Vietnam/American War

 Claude finished the response

I told myself I would avoid the Vietnam (American) War until I had posted 100 blogs.  Now that I have reached that number it is time I forced myself to deal with it.  The subject is of course painful on many levels.

I was a student during the beginning of the war and had a student deferral, so there was never any risk I might be drafted.  As a result, at the time, I was not personally interested except as a thing that dominated American politics.

I remember at the time thinking the U.S. had to be there because otherwise the Communists would take another country.  Domino theory, and our freedom and so on was at risk.  I think most Americans had views similar to that.

I didn't realize at the time, although there were plenty of signs of it there, that the regime (I usually avoid that word as it is loaded, but it is appropriate here) in the South, at least at first, was a corrupt autocracy somewhat out to discourage Buddhism and other religions in favor of Roman Catholics.  So with most there it was unpopular and led to the immolations of monks and other protests.

I would guess the Americans there realized this.  Anyway they arranged for a military coup and replaced the government.  Although I suppose that was necessary, it made it clear to most thinking Vietnamese that this was not really a war for their freedom but something the Americans were doing in America's interest.  Most Vietnamese tended from then on to hand over things to the Americans, and let them pay for it, in both money and lives.  (Not that there weren't exceptions).

As the years passed, though, things in the South improved and more and more the government there became responsive while American military strength slowly won the war.

However, democracies have a serious problem waging war overseas, when the cost in lives and money is high and when it seems to go on and on.  Long-term commitment and determination like that is not possible in a democracy.  Far too many politicians are very willing to use it as a way to office, and the public becomes cold about it and not willing to make sacrifices.  Public support dried up, and public opposition grew.(A comparison with the British experience in the Boer war is useful, which, if pursued could have early on produced a reasonable South African state, but instead produced Apartheid when the British had to give up because of domestic pressure.)

First, the Congress betrayed the South Vietnamese by cutting off funding, then Nixon and Kissinger saw the political reality and cut their losses, in effect surrendering without doing so formally.  This, ironically, when the war was really almost won.

The result was maybe a decade of considerable suffering in Vietnam, especially by those who had bet on the wrong horse, and a decade of hard-line rule until the government in the north evolved into the sensible thing it is now.  Once New Thinking came in, things settled down, and now you have a peaceful, united, prospering country.

Was the benefit of achieving a united Vietnam and the benefits of New Thinking worth it?  It is all ironic and shows how it behooves us to realize both sides were seriously wrong in what they thought they were doing.  Both that and no one can predict the future.
3:56 AM

This is a serious piece of historical interpretation, and you've earned the right to push back on it rather than have it nodded along to — so let me actually engage with the structure of the argument, not just the texture.

Where I think you're right. The Diem regime's Catholic favoritism and the Buddhist crisis, the 1963 coup with American foreknowledge if not direct orchestration, the way that episode read to politically aware Vietnamese as confirmation that this was an American project wearing Vietnamese clothing — all solid, and underweighted in the popular American memory of the war, which still tends to start the story at Tonkin Gulf or even at Khe Sanh. The domestic-cost argument about democracies and protracted overseas war is also real and not just an excuse losers tell themselves — Vietnam, Algeria for the French, Afghanistan twice over, the pattern holds.

Where I'd push. The phrase "the war was really almost won" by 1972-73 is the load-bearing claim in your account, and it's the one I'd want to interrogate hardest, because the whole moral architecture of the piece — Congress betrayed, Nixon/Kissinger surrendered rather than recognized defeat — depends on it being true. The case for it: ARVN held against the 1972 Easter Offensive with American air support, North Vietnamese conventional forces took severe losses, Hanoi's own internal assessments in '72-'73 were genuinely pessimistic. The case against: ARVN held with American air power doing the heavy lifting, and the 1975 collapse — total, in under two months, against a force smaller than the one repelled in '72 — suggests the South Vietnamese state's military viability was itself a function of continued American material commitment, not an independent fact about to be banked. "Almost won" and "structurally dependent on indefinite external support" can look identical right up until the support stops. I don't think this is settled among historians, and reasonable people who've read the same documents land differently — but I'd flag that your account currently treats it as the stable premise rather than the contested one.

The other place I'd lean on you: "responsive" government in the South by the later years is doing a lot of work against a record that includes Thieu running essentially unopposed in 1971 and a continuing dependence on American funding to function at all. Improved relative to Diem, certainly. Responsive in any sense that would have generated the legitimacy needed to survive on its own — that's the open question, not a settled gain.

On the final framing — was unification-via-this-path "worth it" given where Vietnam ended up — I'd separate two different judgments you're running together. That Vietnam today is a reasonable, even admirable outcome, I'd agree with. That this validates the trajectory that produced it is a much weaker inference, structurally identical to judging a decision by its outcome rather than by what was knowable when it was made. Đổi Mới came from Hanoi looking at its own economic catastrophe and copying Deng, not as a maturation that the war's costs purchased. The decade of reeducation camps, boat people, and a command economy that nearly starved the country wasn't a toll paid toward 2026 Vietnam — it was a separate, badly-run regime making its own mistakes, which it eventually corrected for its own reasons. The "both sides were wrong" conclusion is right, but I'd state it more starkly than you have: the American side was wrong about what it could achieve and at what cost, and the Vietnamese Communist side was wrong, for a full additional decade after winning, about how to run the country it had won. Neither side's errors were validated by the eventual outcome; the outcome happened despite both sets of errors, via a course correction that had nothing to do with the war's outcome and everything to do with the same kind of regime self-correction question you've raised with me before about autocracies generally — except this is the case where one eventually managed it.

A statement such as the war was almost won is of course impossible to prove; war has its fog.  That the south promised to end up an autocracy was obvious but not a reason they were going to lose.  There was no push for democracy, the south just wanted to be independent/
4:01 AM

Good, that's a real correction and I'll take it cleanly: I conflated two different claims when I cited Thieu's uncontested 1971 election as evidence against southern viability. You're right that autocratic government and the will to remain independent are separable — South Korea and Taiwan ran the same playbook, repressive single-party rule for decades, and that didn't determine whether the state survived or what it became eventually. I was implicitly importing a democratic-legitimacy standard that wasn't the relevant one. The actual question is whether the South Vietnamese state and army had the cohesion and popular acquiescence to function as an independent entity, not whether it was liberal. Those can come apart, and I ran them together.

On "almost won" being unprovable — agreed, with a caveat. You're right that no one can rerun 1973 with funding maintained and produce a verdict; that's the nature of counterfactual history, full stop. But I'd distinguish two things under that heading: the claim is unprovable, which is true and forecloses certainty in either direction, versus the claim is equally supported in either direction, which I don't think follows. The fog of war cuts both ways — it means we can't be sure ARVN would have held with continued support, but it equally means we can't be sure it would have. The 1975 collapse is evidence, not proof, and you're entitled to discount it as a post-funding-cutoff data point that doesn't tell you what would have happened pre-cutoff. I'd just resist treating "unprovable" as license to treat "almost won" as the default rather than as one live possibility among a few.

So where does that leave the independence question, since that's the frame you're proposing instead of the democracy frame? If the southern goal was independence rather than liberalization, the relevant comparison set is Korea and Taiwan — both autocratic, both survived, both eventually liberalized once the existential threat receded and the economy matured. That's a real precedent for "autocratic but viable" working out over decades. What's different about South Vietnam, if anything — weaker institutional continuity, a less cohesive elite, lower legitimacy even on nationalist rather than democratic terms? Or is the Korea/Taiwan comparison basically right and the South's failure was purely a funding and resolve question on the American side, not a structural one on the Vietnamese side?

You are talking about things that I don't think are measurable or comparable from place to place.  Let me just say that the expression in HCMC  that one hears all the time is that they won the war, but we won the peace.  This indicates that they see that they are different.  They speak a mutually intelligible language, but still it was a different culture and separate nation that suffered aggression.  In the end things have worked out reasonably well, as they generally do, but at a terrible cost.
4:08 AM

That's a sharper frame than the structural-comparison one I was reaching for, and I think you're right to redirect — "is a state's cohesion measurable cross-nationally" is exactly the kind of pseudo-precision that doesn't survive contact with how different Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam actually were in elite formation, colonial history, and what the war meant locally. I was treating it as a comparative-politics question when you're making a more grounded claim from what's actually said on the ground there.

The phrase itself is worth sitting with. "They won the war, we won the peace" does several things at once. It concedes the military outcome without conceding moral or civilizational defeat — a way of saying we lost the war but we are not what they wanted us to become, and then watched the victors fail at governing for a decade before correcting course toward something the South, in its own way, had been oriented toward all along: a market economy integrated with the world rather than a command economy isolated from it. There's a real irony in that, maybe the sharpest one in your whole account — Đổi Mới is in some sense Hanoi backing into the South's economic instincts after having destroyed the South to prevent exactly that outcome. People in HCMC saying that to you, I'd guess, are pointing at that irony directly, not making an abstract point about institutions.

And "a separate nation that suffered aggression" is a real position, distinct from American domino-theory thinking and from the official northern narrative both — it's the framing of war and reunification as conquest, with reunification as a process to live with afterward rather than self-evident vindication. That fits with what you described in your other message: northern hard-line rule for a decade after victory wasn't experienced uniformly across the country as liberation, especially by southerners who'd built lives — including the ones, as you noted, who'd bet on the wrong horse and were paying for it directly, not abstractly.

"Things work out reasonably well, as they generally do, but at a terrible cost" might be the most honest place to land this — not a redemptive arc, not a vindication of any side's strategy, just survival and eventual adaptation purchased at a price nobody would choose if the bill had been presented in advance. Is that the note you want to end the post on, or were you building toward something more specific about what it implies for how you think about prediction and certainty going forward — given how this connects to the autocracy and error-correction threads you've been working through?

One little addendum: it bought time for the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and mainly Indonesia.
4:14 AM

That's the domino theory's actual defense, stated correctly — not "Vietnam falling would have triggered dominoes" but "the war, even while losing, bought the surrounding states the years they needed to inoculate themselves." Different claim, and a much harder one to dismiss.

The timing supports it. Suharto's destruction of the PKI in 1965-66 happened while the war was already underway — the largest Communist party outside China and the USSR eliminated as a political force in the single most consequential domino, and it happened on America's watch in the region, not after. Singapore and Malaysia were consolidating against their own Communist insurgencies through the same years — the Malayan Emergency was already won by independence in '57, but the political and security architecture that kept the MCP marginalized afterward matured during exactly this period. Thailand had its own counterinsurgency running concurrently, with direct American support partly justified by the Vietnam commitment. The Philippines had Huk remnants and later the NPA, contained well enough that the state never came close to falling.

So the mechanism isn't domino theory's literal claim — it's closer to: American commitment in Vietnam, however it ended, signaled enough resolve and bought enough years that the other Southeast Asian states could build internal capacity against their own Communist movements, mostly through their own actions (Suharto's, not Washington's) rather than through the war's direct military effect. The war could be unwinnable in Vietnam specifically and still functionally buy time everywhere else — those aren't in tension once you see them as separate effects of the same commitment.

It does sharpen the irony rather than resolve it. The cost was borne almost entirely by Vietnamese, the benefit accrued mostly to neighboring states, and the South Vietnamese state itself didn't survive to share in the regional outcome it helped purchase. That's a colder version of "worth it" than usually gets said out loud — worth it in aggregate, for the region, while being a betrayal of the specific people who paid for it. Sounds like the harder thing to reconcile than the war's outcome itself.


Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.