seem not only to prove the correctness of Morgenthau's predictions, but also to support the idea that his foreign policy analysis is, first and foremost, the empirical application of his theoretical reflection against rationalism and political universalism. The limits of the rationalist approach to military strategy, the criticism of universal categories typical of liberalism, the accent on the intangible dimension of power and the subsequent need for a prudent approach to foreign policy – all these are indeed themes at the very centre of books such as Scientific Man versus Power Politics, Politics among Nations and In Defence of the National Interest.

Morgenthau and his critics

Morgenthau's position on Vietnam surprised both his visceral sympathisers and his inflexible detractors. The theorist of power politics, the one who had advocated intransigence against the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War,Footnote ⁸² was now suggesting moderation and even withdrawal from Southeast Asia. The astonishment stemmed from the fact that ‘the founding father of realism’Footnote ⁸³ was holding a position quite similar to those of the radical left, of pacifists and of pro-communists. The open hostility towards the Indochina War, in a moment when the American initiative was meeting growing difficulties, appeared to many as a real stab in the back. To make matters worse, the lucid analysis of the flaws of US foreign policy was accompanied by a number of interviews, in which Morgenthau displayed open contempt for the way the Johnson administration was conducting the war. For example, in an interview of 26 March 1965 in the San Francisco Chronicle, he openly declared: ‘If I could use a certain four letter word on this campus, I could sum up our policy in Vietnam.’Footnote ⁸⁴

Aware of the objections he would be faced with, Morgenthau would often state that his was no radical change of perspective but rather, as was recalled at the beginning of this article, the application of the general principles he had proposed in his previous works. At the end of the 1970s, recalling the personal battle he had fought against the various American administrations, he declared:

The so-called Cold Warriors did not realise that Morgenthau's opposition to the militarisation of the Cold War in Asia resulted from the defence of those very principles which had convinced the Truman administration to seek his advice at the dawning of the Cold War. But in their opinion, it was an unforgivable about-face that could not be left unpunished.

To begin with, he was fired as consultant to the Department of Defense: the collaboration between the Realist scholar and the American administrations, which had begun over fifteen years earlier, was thus abruptly interrupted. But this was just the beginning. He was publicly accused of unpatriotic behaviour, communism, and pacifism; his appointment to the presidency of the American Political Science Association was blocked; and later, he would be investigated by the FBI and even by the Internal Revenue Service.Footnote ⁸⁶

Morgenthau claimed also that in order to discredit him, the Johnson administration created a special office (entitled Project Morgenthau) whose official spokesmen were National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and Zbigniew Brzezinski.Footnote ⁸⁷ In the following excerpt, worth quoting at length, he recalls the activity and the less than honourable results of that particular project:

Brzezinski's aversion to Morgenthau was fully understandable, since the latter had personally attacked him in an article published in the Washington Post on 15 March 1964.Footnote ⁸⁹ In his opinion, Brzezinski had made two serious errors: confounding the European and Indochinese political situations and supporting the ‘domino theory’. The origin of Bundy's aversion, on the other hand, is more difficult to trace. With the following sardonic description, Morgenthau explained Bundy's hostility:

The attacks were not exclusively institutional. Morgenthau started to receive abusive letters, in which the accusations of communism and unpatriotic behaviour were accompanied by anti-Semitic slurs. In an exchange of letters with Walter Lippmann, he wrote, in words full of sorrow that:

The acrimonious tone acquired by the Vietnam debate was, understandably, a reason of great pain for Morgenthau. In 1974, during a conference held at the International School on Disarmament and Research Conflicts (ISODARCO) in Urbino, Italy, he sardonically observed that instead of campaigning against the Vietnam War, he should have devoted his time to collecting butterflies.Footnote ⁹² Nevertheless, in his very unwelcome condition as victim of real political aggressions, he would find the moral strength to transform his painful personal experience into a general reflection on the role of intellectuals in the public realm.

In an article, meaningfully titled The Web of Falsehood, he expressed his disbelief in seeing so many people publicly defending US foreign policy in Indochina, only to voice their perplexities in private.Footnote ⁹³ His criticism was for all those who kept silent for fear of personal repercussions, rather than for those who genuinely believed in the legitimacy of the war. Once again, the intellectuals had not fulfilled their function, and it was his turn, with arguments actually different from those originally offered by Julien Benda in the 1920s, to denounce their treason.Footnote ⁹⁴ Even though influential figures such as William Fulbright, George McGovern and George Kennan had expressed doubts in private on American involvement in Vietnam, their position had not been immediately made public,Footnote ⁹⁵ a fact that is testimony to the civil courage of Morgenthau's opposition.

He was only too aware of the price intellectuals had to pay for their opposition to power, even in a liberal democracy such as that of the US. The treason of German intellectuals in the 1930s was an indelible memory for him, as was proven by the many references to that experience in his lectures at the University of Chicago.Footnote ⁹⁶ Additionally, there was the memory of the treatment endured by Karl Rothenbücher – one of Morgenthau's teachers at the University of Munich – when he published a pamphlet denouncing Kahr's anti-republican conspiracy in Weimar Germany and, most of all, of Rothenbücher's stoic reaction to the insulting and acrimonious attacks that followed.Footnote ⁹⁷ With equally stoic and proud equanimity, Morgenthau would suffer insults and accusations from his enemies, finding the moral strength to transform the pain caused by such unfair treatment into a renewed source of intellectual inspiration and political commitment. It was during the Vietnam debate that he would use the expression ‘speak truth to power’, in order to identify the duty of public intellectuals to continually challenge the holders of power and question the existing status quo.Footnote ⁹⁸

Although Morgenthau's critique of American intervention in Indochina was a direct application of his general philosophy of politics and foreign policy,Footnote ⁹⁹ the Vietnam debate radicalised and transformed him into an intellectual dissenter who preached public opposition to the war and who was extremely concerned about the destructive effects of the war on American society.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The appeal of his words on Vietnam, beside the customary lucidity of thought, lies also in the political passion that had been concealed in previous works. While he had always advocated prudence in foreign policy, in the public debate over Vietnam he treated the cause he was fighting for not only truthfully and passionately, but also with a measure of courage that warrants him a place of honour in the noble history of intellectuals.Footnote ¹⁰¹