Jakarta –
Today is exactly half a century ago, team United States of America (USA) withdrawn from Vietnam. At that time, the US lost the Vietnam war.
Reported by the BBC, Wednesday (29/3/2023), the eight-year war had consumed Uncle Sam’s money and energy, but the Viet Cong still won. How could a superpower lose to the North Vietnamese troops and guerrillas?
The BBC asked two experts and academics how the US ended up losing the Vietnam War. It was at the height of the Cold War, the communist and capitalist world powers were facing each other.
France, bankrupt as a result of the Second World War, has tried but failed to hold on to its colony in Indochina. A peace conference divided Vietnam into a communist state in the north and a US-backed state in the south.
But the French defeat did not end the conflict in that country. Driven by fears that all of Vietnam and the countries around it were turning communist, the US was dragged into a war that would last a decade and cost millions of lives.
So how did the world’s leading military power lose a war to an insurgency in the impoverished new nation of Southeast Asia? Here are two experts’ opinions on some of the most common explanations.
Fighting war on the other side of the world is a huge task. At the height of the war, the US had more than half a million troops in Vietnam.
Next up, US confidence and war costs:
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