> SA writes: 'In keeping with the teachings of the New Left, we're supposed to believe that US foreign policy was a machine that could no more tolerate a small country like Vietnam "withdrawing from the capitalist world system" than a PC can run Mac OSX. But in real life the people who debated foreign policy at high levels almost never talked about that stuff.'
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> Really? I wonder. Northern Ireland was my country's Vietnam, and the ruling elite certainly did say that it would be intolerable to withdraw. What was intolerable for them was not 'withdrawing from the capitalist world', but the overthrow of British prestige.
Sure, definitely. This issue of "prestige" was also close to the heart of the Vietnam issue. But the thing about prestige is that ultimately it's in the eye of the beholder.
> I don't know enough about Vietnam, but I suspect that resistance to withdrawal was greater than you think. Certainly it seemed to traumatise the US military and political establishment to have had withdrawal forced upon them, and Foreign Affairs has not stopped talking about 'Vietnam Syndrome' ever since.
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Yes, that's why I was talking about 1963-64, rather than 1967 or 1971. Once they sent in the Marines, it was no longer mostly a question of US interests in Vietnam, or even in Asia, but rather of ignominious US defeat, which is a different issue by several orders of magnitude. And of course once the US was in, there was no limit to the ghoulish apologias ostensibly liberal people could make for the butchery (though also much criticism from certain precincts of liberalism, too).
SA