No More Vietnam Syndrome

U.S. FOREIGN POLICY for decades proceeded in the shadow of the failure in Vietnam. Some 58,000 Americans were killed in that war.

- Brian Doherty

Stateside protests were fierce enough to persuade President Lyndon Johnson to sit out the ’68 election. Seven years later, after about 2 million civilian Vietnamese deaths, the U.S. finally gave up without having prevented a Communist takeover of the country.

“Vietnam syndrome” restricted our foreign conflicts, for a time, to such swift and relatively petty adventures as 1983’s post-coup invasion of Grenada (which, though it involved fewer than 8,000 U.S. troops, did kill 19 U.S. soldiers, wound 116 more, and prompt a massive majority of the U.N. General Assembly to dub the American action a “flagrant violation of international law”) and the 1989 overthrow of troublesome Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega.

But in 1991, the U.S. resumed bigtime war waging in order to reverse Iraq’s conquest of Kuwait. Along with 38 allied countries, America commanded more than 600,000 troops in a three-month ground war. The Bill Clinton era meanwhile saw U.S. overseas interventions begin to be characterized as “humanitarian.” We dipped in and out, sending troops or war planes to Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Kosovo and helping to displace over a million people combined.