Quote:
Originally Posted by Raellus
You're right. Granted, it's apples to oranges, but "the politicians wouldn't let us win" narrative about the Vietnam War has been overplayed by American military apologists. Although the we didn't go so far as to invade North Vietnam or use nuclear weapons, the US did indeed try very hard to win. By 1968, we had half-a-million troops on the ground in South Vietnam, and US combat troops in Vietnam spent more time in active combat zones than they did in either world war. In addition, we dropped a greater tonnage of bombs on North Vietnam during the conflict than we did versus the combined Axis Powers in WWII (and with more accuracy, to boot).
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With the benefit of long hindsight, I think the biggest factor in the US losing the Vietnam War was that US political leaders as well as the leaders of the military and intelligence services fundamentally misunderstood Indochina's history from the Vietnamese perspective. Ho Chi Minh was very much an "accidental communist". Literally the only reason he became a communist was that his repeated attempts to have a seat at the table at the Paris Peace Accords in 1919 and 1920 were ignored. It was the same after World War II. The US very much could have chosen a different path with respect to supporting France's continued colonialism in Indochina, but chose not to (and flying in the face of its own decades-long proclamations on the right of peoples to choose how to be governed in their own lands). The Viet Minh were patriots, flighting for self determination. In the end the only support they could get was from the Soviet Union and Maoist China.
I mention these events because taking into account the tendency for the US, the UK, my own country, to misunderstand the motivations of its adversaries can absolutely be used in our various attempts to devise alt-histories that would bring about the Twilight War. Likewise the tendencies of the Warsaw Pact nations and other belligerents to misunderstand the motivations of the US and the NATO countries. I really enjoy seeing those elements in T2K alt-histories, because that sort of thing has resulted in wars and the direction of conflicts countless times in human history.