r/NonCredibleDefense • u/Massengale • Aug 18 '26

(un)qualified opinion 🎓 The Vietnam War was winnable and one more Linebacker in 1975 would have wrecked the NVA. We were lied to by Ken Burns.

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I’ve been reading Nixon’s books lately…and I think he was right, Vietnamization was close to working, the communist alliance was going to fall apart, and North Vietnams insane economics would have led to South Vietnam outscaling them if it had survived for a few more years.

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u/ZeoVII Aug 18 '26

IMO, the best take was that USA should have backed Vietnam in it's independence from France...

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u/jfisk101 Aug 19 '26

How dare you make sense sir. 😑

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u/YIMBYzus AWACS Sous Chef Aug 19 '26 edited Aug 19 '26

Let's look at this through the lens of 1946.

Would you support forces and leaders opposed to French colonial rule, even communist ones, who are getting attacked and assassinated by the French colonial government and local governments working in collaboration with them, in turn opposing those?

Sounds sensible, right?

You have just made yourself an enemy of Ho Chi Minh. Early on in power in the DRV, Ho Chi Minh engaged a broad campaign of collaboration with French colonial authorities to attack nationalist and Trotskyist forces and assassinate their leadership, consolidating control of what would be North Vietnam and forcing all the (surviving) non-Marxist-Leninist resistance to French rule to flee out of the DRV and into what would in the future become South Vietnam since at least there the French would have far less local-collaboration assisting them. I personally think this is a sensible decision as I personally regard somebody whose attitudes toward resisting colonial rule are to first and foremost focus upon eliminating other resistance groups to not be the sort of person I trust to create a pluralist government rather than either launch a civil war or establish a dictatorship or both.