In making this argument Lind draws heavily on the publications of the Cold War International History Project, and especially on research in Soviet and Chinese archives by the historians Ilya Gaiduk, Chen Jian, and Qiang Zhai. He shows that Ho Chi Minh could hardly have defeated the French in the early 1950s or challenged the Americans a decade later without military assistance from Moscow and, to an even greater extent, from Beijing. He claims that Marxism-Leninism gave Ho, Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, and Mao Zedong a common objective in seeking revolution throughout the world: "In reality, there was an international communist conspiracy, and Ho Chi Minh was a charter member of it."
The Cold War was, therefore, "a world war ... in which the future governance of the international system was at stake, and in which the great powers opposing the United States and its allies were the moral equivalents of Nazi Germany." Vietnam became a battleground because the Soviet Union did not dare challenge the Americans in Europe -- or, after the Korean War broke out, in Northeast Asia. In the Third World, though, Moscow could conceal its hand and still advance its cause. Ho's reputation as a nationalist, together with Mao's willingness to sustain him, made Vietnam a particularly promising opportunity. This was a confrontation, then, that the United States could hardly have avoided: to have remained aloof would have risked "a dramatic pro-Soviet realignment in world politics."
Vietnam was the right war, Lind thinks, but it was fought in the wrong way. Lyndon Johnson deferred too uncritically to generals whose strategy of searching out and destroying enemy forces -- instead of securing population centers -- produced more casualties than results. As a predictable consequence, public and congressional support eroded. Expanding the conflict would only have made things worse, because, new Chinese sources show, Mao was prepared to intervene. The only good alternative was for "the United States to forfeit the war after 1968, in order to preserve the American domestic political consensus in favor of the Cold War on other fronts."
Victory, Lind maintains, was not the point. All that was needed was to have made an effort, to show that the United States would defend its allies in the Third World as well as elsewhere, to assure future targets of Moscow's expansionism that Washington would not abandon them. But by sticking with the war to the point of a complete collapse of domestic resolve and a humiliating withdrawal, the Nixon and Ford Administrations encouraged Soviet aggressiveness during the late 1970s -- a trend reversed only when Ronald Reagan took the country back to a strategy of making its commitments credible once again.
Such is Lind's argument, and some of it makes sense. We do know now that Stalin, Mao, and Ho met in Moscow in 1950 to map out the strategy for an eventual takeover of Indochina. We know that there was greater Soviet and Chinese support for North Vietnam than previously suspected: Russian anti-aircraft crews actually shot down Americans over that country, and at one point there were as many as 170,000 Chinese soldiers on its territory. We know that the North Vietnamese were never really serious about a negotiated settlement, and that their supposedly autonomous Viet Cong allies were in fact their puppets. We certainly know that the Americans and the South Vietnamese had no monopoly on the use of violence: the North Vietnamese were just as bad, and the Khmer Rouge were of course much worse.