WI: John F. Kennedy Attempts Neutralization of Vietnam

Greenville

Banned
What if while still alive, President Kennedy attempted to create an agreement of neutralization between the United States, Soviet Union, and China over Vietnam?
 
I have a few problems / questions about this:
  • Can't see Kennedy doing this, given his no-nonsense Cold Warrior stance.
  • If he did try this, he'd have people lined up on both sides of the aisle yelling about a sellout and similar not-so-complimentary phrases. Given that, good bye 1964.
  • Who's going to guarantee a neutral Viet Nam?
  • How long does anyone seriously think a neutral Viet Nam will last, given that this is just about the flood tide of the Cold War? Six months? Maybe a year, tops, before somehow it's de-stabilized.
Not saying this is ASB, but it would be damnably difficult, even in theory.
 
I have a few problems / questions about this:
  • Can't see Kennedy doing this, given his no-nonsense Cold Warrior stance.
  • If he did try this, he'd have people lined up on both sides of the aisle yelling about a sellout and similar not-so-complimentary phrases. Given that, good bye 1964.
  • Who's going to guarantee a neutral Viet Nam?
  • How long does anyone seriously think a neutral Viet Nam will last, given that this is just about the flood tide of the Cold War? Six months? Maybe a year, tops, before somehow it's de-stabilized.
Not saying this is ASB, but it would be damnably difficult, even in theory.

*Coughs* Laos *Cough*
 
Actually, it does bring something to mind. If neutralization works ... and we can debate this, because it eventually failed in Laos even though it saved us from a war that cost American lives, and it could easily eventually fail in Vietnam, despite saving us from overt, direct engagement in a war ... but if it did work, that would be a policy shift in the Cold War that could be very interesting. So stark and interesting, in fact, that I cannot at the moment conceive of its full consequences. I thought about this a bit, and in Laos, it failed because North Vietnam was an instigator even when the Soviets and Chinese were not themselves. I think you can argue it could succeed in Vietnam because by the Chinese and Soviets putting full pressure on North Vietnam to cease hostilities ... which they put some pressure on them to do so in the OTL at various points, but never authoritative pressure ... and by the Soviets not supplying North Vietnam for a conflict, you cut the North Vietnamese off from the golden teat, cut the Viet Cong off from their golden teat in the North Vietnamese, and cut the Pathet Lao off from the golden teat of North Vietnamese support which can come because of Soviet and Chinese. So that is interesting.
 
A lot of the New Frontiersmen were fixated on 'revolutionary warfare' or 'wars of national liberation', and saw counterinsurgency and graduated response as the proper means for the war in Vietnam. They critically misjudged the character of the war, driven and maintained first and foremost by Hanoi and Beijing; great as the Green Berets are, you can't fight regiments of NVA regulars with tanks and artillery with a COIN army.

Neutralization would probably not last; Diem would never agree to it in the first place, but if it happened, all of Vietnam would be under Hanoi's thumb pretty quickly. Indonesia probably wouldn't have purged its communists as per OTL 1965, and thereafter the Philippines and even Japan might find themselves forced into neutrality or eventually outright communism.
 
It is important to note that in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy had the political capital to do a lot in regards to handling of Vietnam, complicated as it was. And there was a proposal for neutralization of Cuba in exchange for neutralization of Vietnam; Castro has grown dissatisfied with the Soviet Union, and there were back channel discussions between Castro and the administration on rapprochement. And that rapprochement discussion is even a separate issue from Vietnam, but it could be bundled with the Vietnam issue as it was in that proposal.
 
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