What are the reasons for losing the Vietnam war?

Answer 1

This question could be quite contentious, depending on who you ask.

Since the end of that conflict, there has been a debate as to whether America actually won, lost or just pulled its troops out.

If you look at any military account of the war, America was winning. But this was only after many years of battle, and many American casualties.

Even though the Northern Vietnamese Communists were the weaker side, militarily, their impressive use of insurgent techniques saw the conflict draw out over many decades. But this was one of the aims of their tactics; to frustrate the enemy. This was partly why the idea of tunnels was created, for the Communists to place themselves right next to the enemy (or in this case underneath them) so as to avoid being bombed from planes above.

Essentially, the decision for America to pull out was political. In this instance it came from public opinion.

The opinion that the Vietnam War was bad was mainly orchestrated by American university students and the media (with Americans having TV for the first time seeing the devastation and casualties). This was later shown to be a deliberate, highly organised campaign.

Since the fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 former KGB spies have written about and produced evidence to show that they had specifically targeted American university campuses and journalists (who had studied in those universities) for the purposes of changing public opinion and pressurising America's leaders to end US entanglement in Asia.

In the end, America not only pulled out, but (as the student movement would later come to be called) the anti-war movement pressurised the US to stop all funding to America's allies in southern Vietnam, resulting in their defeat by the northern Vietnamese Communists, which itself led to many massacres. As a result of the American withdrawal, neighbouring Cambodia was overtaken by another Communist regime, the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot. Under which one million Cambodians died.