Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo

By Jeffrey Record

In examining the influence of historical analogies on decisions to use--or not use--force, military strategist Jeffrey Record assesses every major application of U.S. force from the Korean War to the NATO war on Serbia. Specifically, he looks at the influence of two analogies: the democracies? appeasement of Hitler at Munich and America's defeat in the Vietnam War. His book judges the utility of these two analogies on presidential decision-making and finds considerable misuse of them in situations where force was optional. He points to the Johnson administration's application of the Munich analogy to the circumstances of Southeast Asia in 1965 as the most egregious example of their misuse, but also cites the faulty reasoning by historical analogy that prevailed among critics of Reagan's policy in Central America and in Clinton's use of force in Haiti and the former Yugoslavia. The author's findings show generational experience to be a key influence on presidential decision-making: Munich persuaded mid-twentieth-century presidents that force should be used early and decisively while Vietnam cautioned later presidents against using force at all. Both analogies were at work for the Gulf War, with Munich urging a decision for war and Vietnam warning against a graduated and highly restricted use of force. Record also reminds us of the times when presidents have used analogies to mobilize public support for action they have already decided to take. Addressing both the process of presidential decision-making and the wisdom of decisions made, this well-reasoned book offers timely lessons to a broad audience that includes political scientists, military historians, defense analysts, and policy makers, as well as those simply curious about history's influence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781612515816

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Making

War,

Thinking

History

The latest edition of this work has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of Marguerite and Gerry Lenfest.

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2002 by Jeffrey Record

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

First Naval Institute Press paperback edition published 2014

ISBN 978-1-61251-581-6 (eBook)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Record, Jeffrey.

Making war, thinking history : Munich, Vietnam, and presidential uses of force from Korea to Kosovo / Jeffrey Record.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Presidents—United States—History—20th century. 2. United States—Foreign relations—1945–1989—Decision making. 3. United States—Foreign relations—1989—Decision making. 4. United States—Military policy. 5. Executive power—United States—History—20th century. 6. War (International law)—History—20th century. 7. Intervention (International law)—History—20th century. 8. Aggression (International law)—History—20th century. I. Title.

E176.1.R298 2002

973.92—dc21

2001044764

Print editions meet the requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

987654321

Contents

Introduction

1Munich and Vietnam: Lessons Drawn

2Truman in Korea

3Eisenhower in Indochina

4Kennedy and Johnson in Vietnam and the Caribbean

5Nixon and Kissinger in Vietnam

6Reagan in Lebanon, Grenada, Central America, and Afghanistan

7Bush in Panama, the Persian Gulf, and Somalia

8Clinton in Haiti and the Balkans

9Legacies of Munich and Vietnam for the Post–Cold War World

10Using Force, Thinking History

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Making

War,

Thinking

History

Introduction

North Korea’s invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, caught President Harry Truman vacationing in his hometown of Independence, Missouri. He ordered an immediate departure for Washington.

On the plane ride back to the White House, the former artillery officer, haberdasher, senator, and vice president employed his considerable knowledge of history to interpret the meaning of the North Korean attack. I had time to think aboard the plane, he recounted in his memoirs. In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak. I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered each time that the democracies failed to act it had just encouraged the aggressors to keep going ahead. Now, Truman reasoned, Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted ten, fifteen, twenty years earlier. I felt certain that if South Korea was allowed to fall Communist leaders would be emboldened to override nations closer to our shores. Ultimately, it would mean a third world war, just as similar incidents had brought on the second world war.¹

Long before he became president, Truman recalled, he had realized that almost all current events in the affairs of governments and nations have their parallels in the past, and had concluded that no decision affecting the people should be made impulsively, but on the basis of historical background and careful consideration of the facts as they exist at the time. History taught me, continued this president well read in history, "that the leader of any country . . . must know the history of not only his own country but of all the other great countries, and that he must make the effort to apply this knowledge to the decisions that have to be made."²

Thus, Truman applied the history of the 1930s—more specifically, what he perceived to be the lessons of the 1930s—when deciding whether or not to defend South Korea. His decision to fight was virtually dictated by the parallel he saw between Nazi and communist aggression, and it had enormous consequences for American foreign policy. It militarized the U.S. Cold War strategy of containment and extended it from Europe to Asia, setting the stage for the ill-advised U.S. intervention in Vietnam fifteen years later.

American presidents’ uses of force are influenced by myriad factors, including personality, professional military advice, perceived stakes, anticipated enemy responses, and domestic political considerations. They are also influenced by ideas, including historical analogies. In some cases—i.e., in wars of necessity—the choice of force is mandatory. Enemy attacks on U.S. territory, U.S. military forces overseas, and on treaty allies automatically mean war. America’s membership in NATO rests on a prehostilities judgment that the territorial integrity of the other members of the alliance is a fighting matter. Much more numerous—and controversial—than wars of necessity, however, are wars of choice. Indeed, none of America’s wars since 1945 have been wars of necessity. The United States was not committed to defend South Korea in 1950, Kuwait in 1990, or Kosovo in 1999; nor was it legally bound to defend South Vietnam in 1965, although U.S. intervention there was certainly permissible under the vaguely worded 1955 SEATO Treaty. Domestic political controversy usually surrounds wars of choice precisely because military intervention is optional. The greatest controversy arises in cases of optional use of force on behalf of values as opposed to national interests, although most U.S. military interventions rest on a blend of the two.³

Both wars of necessity and wars of choice involve a great deal of choice about how to fight. For example, although the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor (followed by Nazi Germany’s gratuitous declaration of war) made World War II a war of necessity for the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt, anticipating U.S. entry, had already decided to pursue a Germany first strategy. The Johnson administration’s decision to send U.S. ground combat troops into Vietnam in 1965 left open the question of how best to defeat the Vietnamese Communists. Gen. William Westmoreland’s selection of an attrition strategy was challenged at the time within the U.S. military and to this day remains controversial.

Not least among the influences on presidents’ use of force is what presidents believe history teaches about using force. Indeed, just as individuals make personal decisions based on daily experience, presidents cannot help but reason by historical analogy to some degree during a crisis involving possible use of force. Their reasoning may be sound or faulty, but reason by historical analogy they do. Historian Ernest R. May’s groundbreaking Lessons of the Past: The Use and Misuse of History in American Foreign Policy, published in 1973, still stands as the seminal book in the field of examining foreign policy reasoning by historical analogy. Almost twenty years later, Yuen Foong Khong published his impressive study of the analogies at work behind U.S. entry into the Vietnam War, Analogies at War: Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the American Decisions of 1965. For these and other scholars in the field, the starting point is Robert Jervis’s observation, in his seminal Perception and Misperception in International Politics (1976), that previous international events provide the statesman with a range of imaginable situations and allow him to detect patterns and causal links that can help him understand his world.⁴ Specifically, according to Christopher Hemmer, analogies are road maps that help policy makers maximize the national interest by guiding them through unfamiliar terrain by giving them information about the international ramifications of particular policies.⁵ Analogies can help clarify the circumstances confronting decision makers, shed light on the stakes involved, and point to courses of action. For example, the punitive Versailles treaty of 1919 and its consequences for peace in Europe taught Allied leaders during World War II how not to treat defeated Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

This book examines presidential use-of-force decisions from the Korean War through the Kosovo crisis and reveals presidents extensively engaged in reasoning by historical analogy. Presidents have both employed analogies to inform their decision making and deployed them to mobilize public support for decisions made or about to be made. Presidents who believe that a particular historical analogy applies to the situation at hand display a propensity to use it to reinforce their case for action or inaction, and subsequently tend to deploy it to marshal popular and congressional support for the preferred course of action.

Presidential choices of foreign policy analogies are greatly influenced by generational experiences, especially war.⁶ World War II and the events leading up to it exerted an enormous influence on the worldview of most Cold War presidents, including the last one, George Bush, who was also the last World War II veteran to occupy the White House. In contrast, Bill Clinton, the first post–Cold War president (and the first president born after World War II), represents the generation of the lost war in Southeast Asia, not the good war of 1941–45.

It should thus come as no surprise that the Munich and Vietnam analogies have weighed heavily on presidents faced with overseas crises. Munich refers, of course, to the infamous conference of September 1938 at which Great Britain and France handed Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland over to Hitler without a fight. But Munich has become shorthand for the democracies’ appeasement of Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese throughout the 1930s, which is still believed to have foreordained World War II. The Vietnam analogy, of course, refers to America’s ruinous military intervention in the Vietnam War.

The two analogies are quite different, although both can—and have—inform the same presidential decision. Munich is about whether to use force and about what can happen when force is not used. Munich teaches nothing about how force should be used. Unlike Vietnam, the Munich agreement entailed no loss of life and directly affected no American. How force should be used is a major theme of many of those who have sought to draw policy-relevant lessons from the Vietnam War. Others, however, believe that Vietnam teaches that force should never have been used in the first place, thus rendering moot discussions about the amount of force necessary and how it should have been employed. Here arises the greatest distinction between the two analogies insofar as they influence use-of-force decision making: while there is a broad consensus on the chief lesson of Munich, no such agreement exists on the lessons of Vietnam. Both individual and organizational policy makers have drawn lessons from Vietnam and in some cases have openly declared them to be guideposts for future uses of U.S. military power. But a great divide still separates the lessons drawn by those who believe the war was not winnable at any acceptable price and those who believe the war was winnable but that victory was self-denied.

Robert Timberg’s best-seller The Nightingale’s Song postulates the Vietnam generation as split at its core between those young men of military service age who went off to war and those who did not. For most of those who went, the issue was not whether or not U.S. forces should have been fighting there, but rather why the war was fought the way it was. For many of those who stayed home, the issue was why it was fought at all. The great divide between whether and how persists. There were also war hawks—now prominent among today’s political elite—who succeeded in avoiding military service in Vietnam.

On the subject of force, the Vietnam War remains important precisely because it sparked a debate within the national political and military leadership over the uses of U.S. military power that continues unabated. A milestone in that debate was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger’s National Press Club speech of November 1984 in which he sought to establish rather narrow criteria for using force, prompting a counterspeech by Secretary of State George Shultz a month later. The debate has been heightened by the post–Cold War collapse of consensus on the organizing principle of American foreign policy and by controversial presidential uses of force in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.

Generational change continues to exert an influence as the national political and military reins of power pass ever more quickly from those for whom the dominant foreign policy referent experience was Munich and World War II to those for whom it is Vietnam. The debate has been enriched by heightened congressional assertiveness in foreign policy and the professional military’s increased influence on use-of-force decisions.

Munich and Vietnam are tightly woven into the fabric of the debate, and although Munich is more distant in time, it still informs policy makers. Indeed, both analogies were at work during the Persian Gulf crisis of 1990–91 and the Kosovo crisis of 1999. Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic were viewed as regional Hitlers whose aggression had to be checked before it got out of hand, and force was employed against both aggressors, but with the utmost determination to avoid protracted hostilities and politically unacceptable American losses. Munich urged intervention, but Vietnam counseled caution; together, they produced a search for painless victory. As commentator Daniel Schorr noted of NATO’s war against Serbia: If memories of Munich helped influence NATO’s decision to go to war against Yugoslavia, memories of Vietnam influenced the decision to keep war high up in the air, above the quagmire, as long as possible. Indeed, Munich and Vietnam are code words for ‘appeasement’ and ‘quagmire,’ and no expressions are more laden with the struggles of the past and hazards for future policy.⁷

The persistent influence of the Munich and Vietnam analogies in the formulation and implementation of American foreign policy stems in part from their apparent reinforcement by subsequent events. The very success of U.S. force against Iraq and Serbia seemingly validates the proposition that the only way to deal with aggressive dictators is to use force against them early and conclusively in order to prevent more costly aggression later on. If you don’t stop Hitler in Czechoslovakia, he’ll go on for Poland and the rest of Europe, becomes, If you let stand Saddam’s aggression against Kuwait, the next thing he’ll do is grab Saudi Arabia. And, If you don’t check Milosevic’s bid to establish a greater Serbia out of the ruins of the former Yugoslavia, you are inviting the destabilization of all of southeastern Europe and perhaps a regional war. In short, the reasoning goes, small threats become ever-larger threats unless they are nipped in the bud. In contrast, the failed use of force in Lebanon and Somalia apparently confirms the propositions, depending on which of two basic contradictory lessons one chooses to draw, that the United States should stay out of foreign civil wars that do not directly threaten vital U.S. security interests, and, alternatively, that the United States should prosecute to victory any war it fights, regardless of the soundness of the original decision to fight.

This book pursues three purposes: First, to identify and assess the policy lessons the national political and military leadership have drawn from Munich and Vietnam. This task is much easier for Munich than for Vietnam; there is, to repeat, agreement on the great lesson of Munich, but continuing disagreement over the many lessons of Vietnam. Second, to trace the influence of those lessons in selected instances of presidential consideration or actual use of force since 1945. The cases examined in the chapters that follow all involve wars of choice. They include Truman’s decision to fight in Korea in 1950; Eisenhower’s decision not to intervene in French Indochina in 1954; Kennedy and Johnson’s approach to military intervention in Vietnam; Nixon’s decision to continue fighting in Vietnam for an honorable peace; Reagan’s intervention in Lebanon and Grenada and noninterventions in Central America and Afghanistan; Bush’s invasion of Panama and overthrow of Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait, as well as his decision not to intervene in Bosnia; and Clinton’s invasion of Haiti, escalation in Somalia, and double interventions in the former Yugoslavia. Third, to assess the usefulness of the Munich and Vietnam analogies as a means of informing past decisions to use or not to use force, and more generally the value of reasoning by historical analogy.

It is my hope to provide the reader not only with insight into past U.S. uses of force but also with an appreciation of the limitations of reasoning by historical analogy in a foreign policy crisis. If Munich and Vietnam were experiences no policy maker wishes to repeat, the same may be said for repetition of faulty historical reasoning. Unfortunately, there is no empirical means to determine the influence of a particular historical analogy on a past decision to use force relative even to other analogies at play, to say nothing of nonhistorical influences. But public and private testimony of presidents and their senior foreign policy and military advisers makes it clear that such reasoning is commonplace in use-of-force decision making. Munich played a key role in determining Lyndon Johnson’s decision to intervene in the Vietnam War, and proved to be a faulty analogy in that case. But no one knows whether, absent Munich, Johnson would nonetheless have made the same decision. Other analogies were at work, including the analogy of the Korean War, during which the United States militarily reversed a communist invasion in yet another Cold War–divided country.

Chapter 1, Munich and Vietnam: Lessons Drawn, identifies and discusses the lessons U.S. foreign policy makers—presidents first and foremost—and senior military leaders have drawn from Munich and Vietnam. The chapter starts with a factual review of the Munich conference and the Vietnam War conditioned by recognition that, unlike Munich, the Vietnam War remains a historiographical battleground on which even major issues of fact are vehemently disputed. The chapter then examines the public and private testimony, oral and written, of key decision makers expressing their views on Munich and Vietnam and their policy implications. The literature in both cases is extensive, and in the case of Vietnam the fact of competing—and in some cases irreconcilable—lessons drawn by different policy makers does not and should not obscure the significance of the relative consensus on the war’s lessons within the professional military, the instrument of U.S. force. That consensus is embodied in the so-called Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, which continues to exert a major influence on use-of-force decisions. I do not hesitate to express my own views on what happened to the United States in Vietnam and why; I have devoted considerable study to that conflict, published extensively on it, and teach the Vietnam War elective course at the U.S. Air Force’s Air War College.

The next several chapters examine the influence of the Munich and Vietnam War analogies with respect to specific presidential uses—and nonuses—of force. Historical analogies can encourage or discourage use of force. This examination covers three consecutive but different periods of American foreign policy since 1945. The first period runs from the end of World War II to the Johnson administration’s decision to commit U.S. ground combat forces to the Vietnam War. Except for the first few years after World War II this period was characterized by strong consensus on the organizing principle of U.S. foreign policy, exceptional congressional deference to the White House on foreign policy and defense matters, and the dominance of a political generation for whom Munich and World War II were the most influential foreign policy referent experiences. During this period, David W. Levy observed, the president’s power to define the national interest, to lay out the defensive perimeters of the United States, to declare when and how the country’s safety was threatened was virtually unassailable. His pronouncements on matters of the security of the United States were almost like royal decrees.⁸

The second period begins in 1965 and extends to the end of the Cold War. During this period, the Vietnam War and its outcome severely cracked the foreign policy consensus, especially within the Democratic Party, and Congress responded to the war by reasserting its constitutional prerogatives in foreign policy.

The last period stretches from the Cold War’s demise to the present. This period has been characterized by the lack of foreign policy consensus, a weakened presidency, and the coming to power at last of a political generation for whom the Vietnam War itself—not Munich and World War II—is the dominant foreign policy referent experience.

In each use-of-force decision examined by this book, two basic questions are addressed: how influential was the analogy in question with respect to the use-of-force decision, and to what degree was the analogy useful as a tool of informing that decision? Because there is no way to determine empirically every factor behind past decisions and their relative contributions in producing those decisions, the influence of reasoning by historical analogy must be inferred from policy makers’ statements and actions. For example, Truman’s views on Munich and its lessons are known, and it is hard to believe that he would have decided on war in Korea had not the very term appeasement become synonymous in his own mind with foreign policy disaster. Because there is no way of empirically proving the utility of a historical analogy in a given crisis setting, judgment here, too, must necessarily be subjective. For example, it requires no special insight to conclude that the Munich analogy badly misinformed policy makers on Vietnam, and that the French experience in the First Indochina War should have been examined far more seriously than it was. Subjective does not mean uninformed by reason and fact.

Nor can the role of domestic political considerations be divorced from the study of historical analogies. Most examinations of the sources of U.S. foreign policy, including use-of-force decisions, pay insufficient attention to domestic politics, which since the Vietnam War and even more so since the end of the Cold War have intruded on foreign policy decision making as never before since the apogee of isolationism in the 1930s. Of particular significance during the Cold War was the Democratic Party’s defensiveness on the issue of communist expansion overseas. Appeasement of Hitler produced a Second World War that expanded the Soviet empire in Europe and set the stage for communism’s victory in China. In so doing, it made the Democratic Party for the remainder of the Cold War vulnerable to Republican charges—which were especially shrill during the late 1940s and 1950s—of being soft on communism. In turn, the Vietnam War provoked a domestic political reaction that continues to influence the way the United States goes about using force.

Previous studies of official reasoning by historical analogy have not paid sufficient attention to what particular foreign policy lessons mean and why. For example, the tenets of the Weinberger-Powell Doctrine are not fully appreciated as the Pentagon’s judgment of the lessons of the Vietnam War; nor is America’s prosecution of the Gulf War comprehensible except as a deliberate and measured attempt to put those lessons into practice. In addition, most of the earlier studies focus on actual uses of force, ignoring equally important decisions not to use force. Military inaction can be just as good a gauge of analogical influence as military action. Truman’s nonintervention in China’s civil war, Eisenhower’s nonintervention in the French-Indochina War, and Bush’s nonintervention in Bosnia all testify to the power of non–foreign policy analogical influences on foreign policy decision making. Analogical pressures to intervene were offset or overwhelmed by other considerations. Finally, most earlier studies were denied the benefit of the Cold War’s demise, which engendered the release of important new information and perspectives on such events as the North Korean attack on South Korea and the Cuban missile crisis. Stalin’s role in the outbreak of the Korean War is much better documented today than it was even a decade ago, as is behind-the-scenes Soviet decision making on Cuba during the period