Review – New Zealand and the Vietnam War

Roberto Rabel, New Zealand and the Vietnam War: Politics and Diplomacy, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2005. 443pp. ISBN 1-86940-340-1.

Reviewed by Roger Dingman, University of Southern California

North of the equator, understanding of New Zealand's role in the Vietnam War hovers between total ignorance and grave misunderstanding. The editors of a multi-national volume marking the thirtieth anniversary of the Paris peace agreements of 1973 went so far as to say that 'outside Europe, only Australia contributed manpower' to the fighting. [1] In a recent review of literature on the war and its relevance for understanding the current conflict in Iraq, one of America's most distinguished Vietnam war scholars made no mention whatsoever of any allies fighting alongside the United States in Vietnam. [2] And Robert M. Blackburn, in a study of Washington's recruitment of non-Vietnamese Asian fighting men published a dozen years ago, put Australia and New Zealand in an appendix, implying that America's antipodean allies were no better than the purchased soldiers of its Cold War Asian client states. [3] This book, if it does nothing else, should lay to rest such incomplete and prejudicial judgments.

Its author is well positioned to change assessments of New Zealand's part in the decades-long war for Vietnamese independence and unity. He has broad experience and perspective as an international historian, having published on subjects ranging from Trieste in the early Cold War to Latin America, and contributed to New Zealand in World Affairs, Volume 2, 1957–1972. He has risen to eminence first as a University of Otago historian and more recently as director of that institution's International Office. And over the many years of gestation of this work, he has mined archives in London, Washington, and Austin, Texas, as well as official records in Wellington, in an effort to shed light on the diplomatic and political dynamics of New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam conflict.

Rabel's work is organised along lines that will be familiar to readers of Ian McGibbon's earlier studies of New Zealand's role in the Korean War. He tells the political and diplomatic side of the story, leaving its military aspects for a second volume. Such a division of labor allows him to write what is in essence an official monograph on New Zealand–American alliance diplomacy over Vietnam. He hammers home a consistent interpretive theme: all of the Kiwi players in this game were intent on protecting what they perceived to be New Zealand's national interest. The prime minister, his expert foreign policy advisors and diplomatic representatives, and even those who came to object to New Zealand's involvement in Vietnam, accepted the axioms of Cold War foreign policy, believing firmly that communism posed a genuine threat, that a 'forward defense' against it in Southeast Asia was wise, and that the preservation of strong ties with allies, Australia close at hand and America across the Pacific, was absolutely essential. But they came to differ over two vital questions. Was the survival of an independent, non-communist, and friendly South Vietnam – seen as anything but certain from the outset – essential to New Zealand's alliance relationships and regional security? And should Kiwi lives and treasure be sacrificed in pursuit of that goal?

Rabel chronicles, in chapters whose focus alternates between successive National governments and their Labour and extra-governmental opponents, New Zealand leaders' efforts to answer such questions satisfactorily. He richly details the genesis of an 'alliance solidarity' rationale for commitment of New Zealand forces to Vietnam among Wellington's official foreign policy elite. That produced a posture that the key central political leader in this study, Prime Minister Keith Holyoake, endorsed: New Zealand would be 'the most dovish of the hawks' on Vietnam, dispatching a small force and voicing doubts about the wisdom of American policies in only the most guarded and limited fashion. Rabel presents a generally favorable portrait of Holyoake. The prime minister was a shrewd, down-to-earth sort of politician who heeded his experts' advice. He succeeded in convincing Washington that New Zealand was doing all that it could even as he successfully maneuvered to outflank and minimise the influence of his critics at home. Rabel's treatment of war opponents, especially of the emergence of the Committees on Vietnam and of the struggles among various groups within the slowly growing anti-war movement, is no less thorough. Six of the ten chapters that deal with what has been called 'the American war in Vietnam' focus on war protesters and what Rabel sees as the government's largely successful, if sometimes heavy-handed, efforts to marginalise them.

The author offers Solomonic judgments on this important episode in New Zealand's international history. His verdicts on the Vietnam debate and its protagonists are invariably even-handed. He acknowledges that differences of opinion both within and outside government were 'derivative', in that they mirrored similar clashes, albeit on a much smaller scale and in more muted form, in the United States. But at the same time, by shattering the notion that foreign policy must always be bipartisan and consensual, they had unique local significance. Both sides achieved success. Even the election of a Labour government in 1972 failed to alter the fundamentals of New Zealand's 'alliance-first' Vietnam diplomacy. Whatever Wellington said or did still had to be gauged in terms of its impact on relations with Washington, and to a lesser degree, Canberra. The anti-Vietnam War protestors never had any significant impact on voters at the polls. But they provided a precedent and laid psychological and organisational foundations for those who, two decades later, championed a genuinely independent foreign policy posture for New Zealand.

I would not dispute such judgments. Only three, relatively minor, points of criticism need be raised about the way in which Rabel develops and presents them. Even though the military aspects of New Zealand's involvement in the Vietnam War are to be the subject of a separate volume, a table indicating the dates, character, and size of Kiwi forces deployed would have made it easier for the reader to see more clearly the significance of the decisions concerning them. Some use of Australian archives might also have enabled Rabel to offer a fuller and more nuanced account of the trans-Tasman aspects of New Zealand's Vietnam War policy dilemmas than he derived from Peter Edwards' fine study of Australia's Vietnam experience. [4] More importantly, the author might have written with a little less sangfroid. American historians of the Vietnam conflict can be faulted for infusing their narratives with too much passion in ways that portray Lyndon Johnson as moral monster or 'flawed giant', [5] and paint roseate or romanticised pictures of 'The [Anti-war] Movement' and its significance. But Rabel, perhaps because he is writing for a New Zealand audience that he presumes already knows a great deal about prime ministers, their brainy advisers and their youthful critics, wastes few words on his protagonists as human beings. A little more of their flesh and blood might have made the tale of their decisions and differences even more interesting.

I came away from the book, however, wishing that Rabel had cast his conclusions more broadly. He presents them in particularist, national terms: Despite external pressures, New Zealand shrewdly and successfully defended its national interests. Prime ministers, policy advisers and protestors remained true to their respective principles. But a broader, international perspective suggests conclusions of more enduring significance. The struggle, not just 'success' or 'failure' in it, is what matters over time. Rabel reveals what the issues are when small and medium powers are forced to consider whether to say 'yes' or 'no' to their perceived great-power protectors when the latter launch dangerous and dubious military enterprises. He lays before the reader the imperatives that alliance diplomacy presents to a small state, indeed all states, in time of war: preserving a framework for broader cooperation; evading over-commitment of military forces; and striking a balance between evasion and full disclosure in defending external policies at home. But he does not, in my view, give sufficient emphasis to their enduring importance.

When issues rather than outcomes are given pride of place, Rabel's account of New Zealand's involvement in a war that ended 30 years ago becomes more instructive for the readers today. The context is different, for the Cold War and ANZUS are long gone. The place bears little resemblance to Vietnam. But one need only substitute 'Iraq' for 'Vietnam' to see that this tale of New Zealand's involvement in a distant American war has great relevance for those who make, analyse, and criticise foreign policies today.

Footnotes

Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaisse (eds), La Guerre du Vietnam et l'Europe 1963–1973, Brussels, 2003, reviewed by Serge Ricard in Diplomatic History 29, Nov 2005, p. 880.
David L. Anderson, 'One Vietnam Should Be Enough and Other Reflections on Diplomatic History and the Making of Foreign Policy', Diplomatic History 30, Jan 2006, pp. 1–21.
Robert M. Blackburn, Mercenaries and Lyndon Johnson's 'More Flags': The Hiring of Korean, Filipino and Thai Soldiers in the Vietnam War, McFarland, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1994.
Peter Edwards, A Nation at War: Australian Politics, Society and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War 1965–1975, Australian War Memorial, Sydney, 1997.
The phrase comes from Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960–1973, Oxford University Press, New York, 1998.