Whether defense of the homeland was at stake depended vitally on whether they perceived themselves as North Vietnamese or simply as Vietnamese. In fact the evidence is overwhelming that they regarded themselves simply as Vietnamese, regarding the division at the Seventeenth Parallel simply as a temporary demarcation imposed from outside.
Examination of the respective matrices for the United States and Vietnam thus made the outcome of the war almost fore ordained. On the one hand, Ho Chi Minh, his lieutenants, and the political leadership among Vietnamese Communists in general regarded success as a question of national survival. On the other hand, while individual American leaders (such as LBJ) might have a deep personal stake in the outcome, the American political leadership class as a whole did not regard success in Vietnam as a survival or even a vital interest, but at most as a major interest. Had the disparity between the United States and North Vietnam been as great as that between, say, the U.S. and Grenada or Panama, the difference in intensity of interest might not have mattered, since the weaker side could be quickly overwhelmed. But North Vietnam was not weak enough to be quickly bowled over, and in a protracted struggle of attrition, the greater intensity of the perceived interest of its leadership in a successful outcome proved to be decisive. To the American political leadership class as a whole, the game proved to be not worth the candle.
In the prenuclear age, the typical survival interest of a nation was protection of its homeland against invasion and conquest. Because the United States was in modern times a large, powerful, and geographically isolated nation, it seldom felt its survival interests to be immediately threatened in this sense, but for other major powers the potential military threat to survival interests has been much more direct. From 1870 until 1940, for example, France almos...