As someone who lives in Vietnam, I'd disagree with this statement. It functions at the whim of all of the foreign investment, not of any particular genius on its part.
As for who won what, it's way more nuanced then you are presenting.
The US wasn't really in Vietnam to win anything, but there to stop the North from capturing the South, which it did quite easily until the money dried up. There was a reason the US never went north of the 17th parallel and it wasn't because the North was beating them back. Saigon didn't fall until two years after the US pulled out.
Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out. The NVA rarely won a battle in military terms. The Tet Offensive was a failure too, from a military perspective anyways.
I don't personally believe the US should have been here and am anti-war in most circumstances, but growing up in a household with three Vietnam vets (my grandfather served in Saigon for 8 years as a Colonel, my dad, my uncle died in Danang) I'm fairly studied on the situation. I don't think anyone "won", especially after living here for five years. Everyone was a loser imho.
> The US wasn't really in Vietnam to win anything, but there to stop the North from capturing the South, which it did quite easily until the money dried up.
[...]
> Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out.
But that's just not how wars work. No politician goes to war to get a good kill ratio. It's a question of strategic objectives. AFAIK, the dominant theory on the US side was that once the incompetently-led South Vietnam fell to the North, the "domino effect" would turn the rest of Southeast Asia into a bastion of godless communists. The US lost due in a large part to political factors, but anyone thinking that military factors are the only important thing in war shouldn't really be allowed to take any strategic decision. There is just no question that North Vietnam, on the other hand, achieved its own strategic objectives and won.
Vietnam was the first modern asymmetric war. Overwhelming military superiority simply did not translate into victory, and short of total genocide it could have never been otherwise. It is a shame that all those lessons were so easily "unlearnt" after a single successful campaign (Kuwait), resulting in the mess that were (and are) Iraq and Afghanistan today.
It's weird: on one side, killing more people than your adversaries is not as important as it once was, but this means that conflicts are now harder to solve on the battlefield, so they tend to be longer and more bloody than before.
I subscribed to the standard leftist narrative about the war until I actually moved here and spent five years traveling around the country and speaking to people on the ground. Exactly as you say, the truth is much more nuanced. It was a complex war fought for different reasons by different people.
And anyone that has lived here can tell you that the ruling communist kleptocracy is no friend of the Vietnamese people.
Agree. But the alternative would be a diem-type junta that also killed people in large numbers but didn't care for the 90% of the population that were peasants. You'd probably get something closer to a central african state where multinationals exploit and the political class gets rich at the expense of the majority
The current government doesn't care about the working class either. They're too busy siphoning cash off into their offshore nest eggs. A political elite class getting rich at the expense of the majority describes modern Vietnam exactly.
That's why minimum wage got bumped 13-15% in 2015? Geez. Thailand and Malaysia have barely progressed since 2000. Vietnam's growth has been off the charts.
Inflation has also been out of control. Ask any random working class Vietnamese and they'll tell you they're having more trouble making ends meet now than several years ago. And most people are predicting a huge banking crisis thanks to bad loans made to cronies of the party leaders. I wouldn't trust economic figures coming out of Vietnam any more than I would from China.
Centralized economies encourage corruption and stifle growth. Vietnam is no exception.
I've been in and out of Vietnam since the 90s. It takes a long long time to bring up the working class. You could substitute your statement for Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand; all of which have had democracies for a long time. All corrupt without exception.
And Vietnam doesn't have a centralized economy any more. And neither does China. Your rants sound like the standard rants of everyone who wants to be willfully ignorant of development in these countries. "They aren't progressing because their stats are false. Why? Because I said so!". Nevermind the rise in real wages and standards of living.
As someone who lives in Vietnam, I'd disagree with this statement. It functions at the whim of all of the foreign investment, not of any particular genius on its part.
As for who won what, it's way more nuanced then you are presenting.
The US wasn't really in Vietnam to win anything, but there to stop the North from capturing the South, which it did quite easily until the money dried up. There was a reason the US never went north of the 17th parallel and it wasn't because the North was beating them back. Saigon didn't fall until two years after the US pulled out.
Militarily, the US was maintaining a kill ratio of 134:1 until the pull out. The NVA rarely won a battle in military terms. The Tet Offensive was a failure too, from a military perspective anyways.
I don't personally believe the US should have been here and am anti-war in most circumstances, but growing up in a household with three Vietnam vets (my grandfather served in Saigon for 8 years as a Colonel, my dad, my uncle died in Danang) I'm fairly studied on the situation. I don't think anyone "won", especially after living here for five years. Everyone was a loser imho.