Re: Could We Have Won Vietnam?
I suppose we could have risked nuclear war with China and the USSR by nuking North Vietnam. That would have "won" the war.
But given the constraints that we placed on ourselves because of the threat of a larger war with the Soviets and China, we could have stayed there fighting to this day. Or left, like we did, and let the NVA roll in shortly after we got out.
A more useful question would be, "Would the communist Soviet Union have collapsed had the West, led by the United States, failed to pursue a long-term strategy of containment." That strategy had a lot of negative consequences. But, in the end, Europe did not fall to communism. And we didn't have to fight a nuclear war to see eastern europe liberated.
I always thought of Vietnam as a long, failed battle in a longer post-WWII ideological struggle for world dominance. Would the world be a place of representative democracies? Or of Soviet style dictatorships? I think in 1947, no body knew the answer yet.
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