Is there any realistic way the United States could have won the war in Vietnam?

>Add into this the fact that South Vietnam was a former French colony, and as a result of this a corrupt theo-oligarchy, and the only way to keep Saigon afloat was with constant infusions of fresh American blood.

This.

South Vietnam wasn't fucking worth all that blood and treasure.

Reminder that Lyndon Johnson's wife was a major stockholder in Bell Helicopter. Every Huey blown out of the sky and replaced was more $$$ in her pocket.

No

Ironically, Vietnam has a huge "the South will rise again" contingent.

Wow, the press was really in their pocket.

I was thinking more offering North Vietnam money and American support of reunification in exchange for them giving the middle finger to China and the USSR.

No, because the prize simply wasn't worth the cost in blood and treasure, and the American people knew this. There simply wasn't enough willpower on the American side, and for good reason too.

Also, if it had been won then China would have just pulled a Korean War 2.0 and invaded Vietnam.

Vietnam was literally the most unpopular war in American history outside of the Civil War. The media's negative portrayal was mainly a reflection of that.

Nuke Hanoi on day 1, don't give time to the soviets train a guerrilla

What happened is, Vietnam was on the backburner in the US from 1945 to the early sixties, and by the time that it became a major issue, the US had committed itself to South Vietnam so strongly that the white house thought that they couldn't back away without risking allies like Japan and Germany.

We became committed by sheer inertia, without ever consciously making the decision to tie our fortunes to theirs.

>China would have just pulled a Korean War 2.0 and invaded Vietnam.

They did that anyway. And lost miserably.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War

Among professors and their students that is. Also the Civil War comparison doesn't match because the Northern press was almost entirely pro-war despite the popular discontent.

Yeah, like Japan and Germany would've given a shit as long as the Marshall Plan shekels kept rolling in.

They would stay sited without an army of their own.

Sure. Just keep fighting. Stop caring about casualties as much.

It seems absurd now, but in the early 60s the US had

>gotten the absolute shit bullied out of them by Khrushchev in a conference that was supposed to thaw relations
>had their pilots shot down over the USSR
>had their pilots shot down (and killed) over Cuba
>had the Berlin Wall built under their nose
>had the Bay of Pigs fail miserably
>had the USSR move nuclear weapons into Cuba and had the situation end with status quo antebellum after a near-nuclear war
>de facto had a large amount of Laos annexed by North Vietnam
>had Cambodia refuse to fight commies
>had Indonesia sending troops into Malaya to go foment a revolution there
>had the first Chinese nuclear test

The majority of opinion, at the White House, at the State Department, and in the defense establishment, was that if we didn't draw a line somewhere and hold it, major allies would lose faith in America and begin to collaborate with the USSR.

*cease fire

yes: keep fighting

The Konfrontasi wasn't viewed as an American affair

Not so much Konfrontasi specifically so much as Sukarno's dalliance with communism.

At the time, Indonesia had the world's third largest communist party by membership.

A source on any of these claims?

This is bull, hes the tet offensive wiped out the viet kong and was a failure, but the media didnt know this, so why you expect them to have reported that is beyond me.

What was known was that for years the military had been basically saying the war was almost won and the viet kong were close to collapse and all of a sudden this massive offensive comes out of nowhere. Sure it was defeated but it was exposed that the army was either lieing or had no real idea what was actually happening in vietnam. Furthermore the idea that the vietnamese population supported the sourthern government was shattered.

So after that no matter what successes yhe army reported no one believed them.

Also when youre fighting to defend freedom and your explanation for losing is that the free press is to blame youre a retard. Its like the stab in the back myth all over again.

This misinterprets why Tet is viewed as a defeat, Westmoreland had said to the media a couple of months before that the NVA was a spent force and the war was in the bag, then Tet (the largest offensive yet) happens and makes him look like a total fucking dropkick

What's important to remember is that the Viet Cong weren't the only communists fighting in the South.

As soon as the Viet Cong became exhausted, the North Vietnamese began to send NVA units in their place, and the conflict became a conventional war

By 1972, the Ho Chi Minh trail was literally a four lane highway and the NVA were fielding multiple armored divisions.

>the free press
>muh nazis
They were certainly quite in uniform for a supposed "free press" not to mention their tendency to downplay North Vietnamese atrocities and hype up American ones.

>dog bites man
>man bites dog

Which one of these stories is more interesting.

Besides that, US reporters could operate in US held areas and not insurgent held areas. US war crimes happened in US held areas and insurgent war crimes happened in insurgent held areas.

It's almost like a free press isn't beholden to towing the governments line, imagine that!

Yes, bomb the north into submission, sure the jungle was thick but the united states had the capability to make it look like a world war 1 battlezone, and then stay on the defensive, let the enemy attack you with ground forces because it will almost always cost them more to attack then it will for you to defend, also invest into a proper air force earlier and don't let the Airforce fall into a nuclear bomb shuttle force.
Even if it isnt a 'win' if you cripple the enemies ability to fight or function it will be devistating to them.
The other issues would be China and the USSR funneling supplies into North Vietnam, but as long as they are paying more then you are financialy and in blood it will eventualy end in your favor.
There is no quick way to win in vietnam because all their supplies come from other nations so you can not strike at their industry. But if you take steps to remove their jungle cover, make it insanely costly to attack, and don't waste lives and materiel in attacks for territory that is worthless it will give you a better chance to beat your enemy into submission.

It's just so strange to that we still view the war as if those war time conditions still applied. It's like since we didn't know at the time we never did.
It's almost as if the media was towing it's own line, imagine that.

Keep in mind that WW2 and Korea both had official censorship of the press corps.

Johnson refused to censor the media in Vietnam because it would mean admitting that an actual war had broken out.

Also keep in mind that the journalists who covered Vietnam had been raised on conventional wars, so they kept waiting for the big, decisive clash that never came. This meant that they didn't filter out into the country to see what the VC was doing to the locals, and that they got increasingly confused and agitated the longer things went on without anything big happening.

Victory was impossible without an invasion of the North

Name some American mistakes in 20th century?

>Vietnam
Should've supported Ho Chi Min from the start

>India
Should've supported India instead of threatening to nuke them

>Pakistan
Should've not supported them

>China
Should've not gave China the keys to world economy.

>Russia
Should've nuked them from the start

>South America
Should've tied economy more closely

>Africa
Should've tied economy more closely

>Space
Should've continued space instead of defunding it right afterwards

>more bombs than the entire ww2
>agent orange and napalm to remove forest

Pajeet detected. Maybe if India wasn't so chummy with the Soviets the U.S. wouldn't have been chummy with Pakistan. Pakistan was actually pretty normal before the whole afghan thing.

see It wasn't the efficacy of the offensive that concerned America, it was the fact that there was an offensive at all. America had been told for months that the Viet Cong couldn't do dick and we'd win annnnnnny day now.

The bottom line is:
The Communists wanted it much, much more.
The South Vietnamese were incompetent and unwilling to fight, so we were in essence dying for a government that wouldn't do the same.
The Pentagon knew that we couldn't win with our current strategy. Maybe another strategy would've worked, but it didn't matter because they were persisting in a strategy that didn't work, and they knew it wouldn't work. That's why the Pentagon Papers were such a big deal.

We lost the day we deployed regular troops. The only way to win that kind of insurgency (see: War in Afghanistan) is to not invade at all and play the long game. Cultivate influence, buy power brokers, maybe a black op here and there. Wrong tool for the job.

Don't support a fucking despotic regime maybe?

>Is there any realistic way the United States could have won the war in Vietnam?
I used to think like many here did, that we would've won eventually. I beg you to read a book called a Rumor of War, by Phillip Caputo, to convert you as it converted me.

There's one part where Caputo's unit gets diverted from a big offensive, because one South Vietnamese general launched a rebellion against the government. So here is a large US Marine Corps unit, which has to STOP getting ready for a battle with the enemy, to START fighting the very people they're trying to save. So as they're marching in, they see US jets screaming overhead, going to bomb not the enemy but their allies.

South Vietnam didn't deserve our sacrifice. They didn't deserve the trauma it caused this country, in ruined lives, in political schisms, in how it shaped our country. While some of the soldiers were as hardcore as we were, the government was corrupt and incompetent and evil. They weren't capable of doing what it took to win, so why should we care?

Had the media potrayed the Tet Offensve as a """loss""" and without public outcry more resources would have been given to the war machine in vietnam.
Thus winning the war and possibly even lowering the deaths on US side.

Again, see , The Viet Cong were supposed to be life support. They were not supposed to be able to do shit. It doesn't matter if it was a loss from the Commies, they weren't supposed to even be in a position to fight a battle that they could lose.

Let's try an example.
Say a kid says hes going to beat the shit out of you and take your bike. You're scared, but your big brother says "Don't worry little bro, the cops found him and he's locked up in jail for a long time." So you breathe a sigh of relief.
Two weeks go by. Then one night you're biking home, and that FUCKING GUY lunges out of a bush. But at the last second he trips and falls and bloodies his nose on the concrete, before escaping into the night.
You're not going to care very much that the bully is hurt. You're going to be fucking pissed that your brother lied to you, right?

The Tet Offensive wasn't about losses, it was about trust, and the mere presence of such an offensive after months of assurances of imminent defeat evaporated all of that trust. The media was right to call them out on that bullshit, and you'd be thanking your lucky stars for the media if you were conscripted on your way to that humid shithole.

Whoops, should be
It doesn't matter if it was a loss [for]*** the Commies

by keeping public opinion high at home.

Giving them independence after ww2. Ho originally believed in democracy and drafted a declaration of independence that was word for word the same essentially as the US one with Vietnam put in. It was only when we betrayed him that he started to turn to Marxism instead.

the whole reason we betrayed them in the first place is because of the frogs. they threatened to pull out of NATO if we didnt help, and given that this was the height of the cold war we couldn't really afford to lose them to the soviets. we originally supported decolonization.

every where commies won, that place became a Soviet colony

Bit misleading but the US attitude towards India is primarily based off of Soviets attitude toward India. India had maintained neutrality throughout. Soviets helped India broker peace with Pakistan few decades before. So US felt snubbed. Nixon/Kissinger specially hated the Indian female president.

Pakistan was a military dictatorship. India was a democratic country. China was communist. Russia was communist.

The problem was US was too focused on cold war and forgot everything else aka the future. Now the big threat to US is not India or even Russia (which is a distraction) but rather China. It will be an existential threat to US in the coming decades too.