European views on American involvement in the Vietnam war.

[Malthus]

I offered one. What's wrong with "containment"?

[garbon]

Because simply saying "you can call it imperialism" with nothing else offered up is simply shutting down the conversation.

How so? Or at least how would that differ from the conversation that would be had if there was one term that we agreed upon.  Like let's say we went with Malthus's containment.  What now?

[Razgovory]

You are missing the substance of the criticism against your position. No-one is objecting to criticizing US involvement in Vietnam. What people are objecting to, and rightly, is decribing something that has absolutely nothing to do with creating an empire as "imperialistic".

Its simply a misnomer. "Imperialism" already has a perfectly good meaning, and torturing the language, or as CC seems to want to do, applying ever more attenuated meanings of "imperial" like "economic imperialism", seem like desperately clinging to a term for no good reason. Why is it so important to use that term in the first place?

The answer, as we all know, is that it fits within mid 20th century rhetoric: imperialist = morally suspect.

Well, like I've said numerous times already - propose another term and I'm happy to use it.

Okay.  "Liberation".  It's not really connected to the word "Liberation" as we normally define it, but then neither is "Imperialism", and at least "Liberation" has a positive connotation.  So, will you be using this new term?

[derspiess]

I offered one. What's wrong with "containment"?

Hey, now.  That's a loaded term in favor of the US.  Need to use a more neutral one like "imperialism".

[Jacob]

What you seem to be in denial about is that the terms "imperialism" and "imperialistic" have largely become epitaphs, which makes them problematic when you attempt to use them descriptively--unless you in fact intent to use them as epitaphs.

I don't think they're simply epitaphs, I think there's a whole bunch of substance behind the term. Check out wikipedia, for a primer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism

Beyond the negative connotations, however, is the fact that clearly most posters here don't agree with your definition of the terms.  Most of us seem to be saying that an imperialistic war would be one fought to acquire territory outside of areas generally considered to be part of the nation, or to set up subject states--and we reject the notion that that's what the US was doing in Vietnam.

That's great, and we agree. I don't think the US was trying to institute the equivalent of the British Raj in Vietnam.

What would be great would be to hear some thoughts on what the US was trying to do in Vietnam, how they went about it, how the power dynamics played out, how you'd characterize those motives and actions and power dynamics, whether there was a broader recognizable pattern that could be seen in other US actions, whether some of those elements and patterns can be seen in the actions of other actors at the time or at other times.

And if you get that far, some sort of description for those patterns - whatever they may be - would be interesting as well.

Personally, I think the power dynamics and actions are vastly more interesting and significant than the motives, but I'm happy to hear you thoughts on all of them.

[Jacob]

Why do we have to have a single term? If we do, I propose "the Vietnam War"

I'm not sure it works as it turns into a tautology. We're not really going to have much of a conversation or learn much from investigating to what degree the Vietnam War conforms to the definition of the Vietnam War.

... actually, I take that back. This is languish. We could probably get a rousing semantic argument going.

[Jacob]

The fact remains, the 20th century saw a number of wars that were fought directly or by proxy as great powers attempted to establish or maintain spheres of influence.

Even under that definition, the Vietnam War doesn't qualify, because the US was not trying to establish or maintain a sphere of influence, it was attempting to deny the Soviet Union from establishing one.

Seems to me that South Vietnam was at the very least intended to be in the US sphere of influence.

[Berkut]

Jacob, the trouble is that you are applying a label as an explanation for an extraordinarily complex set of events, imputing a single motive for a war which had many authors each of which had motivations for commencing/contunuing/escalating that war which themselves were mixed and changed over time.

It's simply ahistorical to apply a label like imperialistic. It's not useful shorthand in a way that it might possibly be for the Scramble for Africa (even there it is simplistic). It does not illuminate, it does not explain.

That is the nature of categorizing anything; you reduce complex, unique, multi-faceted individual phenomena and look for common elements that you use to get a grip on broader patterns.

But like I said, I'm happy to abandon the word imperialist if an alternative is proposed. I'm also interested in a taxonomy of conflicts that's radically different than the one that calls US and Soviet cold war proxy conflicts "imperialist" (or another word that covers the same characteristics) if someone has one to put forward; that could be an interesting discussion.

I get the objections to "imperialist" - they've repeated a number of times in this thread in a whole bunch of variations - what I'm asking for is some sort of alternative, any kind of alternative for discussing, whether it's semantics, taxonomy, or something else. Because simply saying "you can call it imperialism" with nothing else offered up is simply shutting down the conversation.

How about "cold war proxy conflict"?

[Razgovory]

Really?  The US didn't show much interest in it until the Reds did.  Anyway, you want to use my term?

[Berkut]

The fact remains, the 20th century saw a number of wars that were fought directly or by proxy as great powers attempted to establish or maintain spheres of influence.

Even under that definition, the Vietnam War doesn't qualify, because the US was not trying to establish or maintain a sphere of influence, it was attempting to deny the Soviet Union from establishing one.

Seems to me that South Vietnam was at the very least intended to be in the US sphere of influence.

But that was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

It's not like the US would have been mucking about in South Vietnam absent the threat of Communism in North Vietnam.

We sure as hell were not interested in setting up client states in the US "sphere of influence" in other Southeast Asian countries that were not under Communist threat, which suggests (IMO) that the driving factor was in fact Communism (misgruided as it was in hindsight), rather than some desire to expand the US sphere of influence into SE Asia in general.

[The Brain]

The Vietnam War was nothing like Auschwitz.

[Jacob]

I offered one. What's wrong with "containment"?

Not bad.

I mean, it should probably be turned into an adjective, but that's just semantic quibbling on my part

More substantially, using "containmentist" (to coin a clumsy adjectiviztion) seems to shift the focus of the analysis towards the motivation of the great powers and away from the power dynamics between great powers and their clients, and away from the experience of the populations in the theatres of containment.

Still, it's more neutral sounding. Now all you need to do is to make this new term gain some traction

That said, I expect that should "containmentist" or something similar gain wide currency it would quickly attract a similarly negative connotation as "imperialist" because it's still pretty hard to cast the things it covers (client elites oppressing the populace, proxy wars, etc) as positive from the perspective of the people in theatre.

[Jacob]

But that was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself.

Malthus has brought this up as well previously, and perhaps that's one of the fault lines in the argument. Do we prioritize intent or effect? Do we prioritize the perspective of the actor or the acted upon?

Would you be comfortable with saying the Vietnam War was not conceived as imperialist by the US, but was experienced as imperialist by the Vietnamese?

[The Minsky Moment]

Seems to me that South Vietnam was at the very least intended to be in the US sphere of influence.

Let's put it this way.
The US wasn't trying to maintain a sphere of influence by intervening because it didn't have one there in the first place.
And if staying out would not have resulted in the USSR acquiring a sphere of influence, the US wouldn't have bothered.
So I don't think it is right that the US intent in getting involved was to acquire of sphere of influence.
In fact, of course, the US did acquire such influence, at least as long as South Vietnam existed, but that was a side effect of the decision to intervene rather than the motivation for it (the same holds for ROK and the Korean War).

[The Minsky Moment]

. Do we prioritize intent or effect? Do we prioritize the perspective of the actor or the acted upon?

I'll answer your question with a question.
Assuming your definition, is there any way for a Great Power to come to the defense of a smaller nation threatened by another Great Power without the defending Great Power thereby itself waging an imperialist war?  Because the defending power, by virtue of coming to the weaker nation's defense, thereby creates reliance of the weaker nation on itself for basic security, and also creates a powerful sphere of influence in the weaker nation.  Moreoever, it will be in the defending Great Power's interest to maintain and bolster that influence throughout the duration of the conflict in order to make the joint resistance more effective. 

As an example: under a broad view of your definition, can't France and Britain be accused of fighting an imperialist war against Germany in 1939 in order to maintain their sphere of influence in Poland?