Forget Vietnam, You Get Iran And Iraq | Ask The Professor

0:03 Hi, this is John Meersheimer. In the course of doing my many videos, I often receive questions from viewers that deal with a particular issue that they would like me to give my views on. And I thought I'd take this opportunity to answer one of the many questions that I have received, and hopefully over time answer more of those questions.

0:29 But here's a question that I recently received. How did the Vietnam War affect your thinking about international relations? I went into the American military at about the same time the Vietnam War started. The first combat troops landed in Vietnam in March of 1965, and I entered the U.S. Army in June of 1965.

0:57 And of course, I was in the American military from June 65 to roughly August 1975. And during that time, I went to West Point from July 1966 to June 1970. And the Vietnam War ended in late April of 1975. And as I said, I left the military in August of 1975. So you see that my term, or my time in the U.S.

1:29 military, both the Army and the Air Force, was coterminous with the Vietnam War. So it really was one of the seminal events of my lifetime. And given that I was in the military, I spent a lot of time thinking about that war. Now, the first thing that I learned from the Vietnam War was that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, and that the war in Vietnam was largely all about nationalism.

2:05 But that was not the way I or hardly anyone else thought about that war when it first started in 1965. The ism, so to speak, that really mattered in the minds of most Americans was communism. And the widespread belief was that we were fighting against communism in Vietnam, not against nationalism. And there was a lot of, there were a lot of people back then who believed in what was called the domino theory.

2:38 And that was the idea that if communism won in Vietnam, communism would win in other countries in Southeast Asia, communism would eventually sweep all over East Asia and then head towards Europe. And the dominoes would continually fall and the world would turn into nothing but communist countries. This would be the end result of the domino theory.

3:08 And given the power of this theory in the minds of so many American policymakers and so many people and the American public, it was believed that we had to defeat communism in Vietnam to prevent the domino effect from taking place. But as that war wore on, it became manifestly clear that it was not mainly a war about communism, and that the domino theory really was a badly flawed theory as well.

3:42 And what became very clear to most people, certainly by the late 60s, very early 70s, was that the United States was fighting against nationalism, not against communism. What the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese as well, and here we're talking mainly about the Viet Cong, the South Vietnamese who were fighting against us.

4:08 What the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese wanted was they wanted their own state. They wanted sovereignty. They wanted a sovereign Vietnamese state. They fought against the French and defeated the French. And then they were fighting against the United States and they wanted to defeat the United States.

4:30 They wanted to push the United States out of Vietnam, the same way they pushed the French out of Vietnam and established their own Vietnamese nation-state. Again, this was all about nationalism. It was not about communism. At the same time, it became apparent that nationalism was such a powerful force, it also became clear that communism was not a monolith.

5:27 And of course, the domino theory assumed that communism was a monolith. That once one country became communists, adjacent countries would become communists, and then other adjacent countries would become communists, and it would spread all over the world. But the Sino-Soviet split, the split between the largest and most powerful communist countries in the world, China and the Soviet Union in the late 1960s, showed that communism was not a monolith.

6:01 And in fact, in 1969, the Chinese and the Soviets fought a huge series of battles in the Far East that resulted in a huge number of casualties. So it was clear by the late 1960s that not only was nationalism the core issue at play in the Vietnam War, that this was a war where the Vietnamese were fighting for their sovereignty, fighting for self-determination.

6:31 But it was also clear that communism was not a monolith and the domino theory made no sense. So I took away from that war a firm understanding that when you interfere in the politics of countries like Vietnam, you're going to run into a buzzsaw. And that buzzsaw is nationalism, and therefore you best stay out.

6:58 So when it came to invading Iraq in 2003 and remaining in Afghanistan after 2001, I opposed both those endeavors because I thought that the United States would get itself into a lot of trouble, in large part because the people inside of those countries, inside of Iraq, inside of Iran, would resist mightily.

7:26 They were sovereign states and they didn't want the United States coming in and running their politics. So I think one of the principal lessons I learned from the Vietnam War is that nationalism is a remarkably powerful political ideology, and it points to one simple lesson: stay out of places like Vietnam, stay out of places like Iraq, stay out of places like Afghanistan, and stay out of places like Iran, if you are thinking about invading that country.

8:01 The other thing that I learned during the Vietnam War was that there are real limits to what a powerful military can do in almost every circumstance, but certainly when it gets involved in social engineering, which was the case, of course, in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan, where the American military was not simply interested in fighting and winning battles, but it was interested in doing social engineering.

8:31 There are just real limits to what you can do with the military. And I think that anybody who spends any time in the military comes to understand that pretty quickly. I think that's certainly true of people who serve in institutions like the Army and in the Air Force, where you're down on the ground dealing with the other side on a day-to-day basis and dealing with your allies on a day-to-day basis.

8:59 You begin to realize that there's just limits to what you can do. Now, there's no question that any state wants to make sure that it has a powerful military. You'd rather have a powerful military than a weak military, no question about that. But you do have to understand the limits of military force.

9:18 You have to understand that there are real limits to what you can do with a really powerful military. And again, in the Vietnam War, if you think about it, the United States was clearly the most powerful state on the planet during the Vietnam War. One could argue that the Soviet Union was a real competitor, and there's no doubt about that.

9:37 But we weren't fighting the Soviet Union. We were fighting the Vietnamese. They had some assistance from the Soviets and they had some assistance from the Chinese. But we were up against the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese, and the Viet Cong and South Vietnam, and we could not beat them. We could not beat the Afghanis.

9:56 We were in the Afghanistan War for 20 years, and we could not defeat the Taliban. Again, there's just real limits to what you can do with military force. And I think I learned this very well during the Vietnam War. And therefore I have learned to be very cautious about employing military force in any scenario.

10:19 This is not to say that military force never works, because that's not true. Just look at the first Gulf War, the war in 1991. The United States was wildly successful in that war. It shows you that war does the utility of military force. But there are a lot of other cases involving the U.S. military in the years since I first joined it in 1965 that demonstrate the limits of military force.

10:47 So, what's my bottom line here? My bottom line is twofold. In terms of answering the question, what did I take away from the Vietnam War in the 1965-1975 period? The answer is number one, I came to appreciate the power of nationalism and what that means for thinking about intervening in the affairs of other countries.

11:15 And number two, I came to appreciate that although military force is very important and the balance of power matters greatly, you want to never underestimate how much trouble you can get into using military force because it does not always work out the way you intend it. You are in the realm of uncertainty anytime you employ military force.

11:43 And that is the second lesson I learned from my experience in the American military, which again was coterminous with the Vietnam War. Thank you.