Ayn Rand on the ‘Philosophical Collapse’ Behind the Vietnam War, Fifty Years Later

Fifty years ago, on April 30, 1975, the Vietnam War ended with the last American helicopter lifting off from the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, as communist forces captured the South Vietnamese capital.

In a 1975 essay, “The Lessons of Vietnam,” Ayn Rand offered a perspective that she had advocated for over a decade in a vast range of articles and public appearances — a perspective that differed dramatically from practically everyone around her. For Rand, the fall of Saigon was not just the tragic end of a foreign conflict that had cost billions in taxpayer dollars and claimed the lives of more than 58,000 Americans. It was a sign of America’s deeper, philosophical collapse.

Vietnam, in her words, was a “shameful war,” but “not for the reasons which leftists and sundry friends of North Vietnam are proclaiming.”¹ Rand rejected the arguments of the peace activists, many of whom characterized the United States as a global oppressor, and the North Vietnamese as victims of Western aggression. The opponents of the war did not want to defend America’s values and interests, but to renounce them.

Rand, by contrast, condemned the war precisely because it was not fought in America’s self-interest. It was a war that “the U.S. had no selfish reason to fight, because it served no national interest, because we had nothing to gain from it. . . .”² In her view, the United States had no moral obligation to police the rest of the world or to enter into a war that did not serve to defend its citizens’ rights.

In a Q&A session at the Ford Hall Forum, Rand was especially critical of those peace activists who sided with the North Vietnamese communists by distributing Viet Cong flags. She called anyone who supports a military enemy during war “murderers” who had “the deaths of every soldier in Vietnam” on their hands.³

In another point of departure from the peace activists, Rand opposed an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. In material that she published in 1974, she argued that withdrawing now would amount to “a declaration of [America’s] debilitated impotence,” giving the world “the impression that the American people will not fight against Soviet Russia.” Faced with this impossible situation, she went on to say that “There is no proper solution for the war in Vietnam: it is a war we should never have entered. We are caught in a trap: it is senseless to continue, and it is now impossible to withdraw.”⁴

Rand broke not just with the left but with the right, and was particularly outraged at the ways in which both sides supported the military draft. That said, although Rand was a staunch opponent of the draft, for those draft dodgers who avoided military service simply because they did not want to fight communists, she stated that “not only do they not deserve amnesty, but they deserve to be sent to Russia at public expense, or North Vietnam, and stay there.”⁵

Likewise, Rand was unsparing in her critique of those on the political right who claimed the war was necessary to contain communism. If that were truly America’s purpose, she asked, why had the U.S. abandoned support for Taiwan in an attempt to curry favor with Communist China? In her 1972 essay The Shanghai Gesture, Rand identified the apparent double standard:  

Will the fall of jungle villages unleash the communist conquest — but the surrender of a rich, civilized island, with an intelligently anticommunist people, will not? . . . [W]e never had a treaty to protect South Vietnam. We have one to protect Taiwan. What will the abrogation of that treaty do to our national honor?⁶

In Rand’s view, the reason why both the political left and right were both wrong on Vietnam was because of their shared moral premises: the philosophy of altruism — the idea that self-sacrifice for the sake of others is a moral duty. America had gotten into the war because of the notion that America owes “a duty to the rest of the world” and is “responsible for the welfare of any nation on earth.”⁷

This altruistic policy resulted not only in moral confusion, but in military paralysis. According to Rand, the war was waged by a “no win” strategy, in which American troops were not permitted to defeat the enemy, only to “contain” them. In Rand’s view, such a policy was the result of the fact that America was not fighting for its own freedom, or even for freedom in Vietnam. Rather, it was fighting for South Vietnam’s “right” to vote itself into any form of government — including communism.⁸ Altruism demanded that America not impose its own values, but instead defend the abstract right of “national self-determination,” no matter the outcome.

The end result was a war fought without a morally intelligible purpose, and without the clear goals or leadership necessary for victory. This lack of conviction, Rand argued, left American soldiers with no moral incentive to fight — no values of their own to uphold — while their enemies, the Viet Cong, were steeped in Marxist ideology and convinced of the righteousness of their cause.

Rand compared this to her own experience, while growing up during the Russian Civil War, of the anticommunist White Army’s loss to the Reds, because it stood for nothing in particular. Similarly, the debacle in Vietnam was caused by the fact that Americans could not articulate what they were fighting for. The country’s leaders (even those who claimed to oppose communism) were ultimately “afraid to assume the responsibility of a moral crusade for America’s values.”⁹

Rand believed that the only way for America to learn this lesson was an ideological investigation into the premises that had led the country into Vietnam in the first place. Writing in the context of the Watergate hearings, she argued that Vietnam was an even greater scandal worthy of public scrutiny:

Intellectual crimes cannot — and need not — be punished by law: the only punishment required is exposure. . . . Obviously, this is not a task for politicians, it is a task for theoretical thinkers, for intellectuals, for philosophers. But today they are the men who were responsible . . . for our involvement in Vietnam. This is the reason why no such investigation can or will be held today. And this is the all-inclusive lesson to be learned from Vietnam.¹⁰

Although Rand outlined the lessons of the Vietnam War in May 1975, almost half a century later, an eerily similar series of events occurred in August 2021 during the U.S. withdrawal from Kabul, Afghanistan. Once again, America found itself in a long, drawn-out war, in a faraway country, fought in the name of “making the world safe for democracy.” To prevent such calamities as were witnessed in Saigon and Kabul from happening again, Rand’s philosophical guidance is needed: that a free country cannot survive if it sacrifices itself on the altar of altruism.

Further Resources and Reading:

• Objectively Speaking: Ayn Rand Interviewed (pp. 70–71, 195), ca. 1964–1967. In material excerpted from two separate interviews,Rand condemns U.S. involvement in Vietnam as morally unjustified and strategically incoherent, denounces the draft as a violation of individual rights, and criticizes the American press for their coverage of the war.
• “Our Cultural Value-Deprivation,” The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (pp. 100–114), originally published in The Objectivist, 1966. Rand criticizes U.S. involvement in Vietnam as morally directionless, questioning the legitimacy of defending South Vietnam’s right to self-determination while the U.S. appeases communist tyranny in other parts of the world.
• “The Wreckage of the Consensus,” Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (pp. 221–235), originally delivered at the Ford Hall Forum, 1967. Rand condemns the draft and describes the Vietnam War as a morally directionless conflict rooted in altruism, where American soldiers are sacrificed “for the sake of sacrifice.”
• “The Chickens’ Homecoming,” Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (pp. 41–50), originally published in The Objectivist, 1970. Rand denounces a resolution by the American Philosophical Association condemning the Vietnam War, criticizing it as a morally bankrupt attack on U.S. actions that showcases the philosophical corruption that led America into the war in the first place.
• “The Shanghai Gesture, Part III,” The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. I, No. 15 (April 24, 1972). Rand condemns the Nixon administration’s rapprochement with Communist China as a betrayal of Taiwan, arguing that the U.S. could not plausibly claim to be fighting communism in Vietnam while abandoning a country like Taiwan, who had achieved prosperity and freedom.
• “From My ‘Future File,’” The Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. III, No. 26 (September 23, 1974). Rand describes the Vietnam war as a conflict that the U.S. should never have entered and warns that withdrawal would signal appeasement to Soviet Russia.
• “The Lessons of Vietnam,” The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (pp. 137–148), originally published in The Ayn Rand Letter, 1975. In an essay that was Rand’s most substantive statement on the Vietnam War, Rand denounces the conflict as a moral, political, and philosophical disaster rooted in America’s altruist foreign policy in which American soldiers were sent overseas without any real values to fight for.
• “The War in Vietnam,” Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q&A (pp. 90–94), compiled from Ford Hall Forum appearances, 1967–1976, published 2005. In material excerpted from multiple lectures,Rand describes the Vietnam War as an instance of altruistic self-sacrifice, arguing that the U.S. lacked a clear moral purpose, and condemns antiwar activists for aiding the enemy.

1. Ayn Rand, “The Lessons of Vietnam,” in The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought (New York, NY: New American Library, 1989), 140.
2. Rand, The Lessons of Vietnam,” 140.
3. Ayn Rand, “Apollo and Dionysus,” Ford Hall Forum (November 9, 1969).
4. Ayn Rand, “From My ‘Future File,’” in Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. III, No. 26 (September 23, 1974).
5. Ayn Rand, “A Nation’s Unity,” Ford Hall Forum (October 22, 1972). Rand further articulated her position on amnesty for draft dodgers in a 1973 fan letter to Doris Gordon.
6. Ayn Rand, “The Shanghai Gesture, Part III,” in Ayn Rand Letter, Vol. I, No. 15 (April 24, 1972).
7. Ayn Rand, “The Chickens’ Homecoming,” in Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution (New York, NY: Meridian, 1999), 49.
8. Ayn Rand, “The Wreckage of the Consensus” in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (New York, NY: Signet, 1967), 225.
9. Rand, “The Lessons of Vietnam,” 147.
10. Rand, “The Lessons of Vietnam,” 148.