A quarter of a century after the Fall of Saigon, Vietnam continues to exercise a powerful hold of the American psyche. No deployment of American troops abroad is considered without the infusion of the Vietnam question. No formulation of strategic policy can be completed without weighing the possibility of Vietnanization. Even the politics of a person cannot be discussed without taking into account his opinion on the Vietnam Ware. This national obsession with Vietnam is perfectly national when viewed from a far. It was the only war that the United States has ever lost. It defined an era of American history that must rank with the depression as one of this nations most traumatic. It concluded with Watergate and led many to believe that the United States was in decline. Even with the sobering effect of time, passions concerning American policy and behavior in Southeast Asia reach a level normally associated with sensitive social issues. To understand why, one must look at Vietnam in the proper context. American involvement occurred in the middle of, and was the most visible engagement, of the defining paradign of the post World War II era, the Cold War. Only through this prism can the Vietnam experience be defined.One of the seven global powers entering World War II; the United States emerged as an undisputed superpower. Her economic and military night was overwhelming in a world ravaged by five years of total war. The only adversary of comparable power was a notion at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, the Soviet Union. As the vanguard of the communist world, the U.S.S.R.s raison detve was the facilitate the overthrow of the global capitalist system and replace it with a dictatorship of the proletariat. Thus the explicit mission of American Foreign policy after 1945 was opposition to communist advancement anywhere in the world. This took many forms and was backed by key assumption.Central among then was the av...
