DBA40

Revisiting Lessons of the Vietnam War

Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to Brookings. I'm Michel Hamlin and the Foreign Policy Program. And I have the privilege of being up here today with two of my good friends who have written remarkable new books about Afghanistan, Max Boot and Steve Young, excuse me, Excuse me, about Vietnam. That's the Freudian slip. There were two other good friends. Yeah, two other good friends. Right. But I got the names right, of these two. And this is Steve Young, not the quarterback, and this is Max Boot. Yes, the Council on Foreign Relations scholar and MacOS hanging off the quarterback. Also, not the quarterback. Well, maybe the high-school team or the Redskins because we haven't finished that conversation yet as to the team's future. I luckily had some of their material to read over the weekend rather than abusing myself with that, watching that football game. But we are here to be treated today to some very important new histories about Vietnam. And we will get into potentially Afghanistan later with your help if you wish. But that's not where we're going to start. We're going to start by burrowing in a bit on Vietnam. And the books these two gentlemen have written, of course, Vietnam is still an important part of our country and it's not just its history, but it's contemporary outlook on life. As Faulkner said, the past is never forgotten, It's not even past. And I think that's certainly true with Vietnam today. A lot of a lot of you, a lot of us had been influenced by Vietnam directly and personally, but also it clearly influences our national politics and our ways of thinking about war and social cohesion and a lot of the issues that are back on the agenda today. But again, we're not going to start there. We're going to start by talking about the specific books and histories they've each written, which take angles on Vietnam, but speak more generally to that war. Max wrote a book called The Road Not Taken. And it's about a man named Edward Lansdowne, who many of you are familiar with and who max is going to talk more about in just a moment. Who had some ideas on Vietnam that clearly were not ultimately at the core of American policy? And a big question is, how much difference would it have made if they had been more heated? And that's certainly going to be the theme we continue on with Steve Young as he talks about his book on the chords program. And by the way, the courts program is interesting enough and important enough that some people including Steve, think the war could have gotten much differently if we had full heartedly and more early on endorsed it. It's also a little bit opaque enough and forgotten enough that many websites can't even agree on what the initials stand for. I think everybody says civil operations. But after that, the consensus seems to diverge as to whether this was revolutionary development or rural support or a little of both. The first one sounds a little, a little lefty, but it may have been the accurate name at least for a time. Steve can explain all that to, uh, shortly. But this was an idea to try to really work on both local and local security and good governance at the local level, the kind of themes that we've continually been debating and discussing in regard to Iraq and Afghanistan in this century. So our format today will ultimately get to you and we'll want to involve you and your questions in roughly the second half of the 90 minutes. At the beginning, what I'm going to do in just a moment here is ask first Steve and then max. Just to mention a little bit more about the specific scope of their book very briefly. So you can begin to see how we're envisioning the flow of the conversation. And then I want to take 10 or 12 minutes with each of them. Just ask them to explain some of the big ideas in their book. The main flow of their argument, the main flow of their history, with a couple of follow-up questions for me, and I'll begin with max, because Edward land snail sorta comes first in the Vietnam history. He had been involved in Vietnam in the early to mid 1960s, especially in Maxwell. Say more about that in a second. The chords debate may have had some roots in earlier periods in the Vietnam Campaign, such as it was. But it really became a big idea and official program more towards the latter part of the 60s and into the seventies. And I think It's fair to say, although Steve can quickly correct me here in a second when I give him the podium that there is a serious argument as to whether if we had gotten a court sooner, as someone like an ever land sales outlook might have advised whether we could have done much better in Vietnam. So that's the question before the jury and also whether there are any lessons for today in our current counter-insurgency and stabilization missions in the United States at the moment. But that's my once-over. Let me ask both Stephen max now to situate in their own words, their book in this broader debate. And then we'll go into the actual meat of the discussion. Steve. Oh, one more word. Steve has a distinguished career in philanthropy, in corporate governance, in social responsibility, a considerable background with Harvard University, both its college and law school, and then later as an assistant dean. Lot of ongoing activities in the great state of Minnesota as well. And so we're very glad to welcome him back to Brookings. Max went to Berklee for college, then studied history at Yale in graduate school. And as you know, is the author of previous award-winning books on counterinsurgency, on, on revolutions in military affairs and related matters. And just one of the most distinguished authors. International Securities scholars of his day. So without further ado, see please tell us a little more about your buck. Thank you, Michael. So there's a long story behind this book, which I will avoid talking to you, but it began when Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker, who was our ambassador in Saigon from 67 to 73, asked me to help him write memoirs. So I worked with Ellsworth and he passed away. The memoirs did not get published. I had a lot of stuff from his files, from the interviews, from reading all the secret cables. A lot of it was about the pacification, working with the Vietnamese and the political side. I'd also served in chords myself. And so I tried to pull together a story about, about chords, which nobody was interested in, frankly. So years went on. Iraq happened in Afghanistan happened. And I had a friend a couple of years ago said Steve, the people have to know about chords and its successes. That will be one of my points. But I said I've tried, nobody's interesting. So where you gotta make it academic? You gotta, you gotta have a theory. Because people don't want to rethink Vietnam very much. This is all before the Ken Burns program. So he said, Well, why don't you do something with hard and soft power? So I said, Okay, so then I tried to think about how does chords counterinsurgency? You will, because a lot of harmonies between this and the headlands Dale. How does so I want to reference headlands tail. So how does an ED lands they all approach fit with hard and soft power. So my first response was yes, it's soft power. And the more I thought about I said No, no fact, the more I thought about it after that. And I know Joe Nye, soft power is I will be very frank, ladies and gentlemen, on many points, it's a stupid idea. But we have, we have dichotomized, are thinking about power and foreign affairs into two in incompatible alternatives. I take, I'll go into this later. There's the continuum I argue comes from Clausewitz. Most of what goes on is in the middle. Neither hard power nor soft power is relevant. Something else is relevant in the continuation of the spectrum from, if you will, from peace to thermonuclear war. Chords is in the middle. So I try to articulate a theory and I put a clumsy name on it called associative power. Because the genius of chords and this goes back to land stale and 54 and 55 is you work with other people. If you want to be successful, it's not unilateral. So courts ultimately is combining efforts, US, South Vietnamese, US military and civilian. South Vietnamese military and civilian. It's all about putting together a complex joint venture. So that's my point number one. Point number two is that basically defeated the Viet Cong and we won the war in South Vietnam by 972. So you can see this is going to be provocative. Thank you, That was excellent for situating the topic within the broader subject. Max, we could ask you to do the same and then I'll launch him a little more extensive discussion in your book. Well, my book is a biography of Ed lands there, but really seeks to tell the story of our involvement in Vietnam through the life of headlands there. Who was this once legendary covert operative said to be the model for the ugly American as well as the quiet American. And he was somebody who had a career in the Air Force, ultimately retires and Airforce two-star. But his most illustrious years were spent on assignment to the CIA. In the 1950's, he masterminded the defeated the hook rebellion, the communist insurgency in the Philippines. And his reward for that was to get a one-way ticket to Saigon in the summer of 950 for where he helped to create this new state of south Vietnam and became very close to no dens, yeah, the first leader of South Vietnam. He subsequently left Vietnam and became engaged in other pursuits in this town, including running something called Operation Mongoose and 960 to, to overthrow Castro. But he kept close tabs on what was happening in Vietnam. And he was very dismayed by the course of events in particular, by the rift between the Kennedy administration, NCAM. And he watched helplessly from the sidelines as the Kennedy administration did exactly what he told them not to do, which was to overthrows EM, which he warned would be a disaster because it would undermine whatever tenuous stability South Vietnam had achieved. In the early sixties. His advice was disregarded. He was force, forcibly retired by Robert Macnamara with whom he clashed incessantly. And then he went back for another tour of duty in Vietnam from 65 to 68, working first for Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and then for Ellsworth Bunker. And again, his advice was largely ignored because his advice was really to focus aren't creating a viable political entity in South Vietnam. One that could win the battle for hearts and minds, that could compete with the Viet Cong and the attempt to govern the South Vietnamese countryside. And of course, the, the, the main thrust of US policy was simply to bomb North Vietnam and the Vietcong into oblivion because General William Westmoreland thought that he could defeat the enemy by killing a lot of them and lands, they argued consistently that was not going to work. In fact, it was going to backfire. He was really a pioneer of what we would today call population centric counterinsurgency. The idea that to be successful, the troops have to win the confidence and support the people. And you don't want the confidence and support of the people by destroying their villages and killing them. And lot of that went on in Vietnam, obviously under both the French and, and our, and our war. And so he argued against all that and he was largely disregarded and he retired in the middle of 960 aid after the Tet Offensive, disillusioned and dejected because he had seen as advice consistently ignored by the powers that be. And so the reason my book is called The Road Not Taken. Edward lands, the only American tragedy and Vietnam is because I suggest that there was another road that Ed lands they'll argued for. And we could've, if not necessarily won the war, at least things would have been, would have gone at lower cost both to ourselves into the Vietnamese. If we follow the approach that learns, there'll advocated. Outstanding. Let me ask a little more about that approach because I guess I will at least mentioned in passing already Iraq and Afghanistan, you and I have had the privilege of seeing some amazing Americans and action and the wars of this century. Where when I reflect on the comparisons of Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam, I don't get the sense that that Vietnam was all that well poised to win. And I'm going to have the similar kind of question for you, Steve a little later. And so you can try to do a combined effort, security and good governance and economic development. But in these societies where institutions and individuals are weak or corrupt, where there is an outside power with sanctuary and support from abroad. It seems like it's a daunting proposition. So I just wanted to ask which of the tenets of land sales do you think we're sort of well enough and sophisticated enough in their in their development, they really could have made a meaningful difference. Is it primarily just taking away the bad stuff we did? Or do you really have a sense that land snail had complex integrated concept in mind that itself was refined enough that it really could have worked. You see what I'm getting at? In other words, the, the barrages with artillery, with napalm. The harm done by those seem so great that maybe simply avoiding that would have been the benefit of listening to land snail or do you think that he had really worked through a combined concept that it sort of added up to something particularly synergistic. Well, I think a lot of what I learned there was preaching again is what is known today as population center counterinsurgency. I mean, he really invented the modern day counterinsurgency in the late fifties, early sixties helped to give the Army Special Forces their counterinsurgency mission. Back then it was called counter guerrilla warfare. Eventually it became known as, as counterinsurgency. But the basic inside of that is to position that the army on the side of the people to avoid heavy fire power, but also to focus on governance. And that's something that we still have a lot of trouble with today. I think the, you know, Mike, you and I were both in Iraq during the surge and I think part of what made the surgeon Iraq successful in 2007, 2008 was basically the application of lands they holism to Iraq, although it certainly wasn't viewed that way. But, you know, the, the counter-insurgency manual tried to distill the lessons of past counterinsurgency and lands there wasn't cited, but certainly others who had very similar viewpoints, war. And so I think that was what enabled at least some of the temporary success, but it wasn't more last thing and in part because I think that even now we neglect the basic emphasis that lands they all put on building governmental institutions and working closely with local political leaders. And I think one of the big mistakes that we made in both Afghanistan and Iraq was, was becoming so at odds with our local allies with Malachi and with, with Hamid Karzai. And in some ways this parallels are falling out with no didn't Xian, which had such catastrophic consequences in Vietnam and led to the Americanization of the war. And I think part of lands that was genius is that he was along with te Lawrence, one of the most illustrious advisors of the 20th century. And he was somebody in the Philippines. He became his closest brothers with Ramon MSC, who was the Defense Minister and whom he elevated essentially to the presidency in the Philippines. And he again became very close with Zm in a way that no other American was as close with them and he was really establish report. He was able to get them to do what he wanted, not by hectoring them, not by lecturing them, not by giving, you know, non-negotiable demands, which tends to be the American way of dealing with, with, with weak local allies. But he would be friend them, he would listen to them, and he would sit there for hours. And in the case of a yam, this was quite an ordeal because anybody who dealt with them could, could tell you that he would go on for hours. And most Americans were ready to strangle themselves listening to the minutia of South Vietnamese politics. But why is though had this infinite patients and he would. Gladly listen to what zi, um, had to say no matter how long winded he was. And then eventually he would kind of lean into him and say, So if I understand, Do what you're saying is x, y, and z. And then he would suddenly rephrase what he had just heard and gently steer this foreign leader along the path he wanted to go and not by telling him, god **** it. This is the way we're going to do it. We're Americans when we know better. But by saying you have the wisdom, I'm just helping to draw the wisdom out of you. It's a very different approach, much more effective, and it's something we, we fail to do with leaders like Karzai molecule. I think there's something oh, we still struggle with today, I think, but that's, you know, that along with limiting the firepower, it's kind of a general different approach to counterinsurgency. And it's, It's worlds removed from the drone strikes, its military operations because lands there, it was really focused on the political element of warfare. And, you know, we all know the class. So it said that, you know, about, talked about the primacy of politics and warfare. But all of our military folks learn that in school, but we don't actually practice and on the battlefield and we tend to give pride of place to combat arms. And we neglect the, the political dimension, which is why it's so hard to win lasting victories in places like Afghanistan or Iraq are today in Syria. So thank you and I'm just going to keep that with a couple more questions for you and then move on to Steve and I realize we're just sort of getting little snapshots of your argument in your history. So I apologize if this is an imperfect way to do it. And we encourage everyone, of course, to read the book and by the book. But I wanted to ask you a little bit more about the M and land snail. And you alluded to Malachi and Karzai. You could argue that with Malika and Karzai, we stuck with them and with the M, We didn't. And in all three cases we got bad outcomes. Or at least in Iraq and Afghanistan for the amount of effort we put in the results are pretty mediocre. And if those two hadn't been ultimately displaced, we were perhaps headed for an unfortunate outcome. One could argue that. So I guess I I guess I want to probe a little more on the DM question. I don't know the history of that individual very well, but what I do know isn't that impressive? And you didn't say anything just now that maybe you feel more impressed by df. And I wonder how well we could've done with a guy who was widely seen as corrupt, as divisive, I think between Catholics and Buddhists, as insufficiently attuned to where his people were at that moment in their history. Is this really a guy that even if we had display the infinite patience of Job or land snail that we could've brought to run his country well enough to defeat the insurgency that was being presented and supported from abroad by some pretty powerful actors. I mean, what you're articulating, it was basically the critique took root in the Kennedy administration at 960 three. And that led to the overthrow. And it's a critique which is still widely held today, including if you watch the episode 2 of the of the Ken Burns documentary series, a lot of criticisms in there of of, of z. I wouldn't say so much for corruption because I don't think even his worst critics accuse them of being corrupt. But certainly he was accused of being autocratic, aloof. This Catholic Mandarin out of touch with his people, a dictator. And a lot of those criticisms had some validity. But here's the thing. You know, everybody in 960 three was so focused on how terrible Zm supposedly was and certainly Halberstam and she and in the press corps was, was howling for him. Ultimately, the Kennedy administration concluded that we could not be successful in, in, in the Vietnam conflict with Zm. But guess what? We saw what happened when he was actually overthrown in the situation spiraled out of control because it turns out and in retrospect that Xian was actually holding South Vietnam together more or less. And as soon as he was overthrown, you had one illegitimate ruler after another, one military coup after another. And the security situation disintegrated at leaving Johnson with no choice he thought but to send American troops if he was to prevent the collapse of South Vietnam. And I think from lands they also perspective what he would've said is that, you know, Xian was underrated, that he was actually an honest guy. He had, he had credibility because he was both anti-communist in anti-French, that he was really the most credible nationalist leader that South Vietnam could have had. But he had a lot of issues and of course, chief among them was his conspiratorial brother. No, didn't knew who pushed him to create a more fascist type state in South Vietnam. After lands they were left at the end of 950 six. But what lands they'll consistently argued was, instead of raging against the yam and, and, and giving the military the approval to overthrow him. What we need to do is we need to influence him for the better and lands there when he had been in South Vietnam had actually managed to influence for the better. But after he left, we wound up with this adversarial posture with syndrome where we weren't influencing just like we wound up with an adversarial posture with Karzai and molecule here. And it wound up being incredibly counterproductive. So two more questions. One on military reform and the, and the performance of South Korean military forces and then one on South Vietnamese. South Vietnamese. Thank you. But I'm getting ahead of myself when I'm thinking about the military reform piece. But then also one I'm thinking about local governance and what the land snail view of the world might have meant for South Vietnamese local governance and how you would have actually implemented this concept of population centric security. Within Vietnam given its various fissures and social challenges. So that's the second question. The first one, you mentioned Neil Sheehan, bright shining lie, perhaps one of the best Vietnam books. And he did something similar in his book to what you've done, I think in yours to find one very interesting, important American who spanned much of the effort. And of course that was john Paul then from getting that name right after my previous missteps. And but I remember very vividly from the bright shining light book, a battle of, I think up Bach in 1964, where South Vietnamese forces performed abysmally and was 63. 63. And, and so the performance was so poor that I had to ask. That's just one snapshot and I'm just this is a provocation, obviously not if not trying to counter you, I'm just trying to set up a point of view and see how you would respond even if we continue to massage DM and get them to make a few okay decisions at the level of national governance. Weren't the South Vietnamese forces so unmotivated and incompetent frankly, that they were up against a better FO and the timeline on which the land snail effort would have had to occur would've been so belated compared to, you know, the kind of time we really had available to us that we would have been in a bad place regardless. I think that's a I don't think that's a fully accurate argument, I guess I would say because there was certainly no question that the ARVN, the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, had their weaknesses and they were up against a superb foe in the North Vietnamese military machine and in the Vietcong, some of the best soldiers in the world. No question about it. But in fact, and we can see this more clearly what the advantage of historical hindsight, despite the occasional reverses that they suffered and the battle about back, which was one where John Paul van was the advisor to the, I think it was the Arvin seventh Division and he castigate them in the press and, and, and gave the ARVN a bad a bad name because of that. I think that was in that period in the 62, 63 area when Museum was still in power is a little bit of an aberration because in fact, at that point, the Arvin was on the offensive and the Vietcong were actually on the defensive. And they were being driven back not only by the ARVN, which had new American military equipment, American advisers and was actually on, on the go. But also by the strategic hamlets program, which was kind of a classic counterinsurgency initiative to try to secure the rural population from the Vietcong. And again, that had some problems and it was overhyped by the Xeon regime and it expanded to rapidly and so forth. But generally it was actually making headway. And if you actually read the official history put forward by the North Vietnamese Military and the North Vietnamese government, they will can see that they were suffering some serious defeats in the 62, 63 period. And it was there, they only really regain the initiative as soon as he was overthrown because at that point the strategic hamlets were abandoned. Chaos gripped South Vietnam, all the, all the province and district chiefs who replaced you had one military regime after another. So you lost any kind of cohesiveness or stability. And that's what really enabled this massive North Vietnamese invasion to occur, which led to two Johnson's fateful decision to send American combat troops in 960 five, which headlands they'll oppose. So I know, I think, I hope that people will read my book with an open mind because I think I tried to provide a more balanced picture of z, Um, and I don't neglect has his dark side or his weaknesses. And there were many. But I don't think that he was quite a bad guy as S has often been portrayed. Not as bad as the Kennedy administration thought he was. Because in fact, as we know, things got a lot worse once he was gone. And then finally, Thank you. Appreciate very much the clarification on the key themes in your book and how they push back against some widely-held use, including perhaps by me. But on the issue of the strategic hamlets and the potential for local political governance to improve. What's your feel about me? I think it's implied and you're slightly more optimistic sense of how things could have gone but, but how would the fissures in society, the agrarian versus rural land holder versus not landholder, Catholic versus Buddhist. How could these have been reconciled in a low and a strategy for good governance locally, would you have had to go for those towns and villages that were primarily, uh, you know, less divided that start with those had the Ink Spots grow to the more complex areas of social descent and you know, divisiveness or what was the potential really to bring this society together and unify it. Hamlet by Hamlet. Well, that was actually a lot of what lands though was advocating a starting with, with local areas that were more resistant to communism, where you had villages that were Catholic or, or belong to one of the religious sects, the cow die or the wall. How, who were ideologically resistant to this atheist ideology and kind of expand outward. But he also believed it was incredibly important to have. Local governance in the villages. And one of the things that he thought Z, I'm really made a big mistake on which he did after lands they left Vietnam was in the local election of village chiefs because, and then start appointing them basically from Saigon like the district and provincial leaders. And you know, what that meant in practice was that if villagers were not happy with their local chief, there was no way to vote them out of office and we want to get rid of them was to dime him out to the Vietcong and have the Vietcong kill him. And that happened quite a bit. And the Viet Cong would tend to kill either the most corrupt and unpopular village chiefs or the most effective ones who are the best at resisting the Communist offensive. But lands they all thought this was a just a fatal miscalculation on the part. He probably would've been able to dissuade them from doing it if he had been around. But because he thought it was important for villagers to, to have confidence in their officials and be able to replace them through lawful elected means and and, you know, lands they'll basically, I mean, he was certainly well aware the fissures and in South Vietnamese society, some of which you of you have mentioned. But I mean, he consistently argued that whether it was the amber or, or his successors, that they had to reach out to their political opponents to try to have a more inclusive regime that would represent all aspects of society. And that would not rule in dictatorial or heavy handed fashion. And he had some success in achieving that kind of outcome in the mid-fifties when he had the full support of the Eisenhower administration, the Dulles brothers in particular behind him. But in subsequent years, he lost that support. And Johnson and in Westmoreland, the folks who are running the war in the mid-sixties just couldn't have cared less. They were happy to back and military regime and to, you know, go out and kill VC and they kind of ignored land sales efforts to, to increase governmental legitimacy by holding legitimate and fair elections. I mean, he actually managed to hold legislative elections and 960 six that were pretty fair, but he had very little support from anybody. And when, you know, there was a scene in my book were Richard Nixon who was at that point out of office. But new lines though from having served as vice president and came to Vietnam and visited with lions, they want his team and he said, you know, hey Ed, So what are you guys up to these days and and lands, they'll said, Well, you know, Mr. Vice President or trying to hold these, these, these legitimate and fair elections for the, for the legislature and in Saigon and, and, you know, Nixon kinda look blankly and his reply was, well, of course, I'm all in favor of free and fair elections. As long as the right candidate ones. And AA, oh, that wasn't at all the lands they'll philosophy. His idea was, really, I don't have real free and fair elections where whoever is the most popular candidate wins. But, you know, Johnson and Nixon and all these other US leaders. Their view was basically what we've spent years fixing elections in the United States. So why shouldn't we fix the election in South Vietnam? Fantastic. Thank you very much. Excellent overview that got me very intrigued. And it's just two weeks till Christmas, so I'll be doing some shopping that I hadn't necessarily in the kind of quantities that I hadn't necessarily anticipated because I'm going to send this book around to a few places. Steve, over to you. Let me there's a lot on the table already and may want to comment already on some of what you've heard. But specifically, I also hope that you'll tell us a little more about the key precepts of chords. And the one question I would put before you is when I heard you talk about that continuum and you said that cords was neither hard power nor soft power. I actually thought it was both hard power and soft power. So maybe you can explain or help me understand my confusion. But if you can lay out just a few more of the big ideas in the courts program in anything you want to do by way of reacting to Max as well. Okay. First, what reacting to what you guys have been saying? I will I will put before the group the proposition that cords addressed and largely solved all those issues. What sub rosa one of my stories as I can I'm going to Can't remember some of the detail that he was 71. There were provincial elections. Parker, you may remember provincial council elections. And I'm sorry, folks, it was either Peter eyes, nose, or Peter Jay from the from the Washington Post. I was working in Saigon at the time. I got to know the big thing about democracy in Vietnam. I said, Hey, there these Provincial Council elections and their real competition going on down there, you want to come with me? So I think it was pure j. So we went down to Qianlong and where I used to work, we went to a couple of districts and there's these heat intellectual go you, if you have enemies, do not get along with each other very well as a general principle. So there are a bunch of candidates and he goes, he goes back to Saigon. He says Steve, I got to thank is amazing. He wrote up something like, I don't know, 3038 paragraphs on these elections. Story gets published in the Washington Post. And it was either, and I can't remember, ladies and gentlemen, it was either eight paragraphs on page 11 or 11 paragraphs on page eight, right? In other words, a major, major accomplishment in terms of what we Americans were trying to do. A Vietnam ignored, right? So the fact that I could stay chords addressed all these things. And some of you may be looking at me saying, You know what, Steve smoking. I can understand. Let me do two things. First, getting back to Mike's point about the continuum in the center, I would argue, and this is a, this is a debate. I think we Americans are new here in Washington. You have to have. Both soft power and hard power are fundamentally unilateral. And I submit that if you listen to what Max was saying about length tail, because my dad had the same experience, was young in the 50s. If you can sit there is an American and listen to somebody like that. You're not being unilateral. You're doing something else. You're building a relationship, you're building trust, you're doing something. So soft power, unilateralism, quoting Joe Nye, Joe Biden just had a piece the other month. Soft power is they do what we want because they love our values, right? Just like those Iraqis in 2003, right? Once we got rid of Saddam, they're all going to welcome Western democracy in American values and things like this. And I believe George W Bush are then President, later complained and nobody told him that there were Sunnis and Shia, right? So soft power is they're going to do stuff for us. Karzai is going to get along with us, but monkeys going to do what we want because our values, right? That's very unilateral. I submit, we lecture. The other thing with hard power is it's expressing unilateral. Here's what Clausewitz writes about, right? I bet I break your will through the use of violence. Now what's in the middle? When I'm not there to impose unilaterally, I got to work out a deal. A quick, a quick jaunt to history up. Washington. George Washington won the Battle of Yorktown. Is that historically accurate? That he alone and the American forces won the Battle of Yorktown. Some of you may remember that Benjamin Franklin had negotiated a treaty of alliance with the king of France. And at the time of the Battle of Yorktown, what was out in the Chesapeake Bay. Degrasse is Fleet, preventing the British from resupplying and, and supporting Cornwallis is tropes. Without that French fleet, the British would have resupplied Cornwallis. Cornwallis would have won the battle, and there will be no United States of America. We only survive, We only one at Yorktown because there was an alliance we were working with other people. They were helping us. 1.2nd. Let me give you a try to be very fast on what happened to create courts. And why was it created? Because I think it indirectly addresses these, the failures of these two extremes and something in the middle. Some of you may recall in the fall of 960 six, we Americans in Washington and President Johnson in particular, faced with two competing philosophies about what to do in Vietnam. There was the approach or Robert Macnamara and the military which was hard power, roughly speaking, there was the approach of the anti-war movement and the doves and George Ball and others which was to negotiate, which is an effect of soft power approach. We have, we have to negotiate and get out of the war. In October 1966. Some of you may remember Macnamara submitted to Johnson What is fairly well-known, and the text is in at least the Ravel addition to the Pentagon Papers. His memorandum, which basically said, I have come to the conclusion that nothing we're doing will defend South Vietnam. We cannot convince the North Vietnamese to give up. And I don't know what to do. I'm overstating the case, write. The memo was elegant. It is professorial. It is, it is emotionally neutral. It is well-written, it as well craft the pros has excellent, but the bottom line is, so put yourself in the shoes of LBJ and October 1966 with congressional elections coming up in like two weeks, right? And your second, we're not talking about any Secretary of State, secretary defense leads. And Joan talked about Robert McNamara, iconic figure in a very, very, very close confidant of Bobby Kennedy, who's telling Bobbi everything. He's also telling LBJ and he's basically go on to his president who's got listening to Macnamara in the military. A 175 thousand Muslim Americans in combat in South Vietnam and more on the way. He hasn't given the military all they wanted. But he's basically done the non lands Dale approach. Just I I support what Max was saying. Now, a Secretary of Defense comes and says, Oh, sorry, Mr. President, you can't win doing what I told you do. And I don't have any ideas. In ending up my book. I was a friend of mine, suggested I go back to the LBJ Library and Austin go through files of Colmar. And I also said, Oh, Walt Rostow. And some of you may remember, I'll go through because Rostow was the advisor for national security it that'll be taken over from McGeorge Bundy. I go through Rostow files and commerce files, sitting in a folder in hostile files, which I don't think anybody say. It's a piece of paper with handwritten notes by Ross out of a luncheon meeting with LBJ, a mass o menos November 13th. I think I reference it in the book, 1966. And the note says, put together a small group, you, Robert calmer, chair Katzenbach, Cy Vance, and get a smart general and rethink Vietnam. Now I found no, I've never seen any other reference. I'd see nothing else at that group was actually formed and met, but With by the end of November, within two or three weeks, Robert Colmar on the White House staff comes up with a strategy for Vietnam, which is new and comprehensive. And it's in the middle. It's not more hard power. And it's not soft power. It's basically working with the South Vietnamese at the village level. It's kind of, it's a land snail kind of strategy. And mobilizing more and more South Vietnamese assets, IE the ARVN, IE the economic wealth of South Vietnam gotta get the economy going. And implicitly in commerce recommendation of late 66, phasing out and withdrawing american forces. This gets accepted by Johnson in March. He, he puts it in the operation by sending out Ellsworth Bunker to be Ambassador, Robert Kober to set up the chords organization. And Creighton Abrams to be a deputy to Westmoreland, to focus in on the Arvin and building up the capability of the ARVN. And those three people work on that for the next three or four years. And and basically, as I said earlier, and I will defend it in the Q and a, the communist, the Viet Cong, the Southern sympathizers of Hanoi were defeated. And in 70 to the ARVN held off a main force invasion of Hanoi divisions with the help of american airpower. But American bombing it en la Khan, Tom and Jerry would not have won the day if the ARVN had broke. And at least the Ken Burns film admitted that, that the Arvin stood their ground and it was the ARB and under general Jerome who recaptured Guang tree. So what was courts? I mean, next question. I mean, there's the book I try to go through sort of year-by-year, step-by-step. How did this work? Who did what? What was the theory and the basic theory, the operational theory. There were two phases, I argue a one. The first phase was sort of the calmer phase, which was of the call revolutionary development. Which was basically central government cadres Coming down the villages to motivate the people. The second phase, which I give all credit to William Coby, who in my, in my experience I worked for the guy was a genius. He was just a remarkable man. It was local elections and organizing the people in their local communities. Which Michael gets to your point, if you're in a while, how village the why, how elect their own village council, right? If you're in a while, how Catholic village? Depending on where you're like, Yeah, you're good. You have a village council of 10 people. You're gonna get six. Why, how, and for Catholics? And guess what generally happens among human beings and those kind of situations kinda work out a compromise. Write the law, how don't sort of step one, all the Catholics, the Catholics get along a little bit, but then they ask for a few things. And in the ebb and flow of democratic politics, you trade off and you build a community process, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So let me stop there. Fantastic. If I could just add one thing Steve just said because I obviously agree with what Steve was saying, but I think, you know, the tragedy of Vietnam is that we try this other approach, the firepower intensive Westmoreland Johnson Approach. For, you know, it's really from 65 to 68 with two years of complete chaos before that, between 6365. So by the time the alternative chords approach started to have some success after the failure of the Tet Offensive in 1960's, the patients to the American public was exhausted and nobody at that point was interested in a fair assessment of what was going on in Vietnam. They just wanted to get the **** out. And essentially that unsuccessful approach that Johnson Westmoreland pursued, which killed so many Americans and so many Vietnamese and also killed in American popular support for the war. So that by the time we started to get things more right, it was, it was too late because even, even, even Nixon was Kissinger were intent on I'm just pulling everybody out as quickly as possible. So question for you, Steve, to follow-up. You mentioned McGeorge Bundy who I think left in 1966. And I think he left largely in frustration at how the, how the war was going. He doesn't seem to have had it, despite his great gifts, doesn't seem to have had the intuitive realization that there was an alternative, right? Because he was a smart guy and a, and a pretty historically minded guy. And if he had thought it was worth fighting for that, there was something else to do that was doable. Presumably, he might have stayed on I'm just asking this as a provocation. So why do you think McGeorge Bundy didn't grasp the potential here, out of the land snail model, out of, in some ways what seems like common sense. Try to scale back the firepower focus more on local governance. Why were we so devoid of ideas in that crucial period of time? It is Max has just said may have been when we really squandered the opportunity politically. This may be unfair and it involves my institution in my class and my background of Harvard. Mcgeorge Bundy, right? I mean, David Halberstam got something, I think, very correct in his book, the best and the brightest. And may I also submit, ladies and gentlemen, that that's what happened in our presidential election of 2016. The best and the brightest were rejected by the deplorables. And Halberstam was onto something. Macnamara was, was cold, focused on numbers. He was more an MIT numbers guy, right? Mcgeorge Bundy was, was old line New England, Harvard. I think he was dean of the faculty, didn't have a PhD, if I recall correctly. But McGeorge Bundy had everything figured out. There's a story, a story. I think it's an Halberstam, but I've, I've heard from others to Lyndon Johnson right after the inauguration. He said the first cabinet meeting of the Kennedy Cabinet. And he goes back up to the hill and he goes with his mentor Sam Rayburn. And he says something like, I'm sorry for the language. They something like Sam, I'm ******. I mean, where are these people? I mean, MIT PhD, Harvard disharmony goes all these credentials of all the people in Kennedy's cabinet, whom I think that those of us around at the time were saying My God, these are Demi Gods. What was the, what was the other story about how a meeting of the max, the most brilliant meeting in the White House was the Kennedy cannon, since Thomas Jefferson dined alone. So anyway, so Johnson is crying to Sam Rayburn about this. He's a class, he says crude, vulgar, Texan. And Sam Rayburn says, I'm a ****. Linda and I just wash. One of those people had ever been elected sheriff. And that McGeorge Bundy, There's something in there. You don't sympathize with other people. You rationalize everything. You impose conceptual boxes on other cultures, on other people. And you have, and this is what I think you see in retrospect. If you read the memo to these people, you have this remarkable ability to rationalize. And there's, you know, what outcome you kinda want the president to get to, right? So you rationalize the data that this to that. And then if I read the memo, I come down and I say right, option number one is, you know, so there is a danger in being too smart. Last question for you anyway. I'll just jump in. Yeah, absolutely. One fast. They're anecdote that supports the point that Steve was making about the arrogance of the best and brightest. This was something a meeting that occurred in 62 and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara called headlands, who at that point was essentially what we would now call the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, called them into his office and said he had this graph paper there any out a pencil and he said, you know, add, I'm working on on arithmetic, the Vietnam War, getting everything into, into the computer here. And I have a list of factors. And I want you to help me with getting the numbers right and lands. They'll stood there and listen to him for a little bit and said, well, Mr. Secretary, you know, I'm happy to be helpful, but you, you need to remember the most important factor of all which x factor. And Macnamara immediately writes X-factor on his graph paper. And he says, Okay, great, tell me how to calculate that. And land snail says, Well, unfortunately, Mr. Secretary, I don't know how to calculate it because the X factor is the most important thing of all, but you can't get it down the numbers. It's the feelings of the people who the people actually want to be governed by. And that is going to resist any attempt to reduce the war down to an arithmetic calculation. And so of course, Macnamara being Macnamara, instead of listening the lines, they only taking this in, concluded that lands they, it was an idiot who is too stupid to understand this new technology and basically shunted him off from having any more influence on, on the course of Vietnam policy. If we had done it right, how long would it have taken? Three years? But we did it, we did it in three years with chords. That's a little bit flip because one of things, like a couple of things I put in the book there, there are two other things like I have a chapter on Bunker as the ambassador. And I call it something like setting the context. You've got to set the context. And that, and that is your goes to your point Michael, the capacity, the ability of your ally. If you don't set the context, if you don't have the right leadership, the right amine has a whole bunch of things. The accounting, then your chords effort ain't going to work. So I'm being flip. But if you set the context three years, going back to another point is in 64, this goes to there was a, there was a Vietnamese government in 64 wed, which these are what were my friends. So which Robert Macnamara, Cabot Lodge, harkens the West. They had no clue. This was a government of dvx who put to add a coalition approach to fighting the communists coalition from villages on up. That same party, that same philosophy shows up again under two after the Tet Offensive. And here's the Vietnamese partner to Colby in the chords organization. It was there in 64 and we pushed it aside. But if we did it, we did it for three years. You say we succeeded in 72 and helping the South Vietnamese repel one particular invasion. So what did we get wrong? And obviously would've been better to start sooner. But what do we get wrong? That meant that ultimately the war was lost. If we did what you said for the length of time you espouse got to an okay place in 72, was it just too abrupt departure or what? No. There was something else and something that I came across when I was working with Ellsworth and I don't want to talk about it too much because I'm trying to write a book about it. But from my point of view, the Vietnam War was lost. On May 31, 970, one in Paris. And if you want more background, please contact Henry Kissinger. For those of you. I mean, there's, there's a big, big story there. That's a, that's a cryptic reference basically to the fact that we, that the Paris Peace Accords negotiated by Henry Kissinger and obviously under Nixon, were ultimately lopsided in that we removed all of our troops from South Vietnam. But North Vietnam was allowed to keep more than 200 thousand of its own troops in South Vietnam. And that was ultimately the lop-sided bargain that doomed the state of South Vietnam. But I think going back to what's the worst thing in the success in stopping, repelling the Easter offensive. And 972, and we had only about 5 thousand advisors in, in South Vietnam, but they're able to call on mass of airpower. I think if we had kept that kind of commitment indefinitely up to the present day, it's possible that, or even likely that South Vietnam would have survived. If I could follow up on that for this very important is that none of this is covered, I think in the Ken Burns documentary, which is sort of going to be the collective wisdom of our people about this. So first of all, the Henry shows up in Saigon with the peace agreement in September 70 to a, presents it to two in an English version. Had any Vietnamese draft until suddenly realizes there's a much longer story or two. But to suddenly realizes that his fundamental condition that the North Vietnamese regular army, the Pavane, leave South Vietnam has been ignored. The Pavane are going to stay in South Vietnam and he refuses to sign. It's coming up on the 68 election, right? He's got, he's got his American patron a refuses to sign. The consequence was bunker has to negotiate private letters from Nixon to two, promising be 50 two's. If the Pavane ever goes on the offensive inside South Vietnam. In the United States, we had a little affair called Watergate. President Nixon resigns. If you, if you read continuums book, a die tangled was one. Great spring victory. It says, lays one after the resignation guide lays one calls together Politburo and says, let's test them. So they, they, they use the Pavane troops to go after a remote God forsaken provincial capital foot-long, right? And they surround for glaucoma, they take foot-long Gerald Ford as president. B5 T2s are not set. Oh, by the way, the Politburo is meaning 24, 7 in Hanoi with a landline going down to their commander and foot-long commander reports back to the Politburo, we're faking it. No be 52 is we got the province and lays one said, that's it. The Americans are not coming back, release the troops. So this just goes to max is point that if we had remained a credible ally in 75, not clear that anybody could have conquered the South. Well, thank you. I've monopolized enough. I think a lot of you are going to want to get in on this and so please just wait for a microphone, identify yourself and if you want to direct the question to one or the other, That's great place right here. Again, the fourth row. Eric Hirshhorn. I feel as though I'm listening to a discussion of how the deck chairs should have been arranged on the Titanic. And my question is whether this was ever a good place to take a stand on, whether it was quicksand from the get-go. If I if I could speak to that. Historically, we will personal thing. But another factor against strategic, I don't know how many of you know, uh, remember norm Hannah? Norm Hannah wrote a book, I can't remember but norm Hannah was, was Paul mill for sync back in the 50s and 60s anyway, enormous State Department, I think norms argument was the place to take a stand, was Laos, the mountains of Laos to prevent the North Vietnamese from infiltrating. And apparently the only piece of advice the President Eisenhower gave to incoming President Kennedy when the two men met before they went up to the inauguration, was that he says, the most dangerous thing you have to face as Laos. Halberstam talks about this. I think some others, there was a compromise that because of the Bay of Pigs and the military are military refused to go and allows because there are no logistic basis, there's no support how can use. So Kennedy has to compromise and Laos. He then concludes that for whatever reason the line you have to defend itself, Vietnam, which has a long border. That's one factor. The second factor, Could, could Was there anything there? Was there any there they're into grounds. One. And these are the two arguments, I think I remember college kid fueling the anti-war movement. One was, these people don't deserve our help. There's nothing there, there's no there, there are a bunch of crooks are a bunch of this are a bunch of that. They're fractile there. Who knows what? They're not. They don't get their act together. The second thing was they can't perform their, their impractical, unworthy allies because they cannot deliver one of those two things. The, the original premise of the American commitment to South Vietnam. Which was the October 23rd letter of eisenhower to zm, which and this is the Reveal was written by my father, who was head of Southeast Asian Affairs for the state department at the time. And it very expressly references, and this point has been overlooked by everybody. In expressly references nationalism among the Vietnamese as a motivating force. And I remember dad, it was a new frontiersman, ITS ambassador to Thailand. I mean, we were in Thailand. Everyone. I was a kid in high school and I didn't get but my dad sense of going back to Washington, meeting with Macnamara and coming back and this was his team, Rusk. They never got this point about nationalism that I mean, dad, my dad and headlands, they'll work very closely together. They never got the point that if you're going to have the Vietnamese become worthy and stand up and be effective. You have got to appeal to their nationalism. To this day. We do not have, in English a book which will tell you about vietnamese nationalism. I tried to put two chapters in my book. This is sort of, I apologize for being pretentious, but I bring these along. This is the political theory of young top shin bone. It is the direct theory. It was a theory written by Professor wind up way who became a friend of mine. And here is on the Vietnamese side, the justification for the courts program and village decentralization and vietnamese, vietnamese nationalism goes back centuries. So let me put the same. He'd never, we never studied it up at the same question out to Max and frankly went when you combine the odds of success even for a better design approach with a relative strategic importance of Vietnam. Was this war worth fighting? Well, I think the, the, the question is, was South Vietnam worth supporting? And I thank you. Can, you can certainly see why in the 950 is we decided to support South Vietnam as an anti-communist bulwark for the same reason that we support at South Korea, which was just as much of an artificial state and was in many ways even more liberal than 115 than, than South Vietnam was. But Ed land snails philosophy was that South Vietnam had to basically stand or fall based on its own efforts, that we should not be fighting the war for them, that they needed to fight the war for themselves. And we need to give them assistance. We need it to help them build up a viable political entity. Should not be sending American troops to do the fighting. And I think that's a philosophy that in hindsight looks pretty good. Because whether we had, whether we would have won or lost the South Vietnamese war, it wouldn't have resulted in, even if we had lost that wouldn't it resulted in the deaths of 58 thousand Americans in millions of Vietnamese. And this fire power intensive struggle. We got the worst of all worlds that we disregarded the lands they can young approach Steve's father to try to build up a viable political entity and South Vietnam. And we thought we could just short-circuit that process through massive use of fire power. And, you know, I get, I get, I got some chills just yesterday when I say story in The New York Times about how we are using B52 is to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, where you have tried using B52 to fight guerillas before. It has not worked well, it will not work well in the future. Okay, we'll take two and this Rao start with Gary and then we'll go to the third row here. I'll take them both together before we go to you guys. Thanks very much for this conversation. I'm here at Mitchell. Right. The mature report. And I I want to I think this speaks of I'm going to direct this to max, but not because I'm not interested in the point of view of everybody up there. And then he has, it seems to me the two, the two questions that people wrestle with our Should we've ever been there? And could we have one? And the question that I'm as I sit and listen to this conversation this afternoon, the question that I get more and more intrigued with was, what difference? Leaving aside the death of people who I'm, I'm leaving aside that part of it. But in political terms, what difference would it have made to us and to the Vietnamese if we had one that, or what would the world, how, how would the world have been different if America had one? The Vietnam War is really the question that I'm intrigued. Both, great, and we'll take one more before we go to the response. Eleanor Bachrach. And micro and macro inside the question, the microbe being Mr. Beau, you say that we said that supported Zm more bad. At the same time you point to how he was asserting more and yellow things are already falling apart under him. Partly, let me be largely because of his brother and his dragon lady. But I'm not convinced and of course they couldn't have foreseen. But the larger question is, was the original sin are intervening to prevent the elections in the mid 1950s. So we're reuniting the Vietnam because it was anti-democratic. And it seems to me that when I was studying Southeast Asia in college, there was a lot about it being a nationalist movement more than communists. So start with next boot and then if Steve wants to, okay, there are a lot of questions out there. You're referring to the reunification elections that were agreed 2950 for Geneva Accords. But remember the United States wasn't in South Vietnam are not actually parties. So the Geneva Accords. And so we were not bound to implement them in the notion that there could have been free and fair elections across Vietnam is just, is just an illusion because by, by 950 six, North Vietnam was a communist dictatorship. ** Chi Minh was not going to allow free and fair vote. And we didn't want a free and fair vote either because North Vietnam was bigger than within South Vietnam. And some and hace Min also had greater standing as a nationalist leader having defeated the French than the guy we were supporting, no dens, yeah, um, so, yeah, undoubtedly, you know, we would've lost and the Peninsula in Vietnam would have been reunified under, under hace Min. But that was, that was why President Eisenhower didn't want to have that election. So that's, you know, but I don't think that it was therefore necessarily illegitimate to back the state of South Vietnam anymore than it was legit an illegitimate to back this theta South Korea, which remember under Syngman Rhee during the Korean War was not a democracy. And actually headlands there was working on trying to develop more of a democratic polity in, in South Vietnam. And the point on Xian was that yes he was, there was a crisis going on in 1963. But, you know, the, the view of a lot of smart people, including land snail and Rostow and others, was that, you know, we should not necessarily get rid of Zm because that would make the situation worse. What we needed to do was to guide them along a more consensual approach and less confrontational because his brother no, didn't knew as pushing the confrontational approach where we didn't have anybody on the American side who had his confidence to try to move them along in a more conciliatory fashion, which is why lands they will kept trying to get out to Vietnam. And he kept being stymied by his bureaucratic enemies. I mean, one of the, one of the turning points I mentioned in the book happened in 961, when lands they will became very close to JFK. And JFK listen to him on counterinsurgency. He introduced him to the problem of Vietnam. And he, he talked about making lines. They are the ambassador to, to Vietnam or possibly making Steve's Father Ken Young the ambassador. And having lands, they will go out as his political advisor. And in hindsight, a lot of people, including Ross down, a lot of others think that history might have taken a different turn off that it happened because they could have exercised a positive influence over z m and avoided this terrible confrontation that we had in 1963. Now your question, remind me again quickly. How much difference would it make? Yeah, We had done a successful job. Oh, what if we had won the war, right? Right. Got it. Got it. Yes. If we had one while, I think it would certainly would've made a big difference to millions of people who might now be alive and quite leaving aside just no, no, no, no. Let me finish. Leaving aside the victims of the American of the war on, on both sides, Vietnamese and Americans, what I'm thinking specifically, or all the people who died and 975 after the fall of South Vietnam and then the fall of Cambodia, of course, because Cambodia probably would not have fallen to the communists of South Vietnam had not fallen. And of course, we know the killing fields in Cambodia, something like 2 million people killed. We know hundreds of thousands of both people killed fleeing Southeast Asia. Just a humanitarian nightmare. Beyond that, I think, you know, obviously the loss of the Vietnam War effects and American confidence, it led to major strategic setbacks elsewhere around the world it was, you know, as we all remember, those of us who are old enough. And I barely was old enough at the time, but the crisis of confidence that the country suffered. And also I think, but remember also what it meant for, for Vietnam. Because eventually in more recent years, Vietnam is follow the kind of reformist market Leninist path of China. And so it's becoming a more prosperous and bustling place. But you know, anybody who visits Vietnam today sees very quickly that southern Vietnam, hace Min City, Saigon remains a much more vibrant and economically bustling place than Hanoi is. And so it's not hard to see what might have been. Because remember, like in the case of Korea in 960, North Korea was richer than South Korea and North Korea was more developed. It had all the industry. Today. Of course, South Korea is like the 11th richest country in the world, and North Korea is one of the poorest. And again, Vietnam is a very poor place. But I would submit to you that if South Vietnam had gone a different way, if I'd gone the way of South Korea, Taiwan, and had remained non communist than an American ally, it could today be another Asian tiger. Like, like, like Taiwan, like South Korea, and eventually it's getting there anyway, okay, you can say it's getting there anyway. So becoming an ally of America anyway, and that's true, but I think we've, we've basically lost a few decades of development along the way. Do you want to comment any of that on your question first, so two things come to mind. One, the consequence for we Americans, this gets more complicated because we got into it. But if we had one, we would not be such a divided society today. We would not have had the sense of whatever we want to call it and from wherever you are on the political spectrum. But that sense of American exceptionalism, that sense of American idealism, the sense of patriotism, the sense of being proud, that would be very strong and we would have a center to our politics. The rot in corruption, which is facing us today, started with a sense of something has gone wrong. Our government lied to us, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I think we can all relive those years. Secondly, and this is yet to happen, but I predict that the Chinese are going to buy Vietnam. Alright, just cash. They've already bought half the Politburo. I'm told by cash, they've stolen the islands, that they're, they're militarizing and in the South China Sea or vietnamese a stolen from the Vietnamese. If China militarized is the South China Sea, you could argue, have you all thought about the ship traffic that goes through the South China Sea every day. If you want to destroy Taiwan, Japan and South Korea and Southeast Asia, what do you do? You close the South China Sea, which the Chinese can do right now today because they've got the any ship missiles and they've got the land-based bases, they just shoot the ships. Now that provokes World War three, but what the heck? I mean, they can win it, right? I mean, I'm being flip, but that's a real consequence. If they dominate Vietnam, they get to South China Sea. If Vietnam were split and the southern part of Vietnam was strong economically militarily in a democratic society, China would have a much more difficult time. I don't think they could get the South China Sea. So that's going back to your points. The original sin, another point that I think is out there, you can find that Khrushchev would not pressure hace Min to have a fair election. And 856, because Khrushchev didn't want the elections, because of the precedent for the careers. And the germany's, the Russians did not want any talk of elections to unify Germany or unify Korea. So he had to stop it in South Vietnam. That's sort of another fact on this. Secondly, you mentioned this great gorilla in the room, which is, which is sort of WHO and the Viet Minh as nationalists. A very, very common feeling. I think it's a myth. Because you have to look at the murders in 945 and 946. Because WHO and the Viet Minh murdered the leading nationalists. Like, like the guy who came up with this drug to Adams, a young man. He's put together the Davidic party 1939. He's hold off and murdered in 1946, right when foo show the who at age 19 and 1939, has a transcendental experience. He sets up the legend. He's got hundreds of thousands of followers, he's murdered. And 847, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Hace Min and his people brought the French back to Central and North Vietnam in March of 1947191946. They brought him back. And then you had for about six months the communists in the French cooperating and in eliminating nationalists leadership. When the nationalists leadership has been eliminated by the fall, guess what? These two parties turn against each other. Right? Who and his people go to the Vietnamese people and say, Oh my God, those nasty French want to come back and reestablish colonialism, join us and will fight the French. The French then say, Oh my God, these the Hoshi men, he's not really a nationalist. We've just discovered he's a communist. Catholics and wealthy people of Vietnam rally to the tricolor, we will protect you. And, you know, this is where the Graham Greene image of the third force comes up. Rightmost you have nice, It's hard to say. Now what do we do? We have no leaders at the Communists on one side, the colonialist on the other. What are we going to do? In 1954? Two people arrive to try to deal with the third force, right? One is Ed land snail, the American who's got this down. I mean, just read, read, read the quiet American. Graham Greene is, is, is almost apoplectic in putting down these Americans for trying to work with the nationalists. And then the other guy is noting Tim. So this story about nationalism has never really been covered and there's not word, one word I think, about the genuine Vietnamese nationalist in the Ken Burns series. Okay, So let's go through another route. I think this time I'm going to take four in the hope that they'll be sorry, a two for each of our guys up here. So we'll go with I'm Sandy, although 1234. So row 1, 2, 3, and 4, and then we'll have time for another round. Don't worry. Sandy Garcia, SIS. We appear to have a National Security Advisor and team today who reflect the best and brightest criteria of the Halberstam era and your own descriptions, do they, in your view represent an understanding of the lessons we discuss? In what way do they in what way don't they? Okay. And then here please. Shared Gordon Bear army and state department retired. It seems to me that American policy in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan has followed essentially the same trajectory. Engage, escalate and abandoned. Took us three years or so to learn how to do counter-insurgency, which we did successfully after 1968 and then throw it away. In Iraq. Petraeus rewrote the book on counterinsurgency. He'd done his dissertation on Vietnam. He had some help from, from other people, mainly army officers as opposed to the State Department or academic types. We abandoned Iraq in 2011. The Obama administration wanted to abandon Afghanistan in 2016. Unfortunately, turn that one around. Not appreciate your comment on that one final footnote. As distributed, pointed out, the blood bath in Southeast Asia after 1975 was ignored or minimized in the Ken Burns documentary. And father replied, You can really was a coach your app and CT scan egg. That's another international as CHA, this way says Saigon civil assistance go some way. A chest voice could escape eg. I now had she change but who's counterpart in there? Right at the time I always airways after it after terrifying to him and we were involved to allow you to extend and helped me to rebuild areas that had been smashed up during a counter offensive. I always an outlying area beyond show line districts jargon. And that always made up of, on the one hand, by half of them were Catholic refugees from the North. And principal roles with each cone which each group boys, local priest and the other half were the Buddhist contention and the principal individual there would have been a Buddhist monk. I certainly agree with your comment that they, they work together because there was this sense of concern about the Communists, about the air con. And they had experienced one. Or it could be time. Like you've got a final question in this round, in the fourth row, here, in the fourth row. And then we'll know it will start in the sixth row. For the next round line, Rosenblatt, I'm accords graduate as well. Working with selfie enemies in the field. The corrosive NIS of the corruption really was one of our chief obstacles. The local leadership, military and civilian were quite aware that their superiors at what their positions. And that indeed the American president said fuel the price of a province Chiefs job, that the price of the core commanders job. So we had good people to work with it, the relatively junior levels, but no way for them to succeed unless we targeted corruption is a problem and use our leverage to deal with it. We didn't use that leverage. And I think we need to recognize that. Thank you. I think that I just open. Please go ahead. I was going to actually sure that you do the questions on the 21st century because those were the first two. And I was going to start with Steve to handle the last question, just trying to make sure we get through but you can still comment on it when the floor is yours. How about that Is want to keep the pace going because I have time for a couple more rounds here. So Steve, that last question to you hopefully, first of all, if I may, ladies and gentlemen, I would like liable Rosenblatt in Parker board to stand up. Parker, please. Okay. Ladies and gentlemen, I want to introduce you to American heroes because these two guys, in March 1975 started a refugee movement when Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford didn't want to do it. And because of them, a 705,000 thousand South Vietnamese allies of ours, we're saved. And you guys need to be uploaded on corruption. I Lionel is, as usual, prescient, insightful and very hard minded. A major problem which I don't think the South Vietnamese elite ever really dealt with. Not for lack of trying by a lot of Americans and not for lack of trying by a number of Vietnamese. I think the, I've been thinking about this for years. There's a cultural dynamic and it's part of it when we see this throughout transitioning societies partially, which is patron-client politics, I mean Afghanistan, all these issues you guys experienced in their IRAC, corruption, Iraq and Afghanistan. If I'm going to get ahead, I need oil and I need Parker is part of my team. I've gotta take care of them and I have to take care of them. And material ways, money, foreign bank accounts, houses, suffer the wife, whatever it is. I've got to have a source of funds, but I'm not alone. All of you, if we're all in this system, you're all parts of patron-client relationships. And patron-client relationships are nourished by wealth. Boss Tweed in New York Daily in Chicago. I mean, it's, it's, uh, and, and this is a political structure. And max, I'd be appreciate your thinking on this. This is a political structure that is very advantageous to idealistic motivated insurgents, right? Whether they're the Taliban or, or, or, or isis in Iraq or, or certain aspects of the Communists in Vietnam. And to me this is, this is the Achilles heel of the strategy that I recommend of associated power. If our basic approach is associated a power with a group of people in another country. And they're running traditional patron client systems. And we go in there, we lecture them on on, you know, honesty, integrity live on your salary. I mean, I remember a lieutenant in tambien province as lieutenant was whatever was 2000 PI asters a month. The RD lieutenant, He's got a wife, He's got two kids. I think one bag of rice was, was 500 pastors is monthly salary buys him four bags of rice. I mean, the guy can't make it. Right. So the wife is working. But I mean, I think you've you've you've hit on a structural problem that I don't think we, as a foreign policy elite really looked at with any great sophistication. So let's go to Max for that and then the other questions on 21st century applications and issues. Yeah, I mean, I fully agree that corruption is kinda the sleeper issue that we don't pay enough attention to. And it was striking to me the parallels between the challenges we face today and the challenges that lands though was involved in from 65 to 68 because he was, when as an advisor to the US ambassadors, he kept beating the drums about corruption that we add to reduce the mass of corruption. Again, as the questioner suggests, that was being fueled by our own cash, exactly the same as it's happened in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years. And he wanted to push reformers within the Arvin military structure. He wanted to take away the ability of the, of the, of the military junta to appoint the provincial and district chiefs because he want, he didn't want them to use those as patronage posts where people just bought their jobs and then recovered the cost through, through corruption. And he just had no support in the Johnson administration because again, nobody really cared about that kind of stuff. All they wanted to do was go out and kill VC. And they end in the same exam. Exact problem. We've had enough Afghanistan and Iraq because if you're cracking down on corruption, you have to have some very difficult conversations and confront your own military allies who are in the middle of that corruption. And it's much easier just to avoid that altogether and just turn a blind eye. And it's ironic because you'd asked about the current national security leadership. I mean, I was actually it's funny because I was part of a small advisory team for General Petraeus and Afghanistan when he came in as the commander in 2010. And what our assessment was was that corruption was the number one issue driving the Taliban. And so we had to do something to address it. And what General Petraeus did was actually he appointed something called Task Force Sophia to address corruption led by this promising young Army General named HR McMaster. But of course he only had limited success because it's a very difficult intractable problem. And much of the rest of the US government just wants to keep relationships as they are and not to, not to cause confrontation and upheaval with our allies. I mean, in terms of the question was in terms of what is, what lessons have they learn today? I mean, very interesting question because as I'm sure many of you know, HR gained prominence for his best-selling PhD dissertation called dereliction of duty, in which he very harsh the blast at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and in the 60s for not being more confrontational with President Johnson. I have mixed feelings about that thesis because I'm not sure the joint chiefs of staff knew what they were doing either because they were actually in favor of a more conventional Brute Force military approach. I don't know that would have been successful either, but I mean, it's certainly, as many people have remarked, it'll be interesting to see what what HR is views are on the proper role of military officers and government now that he has himself at the center of the power in this administration. But yeah, I mean, to the other point that was made about how are we repeating an Iraq and Afghanistan, some of the same mistakes. I think there is, there is an element of truth to that. It's not only our short attention span and our tendency to think, we're just going to whip the bad guys and leave. But also our inattention to issues of corruption as we were discussing and political governance. And we don't see those as being really the center of gravity for the conflict which they really are at the end of the day, it's not, we're not going to wind us by killing insurgents, but there's a tendency to, even now, although we don't necessarily use the same brute force methods as in Afghanistan, as in, as in Vietnam. We don't have free fire zone. So you don't have nightly harassment and interdiction fire or we're just randomly firing artillery. But we're much more precise today. But there's a tendency to data think that with our drone strikes and our precision guided munitions that we can just kill individuals. And in, by basically by leadership targeting to, to defeat the insurgency. And that has not work because you've seen what happened since 2000 one, I mean, we've killed tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of Islamist warriors all over the world. And they're probably more Islamist terrorists today than there were in 2001. Those groups remain stronger even though some had been defeated. Others have arisen. And so I think the lesson we need to learn from Vietnam is it's all about governance. And until you get the governance right, you're not going to win. Lasting victory is whether it's in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, name a country and of course, very, very hard to get governance right. And that's why we tend to two, avoid it. And you know, nation-building is a, is a third rail in Washington. One of the few things that, that Trump and Obama Green Eyes that they both hate nation building. But at the end of the day, you're not going to win unless you do nation building. That's how we won the war. In Germany, Japan, and South Korea. We did it through nation-building. And if we avoid doing nation-building the day, we're not going to win. So let's go to one last round because we only have five minutes to go in and you can get wherever final time that you got in and that. So let, let's see, I've got this woman here in the purple and then we'll work our way over. Many will even get the ten I'm going to plead for year. I will discuss later, get these two guys who'd had their hands up for lasso go 1, 2, 3, 4, and then wrap up. I'm Dr. Caroline pop when I graduated from college in 1969. So this was my War. I was married to an anti-war activist who was Harvard 67. Marty slate. You haven't talked about the anti-war movement. And a lot of the feeling in the anti-war movement was that people hated us because of the corruption that we lost the hearts and minds. If we, if there had not been in any war movement, would we still be there today? Afraid that as soon as we left, the government will collapse by you. And then here, the gentleman in the blue tie. And they will come over there. Dan Roper from the Association of the United States Army. I'd like you both to elaborate a little bit, if you would, on the binary nature of the discussion, whether it was hard power and soft power, which had gone to, you call dissociative power or smart power. That is now what nice calling it to the problems we've had in Iraq and Afghanistan with big debates on is it enemies centric counterinsurgency, or is it population centered counterinsurgency? And is there if we got to binary and national security decision-making process words, again, it's not an either or when you're talking about a wicked complex problem like either Iraq, Afghanistan, or Vietnam. And last two over here on the side? Yes, these two gentlemen, stanley rapoport, simple questions dealt with regard to governance. Don't you think we should recognize Eisenhower as not getting us into the war? Because he realized that the war in Vietnam and supporting didn't Ben Fu was not going to work. And I'd like to ask about candidate do you think the issue of governance and the role of the Catholic Church with DM played a role in his choice to get into the war. And then finally, right behind you. And then we'll wrap up Mike or lash out. My question has to do it. One of my beans. Involved in the anti-war movement in the period. There seems there was a lot of belief that the American Army soldiers did not want to fight that war. And one of the reasons for the agreement to withdraw American troops in R and a participation in the war was the lack of morale and the American army to continue the struggle. So Steve, you, I think a couple of those questions and then any final thoughts and then save it. Let me just try to shoot sort of responses on your course about the National Security Council. So I have a friend and I've tried to promote the book in the theory and I really like this on the supposition that it might be helpful. So I thought I had breakfast, my last trip to Washington and said, See, that's really interesting. I'll try to set up a meeting for you, but don't talk about Vietnam. So I'm I'm not visualized, kinda crushed. I mean, how do you explain something to this staff if you don't if you don't go into history, if you don't learn from history, et cetera, et cetera, anti-war movement. Long complicated thing. My sense is if you, if you go to Vietnam today and you have a private conversation with almost any Vietnamese 0 including communist. Write us a number one. Where do they want to send their kids? Where are they spending their money? Our reputation among the Vietnamese because we went there and we sacrificed, and we did not ask for one ounce of gold. We did not ask for one acre of land. And frankly, they don't understand this. And we backed head in half. They just think you Americans, I mean, everybody else in history, you go there, you grab stuff, you know, but you people came, you lost 58 thousand of your people. You tried to help us. You screwed up. But **** it, you're nice people. Naive. Maybe, they maybe don't think about the any war movement in terms of soft power, which I like to do is to why did Hanoi, when Hanoi, he had soft power in the United States and we had 0 soft power in Hanoi. The soft power of Hanoi in the United States was the anti-war movement. And that, I mean, a long conversation on that, but okay. The, the link between declining morale and US forces and withdraw my sense at the time was it was reversed. The real morale problem started after Nixon announced Vietnam as ation, which was taken by the military as a rejection of the hard power strategy. It was not seen as a sophisticated policy that it was Nixon saw. And therefore, my senses, your drafty are in Vietnam and in 69, 70, 71. And you want to be the last guy killed because withdrawal in the hard power context is failure. So I think it was the other way around. The hard, the hard power, soft power to binary. I think my point is AB, we are much too binary. And I, even in the book I criticize Petraeus and coin frankly, basically saying, I think which and the crystals plan for Afghanistan. They get 80 percent population centered, but they don't get the heart. They don't get the genius of Bill Colby, which is the people do it for themselves. The real trick is the people or the front-line troops. Everybody else's reserve, your main forces, your drones or your school buildings or your governance. Because if the people don't stand up and quote unquote fight. And often the fight in a critical situation. And my sense from afar is this is very true in Muslim societies. It's the mothers, the mothers who go to their sons and say, don't you join the Taliban? How do you motivate them, others? And this, and this, this is all peoples, I would say not population centric Max, I think we ought to say people-centric and get out with the people. Because if you do that, then things sort of solve themselves. And I really love your expression. Wicked problems. That's a technical term I picked up from academics in the Humphrey School. A wicked problem is what we had in Vietnam, It's Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria. No easy answers. And it takes us a certain suppleness and sophistication of mind to see the different pieces you have to put together. That's another thing, by the way, we'd have enough time to talk about. But with chords and these other things, you gotta have five or six things mutually interrelated happening all simultaneously. One of the other things I see in retrospect, as we Americans tend to think in linear terms, particularly our military, step 1 and then step two and then step three and step four. So you're debating about step number one and somebody says, Yeah, you can't do number one because number four isn't in place. And then somebody else says, yeah, but you can't do number 4 until you get number 1 and you debate, you all end up going to number one, which is usually going out and try to kill somebody. Thank you. Okay. Let's go to Max and thank you very much for those eloquent comments, max, to wrap up the whole day over to you. Well, let me just pick up on, on one question about President Eisenhower. Did he, was he determined to keep us out of the war? I mean, there is some truth to that. In the spring of 950 for The NBN, foo was on the verge of falling. There were a lot of generals in the Pentagon and certainly at the urging of the French, were trying to develop military options for us, the safety NBN foo and Eisenhower was actually somewhat open to it, but he wanted the allies to come on board. The British didn't, and he, congressional support was not there. And so at the end of the day, Eisenhower decided, no, we were not going to save the French bacon in part because as lands they on others were arguing, France could never succeed because they were essentially fighting for the colonialist regime and the Vietnamese wanted independence. But after the fall DEA and beyond f2 and the negotiations in Geneva which split the country in half. Again, Eisenhower was not going to send large numbers of American troops to defend South Vietnam. What he did was he essentially sent headlands tail, and basically it doesn't aids through Allen Dulles and the secretary, the CIA director, and his brother, John Foster Dulles as secretary of state. And basically, land snail did what he had done in the Philippines where in a similar situation and 950, he had been dispatched with a handful of aids to try to rescue a country that was in danger of falling to communist insurgents. And in both cases, he built up a local leader, MOG psi, psi in the Philippines cm and in South Vietnam, he instituted what we today call population centric counterinsurgency, telling the army to stop abusing the people and to become brothers with the people. And by the way, that the way that population center counterinsurgency really works is that it isolates the gorillas and then you can target the gorillas very accurately because the people rat them out. But you first have to win the confidence of the people to tell you who are the insurgents in their midst. And that's something that lands they all pioneered and in both the Philippines and Vietnam. And he had the full support of President Eisenhower in the Dulles brothers because Eisenhower did not want massive American military commitments. He favorite covert action. You favorite low level types of interventions. And that was actually fairly successful, not everywhere, but in general it was. And I would submit to you that today as we think about a model for American policy going forward, That's not a bad model to think about because it avoids kinda the disasters of sending hundreds of thousands of troops into a war that nobody wants at a place like Iraq. But at the same time, we don't simply, we can't simply write off all these countries either because we know they're bidding terrorism, they're creating threats that we need to be worried about. We can't have another Islamic state on the ground in a place like Iraq and Syria. And, you know, we are to some extent doing this and we've done it successfully in recent years in places like El Salvador and Columbia and elsewhere, we've used essentially relatively small-scale advisory emissions with that. And providing aid to the local governments and building up local leaders like President OD bay and in Colombia to defeat the insurgents and take the lead on their own with American help. That's kind of the lands they will model. That's what headlands there was arguing for in Vietnam. You can argue about whether we ever had a chance to do that in Vietnam, but we certainly lost our chance after we, we, we colluded in the overthrow of no, didn't jam in November at 960 three. But in the future, I would say let's avoid that mistake and let's think about how we can apply that lands, they'll model low-level engagement, deal with all the, all the national security threats that we face all over the world. Fantastic. Well, listen to me first. Thank all of you because there's a lot of expertise in this room and a lot of great service. And I know we all welcome your comments and questions and please join me in thanking these two guys.