Most people think that America was wrong to fight the Vietnam War. But that only implies that they think it wasn't worth it. Our goal of stopping the North from conquering the South didn't justify losing 50,000 soldiers.

But that is not the same thing as saying that the goal was actually an incorrect one. You can be against the war and still think that it was wrong for the North to take over. Then again you could go further and be against that war because you thought the North was not in the wrong.

However if you are in that second category you have to also think that those presently in the South are at least as happy as they would have been had we not lost.

If you don't think that then you have no business feeling friendly to the conquerors, given that many of them are still alive.

Since Obama is showing such friendliness to them it is supposed to mean that he is in that second category. He is supposed to believe that not only was the Vietnam war not worth the cost but also that it was not worth fighting even if there was no cost.

And maybe it wasn't. But do most Americans feel that way? Do older Southern Vietnamese feel this way? Would Obama admits he feels this way?

Or, he can believe that the Vietnam War was not a war fought to try to stop the North from conquering the South.

Diem was a corrupt and antidemocratic dictator and I am sure that at least some southern Vietnamese were glad to see him go. I would consider it to be reasonable for someone to believe that Ngo Dinh Diem was worse than Ho Chi Minh.

Or maybe he thinks that whatever the motivations were 40 years ago, now it is time to support Vietnam because it is increasing in economic and political power and it is near China and more sympathetic to the US than most neighboring countries.

Yea its totally irrelevant, all that motivates the current thawing is that Vietnam is a strategic partner against China and specifically its aggressive expansion in the waters around Vietnam.

Man, I can't wait for the next instalment of Rethinking Historical Atrocities with David Sklansky.

There is actually an interesting question (why is the Vietnam War less popular than the Korean War?), but the bolded is insane! Obama's policy towards Vietnam is presumably based on his perception of American interests today, not his judgments about the merits of a 40-year-old war.

LOGIC FAIL.

Needs a probabilistic element.

If only 30,000 soldiers had been lost what percentage decrease in the number of anti-war camp would there be? What if 20,000? What if 10,000 US but twice as many Vietnamese died? How about three times?

David how do you feel knowing it is only the fact you are you that prevents your threads from being closed.

Lol seriously. We're friendlier with Germany and Japan than Russia now, so clearly we regret not joining the axis!! Bang up job as usual Sklansky.

Vietnamese refugee guy I work with isnt super happy about the way it turned out.

Boeing selling them 11 billion dollars worth of aircraft the very same day was a pleasant coincidence, don't you think?

Any boat people or people who spent time in a re-education camp are pretty much on the same wavelength.

We're only allowed one thread about Hillary and one thread about Donald etc. in this over thread-controlled forum. It's good that someone is able to create threads in a more normal fashion without having to have his thread crammed into an omnibus thread, like an all-history-related-topics thread for this one.

Many of the South Vietnamese who desired our support in the war were killed after the war. So they are not around to complain about the post-war suffering inflicted on the South.

Most that live there now were too young or yet to be born to know better.

I would think the logical Sklansky bucks line would be that we should have normalized relations the day after we pulled out.

The difference is that we beat them and they thus didn't achieve their aims. We wouldn't feel the same way if we had failed to beat them and they continued . Unless we now think those aims that they (would have) achieved weren't wrong (obviously not) or that so much time had passed that almost all the perpetrators are dead.

Most likely Obama is either feigning more friendliness than he actually feels or he believes that the goals of the Vietnam War turned out not to be a good idea.

That's fine. It was the degree of praise and friendliness in his speech that made me think of this. I was wondering if he meant it.

Or Obama thinks its in the best interest of the United States to strengthen relations with Vietnam now.

Thus he feigns undeserved friendliness.

By the way a few of you may remember that several years ago I took the sort of opposite position in a post where I noted that Vietnam was an exception to our usual situation where we can claim that we prevented great harm by going to war. That's obviously true of WW II and the Civil War but less so for others. But until Vietnam there was no way to refute that claim because we won our wars. In the case of Vietnam we could finally see if that great harm would come to pass. And since it didn't it, we could be more suspicious of the claims that many of our other wars were worthy (The first one certainly wasn't if the British would have freed our slaves as they promised.)

Again though I don't actually care about these subjects. I only bring them up when I see an aspect popping up that seems amenable to poker type thinking. We might as well be talking about whether to go for it on fourth and two. Or the probability that God actually came to Joseph in a dream to tell him not to worry about other men even though his wife he hadn't touched was pregnant.

This. Just like Nixon didn't go to China because he agreed with Mao on everything.

Not going to continue making the point that is continuing to be misunderstood. Nixon didn't heap the praise on China that Obama heaped on Vietnam. He pretty much implied that the country was fine now. Which means those who sent us to war were wrong to do so even if the cost was small. Thus the question in the title of the thread.

Vietnam underwent massive economic and political reform in the 80s. How Obama treats them now has no bearing what so ever on Obama's view of communist North Vietnams attempt to violently unify the country in the 60s. Not going to explain this to you any further.

The problem is your thinking always sucks and you never draw correct or reasonable conclusions from it.

No