Practicing History_ Selected Essays - Barbara W. Tuchman [149]
COALITION IN VIETNAM—NOT WORTH ONE MORE LIFE
If the goal of coalition government still lies behind the conditions on which the Nixon administration is prepared to make its exit from Vietnam, there can be no foreseeable, exit. We have been pursuing this goal (whether from conviction or for public consumption one cannot say) for four years. As recently as Mr. Kissinger’s last visit to Paris he carried with him, as he told the press, “a plan for coalition.” On what basis of reasonable expectation? Between erstwhile enemies in a civil conflict, the only form of coalition that can occur is that which results when a snake swallows a rabbit. One side or another must be eventually engorged.
How can there be compromise over a division so fundamental that it requires recourse to war? Could the South and North have agreed to stop fighting after Gettysburg and form a joint government? Or Robespierre share power with Louis XVI? Or Generalissimo Franco settle into coalition with Loyalists after the Spanish Civil War? Our own experience in Asia is a nearer guide.
We pursued coalition doggedly and deludedly between the Nationalists and Communists in China in the years 1944–7 only to end in failure, in the defeat of our war aims in Asia, and in the final collapse of America’s client.
The argument for coalition at that time seemed compelling, if not to professional observers in the field, at least to policy-makers in the capital who, following the law of their kind, evolve policy to fit a picture in their heads rather than to fit the situation. The basic premise and stated war aim of our effort in the Far East in World War II was a strong, stable, united China on our side after the war, to fill the vacuum that would be left by the defeat of Japan and maintain the peace and stability of Asia in the post-war world. The long-threatened outbreak of civil war in China would nullify that objective. To avert such an outcome, as well as for other short-term military reasons, coalition between the two fiercely inimical parties in China was, as we saw it, imperative. It seemed obtainable because both sides professed to want it and agreed to negotiate.
The Communists’ desire was genuine because they intended to use coalition as a base from which to expand and were confident they could make it a stage on the way to national power, and also because as a participant in legal government they could receive American arms. For exactly these reasons Chiang Kai-shek had no intention whatever of opening his government to the camel’s nose, but under American pressure he had to play the game of negotiations because his already failing regime was dependent on American arms and other aid. Like any bargainer determined to avoid a fulfillment without overtly taking the negative, Chiang proposed terms unacceptable to the other side, in this case his control of the Communist armed forces. Equally unprepared to commit suicide, the Communists in their turn proposed terms and safeguards unacceptable to Chiang.
With the U.S. as anxious broker, demands and concessions, deadlocks and renewals continued for two and a half years, past the end of World War II, with the dispatch by President Truman of the outstanding American figure of the war, General George Marshall, as mediator. He persisted for a year, but as mediator the U.S. was in the end unavailing, having restricted its options in advance all to one side. Although in one moment of transitory agreement Chiang and Mao were photographed across a table raising their glasses to each other with cordial smiles of an old hate, there never was a real possibility of the two camps reaching mutually acceptable terms, since the survival of one necessarily meant the demise of the other.
As General