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Author's Note: This essay was written from a perspective that is quite the opposite of most contemporary
thinking on the subject. The United States' policy of militarised containment in Asia: How the primary reliance on militarised containment undermined the effectiveness of containment in Asia overall. SYNOPSIS This essay argues that the United States policy of containment based primarily on military force undermined the effectiveness of containment in the Asian region. Under Truman the policy led the U.S. to become militarily directly involved in wars against secondary enemies, which gave the Soviet's the initiative in the region while placing the U.S. in a defensive and reactionary role. Under Eisenhower containment was based on the threatened use of nuclear weapons, which were unsuitable for the limited type wars and confrontations in the region, and was seen as an over-reaction to the Communist threat. Under Kennedy and Johnson containment was based on Flexible Response which saw the contradiction of the U.S. becoming directly involved in Vietnam in order to avoid becoming involved. Vietnam also represented the failure of the U.S. to recognise Communism as a vehicle for nationalism, and therefore fail to deal with it as a political rather than a military problem. This essay analyses the U.S. policy of militarised containment, and its evolution through the four administrations of Truman, Eisenhower, and the Kennedy/Johnson administrations. It analyses the effects of the policy in the Asian region and the costs to the U.S. of each administrations' containment policy. While the U.S. policy of containing Communism in Asia was successful generally, in that it did prevent much of the region falling to Communism, this essay argues that the policy of militarised containment was unsuitable for the Asian region, and that militarised containment as a policy undermined and weakened containment in Asia overall. The policy of militarised containment led the Truman administration to begin a two decade relationship of mutual hostility over Taiwan between China and the U.S., and caused the U.S. to become unnecessarily directly involved in the Korean war, which was outside of U.S. primary interests in Asia. The Eisenhower administration's policy of New Look containment, through its reliance on nuclear retaliation, threatened the U.S. with the loss of international support for its militarised containment policy, while New Look's emphases on strategic alliances saw the U.S. tied to unnecessary treaties, such as the Taiwan-U.S. Defence Treaty of 1955. The Kennedy/Johnson administrations' policy of Flexible Response found the U.S. being drawn ever deeper into Vietnam because of the policy's emphases on incremental response. By maintaining the emphases on militarised containment the Kennedy/Johnson administrations failed to see that Vietnamese Communism was not Soviet or Chinese expansionism, but rather was based on ethnic Vietnamese nationalism which did not necessarily need to be militarily opposed. The Communist victory in China, followed closely by the Soviet's successful testing of an atomic weapon, highlighted what the Truman administration saw as United States vulnerability, and led it to see the need for a stronger stand against what it perceived as the growing power of Soviet Communism. The outcome was the adoption of the recommendations in NSC68; the militarisation of containment. Whereas the military aspect of containment had been seen as equally important as the political and economic, now containment by military force became the primary means of containing both Soviet and Chinese Communism.1 Moreover, until this time the U.S. had made a clear distinction between core and peripheral interests in the determination of its strategic interests.2 Now the distinction between core and peripheral interests became blurred, as the U.S. now believed that it had to defend all areas against the spread of Communism, not only in Europe, but now within the Asia-Pacific region as well. In such a light all interests were seen to be vital interests.3 This led to the replacement of strongpoint defense with that of perimeter defense where "all points along the perimeter [are] considered [to be] of equal importance."4 Although containment was still modelled on the European situation, the Communist victory in China forced the U.S. to re-evaluate its interests in Asia. With the outbreak of the Korean War the Truman administration decided to put this new hardline policy into practice. The decision to defend all areas against Communist expansion saw the U.S. begin the expansion of containment in Asia to include Taiwan. U.S. warships in the Taiwan Strait were seen by China as a direct military threat, and as interference in Chinese domestic affairs. The Chinese government believed that Truman's decision to place warships between Taiwan and the mainland implied that the United States was planning to detach Taiwan from the mainland.5 This immediately undermined any chance of America improving its relations with China. By alienating China in this way the U.S. effectively lost any chance of reaching an accommodation with China, even though it was Communist. Prior to the Korean War this was still a possibility, as the U.S. did recognise that Chinese Communism was separate from the Soviet Union and was not necessarily Soviet dominated.6 Yet by its actions the U.S. pushed China toward an alliance with the Soviet Union. This was shown by Clement Atlee, then British Prime Minister, who asked if it was it wise for the U.S. "to follow a policy which without being effective against China leaves her with Russia as her only friend?"7 In so doing the U.S. lost any chance of creating a neutral China. A China not directly linked to either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, that would act as a neutral barrier between Soviet expansionism and the rest of Asia. By deliberately choosing a course of action it knew beforehand would be seen by China as hostile, the U.S. found that it had created a China antagonistic to U.S. interests in Asia. Clark shows this clearly when he writes: In the history of U.S./Sino relations, Truman's decision of June 27, 1950, stands out as a definite and decisive turning point - the point at which the U.S. and China became committed to mutual hostility.8 The expansion of containment onto the Asian mainland was another outcome of the Korean War. Perimeter defense now meant that Korea had to be defended in order to stop what NSC68 called Soviet "piecemeal aggression", that could lead to a succession of "gradual withdrawals under pressure until . . . [the U.S. had] sacrificed positions of vital interest."9 To the Truman administration Korea was seen as a test of American resolve10, where a failure to defend Korea would damage America's credibility in the region, and discredit the policy of containment.11 The problem for the United States was that Korea was a peripheral war, outside of America's primary interest of opposing and containing the Soviet Union, and where North Korea was in fact a secondary adversary.12 By becoming directly involved in the Korean War, the United States found itself expending its own energy and resources against a secondary enemy instead of concentrating it against the primary enemy, the Soviet Union. While the Soviets wisely decided to mainly provided material support for North Korea, limiting both its political exposure and costs. The U.S. found itself in a primarily defensive position, where it was reacting to Soviet moves, rather than controlling the initiative and placing the Soviets in the reactive position. So that as the U.S. responded directly to what it perceived as Soviet proxy aggression in Asia, it found that Moscow, rather than Washington, was increasingly controlling the disposition of American forces in Asia.13 The problem for the Truman Administration was that it had no policy to deal with the Asian region specifically. So that the initiative by default went to the Soviets and later the Chinese, while the U.S. found itself over time being drawn ever deeper into direct involvement in peripheral wars against secondary enemies. Gaddis shows this starkly when he writes: There was in the administration very much a sense of direction without destination - of marching forthrightly forward into unknown areas, without any clear sense of what the ultimate objective was, how long it would take to achieve it, or what it would cost.14 This was a fundamental problem of militarised containment, in that it was really only useful as a short term solution to contain Communism, and this flaw was continued into to the Johnson administration and Vietnam. The Eisenhower administration initially continued Truman's policy of militarised containment, and in 1953 introduced a new containment policy; New Look containment. The New Look policy was built around an increased dependence on nuclear weapons. Under this policy the U.S. publicly stated that it was prepared to use nuclear weapons to stop Soviet and Chinese aggression, including, from 1955, in local or limited wars. This was clearly shown in NSC162/2 (1953) which stated, "the United States will consider nuclear weapons to be available for use as other munitions."15 As Eisenhower put it, the message to the Russians and Chinese was simple, the United States would "blow hell out of them in a hurry if they start anything."16 New Look containment was in fact a re- working of Truman's policy rather than an entirely new policy. It maintained the assumptions and strategic basis of Truman's policy, particularly its primary reliance on militarised containment. The opportunity to put this policy into practise came in 1955 and 1958 over the Taiwan Straits crises. Although Eisenhower did not directly state that nuclear weapons would be used to defend Taiwan, his administration deliberately made statements that they may be used, in order to confuse the Chinese over U.S. intentions.17 Whatever the military advantages of such a strategy, politically such a stance was dangerous. The threat of using nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan started a major international war scare, as America's allies and enemies realised that Eisenhower was serious. As Eisenhower made clear, "We're not talking now about a limited, brush fire war, we're talking about going to the threshold of World War III."18 Such an attitude would hardly have brought comfort to America's allies, who were in all likelihood as much in the dark as the Chinese were over whether the U.S. would use the weapons. This was a serious mistake on the part of the United States, as its allies now realised that the Eisenhower administration was prepared to start a nuclear war over a relatively small issue. This realisation thoroughly discredited Eisenhower's New Look policy in the eyes of the United States' allies, and left the U. S. risking a major war with China without any real international support.19 As Dean Acheson realised, the United States could find itself in "a war without friends or allies."20 Clearly, the threat to use nuclear weapons to defend Taiwan was an overreaction on the part of the United States, when the U.S. could easily have stopped any invasion with conventional naval power alone. It risked making the United States appear weak and vulnerable in Asia, while making China appear militarily stronger than it really was. It also risked making the U.S. look more ideologically driven and hardline in its opposition to Communism, than the Communists themselves, so that U.S. actions appeared to be somewhat divorced from the reality of the situation.21 At a time of the emergence of nonaligned nations in Asia, this would only have given them more reason to resist being aligned with the U.S. It could even have seen some of America's allies begin to question not only American policy and leadership ability, but also their own relationship with the United States. In fact U.S. policy was highly questionable. If containment was designed to restrict Communist China's power in the region, then Eisenhower's New Look policy was failing. By threatening China with nuclear weapons the United States effectively gave the Chinese a very powerful motivation for acquiring nuclear weapons themselves. That is not to say that China had no interest in acquiring such weapons before the Taiwan crises, rather that U.S. threats to use them made the Chinese even more determined to have the weapons, and in the shortest possible time.22 Yet the threat of using nuclear weapons was not the real problem, it was only a symptom of a deeper and more fundamental problem of U.S. containment policy in Asia; the militarisation of containment itself. It was simply unsuitable for the unstable and diverse situation in Asia. It was too hardline and inflexible. When, under Eisenhower, it was based on nuclear retaliation, it became even more limited, in that Eisenhower tried to use the threat of nuclear retaliation to address all threats and challenges to containment. As Gaddis shows, "The problem, in short, was that of fitting a single draconian solution to a diverse and varyingly tractable set of problems."23 This was both the problem with New Look, and ultimately the reason for its failure. Eisenhower's New Look also placed greater emphases on strategic alliances. The problem was that not all of these alliances were strictly neccessary, and some came with a high cost for the U.S. Of these the U.S.-Taiwan bilateral defense treaty was both unnecessary and costly. The U.S. did not need to have a formal treaty with Taiwan, and in fact it would have been better for the U.S. to have had an informal agreement with it. This is essentially what the U.S. had done since Truman had sent the Seventh Fleet into the straits in 1950. Truman had made it quite clear that the U.S. would defend Taiwan, but had left open the future status of Taiwan.24 By making a formal treaty with Taiwan the U.S. was tying itself to a permanent dilemma, whereas an informal 'understanding' over Taiwan would have given the U.S. greater flexibility in its relations with both China and Taiwan. It would have avoided unnecessarily further antagonising the Chinese government, and may have given the U.S. some leverage over the Chinese in order to moderate their behaviour. This is shown by Truman's statement in June 1950, "the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific."25 In other words, if the Chinese did nothing to threaten U.S. security interests in the region, then the future status of Taiwan was open for discussion. It would also have put Chiang on notice to behave himself or risk losing U.S. support. That the treaty was formalised after the Taiwan Straits crisis of 1955 had already began, shows that the U.S. was again reacting to a situation, instead of taking control of it. The cost of making the treaty also made it questionable. It completely alienated the Chinese government who saw it as nothing less than a violation of Chinese sovereignty, and risked making the U.S. appear in Asian eyes as simply another Western imperialist.26 Moreover, by allying itself to Chiang Kai-shek the U.S. also made itself unnecessarily vulnerable, in that it could find itself dragged into a major war with China over the actions of Chiang. Under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations militarised containment was continued. Eisenhower's New Look policy, which Kennedy believed had failed, was replaced with the policy of Flexible Response. This was based on the idea that the U.S. needed to have more flexibility in dealing with the Communist threat. It was designed so the U.S. could respond to threats in whatever way was determined the best for any given situation.27 The emphasis in Flexible Response was on calibration, that is, fine tuning the response to the situation.28 This was to be achieved through the application of incremental pressure, where only enough force was to be applied to meet the challenge.29 It was Vietnam where this policy was put to the test, and where it ultimately failed. The policy of incremental pressure, it turned out, had the opposite effect than those intended. Because the pressure was based on military force, instead of pushing Hanoi towards negotiations, it simply made the North Vietnamese more determined to continue the struggle. The problem was that the whole basis of the policy, when based on a military response, was fundamentally flawed. Gaddis explained it this way; to the Kennedy administration, "Getting involved, was the best way to avoid getting involved."30 Having become militarily involved in Vietnam in order to limit its involvement, the U.S. found that its objectives were not met, and therefore further incremental pressure had to be applied, which meant further involvement. It was in effect a military roundabout, of Northern action and U.S. reaction. In fact, the United States should never have been directly militarily involved in Vietnam in the first place. The loss of South Vietnam to the Communists would not have been the disaster the U.S. thought it would be. Because of their emphasis on militarised containment the U.S. failed to take into account the role of ethnic nationalism in the region. They therefore failed to see that even though the North Vietnamese were Communist, they were, like the Chinese Communists, based as much on Vietnamese nationalism as on Communism. So that like the Chinese, who had fundamental differences with the Soviet Union, not least of which was their claim of an Asian or Chinese path to socialism, and who wanted to follow their own interests, the Vietnamese were no more likely to follow the lead of the Chinese or the Soviet Union either.31 Just as China modified Communism for its own social, economic, and political requirements, North Vietnam because of its own situation could reasonably be expected to do the same. Nor could ideology overcome the ethnic distrust of China by the Vietnamese. As the American's never fully appreciated, the North Vietnamese were always determined to control their own future, while keeping both Soviet and Chinese influence to a minimum.32 The only real interest the North Vietnamese shared with China was their mutual opposition to American forces in South Vietnam. Indeed, the ideological, nationalistic, and ethnic differences between Communist states in Asia was shown clearly in 1979 over Cambodia. Not only did the Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge choose their own unique path to socialism, but the two Communist states of China and Vietnam went to war over Cambodia in what was effectively a spheres of influence confrontation.33 Communism, as a monolithic system, was only in the American imagination. Moreover, the U.S. failed to understand that the loss of South Vietnam would not necessarily have meant the loss of all of South East Asia to Communism. Communist expansion was not based on military force, it was based on ideology; military force was used to overcome internal opposition to it. So that not only was direct American military force the wrong response to it in Vietnam, the U.S. was wrong to assume it could be successfully spread militarily by a Communist Vietnam or China. The very forces of nationalism that opposed the U.S. in Vietnam, would oppose Vietnamese and Chinese Communist expansion in the rest of Southeast Asia. Yet because of its emphases on militarised containment, the U.S. failed to see that what was really needed was a political response to the nationalist forces being unleashed in Southeast Asia. Diplomacy, even with Communists, rather than armies, would have been more likely to have served U.S. interests in the region better. More concretely, the loss of Vietnam, even the Asian mainland to Communism, would not have been a major military threat to the United States, as outside of Japan there was very little in the way of industrial capacity in the region.34 The Communist Asian states would not have had the industrial capacity to wage a major war against the U.S., and that it would have taken them decades at best to have gained even a fraction of U.S. industrial power. As well, neither Vietnam or China, had a credible naval force, while the U.S. had the most powerful naval forces in the world. Even with Vietnam under Communist control, without naval power the mainland Communist forces would be contained on the mainland, and therefore would pose no serious military threat to the rest of Southeast Asia or Japan. Militarised containment had bought Kennedy and Johnson, no more success than it had Truman and Eisenhower. The 1968 Tet Offensive showed Johnson clearly that military force was no answer to ideological and political force. In fact, militarised containment in Vietnam was destroying the very society it was supposed to protect, undermining America's position in Vietnam even further.35 Yet the Vietnam War was more than simply an example of American intervention to oppose Communist expansion. The Vietnam war represented nothing less than the complete failure of the militarised containment policy itself. It was where all the failures of the policy were brought together, eventually overwhelming the Johnson administration's ability, even the American nation's ability, to maintain it. So that Vietnam ultimately became the deathbed for the policy of containment based primarily on military force. In conclusion, the U.S. policy of containing Communism based principally on military force, was undermining both the United States' political and military position in Asia, and the containment policy itself. This was because it ignored the fact that Communism was not based on militarism or military expansion, rather it was based on ideological, nationalist, and political forces. This was something that military force is poorly designed to contain. The fact that the United States tried to contain Communism primarily through military means, led it to the mistaken belief that Communism had to be opposed in all areas. This led the U.S. into costly and unnecessary confrontations against secondary enemies, in areas that the U.S. would have been better advised to have stayed out of militarily. If the U.S. had stayed with strongpoint defense, instead of perimeter defense, then militarised containment may have worked. Even though such a policy may have seen the Asian mainland fall to Communism, if Sino-Soviet and Sino-Vietnamese relations are any indication, the various Communist nations could have been as busy fighting amongst themselves as with the U.S. Control of the mainland may actually have weakened Communism both as an alternative ideology, and as a military threat to the U.S. in the Asia-Pacific region. So that instead of the U.S. being in the position of reacting to Soviet and Chinese moves, the U.S. could have caused trouble between the various Communist nations by supporting one side against the other. Considering the ethnic and ideological differences between them, this probably would not have been too difficult. Yet America's decision to take a more hardline approach to Communism effectively thwarted such possibilities. Threatening enemies with nuclear destruction leaves little in the way of strategic and diplomatic flexibility, which is an absolute must if a nation is to be successful in international relations. It also tends to lead to one dimensional thinking, such as nuclear weapons being the solution to all military threats. It also leads to poor strategic decision making, such as the U.S. tying itself to regimes which only existed because of U.S. support. By seeing and dealing with situations primarily from a military perspective, the U.S. found that its only response could be of a military nature. Obviously, militarised containment had to make way for a form of containment that recognised the political realities of the Asian region. No longer could the role of nationalism be ignored, including the Communist variety. The United States had to come to terms with Asian Communism, and to accept the fact that it was there to stay. Reality, in other words, had to be accepted. ENDNOTES 1. C. A. Kupchan, The Vulnerability of Empire, (New York: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 461 - 462. 2 . J. L. Gaddis, Strategies of Containment, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 91. 3. Ibid., p. 95. 4. Ibid., p. 91. 5. G. Clark, In Fear of China, (Melbourne: Lansdowne Press, 1967), pp. 75 - 76. 6. Gaddis, op. cit., pp. 115 - 116. 7. Ibid., p. 116. 8. Clark, op. cit., p. 75. 9. Gaddis, op. cit., p. 97. 10. M. Yahuda, The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 1945-1995, (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 26. 11. Kupchan, op. cit., p. 474. 12. Gaddis, op. cit., p. 117. 13. Ibid., p. 123. 14. Ibid., p. 126. 15. Ibid., p. 149. 16. Ibid., p. 150. 17 . R. A. Divine, Eisenhower and the Cold War, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 63. 18. Ibid., p. 57. 19. Gaddis, op. cit., p. 170. 20. Ibid. 21. Clark, op. cit., p. 78. 22. R. Foot, The Practice of Power: US Relations with China since 1949, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 170. 23. Gaddis, op. cit., p. 172. 24. Clark, op. cit., p. 75. 25. Ibid. 26. R. G. Sutter, China Watch: Sino-American Reconciliation. (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 43. 27. Gaddis, op. cit., p. 214. 28. Ibid., p. 215. 29. Ibid., p. 249. 30. Ibid. 31. I. C. Y. Hsu, The Rise of Modern China, 4th Ed., (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 651 32. G. Kolko, "Vietnam: Anatomy of a war 1940-1975", in Robert Lee (Comp), Imperialism in Asia: Selected Readings, Book of Readings for Imperialism in Asia Subject, University of Western Sydney Macarthur, 1997, p 192. 33. Yahuda, op. cit., pp. 87 - 89. 34. Gaddis, op. cit., p. 60. 35. 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As supplied through university. 1997. pp. 189-225. Kupchan, C. A. 1994. The Vulnerability of Empire. New York: Cornell University Press. Miller, M. 1974. Plain Speaking: Conversations with Harry S. Truman. London: Victor Gollancz. Schaller, M. 1990. The United States and China in the Twentieth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sutter, R. G. 1978. China Watch: Sino-American Reconciliation. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Tinker, H. 1987. Men Who Overturned Empires: Fighters, Dreamers and Schemers. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. Van De Mark, B. 1995. Into the Quagmire: Lyndon Johnson and the Escalation of the Vietnam War. New York: Oxford University Press. Yahuda, M. 1996. The International Politics of the Asia-Pacific, 1945-1995. London: Routledge. --------------------------------------------- Author's Note: This essay was written from a perspective that is quite the opposite of most contemporary thinking on the subject. The United States' policy of militarised containment in Asia: How the primary reliance on militarised containment undermined the effectiveness of containment in Asia overall. |
