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Now obviously WWI had a lot more deaths and participants but aside from that speaking in terms of the overall goals and lack of achievement which do you think was the more pointless and unnecessary war?
In WWI, a good number of the combatants had a reasonable fear that failure to "get them, before they get you" would lead to the invasion and occupation of their home nations by an enemy power(s) located just across the border.
In contrast, even with Vietnam falling to the communists, the US homeland was never under serious threat of attack, let alone invasion and occupation.
From the point of view of the United States? The Vietnam War. Simply put, there were more compelling American interests at stake in World War I than in the Vietnam War.
After all, in Vietnam the overriding American interest - stopping the communists from rolling up the rest of SE Asia after they got South Vietnam - never happened even though they did get South Vietnam. The Soviet Union went out of business, and we have normalized relations with Vietnam and do tens of billions of dollars of trade with them annually. In other words, things seem to have worked out pretty well despite the war's failure.
This is not to say that American interests in World War I were tremendous - but they were certainly more significant in comparison to those of the Vietnam War.
Of all the things that I have read... WWI makes the least sense to me of any major war of the 20th century? Essentially one big dispute amongst one family, WWI seems to me to be about nothing more than family rivalry, jealousy personal immaturity, wounded ego and I'm not sure what the hell else.
Vietnam was a war of national independence, people wanting to be free from colonial rule and oppression. I can understand that, that makes sense. That is something worth fighting and dying for. It mad no sense for the United States to fight a war to end the very thing that brought it into being, self rule, self determination the idea of self-governance.
The sides in WW I fought not so much for any national goals so much as they fought to avoid being defeated. It is difficult to identify any participant as having had an affirmative purpose in mind when they went to war. I suppose that Austria did, they wanted to crush the Serbians who were a source of agitation of the minorities within the A-H Empire. Everyone else just sort of piled on.
Of the two sides in the Vietnam War, the US mistakenly believed that the war helped serve the purpose of frustrating the global triumph of communism, but they did believe it, and the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong believed that they were fighting to establish national sovereignty, a readily identifiable and fairly common purpose for going to war, and a goal which was indeed achieved as a result.
As such, it looks like WW I as the "most pointless" , although I wonder if the word "pointless" is subject to that sort of modification by degrees.
The Vietnam war made a great deal of sense from the point of view of the Vietnamese. Their country was occupied by foreigners and the Vietnamese wanted them out.
In the context of post WWII Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe and coming on the heels of the Korean War, Vietnam wasn't at all pointless from the view of the USA/western countries. Whether or not it was impossible to conclude Vietnam with a return to the 1954 Geneva accord borders in the way Korea was ended is a another question.
I say the Vietnam war made sense and had a point, but the USA could have walked away sooner.
As for WWI, it depends upon how the start of the war was framed. The Serbian group that engineered the assassination of the Archduke wasn't random - it was a purposeful direct attack upon the monarchy with the eventual goal of eliminating monarchies from Europe. That's how Austria-Hungary saw it, and there was plenty of evidence to show assistance from the Serbian government in the plot. When one government sends killers to take out another government's leaders, that is a legitimate cause for war.
And from the point of view of the other countries in Europe, if a war is going to happen, you want to have your military ready and it's a great advantage to throw the first punch. The problem with that is the "if" in "if a war was going to happen". It didn't have to happen. If the leadership of only Germany and/or France had said "we don't want to have a war", it would not have happened.
As the others have pointed out, once a war starts, it becomes about survival more than about causes.
As for the USA in WWI ...
The only interest the USA had in entering WWI was protecting the repayment of loans made by US banks to finance Great Britain and France. Those countries made it clear that if they lost, they would default upon the billions that they owed the US banks. Such a default would be a huge blow to the US economy.
Of course they didn't repay the loans after the war in any real fashion, but the announcing of a default would have caused a run on the banks and might have even caused Wall Street plutocrats to lose some of their personal fortunes.
It was really a no-brainer: a hundred thousand lives of lower class Americans vs Wall street losing a few billion dollars.
So as for WWI, it made a lot of sense from the point of view of Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia.
For the others piling on, that was pointless. For the USA, it was worse than pointless, it was a betrayal by our leadership.
I can't vote because it's such a great question. WWII, Korea had points. The first Gulf War had a point.
WWI was stumbled into. It could have been avoided almost up to the last minute. No one wanted it but no one was brave enough to stop it.
Viet Nam was a logical war from the point of view of American post-WWII policy: contain communism. Not just in Europe but everywhere. This led to many misadventures but all were consistent with the containment policy and in the end the bore fruit.
Now Vietnam is doing OK. Not a Singapore, Taiwan or Indonesia but more of less able to take care of itself. Through the long threads of post-Viet Nam War history, you could unravel strands that its success is testament to America's strategy.
No such story is possible for Europe. WWI, even without WWII, permanently diminished it. France, Germany, England, Austria, Russia are not the powers they were previously. Russia is feared but is strong only in comparison to weak neighbors.
Which do you think was the most pointless war, WWI or Vietnam?
Such vastly different conflicts in every respect: motivation, execution, outcome...
That said, Vietnam was so utterly braindead; as if we'd prevent the Vietnamese from behaving as Vietnamese. It was a defeat before the first US troops got off the boat.
Of all the things that I have read... WWI makes the least sense to me of any major war of the 20th century? Essentially one big dispute amongst one family, WWI seems to me to be about nothing more than family rivalry, jealousy personal immaturity, wounded ego and I'm not sure what the hell else.
Vietnam was a war of national independence, people wanting to be free from colonial rule and oppression. I can understand that, that makes sense. That is something worth fighting and dying for. It mad no sense for the United States to fight a war to end the very thing that brought it into being, self rule, self determination the idea of self-governance.
I agree. I have never understood why the Europeans got into WW I, either, except that they hadn't had a general war in a century and felt it was time to do something with all the arms, wealth, and spare population available. I find the excuses that Wilson and the Anglophiles used to con the US into participating to be flimsy and unconvincing at best, probably greedy and ethnocentric at worst.
I also agree about Vietnam being first a war for self-determination. Ho Chi Minh had been fighting for Vietnam's freedom from the Japanese and the French since 1941. After 1954, he fought for the reunification of his nation as well.
The US belief in "the domino theory" and the context of the Cold War provides a rationale for the US involvement in Vietnam that's missing from the rationale used to justify WW I. American leaders were truly afraid of "the Communist menace" and the USSR and China in the late 1950s. That they were wrong about the results of losing Vietnam or that they over-estimated the power of the Communist bloc doesn't make US involvement nearly as pointless as sending Americans to war because the POTUS and many rich and powerful Americans favored the British aristocracy over the German.
Such vastly different conflicts in every respect: motivation, execution, outcome...
That said, Vietnam was so utterly braindead; as if we'd prevent the Vietnamese from behaving as Vietnamese. It was a defeat before the first US troops got off the boat.
Just like Afghanistan.
Just like Iraq.
Precisely.
Rather than being an advance of communism, it was a civil war with a communist veneer.
And once we got involved, the inane of sunk costs fallacy took root, in which however ill-advised our entry was, we had to keep dying there because to stop dying there would somehow dishonor the ones who had already died there. Doesn't make a lick of sense, but it's an age-old bit of illogic that has always plagued human thinking.
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Which do you think was the most pointless war, WWI or Vietnam?
