Word: vietnams
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...following: China cannot tolerate what it regards as a real threat to its own frontiers. This means, as a corollary, that China cannot tolerate the displacement of a friendly neighbor on its immediate frontier by an unfriendly neighbor or an unknown quantity. Ergo, any imminent threat to North Vietnam as a state that would imply to China that North Vietnam was to be displaced as a state, as a friendly state, and replaced by another state, would, we have always believed, bring on almost automatically greatly intensified Chinese involvement in North Vietnam and, in effect, an intervention in North Vietnam...
This is a two-sided threat: the North Vietnamese would prefer that the Chinese not come in, and the Chinese would prefer not to come in; but engagement of this tripwire by us would be an invasion of North Vietnam or else close and destructive bombing near the China border which might accidentally spill over into China...
...asking, all I am suggesting, is that on the basis of experience, and particularly Vietnam experience but also elsewhere, we stand back a few paces and re-examine how successfully applicable that strategy,born as I say, of gifted social science minds, techniques, technology, how really applicable it can be in these highly alien cultural, historic and geographic situations that we so barely understand...
...could and should learn from the past. I would just throw in one comment, and that is that we don't always learn the right lessons from the past, and one of the lessons we may learn from Vietnam which may not be the right lesson is that we should never get that deeply involved in an underdeveloped far-away country. I am not sure that this is the appropriate lesson. The real lesson is the uniqueness of the Vietnam situation, the unique complex of forces there, which made success in that enterprise so highly improbable even if you looked...
...universities were similarly limited in their Vietnam understanding until recent years...