American involvment in vietnam war

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How can we explain America's involvement in the Vietnam War? To what extent did America get it "wrong, terribly wrong"?

America's official explanation for its involvement in the Vietnam War was the containment of communism and the liberation of the Vietnamese people. As is usually the case when nations involve themselves in war, the reasons for it are not as simple as are made out. In this essay I will argue that the allied victory in World War 2, the Cold War, and the national image, all played a part in America's involvement in Vietnam. Robert McNamara, the then Secretary of Defence, wrote twenty years after the war "We were wrong, terribly wrong." So how did they get it wrong? The blanket answer is their failure to see that victory was highly unlikely and victory without massive cost was impossible. Repeated advice to that effect from their own military experts and others went unheeded. The history of the Vietnamese response to centuries of attack by other nations, the extent of their desire for independence and justice, and the grass-root support for the iconic Ho Chi Minh and his motivated resistance movement were not taken into account. I will show that these factors together with civil unrest at home and an unwillingness to lose face are why America got it terribly wrong.

World War 2 ended in victory for allied forces with America emerging as a superpower. A new confidence after pre-war recession found it extending its interests around the world, with the aim of opening up global markets. At the same time, it was committed to protecting those interests against the spread of Communism, predominantly from Russia and China, which might threaten their Capitalist aspirations. Buzzanco (1999, p.16) summarises the U.S. post war agenda:

The United states had interests [I]n Europe, Americans hoped to rebuild Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and other countries along Capitalist lines while also using those areas to prevent the Soviet Union from spreading Communism beyond Eastern Europe, and in Asia, the Japanese, with American direction and aid, were being transformed into the foundation for Capitalist expansion and anti-Communism in Asia.

As self-proclaimed liberators of nations from poverty, and leading protagonists in the Cold War conflict between Capitalism and Communism, the stage was set for American intervention that would see military action for many years to come. The inevitability of this was seen by certain observers, who realised that there was but a short step between this containment policy and an indiscriminate globalism that could compel the United States to intervene militarily on behalf of weak puppet states in remote areas of the world - places, that is, like Vietnam. (Logevall, 1999, p.385).

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In the early 1950's, the French occupation of Vietnam was meeting fierce resistance from the Viet Minh, In response America began sending limited financial and military aid to the French occupying forces. By 1954, the occupation was virtually broken and the French hold on Vietnam was in dire straits. Conditions in Asia were seen as critical by the U.S. leadership. France was requesting urgent American assistance, and the Chinese Communist Party was gaining increasing power in opposition to the U.S. friendly Chinese government of Jiang Jieshi. The French situation and the prospect of an independent Vietnam posed two major problems ...

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