PC: South Vietnam an American protectorate

Wikipedia said:
After supporting the coup of President Diem, Lodge then realized that the situation in the region deteriorated, and he suggested to the State Department that South Vietnam be made to relinquish its independence, and it be made a protectorate of the United States (like the former status of the Philippines) so as to bring governmental stability. The alternatives, he warned, were either increased military involvement by the U.S., or else total abandonment of South Vietnam by America.

I'm not an expert on the Vietnam War, but this seems like an idea which would backfire rather easily. Is there any way for America to try to create a Vietnamese protectorate, and if so, how would it affect the prosecution of the war effort?
 
I'm not an expert on the Vietnam War, but this seems like an idea which would backfire rather easily. Is there any way for America to try to create a Vietnamese protectorate, and if so, how would it affect the prosecution of the war effort?

The idea would not be politically feasible and if tried, it would backfire with devastating results (for american soldiers, the army brass and for the politicians advocating the strategy).
 
It would be seen by the South Vietnamese as a re-imposition of colonial rule on them, which it would be. It would turn the entire south into open opponents of the US. The only possible bright spot is a potential for the whole thing to be over sooner, if much bloodier.
 
It would be seen by the South Vietnamese as a re-imposition of colonial rule on them, which it would be. It would turn the entire south into open opponents of the US. The only possible bright spot is a potential for the whole thing to be over sooner, if much bloodier.

Yes, and the US government would quickly back down, for the simple reason that they do/did not want to lose South Vietnam to the communists.
 
As the other chap says this would just be seen as a reimposition of colonialism. America's stock drops massively all across Asia- even friendly countries will be taken aback.
 
Maybe WWII goes worse and the US occupies Vietnam?

Wha?

Goes worse for whom? Frankly if France was in a condition bad enough that it couldn't take over administration of Indo-China the US would be quite likely to give it independence under Ho Chi Minh. They only rebuffed Ho because they wanted to preserve relations with Europe. One notable characteristic of US ww2 officers in Asia was their disgust with colonialism
 
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How do you define 'protectorate'? In particular, i think a good case could be made for this being otl.

This exactly. That's exactly what the North Vietnamese and their political supporters in the South said we were doing. The way to make it distinct from OTL would be if the USA were to fly our flag over it in the sense we did/do over the Philippines or Puerto Rico or to pick a slightly more ambiguous case, the Panama Canal Zone. But what could possibly motivate the US to make such a claim? It would be a challenge indeed to imagine the wacky sequence of events that would lead to the US trying to hold South Vietnam as more or less integral US territory.

In an indirect way I'd go farther than I did above and say that not only did South Vietnam look like a US protectorate to our foes, it objectively was nothing more or less than that. Without the USA stepping in when France pulled out, South Vietnam would simply never have existed at all; Ho Chi Minh's followers were strong enough to simply take over if some Western Great Power or other didn't dispatch resources and agents to stop them. For a time the US was able to hold them off without sending in a lot of actual American forces, via maintaining and advising locals who, in the view of the majority of all Vietnamese, were compromised by their cooperation with the former French regime, which was at best clearly a protectorate, in the brief period after being a colony outright. No South Vietnamese government was able to survive without US support from the get-go; there was no native alternate to Ho that had anything approaching the popularity the Viet Minh did. That doesn't mean that all Vietnamese wanted the Viet Minh; quite a lot didn't, but they had nothing to rally around that could unite them, and in decades of trying the US failed to help them find something. In the interim, nothing but US backing explained why the Saigon government existed in the first place, nor could it last without US--"protection."

How else would you define a protectorate?
 
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