“When Henry Kissinger first visited Hanoi, to get over jet lag before sitting down to negotiate he scheduled an initial day touring North Vietnamese museums to learn about their cultre. They were all devoted to war. Uh-oh, Dr. K. thought, we picked the wrong side to back. “
Goto Egypt and you’ll notice they seem to have a similar obsession with their military and their relatively not terrible performance in the Yom Kippur War. I guess that is what authoritarian regimes can use as their claim to greatness because everything else sucks. But the show isn’t always indicative of martial prowess. You’ll something similar if you visit the Korean War museum in Seoul. If you are a Korean kid you’d think that the US played a minor role in the 1950s conflict.
how a Steve piece works for me: he mentions Chomsky being not dismissive of the domino theory, which I care little about, but it leads me to ask AI if Chomsky has ever weighed in on "hate speech," which is the concept that most bugs me, and I learn that Chomsky defended even "offensive" speech (holocaust denier), so now when I get paired on the golf course with some old hippie who trots out that cliche, I can go, "oh, so you disagree with Chomsky?" Should be fun.
What a discordant finish. Should the Ukraine lose to Russia, it will not be because the US caused it: Allowed it, perhaps, but certainly not caused it. It isn’t our war in any way, shape, or form, no more than was Vietnam.
In the early nineties, I was in California for a stint on Steve’s favorite game show. My host threw a little pool party one evening. Among the guests were a handful of Russian doctors, visiting after the Soviet collapse in hopes of improving their own health care system. Also invited were several young Vietnamese women. ( They looked much better in their bathing suits than did the Russian doctors.).
It was the most interesting party I’ve ever attended.
The doctors were completely overwhelmed by LA, laughing at the thought that the Soviets ever attempted to compete with a country of such casual affluence.
The Vietnamese girls had a darker view of communism. They had been on a boat leaving South Vietnam after the fall. Commies had intercepted their boat, boarded it, threw all the men and little kids overboard, raped all the women, and left them to their fate.
I’ll never forget that warm California night, the pool glowing blue and the palm trees waving. Loud Russian laughter and the girls quietly talking about the murder of their families.
"What a discordant finish." I couldn't agree more. It makes me feel that Steve's understanding of the situation extends only as far back as February 24, 2022.
In '88-'89 I represented an ethnic Chinese woman whose story was that, fearing for her life, she fled South Vietnam on foot with her 3-year old daughter, got to a refugee colony on Macau, was transfered to a Catholic charity in Iowa, and then was settled in Oakland, where she was raped by her county social worker. The issue was her emotional condition, so big New York defense firm had her evaluated over two days by a San Francisco psychiatrist. At deposition, he testified that every part of her story, starting with fearing for her life in Vietnam, was a fabrication (we got a nice settlement). I hate commies too, but I also hate whores.
I was 14 when the first provincial capital in South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese forces. That was in December 1974 and the North Vietnamese were just feeling out the South Vietnamese for weaknesses. But the situation snowballed quickly. The highlands went next. Pleiku? And then the North Vietnamese went for the South's thin waist. Hue and Danang fell by March. The rout continued and the army of the South streamed south and refused to fight. By April 30, 1975, the communists were in Saigon. The American effort to keep South Vietnam had lost and 58,000 American lives were wasted. Billions of dollars were wasted. America experienced a bitter divide that has never totally healed. And for what? A country with little strategic value and few natural resources.
Due to the American effort in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were dragged into the war and they fell to communist forces as well. But Thailand proved a bulwark. I believe our host is correct in his analysis that Thailand held on so well because it had never been colonialized by the Europeans. Further, Thais consider themselves different than Vietnamese with a totally separate history. In the end, the dominoes stopped at the Thai border.
In Iraq, we effectively backed the majority Shia against the more capable Sunnis the British had put in charge. Not sure how that's worked out for them, since the US media couldn't use it against Republicans since 2009.
If Sukarno had stayed in office, I suspect the situation in Southeast Asia would have been far more combustible. Not so much because of Indonesia's own influence so much as because of the orientation of the Indonesian Communist Party's orientation towards China. The Soviet leadership really did stake their claim to legitimacy on their image of themselves as the vanguard of a world revolution. After 1961 Mao set out to usurp that role, leaving the men in the Kremlin scrambling to assert themselves in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Therefore, so long as it looked like Indonesia might become a satellite of China, not only were Communist groups elsewhere in the region more self-confident, but the USSR had a strong incentive to give them the maximum possible support.
Once Sukarno fell and Suharto set to work killing off the Reds, the Chinese were left with only a few minor allies against the Soviets- the Khmer Rouge and some other obviously psychotic groups here and there, and later the Hoxha regime in Albania. Even so, the Soviet leaders' fear of China was one of the most important facts in world politics from 1961 to 1979.
Fifty years ago when I was ten I had a paper route in suburban Chicago. My employers would drop off bales of newspapers and inserts at the curb and I had to get up super early to bring the bales inside, cut the baling wire and stuff the papers with the local real estate ads and whatnot before setting out on my Schwinn. I remember that morning seeing that Saigon had fallen, splashed on the front pages of the Trib and the Sun-Times. The whole thing struck me as a serious bummer if also in some ways a relief.
I remember thinking then of my fears when I was four or five that I would be drafted to fight in the war. (My mother had laughed kindly and hugged me when I'd confessed my worries to her at that time and told me that I had to be 18 to be drafted. I remember nodding and saying okay, but also thinking: so it's just a matter of time...)
Anyway, later in a history course in college I learned that the border between North and South Vietnam ended up more or less exactly where the Vietnamese had stopped the Chinese long before, which did seem pretty significant.
I was too young for any contemporary 'nam thoughts. Did you have the impression that a lot of the reason we got involved in the war was just cultural habit? I have this idea that we were so pleased with our performance in WWII and so many new fathers had good memories of it that we developed this expectation that each new generation of American men had the right to their own war.
I'm not sure I had any big ideas about it like that at the time, no. And I may not have any now either, except that I wish we'd stop doing this sort of thing.
I read David Halberstam's book about how we got in. It seemed to me JFK/LBJ's people were mostly afraid of being tagged with "Losing Vietnam" as Truman's had been with losing China. So the war became about not losing. Sorensen's "Bear any burden in defense of Liberty" was a big check others had to cash.
I remember headlines about retaking Quang Tri, but I'm not sure if it was in '68 (Tet) or '72, when I guess it was done by South Vietnamese troops. My dad's ship went several times in '69 (he got a Bronze Star a year after), but my mother stressed the free Disneyland tickets to distract us.
I think it was hubris in The Greatest Generation. They thought that America could solve the problems of the world through American leadership, American government and American industry because each helped win World War Two. Think of the big policy initiatives after World War Two. The Marshall Plan. NATO. Korea. The Interstate Highway System. The Space Race. The Nuclear Bomb program. Civil Rights. Medicare. Medicaid. The Great Society. Vietnam.
The parallels are striking: two corrupt pits most Americans couldn't find on a map that we're supposed to be unreservedly dumping tax dollars into.
Vietnam culminated in an astounding 58,000 Americans dead, millions of rounds of ordnance, and we still lost. Kind of like the second war the US has lost in my lifetime. Twenty years and a trillion dollars, and the next generation of Taliban leadership just rolls right into the capital. There's also a confound in those tapering US casualties: troops not engaging and on the verge of murdering their commanders.
I assume your point is if we just give Ukraine more fighter jets and smart bombs then they will turn the tide against the Russians. I see no reason to believe this. I think you just get a bigger, uglier, more expensive war that grinds on for a few more years. And why the eff is this our problem any way? I don't care which group of Slavic oligarchs rules Ukraine.
Majority-minority America shows up in 30 years and the Russian-Ukrainian war will be as meaningless to them as the Spanish-American War is to us. We lost that one too: the Spaniards get to go home and be really cool Europeans and we're stuck with Puerto Rico.
WRT Ukraine, I think we just get ourselves worked up over a villain and we have a difficult time not thinking in comic book terms. Certainly our European allies have reason to be concerned what might happen if Putin won. OTOH the sophisticated among them must know that the Russian/European invasions have traditionally gone in the other direction.
Have you noticed recently how people no longer have concrete thoughts about the doom the bad man might visit upon us? I see discussion after discussion of head nodding about how dangerous the bad man is, but never any examples except immediately after the fact.
I'm not sure it's ever been otherwise. The anti-German propaganda of World War I was downright criminal, and classical liberal Europe was destroyed over it. We got whipped into war frenzy with cultured, civilized Spain, when they could have run the Caribbean for us. The Declaration of Independence reads like Moses before Pharoah.
I keep asking hysterical Democrats what infringement of their liberty they've suffered because of Trump and never get an answer.
Mr. Sailer makes an interesting observation in that Indonesia, population 280 million, makes such a small mark in world politics. Indonesia has twice the population of Japan yet punches below its weight. It is comprised of 17,000 islands yet about half the population lives on Java. It is 87 % Islamic in its religion but it has few of the fanatics that you see in the Arab and Iranian worlds. Indonesia has a GDP-PPP(Purchasing Power Parity) of $ 5 Trillion, 7th in the world and GDP of $ 1.5 Trillion, 16th in the world. Your average American is probably more familiar with Ethiopia or Burma than it is of Indonesia.
it is composed of (or comprises) 17,000 islands...which I only know because I read an article years ago about some guy on a one man crusade to purge Wikipedia of the incorrect use of 'comprise' :)
I’m not sure about the ending. What’s the actual probability Ukraine “wins” the war in any sense, a land war in Asia against a much larger opponent with nuclear weapons? It has to be pretty low.
And same with Vietnam, how likely was it the South Vietnamese would “win” in 1975, 15+ years into a civil war where, as Steve implies, most sympathies lay with their countrymen over foreign “armed missionaries” as Rosseau might have put it (who he noticed, nobody liked).
Enjoyed the piece, but my impression of both these foreign entanglements, not to mention our nation building failures in the Muslim World, is that America should stop playing games it can’t win.
A Ukrainian victory (actually a European victory for the Ukrainians' will be Pyrrhic) is that we feed them just enough war material to make the Russians grind themselves to exhaustion. Russia wins but lives on as a husk of the husk it is now.
I know some Machiavelli types who are slavering at the prospect. I ask them why and they get that confused look like when I ask people why they like travel or whiskey.
Either the NYT or WSJ had an article earlier this week about how Vietnamese in Hanoi are apparently very enthusiastic about meeting Americans and getting selfies with them. The story revolves around the museum celebrating their victory over us and has a bunch of captured American equipment., and obviously has a very nationalistic bent, but even military visitors are happy to meet Americans. The US is the largest trading partner so I am sure that helps with relations, but it sure sounds like they didn't hold much of a grudge.
This is a silly analysis. The Republicans are not "causing Ukraine to lose to Russia". Western powers encouraged Ukraine to repeatedly kick Russia in the back of the pants. Russia finally turned around and hit back. Russia is much, much, much larger than the Ukraine and much, much, much more military powerful. The end of this confrontation was never in question. John Mearsheimer said it plainly and he's been right all along: "Ukraine is going to get wrecked". Why the Western powers wanted this to happen, and why Ukrainians didn't see it coming, are the only real questions.
60 years ago, I was struggling to read Caesar' Gallic War, with a similar observation:"Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae ...."
Or, in English: "Of all these [Gauls], the Belgae are the most courageous, because they are farthest from the culture and civilization of the [Roman] Province, least often visited by merchants introducing the commodities that make for effeminacy, and most important are nearest to the Germans living across the Rhine, with whom they are continually at war."
An unsentimental social analysis by a commander in the field.
1971-72 I was assigned to the 169th Engineer Battalion. Construction. We were completing QL 20 from Xuan Loc to Dalat. Nice road though beautiful country. Since we were late in the ground war we encountered some N Vietnamese units. Seems we were being used to train some of the troops that used that Highway to assault Xuan Loc, the last defensive position of the ARVN before Saigon.
I assumed command of a company in 71. We stopped most construction duties and ran convoys to bring equipment back to Long Binh to turn over to the Vietnamese. Over 200 Vietnamese civilians worked for me as drivers and maintenance workers. I still have fond memories of them and have always wondered how many made it out.
The Americans needed to leave. The majority of the troops were fine, few in infantry. Mostly engineers, artillery and support units for air that supported the ARVN. The big problem was drugs. They were everywhere and cheap and GI’s were bored and wanted drugs and women. My unit left in April 72, same as the 101st in the north.
ARVN was immediately tested in 72 at Tay Ninh. Through their efforts and the support of close air support they kicked the North out and kept it going until the end we all know.
I became a rabid supporter of the Vietnamese and the need to continue to support them with our air support and material aid. The Democrats, the party that got us into the war, managed to use Nixon’s downfall to bail out, leaving most Americans thinking that they had ended Nixon’s war. The lies have continued ever since. The abandonment of the Vietnamese people is a crime that I have a hard time dealing with. Don’t get me started on Kerry and Jane.
Good to hear from you! I was on convoys in QL 20 and to the US base near Tay Ninh, among other places, in 1969-1970. A company I was in was withdrawn from the war, so I turned in its equipment, remaining supplies, and buildings, then transferred to another in-country unit. I think I was below average, but I did the best I could at the time. It is an ineffable experience when people try to kill you, isn't it?
(Edited to change "unusual experience" to "ineffable experience" 2 May 2025.)
“When Henry Kissinger first visited Hanoi, to get over jet lag before sitting down to negotiate he scheduled an initial day touring North Vietnamese museums to learn about their cultre. They were all devoted to war. Uh-oh, Dr. K. thought, we picked the wrong side to back. “
Goto Egypt and you’ll notice they seem to have a similar obsession with their military and their relatively not terrible performance in the Yom Kippur War. I guess that is what authoritarian regimes can use as their claim to greatness because everything else sucks. But the show isn’t always indicative of martial prowess. You’ll something similar if you visit the Korean War museum in Seoul. If you are a Korean kid you’d think that the US played a minor role in the 1950s conflict.
how a Steve piece works for me: he mentions Chomsky being not dismissive of the domino theory, which I care little about, but it leads me to ask AI if Chomsky has ever weighed in on "hate speech," which is the concept that most bugs me, and I learn that Chomsky defended even "offensive" speech (holocaust denier), so now when I get paired on the golf course with some old hippie who trots out that cliche, I can go, "oh, so you disagree with Chomsky?" Should be fun.
What a discordant finish. Should the Ukraine lose to Russia, it will not be because the US caused it: Allowed it, perhaps, but certainly not caused it. It isn’t our war in any way, shape, or form, no more than was Vietnam.
In the early nineties, I was in California for a stint on Steve’s favorite game show. My host threw a little pool party one evening. Among the guests were a handful of Russian doctors, visiting after the Soviet collapse in hopes of improving their own health care system. Also invited were several young Vietnamese women. ( They looked much better in their bathing suits than did the Russian doctors.).
It was the most interesting party I’ve ever attended.
The doctors were completely overwhelmed by LA, laughing at the thought that the Soviets ever attempted to compete with a country of such casual affluence.
The Vietnamese girls had a darker view of communism. They had been on a boat leaving South Vietnam after the fall. Commies had intercepted their boat, boarded it, threw all the men and little kids overboard, raped all the women, and left them to their fate.
I’ll never forget that warm California night, the pool glowing blue and the palm trees waving. Loud Russian laughter and the girls quietly talking about the murder of their families.
I hate commies without reservation.
Communism is evil.
"What a discordant finish." I couldn't agree more. It makes me feel that Steve's understanding of the situation extends only as far back as February 24, 2022.
In '88-'89 I represented an ethnic Chinese woman whose story was that, fearing for her life, she fled South Vietnam on foot with her 3-year old daughter, got to a refugee colony on Macau, was transfered to a Catholic charity in Iowa, and then was settled in Oakland, where she was raped by her county social worker. The issue was her emotional condition, so big New York defense firm had her evaluated over two days by a San Francisco psychiatrist. At deposition, he testified that every part of her story, starting with fearing for her life in Vietnam, was a fabrication (we got a nice settlement). I hate commies too, but I also hate whores.
I hate rapists and pimps more than I hate whores. If I ran America like Louis XIV, I'd execute all pimps and rapists.
How did you get the settlement with his testimony?
We had our own psychiatrist, made a much better impression. Cost me $20k.
Actually, Vietnam was our war. The US had made a commitment to defend South Vietnam.
I was 14 when the first provincial capital in South Vietnam fell to North Vietnamese forces. That was in December 1974 and the North Vietnamese were just feeling out the South Vietnamese for weaknesses. But the situation snowballed quickly. The highlands went next. Pleiku? And then the North Vietnamese went for the South's thin waist. Hue and Danang fell by March. The rout continued and the army of the South streamed south and refused to fight. By April 30, 1975, the communists were in Saigon. The American effort to keep South Vietnam had lost and 58,000 American lives were wasted. Billions of dollars were wasted. America experienced a bitter divide that has never totally healed. And for what? A country with little strategic value and few natural resources.
Due to the American effort in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were dragged into the war and they fell to communist forces as well. But Thailand proved a bulwark. I believe our host is correct in his analysis that Thailand held on so well because it had never been colonialized by the Europeans. Further, Thais consider themselves different than Vietnamese with a totally separate history. In the end, the dominoes stopped at the Thai border.
In Iraq, we effectively backed the majority Shia against the more capable Sunnis the British had put in charge. Not sure how that's worked out for them, since the US media couldn't use it against Republicans since 2009.
If Sukarno had stayed in office, I suspect the situation in Southeast Asia would have been far more combustible. Not so much because of Indonesia's own influence so much as because of the orientation of the Indonesian Communist Party's orientation towards China. The Soviet leadership really did stake their claim to legitimacy on their image of themselves as the vanguard of a world revolution. After 1961 Mao set out to usurp that role, leaving the men in the Kremlin scrambling to assert themselves in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Therefore, so long as it looked like Indonesia might become a satellite of China, not only were Communist groups elsewhere in the region more self-confident, but the USSR had a strong incentive to give them the maximum possible support.
Once Sukarno fell and Suharto set to work killing off the Reds, the Chinese were left with only a few minor allies against the Soviets- the Khmer Rouge and some other obviously psychotic groups here and there, and later the Hoxha regime in Albania. Even so, the Soviet leaders' fear of China was one of the most important facts in world politics from 1961 to 1979.
Lee Kwan Yew also praised US involvement in Vietnam for stopping the dominos from falling all the way to Singapore
Fifty years ago when I was ten I had a paper route in suburban Chicago. My employers would drop off bales of newspapers and inserts at the curb and I had to get up super early to bring the bales inside, cut the baling wire and stuff the papers with the local real estate ads and whatnot before setting out on my Schwinn. I remember that morning seeing that Saigon had fallen, splashed on the front pages of the Trib and the Sun-Times. The whole thing struck me as a serious bummer if also in some ways a relief.
I remember thinking then of my fears when I was four or five that I would be drafted to fight in the war. (My mother had laughed kindly and hugged me when I'd confessed my worries to her at that time and told me that I had to be 18 to be drafted. I remember nodding and saying okay, but also thinking: so it's just a matter of time...)
Anyway, later in a history course in college I learned that the border between North and South Vietnam ended up more or less exactly where the Vietnamese had stopped the Chinese long before, which did seem pretty significant.
I was too young for any contemporary 'nam thoughts. Did you have the impression that a lot of the reason we got involved in the war was just cultural habit? I have this idea that we were so pleased with our performance in WWII and so many new fathers had good memories of it that we developed this expectation that each new generation of American men had the right to their own war.
I'm not sure I had any big ideas about it like that at the time, no. And I may not have any now either, except that I wish we'd stop doing this sort of thing.
I read David Halberstam's book about how we got in. It seemed to me JFK/LBJ's people were mostly afraid of being tagged with "Losing Vietnam" as Truman's had been with losing China. So the war became about not losing. Sorensen's "Bear any burden in defense of Liberty" was a big check others had to cash.
I remember headlines about retaking Quang Tri, but I'm not sure if it was in '68 (Tet) or '72, when I guess it was done by South Vietnamese troops. My dad's ship went several times in '69 (he got a Bronze Star a year after), but my mother stressed the free Disneyland tickets to distract us.
I think it was hubris in The Greatest Generation. They thought that America could solve the problems of the world through American leadership, American government and American industry because each helped win World War Two. Think of the big policy initiatives after World War Two. The Marshall Plan. NATO. Korea. The Interstate Highway System. The Space Race. The Nuclear Bomb program. Civil Rights. Medicare. Medicaid. The Great Society. Vietnam.
My impression is every President since The Big One wants to be FDR or Churchill and every generational cohort wants to be "Greatest."
The parallels are striking: two corrupt pits most Americans couldn't find on a map that we're supposed to be unreservedly dumping tax dollars into.
Vietnam culminated in an astounding 58,000 Americans dead, millions of rounds of ordnance, and we still lost. Kind of like the second war the US has lost in my lifetime. Twenty years and a trillion dollars, and the next generation of Taliban leadership just rolls right into the capital. There's also a confound in those tapering US casualties: troops not engaging and on the verge of murdering their commanders.
I assume your point is if we just give Ukraine more fighter jets and smart bombs then they will turn the tide against the Russians. I see no reason to believe this. I think you just get a bigger, uglier, more expensive war that grinds on for a few more years. And why the eff is this our problem any way? I don't care which group of Slavic oligarchs rules Ukraine.
Majority-minority America shows up in 30 years and the Russian-Ukrainian war will be as meaningless to them as the Spanish-American War is to us. We lost that one too: the Spaniards get to go home and be really cool Europeans and we're stuck with Puerto Rico.
WRT Ukraine, I think we just get ourselves worked up over a villain and we have a difficult time not thinking in comic book terms. Certainly our European allies have reason to be concerned what might happen if Putin won. OTOH the sophisticated among them must know that the Russian/European invasions have traditionally gone in the other direction.
Have you noticed recently how people no longer have concrete thoughts about the doom the bad man might visit upon us? I see discussion after discussion of head nodding about how dangerous the bad man is, but never any examples except immediately after the fact.
I'm not sure it's ever been otherwise. The anti-German propaganda of World War I was downright criminal, and classical liberal Europe was destroyed over it. We got whipped into war frenzy with cultured, civilized Spain, when they could have run the Caribbean for us. The Declaration of Independence reads like Moses before Pharoah.
I keep asking hysterical Democrats what infringement of their liberty they've suffered because of Trump and never get an answer.
Mr. Sailer makes an interesting observation in that Indonesia, population 280 million, makes such a small mark in world politics. Indonesia has twice the population of Japan yet punches below its weight. It is comprised of 17,000 islands yet about half the population lives on Java. It is 87 % Islamic in its religion but it has few of the fanatics that you see in the Arab and Iranian worlds. Indonesia has a GDP-PPP(Purchasing Power Parity) of $ 5 Trillion, 7th in the world and GDP of $ 1.5 Trillion, 16th in the world. Your average American is probably more familiar with Ethiopia or Burma than it is of Indonesia.
it is composed of (or comprises) 17,000 islands...which I only know because I read an article years ago about some guy on a one man crusade to purge Wikipedia of the incorrect use of 'comprise' :)
I just looked it up this morning due to Steve Sailer.
It must be the humidity.
I’m not sure about the ending. What’s the actual probability Ukraine “wins” the war in any sense, a land war in Asia against a much larger opponent with nuclear weapons? It has to be pretty low.
And same with Vietnam, how likely was it the South Vietnamese would “win” in 1975, 15+ years into a civil war where, as Steve implies, most sympathies lay with their countrymen over foreign “armed missionaries” as Rosseau might have put it (who he noticed, nobody liked).
Enjoyed the piece, but my impression of both these foreign entanglements, not to mention our nation building failures in the Muslim World, is that America should stop playing games it can’t win.
A Ukrainian victory (actually a European victory for the Ukrainians' will be Pyrrhic) is that we feed them just enough war material to make the Russians grind themselves to exhaustion. Russia wins but lives on as a husk of the husk it is now.
I know some Machiavelli types who are slavering at the prospect. I ask them why and they get that confused look like when I ask people why they like travel or whiskey.
Either the NYT or WSJ had an article earlier this week about how Vietnamese in Hanoi are apparently very enthusiastic about meeting Americans and getting selfies with them. The story revolves around the museum celebrating their victory over us and has a bunch of captured American equipment., and obviously has a very nationalistic bent, but even military visitors are happy to meet Americans. The US is the largest trading partner so I am sure that helps with relations, but it sure sounds like they didn't hold much of a grudge.
China is Vietnam's largest import-from country and the USA its largest export-to country as of 2023. https://oec.world/en/profile/country/vnm
This is a silly analysis. The Republicans are not "causing Ukraine to lose to Russia". Western powers encouraged Ukraine to repeatedly kick Russia in the back of the pants. Russia finally turned around and hit back. Russia is much, much, much larger than the Ukraine and much, much, much more military powerful. The end of this confrontation was never in question. John Mearsheimer said it plainly and he's been right all along: "Ukraine is going to get wrecked". Why the Western powers wanted this to happen, and why Ukrainians didn't see it coming, are the only real questions.
The Dai Viet (Northern Vietnam)successfully resisted the Mongols (Kublai). History is a good teacher.
60 years ago, I was struggling to read Caesar' Gallic War, with a similar observation:"Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae ...."
Or, in English: "Of all these [Gauls], the Belgae are the most courageous, because they are farthest from the culture and civilization of the [Roman] Province, least often visited by merchants introducing the commodities that make for effeminacy, and most important are nearest to the Germans living across the Rhine, with whom they are continually at war."
An unsentimental social analysis by a commander in the field.
1971-72 I was assigned to the 169th Engineer Battalion. Construction. We were completing QL 20 from Xuan Loc to Dalat. Nice road though beautiful country. Since we were late in the ground war we encountered some N Vietnamese units. Seems we were being used to train some of the troops that used that Highway to assault Xuan Loc, the last defensive position of the ARVN before Saigon.
I assumed command of a company in 71. We stopped most construction duties and ran convoys to bring equipment back to Long Binh to turn over to the Vietnamese. Over 200 Vietnamese civilians worked for me as drivers and maintenance workers. I still have fond memories of them and have always wondered how many made it out.
The Americans needed to leave. The majority of the troops were fine, few in infantry. Mostly engineers, artillery and support units for air that supported the ARVN. The big problem was drugs. They were everywhere and cheap and GI’s were bored and wanted drugs and women. My unit left in April 72, same as the 101st in the north.
ARVN was immediately tested in 72 at Tay Ninh. Through their efforts and the support of close air support they kicked the North out and kept it going until the end we all know.
I became a rabid supporter of the Vietnamese and the need to continue to support them with our air support and material aid. The Democrats, the party that got us into the war, managed to use Nixon’s downfall to bail out, leaving most Americans thinking that they had ended Nixon’s war. The lies have continued ever since. The abandonment of the Vietnamese people is a crime that I have a hard time dealing with. Don’t get me started on Kerry and Jane.
I've long wondered if they got Nixon out SO they could abandon the South. Probably true of some of them. Useful idiots of the Soviets.
I think so. If Watergate was the crime of the century then Biden was satan.
Biden began his career at that time. His record of never being right continued for 50 years. But he made a lot of money.
Good to hear from you! I was on convoys in QL 20 and to the US base near Tay Ninh, among other places, in 1969-1970. A company I was in was withdrawn from the war, so I turned in its equipment, remaining supplies, and buildings, then transferred to another in-country unit. I think I was below average, but I did the best I could at the time. It is an ineffable experience when people try to kill you, isn't it?
(Edited to change "unusual experience" to "ineffable experience" 2 May 2025.)
Yes, it was a strange revelation, especially since they didn’t even know me.