This article originally ran in January 29, 1966
The New Republic addressed a number of questions arising out of the war in Vietnam to Dr. Reinhold Niebuhr, who returned the following answers:
Q: You concluded your book. The Irony of American History, with these words: "If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history, but by hatred and vainglory." Do you detect in recent Administration pronouncements on Vietnam the sort of "hatred and vainglory" you had in mind?
A: The judgment you refer to was prompted by the irresponsible neutralism to which we were addicted after the First World War and which vaingloriously thought we would be preserved as a museum piece of pure democracy, while other nations were enslaved by Nazism. We emerged as one of the two superpowers after the Second World War. Our power had cured us of irresponsible neutralism, but not of self-righteousness. We now act as the self-appointed guardians of democracy against the Communist peril in all parts of the world. Hans Morgenthau defined our stance as "globalism" in your pages. The President's State of the Union address in which he proposed that a healthy and wealthy nation might erect a welfare-state paradise at home, and still pursue its saving police duties in Vietnam, thus proving true to the principle of national self-determination, had a touch of this vainglory.
Q: It is said by Administration spokesmen that if Vietnam is allowed to fall to the Communists, it will signal a similar fate for other Asian countries, and perhaps others in the underdeveloped world. What is your comment on this?
A: There is obviously some truth in the argument that if we withdraw from Vietnam, other Asian nations, particularly Thailand, Malaysia and perhaps the Philippines, will not be safe against Chinese expansion. Our military presence is obviously necessary in Asia. But it was certainly an error of inadvertence to become involved in South Vietnam by gradually increasing commitments, so that our prestige is involved in the pretense that we are helping a small nation to preserve its independence. There are indications that this small sliver of a nation with a peasant culture is incapable of either the democracy or integral nationhood which our dogmas attribute to it.
Q: You favored military action against the Nazis and, later, against the aggressors in Korea, is not the present challenge in Vietnam comparable-a challenge to our will to resist a totalitarian regime which takes up arms against its neighbors?
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