No More Vietnam Syndrome: New at Reason

U.S. foreign policy for decades proceeded in the shadow of the failure in Vietnam. Some 58,000 Americans were killed in that war. Stateside protests were fierce enough to persuade President Lyndon Johnson to sit out the ’68 election. Seven years later, after about 2 million civilian Vietnamese deaths, the U.S. finally gave up without having prevented a Communist takeover of the country.

“Vietnam syndrome” restricted our foreign conflicts, for a time, to such swift and relatively petty adventures as 1983’s post-coup invasion of Grenada (which, though it involved fewer than 8,000 U.S. troops, did kill 19 U.S. soldiers, wound 116 more, and prompt a massive majority of the U.N. General Assembly to dub the American action a “flagrant violation of international law”) and the 1989 overthrow of troublesome Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega, writes Brian Doherty.

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