Yuen Foong KHONG.  Analogies at War:  Korea, Munich, Dien Bien Phu, and the Vietnam Decisions of 1965.  Princeton New Herseyt Univ. Press. 1992, 286 PP.

Reviewed by Russ L. Kleinbach, American Asian Review Vol. XII, No. 3, Fall 94.

Yuen Foong Khong succeeds very well in his aim of explaining and exemplifying how and why historical analogies are used in decision making processes, but he fails to identify the paradigm assumptions underlying the analogies he uses.  Khong explains the “analogical explanation” framework, and illustrates how in the Viet Nam decisions of 1965, analogies mattered because they helped the “policymakers arrive at inferences--about the nature of the problem confronting them, about the stakes of the problem, and about dangers and prospects of alternative solutions . . . [p. 252].”  His systematic integration of psychology with political and historical analysis is very helpful theoretically and in terms of information and understanding of the Viet Nam experience.  His focus on the discussions leading to the decisions as a level of analysis is important and legitimate.  What is misleading with this analysis is the implicit assumption that the use of “analogy” is the primary level on which the decision making process is working. It is what A. N. Whitehead referred to as the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”[i] I argue that foundational to the understanding of the analogies there is an underlying paradigm--made up of  (a) material conditions, (b) social, political and economic structures, and (c) worldview assumptions--which structure the analogies themselves, just as the analogies structure the conscious decision making process.  To understand the Vietnam decisions we must understand both levels of the structure of knowledge.  First let us identify the task and some of the positive contributions in this work. 

The Analogical Explanation (AE) framework “essentially takes an information-processing approach to understanding decision-making [p. 40].”  The task of the book is to identify, explain and illustrate the “cognitive sources of foreign policy [p. 9].”  The  author also shows how  “analogies actually influence the selection of policy options” (p. 9), and “why policymakers often use analogies poorly [p. 13].”  The latter task is accomplished by focusing on “the processes of analogical reasoning . . . that makes it difficult, though not impossible, to use historical analogies properly in foreign affairs [p. 13].”

The thesis of the study is that the AE framework:  

suggests that analogies are cognitive devices that ‘help’ policymakers perform six diagnostic tasks central to political decision-making.  Analogies (1) help define the nature of the situation confronting the policymaker, (2) help assess the stakes, and (3) provide prescriptions.  They help evaluate alternative options by (4) predicting their chances of success, (5) evaluating their moral rightness, and (6) warning about dangers associated with the options. [p. 10]

Khong argues that the AE framework “succeeds in accounting for the Vietnam decisions of 1965 at a level of precision not achieved by other explanations [p. 11].”

First a look at the theoretical assumptions which Khong uses to develop his case:

Human beings are creatures with limited cognitive capacities.  As a result they cope with the enormous amount of information by reliance on “knowledge structures” such as analogies or schemas (p. 25).  “The difference between a schema and an analogy is that an analogy is specific and concrete [e.g., Korean war], while a schema is abstract and generic [e.g., aggression unchecked means general war later].” (p. 26)

“Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that one major way human beings make sense of new situations is by matching them with old situations [i.e., analogies] stored in memory  [p. 24].”    The fact that recent events are easier to recall is the “availability heuristic” (pp. 35f).

      “[P]eople tend to access analogies on the basis of surface similarities. . . . Once the analogy or schema is accessed, it (1) allows the perceiver to go beyond the information given, (2) processes information ‘top-down,’ and (3) can lead to the phenomenon of perseverance.  These two sets of findings suggest that the process of analogical reasoning involves cognitive mechanisms and inferential steps that may lead to simplistic and mistaken interpretations  of the incoming stimuli [p. 14].” “The idea of top-down or ‘theory-driven’ processing is that incoming information is compared with or fitted into existing schemas stored in the memory. . . . ‘bottom-up’ or ‘data-driven’ processing happens just as frequently . . . [p. 37].”    “The ‘default values’ of the schema fill in for information missing in the incoming stimuli; thus, the schema makes a more complete picture possible [p. 28].” “The significance of top-down processing is that information that does not fit the schema is either ignored or not given the weight it deserves [p. 38f].”   The “perseverance effect” is the tendency of individuals “to hold on to their schemas even when confronted with contradictory information [p. 39].”

With this theoretical framework laid out, and with historical evidence that reasoning by historical analogy became a “virtual ritual” in the State Department in the 1960’s (p. 72),  Khong reviews pre-1965 decisions, looking at the general policy of the containment of communism as the explanation for these pre-1965 decisions. He then does a case study of the American government’s 1965 decisions on Viet Nam, identifying Korea, Munich, and Dien Bien Phu as the most commonly used analogies by the decision makers at the time. 

I suggest that the need for containment is best viewed as an overarching constant in postwar American diplomacy.  It is something of which policymakers are always aware, and it predisposes them to be concerned about communist gains anywhere, but by itself it cannot explain why policymakers made the choices they did in 1954, 1961, and 1965 [ p. 73].

This statement is precise and important because it clarifies the author’s task as explaining why one policy option was selected from among a selection of options, all of which were acceptable given an underlying paradigm.  I suggest it might be helpful to think of the underlying paradigm as “level 1,” the containment policy as “level 2,” and the decision making process using specific  analogies as “level 3.” 

I believe the underlying paradigm (level 1) contains the following (a) material conditions, (b) social, political and economic structures, and (c) worldview assumptions, which are assumed  by the “decision makers” and the author  of this text;  (i) Reality is centered in the individual with a civil and ideological extension to the nation which is a geographic area with shared economic interests and belief system.  Reality is  experienced from the perspective of the  “I.”  (ii) It is the “power of ideas,” (p. 7) and “decision makers” that determine the course of history. [Material and ideal interests, conditions and structures do not directly govern human conduct. (see p. 19)]  (iii) Truth includes an ethic and ideology based on American individual rights, exemplified in the first ten amendments to the constitution. The belief in individual rights (e.g., freedom, property, democracy) extends to the rights of our nation, i.e., “national security.”  Freedom is defined “negatively,” i.e., as the absence of government restrictions, especially as it applies to private property and religion. [Freedom should not be defined “positively,”[ii] i.e., as “freedom of access” to the necessities of life, such as land.]  Democracy is defined as applying to political elections, [and not to direct or indirect popular control of economic aspects of peoples lives]. “Property,” means that the private owning of productive property is a human, [not a utilitarian social],[iii] right.  (iv) Beliefs (e.g., free enterprise capitalism) take on the character of revealed doctrine or “scientific” truth. [The structure of capitalist class relations and the dynamics of a world market system are equated with the natural and moral laws of nature.]   Since America has the truth, we are relatively closed to diversity or neutrality in belief and structure.  Reality is known.  There is truth and there is falsehood.   Truth is America, Christianity, political democracy and capitalism.  Error has no rights. Neutrality is evil.  “If you are not with us, you are against us,” and “if we do not win we lose.”  We Americans are the world’s leaders, judges, and police establishing truth and “saving” the world.  If we don’t control a country, we “lose” it to evil, the unnatural, the uncapitalist, the unChristian, the unfree.  (v) There is a separation between means and ends.  Life and reality are a journey through time.  This journey is make up of goals or ends to be accomplished.  It is a repetition of the selection of means chosen to reach unrelated ends in the future.  [This was illustrated in U.S. governments systematic lying to the world about the means used to achieve the end of “saving” Viet Nam.]

The chapter on “Containment, Analogies, and Pre-1965 Vietnam Decisions,” and pages 190-205 are used to illustrate how a “level 2” analysis of the containment policy cannot account for the precise policies chosen in three particular cases.

Our analysis of three major pre-1965 Vietnam decisions suggests that even at the height of containment, the United States was willing to allow the North to go communist in 1954, and in 1961 to live with a negotiated settlement in Laos, as well as to avoid direct military confrontation with the NLF. . . .  Containment, therefore, cannot tell us whether U.S. concerns would result in action or not; neither can it tell us the form of the action [p. 95].

This is a half-truth which begets significant error.  True, these cases show that we cannot predict from a containment policy what action will be taken, but we can predict that some action will be taken.  First it is misleading to say that the U.S. did nothing to stop North Viet Nam from going communist;  (a) the issue was not “North” Viet Nam, it was all of Viet Nam, (b) the U.S. paid for much of the French colonialist war and tried to get the British to join in “saving” Viet Nam for the French,  and (c) once the French were defeated, the U.S. acted to prevent the implementation  of the Geneva Agreement by creating a de facto anti-communist, Christian, pro-American government in the southern half of the country, and equipping that government with arms to suppress the NLF in southern Viet Nam. This is hardly a “doing nothing” policy.  Without a containment policy we might have done nothing, in which case, most likely, Ho Chi Minh would have become the president of Viet Nam in 1956.

Khong’s more qualified claim that analogies were “often, though by no means always, relevant. . . . [and] were one factor among many influencing” (p. 96) Eisenhower’s and Kennedy’s decisions on Viet Nam is well documented in his text.

The chapters on Korea and Dien Bien Phu are probably the most informative to the reader interested in learning more about the process and content of the 1965 Viet Nam decisions. There is also a chapter on Munich which is interesting but not as central to the decisions being made at the time.  In the interest of space I will focus mainly on the Korean and Dien Bien Phu analogies.

The lessons of the Korea analogy as applied to Viet Nam and most strongly supported by Johnson and Rusk (p. 104) were as follows:  (a) The issue was aggression from the communist North, backed by China and the U.S.S.R., against the South. This was not a civil war (pp. 99ff).  (b)  If aggression from the North was the issue, military action on the part of the U.S. was the solution to convince the communists that victory was not possible (pp. 101, 112, 117). Thus the air war against the North (p. 139).  (c) It was vital to U.S. security to stop the dominoes from falling (p. 139).  (d)  Repelling aggression and preserving “freedom” made it morally acceptable to intervene (p. 139).  (e)  The likelihood of success was good (p. 139).  (f)  As in Korea, if the U.S. pushed the North Vietnamese too hard, the Chinese might intervene (p. 117), thus the more restrained “slow squeeze” bombing policy against the North, and the escalation of the ground war in the South (p. 139).   (g)  Negotiations with the possibility of a neutral South were unacceptable (p. 119).

The lessons of the Dien Bien Phu analogy as applied to Viet Nam and most strongly supported by George Ball  (pp. 106ff, 150ff) were as follows:  (a)  The conflict in Viet Nam was a “sui generis,” (p. 107) Vietnamese war of independence (p. 163) against “colonial* domination” (p. 140) [*sic: read, neo-colonialist].  (b)  The stakes were minimal (p. 163). NATO and Japan would support a negotiated settlement.  (c)  There was dubious moral acceptability of intervention in an internal revolution (p. 163).  (d)  There was no stable alternative government in the South (p. 240ff). The “Viet Cong’s* [*sic: read, NLF] adversaries would be likely to experience serious internal dissent,” resulting in central government repression (p. 149).  (e)  Like the French, the U.S. was the “oppressor,” (pp. 149, 152, 228), and in this alone.  (f)  “Morale in the South,”* [*sic: read, “among the ARVN troops”] would be low because nationalism is on the side of the rebellion (pp. 150, 160).  (g)  The U.S. would have “difficulty in collecting intelligence and understanding the enemy, overestimating the ‘effectiveness of our sophisticated weapons under jungle conditions,’ and so on [p. 152].”  The U.S., like the French, would be misled, by it’s own statistics, into believing it was winning the war.  (h)  The NLF and the NVA would do to the U.S. what they did to the French. We could not win.  They would not fight a head-on war and would wear down the U.S. forces (p. 124).  (i)  There was likely to be domestic opposition in the U.S. to a protracted ground war in Viet Nam (p. 159).  (j)  Therefore we should cut our losses, negotiate, and allow the country to become communist.

Khong’s most important observation on Munich is the following: 

The question of Munich is primarily one of stakes.  The Munich analogy magnified the stakes of Vietnam for the United States because it envisioned a 1930s syndrome in Southeast Asia.  In this sense, the Munich analogy was the intellectual basis of the domino theory. American policymakers from Eisenhower to Nixon remembered the crumbling European dominoes of the 1930s only too well; they were convinced that the spread of communism--the fascism of the 1960s--would lead to a similar catastrophe.  [p. 184]

Hence Johnson’s explanation of why he could not get out of Vietnam:  “Everything I knew about history told me that if I got out of Vietnam and let Ho Chi Minh run through the streets of Saigon, then I’d be doing what Chamberlain did in World War II.” [p. 181]

Remembering the “availability heuristic” from the earlier theory, Khong makes two additional important observations.  First, Johnson, Rusk and most of Johnson’s advisors were closest to the Korean war as part of their experience in American government.  George Ball had been a lawyer for the French government during the first Indochina War (p. 157).  It is not surprising therefore that Ball was the only advisor close to the decision making process in 1965 to use the Dien Bien Phu analogy in his analysis of what the U.S. should do.

Khong then makes the case that combining (a) cognitive psychological theory  (b) the predisposition of decision makers to using specific analogies, (c) the American definitions of the analogies being used, (d) the fact that the “policy makers were given ambiguous and conflicting information about Vietnam [p. 165],” and (e) the tendency “that analogies often function as important information processors. . . .  [to] help resolve conflicting incoming information in ways consistent with the expectations of the analogy [p. 169],” it is not surprising that Johnson chose to intervene with a gradual escalation of the land war in the south and the bombing of the north, always careful not to push so hard as to bring the  Chinese into the war, as happened in Korea.

“The Psychology of Analogical Reasoning” (Chapter 8) is a detailed reflective application of the psychological theory to decision processes discussed in the book.  It is essentially a summary of the points that have been make explicitly or implicitly earlier in the work. It is however one of the most interesting chapters because it is not until this chapter that Khong cuts loose and tells it like was.  For example,  

The perseverance of the subjects’ “theories” in the face of contradictory evidence also seems to have manifested itself in the Vietnam analogies. The fact that someone usually pointed out important flaws in the policymakers’ analogies did little to erode their faith.  [p .224]

First, . . . China and Soviet Union cannot, by any means, be depicted as states that were using North Vietnam to violate the territorial integrity and political sovereignty of South Vietnam.

Second, and perhaps more to the point, the Geneva Conference of 1954 did not create two separate states. The seventeenth parallel was not meant to be a political boundary between North and South Vietnam. . . .  it was “provisional and should not in any way be interpreted as constituting a political or territorial boundary.”  The notion of aggression is consequently not very illuminating; the conflict between North and South in Vietnam is better described as a civil war. [p. 234]

So we learn  an important lesson from Analogies at War. 

When their [analogies] lessons become part of the unspoken and spoken lore, when there is only one consensual interpretation, their premises and their relevance become matters of dogma that few will see fit to question.  At that point, analogies step beyond their roles as heuristic devices for discovering new explanations and assume the roles of explanations and facts themselves. [p. 262]

The book is about the “power of ideas,” (p. 7) which “decision makers” use from their “repertoires” (p. 215) to determine the course of history.  This is evident throughout but explicitly in the author’s use of the Weber quotation which opens his second chapter (p. 19). 

Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct.  Yet very frequently the “world images” that have been created by “ideas” have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. [my emphasis]

Interestingly, Khong uses this quotation to focus on the “importance of ideas” (p. 19).  Material and ideal interests are dismissed because “[e]vidence of such concerns are simply absent in the memos and minutes of meetings leading to the decisions of 1965 [p. 65].”  This is important because it illustrates that this book is not about the “material and ideal interests” nor  material conditions or social, political and economic structures, e.g., economic depressions, political repression or neo-colonialism, which govern people’s conduct.  This book is about the  ideas/ analogies which influence the choice of options which are available given the underlying paradigm.  The underlying paradigm is not identified or acknowledged in this book, nor are options which would have followed from a different paradigm.  It is perfectly appropriate for Khong to focus on the level of analysis which he does but he should at least have acknowledged that there exists a theoretical approach which argues that  underlying material and ideal interests, conditions and assumptions exist which influence the selection and definition of analogies used by the decision makers.

The underlying paradigm is also evident throughout the study in the unchallenged assumption that the actors of history and the sources of problems are ideas (e.g., analogies), ideologies (e.g., communism), and individuals (e.g., Hitler, Churchill, Mussolini, Mao, Eisenhower, Ho Chi Minh and Johnson.) Khong quotes Truman: “Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted . . .”  (pp. 23)

Khong does a good job at many points (e.g., pp. 8-9, 71ff, 190ff  252) of identifying what the skeptics of his thesis would argue.  He gives them credit where credit is due and effectively argues for the Analogical Explanation as being the better analysis, while  not the only factor in understanding the decisions made.  What is missing is any of the kind of deeper paradigmatic analysis or the inclusion of the issues which skeptics who do not share his paradigm, e.g., I. F. Stone[iv]^  would raise.

The author’s acceptance of the underlying paradigm is  also obvious in the use of language in the book. The text is filled with references to “communists” but few or none to “capitalists” or whatever the Americans and their Vietnamese allies were.  There are a few references to “colonialism” but none to “neo-colonialism.” There many sentences such as, “South Vietnam was in danger of losing the fight with the Vietnamese communists [p. 48].”  Since it is likely that the majority of southern Vietnamese were not supporters of the Americans and the Saigon Government, why not write “The Government of South Vietnam (GVN) was in danger of losing the fight with the NLF,” or “southern  Viet Nam was likely to win it’s fight with the  Vietnamese capitalists.”   We read of “South Vietnam’s impending defeat by North Vietnam [p. 54].”  This unqualified language accepts the American paradigm of two Viet Nams and of northern aggression.  We know from his statement (p. 234) that he knows that the Geneva Accords maintained one Viet Nam.  Khong writes (p. 89) that “in the early 1960s . . . Diem’s government was not threatened by an outright invasion of regular North Vietnamese units but by Hanoi-backed communist guerrillas, many of whom were Southerners.” He could have written “Diem’s American-backed government,” and he should not have identified all the guerillas as communist because many were not communists. On page 244 Khong writes, “Many of the peasants in the South supported the Vietcong because they did not perceive the Vietcong as invaders but as social reformers and nationalists.”  What should be clarified here is that “supported”  also meant being non-communist members and/or soldiers of the NLF.  The term “Vietcong” was a label to make it “true” that all revolutionaries were communist. The text also includes many examples of terms such as “saved” (pp. 81 & 151), “fallen” (pp. 82 & 251), and “collapse” (pp. 117 & 151), used from the perspective of underlying paradigm, and seldom  from the perspective of a simply descriptive history. 

Toward the end of the book the author does a good job of being honest to the Geneva Accords but shies away from any creative analysis of how one might have looked at this analogy.  For example, Lyndon Johnson wrote that Munich shows that “success only feeds the appetite of aggression [p. 49].”   Khong might have pointed out in his discussion (p 79f) that, by parallel analogy,  Ho Chi Minh’s compromise with the French at Geneva in 1954, and the American success with SEATO and the U.S. selection of Diem,  fed Diem’s and America’s appetite for aggression. Isn’t it possible that by analogy  Ho Chi Minh looked back at Geneva as Johnson looked back at Munich?   Each saying, “Never again!”

The book is well worth the reading for its integrated disciplinary theoretical analysis of the conscious level of decision making, and for the information on the American Vietnam decisions of 1965.  It is a book which helps explain why and how American policy options were taken. This is important, for all of us (including policymakers) who have read this book should be more self-conscious and therefore more in control of the cognitive processes which we use in making decisions. But we must look deeper than cognitive processes if we are to understand and influence (a) the material conditions, (b) the social, political and economic structures, and (c) the worldview assumptions, which generate conflicts such as the Indochina wars, the World Wars, the Korean war, and the American-Iraq war, and which will be the “circumstances directly encountered, given and  transmitted” to our children from their past. 

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.  The tradition [material, structural and mental] of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.[v]