Consequences of failure: the politics of Saigon and Kabul

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The brutal defeat of the United States in the Afghanistan War drew parallels with the fall of Saigon in 1975. This event also included televised footage of panicked crowds desperately seeking to flee the country, of victorious tyrants basking in the palace. Presidential and American-made military. material picked up by a bitter opponent.

As vice president, Joe Biden came up with his own planned parallel. If the United States left Afghanistan and its government fell, there would be no political price to pay. “We don’t have to worry about it,” Biden reportedly told diplomat Richard Holbrooke. “We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.

Biden’s timeline was a bit off. The United States withdrew its military forces from South Vietnam in 1973 under Nixon, but our ally did not fall until April 1975 under Gerald Ford. Nonetheless, now that the Afghan collapse has occurred under his watch, Biden’s claim deserves consideration, on both sides.

So far, in the (very) short term, Biden’s prediction that an American president withdrawing from Afghanistan will not suffer politically has not been confirmed. On the contrary, the Afghan disaster has been sharply criticized by members of both sides. Opinion polls show that about two-thirds of those polled disapprove of the way Biden handled the pullout. Most concerning for the president is that his overall job approval rating has plummeted, falling below 50% and putting him “under water” in late August for the first time in his presidency. As of September 23, Biden’s approval rating averaged over RealClearPolitics polls was 46%, his disapproval 50%. It’s not easy to disentangle Afghanistan from the current COVID problems or chaos along the Texas border as the source of Biden’s declining popularity, but it has clearly played a major role.

What about Biden’s interpretation of Vietnam? In the short term, he was basically right. Gerald Ford did not suffer politically from the fall of South Vietnam. The best evidence comes from the Gallup polls. A week and a half before the collapse, Ford’s approval rating stood at 39%. It was at 40% a few days after the fall of the government. In the following 11 Gallup surveys up to the end of 1975, Ford’s approval rating averaged 46% and never fell below its mid-April level.

Six factors help explain the difference between the short-term public reaction to Biden’s defeat and that of Ford:

  • Ford’s defeat wasn’t really Ford defeat. It was the Democratic Congress that cut aid to South Vietnam as the North Vietnamese military launched a major military offensive, despite Ford’s call for a joint session of Congress. (As a senator, Joe Biden also played a role in this.) Biden, however, has an undiluted responsibility for returning Afghanistan to the Taliban.
  • The fall of South Vietnam comes two years after the withdrawal of American forces. Some critics of Nixon argue that he only wanted the 1973 peace deal to buy a “decent gap” before a South Vietnamese collapse; Nixon himself has said he believes South Vietnam’s independence could be maintained indefinitely as long as US supplies and air support continue. Either way, the image of an American ally losing a war two years after the departure of American forces is less shocking than that of an American ally losing a war as the American troops themselves are driven out. country.
  • Vietnam claimed the lives of 58,220 US servicemen, compared to an estimated 6,300 Americans (more than half of whom were Pentagon “contractors”) killed in 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. The Americans were fed up with Vietnam and had no desire to provide even the indirect aid that might have been needed to avoid a North Vietnamese victory. While polls have shown that most Americans prefer to leave Afghanistan, the predominant attitude of Americans towards the Afghan war in 2021 was arguably apathy, not antipathy. From a political point of view, public opinion has made the Vietnam War untenable. By contrast, Biden’s choice in Afghanistan was an unforced error.
  • Although the North Vietnamese regime had an imperialist and Stalinist character, it had never attacked the homeland of the United States. For their part, the Taliban were partners in the worst terrorist act ever committed on American soil, a fact even more anchored in public consciousness by the proximity of their reconquest of Afghanistan in the 20th century.e anniversary of September 11. The Americans may have wanted to end the war with the Taliban. They didn’t want to lose him.
  • Ford was able to regain some national honor when he ordered the U.S. Marines to liberate the Mayagüez, an American merchant ship that had been hacked by the Khmer Rouge the day after their takeover in Cambodia. Biden undoubtedly hoped he would accomplish the same type of recovery with drone strikes against ISIS terrorists following the suicide bombing at Kabul airport in the last days of the week. ‘evacuation. However, the first strike was not impressive (the Pentagon never even disclosed the name of the target) and the second turned out to be a horrific disaster that claimed the lives of an innocent aid worker and seven children.
  • Biden’s evacuation of Afghanistan, rushing to meet the self-imposed August 31 deadline, left behind hundreds of Americans and thousands of Afghan allies who are now in mortal danger. Many have reached safety, but some remain. In addition, the images of Afghans clinging desperately to an American plane taking off (several falling to death) will remain etched in American memory for a long time. The impression of an administration coldly leaving Americans to fend for themselves behind enemy lines will no doubt persist too, with no clear analogy in Vietnam (leaving aside controversial claims about American MIAs).

In the long term, however, the upward trend in Ford’s job approval ratings in the months following South Vietnam’s collapse fails to capture the possible political effect that may have contributed to its defeat. in 1976 and the subsequent transformation of American politics early in the next decade.

Above all, the fall of Saigon set in motion an international Soviet juggernaut which was only stopped with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. In less than five years, from April 1975 to December 1979, 10 countries fell. in the Soviet orbit – South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, South Yemen, Grenada, Nicaragua and Afghanistan. In 1975, Indochina was the first course; Angola was on the menu next, in November. These successful “wars of national liberation”, as the Soviets called them, were made possible by vast injections of Soviet arms and advisers (and in Angola, Cuban troops), without opposition from the demoralized United States. . Communist advances, coupled with the widespread atrocities and refugees that invariably accompanied these advances, fueled Reagan’s rise.

When Reagan entered the Republican primaries against Ford in 1976, his candidacy was largely a reaction against the Nixon / Ford / Kissinger policy of “detente” or easing tensions with the USSR. Reagan criticized detente as a one-way street combining American concessions with Soviet aggression. “All I can see is what the other nations of the world are seeing: the collapse of American will and the withdrawal of American power,” Reagan said in a speech in Florida at the start of the season. 1976 primary. Although Reagan rarely openly discussed national humiliation in Vietnam, it was never far from the surface of his analysis. (In 1980, just five years after the fall of Saigon, Reagan went further, calling the Vietnam War a “noble cause.”)

Reagan did not win the GOP nomination in 1976, but he fought Ford until the Republican convention in Kansas City, missing only 117 out of 2,258 delegates. In the general election, Jimmy Carter defeated Ford by a narrow electoral margin, while narrowly winning the nationwide aggregate popular vote of 50 to 48%. It remains an open question to what extent Ford’s defeat was due to the political damage inflicted by Reagan’s main challenge. And, of course, it was Reagan who ultimately inherited the leadership of the Republican Party and the presidency four years later.

The collapse of South Vietnam showed that a president could suffer little short-term damage in approval polls after a defeat, but that such events could nonetheless generate diffuse long-term vulnerabilities for him. President Biden hopes the reverse is also true – that the political damage from the US defeat in Afghanistan, while severe, will be short-lived. And maybe it is. Voters have a notoriously short attention span.

But there are plenty of reasons to believe that it could also get worse. Just as the North Vietnamese victory sparked a series of events that ultimately undermined Ford, there are half a dozen scenarios that could further increase the political cost to Biden of handing over Afghanistan to the Taliban. The news could, for example, flow of heated retaliation by the Taliban against America’s Afghan allies, or of more general human rights violations. These stories have already started to appear. Unchecked Afghan refugees brought to the United States could pose a danger. The weapons left by American forces could be used in a dramatic way against American interests. (A few years after the fall of South Vietnam, captured M-16 rifles came into the hands of Communist guerrillas in El Salvador.)

Terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda and ISIS-K, could demonstrate more clearly that they are firmly established in Afghanistan, presenting new threats to the United States and its allies. One or more of these groups could launch bloody terrorist attacks against Americans abroad or even on American soil. This has, after all, happened before. Finally, an adversary state of the United States, say China or Russia, might decide that Biden’s weakness, highlighted in Afghanistan, makes him an opportune time to strike lightning against Taiwan, Ukraine or the Baltic states. .

What will Biden’s Angola be? If he’s lucky he won’t, but he has very little control over any of these scenarios. Like all American presidents, he is at the mercy of events.

Andrew E. Busch is Emeritus Professor of Government and George R. Roberts Fellow at Claremont McKenna College. He is co-author of “Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics” (Rowman & Littlefield).


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