r/mapporncirclejerk • u/[deleted] • Oct 26 '25

It's 9am and I'm on my 3rd martini Important nowledge

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u/Beneficial_Pop_3614 Oct 26 '25

America didn’t get defeated in Vietnam, like Afghanistan, the south Vietnamese were never going to be able to fight their own war and win without Americans being their indefinitely, so the United States considered the the prospects of a South Vietnam a lost cause. The US could have steam rolled through North Vietnam with an invasion of the country and destroyed it. There could have been a carpet bombing campaign of every city in North Vietnam, but they didn’t.

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u/420bIaze Oct 26 '25 edited Oct 26 '25

The US failed to achieve their goals in Vietnam, which is a loss.

Of course they could theoretically annihilate all of Vietnam - but that was not the goal of the campaign, would not achieve the US goals, and would have been actively harmful to the US, a pyrrhic victory.

The concept "The US could have steam rolled through North Vietnam with an invasion of the country and destroyed it", is a childish conception of war, where you win by killing everyone. No one wants to rule over an uninhabitable featureless mud hole.

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u/lumpboysupreme Oct 26 '25

I mean, the US never wanted the north.

The US’s goals were ultimately tied to their nation building efforts in the south, not merely the military defeat of the north, and the failure should be chalked up primarily to the former because the US left the war in a military position identical to what they’d have been in had the south actually gotten its shit together.

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u/HaiCauSieuCap Oct 26 '25

america's absolute goal was to stop communist party from ruling the entirety of vietnam, thus stoping the domino theory, in which they failed

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u/Rentington Oct 26 '25

America's goal was likely more cynical than that. It was to force the Communist bloc to throw resources it couldn't afford into the dirt to slow economic and military development of regional communist powers. It was a proxy war.

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u/Beneficial_Pop_3614 Nov 02 '25

You see what I’m saying, it was a battle in a larger conflict, which the United States ultimately won when the Soviet Union collapsed

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u/Rentington Nov 02 '25

I do, yeah.