The course of negotiations will then determine whether or not the two sides were correct in supposing that a negotiated settlement could be reached; if either side decides in the negative the negotiations will break down, as happened in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations (with the result not of formal war but at least of a more warlike condition between them).
The United States, however, entered into the Vietnam War in a way that effectively precluded negotiation in advance of hostilities. The process of entry into the war is outside the scope of this discussion, but American entry into the war was not as gradual as it has come to be seen in retrospective popular belief; the main escalation from "military advisors" in the low tens of thousands to regular combat troops in the hundreds of thousands took place in months rather than years (Prados, 1995, pp. 102-103).
However, this escalation was initially viewed by American policymakers as a relatively short-term expedient to help an ally hold on through a crisis, and it seems to have been assumed initially that intervention was certain to be successful. Hence no consideration was given to the alternative of negotiation. Robert S. McNamara takes himself and his fellow policymakers to task for, subsequently, failing to grasp the extent of the predicament that they had entered into (McNamara et al., 1999, p. 221). The unwritten corollary is that even less thought was given to the full implications at the entry stage. Hence there was no prospect of negotiations to prevent the escalation to war; American participation in the war was already fully underway before negotiation appeared even as a possible alternative.
A further dimension of the war contributed to removing the option of "preventive" negotiation. Since the United States was involved initially to bolster South Vietnam, an ally already at war, it was only South Vietnam that could have sought negotiations in the ...