Republic of Vietnam - ideas

Dirk_Pitt

Banned
Avoid watergate.

WTF? Watergate was a non-factor in the Vietnam War. The Americanized war was lost by 1968 well before Watergate reared it's ugly head.

If you want victory in Vietnam avoid politicizing the war: basically LBJ put political considerations before military considerations and we fought with a hand tied behind our back. The politicians never learned from Korea.
 

Jlinker613

Banned
The United States set up modern medical facilities and many modern schools. If the US were to have kept its deal and supplied the south, South Vietnam could have ended up like the four Asian tigers. On the down side, it could have ended up like the Philippines, where the US also left all of those advantages, but they managed to screw it up there anyway.
 
There are a great deal of problems with trying for a stable Republic of Vietnam, and those problems in many cases go back all the way to the *first* Indochina War and the view among Vietnamese nationalists in both post-FICW Vietnams that the real nationalists did not approve of any government tied to the Vichy French colonial regime. Non-Communist Vietnamese leaders thus had problems with political legitimacy that would have been extremely difficult to overcome with thoughtful, skilled, able leadership. With the OTL leadership in the RVN Vietnamese people were confronted with the brutal leadership of Hanoi which had actual legitimacy or the RVN, which was too strong to permit opposition of any but a violent sort but far too weak to actually rule and had power only insofar as it had foreign, non-Vietnamese backing. :(
 
I don't know how stable a foundation the RVN was on exactly, but I'm willing to guess that it would take a lot of work to have it survive with the Vietnam War occurring as in OTL.

If I'm not mistaken, documents from the State Department around the mid-50s had the top State people involved claiming that if they really did allow free elections, 80-90% of the South would have voted for Ho Chi Minh to be their leader. So, not a promising start for a state set up for the express purpose of being anti-communist.

Other than that, you'd need more competent, non-corrupted or dictatorial leaders who could appeal to the majority of the South Vietnamese people(think the opposite of Diem). And for the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese to either bungle up the war efforts or a wiser American/western approach and involvement in the war that could entail continued American funding and support after the end of OTL American involvement in 1973.

The RVN was on a bad formation before it even technically existed. Anti-Communist leaders in Vietnam tended to be associated with the French colonial regime, itself associated with the Vichy (i.e. Axis Powers) French. This was so under Emperor Bao Dai, and it remained so in South Vietnam. It was no great help to South Vietnam either that both France and the USA virtually ignored any role by South Vietnam in what was theoretically Vietnamese affairs. Even more problematically the Vietnamese regime in the north was seen as the real-true nationalists who were for Vietnam first, and no colonial empire (now, what it actually was is not necessarily what it was seen as, but Hanoi understood PR and propaganda much more effectively than Saigon did) and where in the case of the Korean War the USA found a means to stabilize the front line into technologically upgraded trench warfare in Vietnam the problem of political weakness of anti-communist factions was impossible to handle for US leaders focused on the US war there, and Vietnamese people as "the gooks" who all looked like and had nothing really worth noting in themselves.
 

Hendryk

Banned
in OTL RVN discovered oil first week of April 1974 off the Mekong Delta.


RVN discovers oil in 1964 and a lot of it, That would give them the cash to call their own tune.
As much of the Middle East and Africa amply demonstrate, if you give a corrupt dictatorship oil money, you just end up with an even more corrupt dictatorship. What South Vietnam lacked above all was competent governance, so that's what needs to be addressed first.

How about an earlier POD from the end of the Chinese Civil war where a large number of Chinese nationalist units were able to retreat to northern vietnam? That will create a buffer state that will make soviet and Chicomm aide to Northern Vietnam significantly more difficult.
If the behavior of Chinese Nationalist troops in Burma is an guide, they'd just set up their own rogue state and engage in large-scale organized crime. Which, coming on top of deep-rooted anti-Chinese sentiment in Vietnam, may actually result in the population supporting the North instead.
 
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