Who lost the Vietnam War?

a. Disposal forces → expendables.
b. She uses half court tennis. I would have used half board Go. If you concede half the battle-space, you lose because the enemy has sanctuary and can refresh to come at you again. He wears you down.
c. Le Duan. If there was a man the Americans had to kill, he was that man. Giap and Ho were “important” but he was Vietnam's Ben Franklin and George Washington combined.
d. Triangle 1 of action. Two big enemies court a smaller power. Russia and China want to tie down the United States in Vietnam, but they hate each other. They cannot agree on how to tie the United States in Vietnam. Vietnam sees this enmity and plays the angles.
e. Assassination. How do you delegitimize your effort? You whack your puppet leader. Diem was military couped. At that moment, there was no way to legitimize a war in defense of freedom.
f. How do you win hearts and minds? You bomb your ally and poison them. (Ever wonder how long McNamara would last in a Vietnamese court if they ever could have gotten their hands on the son of a bitch? We should have executed him, ourselves. Eta.).
g. Triangle 2 of action. Once again, the two vertices are the big ally and puppet regime. They hate each other. The Vietnamese play the angles.
h. Both triangles of action are mutually supportive but do not use the same methods. China and Russia are pitted against each other in a bidding war (Ideology). The US and RVN are pitted against each other in a mutual hate fest. Who wins? PRVN.
i. Negotiations → weaponize the process as propaganda. RVN is not even allowed to participate. How legitimate is America's puppet? Not very.

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in the background;

a. While Johnson and McNamara are busy becoming war criminals, what is the rest of the US government doing? Our professionals wait for some POTUS with brains, but in the meantime ” containment”, which is failing, needs a supplement.
b. Dependence. If China wants the good stuff, cut them off from the West and let them burden the Russians for it. This plays to that Triangle of action 3. Russia will begrudge their actual hereditary enemy. If you look at the current situation with China, this is exactly what the outnumbered and outgunned Americans do to them, today. The Braindead Beijing Bandits have the upper hand on Moscow, but they don't have oil, fertilizer, brains, or a functioning government, like they did in the 1960s. So…
c. Mahan. If you blockade, you drive trade costs up 12X. The US, for example, would energize its economy 3X minimum if we would use our canals, rivers and coastal waterways to ship goods. Instead, we truck. STUPID. The PRC until we relaxed our control inside the first island chain were forced to trade exclusively by rail with Russia. Guess what we just did, again? Interrupted Chinese trade.
d. Who is the main enemy in the China squeeze? Not China. Russia. They are the primary. Overload the demands on their industry and resources from their satellites. Watch them break up. Sort of what Putin thinks he does to us with his Ukraine war? We have to watch out for that one.
e. CoCOM. It still exists (IMF) in some other forms. Note that China is especially sanctioned to make them the most burdensome Russian dependency. Today that wedge still exists, but Russia is more of a resource basin, rather than a technology asset to China.
f. Taiwan crises. Russians and Chinese betray each other.
g. Great Leap Off The Cliff. Thanks, Mao. Killed 3% → 5% of your people, wrecked your economy and gave the US an exit strategy without the whole dominoes effect. Made your successor look for an ally. Who? We'll get to that one.
h. The SA-2 hypothesis. Our bombing campaign cost us 4,000 planes and 1300 pilots. It cost the Russians 200,000 missiles and 5,000 expensive and scarce advisors blown up. What? Our air farce actually knew what it was doing? We were working Triangle 3 very hard. I do not credit Johnson.
i. 1969 the Russians come to the US with a proposal. Let's nuke China, together. What? They were that STUPID to approach us? The Russians even put it in writing. The Russians and Chinese were fighting each other along the Amur. Uncle's satellites took pictures, so it was easy to figure out that Moscow and Beijing were just a couple of border clashes from a nuclear war. There were a LOT of Chinese, so Russia wanted to share the joy of incinerating them. Put it in writing, means Uncle will snitch. Now Beijing has an incentive to seek a new friend.
j. China and her new friend juggle the “go board”. This kind of neutralizes Vietnam as an American quagmire from the Russian point of view. Instead, they have to pull out half the troops they were going to use to invade Europe. They have to fortify 5,500 kilometers of Sino-Russian frontier. They have to point half of their rockets SOUTH. Uncle has found a sponge.
k. Dominoes averted. With China off the board, the US government can now leave their “puppet regime” in the lurch. The 2 Vietnams will duke it out on their own. The RVN loses, inevitably. We were chased out of the country, that is true. We were “defeated” that is true. BUT, when you are playing for a bigger table, and you are massively outgunned and outnumbered, you make that pawn sacrifice to reorder the go board.
l. Dung Zhao Ping, the guy who replaces Mao, in the confusion, tried a few things. The Paracel Islands were a success. The Khmer Rouge were a mixed bag. Direct attack on the PRVN did not go so well. Dung gets his reforms.
m. Tiananmen Square happens. Triangle 4 instituted. The PLA and CCP joined at the hip to make war on the Chinese people. The bribe is a literal bribe. The politicians and generals agree to loot the Chinese treasury. Later, the new business class joins them as a very junior partner. Corruption is built into the stabilization matrix. Fascism replaces communism. That is today's China.
n. In the meantime, the USSR goes POOF. The US strategic goal is achieved.
o. Who won? The Vietnamese unified. But they needed a new friend. Russia was gone. China was now an enemy. Where and who was left to counteract the Chinese?



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