What Trump Needs to Learn From Vietnam
In August 1965, a resolute President Lyndon Johnson said: “America wins the wars that she undertakes. Make no mistake about it.” But the strategy on which he committed America to its ill-fated intervention in Vietnam that year did not aim at winning, but at not losing. McGeorge Bundy, Johnson’s national security adviser, later admitted as much to a biographer, saying that he had personally approved a strategy that used just enough military pressure to achieve a battlefield stalemate, which “would eventually compel the Vietnamese Communists to compromise their objectives,” forcing them to the negotiating table or to a Korea-style armistice.
Bundy added that his strategy rested, in hindsight, on “little more than an unexamined assumption.”… Seguir leyendo »