Vietnam Wars elsewhere

Read my signature and have a guess.

Had the PKI gained power in Indonesia Confrontation would have been significantly more intense, with cross boarder operations into Malaysian Borneo on a much larger scale and Commonwealth counter attacks over the border becoming larger and less covert.

That is consistent with the Vietnam analogy.

When would have been the best POD for a coup/movement during this confrontation? Was there one.
 
Could no Korean War lead to a Vietnam-style insurgency later? IIRC, the ROK was pretty oppressive and military-dominated prior to the 1980s or so. It seems likely that that would hold true minus the OTL war. So if the USSR or PRC convinces the North to wait, the US could find itself drawn in to help the ROK once Communist guerrillas start biting.

One very interesting element in this war would be the role of Japan. If things start going south, the US could very well start pressuring Japan to send troops to help. That would almost certainly backfire horribly, given the Japanese history in Korea. In addition, Japan would probably be more left-wing than OTL minus the OTL emphasis on building Japan up as a right-wing bastion in Asia that resulted from the Korean War. Could Japan experience its own revolution? That could be a worse Vietnam all on its own.

I think Iran would be a very good choice to give the US a much worse struggle than OTL in Vietnam, if thats even possible.

Is Pakistan a possibility? Maybe the country violently collapses following a bad defeat in a war in India, then the US gets involved to keep the Soviets from setting up shop. That would be pretty bad, IMO. I don't know how India would react to such an occupation. I think they'd be happy to have the Pakistanis hating someone else for a change, but they'd probably not like large US forces on their border.
 
That 'coup' that ended in the obliteration of the PKI was supposedly made by Suharto in a power grab though, or was it really by the Commies?

Because if it's the latter, then the obvious POD is that the coup is a success.
 

Cook

Banned
That 'coup' that ended in the obliteration of the PKI was supposedly made by Suharto in a power grab though, or was it really by the Commies?

Because if it's the latter, then the obvious POD is that the coup is a success.

I’ve never seen a credible source that puts credence in the claim that Suharto organised it.
 
There is this:

Professor Dale Scott alleges that the entire movement was designed to allow for Suharto's response. He draws attention to the fact the side of Lapangan Medeka on which KOSTRAD HQ was situated was not occupied, and that only those generals who might have prevented Suharto seizing power (except Nasution) were kidnapped. He also alleges that the fact that the generals were killed near an air force base where PKI members had been trained allowed him to shift the blame away from the Army. He links the support given by the CIA to anti-Sukarno rebels in the 1950s to their later support for Suharto and anti-communist forces. He points out that training in the US of Indonesian Army personnel continued even as overt military assistance dried up. Another damaging revelation came to light when it emerged that one of the main plotters, Col Latief was a close associate of Suharto, as were other key figures in the movement, and that Latief actually visited Suharto on the night before the murders (Wertheim, 1970)

But once again it's open to debate. But do you think the Movement WAS by the PKI?
 

Cook

Banned
Dale Scott is a serial Conspiracy Theorist who sees the hand of the C.I.A. in his bread going stale.
 
Nowhere in the Western Hemisphere. The U.S. would fight to win in the Americas and would be backed by a solid majority of the population. ....

So...why haven't we invaded Cuba already, any time in the past 50 years?

During much of that time it was pretty well established that Cuba was under the Soviet nuclear umbrella, to be sure. Part of the settlement of the Missile Crisis was a promise from us that we would not invade.

Another outcome--not so well known to the USA to be sure--was that given Castro's gung-ho willingness to risk triggering WWIII during the crisis, the Soviets yanked out not only the big missiles the Americans were watching, but the small tactical weapons another poster mentioned. Those had been directly in Cuban hands, true--but Khrushchev was not going to leave them there! The Russians took them back and out of the hemisphere.

Whether or not they might have guessed Americans knew about them, the fact is, we didn't. We know about these things now because of a historical conference between Americans and Russians in the 1990s. The Soviets took them back because they didn't want the Cubans to get trigger-happy with them and they felt Castro had just demonstrated that he might.

So actually I am not 100 percent sure the Soviets would have necessarily escalated to nuclear weapons to defend Cuba. But there was a chance they would and that was enough to deter us.

But before the Crisis, we did try to intervene of course--that was the Bay of Pigs.

If what you say is so open and shut, CalBear, you need to explain why even then the intervention was so indirect and limited, and why we did not immediately escalate to a more direct and massive one when that failed.

I think the answer is, that cooler heads realized that Cuba could indeed become a quagmire, no matter what level of resolve the American citizen had to see it through. That's without the Soviet nuclear coverage to consider.

Vietnam of course was just as much in the Soviet sphere as Cuba was.

Again--once the USSR collapsed, the question comes up, why has the USA not invaded Cuba since 1991? Again I think the danger is that it would become a quagmire.

There is no question in my mind that with sufficient firepower, one can suppress any movement. And that the USA had that firepower. The thing is, such firepower accomplishes the suppression by means of genocide (and certainly in the case of Vietnam, ecocide as well). Enough firepower to "win" in Vietnam would have been tantamount to nuking the place. I think the same would be true in Cuba. The Cubans, isolated from Soviet supplies, would not have been able to inflict as much damage on the Americans--but it still would have been necessary to kill huge numbers of Cubans to "save" them from Castro. And then stay in a very hostile country for decades to try to get them to vote the way we wanted them to. And probably fail. We might wind up killing them all, but we'd never get a nice friendly pro-American regime--not one that didn't depend on a police state that makes Castro look like Santa Claus by comparison anyway.

(A police state that could not possibly fund itself--they'd be utterly dependent on very expensive US generosity, for as long as we cared to prop them up, and utterly unable to stay in power the minute we didn't. Or sooner...)

One can blame "hippies" all one wants. The point is, inevitably a genocidal quagmire for questionable reasons fosters dissent. The hippies were hardly some alien infection--they were perfectly normal Americans, who reacted to a bad situation in a way I think was downright admirably patriotic--in terms of the stated values of the United States.

So yeah. If it is as ASB as some people think here for the USA to have had a Communist revolution, it's partially because our ruling class is not as bloody stupid as some people would like them to be. If they did something as bloody stupid as invade Cuba...well, that would be my POD for a Communist USA, by 1975 or so.
 
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