Countering the United States in Vietnam } 235
respective universalistic creeds and believing that the future of Southeast
Asia should evolve along lines comporting with their own vision of society.
US Pressure on Hanoi and China’s Effort to Deter US Attack on DRV
Having decided to continue the US effort to contain communism at the 17th
parallel, Washington concluded that it was crucial to compel Hanoi to sus-
pend or at least radically reduce the infiltration of men and materiel from
North to South Vietnam. This was to be achieved, US strategists concluded,
by threatening to bomb the DRV’s modern industrial and transportation
facilities built up since 1954 with Chinese, Soviet, and East European assis-
tance. US leaders believed that the VWP would be unwilling to risk destruc-
tion of the DRV’s recently built modern sector of its economy. Once it became
clear to DRV leaders that the United States was, in fact, prepared to bomb
those facilities, Hanoi would move to protect them by suspending the drive
to take over the south, even if only for a while. In effect, if given a choice
between taking over South Vietnam and seeing the utter destruction of
North Vietnam, Hanoi would stop infiltration—or so US leaders calculated.
Washington’s belief that infiltration was central to the deteriorating situation
of the RVN was not incorrect. But the belief that US bombing, threatened or
actual, of North Vietnam would persuade VWP leaders to cease such infiltra-
tion turned out to be an egregious miscalculation.
By spring 1964, US leaders were making public statements threatening US
bombing of the north if infiltration continued. When this had no effect on in-
filtration, Washington seized the opportunity in August 1964 of an attempted
attack on US destroyers by PAVN torpedo boats in the Gulf of Tonkin (the
“Gulf of Tonkin incident”) to bomb DRV naval facilities and ships. This
bombing was intended as a warning to Hanoi that further, more devastating
bombing would follow if the VWP did not suspend infiltration. Over the
next four years, all the way to March 1968, the United States would gradually
increase the intensity and scope of bombing of North Vietnam in search of
“the breaking point” at which the VWP would call off its drive to liberate the
south. That point was never reached; the VWP persisted in its quest in spite
of US bombing.^4
Beijing’s policy calculus shifted with the prospect of a US attack on the
DRV and the prospect of an all-out war between the United States and the
D R V.^5 In its polemical argument with Khrushchev, the CCP had argued that
spreading wars of national liberation in the intermediate zone would deter
rather than precipitate imperialist aggression against the socialist countries.
Now, in Vietnam, the United States was moving toward an attack on socialist
DRV because of its pursuit of a war of national liberation. The prospect of a
US attack on socialist North Vietnam required China put its strength on the