AHC/WI: No Vietnam War

Will Kürlich Kerl said:
Back to 1940; Japan doesn't invade Indochina.
JVM said:
Why did we not think of this before? That makes fine sense.
Because it's the most outrageously improbable of the options offered so far?:rolleyes: To achieve this, you'd have to kill off the entire IJA General Staff & most of the officers Col & above of the Kwantung Army, & do it around 1936, before Japan became mired in an unwinnable war in China.

How you achieve that short of a convenient asteroid, IDK.:rolleyes:

If you like this idea, what's wrong with FDR telling France to go screw?:confused:
Ho was, first and foremost, a nationalist. He was also, of course, a communist ...
I think he'd have been willing to head a 'popular front' government, possibly even one that was semi democratic.
I have real doubts he'd have done anything like allow a genuine democracy, given the OTL outcome, seeing he was a Communist. IMO, that trumps his claims to nationalist credentials.
 
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If you like this idea, what's wrong with FDR telling France to go screw?
Hey man, relax. The whole damn thing's improbable, that's why it's speculative fiction and not history.
 
Bumping phx's reply about likelihood of IJA not invading FIC!

I've said too many times to count that the US could've avoided the Vietnam War several ways:

  • Getting France to accept devolution to Viet Minh control gracefully in 1945.
  • Diplomatically recognizing the PRC off the bat in 1949 and establishing soome sort of defense and economic cooperation deal that butterflies the Korean War and Vietnam wars at a stroke and the Great Leap Backward.
  • Allowing the plebescite in 1954 to go through and unite all of Vietnam under Viet Minh control w/o trying to preserve French colonialism in the RVN.
  • As y'all have mentioned, Tricky Dicky winning 1960 election and not feeling quite so needy to prove himself a Cold Warrior as JFK and especially LBJ were IOTL.
Any of the above would've worked
 
TxCoatl1970 said:
I've said too many times to count that the US could've avoided the Vietnam War several ways:

  • Getting France to accept devolution to Viet Minh control gracefully in 1945.
  • Diplomatically recognizing the PRC off the bat in 1949 and establishing soome sort of defense and economic cooperation deal that butterflies the Korean War and Vietnam wars at a stroke and the Great Leap Backward.
  • Allowing the plebescite in 1954 to go through and unite all of Vietnam under Viet Minh control w/o trying to preserve French colonialism in the RVN.
  • As y'all have mentioned, Tricky Dicky winning 1960 election and not feeling quite so needy to prove himself a Cold Warrior as JFK and especially LBJ were IOTL.
Any of the above would've worked
Why is giving Vietnam over to the Viet Minh a good thing?:confused::confused:
 
LSS, we avoid putting SE Asia through thirty years of agony, millions dead and maimed, and turning Vietnam Laos and Cambodia into moonscapes.
For the US it was grim failure that led to decades of soul-searching, but a Biblical catastrophe for the folks on the ground.

I'm under no illusions the Viet Minh were secretly democrats but they weren't our enemies until we needlessly made them our enemies.
They weren't threatening the US or key allies. If the US hadn't chosen it to make their stand against Communism in SE Asia, it wouldn't have killed , maimed as many people on both sides.
We can talk about how in the grand geopolitical calculus it made sense to kiss up to France after WWII. It led to a disaster.
To me what makes it such a tragedy is it was needless.
IMO there was no reason to go there or oppose the Viet Minh.
 
I find if the Vietnam War never takes place, South Vietnam will fall faster and it will largely comes as a surprise to the American people. The Democrats will get blamed for fall of Vietnam which will be a long term blow. But I don't foresee this happening until the late 1960s/early 1970s. Race riots will still take place even if there is no Vietnam War. The Great Society is much more successful for Johnson to get threw and he may even run for a second term which he will win out over Bobby Kennedy in 1968 whom I don't see being assassinated. MLK will still be killed because his death as long as he still heads to Memphis as because it was largely unrelated to the outcome of the war.

The Republicans will take the White House in 1972 hoping to be more aggressive in the Cold War to combat the loss of Vietnam and Soviet military expansion at the peak of its economic output.
 
This is essentially the reason so many people died: the assumption that Vietnam (and anywhere else brown people live) was America's to "give over" in the first place.

It's essentially the same assumption that allowed appeasement; the idea that the Great Powers (or in this case a superpower) have the authority to give away or take back what was never theirs in the first place.

In practical terms, by 1945 the Viet Minh were by far the strongest, most popular, and, importantly, most competent native political group in Vietnam, by my reading, so attempting to keep them out of government was essentially doomed to failure. Far better to co-opt the people who will, inevitably, end up running much of the country than to alienate them.
 
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