ABSTRACT

References to the ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ began appearing as early as 1976. The concept was taken to mean that after the trauma of defeat (itself an anomaly in a two-century military tradition that had known only victories, with the partial exception of the War of 1812), the American people would no longer support risky foreign interventions.3 As Norman Podhoretz (the influential former editor of Commentary magazine) wrote in 1984, the lesson of Vietnam that had ‘taken the deepest root in American culture’ was that military force had become ‘obsolete as an instrument of American political purposes’.4 This heightened scepticism of the political utility of force also infected the military culture, fuelling the military’s determination to circumscribe policy-makers’ flexibility in using force as a political instrument. Despite President George H. W. Bush’s claim that the spectre of Vietnam had been ‘buried forever in the desert sands of the Arabian Peninsula’, American strategy in the first Gulf War was actually the clearest expression of the lingering trauma of Vietnam. Far from having been ‘kicked’, memories of Vietnam continued to shape American strategy until the terrorist attacks of 9/11 replaced them as the defining reference point for US military culture.