1968: US exploid sino-russian split for possible US Victory in Vietnam?

I wonder if Nixon and US Government had understood to use the Chinese-Russian split which according to Wiki reached its peak in the late 1960s for a possible US victory in Vietnam?
Maybe saying to Mao we support You against the Russians if you put pressure on North Vietnam to stop their campaign in the South Vietnam?
 
I think that if the Us gov't had actually understood the nuances of political relations between different communist nations back then, the Vietnam war would not have been nearly the disaster that it was.
 
Maybe saying to Mao we support You against the Russians if you put pressure on North Vietnam to stop their campaign in the South Vietnam?

I just read Nixon and Mao: the week that changed the world by Margaret McMillan and apparently Kissinger tried to do just that during Nixon's visit to China. The Chinese basically told the US that they had never had that much influence over the N Vietnamese and that even if they put all their pressure on Hanoi that the Vietnamese would just rely more on the USSR and nothing would change.

The US never really understood that the N Vietnamese govt. was never as subservient to the PRC as the US though they were. years after the war Robert McNamara talked to an officer in what was N Vietnam who explained that, even under the most friendly period between China and the N Vietnam, the Vietnamese always mistrusted the PRC because of the long history of bad blood between the two nations.

So I think a better option would actually be for Nixon to do the exact opposite; offer to support the Soviets against China and in exchange the Soviets will threaten to turn the North over the Chinese unless Hanoi agrees to make peace with S Vietnam.
 
Bluntly, Vietnam was wholly unwinnable for the US. The North Vietnamese were never the pawns of the Chinese nor Soviets (as mentioned earlier, the Vietnamese had fought the Chinese for a thousand years), and the Vietnamese saw the war as it was, which was a civil war and (in their view) a war for independence, compared to the US who thought it was just an area of the Cold War and saw it as the North expressing aggression against a democratic South, and thought that the North were just pawns of Communist puppet masters.

You can broker a temporary secession of hostilities at best, but the North and Vietcong will strike back at some point (as they did in 1974) and continue the war as long as it would take. They suffered a death toll that, if it was the United States, would account for 70 million people, and they would fight generation after generation if necessary.
 
Bluntly, Vietnam was wholly unwinnable for the US. The North Vietnamese were never the pawns of the Chinese nor Soviets (as mentioned earlier, the Vietnamese had fought the Chinese for a thousand years), and the Vietnamese saw the war as it was, which was a civil war and (in their view) a war for independence, compared to the US who thought it was just an area of the Cold War and saw it as the North expressing aggression against a democratic South, and thought that the North were just pawns of Communist puppet masters.

You can broker a temporary secession of hostilities at best, but the North and Vietcong will strike back at some point (as they did in 1974) and continue the war as long as it would take. They suffered a death toll that, if it was the United States, would account for 70 million people, and they would fight generation after generation if necessary.

This is true but without food and millitary aid from China and the USSR the North couldn't have survived?
 
This is true but without food and millitary aid from China and the USSR the North couldn't have survived?

The North would have survived. It had enough food for its purposes and would have fought with sticks and stones if it had too (although it would likely just cannibalize weaponry and continue a tradition of rigging weapons like punji sticks and so forth). Vietnam would never give up. They had been fighting for their independence for thousands of years from various masters, and saw the US effort as an attempt to enslave the Vietnamese people and make Vietnam a colony. They would fight generation after generation with whatever they had no matter how big or small. And I don't think you could ever get the Communist nations to totally cut off support either.
 
The only way for the US to win the War is for them to have never allowed there to be one in the first. If we had just recognized Mihn's government who we aided against the Japonese, there would have been no conflict to begin with. We chalk that war into just another war the French got us into. De Gaulle demanded that they be given Indochina back and we let him have it. Mihn was not a communist to begin with, but accepted some communist ideals for aid in overthrowing a reinstated french colonial government/protecterate.
 

Hendryk

Banned
The only way for the US to win the War is for them to have never allowed there to be one in the first. If we had just recognized Mihn's government who we aided against the Japonese, there would have been no conflict to begin with. We chalk that war into just another war the French got us into. De Gaulle demanded that they be given Indochina back and we let him have it. Mihn was not a communist to begin with, but accepted some communist ideals for aid in overthrowing a reinstated french colonial government/protecterate.
The real culprit was Admiral d'Argenlieu. A process of negotiated French disengagement was underway when he decided that the uppity gooks needed to be put back in their place, and shelled Haiphong, killing thousands of civilians. The negotiations were abruptly cut off, and the Indochina War began in earnest.

Every once in a while you come across morons like him, who think that a political problem can be solved with the application of massive military violence.
 
The real culprit was Admiral d'Argenlieu. A process of negotiated French disengagement was underway when he decided that the uppity gooks needed to be put back in their place, and shelled Haiphong, killing thousands of civilians. The negotiations were abruptly cut off, and the Indochina War began in earnest.

Every once in a while you come across morons like him, who think that a political problem can be solved with the application of massive military violence.

So we have to remove "red china" variable for no Vietnam War?
 

Hendryk

Banned
So we have to remove "red china" variable for no Vietnam War?
If you have China remain non-Communist, it definitely decreases the likelihood of a Vietnam War taking place; but what I'm saying is that removing a single man from the picture may lead to peaceful independence, butterflying away the circumstances that led to American involvement in Indochina in the first place.
 
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