What if the Vietnam War did not happen?

-- a university of arizona course on methods and approaches for studying the future

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From JJKF42A@prodigy.com Sun Jan 07 14:29:24 1996
Newsgroups: alt.history.what-if
Subject: Re: Vietnam War does not happen
From: JJKF42A@prodigy.com (Charles Holness)
Date: 7 Jan 1996 21:29:24 GMT

There is absolutely no way the CIA was going to destabilize the French
empire.   That would have made implacable enemies of a French right
seething with resentment and humiliation from 1940.  France would have
left NATO in 1950 instead of 1966.   At best maybe Ike might have not
bankrolled the French war effort but politically could he have afforded
to 'lose' Indochina ?   If anyone could have it was him.

Let's look at another option.  LBJ intended to secure the right flank of
the Great Society by preventing Vietnam from being lost on his watch.  He
sincerely got sucked into a quagmire by 'experts' who shared the '60s
faith that just as therapy and rehabilitation could end crime, just as
projects and counseling could end poverty, so could 'nation building'
create a self sustaining country.  I doubt if Nixon would have shared
that faith, or felt the need to secure his right flank.  But maybe if he
had not been committed to South Vietnam he might have faced the same John
Birch Society driven Goldwater insurgency that Rockefeller did in 64. 
How would the politics of the  last 20 years have been different if Nixon
had taken us into Vietnam to head off Goldwater ?  What if the GOP had
had to pay the price for Vietnam ?




From tjherr@teleport.com Tue Jan 09 22:52:10 1996
Newsgroups: alt.history.what-if
Subject: Re: Vietnam War does not happen
From: tjherr@teleport.com (Paul Herring)
Date: 10 Jan 1996 05:52:10 GMT

In article <4cpdvk$22n6@usenetp1.news.prodigy.com>, JJKF42A@prodigy.com
(Charles Holness) wrote:

> There is absolutely no way the CIA was going to destabilize the French
> empire.   That would have made implacable enemies of a French right
> seething with resentment and humiliation from 1940.

   Wouldn't have mattered; France was hosed as a world power by then
anyway. And the U.S. didn't mind dismantling the British Empire during the
same period, so I don't see why they should here.

  France would have
> left NATO in 1950 instead of 1966.   At best maybe Ike might have not
> bankrolled the French war effort but politically could he have afforded
> to 'lose' Indochina ? 

    You didn't read my post--Vietnam would have been on OUR side during the Cold
War, because we would have supported Ho like we supported Tito in
Yugoslavia (not Hungary, like I mistakenly wrote in my original
post--sorry). And we would have had a new friend to the south of Red
China.
 
                                         Paul H.

From jan@umtali.demon.co.uk Wed Jan 10 16:54:36 1996
Newsgroups: alt.history.what-if
Subject: Re: Vietnam War does not happen
From: jan@umtali.demon.co.uk (Jan Hards)
Date: Thu, 11 Jan 1996 01:54:36 +0200

In article ,
tjherr@teleport.com (Paul Herring) wrote:

>In article <4cpdvk$22n6@usenetp1.news.prodigy.com>, JJKF42A@prodigy.com
>(Charles Holness) wrote:
>
>> There is absolutely no way the CIA was going to destabilize the French
>> empire.   That would have made implacable enemies of a French right
>> seething with resentment and humiliation from 1940.
>
>   Wouldn't have mattered; France was hosed as a world power by then
>anyway. And the U.S. didn't mind dismantling the British Empire during the
>same period, so I don't see why they should here.

In retrospect maybe, but in the post war years after Britain and perhaps
Nationalist China, France was the United States' chief ally.  You do not
just go and undermine an ally that way, no matter how wrong you think their
policies are.  At least the US state department did not do this.  (CIA did
sometimes).

And give us a few examples of how the US dismantled the British Empire.  I
thought the Brits did it all by themselves.  And Suez does not equate to
dismantling the Empire, although I will admit there are some connections.

>  France would have
>> left NATO in 1950 instead of 1966.   At best maybe Ike might have not
>> bankrolled the French war effort but politically could he have afforded
>> to 'lose' Indochina ? 
>
>    You didn't read my post--Vietnam would have been on OUR side during the Cold
>War, because we would have supported Ho like we supported Tito in
>Yugoslavia (not Hungary, like I mistakenly wrote in my original
>post--sorry). And we would have had a new friend to the south of Red
>China. 

So Yugoslavia was on our side during the Cold war was it?  At best it was
simply a neutral power.  As for a communist Vietnam being a US ally, I
think not.  Okay maybe the Americans could have exploited Hanoi-Peking
rivalries, but what is going to stop Vietnam subverting the rest of SE Asia
to Communism as well.  Remember in those days most in the west believed in
the communist monolith.  This meant that all communist states were seen as
a threat.  I doubt Nixon's policies of the early 1970s could have been
adopted in the 1950s. 

Jan.



ÑÑÑÑ
Jan Hards, jan@umtali.demon.co.uk



From cdb100620@aol.com Thu Jan 11 16:50:03 1996
Newsgroups: alt.history.what-if
Subject: Re: Vietnam War does not happen
From: cdb100620@aol.com (CDB100620)
Date: 11 Jan 1996 18:50:03 -0500

I've always wondered what would have happened had Roosevelt lived to
complete his fourth term.  He repeatedly said the United States wasn't
fighting WW2 so the European powers could re-establish their overseas
empires.  The FDR state department was not fond of Vichy France, and in
particular was not at all happy with the French government of Indochina,
which was working hand-in-glove with the Japanese conquerors, to the
extent of turning over shot-down allied fliers to them.  The OSS armed and
trained Ho Chi Minh at least in part in order to develop an "underground
railroad" for escaping American and British airmen.  Roosevelt's plan was
for Indochina to become an protectorate of the United Nations, the end
goal independence.  Had that happened, a lot of killing would have been
prevented.

Even after Roosevelt's death in 1945, had Ho been able to move things
along quicker, a big war might have been avoided.  We might have witnessed
an Indochina scenario similar to that played out in Indonesia, the chief
difference being that Sukarno was a collaborator with the Japanese, even
going along with their horrific work camps and the mass deaths of
Indonesians they caused.  Ho, on the other hand, was implacably hostile to
the Japanese as well as the French.
Despite Sukarno's background, the U.S. stood by and let him kick the Dutch
out of Indonesia. At the end, the Dutch were crying that Sukarno was a
commie, but at that time the cold war was still in its infancy and
American leaders were indifferent.
Had Ho been able to bring the French to their knees before, say, Mao
kicked Chiang out of China in 1949, or at least before the Korean War
started the next year, he might well have won U.S. support. 

I also wonder whether the U.S. would have gotten involved in the war had a
military man, say MacArthur, been elected president in 1948.  The military
was horrified at the prospect of a land war in Asia.  MacArthur proposed
limiting the American defense line to the island perimeter of
Asia--Taiwan, the Ryukyus, Japan and abandoning mainland Asia to its own
devices.  There was confusion about whether the Korean peninsula should
be part of this defense line.  My suspicion is that had MacArthur--or even
Eisenhower--been elected in '48, we would have stayed out of Asia, but
that by 1952, with our troops already committed in a war in Asia, even
McArthur would have kept us in Asia, maybe even got us in deeper. 
Keith Pennington

"Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in
that work does what he wants to do."
                                      --R.G. Collingwood