How would things have turned out differently if the U.S. had not waged war in Vietnam?
Let’s just imagine for a second that we Americans just let the North Vietnamese turn Vietnam into a “communist state” when the French left after their disaster at Dien Bien Phu in the 1950s. And let’s just imagine for a second, that we took a political stance that rang something like this: “So you want to experiment with communism? Well, you people have been through alot. Knock yourself out! We’ll be over here, across the Pacific, doubling and tripling our standard of living. Let us know if you get tired of that Maoist thing….” I would argue that they would have had their experiment with communism, and then (as they are now) realizing that it sounded good, but in reality, didn’t work so well, just as the Chinese did. I recently read a good quote that illustrates this. An American traveling in Vietnam asked if the Vietnamese still hated Americans. The answer? “We don’t hate Americans…we want TO BE Americans…”. I would argue this might, just might, have saved more than a million Vietnamese and more than 55,000 American lives, saved trillions of dollars, eliminated a terrible period of strife in America (and Vietnam), and created another American ally, sooner rather than later.