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speech, “and the result brought us closer to World War II. History teaches us that by being strong and resolute we can keep the peace.” George H. W. Bush concurred. “Half a century ago, the world had the chance to stop a ruthless aggressor and missed it,” he declared in explaining his intended response to Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait. “I pledge to you: We will not make the same mistake again.”35 Within months, Bush, having—so it seemed—handily disposed of Saddam in Gulf War I, announced with satisfaction that “we’ve kicked the Vietnam syndrome.” Demonstrating an even greater penchant for military activism, Bush’s successor Bill Clinton affirmed that judgment.36 To justify the use of force, Clinton too deployed the lessons of Munich.37 Appeasement rather than overreaction had once again become the sin to be avoided at all costs.

For Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and the entire foreign policy establishment, the most important conclusion to be derived from Vietnam was that the American experience there was sui generis. This meant, of course, that the war had no truly important lessons to teach, none at least that should call into question the larger record of U.S. policy or alter its future course. Reflecting on the past took a backseat to looking ahead.

Henry Kissinger himself both anticipated and helped to ensure this outcome. For public consumption, Kissinger made a show of wanting to plumb the Vietnam experience for whatever it had to teach. Behind closed doors, he took the position that combing through the debris left by the U.S. failure would yield little of value. Already in 1975, in a memo drafted for President Gerald Ford, Kissinger, then secretary of state, called it “remarkable, considering how long the war lasted and how intensely it was reported and commented [upon], that there are really not very many lessons from our experience in Vietnam that can be usefully applied elsewhere despite the obvious temptation to try.” Kissinger continued:

Vietnam represented a unique situation, geographically, ethnically, politically, militarily, and diplomatically. We should probably be grateful for that and should recognize it for what it is, instead of trying to apply the “lessons of Vietnam” as universally as we once tried to apply the “lessons of Munich.” . . . [T]he war had almost universal effects but it did not provide a universal catechism.38

Regarding Vietnam’s policy significance, Kissinger proved remarkably prescient. Within a decade, Washington had all but forgotten Vietnam. The catechism to which policy makers adhered during the 1980s and beyond did not differ perceptibly from the one that landed the United States in Vietnam in the first place.

SEAMLESS TRANSITION

If the disaster of Vietnam posed only a momentary challenge, the passing of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Empire posed none at all. It was after all the threat of totalitarianism originating during the middle third of the twentieth century that had ostensibly summoned the United States to shoulder unprecedented burdens. As it turned out, however, the disappearance of the totalitarian threat in no way eased those burdens. The emergency that had begun in the 1930s finally ended; the imperative for exercising global leadership persisted.

Beginning with Franklin Roosevelt, every U.S. president had insisted that at the far side of America’s resistance to totalitarianism world peace awaited. The reward for exertions today was to be a reduced need for exertions on the morrow.

Yet the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the disappearance of Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” in 1991 elicited a chorus of warnings against any hint of backsliding. According to people in the know, peace was not in the offing, not yet anyway. Indeed, according to proponents of the Washington rules, the end of the Cold War confronted the United States with new, even more daunting challenges. In a world of ever-growing complexity, with the tempo of change accelerating, dangers loomed. The Red Menace had disappeared, but humankind more than ever needed