Cold War credibility in the shadow of Vietnam: The politics and discourse of U.S. troop withdrawals from Korea, 1969-1979

The strains and aftermath of the Vietnam War prompted U.S. presidents of the 1970s to be the first ones to contemplate a complete withdrawal of U.S. ground forces from South Korea. The ensuing debate forced American civilian and military leaders to confront a long-held traditional mindset about the importance of U.S. credibility and reputation that had been forged in the early Cold War. Scholars have long noted that this identifiable Cold War mindset consisted of apparent lessons from World War II about appeasement and key assumptions about the nature of the Soviet enemy and the broader Cold War conflict that encouraged a "fixation"on U.S. credibility. The presence and influence of this traditional mindset's "credibility" imperative in the post-Vietnam Cold War, however, has largely been ignored or discounted. The debate over withdrawing U.S. ground forces from South Korea in the 1970s occurred in the context of a relatively static conflict between North Korea and South Korea, which provides a unique, relatively unchanging backdrop against which to evaluate this neglected period of U.S. Cold War credibility concerns. Diachronic analysis of the troop withdrawal debate and decision making reveals important continuities and discontinuities in U.S. Cold War thinking, and highlights the ebb and flow of the influence of a persistent early Cold War mindset as it competed with other values and imperatives, especially fiscal responsibility and disentanglement, in the shadow of the Vietnam War. Using the debate as barometer of U.S. Cold War discourse, one finds that the post-Vietnam recession in the prominence of credibility concerns was modest and temporary, and that a traditional Cold War mindset and credibility fixation still exerted considerable influence on U.S. policymakers. It overarched the withdrawal debate and defined much of the conceptual space in which the debate could take place. As in other debates over national security in previous decades, the concept of credibility exerted particularly powerful influence on policy elites and senior U.S. military commanders, and sometimes unhelpfully distorted their decision making while providing enemies and allies opportunities to leverage exaggerated U.S. concerns about credibility to their advantage.