The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (Tuchman, Barbara W.)
Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.
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Tuchman, Barbara W.. The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. Random House Publishing Group, 2011.
These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!
Why do governments often pursue policies clearly contrary to their own interests? A historical review of bad decisions and of the refusal to benefit from experience that led to wars and prolonged conflicts. By Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August, probably the best study on the origins of World War I.
One: Pursuit of Policy Contrary to Self-Interest
A PHENOMENON noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests.
In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be.
Elsewhere than in government man has accomplished marvels:
To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria:
· it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight.
· Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available.
· The policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.
The French Revolution, great prototype of populist government, reverted rapidly to crowned autocracy as soon as it acquired an able administrator.
Plato’s proposal of selecting a class to be trained as professionals in government.
Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs.
Philip II of Spain, the surpassing wooden-head of all sovereigns: “No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.”
Wooden-headedness is also the refusal to benefit from experience,
why do the superpowers not begin mutual divestment of the means of human suicide?
The Reformation, brought on by the folly of the Renaissance Papacy, would not generally be declared a misfortune by Protestants. Americans on the whole would not consider their independence, provoked by the folly of the English, to be regrettable. Whether the Moorish conquest of Spain,
(Solon) Then he did an extraordinary thing, possibly unique among heads of state: purchasing a ship on the pretext of traveling to see the world, he sailed into voluntary exile for ten years. Fair and just as a statesman, Solon was no less wise as a man. He could have retained supreme control, enlarging his authority to that of tyrant, and was indeed reproached because he did not, but knowing that endless petitions and proposals to modify this or that law would only gain him ill-will if he did not comply, he determined to leave, in order to keep his laws intact because the Athenians could not repeal them without his sanction. His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.
Frederick II, called Stupor Mundi, or Wonder of the World.
It is worth noting the qualities this historian ascribes to them: they were fearless, high-principled, deeply versed in ancient and modern political thought, astute and pragmatic, unafraid of experiment, and—this is significant—“ convinced of man’s power to improve his condition through the use of intelligence.”
It was unnecessary, an activist policy when doing nothing would have served as well.
The most atrocious—and effective—were the dragonnades, or billeting of dragoons on Huguenot families with encouragement to behave as viciously as they wished.
His point is reinforced from an unexpected source in a perceptive comment by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, “In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.” This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect.
somehow retrieving a strength it did not have before.
They were the German decision to resume unrestricted submarine warfare in 1916 and the Japanese decision to attack Pearl Harbor in 1941. The folly in both cases belongs to the category of self-imprisonment in the “we-have-no-alternative” argument and in the most frequent and fatal of self-delusions—underestimation of the opponent.
Kaiser Wilhelm II, assailed by uncertainties but unwilling to appear any less bold than his commanders, added his voice to theirs.
He did not resign. An official who found him later slumped in his chair, looking stricken, asked in alarm if there had been bad news from the front. “No,” answered Bethmann, “but finis Germaniae.”
Here was a strange miscalculation. At a time when at least half the United States was strongly isolationist, the Japanese did the one thing that could have united the American people and motivated the whole nation for war.
This curious vacuum of understanding came from what might be called cultural ignorance, a frequent component of folly.
A principle that emerges in the cases so far mentioned is that folly is a child of power. We all know, from unending repetitions of Lord Acton’s dictum, that power corrupts. We are less aware that it breeds folly; that the power to command frequently causes failure to think; that the responsibility of power often fades as its exercise augments.
The rarest kind of reversal—that of a ruler recognizing that a policy was not serving self-interest and daring the dangers of reversing it by 180 degrees—occurred only yesterday, historically speaking. It was President Sadat’s abandonment of a sterile enmity with Israel and his search, in defiance of outrage and threats by his neighbors, for a more useful relationship. Both in risk and potential gain, it was a major act, and in substituting common sense and courage for mindless continuance in negation, it ranks high and lonely in history, undiminished by the subsequent tragedy of assassination.
Five: America Betrays Herself in Vietnam
1. In Embryo: 1945–46
IGNORANCE WAS NOT a factor in the American endeavor in Vietnam pursued through five successive presidencies, although it was to become an excuse.
The folly consisted not in pursuit of a goal in ignorance of the obstacles but in persistence in the pursuit despite accumulating evidence that the goal was unattainable, and the effect disproportionate to the American interest and eventually damaging to American society, reputation and disposable power in the world.
The question raised is why did the policy-makers close their minds to the evidence and its implications? This is the classic symptom of folly: refusal to draw conclusions from the evidence, addiction to the counter-productive. The “why” of this refusal and this addiction may disclose itself in the course of retracing the tale of American policy-making in Vietnam.
Regardless of their history, they were not considered “ready” for self-rule until prepared for it under Western tutelage.
It provided an easy and comfortable living for some 45,000 French bureaucrats, usually those of mediocre talent, among whom a French survey in 1910 discovered three who could speak a reasonably fluent Vietnamese.
French called their colonial system la mission civilisatrice, which satisfied self-image if not reality.
The French commander assigned to carry out the reconquest himself saw, or felt, the truth. After his first survey of the situation, General Leclerc said to his political adviser, “It would take 500,000 men to do it and even then it could not be done.”
Was American policy already folly in 1945–46? Even judged in terms of the thinking of the time, the answer must be affirmative,
2. Self-Hypnosis: 1946–54
Its central belief was that every movement bearing the label Communist represented a single conspiracy for world conquest under the Soviet aegis.
The Munich argument that was to become a staple: if the free nations had then acted together and in time to crush the aggression of the dictators, World War II might have been averted. The lesson may have been true, but it was misapplied.
“No regime as malevolent as the Chinese Communists could ever produce five million tons of steel.”
Under the title “A Policy of Boldness,” Dulles published in Life magazine in 1952 his belief that with regard to Communist-dominated countries, America must demonstrate that “it wants and expects liberation to occur”
“It must be understood that there is no cheap way to fight a war, once committed.”
Nothing was so ridiculous, Macaulay once wrote, as the British public in one of its periodical fits of morality—and nothing so craven, it could be added, as the American public in its fit of the 1950s.
Harried by disturbing reports from Dien Bien Phu, and by extreme pressure at home to end the war, the French clutched at the opportunity to negotiate.
“falling dominoes” to express the consequences if Indochina should be the first to fall.
Like fibers of a cloth absorbing a dye, policy-makers in Washington were by now so thoroughly imbued, through repeated assertions, with the vital necessity of saving Indochina from Communism that they believed in it, did not question it and were ready to act on it. From rhetoric it had become doctrine
2. Creating the Client: 1954–60
In his book Wanted: An Asian Policy, Edwin O. Reischauer, Far East specialist and future Ambassador to Japan, located the tragedy in the West’s having allowed Indochinese nationalism to become a Communist cause.
3. Creating the Client: 1954–60
As far as the record shows, they held no session devoted to re-examination of the engagement they had inherited in Vietnam,
4. “Married to Failure”: 1960–63
A White House official of the time, asked in later years how the American interest in Southeast Asia was defined in 1961, replied that “it was simply a given, assumed and unquestioned.” The given was that we had to stop the advance of Communism wherever it appeared and Vietnam was then the place of confrontation. If not stopped there, it would be stronger the next time.
It was this gift of certainty that made two Presidents find McNamara so invaluable and was to make him the touchstone of the war.
No less significant was the man not chosen as Secretary of State, Adlai Stevenson, who because he was thoughtful was seen as a Hamlet, as indecisive, as that unforgivable thing, “soft.”
The appointment given instead to Dean Rusk. Sober, judicious, reserved, Rusk did not share the Kennedy style, but he had the advantage of experience
In command of the National Security Council (NSC), with an office in the White House, was McGeorge Bundy
Accustomed to success in the war and in their postwar careers, they expected no less in Washington.
rather than their controlling circumstances, circumstances controlled them: that government, in the words of one of the group, J. K. Galbraith, was rarely more than a choice between “the disastrous and the unpalatable.”
“Well, Mr. Schoenbrun, that was the French. They were fighting for a colony, for an ignoble cause. We’re fighting for freedom, to free them from the Communists, from China, for their independence.” Because Americans believed they were “different” they forgot that they too were white.
Although the doctrine emphasized political measures, counter-insurgency in practice was military.
All the talk was of “winning the allegiance” of the people to their government, but a government for which allegiance had to be won by outsiders was not a good gamble.
The utility of “perseverance in absurdity,” Edmund Burke once said, “is more than I could ever discern.”
Credibility emerged in the Berlin crisis of that summer when, after a harsh and intimidating meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna, Kennedy said to James Reston, “Now we have a problem in making our power credible, and Vietnam looks like the place.” But Vietnam was never the place, because the American government itself never totally believed in what it was doing. The contrast with Berlin was only too plain.
White’s letter further reported “a political breakdown of formidable proportions,” and his own puzzlement that while “Young fellows of 20–25 are dancing and jitterbugging in Saigon nightclubs,” twenty miles away “The Commies on their side seem to be able to find people willing to die for their cause.” It was a discrepancy that was beginning to bother other observers.
Rostow was a positivist, a Dr. Pangloss who, as described by a fellow-worker, would advise the President on learning of a nuclear attack on Manhattan that the first phase of urban renewal had been accomplished at no cost to the Treasury.
To Kennedy in person he was more outspoken, saying that the infusion of American troops would come to dominate a civil war that was not our affair. Taking it over would “hurt American prestige in Asia and would not help the South Vietnamese to stand on their own feet either.” Growing more disturbed and red in the face as Mansfield talked, Kennedy snapped. “Do you expect me to take this at face value?” Like all rulers, he wanted to be confirmed in his policy and was angry at Mansfield, as he confessed to an aide later, for disagreeing so completely, “and angry at myself because I found myself agreeing with him.” Nothing changed.
Adjustment is painful. For the ruler it is easier, once he has entered a policy box, to stay inside. For the lesser official it is better, for the sake of his position, not to make waves, not to press evidence that the chief will find painful to accept. Psychologists call the process of screening out discordant information “cognitive dissonance,” an academic disguise for “Don’t confuse me with the facts.” Cognitive dissonance is the tendency “to suppress, gloss over, water down or ‘waffle’ issues which would produce conflict or ‘psychological pain’ within an organization.” It causes alternatives to be “deselected since even thinking about them entails conflicts.”
He was beginning to agree about a complete military withdrawal. “But I can’t do it until 1965—until after I’m re-elected.” To do it before would cause “a wild conservative outcry” against him. His position was realistic, if not a profile in courage.
Kennedy did, at about this time, instruct Michael Forrestal to think about preparing a plan for post-election withdrawal,
“Know your enemy” is the most important precept in any adversary relationship, but it is the peculiar habit of Americans, when dealing with the Red menace, to sever relations and deal from ignorance.
resorted to another fact-finding mission, the now traditional Washington substitute for policy.
5. Executive War: 1964–68
“I am not going to be the first President of the United States to lose a war,”
Johnson felt he had to be “strong,” to show himself in command, especially to overshadow the aura of the Kennedys, both the dead and the living. He did not feel a comparable impulse to be wise; to examine options before he spoke.
Why then were stakes still considered so high in remote unimportant Vietnam? Communism had made European advances without engendering the hysteria that seemed to infect us out of Asia. If Communist advance anywhere was so to be feared, why did we fling a harebrained strike at Cuba and make our stand in Vietnam?
Ball could be tolerated as an “in-house devil’s advocate,” and was in fact useful in that role as showing the White House open to dissenters. But minds at the top were locked in the vise of 1954—
he included in a list of war aims “To emerge from crisis without unacceptable taint from methods used.”
Bypassing a Declaration was one result of the limited-war concept developed during the Kennedy Administration. In a remarkable statement of that time* McNamara had said, “The greatest contribution Vietnam is making … is developing an ability in the United States to fight a limited war, to go to war without arousing the public ire.” He believed this to be “almost a necessity in our history, because this is the kind of war we’ll likely be facing for the next fifty years.”
In sober words Ambassador Kennan brought out the question of self-betrayal. Success in the war would be hollow even if achievable, he said, because of the harm being done by the spectacle of America inflicting “grievous damage on the lives of a poor and helpless people, particularly on a people of different race and color.… This spectacle produces reactions among millions of people throughout the world profoundly detrimental to the image we would like them to hold of this country.” More respect could be won by “a resolute and courageous liquidation of unsound positions” than by their stubborn pursuit. He quoted John Quincy Adams’ dictum that wherever the standard of liberty was unfurled in the world, “there will be America’s heart … but she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Pursuing monsters meant endless wars in which “the fundamental maxim of [American] policy would insensibly change from liberty to force.”
After World War II a Strategic Bombing Survey by scientists, economists and other specialists had concluded that strategic bombing in the European theater (as distinct from tactical bombing in conjunction with ground action) had not achieved the desired or expected results.
Rusk remained the rock. If he had doubts, he was able as the classic civil servant to convince himself that American policy was right and to reiterate that regardless of all other considerations the original goal of preserving a non-Communist South Vietnam must be maintained. In tribute to his steadfastness, someone in his own department scrawled inside a telephone booth, “Dean Rusk is a recorded announcement.”
By mid-1967, the level reached 463,000,
His was a terrible recognition. To see ourselves newly and suddenly as the “bad guys” in the world’s polarity
America’s purpose was to demonstrate her intent and her capacity to stop Communism
Secretary McNamara’s testimony brought all this into question. In an impressive presentation, he cited evidence to show that the bombing program had not significantly reduced the flow of men and supplies, and he disputed the military advice to lift restraints and allow a greater target range. “We have no reason to believe that it would break the will of the North Vietnamese people or sway the purpose of their leaders … or provide any confidence that they can be bombed to the negotiating table.”
Three months after the Stennis hearings, Johnson announced, without consulting the person in question, McNamara’s nomination as president of the World Bank.
each $ 1 worth of damage inflicted on North Vietnam cost the United States $ 9.60.
When objective evidence disproves strongly held beliefs, what occurs, according to theorists of “cognitive dissonance,” is not rejection of the beliefs but rigidifying, accompanied by attempts to rationalize the disproof. The result is “cognitive rigidity”; in lay language, the knots of folly draw tighter.
They were “like men in a dream,” in George Kennan’s words, incapable of “any realistic assessment of the effects of their own acts.”
Thailand, next door to the threat, had a contingent of 2500 in Vietnam out of its population of 30 million. Clifford had found esteem and encouragement for America’s effort but no disposition to enlarge forces and no serious concern. The view from within Southeast Asia of its own situation raised a serious question about what America was defending.
He found a report by Systems Analysis stating that “despite a massive influx of 500,000 United States troops, 1.5 million tons of bombs a year, 400,000 attack sorties a year, 200,000 enemy KIA [killed in action] in three years, 20,000 United States KIA, etc., our control of the countryside and urban areas is now essentially at pre–August 1965 levels.”
An even stronger signal was Walter Cronkite’s broadcast
The only “rational way out” was to negotiate our way out, but “not,” he warned again, “as victors.”
the public, if accurately reflected by press comment, was readier than the Administration to let go in Southeast Asia, and readier to acknowledge, according to Time, “that victory in Vietnam—or even a favorable settlement—may simply be beyond the grasp of the world’s greatest power.”
To convince the President once and for all of a dead end in Vietnam, Clifford proposed a conference of senior former statesmen to render a verdict. The “Wise Men,”
6. Exit: 1969–73
Kissinger, whom the President had chosen to head the National Security Council, would have done well to consider their problem as if there were a sign pinned to the wall, “Do Not Repeat What Has Already Failed.”
The follies that produced this result
· continuous over-reacting: in the invention of endangered “national security,” the invention of “vital interest,” the invention of a “commitment” which rapidly assumed a life of its own, casting a spell over the inventor.
· second folly was illusion of omnipotence,
· third was wooden-headedness and “cognitive dissonance”; a fourth was “working the levers” as a substitute for thinking.
It was failure to understand that problems and conflicts exist among other peoples that are not soluble by the application of American force or American techniques or even American goodwill.
Wooden-headedness, the “Don’t-confuse-me-with-the-facts” habit, is a universal folly
A contemporary summing up was voiced by a Congressman from Michigan, Donald Riegle. In talking to a couple from his constituency who had lost a son in Vietnam, he faced the stark recognition that he could find no words to justify the boy’s death. “There was no way I could say that what had happened was in their interest or in the national interest or in anyone’s interest.”
Epilogue: “A Lantern on the Stern”
IF PURSUING DISADVANTAGE after the disadvantage has become obvious is irrational, then rejection of reason is the prime characteristic of folly.
Too much power given to anything, like too large a sail on a vessel
“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us!” lamented Samuel Coleridge. “But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives us is a lantern on the stern which shines only on the waves behind us.”
The American misfortune during the Vietnam period was to have had Presidents who lacked the self-confidence for the grand withdrawal.
The test comes in recognizing when persistence in error has become self-damaging.
The question is whether or how a country can protect itself from protective stupidity in policy-making, which in turn raises the question whether it is possible to educate for government.