TRIGGERnometry - Everything You Think You Know About Vietnam Is Wrong — Historian Mark Moyar

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00:01:20.320 One of the central controversies of the war, just was it something that could have been won or not?

00:01:25.160 And a lot of historians, especially on the left, will say, no, this was, you could never have won it.

00:01:30.640 Yes, I mean, the Americans have air power, artillery, the North Vietnamese don't have these things.

00:01:34.540 And so it is very one side. 0.89

00:01:36.400 In fact, that will be the general pattern.

00:01:39.220 So they take crippling losses at the hands of American and South Vietnamese forces.

00:01:45.460 They commit some terrible strategic blunders.

00:01:48.960 This was not a foregone conclusion that it was going to end the way it did.

00:01:53.540 Hollywood's dramatizing things.

00:01:54.920 It is, yes.

00:01:57.260 Hollywood hasn't done a very good job on Vietnam.

00:02:00.720 There's still, I think, a pretty strong feeling among the troops

00:02:04.060 that this is something worth fighting for.

00:02:06.300 There is also this growing realization that the politicians are tying our hands behind our back.

00:02:12.640 We either need to fight this war hard or we need to get out.

00:02:18.620 This episode is sponsored by our friends at Hillsdale College.

00:02:22.000 Right after this episode, go check out the incredible online courses, which are absolutely free at hillsdale.edu slash trigger.

00:02:32.140 Mark, welcome to TriggerNometry.

00:02:34.100 Great to be with you.

00:02:35.280 Great to have you on.

00:02:36.200 We're going to talk about the Vietnam War.

00:02:38.280 And as we discussed before we started, both the two of us and quite a lot of people watching this might not know very much about that war.

00:02:44.820 But we feel like, you know, some of the conversations that have been happening in American society lately sort of seem to there seems to be some connection with the things that happened, the conclusions that were made at that time, the impact on the collective psyche of this country.

00:03:00.840 So tell us what happened. What was the Vietnam War? How did it happen? When did it happen? Why did it happen?

00:03:06.140 Well, that's a great question. And I think if you want to understand the roots of this war, you have to go back at least to 1949. And that's when the Chinese communists won the Chinese Civil War, which is an aspect of our history that most people really don't know very well.

00:03:22.120 But it's, you know, one of the most important events of the 20th century.

00:03:25.880 And up until that time, you had the Truman administration, a lot of other people claiming that communism isn't really a big deal in Asia.

00:03:34.640 We shouldn't be too worried about it. And, you know, for a while, a lot of people thought Mao was just this nice sort of nationalist who said he was going to be democratic.

00:03:42.500 But finally, when he takes over, suddenly reality sets in that these communists are actually pretty bad folks who are going to kill lots of people and try to take over the world.

00:03:52.820 And so you see then in 1950, the U.S. starts aiding the French in Indochina, Vietnam.

00:04:00.520 And then the U.S. also goes into Korea to fight the Korean War.

00:04:05.140 And so a lot of people second guess and kind of forget about these underlying sources.

00:04:10.400 But I think it's you've got to fundamentally understand that there's a war against communism.

00:04:15.180 And this is an ideology that killed 100 million people in the 20th century, which, again, relevant today because you now have young people who don't really know the history saying, oh, socialism, communism are really not that big a deal.

00:04:29.000 But Vietnam clearly is aimed at preventing the spread of communism and particularly Chinese led communism in Southeast Asia.

00:04:39.340 And so when the French War ends in 1954 and the French just decide they're sick of this, the United States decides it's going to help a new government in South Vietnam as part of the effort to contain communism.

00:04:53.180 Because what almost all the Americans at this time thought was that this so-called domino theory meant that if you lose a place like South Vietnam, the other countries in the region are going to fall.

00:05:05.160 And that will be actually the guiding principle for most of the war.

00:05:09.340 And so we've we've got the domino theory. But what people probably don't know as well, Mark, is that America was financing and helping to support the French financially.

00:05:21.920 I mean, they were they were paying billions of dollars even back then, which was a lot of money. It's a lot of money now. But back then it was even more money.

00:05:28.560 Yes. And, you know, initially, the United States was not very keen on this French effort because it was in Roosevelt and Truman kind of thought European colonialism is kind of passe and we're not going to support it.

00:05:41.940 But then when they saw this communist threat, they agreed to help the French.

00:05:45.960 And the French also made promises to the Vietnamese that they could have a greater degree of independence.

00:05:52.080 It's also interesting when you get to 1954 and the French are surrounded at Jan Bien Phu, they come to the Americans and say, can you bomb the communists who have surrounded us?

00:06:03.140 And Eisenhower actually goes to the British and says, we'd like you to join us in an anti-communist coalition.

00:06:10.740 And the British say, well, you know, you didn't help us out in India, so we're not really that keen on helping save the French in Indochina.

00:06:18.380 And so for that reason, the United States holds its hand.

00:06:21.680 And now it creates an interesting what if.

00:06:25.280 I do think had we bombed, actually, we could have perhaps saved the French. 0.56

00:06:28.760 But we didn't really know that at the time.

00:06:30.700 We didn't realize the Viet Minh, the communists, as they call themselves, had committed almost their entire army to Dien Bien Phu.

00:06:38.040 And we're very vulnerable.

00:06:38.980 But, you know, we didn't know that at the time.

00:06:40.260 So we, the U.S. then decides we're just going to hold on to the southern half. 0.69

00:06:44.840 French leave.

00:06:45.740 And so we support this new government in South Vietnam.

00:06:48.820 Well, the French surrender once again.

00:06:50.620 What a shocker. 0.74

00:06:51.140 So how do we get from this situation, the communists have the north, the American-backed, non-anticommunists have the south. 0.53

00:06:59.960 How do you get from that to American boots on the ground? 0.73

00:07:04.320 So at the beginning, the new president of South Vietnam is Ngo Dinh Diem, a very religious Catholic Vietnamese.

00:07:13.540 And a lot of people don't think he's going to succeed because there's a lot of chaos in the south.

00:07:18.040 But he is able to consolidate power, and the communists initially think they can beat him with just political agitation, but that turns out not to be the case.

00:07:28.320 And so as his regime gets stronger, the communists decide in 1960 to launch an armed insurrection, basically using the techniques of Mao for mobilizing the peasants.

00:07:39.600 And so you have that begins in 1960. Diem regime struggles at first. They start to get their act together in 1962. President Kennedy helps puts a lot of aid there. Things are going pretty well in 1963.

00:07:54.840 And then all of a sudden you have what we call the Buddhist crisis, which is a hugely complicated and convoluted story where supposedly some Buddhists in the population were dissatisfied with the government.

00:08:07.200 And this was all really ginned up.

00:08:10.000 And we know, in fact, the communists were helping give the propaganda behind this.

00:08:14.140 But they duped some of the American press into believing them.

00:08:17.540 And so ultimately, the U.S. government supports a coup to overthrow President Xi Jinping in 1963.

00:08:22.840 1963. To me, that is a watershed moment in the war because the war effort suddenly goes off a

00:08:31.320 cliff. Now, a lot of historians have overlooked some of this, but I think it's quite clear. We

00:08:36.080 now know from North Vietnamese sources, this is a huge moment. So the South Vietnamese government

00:08:40.200 goes into a tailspin. And then we have Lyndon Johnson come in. Kennedy's assassinated just a

00:08:47.020 few weeks after President Xi'em. And Lyndon Johnson in 1964 is focusing on getting re-elected

00:08:54.440 in the 64 election. So everything to him has to be looked at that lens. And so you get to the

00:09:00.580 Tonkin Gulf incidents of August in 1964. What happens is that a couple of American destroyers

00:09:07.680 are out on the high seas and the North Vietnamese attack them. And President Johnson then is

00:09:14.260 confronted with the decision what to do. You know, Johnson doesn't want this in the newspaper.

00:09:18.820 This is not something he was hoping for. But now he's confronted with this fact. And so

00:09:22.840 decides he needs to do something. And here we hear him listening to Secretary of Defense Robert

00:09:28.020 McNamara, who is really the architect of the war for both Kennedy and Johnson.

00:09:34.060 What McNamara says is we need to convey a signal of our intent to the North Vietnamese. And here

00:09:42.820 He's drawn on academic theories about conflict, which are not based in history, which is really kind of remarkable to how influential these especially economists are.

00:09:55.140 But he buys into this theory that we'll use force to communicate.

00:09:59.720 And so they undertake a very limited raid on the North Vietnamese naval base nearby.

00:10:06.840 Now, the North Vietnamese see this and they take away the very opposite message that the Americans are trying to send.

00:10:12.120 they see Americans just did a little pinprick strike. That means mean they actually are not

00:10:16.780 serious because if you were serious, you'd hit them really hard. So this leads them to believe

00:10:22.560 that Johnson is going to throw in the towel on Vietnam or not make a big fuss. And then in the

00:10:28.760 election, Lyndon Johnson portrays himself as the peace candidate and says, I'm not going to send

00:10:33.840 American boys to fight wars that Asian boys can fight. And so the North Vietnamese see this and

00:10:39.180 they say, yeah, you know, South Vietnam is now ripe for the taking. It's in big trouble since

00:10:43.720 this coup. And now Lyndon Johnson's saying he's not going to send American troops. So

00:10:48.580 soon as Johnson wins the election in November of 64, North Vietnamese launch an invasion with,

00:10:55.960 for the first time, sending entire North Vietnamese army divisions. Up until this time,

00:11:01.000 they've sent smaller forces recruited in the South. So their plan is...

00:11:04.300 I'm so sorry to interrupt. Can I pause you for one second and just come back to the Gulf of

00:11:08.240 Tonkin incident because our friend Joe Rogan, he brings this up as like, I think when I

00:11:15.400 asked him what his favorite conspiracy is, he said, well, the Gulf of Tonkin is one of

00:11:20.540 them because it was a pretext for war that was false.

00:11:23.900 What's your reading of some of the narratives around that situation?

00:11:28.360 Yes, well, it is a complicated situation.

00:11:31.740 So there are two reported attacks. And one of those attacks clearly took place because there were bullet fragments found on the American ships.

00:11:42.540 The second one is still kind of a mystery. The Americans at the time, though, did think there was a second attack based on communications intercepts.

00:11:50.660 Now, some of those intercepts may be referred to the first one.

00:11:53.500 Now, what is misleading, and I think maybe what feeds into conspiracy theories, is McNamara deliberately deceives Congress about what's going on.

00:12:04.960 He says this was an unprovoked attack.

00:12:08.440 Now, we know, and this was not known at the time, but the time U.S. is actually conducting covert operations against North Vietnam

00:12:15.200 and probably has something to do with the fact that they attack the American ships.

00:12:22.560 And so McNamara, he comes out as one of the most disreputable people out of all of this, I think.

00:12:31.600 And this is a case where he misled the American people.

00:12:35.340 Do we know why he did it?

00:12:37.420 I think he just felt that it might get a little too messy if people knew that there was some gray areas in here,

00:12:45.380 that maybe this was not purely unprovoked aggression.

00:12:48.780 And again, that also wouldn't probably look great with the election coming up.

00:12:53.040 But we do know Lyndon Johnson and McNamara, they are already talking about bombing North Vietnam in 1965, even when publicly they're trying to claim that they're not going to send American boys.

00:13:06.560 So there is a great amount of deceit.

00:13:08.580 In fact, Johnson's advisers come to him several times in 1964 and say, you know, we've actually got a pretty bad rap, Democrats, because we had Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt promise they were going to keep us out of war and then they get us into war and we could be heading down that road this way.

00:13:25.700 So we may be fighting a war. So you might not want to talk about being the peace guy, but he ignores them and keeps going on this.

00:13:32.300 So it is a rather sorry aspect of the conflict.

00:13:40.200 Do you think there's any truth to the idea that actually there were some forces

00:13:44.600 that really did want this war to escalate within the American administration at the time?

00:13:49.520 There are some who see that it's probably going to happen,

00:13:53.740 and there's a big debate between the ones who are in the McNamara camp

00:13:59.800 who binds these academic theories.

00:14:03.080 And they think they can kind of keep this as a limited war

00:14:06.520 and that it's going to continue.

00:14:09.680 Now, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and others in the military say,

00:14:13.440 you know, that doesn't make any sense.

00:14:15.520 If we either need to fight this war hard or we need to get out.

00:14:19.280 And so that undercurrent was running for the next several years.

00:14:23.940 And for the most part, you know, McNamara is the number one guy.

00:14:26.380 So he largely prevails. And so he pushes this idea that we're going to fight a limited conflict rather than going all out or getting out.

00:14:36.040 So 1965, when was the moment American boots hit Vietnamese soil?

00:14:42.140 So the first American troops come ashore in March of 1965.

00:14:46.980 And at that point, the situations continue to get worse in the South.

00:14:50.560 and the American, they said Johnson's already thinking about doing some bombing,

00:14:56.060 but he thinks that they can bomb the North, but it's going to kind of keep on a somewhat modest pace.

00:15:02.200 They don't know that this big invasion is coming.

00:15:04.500 So they send these first troops thinking that they're just there to guard American bases.

00:15:08.960 They're not there to actually get into the fighting.

00:15:12.200 But what happens then is May of 65, the North Vietnamese, these divisions that are coming from the North, 0.68

00:15:18.220 They launch a big offensive. And by June, it's clear that South Vietnam is probably going to fall unless the Americans get in. 0.81

00:15:26.520 So in June and July, Lyndon Johnson decides, thinks this over and will ultimately in late July say, OK, you know what?

00:15:35.360 Yeah, maybe I said we weren't going to send boys, but actually we need to send our boys because otherwise Vietnam is going to fall.

00:15:41.000 And the consequences of that are things that we just don't want to accept. 0.60

00:15:45.020 that's too damaging. Again, going back to the dominoes, this is going to lead to

00:15:49.480 the fall of other countries in Asia. Because when we look at the American 0.95

00:15:54.300 armed forces at that point, you go, this is the most technologically advanced armed forces in

00:16:01.960 the world. This is the richest country in the world. They were up against, let's be fair,

00:16:07.720 a technologically limited Viet Cong. That should be an easy win, shouldn't it? 1.00

00:16:13.840 Yeah, you might think.

00:16:14.820 And the first battles are very lopsided.

00:16:18.240 The first big one is Operation Starley in August of 65.

00:16:22.400 And, yes, I mean, the Americans have tanks and amphibious vehicles.

00:16:28.060 They have air power, artillery. 0.96

00:16:29.920 The North Vietnamese don't have these things.

00:16:31.160 And so it is very one side. 0.99

00:16:33.040 In fact, that will be the general pattern.

00:16:35.240 But what happens is that the North Vietnamese are able to withdraw when they don't want to fight 0.67

00:16:41.840 or when they're taking it, when they're taking too much damage. 0.95

00:16:46.240 So they can either go into remote jungles and mountains and hide out

00:16:49.880 or then go into Laos and Cambodia.

00:16:51.940 And this is one of the problems that actually begins before 1965.

00:16:57.440 There's a big debate in the U.S. over the country of Laos,

00:17:01.200 which is where the Ho Chi Minh Trail will come in existence.

00:17:03.960 And Kennedy, when he's president, he thinks about sending American troops into Laos 0.57

00:17:10.040 Because in between North and South Vietnam, you have this narrow demilitarized zone and the North Vietnamese can't easily sneak things across. 0.91

00:17:17.840 They tried it and they were stopped. So they decide they're going to go through Laos and build this Ho Chi Minh Trail. 0.90

00:17:23.560 And in some of the U.S. military says, let's go into Laos, cut that Ho Chi Minh Trail. 0.52

00:17:28.440 But Kennedy listens to his civilian state department and they decide to negotiate neutralization, which means North Vietnamese are supposed to leave and the Americans. 0.97

00:17:37.300 But the North Vietnamese, being good communists, violate the agreement and they keep going in. 0.91

00:17:41.380 And so you have an unending supply of equipment and manpower. 0.97

00:17:46.480 So the North Vietnamese will take very heavy losses, but they can keep sending stuff down through the Ho Chi Minh Trail and keep things up indefinitely. 0.99

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00:19:02.500 I read, Mark, and correct me if I'm wrong,

00:19:04.680 that part of the problem for the American forces is that they were very good when it came to offensive maneuvers.

00:19:11.520 Defensive maneuvers, they weren't so good at and they really didn't know, you know,

00:19:16.500 they weren't very good strategically at that particular point.

00:19:20.860 Well, and this is also a point of a lot of debate.

00:19:24.660 General Westmoreland, who's the commander at the time, argues that the American forces should concentrate on what he calls search and destroy.

00:19:32.660 So go look for big enemy units, no matter where they are, even if they're in the furthest reaches of the country, in the mountains and jungles. 0.61

00:19:41.380 And the South Vietnamese, our partners, they will focus on securing the villages and towns where the people, most of the people live. 0.88

00:19:50.400 And this does have the advantage of keeping Americans, for the most part, away from the population, because Americans don't speak Vietnamese.

00:19:57.560 They don't understand the customs.

00:19:59.900 One of the problems is the Vietnamese government this time is in disarray, so they're not very good at this kind of stuff. 0.94

00:20:05.680 But the Americans, the search and destroy is also a very interesting topic because most of these operations, they don't find the enemy.

00:20:13.000 So a lot of people say, well, this was kind of wasteful. 0.76

00:20:15.600 But we now know, especially from looking at the North Vietnamese side, that for one thing, they still inflict very heavy losses on the North Vietnamese because sometimes they do catch them. 0.93

00:20:25.740 And that this really keeps the North Vietnamese off balance. 0.96

00:20:28.780 And if you were just to let the North Vietnamese run free, they would be able to mount massive attacks, 0.96

00:20:34.940 you know, concentrate in overwhelming numbers at a city or a base. 1.00

00:20:38.760 And when they are able to do that, the only way you stop them is destroy the city, essentially,

00:20:42.640 which occasionally happens, but for the most part doesn't.

00:20:45.000 One thing we haven't talked about yet is, and I think it's quite an important part of this,

00:20:49.020 is, of course, this is a proxy war.

00:20:51.200 And the North Vietnamese are not fighting by themselves.

00:20:54.540 They're getting support from China and also the Soviet Union, right?

00:20:58.960 That's correct, yes.

00:21:00.020 And in the early years, China is the main partner.

00:21:05.280 And there's a myth that Ho Chi Minh and the Viet Minh really were not on good terms with the Chinese.

00:21:12.380 They didn't really like them.

00:21:13.380 That is actually not the case.

00:21:15.200 We do know they were quite close, especially Mao and Ho Chi Minh themselves.

00:21:20.280 And there will be a falling out later.

00:21:21.600 But initially, the two of them are quite close to one another and goes back to Djem Bien Phu. 0.83

00:21:29.320 We know the Chinese had sent a thousand trucks to help the Viet Minh win there. 0.74

00:21:33.540 And so the Chinese do see this as a major front in dominating Asia, pushing the United States out as a as a major power. 0.69

00:21:45.140 But the Soviets are also there and the Americans know the Soviets and the Chinese aren't on board.

00:21:50.740 But this American intervention actually sort of widens the Soviet Sino-Soviet split because what happens when the Americans come in, the Vietnamese turn to the Soviets for anti-aircraft weapons because there's so much American air power.

00:22:06.740 And so when they start getting more from the Soviets, the Chinese start getting jealous and you start to see a falling out.

00:22:13.940 And then you have the Cultural Revolution in China. And so eventually the Soviets will become the principal benefactor of the North Vietnamese. 0.70

00:22:22.800 So 1965, boots on the ground. At the beginning, the Americans were making inroads, high fives all around, kicking commie ass. 0.99

00:22:32.180 When did it start to turn? 0.92

00:22:34.000 Well, for the troops themselves, they're still pretty motivated for several years now.

00:22:40.580 Robert McNamara himself starts to become disillusioned at the end of 65.

00:22:45.880 And this is one of the reasons why he's so unpopular is that he's actually now having doubts, but he's not talking too much about them.

00:22:54.420 So a lot of people say, well, you should have maybe resigned or maybe told people that we ought to do something different.

00:23:00.380 The reason he gets discouraged is that when he when the troops go in the middle of 65, he is still believing that we have these limited war theories that tell us that one side restrains itself and the other side will restrain itself.

00:23:15.120 Well, the Americans limit themselves. But late 65, they find out North Vietnamese are sending in a whole bunch more people. And so this theory has been essentially destroyed. 0.87

00:23:25.260 And so now McNamara realizes that it's not going to work and the war is getting bigger and bigger and he can't really figure out a way out of it.

00:23:35.420 Now, you have the military in this point continuing to say we need to either invade Laos, invade North Vietnam, bomb in a much more powerful fashion.

00:23:47.440 But the war will continue to go pretty well for the Americans for the next several years.

00:23:53.320 And there's still, I think, a pretty strong feeling among the troops that this is something worth fighting for.

00:24:00.740 But there is also this growing realization that the politicians are tying our hands behind our back and not letting us win this conflict.

00:24:08.920 And that will increasingly become the sentiment of American troops.

00:24:12.240 What was the stated war goal? What was the objective for the U.S.?

00:24:17.760 The well, officially, it was to protect South Vietnam against North Vietnamese aggression.

00:24:25.300 The you had the model of the Korean War where you had North Korea invading South Korea. 0.61

00:24:32.340 And so the hope was that we could maintain independent South Vietnam.

00:24:38.000 Now, once once the American troops go in, you know, again, there is pressure from the military. 0.70

00:24:42.700 Let's go into the north. 0.98

00:24:44.400 Lin and John said, well, we tried that in Korea and the Chinese came in. 0.96

00:24:48.060 Now, it turns out to have been a huge miscalculation because we now know the Chinese, 0.99

00:24:52.120 they had taken a terrific beating in Korea and they said, we're not doing that again.

00:24:56.920 But the United States, again, decides to limit itself to the southern half of the country. 0.61

00:25:02.520 And so you're playing defense all the time and you have an enemy that can keep infiltrating through the Ho Chi Minh Trail. 1.00

00:25:10.880 Ultimately, the hope is we can build up the South Vietnamese to the point that they can deal with most of this on their own, 0.97

00:25:18.340 which will bear some fruit later in the war, ultimately runs into trouble. 0.99

00:25:24.000 Well, it sounds for younger generations, it feels kind of like Afghanistan.

00:25:28.920 You know, you stabilize it, you train the local people, everything's great.

00:25:32.400 But the moment the American forces aren't there, it reverts to the mean.

00:25:37.900 Yes. Well, I will say that the South Vietnamese government was quite a bit better than what we saw in Afghanistan and Iraq. But on the other hand, the enemy was also much stronger. And the U.S. shot itself in the foot several times in Vietnam in terms of promoting, especially this coup in 1963.

00:25:58.480 three um you know i do think in the case of vietnam we had viable partners um a case of

00:26:06.740 afghanistan i think clearly that was uh you know kind of doomed um because we never really found

00:26:13.020 anybody of course as yeah as soon as we withdraw our air support the head of the country flees the

00:26:17.680 country i mean the south vietnamese will continue to fight as the u.s uh in the congress pull pull

00:26:23.700 out aid and so you mentioned that it's going pretty well for the first couple of years first

00:26:30.040 few years uh and the the first demoralization for the american forces there is the realization

00:26:36.660 that they're not being allowed to to go in and do the job that they need to do to win the war

00:26:43.500 and they're basically sitting ducks just waiting for the the vietcong to attack rather than going 0.79

00:26:49.160 out and cleaning them out basically yeah that's right you know the initial period is you know 0.51

00:26:53.800 kind of a uh emergency rescue operation you got to push all the north vietnamese back and so 1.00

00:27:00.680 that's all quite effective but yeah after a while when uh things just start to drag on 0.99

00:27:07.320 then you do increasingly have people wondering um you know are we just going to sit here forever and

00:27:13.080 And this is similar to Afghanistan in that you have, you know, Afghanistan, when the Americans were there, we, you know, kill Taliban day after day after day, but they kept coming in from Pakistan.

00:27:24.480 And so the American people generally don't have unlimited patience for that sort of thing.

00:27:32.040 And, you know, I think a big part of the problem, too, was Lyndon Johnson never really made an effort to solve a war.

00:27:38.720 He himself will admit that.

00:27:39.860 He will admit that he was so focused on becoming a domestic policy president, he was going to have the great society and civil rights, that if he talked too much about the war, that was going to distract from this.

00:27:51.260 But again, that that that will lead to some of the ultimate disillusionment when if the president's not there explaining to you why you're fighting, it's hard to understand.

00:28:00.740 But not only did he not explain why they were fighting, didn't he also downplay the way that the war was going and the casualties that were being incurred as a result of war?

00:28:11.440 Yeah, and he was certainly trying to put a positive spin. And, you know, he'll initially is going to be a candidate in 1968 for the presidency. And so he will bring General Westmoreland back to kind of give pep talks and say how things are going well, you know, rather than saying himself. But this is partly to assure people that, you know, in fact, things are going OK.

00:28:34.580 then you get to the ted offensive which in 1968 which seems to contradict that now again

00:28:41.220 tell us about the ted offensive before before we talk about this what what happened so in early

00:28:46.420 1967 the north vietnamese and they they keep losing battle after battle and so they at first

00:28:54.020 think things are going well in early 1967 they finally figure out that they're taking crippling

00:29:00.340 losses and that their own commanders in the south were kind of deceiving them about how things were

00:29:05.460 going because they didn't want to lose face so they were always claiming they killed all these

00:29:09.240 american south vietnamese somebody finally did the map and said well wait you the americans and

00:29:13.880 south vietnamese are getting stronger even though you claim you did so they finally kind of figured

00:29:17.840 out we got to find we got to come up with a new game plan so uh since fighting in the remote areas

00:29:24.640 of South Vietnam's not working, what they're going to do is target the cities of South Vietnam,

00:29:30.580 which they've largely left alone, and these are controlled by the government.

00:29:34.560 Their thinking is that if we go in there, the people there are going to rise up because

00:29:40.220 they hate the South Vietnamese and American capitalists, and they think it's going to be

00:29:46.600 kind of like in 1945 when they go into Hanoi. So they attack, they decide to attack during

00:29:51.440 the Tet holiday, which is the biggest holiday of the year, violating a ceasefire. So they

00:29:55.640 have the element of surprise, but turns out the people are not ready to rise up. In fact,

00:30:01.420 almost none of them do. And so now they're stuck in the cities and it's not easy for,

00:30:07.040 they don't, you know, they're not familiar with the cities, so they don't know where to go.

00:30:09.540 They can't just run away easily. So they take crippling losses at the hands of American and

00:30:16.380 South Vietnamese forces. But you have an American media that focuses on just the magnitude of this,

00:30:22.500 suggesting that this showed that they were stronger than they were, which isn't really the

00:30:27.180 case. But again, Lyndon Johnson has mismanaged the war of ideas. And, you know, some of the

00:30:34.180 American hawks say, OK, this is like a Pearl Harbor moment. We can tell the people there was

00:30:38.260 this dastardly surprise attack. Time to really, you know, take the shackles off, send even more

00:30:44.800 troops but johnson doesn't want to do that and so there again you know people that you have an

00:30:51.600 opportunity to capitalize on this you know let's win the war sentiment but instead he uh decides

00:30:57.180 he doesn't want to do that and you know he ends up dropping out of the presidential race partly

00:31:02.120 because of vietnam uh partly for other reasons so reading between the lines of everything you're

00:31:07.180 saying my sense and correct me if i'm wrong is your perspective is you either don't fight

00:31:13.780 Or if you do fight, you fight to win. And the reason that the Vietnam War ended up not being a success is Lyndon Johnson, McNamara, they tried to sit on two stools and end up falling in between them. Is that fair assessment?

00:31:28.340 Yes, there's certainly, I think, a lot of truth to that.

00:31:31.340 Now, there is there were other opportunities, too, I think, because one of the central controversies of the war just was it something that could have been won or not.

00:31:40.000 And a lot of historians, especially on the left, will say, no, this was you could never have won it.

00:31:45.780 Again, I think. The Americans could have gone North Vietnam and maybe there were still been some resistance, but it would have been a much more manageable problem or that we could have cut the Ho Chi Minh trail.

00:31:57.700 But you also do have towards the end of the war, the U.S. decides to cut off aid to South

00:32:05.760 Vietnam, which South Vietnam is actually getting better over time.

00:32:08.900 And so that was another missed opportunity.

00:32:11.560 And then the one other huge missed opportunity was this coup in 1963.

00:32:14.680 I think had we not done that and sort of torn the government apart, it never would have

00:32:20.960 gotten to the to the level that it gets to.

00:32:23.160 And why does America cut off aid to South Vietnam?

00:32:25.060 Yeah. Because Congress is getting fed up with the war. It's also happens coincides with Watergate. And so Congress is getting angry at Nixon. Nixon has promised that he'll go help the South Vietnamese.

00:32:40.240 But because of Watergate, his hands are tied and you have, you know, increasingly large anti-war sentiment within Congress who thinks and has a very benign view of Vietnamese communism and unduly harsh, I think, view of of our Vietnamese allies.

00:33:00.320 Is that really fair, Mark? Is it possible also that, you know, because of the draft and because the people who are going to fight and die and be maimed in Vietnam are just normal people who didn't volunteer for this, who didn't want to be professional soldiers, that the sentiment among the American public at this point has already turned? Or is that not true?

00:33:20.240 Oh, the Nixon actually has been very mindful of this. And he actually will end the draft for that reason. And so he does take that issue away. I do think a lot of the hesitation and reluctance is because of this draft issue.

00:33:35.080 In fact, when you look at how the war is written, a lot of the people who dodged the draft end up becoming very harsh critics of the war.

00:33:42.520 But towards the end, you know, it's not a big, you know, the draft is no longer an issue, but it's part of it's just, you know, some people are saying, you know, we're tired of this.

00:33:54.880 We need money for other things.

00:33:57.320 Again, I think a lot of it, too, was naivete.

00:34:00.820 You know, I mean, you have George McGovern is the presidential campaign and presidential candidate for the Democrats in 1972.

00:34:11.540 And he's saying Ho Chi Minh is the George Washington of Asia. 0.97

00:34:15.740 And you have just incredibly, I think, misguided notions that these Vietnamese communists are nice people. 0.98

00:34:22.500 Of course, after the war, they do all sorts of terrible things to to clearly show that's not who they are. 1.00

00:34:27.340 I have a theory that the best summers happen when you have absolutely nothing nagging at the back

00:34:33.040 of your mind. No loose end, no vague sense that you should probably be doing something you're not.

00:34:38.320 Finances are usually somewhere on that list of things quietly nagging. And today's sponsor has

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00:35:37.760 That's 50% off your first year at monarch.com with code trigger. But also as well, we have to

00:35:45.740 say that the draft and the people who were going to war were blue-collar people, blue-collar men

00:35:53.540 from deprived backgrounds, working-class backgrounds, etc. And there were plenty of

00:36:00.000 people in the upper classes and middle classes who dodged the draft. That must have caused a 0.78

00:36:05.000 hell of a lot of resentment. It did cause some. And if you look at the numbers, the lower classes

00:36:13.240 are disproportionately represented.

00:36:15.840 You do have some of the upper income classes

00:36:20.040 are contributing, but actually there's

00:36:22.240 a big regional divide.

00:36:23.600 So from the southern and western United States,

00:36:26.600 you'll have people of all classes signing up.

00:36:28.680 In the northeast or the upper Midwest,

00:36:31.960 that's where you tend to find a lot of the more affluent people

00:36:35.420 are finding ways not to go into the military.

00:36:39.460 And that does, I think, certainly cause a lot of,

00:36:43.800 of friction and distrust and anger which uh you know i think some senses is still with us uh you 0.55

00:36:51.160 know if you look at the the group of americans from the baby boom who did not go to vietnam

00:36:56.840 um most of them ended up on the political left and came to dominate uh the you know media academia

00:37:05.400 play a very important role in our politics because a lot of those people like you said

00:37:09.800 Instead, they got scarred by this war because they see this war, it's a place, Vietnam, most of them have never been.

00:37:18.960 Most of them, if you're going to be honest, probably didn't quite understand what was going on.

00:37:23.320 But then they would see young men being sent away, some of them as young as 17, returning in coffins.

00:37:30.240 And eventually they would probably think to themselves, not only is this deeply unfair, but what are we getting out of it?

00:37:37.580 Why are our boys dying?

00:37:39.800 Yeah. And that's where why it was so problematic that Lyndon Johnson is not out there explaining to people.

00:37:46.180 And, you know, a lot of his own aides are saying, you look what Franklin Roosevelt did in World War Two.

00:37:50.440 He was out there telling people why it's important for our our sons to be going over there and risking their lives.

00:37:59.300 And, you know, that did a lot to help sustain morale because, yeah, I mean, it's an enormous risk.

00:38:06.280 any family takes or any young man to go, you know, put your life at risk.

00:38:10.560 So it should be something that the people understand and understand its importance.

00:38:17.140 Now, when Richard Nixon comes in, he does address this problem and he gives his famous silent majority speech

00:38:23.340 where he does make a real effort to explain the war to the people, which should have been done long ago.

00:38:30.980 But as I said, I do think actually a pretty strong case to be made of why this war was important.

00:38:37.500 But unfortunately, Lyndon Johnson doesn't really make that case.

00:38:40.400 But it's also as well, there were huge figures at the time like Muhammad Ali, who's, you know, no, no, no Viet Cong has ever called me the N word.

00:38:48.220 You know, this huge cultural and sporting figure who refuses to draft on principle.

00:38:52.960 I mean, that's got to have a huge impact, not only on the zeitgeist, but also on the black population as well.

00:39:00.980 Yeah, so the black population is interesting because in the early years of the war, it's not a big issue for the most part.

00:39:09.020 You do have Martin Luther King coming out, but, you know, the American forces in Vietnam are seen as sort of a model of racial integration because you don't have much in the terms of racial friction from 65 to 68.

00:39:22.220 Now, after 68, you increasingly see the influence of the black power movement, and that causes a lot of problems in Vietnam as well as in the U.S., and increasingly you have this notion that this is a white man's war.

00:39:38.480 And you also have some prominent media actresses, Jane Fonda being the most well-known example, who come out basically in support of the enemy. 0.88

00:39:51.320 And so that was also very distressing for the American troops.

00:39:55.620 A lot of them still will never forgive Jane Fonda.

00:39:58.420 I mean, she goes to North Vietnam and poses with the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft weapons.

00:40:03.480 Basically, it looks like she's helping the guys we're trying to shoot at our pilots.

00:40:07.520 So you really have a sense of betrayal that you don't see really in earlier conflicts.

00:40:13.440 And you mentioned that the perception was eventually that this was a white man's war.

00:40:19.800 Is the implication it's a white man's war being fought disproportionately by black people?

00:40:27.060 Well, there will be allegations made like that in around 1967.

00:40:32.260 And at that point, I mean, it's interesting, too, because previously, until the Korean

00:40:36.360 war blacks were generally kept out of the combat units and so um at least the combat use that that

00:40:42.740 were doing doing um you know in the most difficult parts of the fighting and so um through integration

00:40:49.840 you know some senses it was an advance for now they're integrated in these combat units uh but

00:40:56.840 uh and i don't know the exact number something like maybe 15 to 20 percent in those first few

00:41:01.960 years of the casualties were blacks at a time when they were about 12 percent of the population.

00:41:06.460 So they are overrepresented. Now, after that becomes an issue, the U.S. actually changes the

00:41:13.140 policy so that there is not this disparity. And so for the war as a whole, the blacks are right 1.00

00:41:20.960 around there. It's right around 12 percent of the population overall. And they're also 12 percent of

00:41:26.700 the casualties. Because there was a lot of talk and it'd be good to actually delve into this.

00:41:31.660 that there was a real problem with racialization, racism within the armed forces in Vietnam.

00:41:39.040 Yes. And now the having spent a great deal of time looking at that, I think just about anyone,

00:41:45.220 any veteran will tell you that this problem was not that big of a deal once you were in the field

00:41:51.180 because your life depended on cooperation. And so the real friction all took place in the rear areas.

00:41:58.720 you have people with too much time to do

00:42:01.620 maybe 10% of

00:42:03.940 American forces are actually out

00:42:06.040 the rest of them are only support units

00:42:07.980 and so that's where

00:42:08.800 problems are really bad but you also see

00:42:11.960 this happening all over the world

00:42:14.000 where the US has military bases, Germany

00:42:15.860 Korea etc you have

00:42:17.800 this

00:42:19.480 strong racial antagonism

00:42:21.860 that is really corrosive

00:42:23.980 starting around 1969

00:42:25.940 and when you say

00:42:27.900 starting around, I would assume that the racial antagonism is simply the legacy of the history of

00:42:34.260 slavery and Jim Crow and all the rest of it in this country. Is that what's driving this or is

00:42:39.620 there a new dimension? You mentioned the black power movement. Yeah, I do think the black power 0.94

00:42:46.280 movement is sort of starting to change people's attitudes. For one thing, a lot of the blacks who 0.67

00:42:52.540 fight early in the war had volunteered for service you know a lot of them i think believed

00:42:58.300 in sort of the vision of martin luther king that we want sort of a colorblind society and you know

00:43:03.340 of course a lot of people you know decided you know after you have the civil rights act thing

00:43:09.340 there's not progress as rapidly as some people might want so then you start to see i mean it's

00:43:13.660 a little bit like what we saw too with the um george floyd movement more recently where people

00:43:18.620 say, well, the colorblind society isn't doing enough for us, so we need to take a more radical

00:43:26.080 approach and one that is more confrontational towards whites. 0.83

00:43:33.400 Because you had the problems within the army. There was also problems with drug taking,

00:43:38.980 wasn't there? Yes. And that also is more prevalent in the rear areas because, again,

00:43:45.920 and people kind of know that this could get you killed.

00:43:49.700 Now, the combat truth is they may use drugs.

00:43:51.400 They probably won't be doing it when they're out in the field.

00:43:55.300 Probably, too, because their other soldiers would get really angry at them for doing that

00:43:59.220 because you're putting everyone's lives in jeopardy.

00:44:01.120 But, yeah, the drug problem is also getting worse about the same time,

00:44:04.280 and it's very easy to get marijuana, and heroin then also becomes a problem.

00:44:09.520 That, of course, is a much more serious matter,

00:44:12.880 And and so there are real problems. You know, it's not the case, I would say, that the U.S. forces are becoming less effective.

00:44:23.900 I mean, there is one thing that's happening in this period that probably does more than either race or drugs to undermine performance.

00:44:32.140 And that is when the Americans start withdrawing under Nixon, you start to have people saying, you know, I don't want to be the last guy to die in Vietnam.

00:44:40.380 And here Nixon does not probably do a good enough job. Although you also will see this in World War II or in Korea, you also have this, you know, near the end of the war, nobody wants to be like the last guy to die. So you do have morale problems as a result of that in the latter stages.

00:44:57.060 And you also have scandals going on. So that had a very real impact, particularly on Americans' view of their boys. I mean, there was a scandal with rape, mass rape happening. So let's talk about that. What were these scandals that really damaged Americans' viewpoint of their army?

00:45:17.860 Well, the one big war crime was the My Lai Massacre, which took place in 1968.

00:45:23.140 And you had a part of a company of American forces went into a village and killed and or raped over 400 people.

00:45:37.180 And now he actually was stopped when an American pilot saw this was going on and came in and intervened and then told higher headquarters.

00:45:45.040 but it was a horrific war crime and now the this was done by low-level officers but officers at a

00:45:53.540 higher higher level thought that if this word gets out that this is gonna you know be catastrophic

00:46:00.680 PR nightmare so let's try to hide it so they're able to hide it at first but about a year later

00:46:06.260 the story comes out. And so that is hugely controversial. You know, there's Lieutenant

00:46:14.500 Callie, who's the leading perpetrators put on trial, will get convicted. Americans actually

00:46:20.580 have divided on this. I mean, some people think that Callie was just being made a scapegoat.

00:46:26.240 Other people thought, you know, Callie fully deserves this. He was doing this. Now there's

00:46:31.600 then speculation. Maybe there's this was happening all the time. I think clearly we know

00:46:35.700 So it wasn't this was an aberration, but it does become sort of a rallying call for anti-war movement and others who are saying, look, we're committing war crimes. 0.61

00:46:45.780 I would add to, you know, Americans have committed war crimes.

00:46:48.940 I mean, most wars have some crimes and oftentimes they don't get as much publicity.

00:46:52.840 But this one, you know, they have pictures that are circulated.

00:46:55.580 And so it is very harmful for the American cause.

00:47:00.220 And then you have the Pentagon Papers where Daniel Ellsberg releases this study that had been put together actually under the Johnson administration.

00:47:09.820 Now, it doesn't come out till Nixon's president, but it does reveal some of the deceit and mistakes that were committed by people like McNamara and Johnson and all the disastrous errors that came from that.

00:47:26.280 So that will certainly provoke a lot of controversy.

00:47:28.980 You know, Nixon himself is not covered in the Pentagon Papers. And at first he's kind of thinks, I'll just let this go. But then Henry Kissinger, who is his leading, his national security advisor, tells him that we have to figure out who did this and punish them ruthlessly and that there's actually probably a conspiracy involved.

00:47:50.340 Can I just pause you there, Mark? Because we skipped over. We didn't skip over, but we kind of didn't really delve into what the Pentagon Papers actually said. What were the accusations? What were the mistakes made? What were the crimes that were committed? And then we can come back to this bit, which is Kissinger and saying we need to punish our enemies and the people who did this.

00:48:13.280 Yeah. So the Pentagon Papers expose the American role in the coup of 1963.

00:48:19.720 And at the time, up until this time, it wasn't clear what role the Americans had actually played.

00:48:24.640 But now these make clear that, in fact, the U.S. embassy is supporting this coup.

00:48:29.160 The CIA is involved. And so that that was quite disconcerting for a lot of people, both the right and the left, who are wondering why and why are we actually overthrowing this allied government of ours?

00:48:41.780 You have information about the Tonkin Gulf suggesting that maybe it was not quite what we were told, that in fact there was some provocation involved.

00:48:52.620 You have documents indicating that they're actually planning to go to war when Lyndon Johnson is saying that he's the peace candidate.

00:49:02.340 And you have talk of the war strategy.

00:49:05.720 And one thing we haven't talked about yet is Robert McNamara had what he called the strategy of gradual escalation.

00:49:12.060 And his skin goes back to these game theories that he's pulled from academia.

00:49:16.760 But he argues that when we start bombing North Vietnam in early 1965, we should start off at a low level and build up gradually.

00:49:25.800 And that's part of our plan to communicate our intent and also to limit our risk.

00:49:30.520 Now, the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the same time, this also comes up in the pending papers.

00:49:34.120 The Joint Chiefs of Staff is saying, that's crazy.

00:49:35.720 hit him hard right away. And so, and clearly the strategy of gradual escalation doesn't work. And

00:49:41.960 in fact, what happens is it gives the North Vietnamese time to build up their anti-aircraft

00:49:46.940 defenses. So you have a lot of strategic incompetence being exposed here in the Pentagon

00:49:53.140 papers. Right. I'm going to level with you. I'm not a gamer, even though I look like one. I'm not

00:49:58.980 going to pretend I've been grinding through RPGs between recordings, although I have strong

00:50:03.380 opinions about which Final Fantasy was the best one. I think it's Japanese and I think there's a

00:50:08.240 sword. That's genuinely everything I know. But our social media guys showed me this app and I

00:50:13.180 genuinely thought that's quite clever. It's called Snacksy. Basically, game publishers need new

00:50:18.280 players and they're willing to pay to get them. Snacksy just passes that money onto you. You play

00:50:23.800 games you were probably going to play anyway. You earn coins and you cash them out for real rewards.

00:50:29.260 PayPal, Amazon, Netflix, gift cards. If you prefer gaming credit, you can redeem for PlayStation,

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00:50:45.260 swipe through the game offers, pick something that looks decent, play it, earn, redeem. That's

00:50:50.700 the whole thing. There's a sign up bonus worth up to $10 if you use our link, which is in the

00:50:56.140 description of this episode that's s n a k z y snacksy click the link in the description to get

00:51:04.620 started and when you sign up use the code trigger pod that's t-r-i-g-g-e-r-p-o-d to claim your ten

00:51:15.120 dollar bonus and the app is mobile only so click the link from your phone not your laptop and uh

00:51:23.040 Mark, this takes us into the realm of Hollywood, which actually is a big part of this, but

00:51:27.400 probably after the war.

00:51:28.740 Well, one of the things that's been depicted in a number of movies, one of them, I think

00:51:32.680 American Gangster with Denzel Washington, is the idea that actually the Vietnam War

00:51:39.440 becomes a big drug trafficking operation, and a lot of drugs are coming to the United

00:51:45.620 States through that.

00:51:47.300 A lot of the army is involved.

00:51:48.620 The CIA is involved.

00:51:49.700 How much truth is there to that?

00:51:51.320 I think a lot of it's been exaggerated. Probably some truth to it. I mean, a lot of the drugs taking place are just taking place within that theater. They're not going back and forth necessarily with the United States.

00:52:06.620 I mean, it does get a little murky when the U.S. is supporting various groups in Laos and Cambodia that are also involved in the drug trade.

00:52:18.700 And so it sometimes looks like the U.S. is supporting them.

00:52:23.040 A lot of that's the CIA side of it still.

00:52:26.140 Actually, we don't know that much about it.

00:52:27.560 They they don't release records on those things.

00:52:30.220 But, yeah, I don't think it's probably as serious as people might imagine.

00:52:38.120 Hollywood's dramatizing things.

00:52:39.540 It is, yes.

00:52:41.040 Yes, yeah, there's a lot of Hollywood.

00:52:43.020 Hollywood hasn't done a very good job on Vietnam.

00:52:46.380 Well, we'll talk about that.

00:52:47.580 But before we get there, take us through to the end of the war.

00:52:51.460 We've got to this point where the morale is dipping.

00:52:55.360 The soldiers on the ground are starting to realize we can't actually win

00:52:59.020 because the politicians won't let us.

00:53:00.920 Eventually, the rot sets in.

00:53:03.120 The American media is on it.

00:53:04.800 You've got these racial tensions.

00:53:07.080 Morale is dropping further.

00:53:08.320 As you said, no one wants to be the last guy to die in Vietnam.

00:53:11.380 What happens then, and how do we get through to the American withdrawal? 0.84

00:53:14.620 And just before, probably we'll do with the Kissinger, 0.62

00:53:17.860 actually go and punish the enemies, then get to that point.

00:53:20.500 Okay.

00:53:21.280 Yeah, so after the Ellsberg disclosures were made,

00:53:26.580 so Ellsberg turned himself in,

00:53:27.660 But Henry Kissinger and others tell Nixon that there may be a broader conspiracy here.

00:53:32.660 It might involve some State Department people, some think tanks.

00:53:36.600 And so Nixon decides to set up a group that will become known as the Plumbers to go find out and dig dirt on these people.

00:53:44.680 And so one of the people they target initially is a psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg.

00:53:49.660 and they go and raid his apartment without really proper legal clearance.

00:53:59.260 They end up not finding anything, but this will become important

00:54:01.840 because it basically sets the stage for the actual Watergate break-in,

00:54:05.900 which is what's going to take Nixon down ultimately.

00:54:10.520 And so Nixon, so he gives a silent majority speech in November of 69,

00:54:17.580 In 1970, there's a coup in Cambodia, throws out the pro-communist leader, and the U.S. then decides to go into Cambodia to help the Cambodian government, which is useful in reducing sanctuary.

00:54:33.940 And one of the things we find out is that the Cambodian port of Sihanoukville was a massive hub for North Vietnamese supplies coming in. 0.81

00:54:42.200 So we're able to shut that down. 0.57

00:54:43.460 So that means the only place really they're getting supplies is Laos.

00:54:46.160 So the next year, 71, Nixon supports a South Vietnamese effort.

00:54:52.340 It's all South Vietnamese forces to go in and they have a big fight.

00:54:56.340 It's not as successful as they want, but it has short term benefit, buys time.

00:55:01.860 In 1972, the North Vietnamese decide they're going to launch a huge offensive.

00:55:07.300 This is 14 divisions. This is clearly far beyond any sort of guerrilla war.

00:55:12.420 And it's almost all North Vietnamese coming into the South. 0.66

00:55:15.040 At this point, American ground troops are gone, but U.S. air power is there and inflicts a crushing defeat on the North Vietnamese. 0.89

00:55:23.880 And so this is one of the indicators that the South Vietnamese are getting their act together,

00:55:28.580 that they can fight off 14 divisions without American ground troops.

00:55:33.040 Now, then what happens is you have a peace agreement in late 72 that is really, I think, mismanaged by Kissinger.

00:55:41.320 What Kissinger ends up doing is cutting a deal that allows the North Vietnamese troops to stay in South Vietnam.

00:55:48.800 And South Vietnamese go crazy when they hear this.

00:55:51.900 And Nixon was actually doing this without telling the South Vietnamese.

00:55:54.900 And so there's a huge conflict between the Americans and the South Vietnamese.

00:56:00.720 And then the North Vietnamese are also trying to do that.

00:56:04.080 He, I think, partly didn't realize how bad of an idea it was.

00:56:10.580 really yes he uh you know he also um so nixon for a while he's been trying to sort of cement his

00:56:20.740 legacy as you know a great diplomat and so and it's in if you look at other diplomatic um endeavors

00:56:29.100 it's actually not all that similar some people get so obsessed with the deal that they just start

00:56:33.560 giving things away just so they can say they struck the deal. And so what ultimately happens

00:56:42.440 is, so the South Vietnamese complain, then Kissinger goes back to the North Vietnamese and

00:56:48.020 says, well, we kind of need to change what we agreed to because maybe that wasn't such a great

00:56:52.180 idea. And for the North Vietnamese say, well, we're not, you already agreed to this other stuff. So 0.87

00:56:55.720 then Nixon bombs them in what's called the Christmas bombing, very heavy bombing in December

00:57:00.960 of 72. And Nixon easily thinks, you know, we're going to, you know, clobber North Vietnam. They're

00:57:07.400 going to be hurt for so long. And, you know, they won't be able to do anything, at least not for a

00:57:13.260 while. And we're going to, you know, declare this peace agreement. And he promises the South

00:57:18.680 Vietnamese that he will protect them if the North Vietnamese, in fact, do launch another big 0.88

00:57:24.280 offensive. Now, whether he was going to actually live up to that, we don't know, because he's gone

00:57:29.680 by, uh, 74. Um, the South Vietnamese, you know, basically the peace never really happens. South 0.56

00:57:35.740 Vietnamese are fighting North Vietnamese and it's going pretty well until about the middle of 74

00:57:40.840 when the American, uh, the, the aid cuts by the Congress are, are taking effect. So now South 0.70

00:57:49.600 Vietnamese don't have enough fuel for their aircraft and to defend somebody like South 1.00

00:57:54.120 vietnam you need aircraft um you know they don't have enough uh ammunition and this gradually gets

00:57:59.860 worse and worse and so the north vietnamese see this and launch an offensive in early 75 and they

00:58:06.040 kind of wait to see too are the americans going to come do anything by this time nixon's gone the

00:58:10.380 americans don't do anything and so the north vietnamese then are able to you know with 600

00:58:15.460 000 troops uh defeat this depleted south vietnamese force when you tell the story and you outline it

00:58:23.920 like this, it does sound more and more, and something that I didn't appreciate through

00:58:29.600 watching the movies, and we'll come on to that, it just sounds like political and strategic

00:58:35.260 incompetence. But what you said about Kissinger, I mean, to me, that just blows my mind. I mean,

00:58:40.960 this was obviously a fantastically intelligent man. I'm not the brightest, but even I can work

00:58:46.480 out leaving the enemy in the cities isn't a good idea. Yeah, that's right. And he will catch a lot

00:58:51.640 of heat um yeah you said he was a brilliant man oh that's you know mcnamara also again brilliant

00:58:57.140 guy but yet they commit some terrible strategic blunders which uh you know again i think

00:59:03.660 this was not a foregone conclusion that it was going to end the way it did you had both of those

00:59:09.780 guys making you know very terrible decisions now you also had mcnamara and nixon who you know

00:59:14.860 listened to these guys and i think that's part of the problem is they thought well these guys are

00:59:18.580 so smart they must know what they're talking about um now we do know in the case of McNamara

00:59:22.800 Johnson actually near the end of his presidency concludes that McNamara doesn't know what he's

00:59:28.360 talking about because McNamara wants to in late 67 he wants to cut the bombing because he says

00:59:33.460 bombing is really not doing anything but there's so much information that says it's in fact doing

00:59:37.840 things that um you know McNamara has become deluded and uh yeah Nixon also or excuse me

00:59:44.440 Kissinger commits some huge and costly mistakes.

00:59:50.780 I mean, another thing he does is he comes up with this whole agreement 0.60

00:59:53.560 with the North Vietnamese before he even shows it to the South Vietnamese.

00:59:57.240 And then keeping the North Vietnamese troops there 0.64

01:00:00.960 is not the only huge problem they have in there.

01:00:04.940 And Kissinger didn't even appreciate that some of just the language

01:00:08.920 that's in the document, you know, the Vietnamese are very attuned to language.

01:00:12.340 And he had signed off on these terms that he had no idea that the Vietnamese were going to attach some importance.

01:00:19.820 For example, how do you describe the demilitarized zone between North and South?

01:00:23.920 The U.S. didn't think it was a big deal, but the semantics of this were huge to both Vietnamese.

01:00:28.760 And so he just tied the U.S. to this deal that had all these problems without even getting the concurrence of our allies.

01:00:39.080 and it just, yes, it just did not go at all well.

01:00:43.240 So the war was for because of the domino theory,

01:00:46.280 the idea that if you let Vietnam get overrun by communists,

01:00:50.700 communism will spread in Asia. 0.79

01:00:53.060 Well, Vietnam does get overrun by communists. 0.97

01:00:55.940 Was domino theory correct? 0.98

01:00:57.900 Yes, great question.

01:00:59.220 So I think it's first worthwhile.

01:01:02.040 You know, one of the big problems with the Vietnam War

01:01:03.500 is oftentimes people don't understand the different phases.

01:01:09.400 I mean, it goes from 60 to 75, and a lot of times people think the world's kind of static,

01:01:13.760 but in fact, the world's vastly different in 65 when the U.S. goes in 0.61

01:01:17.940 than when South Vietnam's overrun 75.

01:01:21.540 What you see in 65 is that, in fact, there are lots of countries under threat from communism.

01:01:28.820 The most important one, which doesn't often get its due attention, is Indonesia.

01:01:33.500 At this time, there's a civil war brewing between Sukarno, who is a communist, essentially, and his military.

01:01:42.180 And that will actually come to a head in September of 65.

01:01:47.420 And the military will end up overthrowing Sukarno.

01:01:50.480 But they will actually say later that the reason they took the stand was because they realized the Americans were not bailing out.

01:01:58.120 Had we given up on South Vietnam, I mean, no country in Asia is going to want to be your ally if they see you send 50,000 troops to a country and then leave when the going gets rough.

01:02:09.340 So it was actually, I think, very important in the case of Indonesia, also Thailand, Singapore, Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew.

01:02:17.040 It's very explicitly come out and said that Vietnam bought time for Southeast Asia to solidify and build up its strength against communism.

01:02:25.780 And another thing that happens is American intervention will drive North Vietnam and China apart for a few reasons. 0.58

01:02:37.220 One, as I mentioned, there's now all the Soviet aides coming in.

01:02:41.740 American intervention also, I think, plays a role in the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966,

01:02:46.760 which Mao had thought he had this big period of expansion in Vietnam and Indonesia.

01:02:54.440 Both those get crushed, and he now turns inward for enemies, and he loses interest in international affairs.

01:03:01.680 And so by the time you get to 75, Chinese and North Vietnamese have turned against each other,

01:03:07.320 and in fact they'll fight a war in 1979.

01:03:10.200 So most of the dominoes don't fall, but Cambodia and Laos fall, so those are significant. 0.65

01:03:16.180 And it's also worth noting, this leads then to the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, who killed some two million people in this genocidal conflict, which, again, I think is worth keeping in mind that this is a fanatical ideology. 0.92

01:03:32.900 Vietnamese also kill a lot of their own people. Most of it goes under the radar. 0.93

01:03:37.940 But, you know, I think ultimately the U.S., while it ultimately loses South Vietnam, it holds on to a lot of other Asian countries, which today are actually the main U.S. allies in this ongoing competition with China.

01:03:53.100 And again, reading between the lines of what you're saying, it sounds to me like your view, and of course there'll be historians who disagree on this, but your view, I guess, is it was the right war to fight.

01:04:03.420 It was just fought in the wrong way.

01:04:04.960 Is that fair?

01:04:05.680 That's correct, yes.

01:04:06.660 And that is, yeah, and those are, I mean, really the central issues of the war and, you know, unfortunately, so politicized in this country that to make that argument is sort of radioactive in American academia.

01:04:23.860 It's called, the show is called Trigonometry for a reason.

01:04:26.860 By the way, I honestly didn't know that was going to be your perspective.

01:04:30.480 You know, you were just, you were recommended to us by a friend and really interested in your thoughts on it.

01:04:36.200 So it's an interesting perspective. It's one I have heard from other people. And as you say, it is very toxic. And I imagine that is partly because, well, look, it might not be true. There will be people who say it's not true. But also, I think, because of just how powerful the Hollywood narrative that was created after the war was. And I'm not saying that narrative is false. I'm not qualified to assess whether it's true or false.

01:05:02.200 What I'm saying is even as someone who's not American, who wasn't brought up in America, if I had to tell you what the story of the Vietnam War was, it would be, you know, Platoon.

01:05:14.860 It would be, what's the one with Tom Cruise?

01:05:16.840 Born on the 4th of July.

01:05:17.640 Right.

01:05:17.980 Yes.

01:05:18.300 Like those are not positive war movies.

01:05:20.760 You're not looking at that going, we're the good guys here and this was the right war to fight.

01:05:24.680 Yes.

01:05:25.140 And I mean, the country very much split along political lines.

01:05:28.140 You know, Ronald Reagan, you know, described this as a noble cause.

01:05:32.200 But most of the left has taken the view that it was unnecessary, unwinnable.

01:05:38.200 And, you know, part of a big part, in my view, of why the left pushed that so hard is that what's interesting, look what's going on in college campuses in the middle of 60s.

01:05:49.280 When the U.S. goes into Vietnam, there's actually very little protest.

01:05:53.100 You know, again, this is one of those areas where it's worth keeping in mind the chronology.

01:05:56.760 um the protests don't start till 1967 and it coincides exactly with the reduction of draft

01:06:04.780 deferments for students for college students and so suddenly um and i'm not the first person today

01:06:11.340 but i think it's true that a lot of this opposition is driven by the fact that when you tell some

01:06:17.440 you know students these college students didn't care that much about the war until they said well

01:06:21.860 we're going to send you there and now some of them don't want to go and if you look at you know

01:06:26.500 nation's history it's almost always the case that the manly thing the you know civic thing to do is

01:06:33.780 to go when your country calls you so if you're going to not go and not answer the country's call

01:06:39.300 you have to come up with a reason and so the reason is this was a terrible war and we never

01:06:44.500 should have fought it uh again i think much of this is for self-serving reasons and if you actually

01:06:48.900 look into the facts of the war uh they don't bear those things out a little bit of bush back to that

01:06:54.020 So I have American friends and I know some people who've actually, Vietnam veterans, one whose father committed suicide, came back completely damaged because of what he saw.

01:07:06.840 Young man ended up killing himself before the age of 30.

01:07:09.920 Another one had addiction issues.

01:07:12.500 I think as well, we need to acknowledge, Mark, that there was a very real psychological scar that was imprinted amongst a generation of young men, particularly blue collar working class young men.

01:07:24.700 Well, I think there's certainly cases of that. Now, it is interesting.

01:07:29.460 The polls that have been done, Vietnam veterans, there was a survey done a few years after the war.

01:07:34.560 About 90 percent of them said they were actually proud of their service.

01:07:37.800 Now, most of those people also said the problem was that we tied our hands behind our back.

01:07:43.840 So, again, they didn't have gripes, but it was about how it was fought.

01:07:49.080 Now, the question of psychological damage is an interesting one, too,

01:07:53.960 because you have the rise of certain psychiatrists who are arguing that there is some unique mental illness,

01:08:04.460 and we're going to call PTSD, that's coming out of Vietnam.

01:08:07.800 I think that's mostly been debunked in just in that if you look at any war, there are people with these same problems coming back.

01:08:16.580 Probably a little bit worse, given that when people came home, they weren't greeted as heroes.

01:08:20.780 I would say that. But, you know, any war, I mean, if you talk with veterans of World War Two or Korea or, you know, Afghanistan,

01:08:30.300 I mean, there's a lot of veterans come back from Afghanistan, Iraq, who have committed suicide as well, tragically.

01:08:37.800 But, yeah, I think it's worth keeping in mind that, you know, in many senses, it's really not any worse of a war than most of the wars we've fought.

01:08:50.460 Because, you know, all the wars we've fought have been pretty awful.

01:08:53.140 But again, when you compare the Hollywood, you know, the Hollywood version of World War II movies don't look quite like Platoon or, you know, Apocalypse Now.

01:09:02.260 Look, I'll be honest with you. I was skeptical.

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01:10:25.760 of this episode. Give it a go. And do you think the Vietnam War has made a profound impact on how

01:10:33.040 America sees wars moving forward? I do. And I think, you know, the left and the right took

01:10:39.880 different lessons. I mean, the left lesson was basically we want to stay out of wars and left

01:10:45.880 pretty much stuck with that, you know, for decades. And, you know, every time a war came,

01:10:50.140 they said, this is another Vietnam. It's been interesting with Ukraine. Suddenly they've

01:10:54.100 now become the party of war, which they were actually for, they got us into several wars in

01:11:00.620 the 20th century. You know, the political right, you know, came out with the message that if you're

01:11:05.720 going to fight, you fight to win. And so we saw in the first Gulf War, the Bush administration

01:11:11.840 was very intent on saying, you know, we're going to use maximum force and work there. Now, then you

01:11:18.500 get to Afghanistan, Iraq. You know, in both of those cases, I think the U.S. didn't really know

01:11:23.880 what was coming we weren't expecting a war we thought we are a protracted war and um so and

01:11:32.660 neither of those went quite as as expected yeah you can say that yes so i think that's what's um

01:11:39.660 you know i was going to ask you about that because do you think the the vietnam war and the portrayal

01:11:46.580 of it rightly or wrongly in the media in hollywood among you know a lot of people in the country as

01:11:52.980 well it's the template onto which the failure of afghanistan and the failure of iraq fit very

01:11:58.980 nicely because you know i hinted at this when we right at the beginning of our conversation

01:12:03.920 i i kind of it's strange for us because we're not immersed in american culture nearly as much

01:12:10.240 when we look at conflicts that are happening now ukraine israel uh and you know the left and right

01:12:16.800 split in different ways on those issues both within and against each other etc but you hear

01:12:22.200 a lot of people say this thing like i'm not dying for ukraine or we're not sending american boys

01:12:27.460 which is kind of like weird in the current context because that really isn't remotely what's

01:12:33.240 happening in either of those conflicts nor is it the direction of travel nor does the united

01:12:38.720 states have a draft so even if america did put boots on the ground which it has no intention

01:12:44.360 of doing they would be people who volunteered for that but the the cultural dominance of this thing

01:12:51.300 of like, we're not going to, we're not dying for a foreign country. Does that come from Vietnam?

01:12:58.060 I think on the left, but it's been interesting on the right, you know, that was not, as I said,

01:13:03.880 that was not the main message that the right took. The right took away the message that you fight to

01:13:09.380 win. It's not that you just don't fight. Whereas I think in recent times, mainly I think because

01:13:16.420 of Iraq and Afghanistan, you increasingly hear people on the right who are questioning whether

01:13:21.180 we should get involved in these interventions.

01:13:25.120 But again, I think the right now is thinking more in terms of, you know, Iraq, Afghanistan,

01:13:30.120 how those things were costly.

01:13:33.760 And, you know, at a time when we've got rampant inflation, people here, you know, conscious

01:13:40.160 of how much we spend abroad.

01:13:43.040 And so, yeah, there is a lot of reluctance.

01:13:46.680 And I think there is, and within the Republican Party, you know, of which I'm part, there's

01:13:51.160 There's been this big split between the neoconservatives and the neo-isolationists.

01:13:57.300 The neocons kind of get blamed for Iraq and Afghanistan, and they were kind of the principal

01:14:02.320 architects.

01:14:03.340 And so now you've had this other element that's very hostile to them.

01:14:09.400 There's also, I think, in between those, a large group, which I would say maybe sort

01:14:13.020 of the Reagan conservatives who are sort of not either super eager to get in every

01:14:20.020 war, but also, you know, not necessarily opposed to war and willing to fight when American

01:14:25.180 interests are at stake. 0.88

01:14:26.140 Well, again, as an outsider, that does seem like the smart position because those two

01:14:34.260 other extremes, you know, the neocon wars of the 2000s don't seem to me to have been

01:14:39.580 beneficial to anybody, especially America, say nothing of the people that were killed,

01:14:45.340 et cetera.

01:14:46.580 And the neo-isolationist position or the isolationist position

01:14:49.640 seems to me a little bit naive.

01:14:51.780 We had a big debate about this with a guy called Dave Smith,

01:14:54.900 who is very popular, representing that point of view.

01:14:57.820 Because if you are going to be the most powerful country in the world,

01:15:01.680 you are going to have to control territory beyond your own borders.

01:15:05.960 And sometimes that means getting physical.

01:15:10.880 So to go so far in other extremes seems kind of incompatible

01:15:15.120 with america being the most powerful country in the world yeah i think that's right and i do think

01:15:20.560 there is some naivety and what you know and i have debates with people you know i'm kind of

01:15:25.600 consider myself in the middle on this but um there are some who would say well yes having a military

01:15:32.480 is important for deterrence purposes what we should do is just have a big military but then

01:15:38.240 we never use it but i don't think you can really have deterrent power if you take that position

01:15:44.960 because people are going to call your bluff or if you're out there, you know, advertising this.

01:15:49.760 So, you know, sometimes, as you said, if it's the world's greatest power,

01:15:52.720 sometimes you are actually going to have to do something or you're not going to be the world's greatest power,

01:15:57.120 especially we have this rising China.

01:16:00.560 I do think we also see today what we saw before is that American politicians have not done a good job

01:16:06.340 explaining to the american people why ukraine or israel or whatever other causes why this is

01:16:15.220 actually so important to us um and you know i spend a lot of time teaching college students

01:16:19.380 and that's one thing they say they don't really understand you know why are we spending all this

01:16:23.860 money here but it hasn't really been explained to us and how do you explain it to your students um

01:16:28.820 Well, you know, I take I think both of them are tricky issues. They're not as compelling as the case you have for Vietnam. I mean, I think in the case of Ukraine, we're obviously still have great interests in Europe.

01:16:46.500 You know, it's not a, you know, if Eastern Europe gets unsettled, we have, you know, problems of migration, which, of course, that's a big issue here.

01:16:59.480 Potentially, you know, Russia could keep pushing Western, you know, I'm not convinced that Russia is going to ever go attack Poland.

01:17:07.000 But, you know, there is also the sort of human element that you have, you know, mass killings of civilians. 0.57

01:17:13.340 And at some point, you know, as the world's greatest power, that's something we may not want to be willing to tolerate.

01:17:19.960 I'm not hearing much strategic interest for the United States in that explanation, though.

01:17:23.720 Right. Well, that's the thing, too, is I think it's harder to make the case for strategic interest,

01:17:29.780 which is perhaps part of why, you know, you don't hear a lot of people in Washington make that case.

01:17:35.180 I mean, the other reality you have is, you know, we now have a situation where Russia seems to be just using attrition and they've sort of calculating on their larger population that they're eventually going to grind Ukraine down, which I think would just, you know, be terrible for all concerned.

01:17:51.560 And so, you know, my own view is ultimately need to find some kind of solution to stop this, which probably means, you know, the Ukrainians may have to give some things up, which is not great either. 0.54

01:18:02.280 I mean, you don't want to set the precedent for countries taking territory and then keeping it. 0.83

01:18:07.420 But it's really, to me, just a nasty problem without a lot of very good solutions at this point.

01:18:15.660 And, you know, I think, you know, the Biden administration, I remember a couple of years ago, they were they thought that the Ukrainians were going to, you know, prevail militarily.

01:18:28.100 And, you know, the Russians did very poorly at the beginning.

01:18:31.100 And so I think they thought that was going to continue while it's not.

01:18:34.480 And so I think they miscalculated in.

01:18:37.720 Well, the weird position of the Biden administration was is like Ukraine is going to win, but we're not going to give them the weapons to do it.

01:18:44.540 So it's like, well, they could have won, maybe.

01:18:48.320 Look, it depends.

01:18:49.620 The Ukrainian flag is not going to be flying over the Kremlin anytime soon,

01:18:53.000 but they could have pushed Russia back to the 1991 borders.

01:18:56.280 Now, unlikely, but if you've given them proper support,

01:18:59.080 they might have done that.

01:19:00.420 But it was all pom-poms and no actual support.

01:19:05.480 It wasn't zero, but it wasn't the support that they needed.

01:19:08.840 So this is kind of how I certainly think, and I'm from Russia

01:19:12.480 and I have a lot of Ukrainian family,

01:19:13.860 how we've ended up where we are.

01:19:15.920 What about Israel and the war against Hamas?

01:19:19.560 How do you talk to your students about that? 1.00

01:19:22.180 That's an interesting one, too, because they are...

01:19:25.300 Historically, the Republican Party has been pretty strongly pro-Israel.

01:19:28.980 It's much more divided now.

01:19:31.620 And I think partly because...

01:19:34.540 Well, certainly, we have some very influential figures on the right

01:19:37.760 who are kind of questioning us from the national interest perspective.

01:19:40.880 um you know exactly does america have a national interest in being allied with israel

01:19:47.520 with being allied with israel uh yes i think the harder point the people what people struggle with

01:19:53.360 more is you know do we have a national interest sort of um supporting what's going on in gaza i

01:19:58.080 mean um the uh but i mean i think even on the question in terms of um is in our national

01:20:05.760 interest i think that one's you know something's been debated too i mean you probably saw the

01:20:10.080 There was a big flap with the president of the Heritage Foundation a week or so ago.

01:20:15.960 So clearly, there's a lot of conflict around this.

01:20:19.820 I think...

01:20:20.860 By the time this episode goes out, everyone will have forgotten about Kevin Roberts, who

01:20:24.980 we've had on the show, by the way.

01:20:26.480 But what I'm asking is, what is the strategic interest for the United States in being allied

01:20:31.720 with Israel? 0.81

01:20:32.320 Forget about Gaza.

01:20:33.780 That's where the conversation on the right in America really is.

01:20:36.660 And by the way, on the left too, I think.

01:20:39.140 Why is America allied with Israel?

01:20:41.860 Well, a lot of it, I think, you know, has to do with history. 0.77

01:20:45.260 I mean, we have, there's a sense in this country still, although, again, this is sort of fading,

01:20:50.760 that in the aftermath of World War II, after all that was inflicted on the Jewish people,

01:20:58.780 that they deserve to have a homeland and a place, you know, where they could live in safety.

01:21:04.620 You know, we've always also had this competing view.

01:21:06.400 Well, we also want to be friends with the Arab countries and the Islamic countries around them.

01:21:13.420 You know, I think this was an easier case to make when the U.S. was more concerned about the Middle East.

01:21:18.400 We had these fears of terrorism, that, you know, Israel's an ally in terms of dealing with the terrorist threat.

01:21:24.540 But I think that's partly why it's harder to get support now, because, you know, most Americans, I don't think, now think about terrorism in the same way.

01:21:35.200 You know, I think also there is, you know, in terms of we consider Iran to be one of our top enemies, which makes sense. 0.61

01:21:44.840 Clearly, Israel is critical in terms of keeping those guys in check. 0.75

01:21:50.360 Mark, doesn't it also represent what we're talking about, the scars of Vietnam and that there's a lot of people in this country who simply don't trust government because they go, you've lied to me repeatedly.

01:22:01.980 you lied to me over Vietnam and it's just gone right the way weapons of mass destruction why

01:22:08.320 should I believe you why should I believe a single word you say about Israel Ukraine or anything else 0.77

01:22:13.540 yeah I think that's a valid point I mean certainly you hear a lot of that coming out and not just 0.88

01:22:19.300 Vietnam but also you know Watergate reinforces this and I said the Pentagon papers are part of

01:22:24.240 this because clearly people are being lied to now I do think uh it's exaggerating some people say

01:22:29.960 well, up until Vietnam, America trusts its leaders. Well, if you actually go back and look

01:22:34.720 at your history, Americans have always had a certain suspicion of our leaders, you know,

01:22:38.740 going back to, you know, George III. So I don't think it's quite the case that we just,

01:22:44.240 you know, never thought that our leaders would lie. I mean, if you look in the early Republic,

01:22:49.100 too, they're flinging all sorts of mud and saying how the other sides are all a bunch of scoundrels. 0.88

01:22:54.380 So I think it goes in cycles, too. I mean, yes, in the 90s, and that's partly what, you know, when you get to the first Gulf War, there is, you know, a lot of people think, OK, well, yes, there are weapons of mass destruction and they seem to know what they're doing.

01:23:09.560 again obviously that turned out to be huge and so now we're back in one of those periods of deep

01:23:15.320 distrust um and yeah i'm not sure what gets you out i mean i think it could be a president who

01:23:23.240 you know i think that's one of ronald reagan's big accomplishments is that he was the kind of

01:23:27.400 person who could help restore a certain degree of trust in the government um and i don't think

01:23:33.240 we've really had a figure since then in this country who's been able to do that the thing is

01:23:39.320 Because the media environment is now so, so different.

01:23:42.760 Social media, podcasting, the plurality of voices as such.

01:23:49.080 And also, as I said, this episode will go out some time ago, but we just had a story

01:23:53.820 in the UK.

01:23:54.820 And who knows if the BBC still exists by the time this conversation is aired.

01:23:58.640 Because we now know that large swathes of the media, and I say this as no fanboy of

01:24:05.600 President Trump.

01:24:06.600 know i think he's great on some things and not so great on other things but they lied so much

01:24:12.220 about him they literally did election interference while accusing him of election interference

01:24:18.840 that it's just hard for people i think to trust the media they don't already agree with

01:24:24.320 you know yes i think uh and certainly there's been great distrust in this country and actually

01:24:31.800 Vietnam really saw, I think it's probably the first time you had very deep distrust of the media

01:24:38.640 among some parts, because it clearly became evident that the media was increasingly monolithic

01:24:47.460 ideology and clearly left of center. And so conservatives, you know, complained for a long,

01:24:52.620 for a long time, there really actually wasn't much recourse. And when you have Fox News and

01:24:57.200 the internet it's actually changed things a lot because people have other sources of news to go to

01:25:03.360 and she thinks important but yeah i mean it is unfortunate uh and i think uh we i think in this

01:25:10.820 country gave up a while ago on hoping for something more impartial which i guess the bbc still strives

01:25:15.800 to to be but um you know rlr media here uh pretty much is either left or right um so and i always

01:25:25.180 tell students you want to listen to both to make sure you're getting information. But a lot of

01:25:28.400 people only listen to the side they agree with, which isn't healthy. No, it's not. And, you know,

01:25:33.460 Constance and I always talk about this. And forgive me, because it might be slightly offensive

01:25:38.620 to our American viewers and listeners. But you bloody love a conspiracy theory here.

01:25:43.620 You are the nation of conspiracy theories. Whenever you sit down with somebody,

01:25:47.120 doesn't matter how smart they are, what side of the political spectrum, they all go, you know,

01:25:50.800 really intro like how much of that really is to do with vietnam where expose after expose after

01:25:59.440 expose people lying i mean that is you that government gaslit a nation whilst they're at war

01:26:07.160 that's got to have an effect and then weapons of mass destruction again that has got to make a

01:26:12.900 population more conspiratorial i mean now you do have a good number of conspiracies before vietnam

01:26:20.400 on the political right in terms of, although, you know, what was sometimes seen as communist

01:26:26.880 conspiracies actually have been validated to have been true. But yeah, you certainly see a rise in

01:26:32.780 the distrust of government and a willingness to believe that the government is going to do bad

01:26:38.860 things. And I said, I think it did subside for time. I will tell you, you know, more recently,

01:26:43.800 you know, things that might have been some kind of conspiracy theory, Crossfire Hurricane is an

01:26:48.760 example of you know the government's actually doing some crazy things and you think there's

01:26:52.600 no way the government is actually going to do this um and you know i personally tend not to

01:26:57.840 believe in conspiracy theories but at the same time when you see something like that

01:27:01.960 you say tell us about that a little bit what was that uh well that was surrounding in the 2016

01:27:07.140 campaign um the fbi and this was when obama was still in power they you know used this so-called

01:27:15.020 Steele dossier, which had all these crazy allegations against Trump, which turned out

01:27:19.460 to be false. They use that to open FBI investigations into Trump's associates. And some of this is

01:27:26.860 still being sort of pushed out now by the new government. But you have, you know, the FBI

01:27:33.840 basically being used to try to interfere with the 2016 campaign and senior, very senior FBI

01:27:42.100 officials and some of them you know end up getting fired i mean kevin klein smith this is one i'd

01:27:48.020 like to tell my democratic friends i'll say tell me who kevin clients are the most of them don't

01:27:51.780 even know what he's you know f this fbi official who falsifies um a warrant to spy on the trump

01:27:58.020 campaign and there's you know uh peter mccabe or andrew mccabe excuse me he gets fired by i mean

01:28:03.620 so there's actually quite a few of these very senior fbi officials who are caught up in this

01:28:08.340 and so things like that uh i think have made certainly the right and i think partly what

01:28:14.420 you're seeing on the right is sort of a backlash against this um and a broader sense yes the

01:28:20.580 government is is broken and it needs radical surgery now how you actually fix it is it tends

01:28:27.620 to be a little more difficult than destroying the bad parts because what we also saw and it was

01:28:34.020 people stopped talking about it because of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk. But

01:28:38.980 people kind of forget that before that, the big story was Epstein. And it looked like the

01:28:45.300 Jeffrey Epstein scandal was going to do significant damage to Donald Trump's presidency.

01:28:52.680 And you go, look, well, obviously the Epstein scandal is a big thing, but

01:28:55.620 why this above everything else? And to me, it was the conspiratorial element that was

01:29:02.380 almost making people lose their minds like they couldn't get past that yeah i do think uh and this

01:29:10.480 is one area i think the internet's been uh problematic because theories like this would

01:29:15.420 not have been spread 30 years ago in the way they are but we now have um again partly because you

01:29:21.860 know people just go to where they like to get their information and they tune out things that

01:29:27.480 might contradict that and so yeah i mean certainly it's been incredible how much play that issue the

01:29:33.720 epstein issue has been has been receiving now again a lot of other people aren't paying much

01:29:38.300 attention to it but um of course you also saw with you know the charlie kirk thing you have

01:29:43.320 all these conspiracy theories about who was involved in that uh as well so it is uh an

01:29:50.460 unfortunate element of our politics well it's been great having you on thank you so much for

01:29:55.580 talking to us. Before we head over to our sub stack where our audience get to ask you their

01:30:00.560 questions, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

01:30:05.000 Yeah, I'd say the question of public ethics in this country is something we don't talk enough

01:30:10.720 about. Now, people are getting very spun up about corruption scandals, and rightly so, but...

01:30:19.220 You had some experience yourself with all of this.

01:30:21.060 I did, yes, in the first Trump administration, and I became a whistleblower, essentially,

01:30:25.120 reporting corruption, and then they came after me. And I certainly saw a deficit of ethics in

01:30:31.580 our government. And this is part of a broader cultural problem where historically this country

01:30:37.020 was comfortable talking about ethics in terms of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some of our

01:30:45.760 population still does, but we also have large segments who want to be so secular that we can't

01:30:50.820 talk about any of that stuff and they assume that um through some sort of cosmopolitanism we can

01:30:57.220 still maintain a culture of of ethics but from you know my experience you know ethics isn't something

01:31:03.140 that just you know arises out of thin air this is actually a problem and we see a lot of unethical

01:31:10.980 behavior in our society if we really want our government to cause us less harm we probably need

01:31:17.380 to figure out our cultural, social, religious moorings

01:31:21.880 so that we are actually behaving ourselves better.

01:31:24.940 All right, Mark, thanks so much for joining us.

01:31:26.520 Head on over to triggerpod.co.uk

01:31:28.660 where you get to ask Mark your questions.

01:31:32.320 To what extent did Nixon and Kissinger

01:31:34.420 sabotage the Democrats' peace negotiations

01:31:36.940 ahead of the 68th election?

01:31:38.640 And to what extent does Mark think

01:31:40.200 they should be held as culpable

01:31:41.820 for tens of thousands of potentially unnecessary deaths

01:31:44.580 in the years that followed?

01:31:47.380 We'll be right back.

TRIGGERnometry - May 09, 2026

Everything You Think You Know About Vietnam Is Wrong — Historian Mark Moyar

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