Lessons learned from the American experience in the Vietnam War

Vietnam

Diplomatic Negotiation:

Since the end of World War II, the United States and some of the other western countries were agreed that Communism was the greatest scourge and danger to the free world that was currently in existence. Following the creation of the Truman Doctrine and the heightened fear of Communism in the 1950s and early 1960s, the United States made it clear that they would do whatever was necessary to prevent the spread of Communism. The Domino Theory was one wherein the people believed that if Asia fell into Communism, then the rest of the world could potentially fall to it as well. France was the colonial ruler of Vietnam and had a continued presence in that country well into the twentieth century. Negotiations between various leaders established the creation of North and South Vietnam in the hopes that the Communist Vietcong would remain satisfied with dominion in the North, a belief which proved incorrect when South Vietnam was later invaded.

Presidential Leadership:

During the latter half of the 20th century, the country of Vietnam became a warzone. North Vietnam, led by the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, invaded the Capitalist governed South Vietnam and it embroiled the United States into an armed conflict from which the world would not soon recover. From 1955 until 1963, South Vietnam was led by a man named Ngo Dinh Diem who was made president of the country following the French decolonization of the country. Despite his support from other Capitalistic governments, Diem was a vastly corrupt man who created a governmental policy based on religious intolerance and severe restrictions of personal freedoms. On November 2nd, 1963 a coup d'etat overran Diem's government and resulted in his death. The United States and the people of South Vietnam worked together to overtake the government when it became apparent that Diem was not the man necessary to create democracy.

Cultural/Social Contexts:

Everything that happens in the past will have a direct relation on the rest of the events that occur in any given time or place. The events that occurred in Vietnam in the time before the present moment have led directly to the way the country is organized and governed now. Vietnam was taken over by France and became a colony of the European nation. Historically, it has been shown that colonized nations become psychologically oppressed by the empirical country. This has a direct relationship with the fact that they people were sociologically oppressed by the dominant country. Instead of having an individual identity as a nation, the country was instead just a part of the larger France which then gave a notion to superiority and inferiority to the relationship between colonizer and the colonized.

Conclusion: