Ukraine’s Vietnam Moment

The reports from the Trump-Putin summit in Alaska suggest — at least to us — that sooner or later President Zelensky is going to come to what we have taken to calling the Vietnam Moment. That’s the moment where Ukraine’s leader is going to have to decide whether to, per Mr. Trump, “make a deal” that leaves enemy soldiers on what he sees as his soil. Or whether he says “no,” walks away, and carries on the war with a weak hand.

That’s the position our free South Vietnamese ally, President Nguyen Van Thieu, faced in January 1973 when President Nixon demanded he go along and sent his envoy, General Alexander Haig, to deliver the message. “Brutality is nothing,” Nixon told Secretary Kissinger, who memorialized it in his two-volume memoir of his years working for the 37th president. “You have never seen it if this son-of-a-bitch doesn’t go along, believe me.”

Welcome to Vietnam, we say. The parallels are not precise between Ukraine and Vietnam, but in broad outlines one can detect echoes. In 1973, America was looking to extricate itself from the military defense of Free Vietnam in the face of the communist North’s inexorable campaign to subdue the South. A face-saving deal was concocted by Nixon and the North to withdraw American troops, leaving South Vietnam to carry on its fight for freedom — alone.

At the time Kissinger enthused about the impending agreement — touted by Nixon as “Peace With Honor” — as a moment “to be celebrated,” the secretary contended. There was just one catch, Kissinger recalled. “We still did not have the agreement of that doughty little man in Saigon, President Thieu.” One can imagine the leader of Free Vietnam was less than cheerful about America’s retreat. Yet “Nixon was determined to prevail,” per Kissinger.

Hence the letter — an “ultimatum,” in Kissinger’s words — to Thieu from Nixon. “I have irrevocably decided to initial the Agreement on Jan. 27, 1973, in Paris,” Nixon wrote to America’s ally. “I will do so, if necessary, alone.” Should Thieu fail to go along, Nixon added, “I shall have to explain publicly that your Government obstructs peace. The result will be an inevitable and immediate termination of U.S. economic and military assistance.”

Nixon’s approach was cheered on at the time in the editorial columns of the Times and others of the liberal press. In December 1972, a Times editorial reckoned that America “must inevitably leave the political fate of Vietnam to be decided by the Vietnamese themselves.” That was shorthand for America washing its hands of South Vietnam, leaving the Saigon regime to the tender mercies of the Chinese and Russian communists. 

Yet a little more than two years after the Paris peace accords were signed, North Vietnamese tanks were rumbling into Saigon and millions of South Vietnamese were consigned to generations of communist tyranny. Nixon and Kissinger rationalized the outcome. “It is Congress that must bear the responsibility for the tragic results,” Nixon said later, pointing to the Democrats’ subsequent cutoff of military aid to South Vietnam.

Kissinger said the peace “agreement could have worked,” were it not for “the collapse of executive authority as a result of Watergate and congressional refusal to provide adequate aid to Saigon.” Such truths were but cold comfort to Vietnam after America’s betrayal of Thieu and the catastrophe that befell our ally. Not to mention to Mr. Zelensky and the Ukrainians, who must know the history of American promises of “Peace With Honor.”