12.4 — Korea, Vietnam and the Proxy Wars

The United States dropped more bomb tonnage on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia than all sides dropped in the whole of the Second World War.

Laos, a country that was not formally at war with anyone, became the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. Around two million tonnes of ordnance were dropped on it over nine years, largely to interdict supply routes. An estimated 30 percent of the cluster submunitions did not detonate, and they are still killing farmers and children. Clearance is expected to take decades.

That is what a proxy war looks like from underneath, and this chapter is about the countries where the Cold War was actually fought.

Korea

Japan had ruled Korea since 1910 (Chapter 11.8). In 1945 the peninsula was divided at the 38th parallel — a line proposed by two American officers in about thirty minutes, using a National Geographic map, as a temporary occupation boundary.

It became permanent. A Soviet-backed state in the north under Kim Il-sung; an American-backed state in the south under Syngman Rhee. Both claimed the whole.

North Korea invaded in June 1950, with Stalin's approval and Chinese agreement.

The United Nations authorised intervention — possible only because the Soviet Union was boycotting the Security Council over Chinese representation and was not present to veto.

The war ran in four phases. North Korean advance to the southern tip; American landing at Inchon behind the lines and a drive north to the Chinese border; Chinese intervention with several hundred thousand troops pushing the UN forces back below Seoul; and then two years of stalemate around the original line while armistice talks continued.

Casualties: around three million, a majority of them Korean civilians. North Korean cities were destroyed by bombing so comprehensively that American commanders reported running out of targets.

An armistice was signed in July 1953. No peace treaty has ever been concluded. The two states remain technically at war, and the demilitarised zone is among the most heavily fortified borders in the world.

And the outcome is Chapter 9.4's natural experiment. One people, one language, one history, divided by a line drawn in thirty minutes, and an income ratio now on the order of twenty to one.

Vietnam

The longest and the most consequential for the country that lost it.

The background is colonial. Vietnam was French Indochina. Ho Chi Minh had petitioned at Versailles in 1919 for Vietnamese rights and been ignored (Chapter 11.4). He declared independence in 1945 quoting the American Declaration of Independence in its opening lines.

France fought to keep it from 1946 and was defeated at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, where the Viet Minh dragged artillery through mountains the French had considered impassable and destroyed a fortified base.

The Geneva Accords divided the country at the 17th parallel with elections promised for 1956. The elections were not held, because the American and South Vietnamese governments assessed — as Eisenhower himself wrote — that Ho Chi Minh would have won them.

American involvement escalated through advisers to combat troops after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964 — a reported attack on American destroyers, the second of which is now generally accepted not to have occurred, and which was used to obtain a congressional resolution authorising force.

At peak there were over half a million American troops.

Why they could not win, and it is Chapter 10.4's Spain and Chapter 6.13's ganimi kava in a new form.

The enemy would not give a decisive battle. The Viet Cong and North Vietnamese fought when they chose and dispersed when they did not.

Supply came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail through Laos and Cambodia — a network of paths, roads and tunnels that could not be permanently cut by bombing.

Politics decided it. The South Vietnamese government was corrupt, unpopular and had no rural legitimacy. Land reform, which is what the countryside wanted, was not delivered.

And American tactics undermined American aims. Search-and-destroy operations measured success by body count, which produced incentives to inflate it and to count civilians. Defoliation with Agent Orange over millions of hectares, with health consequences for Vietnamese populations and American veterans that are still litigated. Free-fire zones. My Lai in 1968, where American soldiers killed several hundred unarmed villagers, and which was concealed for a year.

The Tet Offensive in 1968 was a military failure for the North and a political victory — it demonstrated to the American public that claims of imminent victory were false, and it broke domestic support.

American forces withdrew by 1973. Saigon fell in 1975.

The cost. Around 58,000 American dead. Vietnamese deaths estimated at 1.5 to 3.8 million, mostly civilian. Cambodia and Laos destabilised — and the Cambodian bombing and destabilisation contributed materially to the conditions in which the Khmer Rouge took power (Chapter 11.11).

And the war's assumption was wrong. The domino theory held that a communist Vietnam would produce communist neighbours across Asia. What followed instead was war between communist states: Vietnam invaded Khmer Rouge Cambodia in 1978 and ended that regime, and China then invaded Vietnam in 1979. Ideology predicted less than geography and history.

Afghanistan

The Soviet Union invaded in December 1979 to support a communist government facing insurgency.

The United States, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan funded and armed the mujahideen through Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence, which distributed the support and chose the recipients — favouring the more Islamist factions, which had consequences.

Stinger missiles supplied from 1986 removed Soviet helicopter dominance.

Soviet forces withdrew in 1989. Around 15,000 Soviet dead, and Afghan deaths estimated at around a million, with millions more displaced.

And then the West left. The country descended into civil war among the factions, from which the Taliban emerged in the 1990s. Chapter 12.9 continues it.

The word blowback was popularised in this context, and it names a real mechanism: arming a faction to fight an enemy produces an armed faction with its own aims once the enemy leaves.

Latin America

A pattern, not a series of unrelated events.

Guatemala, 1954. A democratically elected government carried out land reform affecting uncultivated land held by the United Fruit Company. A CIA-backed coup removed it. What followed was decades of military rule and a civil war in which around 200,000 people died, the great majority indigenous Maya, and which a UN-backed truth commission in 1999 found to have included acts of genocide.

Chile, 1973. Salvador Allende was elected in 1970 on a socialist programme. The United States, under Nixon and Kissinger, applied economic pressure and supported destabilisation. A military coup on 11 September 1973 installed Pinochet. Around 3,000 killed or disappeared and tens of thousands tortured, documented by Chile's own subsequent truth commissions.

Operation Condor coordinated the intelligence services of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to pursue and kill opponents across borders, including in Europe and the United States.

Argentina's Dirty War, 1976–83, disappeared an estimated 9,000 to 30,000 people, including the practice of throwing drugged prisoners from aircraft into the sea, and the systematic removal of the infants of murdered prisoners for adoption by military families. The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo have identified over a hundred such people by DNA testing decades later.

And Cuba is the other side. The revolution of 1959, the Bay of Pigs, the missile crisis, and a Soviet-subsidised state that achieved genuinely impressive health and literacy outcomes under a one-party system with political imprisonment and no free press.

Africa and Asia

Congo, 1960–61. Patrice Lumumba, the first elected prime minister, was deposed and murdered with Belgian and American involvement (Chapter 10.9). Mobutu ruled for over three decades, looted the state, and was supported as an anti-communist ally throughout.

Angola and Mozambique, where independence from Portugal in 1975 was followed immediately by civil wars sustained by superpower and South African support, lasting decades.

Ethiopia and Somalia, where the superpowers swapped sides in the 1970s — the Soviet Union backing Ethiopia after previously backing Somalia — which demonstrates that the alignments were about strategic position rather than ideology.

Indonesia, 1965–66. Following an alleged coup attempt, the army conducted mass killings of communists and suspected sympathisers. Estimates run from around 500,000 to over a million dead. Declassified American documents show approval and the supply of lists of names. Suharto ruled for thirty-two years.

The pattern

Four features common to nearly all of them.

Local conflicts were internationalised. A dispute over land, ethnicity or succession became a Cold War front, which brought in weapons and money and removed any incentive to compromise.

Both superpowers supported whoever was available. Democracy was a stated principle and alignment was the operational criterion.

Weapons flooded in and stayed. The Kalashnikov is on the flag of Mozambique.

And the wars outlasted the Cold War. Angola's continued to 2002. Afghanistan's has never stopped. Once a country has armed factions, a destroyed state and no functioning economy, the removal of foreign sponsorship does not restore peace.

Where this shows up in your life

Refugee movements, unexploded ordnance, and the politics of a dozen countries trace directly to this period.

And India's position was shaped by it (Chapter 6.26): non-alignment in principle, a security relationship with the Soviet Union in practice from 1971, and a defence procurement inheritance that is still being diversified.

And the honest summary is the one this chapter's opening implies. The Cold War is frequently described as a period in which the great powers avoided war. They avoided war with each other. The conflicts they conducted through others killed on the order of ten to twenty million people, and the countries where they were fought are still, in several cases, dealing with the consequences.

What the next page covers

Chapter 12.5 covers the Middle East — how the modern borders were drawn and by whom, what oil did to the politics of the region, the creation of Israel and the conflict that followed, the Iranian revolution, the Iran-Iraq war, the Gulf wars, and the Sunni-Shia dimension. It is the region where the largest number of the threads in this volume converge.