Which Way the Trolley: America’s Hot Wars During the Cold War, Part 2
In Asia, Communist victories in the early 1950s would have resulted perhaps tens of millions of persons murdered in Stalin-like or Khmer Rouge extermination camps all over Indochina, Taiwan, the Koreas, Malesia, etc. Recall that forty-five million or so died in China under Mao. The countries on the edge of China would have been reduced to the subsistence existence of Soviet style economies. There would have been no time for these countries to develop their free-market economies and paths to freedom as the “Asian Tigers.” Indeed, in the 1950s one would be hard pressed to see much economic or personal freedom differences between Communist North or non-Communist South Korea.
It took several decades, the decades of wars in Indochina, for the Asian countries along the rim of China to become the prosperous and free societies they are today, and to demonstrate the astounding contrast of their economic prosperity with that of the Communist economies. This sounds like the “domino effect” that was spoken of by the Cold War advocates during the Vietnam War, and disdained because it never happened. It seems more likely that the dominoes did not fall precisely because there were the Malaysian, Korean and Vietnam anti-Communist wars which propped up the dominoes until they were robust enough to stand on their own.
Second: The Asian anti-Communist wars helped bring down the Soviet Union and the rule of Communism in Eastern Europe. This is directly related to our first point. That is, the prosperity of the “Asian Tigers” and well-being and prosperity of Western Europe made comparisons with Soviet and East European Communism embarrassing.
At the beginning of the Cold War, George Kennan, an influential American diplomat who had been on post in Moscow during the 1930s and had observed Stalin’s purges and atrocities, prophetically argued that containment of the Communists states was necessary for their internal contradictions, cruelties, inefficiencies and economic stagnation to become obvious. He believed that with time they would be forced to either change, moderate, or collapse. Indeed, that is what happened. In Europe containment took the form of the Marshall plan of economic reconstruction, and the NATO military alliance. In Asia it was the wars fought by the British, the French and the Americans with their local allies.
Another important factor in the fall of Soviet Communism was the fact that free-market, democratic countries were pulling way ahead of Communist countries in electronic and computer technology. This was precisely because in democratic societies’ communications were free and uncensored, and ideas and innovations flowed freely between corporations, small start-up companies, and computer geeks through industry journals, hobby clubs, conferences, etc. These instruments of communication were not possible under the highly censored Communist systems. But again, that developed over several decades and was not foreseeable in the 1950s nor even in the 1960s.
A Speculation, a better outcome in Vietnam
To speculate, what would have happened if for instance, President Johnson had asked for and received a declaration of war at the very beginning of the Vietnam conflict? The anti-war movement would have developed slowly or not at all, as overt demonstrations could have been prosecuted as legally treasonous. In this scenario the South Vietnamese Army and Cambodian armies would have had more time to develop and reform, and with continued American air power support, could well have repulsed the North Vietnamese 1975 offensive as they had done the earlier Easter offensive.[19]
Further, what if, in 1975 or 1976, the North Vietnamese realized they could not win, and an armistice line declared in Indochina, just like Korea, with parts of Laos and Cambodia still non-Communist? In this scenario the great part of the Cambodian Genocide would have been avoided, and the area as a whole, with its Chinese merchants present, would have developed rapidly as a free market economy and democratic government echoing the trajectory of South Korea and Taiwan. This would have resulted in a net gain of several million persons saved from death and torture. Economic (and spiritual) prosperity similar to that of the Asian Tigers would have come to the area decades sooner and more sustained than the present outcomes in all of Indochina. To be specific, Laos languishes on as a semi-Communist country, Vietnam has developed a form of “crony capitalism” in which the former North Vietnamese generals run profitable companies, and Vietnamese labor conditions are awful (not the “workers’ paradise” promised).[20]
The Vietnam Trolley went on its way
Trolley parable becomes a bit unwieldly in analyzing Vietnam, but let me try. Presidents Johnson and Nixon (Jane in the parable) hit the lever to go on the tract to kill just one child, rather than the numerous children in the stalled van. But at the same time, others in the trolley disputed that decision, denounced Jane as a murder and pulled the lever back to its main setting, and then let go. The natural consequence was the deaths of the children in the van in a horrible fiery event when the gas tank ruptured. The wrecked van was thrown aside by the momentum of the trolley. Those who reset the lever pretended nothing much happened.
The salient thing about the anti-war activists was their non-historical and ideologically formed moral beliefs. This is especially true of the radical Left. Even after the Cambodian genocide they went on feeling justified because they had ended the “needless killings” in Vietnam. They took no responsibility for the “needless killings” of the Cambodian genocide. They saw themselves as heroes for having nullified and defeated the military-industrial complex. For many of the activists, politics became the stage for continued moral posturing. As in for example: “I am a progressive, but you are a war-mongering bourgeois, and greedy businessman, etc.” Or specifically from the anti-war radicals, “I stopped the killing in Vietnam, and furthered love and peace, but you were responsible for napalming civilians, etc.”
As Niebuhr would have pointed out, such judgments are rash and moralistic, and do not represent a mature appreciation of true moral dilemmas that have to be made by those in power. Indeed, every high level government official will have some sort of trolley dilemma in their career.
Hilary Clinton is a great example of this. She came from a Methodist and conservative household, and as a high-school student campaigned for Senator Barry Goldwater. Later, as a college junior she turned Left and changed political alliances, ultimately campaigning for Senator Eugene McCarthy who was running on a strong anti-war platform and against Lyndon Johnson.
Later, after being First Lady to Bill Clinton, she was elected senator from New York. There she began to experience some of the trolley dilemmas that those in power are wont to experience. For instance, she voted in favor of the Iraq War, on the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. That is, to use force now, to avoid a bigger tragedy later. Of course the intelligence estimates were wrong, and a long war resulted for no gain and much chaos.
Category: Church History, Winter 2017
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