Vietnam

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President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the UNGA Climate Summit 2014 in the General Assembly Hall at the United Nations in New York, N.Y., Sept. 23, 2014. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
Barack Obama delivers remarks at the UNGA Climate Summit 2014. Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson
John Wohlstetter
February 5, 2015
Foreign Policy
9

The Great Obama Retreat

John Wohlstetter
February 5, 2015
Foreign Policy
9

Just before he was elected president in 2008, Barack Obama declared, “We are just five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” He may not succeed in his aim to transform the domestic landscape. Instead his legacy may be a different transformation entirely: a tectonic shift in America’s position in the world, diminishing America’s status abroad to Read More ›

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Wall building with bullet holes from Bosnian War period in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Image Credit: Fotokon - Adobe Stock
Bruce Chapman
December 1, 1995
Citizen Leadership
5

Clinton risks leading us into quagmire of ‘Vietnam II’

Bruce Chapman
December 1, 1995
Citizen Leadership
5
Vietnam started, too, with limited purposes in service of a universal goal (containing communism, in that case.) And it ended with a goal of merely getting our prisoners home - and with years of disillusionment. President Clinton, who cut his political teeth on opposition to the war in Vietnam, has learned some of the lessons of that conflict, but not the most important one: Don't send troops into a war unless you have a way to win and get out. Yes, of course, "peace enforcement" is not war, supposedly. But it also is not mere "peacekeeping," and in Bosnia even the latter resulted in the deaths of more than 200 United Nations troops. When the president says that the United States mission "may well involve casualties," and that if U.S. troops are attacked "they will have the authority to respond immediately and . . . with overwhelming force," what then follows, if not war? In explaining to the American people and Congress why he had avoided direct intervention earlier, the president said, "I decided that American ground troops should not fight a war in Bosnia because the United States could not force peace on Bosnia's warring ethnic groups: the Serbs, Croats and Muslims." Just so. But why does he think he has "forced" that outcome now, when the Bosnian Serbs are still uncommitted and when whatever commitments are made on paper mean so little in the Balkans anyhow? There have been 34 "truces" and "cease-fires" and other "agreements" before this one, and none has held up. What enables peacekeeping is a manifest and genuine desire for peace on all sides or, even better, the defeat and disarmament of the aggressors. Is someone planning to go door to door to disarm the Bosnian Serbs? Read More ›