In dealing with the question, "Who won the Vietnam War?", the answer is not all that obvious. Clearly, the United States and South Vietnam did not win the war. North Vietnam militarily reigned supreme and defeated its enemies, but the cost of 30 years of war made victory not so sweet. In the final analysis, it would be fair to suggest that, to some degree, everybody lost.
The conflict in Vietnam far predates American involvement. For centuries, the Vietnamese have struggled to gain independence from outside invaders--the Chinese, the Mongols, the French and the Americans (Gibson, 1986, chapter 1). The Vietnamese carried an intense sense of nationalism that no occupation government had yet been able to subdue. In the early 1950's, the United Nations mediated the Geneva agreement in which Vietnam was partitioned into North and South Vietnam along the Seventeenth Parallel. It was planned that Vietnamese forces unfriendly to the West would remain within the north, while South Vietnam would be fashioned according to western economic and political principles--much like what the United Nations accomplished in Korea. Ho Chi Minh emerged as the leading opponent to the U.N. partition when he established the well-disciplined military organization called the Vietminh. The Vietminh established itself as the premier voice of Vietnamese nationalism (Pike, 1978, pp. 15-24).
The partition was never agreed to by North Vietnam or South Vietnam (Higgins, 1965, p. 10). Most of its stipulations, such as demanding free and regular elections, were not abided to by either party. South Vietnam at the time was in a mess politically and economically. Many of the political leaders were simply political appointments friendly to the wishes of the colonial powers (first the French and then the United States). The economy was in ruins because of the exploitive nature of French colonialism. Later American efforts to develop South Vietnam's economy, ...