berserkfan wrote: It would be excellent if Trump made it into office. The powers that be would see the message- ordinary people are few up with the assumptions of modern politics.
Because raising fascist authoritarian populists to power has worked so well everywhere else it’s been tried, right?
USA shed so much (Vietnamese civilian) blood because they were 100% obsessed with the notion that Vietnamese were going to conquer Southeast Asia.
Absolutely nobody thought that Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese were going to “conquer Southeast Asia”. That summary is
not even wrong. The Vietnam war was a proxy war between the US / Western Europeans and China / USSR. After World War II, American policymakers (with some mix of legitimate fears and paranoid fantasy) were terrified that the Soviets would gain a foothold around the world, which they would use to threaten Western economic interests and have a military advantage in the case of another “hot” war. Beyond the growing stockpiles of nuclear weapons on both sides, there was intense jockeying for power around the world, with both the Americans and Soviets backing various “friendly” governments (often nasty dictatorships) wherever they could, or supporting armed rebels in countries with “unfriendly” governments.
From the US side, the regional context was (a) the American backing of Chiang Kai-shek, who ended up on the losing side of the Chinese Communist Revolution, and (b) the war in Korea, which was fought to basically a stalemate against the (PRC) Chinese and Soviets. WWII was, to say the least, a tumultuous time, and in the 40s–60s, it wasn’t obvious to anyone that the world would settle down into any kind of stable order.
* * *
Vietnam, which along with Laos/Cambodia had been a French colony, got thrown into a bit of a limbo in the 40s, as the French didn’t really have the military strength to hold onto it, and the country came under Japanese occupation. I’m not an expert, but from what I remember, the Japanese basically brought down all the previous (French) governing structures, and IIRC the Americans (as well as the Chinese, etc.) supported the Viet Minh in opposition to Japan. After WWII, the Republic of China and Britain had some joint occupation for a while, and then the Allies wanted to give control/influene back to France. With PRC and Soviet backing, the Viet Minh formed a new government in Hanoi to fight the French and the French-backed South Vietnamese government in Saigon. The US government, in the middle of the Korean war, sent money and weapons to help the French, but ultimately decided it was too costly to send American troops. Thus through the 50s, there was a partition in Vietnam between north/south, though the south in particular was still in continuous civil war between Diem’s government and various rebel groups.
[On the other side of the world, this is the same time as the Cuban Missile Crisis, and US and USSR tensions were high. On the other side of SE Asia, the non-aligned democratic government in Burma (a country which had up through WWII been a British colony) was overthrown by a communist military junta. Decolonization was happening throughout the world, and the US had a high-level strategy of “containment” of the USSR and China, wherein the Americans would try to avoid world war, but would work to keep the USSR or China from controlling or influencing previously friendly proxy states.]
Diem was deeply unpopular, his government was weak, and some in the US government thought he wouldn’t be able to hold on. The CIA supported a military coup in the early 60s in which Diem was murdered. A few weeks later US President Kennedy was assassinated.
It’s not totally clear to me what all of Lyndon Johnson’s motivations were (e.g. was he trying to drum up domestic support through military action?), and I still don’t think there’s a full historical accounting of what really went down in the Gulf of Tonkin incident, but in any case Johnson’s foreign policy was aggressively anti-communist, and he decided to plunge the US into full-scale war, sending hundreds of thousands of ground troops in 1965.
I’m not going to reprise the history of the war here. I think it was shortsighted, horrible, and a disaster for US interests in the region and the world. If you want you can read plenty of books about the subject.
