Vietnam Syndrome

Vietnam Syndrome is a term in US politics that refers to public aversion to American overseas military involvements after the domestic controversy over the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. Since the early 1980s, the combination of a public opinion that is apparently biased against war, a relative reluctance to deploy ground troops and to use conscription, and "Vietnam paralysis" are all the perceived results of the syndrome.
Failure in Vietnam.
In the domestic debate over the reasons for the US being unable to defeat North Vietnamese forces during the war, conservative thinkers, many of whom were in the US military, argued that the US had sufficient resources but that the war effort had been undermined at home. In an article in "Commentary", "Making the World Safe for Communism," the journalist Norman Podhoretz stated:
Do we lack power?... Certainly not if power is measured in brute terms of economic, technological, and military capacity. By those standards, we are still the most powerful country in the world... The issue boils down in the end, then, to the question of will.
The term "Vietnam Syndrome" thereafter proliferated in the press and policy circles as a way of explaining the United States, one of the world's superpowers, failing to repel North Vietnam's invasion of South Vietnam. Many conservatives such as Ronald Reagan agreed with Podhoretz. In time, the term "Vietnam Syndrome" expanded as a shorthand for the idea that Americans were worried they would never win a war again and that their nation was in utter decline.
Bosnian War.
"Lift and strike" was a proposed policy by the Clinton administration in 1993, which Bill Clinton had supported during his successful presidential campaign in 1992. The policy sought to improve the chances of a political settlement in the bloody atrocity-filled Bosnian War in the former Yugoslavia by lifting the arms embargo, arming the Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), and striking at the Bosnian Serbs if they resisted the rearmament project. A combination of the Vietnam Syndrome and very strong opposition from American allies in Europe killed the proposal, which was never enacted.
Burial by military actions.
The Reagan administration hoped that the success of the invasion of Grenada would help dispel the Vietnam Syndrome so that the American public could be successfully galvanized to support new US military actions, with President Reagan declaring after the invasion, "Our days of weakness are over. Our military forces are back on their feet and standing tall."
The quick victory during the First Gulf War was widely believed to be the end of the Vietnam Syndrome. US President George H. W. Bush triumphantly declared after the war, "The ghosts of Vietnam have been laid to rest beneath the sands of the Arabian desert."
Reagan's speech to Veterans of Foreign Wars.
In the later 1970s and the 1980s, Ronald Reagan talked about the aspects of the Vietnam Syndrome but argued that it could be overcome if Americans adopted a more confident and optimistic posture in the world, with him as leader. In the speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), which used the term "Vietnam syndrome," Reagan alleged that the time was right for such a change of attitude and action since the Soviet Union was outspending the US in the global arms race such that the latter's global power was decreasing. He accused the Carter administration of being "totally oblivious" to the Soviet threat.
Asserting a need for a more aggressive and activist foreign policy, Reagan also suggested that Americans could have defeated the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army, alleged that the American public had turned against the war from the influence of North Vietnamese propaganda, and implied that officials had let down the soldiers and had been "afraid to let them win" the war.
Reagan equated the "Vietnam syndrome" with a reluctance on the part of the American public to support US military interventions but also with feelings of guilt about the devastation brought about because of the Vietnam War and with feelings of doubt over the morality of America's intentions and actions during the war. Reagan, however, argued that America had fought for "a noble cause" and blamed the war in Vietnam exclusively on North Vietnam's aggression: