The first was an anticolonial war between Communist nationalists and France, which, except for a period during the Second World War, when the Japanese took over, had ruled the country since the eighteen-eighties. There were two major wars against the Communists in Vietnam. They pursued strategies that seemed designed to produce neither a victory nor a settlement, only what Daniel Ellsberg, the leaker of the Pentagon Papers but once a passionate supporter of American intervention, called “the stalemate machine.”Ĭould the United States have found a strategic through line to the outcome we wanted? Could we have adopted a different strategy that would have yielded a secure non-Communist South Vietnam? Max Boot’s “ The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam” (Liveright) is an argument that there was a winning strategy-or, at least, a strategy with better odds than the one we followed. Political and military leaders misunderstood the enemy’s motives they misread conditions on the ground they tried to beat unconventional fighters with conventional tactics they massacred civilians. We got nothing for pretty much everything we tried in Vietnam, and it’s hard to pick out a moment in those thirty years when anti-Communist forces were on a sustainable track to prevailing.

At the height of the bombing, it was costing us ten dollars for every dollar of damage we inflicted. By the time active American military engagement ended, the United States had dropped more than three times as many tons of bombs on Vietnam, a country the size of New Mexico, as the Allies dropped in all of the Second World War. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.įor almost thirty years, by means financial, military, and diplomatic, the United States tried to prevent Vietnam from becoming a Communist state.

The vietnam war was first called