Revisiting Revisionism: Vietnam, Counterinsurgency, and the Lessons of Edward Lansdale
Mark Atwood Lawrence
April 11, 2018
Could the United States have won in Vietnam if only Americans had made different decisions about how to fight the war there? For the most part, academic historians have said no. The South Vietnamese state was so flawed and the reservoir of Soviet and Chinese support for the communist war effort so vast, runs the argument, that Washington had no meaningful chance of victory, no matter how adroitly it used its vast power.
However, a small handful of historians has long begged to differ. These “revisionists†argue that the United States could have achieved its goal — a secure, anti-communist South Vietnam capable of enduring into the indefinite future — if only it had chosen its methods more wisely. To be sure, proponents of this outlook vary widely in their assessments of precisely what went wrong and what could have been done better. Some focus on military decisions, others on the political or diplomatic realms. But the basic point is the same: American leaders stole defeat from the jaws of victory through bad choices.
https://warontherocks.com/2018/04/revisiting-revisionism-vietnam-counterinsurgency-and-the-lessons-of-edward-lansdale/
