U. S. ENTRY INTO AND FAILURE IN THE VIETNAM WAR
This research paper analyzes the reasons why the United States entered the Vietnam War as it did and why its military intervention in that war failed.
After initially opposing French colonial policy during World War II, the United States became convinced after 1945, and especially after the communist victory in China in 1949, that U.S. vital interests required that a communist takeover of South Vietnam be resisted. Toward that end it supported with military and economic assistance the French war effort in Indochina and, after the Geneva accords were signed in 1954, the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam.
During the administration of President John Kennedy, American assistance to Diem increased, including military advisors and counterinsurgency efforts, but when Diem showed himself incapable of marshalling public support for the war, the United States covertly supported a coup against him in November 1963. During Lyndon Johnson's presidency, the United States gradually escalated its involvement in the Vietnam War to shore up crumbling military regimes in the South by bombing throughout the country and introducing ground troops in 1965-1966.
After the communist Tet offensive of February 1968, the United States reconsidered its military commitment to South Vietnam, eventually resulting under President Richard Nixon in the phased withdrawal of American forces with continuing but diminishing American logistic and air support (Vietnamization), the Paris peace talks, the 1973 peace accord with Hanoi, the North Vietnamese offensives of 1974-1975, the rout of the South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) and the fall of Saigon in April 1975.
The American military intervention in Vietnam delayed but ultimately failed to prevent the absorption of South Vietnam by the Hanoi regime. The principal reasons for that failure were: (a) the political instability, corruption and narrow popu...