George C. Herring begins his article by declaring that “the cold war and the American war in Vietnam cannot be disentangled” (18). Discuss one way in which the two were intertwined.
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The American War in Vietnam was inevitable. The United States had to join to fight against the communist backed forces in Vietnam. As George C. Herring describe in his article the “primary U.S. goals were to deter Communist, especially Chinese, expansion and to maintain the credibility of U.S. cold war commitments by preserving an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam.” Any nation that was under threat of becoming a communist state was a threat to the United States. The northern Vietnamese forces (Viet Minh) were backed by the Chinese and the Soviet Union. “U.S. officials also concluded that the fall of Vietnam to communism would threaten their nation’s vital interests.” The American War in Vietnam could not be disentangled, the United States could not allow more nations to become communist states and had to intervener even if “the U.S. never set out to win the war in a traditional sense.” The United States just wanted to deter communist expansion. Any nation that was going to become communist would have inevitably found themselves in contact with the United States and their military.
One way in which the Cold war and the American war in Vietnam were intertwined was the fear of the spread of Communism. Had Americans never engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union, they might have never involved themselves in the war in Vietnam. However, Americans feared that the Soviet Union sought “to impose its absolute authority on the rest of the world,” giving Vietnam’s Communist regime “huge significance.” Americans became convinced that “Ho and the Viet Minh were part of a monolithic Communist bloc controlled by the Kremlin.” As a result, Americans felt obliged to intervene in Vietnam in order to send a message to the Soviet Union: under no circumstances would the United States allow the spread of Communism. They feared the Kremlin’s power and its potential to gain control through other Communist countries, such as Vietnam. Because of the growing fear of Communism, Vietnam War and the Cold War became inevitably entangled.