What if no vietnam war

What if the United States had achieved the goal of helping the South Vietnamese win its civil war against the North? How might history have played out afterwards? The Vietnam War was the first major war to be televised and the horrific images that were beamed back to living rooms across America made the war feel more real.

The media coverage of the war fuelled the protest movement and eventually, the public outcry against the war became so significant that the government could no longer justify its role in Vietnam. The exact point at which the American public began to turn on the war was after the North Vietnamese Tet offensive of Although the offensive, which consisted of a number of surprise attacks across South Vietnam, was a crushing military defeat for the North, it turned out to be a huge political victory for them.

Up to that point, Americans were being told they were winning the war and the North were being defeated. The ambitious Tet offensive shocked the U. For an American military victory to have occurred it would have needed to of happened before public opinion began to turn. With the North now defeated, the country is reunited under South Vietnamese rule and is therefore heavily influenced by America. However, China is right on the northern border of Vietnam and it's unlikely they will sit back and do nothing.

The worst-case scenario sees China acting as it did during the Korean War of the early 50s and intervening to push American forces back. Looking at the best-case scenario, China and the USSR accept the result of the war but they continue to provide heavy support to rebellious communist forces continuing the fight long after the war has ended. This means the U. The Ho Chi Minh trail, the supply route used by Northern forces to get into the South, continues to provide Northern insurgents with a way of infiltrating the South and causing disruption.

The popularity of communism amongst the rural villages of the North and South, coupled with the fact that many Vietnamese view the Americans as an invading force - just like the French before them - means that the U.

At this point, the country could go one of two ways. Either the financial drain and insecurity of Vietnam causes the U. With Vietnam now united and free of violent disruption, the now fledgeling capitalist country can set about nurturing its democratic roots. The failed economic policies of the communist government from no longer occur in this altered timeline, meaning the severe poverty and starvation seen during those years is prevented. The U. Harriman was the one who messed up the Kennedy policy.

Harriman just hated Diem, and he worked around Dean Rusk, who was our secretary of state, to prevent Rusk from controlling policy. And as a result, Kennedy got conflicting advice, and Harriman in the end was able to arrange for the killing of Diem. The problem with that is, who takes over after Diem? Well, it is the military and generals. It was very hard for the generals to lead the state.

We did such stupid things that before the war was really being even fought, our strategy was so flawed that it made defeat very easy. There was a shift in policy between Eisenhower and Kennedy.

Eisenhower understood the strategy of the situation. He told Kennedy, the day before Kennedy was inaugurated, that he could go into Southeast Asia or not.

Eisenhower stressed that, but the Kennedy administration reversed everything that Ike had figured out. Kennedy was very foolish not to spend more time listening to Eisenhower.

There was a very strong element of social prejudice, and there was a kind of clubbiness about the Kennedy administration, a social clubbiness that made someone like Eisenhower unwelcome. Eisenhower was born in Kansas.

He went to West Point. He never went to Harvard. He never lived in the Northeast. The Bostonian Kennedy crowd looked down on Eisenhower because he was a West Point grad, because he came from Kansas, because he was not socially prominent.

By , there had been a big party fight in Vietnam, and a man named Le Duan basically became the strongman. He was the one who was calling the shots, and Ho Chi Minh, whom everybody had heard of, was sort of sidelined. Le Duan decided they were going to invade South Vietnam because he had been down there, and he saw that the South Vietnamese were not crazy about their government.

So by , they had already decided to invade, and that they were going to build a passage through Laos called the Ho Chi Minh Trail. In , there was already a kind of prototype of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It got much bigger, but it was already there in So even before Kennedy made his decisions, the North Vietnamese had already shown their hand.

Do you think Lyndon Johnson could have changed course and changed the outcome of the war after Kennedy was assassinated? Johnson had the opportunity to remedy the mistakes, but Johnson was a very self-centered man. View Iframe URL. Audio: Listen to this story. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.

For almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic, the United States tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state. Millions died in that struggle. By the time active American military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of New Mexico, as the Allies dropped in all of the Second World War. At the height of the bombing, it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted.

We got nothing for it. Could the United States have found a strategic through line to the outcome we wanted? Could we have adopted a different strategy that would have yielded a secure non-Communist South Vietnam? There were two major wars against the Communists in Vietnam. The first was an anticolonial war between Communist nationalists and France, which, except for a period during the Second World War, when the Japanese took over, had ruled the country since the eighteen-eighties.

That war lasted from to , when the French lost the battle of Dien Bien Phu and negotiated a settlement, the Geneva Accords, that partitioned the country at the seventeenth parallel. The second war was a civil war between the two zones created at Geneva: North Vietnam, governed by Vietnamese Communists, and South Vietnam, backed by American aid and, eventually, by American troops.

The more we look at American decision-making in Vietnam, the less sense it makes. Geopolitics helps explain our concerns about the fate of Vietnam in the nineteen-forties and fifties. Relations with the Soviet Union and China were hostile, and Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula were in political turmoil. Still, paying for France to reclaim its colony just as the world was about to experience a wave of decolonization was a dubious undertaking.

And yet that was when the United States embarked on a policy of military escalation. There were sixteen thousand American advisers in South Vietnam in ; during the next ten years, some three million American soldiers would serve there.

Historians argue about whether a given battle was a success or a failure, but, over-all, the military mission was catastrophic on many levels.

The average age of American G. By , thousands of them were on opium or heroin, and more than three hundred incidents of fragging—officers wounded or killed by their own troops—were reported. Half a million Vietnam veterans would suffer from P. People sometimes assume that Western opinion leaders turned against the war only after U. But Kennedy himself was keenly aware of the risks of entrapment, and so was his successor. People were still using that expression in By then, American public opinion and much of the media were antiwar.

Yet we continued to send men to fight there for six more years. Our international standing was never dependent on our commitment to South Vietnam. We might have been accused of inconstancy for abandoning an ally, but everyone would have understood.

In fact, the longer the war went on the more our image suffered. The United States engaged in a number of high-handed and extralegal interventions in the affairs of other nations during the Cold War, but nothing damaged our reputation like Vietnam.

It not only shattered our image of invincibility. It meant that a whole generation grew up looking upon the United States as an imperialist, militarist, and racist power. The political capital we accumulated after leading the alliance against Fascism in the Second World War and then helping rebuild Japan and Western Europe we burned through in Southeast Asia. American Presidents were not imperialists. They genuinely wanted a free and independent South Vietnam, yet the gap between that aspiration and the reality of the military and political situation in-country was unbridgeable.

They could see the problem, but they could not solve it. Political terms are short, and so politics is short-term. The main consideration that seems to have presented itself to those Presidents, from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon, who insisted on staying the course was domestic politics—the fear of being blamed by voters for losing Southeast Asia to Communism.

It was a costly calculation. One of these was John Paul Vann, a lieutenant colonel in the Army who was assigned to a South Vietnamese commander in , at a time when Americans restricted themselves to an advisory role. It seemed to Vann that South Vietnamese officers were trying to keep their troops out of combat.

They would call in air strikes whenever they could, which raised body counts but killed civilians or drove them to the Vietcong. Vann cultivated some young American journalists—among them David Halberstam, of the New York Times, and Neil Sheehan, of United Press International, who had just arrived in Vietnam—to get out his story that the war was not going well.

He wanted the United States to win. He was all about killing the enemy. But his efforts to persuade his superiors in Vietnam and Washington failed, and he resigned from the Army in He returned to Vietnam as a civilian in , and was killed there, in a helicopter crash, in Sheehan was in Vietnam, and he knew Vann and the people Vann worked with.

Lansdale was at various times an officer in the Army and the Air Force, but those jobs were usually covers. For much of his career, he worked for the C. He was brought up in California. He attended U. During the war, Lansdale worked Stateside, but in , shortly after the Japanese surrender, he was sent to the Philippines.

It was there that he had the first of his professional triumphs. He ran covert operations to help the Philippine government defeat a small-scale Communist uprising, and he supervised the candidacy of a Filipino politician named Ramon Magsaysay and got him elected President, in To assist in that effort, Lansdale created an outfit called the National Movement for Free Elections.

It was funded by the C. He was a fabricator of fronts, the man behind the curtain. The Soviets, of course, operated in exactly the same way, through fronts and election-fixing. The Cold War was a looking-glass war. In , fresh from his success with Magsaysay, Lansdale was sent to South Vietnam by the director of the C.

The Communists in question were, of course, Vietnamese opposed to a government put in place and propped up by foreign powers. As Boot explains, Vietnam was a different level of the game. The Philippines was a former American colony. Almost all Filipinos were Christians. They liked Americans and had fought with them in the war against Japan. English was the language used by the government. The Vietnamese, by contrast, had had almost no experience with Americans and were proud of their two-thousand-year history of resistance to foreign invaders, from the Chinese and the Mongols to the French and the Japanese.