Why the South Won the American War in Vietnam

Abstract

The question before us—Why did the North Win the Vietnam War?represents a long tradition in the thinking of U.S. policymakers and American and Vietnamese historians alike. It is, however, as the contributors to this volume make clear, essentially the wrong question because it gives primacy to northerners within Vietnam’ modern revolution and it inaccurately divides the struggle in Vietnam along geopolitical lines that have no cultural or historical precedent. The question as posed without any caveat accepts the official U.S. explanation and justification for the war. During the 1960s, Washington used this“North-South”paradigm to defend U.S. national security interests in Vietnam and to validate American intervention. In December 1961 the White House released an important White Paper entitled“A Threat to Peace: North Vietnam’ Efforts to Conquer South Vietnam.”¹ In this document, Kennedy’ advisors claimed that the National Liberation Front (NLF) was nothing more than a puppet on a string, a false facade constructed to allow communist North Vietnam to take independent South Vietnam by force. To combat this aggression, the report concluded, the United States had to supply its South Vietnamese ally with technical, economic, and military support. After twenty-five grueling years, according to the official U.S. account, North Vietnam finally prevailed because it was willing to sacrifice 3 million of its own people to win a protracted war.