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Except it didn't work... at the end of the war not only was Vietnam still Communist, so were Laos and Cambodia. Vietnam is still Communist to this day.
The US left the region was totally destabilized and there were internecine wars between different Communist factions in the area for another decade.
Don't confuse "Communist" with "Soviet." As I said, it wasn't about the Vietnamese, it was about the Soviets. The realpolitik interest was in preventing states from falling solidly under Soviet influence, regardless of their style of government. Destabilization was acceptable, as long as Soviet influence was diminished.
Except it didn't work... at the end of the war not only was Vietnam still Communist, so were Laos and Cambodia. Vietnam is still Communist to this day.
The US left the region was totally destabilized and there were internecine wars between different Communist factions in the area for another decade.
Another problem with the theory - which predicted not that unless we put up some effort and then bailed that communism would be stopped at the Vietnamese borders, but that unless we prevented the communist takeover of South Vietnam that communism would roll up the rest of Southeast Asia - is the fact that communism was never an international monolith. The Vietnamese didn't give much of a rat's ass about the world beyond the borders of Vietnam.
That's what they wanted. The Vietnam War didn't play out in some way that awed the communists. To the contrary, it played out exactly how Ho Chi Minh pointed out that it would - they'd kill one of ours, we'd kill ten of theirs, and in the end it would be we who picked up our marbles and went home.
Of course, any glance at how Stalin spent considerable energy killing hundreds of thousands of Soviet communists, or at the border war between the USSR and China in 1968, or the Chinese invasion of Vietnam in 1979, dispels the notion of communism as one Borg-like entity. Rather, it consisted of numerous self-interested factions who opportunistically supported each other when their interests happen to jibe. But as often as not, they didn't jibe, and they then bickered and fought amongst themselves. The North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong cared about Vietnam, not Thailand or Malasia or Indonesia.
I'm also confused about the subject of this thread, but I'll address the question in the title. I don't know where you got the idea that Americans don't consider the Vietnam war a failure. In the 45 years since that conflict, I've had many, many conversations about it with many different people, and no one has ever said it was a successful conflict. That includes myself as well, and I was a participant in that war.
That is absolutely true from my own personal experience over the 40 plus years since the U.S. extricated itself out of Viet Nam.
Frankly, it seems as though the op bit off more than they should have here. The thread title caught my eye yesterday & I was going to comment then but I read their initial post & saw how they had completely muddled (unnecessarily) their topic by going off on a tangent about WW2 & other more recent events.
Seriously, I don't care if the op has an anti-U.S. agenda, as that's their right & the U.S. has made some grave foreign policy errors, which is the case with any historical power you can look at (including the Soviet Union & the UK) but they could have kept their focus narrow & opened more than 1 thread instead of diluting the focus away from the THREAD TITLE topic.
Many years ago Colonel(of Infantry) Summers wrote that book On Strategy A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War which quoted Giap when interviewed that the USA never lost a battle militarily in Vietnam but that fact is also was irrelevant as NV leaders expected to outlast the USA. Has led to the we did not lose the battle; it was the politicians who lost the war(or the peace) for us.
Ironically, studying how Germany reacted to 1918 we see the same trend: The military was betrayed by the homefront.
Damn college kids making love, smoking dope and their draft cars and raising hell in the streets.
Why do you insist on continuing to feed this peppermint troll?
As happens, a thread takes on a life of it's own. Dismiss the original poster - pffftttt! Fart in her general direction. She has nothing to offer to the topic, she has no knowledge of the topic, she's even confused on what topic she wants to discuss. Obviously it was intended as some sort of generalized USA-hate rant.
But we can still discuss amongst ourselves I guess.
The original post of this thread has nothing to do with the title.
As for Vietnam, I know plenty of Americans who admitted the war was a failure while it was still going on.
What happened in the 10-15 years before 1975 can be categorized as a failure, or maybe just a painful experience in learning from a major mistake. What happened in the 10-15 years after was one of America's greatest recoveries and triumphs. And I'm sure the OP both recognizes and resents it.
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Why don't Americans...
Hey, guys...
