Discuss the impact of the Vietnam War on United States foreign policy during the

Cold War.

For decades, the Vietnam War has had a significant influence on American foreign
and military policy. The United States had never lost a war until its military forces and
diplomats were forced to flee Saigon in humiliation in 1975. The meaning of the
Vietnam War for American foreign policy remains a hotly contested and unresolved
issue. Even years later, the conflict still often serves as the prism through which
elected officials, military commanders, the media, and the American public view all
armed conflicts involving U.S. troops.
One way the Vietnam War affected United States foreign policy is that the United
States paid a high political cost for the Vietnam War and a Vietnam Syndrome
developed. It weakened public faith in government, and in the honesty and
competence of its leaders, America had poured $120 billion into the war in an
attempt to contain Communism, yet had failed abjectly. Indeed, scepticism, if not
cynicism, and a high degree of suspicion of and distrust toward authority of all kind
characterized the views of an increasing number of Americans in the wake of the
war. The military, especially, was discredited for years, as never before, Americans
after the Vietnam War neither respected nor trusted public institutions. They were
wary of official calls to intervene abroad in the cause of democracy and freedom, and
the bipartisan consensus that had supported American foreign policy since the 1940s
dissolved. Democrats, in particular, questioned the need to contain communism
everywhere around the globe and to play the role of the planet's policeman. The
Democratic majority in Congress would enact the 1973 War Powers Resolution,
ostensibly forbidding the president from sending U.S. troops into combat for more
than ninety days without congressional consent. Exercising a greater assertiveness
in matters of foreign policy, Congress increasingly emphasized the limits of American
power, and the ceiling on the cost Americans would pay in pursuit of specific foreign
policy objectives. The fear of getting bogged down in another quagmire made a
majority of Americans reluctant to intervene militarily in Third World countries. The
neo-isolationist tendency that former President Richard M. Nixon called "the Vietnam
syndrome" would be most manifest in the public debates over President Ronald
Reagan's interventionist policies in Nicaragua and President George Bush's decision
to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait. It wasnt until the victorious outcome of the
Persian Gulf War for the United States and its allies that President Bush declared in
March 1991--"By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all!"