In this essay, I pose a question related to the rise and fall of empires. Does the current impasse over the Strait of Hormuz demonstrate a waning of the United States’ capacity for worldwide power projection? Are we witnessing America’s Dien Bien Phu moment?

What is a Dien Bien Phu moment?

Dien Bien Phu was a battle which became a turning point in a colonial war. It is remembered because a guerrilla force was victorious over a conventionally equipped military force in a set-piece battle. The great power – the empire – at the time was France. The battle took place in the northern part of Vietnam far from the French power base and logistic facilities in Hanoi. On the other hand, it was close – very close – to the Chinese border.

The year was 1954 some years after Mao Zedong and his revolutionaries had won the civil war against the Nationalist government of China. The adversaries at Dien Bien Phu were the French colonial forces in French Indochina equipped with the full range of conventional weapons: air power, armoured vehicles, artillery, formed infantry battalions – the lot! Ranged against the power of France was what many thought of as a ragtag guerrilla force with little chance of victory. The apparent power imbalance was simply too great. The guerrilla force – the Viet Minh – was led by a man who was to become very famous, Vo Nguyen Giap. Prior to the battle the guerrilla force had no armoured vehicles, no artillery, no air power and, what most thought, no chance of victory.

My initial interest in Dien Bien Phu was as a schoolboy in the 1960s and, by the time of leaving school and soon after, I had read two important books, The Battle of Dien Bien Phu by Jules Roy and Street Without Joy by Bernard B. Fall. Later in the 1960s, I entered the Royal Military College of Australia, Duntroon, and came to do a lot more history study.

In the academic course I came to understand that there are battles in history that change everything and that Dien Bien Phu was one of them. The battle itself was in 1954, and the French aim was to re-establish their colonial rule over the whole of French Indochina after the Japanese occupation during second world war. It was planned as a great strategic victory which would once-and-for-all restore France’s national pride and, perhaps, in a bizarre similarity to what we hear today, to ‘Make France Great Again’.

In my seventh decade of life, I visited Dien Bien Phu and inspected the various features I had seen on military maps. I have always been fascinated by the concept that something that has existed as the conventional wisdom for so long can collapse so quickly. As an aside, I have learned since then that such a situation is not only confined to military matters.

Without detailing all the reasons for the French loss, I will list just a few of the most important.

A belief in a cultural superiority over one’s adversary. It is possible that planners of the French army conceived of their enemy as a vast swathe of peasants, with no graduate from an elite military college to lead them. In addition, this ‘vast swathe of peasants’ had no experience of modern warfare.

Over confidence. The French believed that the Viet Minh forces would be mown down by the superior firepower from the French positions on tactically important hills on the valley floor itself. The French had bunkers and were dug-in. When this decisive use of firepower didn’t happen, the French had no ‘Plan B’. They were so confident that ‘Plan A’ would succeed that they saw no need to plan for an alternative. Maybe this was a case where overconfidence meets with inflexibility.

A ‘belief in cause’ differential between the Viet Minh soldiers and the French soldiers. The Viet Minh guerrillas were committed to a passionate cause involving nationalism, independence from a colonial master and Communist ideology.

Failure to appreciate changed strategic assumptions. The French failed to recognise the significance of the fact that the Communist Revolutionary War in China was over. The consequence of this was that the Chinese could divert artillery resources – and lots of it – to their communist friends fighting their own revolution in Vietnam. From the Chinese border it was only a relatively short distance to Dien Bien Phu. The additional problem was that the French were unaware of the scale of supply taking place through the jungle from China.

Surprise use of mass artillery by Viet Minh. The guerrilla force moved all of its Chinese-delivered artillery into place in commanding positions without the French identifying the scale of the developing threat. The Viet Minh then carried out a masterful piece of deception – on most days in their build up they fired a few artillery rounds into the French position. The French took these incidents to be cases of ‘harassing fire’ and an indication of how limited the enemy artillery resources were. This includes the assumption that the Viet Minh ammunition must have been in short supply. The Viet Minh were, however, using these incidents to get the precise range to targets they wanted to engage later.

The Viet Minh then held their main weight of fire completely until they were ready to open a massive artillery bombardment. Then at 5:15pm on March 13, 1954, they used it all in one gigantic barrage and continued firing. Although the French position was not yet to be defeated in detail for some time yet, the French artillery commander – Colonel Charles Piroth – immediately came to the stark conclusion that complete defeat was only a matter of time. Less than 48 hours later he went into his bunker and committed suicide with a grenade. In those short hours he knew the battle was lost and that France as a world power would inevitably wane.

Do any of these factors in the French failure at the battle trigger any parallels for you with the situation in the Strait of Hormuz today? Well, in my mind they do.

Is it likely that, in the same way as the French were outgunned at Dien Bien Phu, so too may America have been out-negotiated, out-manoeuvred, out-guessed and generally out-bluffed in the current situation. Time will tell.

I caution against over-reacting about the immediate consequences of Dien Bien Phu. The fact is that it was a symbolic and catastrophic defeat of the French forces in a colonial war. The interesting counter-balance to consider, however, is that it was not a defeat of the entire French military capability in the country. There were further French operations in Indochina but, following Dien Bien Phu, it was all on a downward slope. It was not long before a negotiated agreement at Geneva came to a settlement dividing Vietnam into two Vietnams – North and South. This gave the French the ability to withdraw with some semblance of honour.

I have used the word ‘waning’ in this essay and that is basically all that has happened to France. France is still a great country and a still great power. It is a vibrant nation and a powerful one as well. It is a nuclear power with a significant navy, including nuclear submarines, aircraft carriers, a powerful air force and army. It has a vibrant and modern economy. Its Dien Bien Phu moment was, perhaps, a moment of recalibration of national prestige and objectives, that’s all. The energy, vibrancy and place of France in the world is still there. So Dien Bien Phu did not end the future of France. So may it turn out with the United States of America.

When it comes to the question of the collapse of Empires, and America’s vulnerability to decline, it may be worth considering an implication of the slogan to ‘Make America Great Again’. This slogan actually contains a subtle recognition that America may have already fallen from a position of greatness. Otherwise, it would not have to be ‘restored’ again.

So, the conclusion I offer is that, yes, the situation in the Strait of Hormuz may well be America’s Dien Bien Phu moment but, as with the case of France, it is not the end of America.

David Mason-Jones can be found at www.journalist.com.au