Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy outside of the Vietnam War
In this post, I analyze LBJ's foreign policy to see if it should be judged positively outside of the Vietnam War. u/Honest_Picture_6960 made an excellent post covering some of the same material earlier this week and I want to give a shoutout to that user for writing such a detailed and thoughtful post. Here's the link: https://www.reddit.com/r/Presidents/comments/1sda53c/foreign_policy_wins_of_the_lyndon_b_johnson/
If you take the Vietnam War out of the equation, LBJ's foreign policy is a mixed bag. He actually had some notable successes: the Outer Space Treaty ensured the peaceful use of outer space, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty mitigated the nuclear arms race. As u/Honest_Picture_6960 pointed out, LBJ helped diffuse the Six-Day War, and he avoided a major crisis when France withdrew from NATO. Crucially, LBJ assisted India during a time of famine there, possibly saving millions of lives. When I first read about this, not only did my opinion of LBJ improve dramatically, I was prepared to do what many on this sub have called me to do: rank LBJ higher than JFK.
However, India is also where we start to get into the more problematic aspects of LBJ's foreign policy. India was a non-aligned country during the Cold War and it was open in criticizing the Vietnam War. LBJ retaliated by limiting food aid to India, and he only reopened full access to aid once India promised not to be so critical of the Vietnam War. (This lines up with how LBJ retaliated against domestic critics of the war like Martin Luther King or Hubert Humphrey, his own vice-president). While deliberately cutting off food aid to people might not have been illegal at the time, under modern international law as established by amendments to the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute, this is a really serious violation of human rights. Simply on a moral level, it's horrible to take food away from starving people to coerce their government to remain silent about an unjust war. Obviously, we don't apply laws retroactively, but I'm invoking modern law to show just how awful it was for LBJ to limit food aid as a political weapon.
Then we come to Indonesia. For all that LBJ agonized over being seen as an appeaser for "losing" South Vietnam, he actually succeeded in stopping the spread of communism in Southeast Asia. He did so by increasing US aid to Indonesia. Yet this came at a high price. For context, previous presidents supported Indonesian leader Sukarno, a democrat who was also non-aligned in the Cold War. But LBJ backed general Suharto, who seized control in a military coup. With help from the Johnson administration, during and after his rise to power Suharto purged Indonesia of suspected communists. The US provided information, funding, and weapons to Suharto. All in all, with American assistance Suharto killed between 500,000 and 2 million suspected communists, many if not most of whom were innocent. LBJ knew of the killings but he did nothing to stop them and he continued giving money and weapons to Suharto. LBJ's actions in Indonesia make the Vietnam War all the more foolhardy; LBJ already achieved what he wanted in stopping communism in Southeast Asia so it didn't matter what happened in Saigon. The government could've fallen and LBJ could still have claimed credit for stopping communism in Southeast Asia.
One overlooked aspect of LBJ's administration is his 1965 intervention in the Dominican Republic. While the intervention succeeded in getting Americans out of the country, it also succeeded in tipping the scales so that authoritarian Joaquín Balaguer would take power. Balaguer oversaw widespread suppressions of civil liberties and numerous murders of political dissidents.
I'm not saying any of this to bash LBJ. As I've said before so many times on this sub, he was a great domestic policy leader and I even made a post acknowledging him as this sub's choice for America's 10th best president overall. There's a strong argument for that ranking given how important his civil rights achievements were for the country. Unfortunately, LBJ really struggled as a foreign policy leader. He had an arrogant view of America's role in global affairs and a condescending attitude towards most other countries, seeing them as insignificant compared to America's power and might. I have to say that despite being very liberal domestically, LBJ often reminds me of George W. Bush in terms of his foreign policy arrogance and narrow view of the rest of the world. It's hypocritical to condemn Republican presidents like Reagan or Bush the Younger for their harmful policies while giving a free pass to LBJ, whose policies led to the deaths of millions of people in Southeast Asia. I don't like Reagan or Bush as presidents, but LBJ's actions probably harmed more people than theirs did, so I don't feel comfortable glazing him while bashing presidents whose policies - while terrible - weren't as destructive as LBJ's foreign policies. It's possible for LBJ to be both a great social reformer and a tragically destructive foreign policy leader. When I travel abroad, there's a reason that LBJ isn't one of the most beloved presidents among non-Americans.
If I were grading LBJ's foreign policy outside of Vietnam, I'd give him a C+. But with Vietnam, I give him a D-. The only thing that saves him from being in F is the fact that he likely did save lives in India, even if that humanitarian act was compromised by him playing politics with peoples' lives. However, on domestic issues he was S tier, averaging him out to be a B+ president.