262 e lusive v ictories
Peace Building amid an Unpopular War
To achieve the objective he established in Vietnam, Nixon needed to
build political support at home for an American commitment to guar-
antee the independence of South Vietnam. Vietnamization could never
make the South Vietnamese military self-suffi cient (no underdeveloped
country could sustain a million-man military purely on its own
resources) or give it the capability to defeat an all-out NVA attack.
Th rough negotiations in Paris, of course, the administration hoped to
defuse the immediate threat posed by communist forces. But long-term
survival of South Vietnam required either a permanent residual Amer-
ican presence, as in South Korea, or massive and continuous military
aid backed by a credible threat of American retaliation should Hanoi
launch another invasion on the scale of the spring 1972 attack. Both
depended upon a political consensus at home, at a time when familiar
postwar political dynamics began to express themselves: the American
people were turning their attention to other concerns and Congress was
starting to reassert its will. Faced with an increasingly inhospitable
domestic climate, the Nixon administration never fashioned a political
strategy that could secure the necessary consensus.
Any possibility that U.S. troops might remain indefi nitely in South
Vietnam vanished early in Nixon’s tenure. Laird initially advised
Abrams to pursue Vietnamization on the Korean model, that is, to plan
around the presence of a small American force to guarantee any cease-
fi re arrangement. Within months, the instructions from Washington
changed: Abrams was told to proceed on the assumption that no U.S.
troops would remain. Th e president and Kissinger learned quickly that
Hanoi would never accept a negotiated solution permitting an ongoing
American military presence. Since ending the war via peace talks
remained the top priority, the administration quietly shelved the notion
of another Korean-style truce. Abrams focused instead on modernizing
the ARVN and the various paramilitary organizations to fi ght on if
necessary without American troops. Thieu and his senior officers
pressed relentlessly for more American arms and equipment, but
Abrams told them they needed to learn how to make better use of what
they had already received. He doubted whether they could ever with-
stand a major communist off ensive absent substantial American air