Vietnam Syndrome

The Vietnam Syndrome, in US politics, is a non-medical conservative term referring to public aversion to American overseas military involvements, following the domestic controversy over the Vietnam War, which ended in 1975. Since the early 1980s, the combination of a public opinion apparently biased against war, a less interventionist US foreign policy, and a relative absence of American wars and military "Vietnam paralysis" are all the perceived results of the syndrome.

In the domestic debate over the reasons the United States was unable to defeat North Vietnamese forces and win over the population there during the War in Vietnam, conservative thinkers and many in the US military argued that the US had sufficient resources but that Americans themselves had undermined the war effort. In an article in Commentary, "Making the World Safe for Communism," journalist Norman Podhoretz complained:

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.

Thereafter, the idea of "Vietnam syndrome" proliferated in the press and policy circles as a way of talking about why the United States, one of the world's superpowers, had been humiliated by self-imposed defeat in Vietnam. Many conservatives agreed with Podhoretz:

…a fickle and spineless public, an unpatriotic anti-war movement and undisciplined soldiers had ashamed the nation by their unwillingness or inability to do what was necessary to destroy North Vietnam. The world was a dangerous place, they warned, and any retreat or compromise was an invitation to Communists and other wicked people out to destroy American supremacy and, by extension, the American way of life.

In time the phrase "Vietnam syndrome" also came into use as a shorthand for the idea that Americans were worried they would never win a war again and that the nation was in utter decline.

In the later 1970s and the 1980s, candidate and then President 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 America's global power was decreasing. He accused the Carter Administration of being "totally oblivious" to the Soviet threat.

...
Wikipedia