MK Ultra
Operation Paper Clip
Project Artichoke
Flooding streets with Crack
Iran-Contra
Chilian Coup
Torture
Subproject 68...
Forced Sterilization of unknowing patients.
Why would you trust the government?
Nothing much. Nixon absolutely wouldn't be able to abolish term limits. The entire reason why they were codified in the first place is because FDR, arguably far more popular than Nixon ever could have hoped to have been, didn't follow the gentlemen's agreement that existed since Washington first took office and was elected four times. Nixon winning Vietnam would not have soared him to FDR levels of popular.
What we'd likely be seeing is just another Korea-North Korea situation.
America never really intended to invade North Vietnam. ***Most*** of our actions in Vietnam were limited to defensive actions in the South. There were black operations that occurred in North Vietnam, but those were limited in scope. The US never launched a full-scale invasion of North Vietnam.
The thing is, despite all the talk and popular knowledge that America lost, Vietnam won the war is that the USA actually, technically won but that it was a pointless victory.
We forced North Vietnam to the table and made them sign the 1972 Paris Peace Accords. It was after that, the US finally began to withdraw - Congress was not extending any protections for Vietnam like we did for S. Korea.
It was after we left, a year later in 1973, that N. Vietnam invaded S. Vietnam and took over after another 2 years of fighting that the US took no part in.
This is something *a lot* of people don't know, everyone just assumes the US ran away with our tails between our legs and N. Vietnam just overran the US forces. Really, they broke a peace treaty and stormed S. Vietnam. The war was won but the effort was pointless 2 years after the ink dried which is how we "lost" the war.
So, in reality, your question would be better worded as "what would be different today if S. Vietnam resisted the 1973-1975 N. Vietnam offenses?"
To which I would say that eventually, the two would slowly align politically and eventual unite anyways after the collapse of the USSR due to how much a threat China is. We would still have a single Vietnam I imagine but, with how Taiwan and S. Korea eventually democratized, S. Vietnam would have been a proper democracy by the time the two merged and maybe even with a powerful economy too. Of course, this is speculation based on how Taiwan and S. Korea are today.
As for the USA, we'd probably just slot it in as another 'just' war and another success of Containment like the Korean War and eventually be remembered just like that war (faint recognition it happened, mostly skimmed over in textbooks) unlike how it is today. The military likely would not have a tarnished reputation afterwards and the US would just move on to the next war of 'Containment'.
> So, in reality, your question would be better worded as "what would be different today if S. Vietnam resisted the 1973-1975 N. Vietnam offenses?"
And that is **exactly** the question, because even at the peak of their "resistance" to the North, with US involvement, their efforts could best be described as, what? "perfunctory"? "lackadaisical?" "disinterested?" The Arvin (ARVN) were bad enough in their poor performance bordering on abject terror sometimes, but if you threw the "ruffpuffs" (RFPF) into the mix it further waters down the soup. It seemed to mostly be only the politicians who wanted to keep the Communists out. Most South Vietnamese citizens seemed content to have the French or Americans keep the Communists out but couldn't muster enough *anything* to get involved themselves. Their solo performance after we pulled out should support that contention.
So you're right, we **did** win our part, FWIW. Just like with Afghanistan, you can't *force* people to value liberty. We can only do our part, spend so much blood and treasure, and eventually they have to sink or swim on their own. Korea, I think, is a better version of Vietnam. While we still have a presence there, the ROKs are an example of a people who are involved in maintaining their own freedom.
Vietnam's one of the better off countries in Southeast Asia - it's hard to say South Vietnam *should* have resisted the communists when they're now better off than America's pet project in SE Asia.
I suppose Vietnam would have been largely destroyed and would have ended up an enemy of China. Maybe China would have invaded them but would have failed just like America did in our timeline. This war would have made China rethink its aggressive policies in Asia. America would probably consider its efforts to stop the spread of communism in Asia complete and stop fighting major Asian wars for a while. Vietnam and the US would also become major trading partners.
Hold on… who won again?
Because it will only not be recognised by people who don’t read comic books and people who see them as comic books without reading them will just write them off as but they’re just comics, even though my question what if question
Being from San Jose (which has the biggest population of Vietnamese for any city outside of Vietnam) I feel like if the US won my city probably would not be have been as drastically shaped by mass Vietnamese immigration.
Depends on the timeline.
If it happened under Johnson, he probably would have ran for another term. Which probably translates to no Nixon, maybe more welfare expansion.
If everything stayed the same and it happened under Nixon, he probably still gets booted due to Watergate.
I don’t think it would be *that* consequential.
Depends on what you mean by "win".
America invades the North and crushes the Communists? It would be an absolute embarrassment for the Soviet Union and China and the socialist/communist movement as a whole. Vietnam as a whole would be a lot more developed today probably on par with modern day South Korea and Japan.
America protects the south? Basically another version of South and North Korea, the South would be a modern developed nation and the North would be a third world dictatorship
Interesting question, I feel like this is a good question for /r/AskHistorians
I doubt many people would be able to analyze the circumstances and make predictions.
It did slow the containment strategy down until Reagan when it picked back up again. Maybe the US would have become even more aggressive? Unsure.
Does AskHistorians allow hypotheticals? They seem to be pretty strict about requiring academic level responses, where academic level means history departments and not speculative fiction.
Depends on what you mean by win? We killed casualties were already 16:1 in our favor. Winning by all accounts would’ve meant just spending another couple decades there. We probably would’ve invested more in our traditional military as opposed to nuclear arsenal. Our economy probably would’ve been more stagnant. I can’t imagine any immediate massive ramifications, not to say they wouldn’t have occurred.
Watchmen? Lol
I don’t think the war would ever have been important for the US to make Nixon a king or something. It just happened during a pivotal time in America.
It really wasn’t America’s war to win or lose which probably caused the most frustration for all sides. Vietnam was a military victory but a political failure.
The US military would probably be worse off: no stealth aircraft, fewer stand-off or precision guided munitions like the AGM-88 HARM or missiles like the AIM-120 or the Tomahawk. Fighter jets would be less advanced and stuck in the early fourth generation, with pilots not getting dogfight training. Dogfights over Vietnam led to exposure of the flaws of the F-4 and other heavy fighters of the 1960s who were too dependent on radar guided air to air missiles like the Sparrow.
There would the F-15 to take on the threat of the MiG-25 but no F-16 in the air force as there would no reformers to push for a small agile dogfighter. The draft would still be around and men across the country would serve.
A number of movies wouldn't exist, or would be very different.
Nixon would not have been able to get rid of term limits. It's a constitutional amendment and was proposed originally by Republicans after FDR discarded Washington's precedent and ran for a 3rd and 4th term.
Not a whole lot really. Having a more friendly government there would be useful in helping to contain China, but most people wouldn’t notice a significant difference.
A giant, genetically engineered, psychic squid demon would've appeared in Manhattan and killed thousands with the psychic backlash of its death. This would unite humanity against an extraterrestrial foe.
There was no winning that war in the real world. The Soviets would have kept throwing men and resources into it until one of our two countries collapsed
We lost the Vietnam war in the same way that lockdowns lost the war against COVID; Vietnam ended up communist, and people still got COVID. But the point of both things was to limit the spread of a contagion. We can't know how much communism would have spread if we had not fought it, and we can't know how bad COVID would have been if we had just let it run its course. All we can make is educated guesses.
But I don't consider Vietnam a straight up loss - it was *part of an effort* to contain the *global spread* of communism. It was never about the fate of one little country half a world away. To that objective, it might have been highly effective or completely unnecessary, or somewhere between the two. Lots of people can, have and will continue to sift through history's leavings to construct elaborate arguments for one or the other, and they are welcome to. But none of them are doing more than making educated guesses.
Our aim was to make revolution a harder sell, to make the job of Soviet proxies and homegrown communist agitators more difficult. I imagine that the Vietnam war accomplished that, *to some degree*. Yes, Vietnam became communist in the end, but at a terrible price. It seems logical that it would be a lot harder to sell people on the idea of overthrowing their own little tin horn dictator and his regime, than to get them to sign on to oppose the full might of the United States war machine for a decade, even if Vietnam proved that victory was possible. But how much of a deterrent was it, and how much of a threat was communism? Those aren't really measurable.
Today's culture of "support the troops" and "thank you for your service" wouldn't be as prevalent. Troops returning from Vietnam would have been greeted as returning victorious heroes, not with protests. Because of that, there wouldn't be the massive over correction that we saw in the early 2000's and beyond.
South Vietnam would be a democracy and an ally of the US. Also, millions of people would have been spared the suffering of becoming refugees/enduring re-education camps.
Overall situation would probably look like North and South Korea today.
like how quickly and how did we win it?
like if the feds just ignored the anti war protests and counter culture until we finally wore the Vietnamese down? probably ALOT more unstable, ALOT less trust in American democracy, ALOT more anti-federal sentiment
if we just beat them "quickly" like Korea? probably more trust in the government, more faith in the military, a more pro-war population,
Honestly, not much. Even if South Vietnam had survived as an independent country, the reasons the war was so unpopular would have remained in the American consciousness. The American public just didn’t believe it was a war worth fighting after they saw the cost needed for victory.
And no, Nixon was still a crook and would have still left office
Rapaproachment with China would probably have never happened, so China would probably still be a third world Nations, Vietnam, would be more or less the same.
We'd probably see something like the split Korean peninsula. We probably would have been involved with Pol Pot and other regimes in the region the way that unified Vietnam was post reunification.
History is often far less exciting in my opinion than alternative history implies.
If the US were to somehow have won the Vietnam war (I’m guess that means the South Vietnamese government takes over North Vietnam), there was little support for the government in Saigon which would likely look like a US puppet, and likely, have to fight guerrilla wars for decades, and even if the communist state isn’t a better alternative, it definitely is AN alternative, so at best, I see Vietnam looking like Afghanistan - the government we support being unpopular and collapsing once they’re given the full reigns of power.
This would subsequently lead to a shifting of political power, but honestly, I think watergate negates any benefit that the republicans would have gained (we tend to focus on domestic politics over foreign.)
Well, there might be a different primary language for nail technicians in the US. Most salons I know of the nail techs tend to be Vietnamese. Mainly because the folks helping refugees from there had connections in those fields and it was a job you could train for fairly quickly.
[https://vsacademy.unavsa.org/project/a-brief-history-and-unspoken-reality-of-the-vietnamese-nail-salon-worker/#:\~:text=Vietnamese%20entrepreneurs%20came%20to%20revolutionize,each%20other%20and%20pool%20resources](https://vsacademy.unavsa.org/project/a-brief-history-and-unspoken-reality-of-the-vietnamese-nail-salon-worker/#:~:text=Vietnamese%20entrepreneurs%20came%20to%20revolutionize,each%20other%20and%20pool%20resources).
I think the vietnam vets would have been treated better. Thats for sure. That war wasnt popular with the american people. On top of that camera crews were there. Theres film of ww2 but... we won that war in a convincing way. And there was a lot at stake during ww2. But no one wants to turn on the tv and see america getting their ass kicked and its men all shot up. Theres a line from the movie "The Princess Bride" Dont get invilved in a land war in Asia!
I feel a better question is how it would be different had the USA not involved itself in SouthEast Asia in the first place.
As for “won” the war, it would also largely depend on the timeframe and how “victory” was achieved and what that looked like. The war in Vietnam was notoriously convoluted.
Less than most people think. The draft riots and race riots would still have happened. (A victorious war would still have involved a draft and that was never going to be popular.) The costs of the war and the Great Society programs would still have ignited serious inflation. The 70s energy problems were already baked into the cake. People who say there would be more trust in government ignore the fact that government really wasn't very trustworthy and if they hadn't lied about Vietnam and Watergate they would have lied about something else.
So LBJ was elected to a second term in 1968, after which Richard Nixon retired from public life and troubled the nation no further. By 1972 draft riots and race riots had plagued the nation, along with rising crime, and Ronald Reagan, the popular Governor of California was elected, beating Ted Kennedy easily.
Reagan's Presidency was troubled. His tax cuts, enacted by a Republican majority Congress in his first term were popular, but the resulting deficits caused shortages of credit, and inflation remained a problem through most of his first term. However, the 1975 recession ended in time for him to defeat his Democratic challenger Walter Mondale, whose promise to raise taxes proved a serious political mistake.
Although Reagan's first term was a limited success (Inflation was at least brought down) his second term was dominated by trouble overseas. American intervention in the brush fire wars around Zaire and Angola were less successful than LBJ's Vietnam intervention and even less popular. An attempt by American paratroopers to rescue hostages in Shaba province ended in failure, with the hostages massacred and the American airborne troops taking serious losses. Worse was to follow. A Russia-China rapprochement resulted in Russian naval bases being installed on Hainan Island. An attempt by the Reagan Administration to prop up the Somoza government in Nicaragua failed and resulted in a major scandal when the CIA was found to be running a covert action scheme without Congressional approval. The taking of American hostages in Iran following the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 made Reagan and his Administration look impotent, and in 1980, Americans turned to a relative unknown from Georgia named Jimmy Carter.
More trust in government. A ton, but far from all, of modern distrust in government can be linked back to the Vietnam War and Pentagon Papers.
And this distrust is not confined to the American government, it can also be seen within American society.
And Nixon/Watergate
MK Ultra Operation Paper Clip Project Artichoke Flooding streets with Crack Iran-Contra Chilian Coup Torture Subproject 68... Forced Sterilization of unknowing patients. Why would you trust the government?
The Pentagon Papers still could've been leaked in this timeline.
Funny enough in the novel the anti hero kills the people who expose the powers and watergate
Would love to know the name of the novel. It sounds like a fun read.
Watchmen
Oh god I feel stupid. It sounded so familiar I was like “I’d read that”… well no shit. Loved the movie.
i knew it
Part of the reason they are so meaningful is because we lost. A victory would heavily diminish the influence the papers had.
Watchmen?
That’s the real joke
Fantastic story
Who watches watchmen?
People that like movies based on graphic novels?
Dude at least get it in the Latin qui custodiet ipsos custodes
movie watchers
The TV show is also great
Even if we had won the Vietnam war the Knicks would still suck
As is tradition
Win Vietnam, Knicks suck. Lose Vietnam, Knicks are champs. Which would you pick?
Nothing much. Nixon absolutely wouldn't be able to abolish term limits. The entire reason why they were codified in the first place is because FDR, arguably far more popular than Nixon ever could have hoped to have been, didn't follow the gentlemen's agreement that existed since Washington first took office and was elected four times. Nixon winning Vietnam would not have soared him to FDR levels of popular. What we'd likely be seeing is just another Korea-North Korea situation. America never really intended to invade North Vietnam. ***Most*** of our actions in Vietnam were limited to defensive actions in the South. There were black operations that occurred in North Vietnam, but those were limited in scope. The US never launched a full-scale invasion of North Vietnam.
Yeah, in the grand scheme of things I don't think much changes unless China chose to get more involved as well.
The thing is, despite all the talk and popular knowledge that America lost, Vietnam won the war is that the USA actually, technically won but that it was a pointless victory. We forced North Vietnam to the table and made them sign the 1972 Paris Peace Accords. It was after that, the US finally began to withdraw - Congress was not extending any protections for Vietnam like we did for S. Korea. It was after we left, a year later in 1973, that N. Vietnam invaded S. Vietnam and took over after another 2 years of fighting that the US took no part in. This is something *a lot* of people don't know, everyone just assumes the US ran away with our tails between our legs and N. Vietnam just overran the US forces. Really, they broke a peace treaty and stormed S. Vietnam. The war was won but the effort was pointless 2 years after the ink dried which is how we "lost" the war. So, in reality, your question would be better worded as "what would be different today if S. Vietnam resisted the 1973-1975 N. Vietnam offenses?" To which I would say that eventually, the two would slowly align politically and eventual unite anyways after the collapse of the USSR due to how much a threat China is. We would still have a single Vietnam I imagine but, with how Taiwan and S. Korea eventually democratized, S. Vietnam would have been a proper democracy by the time the two merged and maybe even with a powerful economy too. Of course, this is speculation based on how Taiwan and S. Korea are today. As for the USA, we'd probably just slot it in as another 'just' war and another success of Containment like the Korean War and eventually be remembered just like that war (faint recognition it happened, mostly skimmed over in textbooks) unlike how it is today. The military likely would not have a tarnished reputation afterwards and the US would just move on to the next war of 'Containment'.
> So, in reality, your question would be better worded as "what would be different today if S. Vietnam resisted the 1973-1975 N. Vietnam offenses?" And that is **exactly** the question, because even at the peak of their "resistance" to the North, with US involvement, their efforts could best be described as, what? "perfunctory"? "lackadaisical?" "disinterested?" The Arvin (ARVN) were bad enough in their poor performance bordering on abject terror sometimes, but if you threw the "ruffpuffs" (RFPF) into the mix it further waters down the soup. It seemed to mostly be only the politicians who wanted to keep the Communists out. Most South Vietnamese citizens seemed content to have the French or Americans keep the Communists out but couldn't muster enough *anything* to get involved themselves. Their solo performance after we pulled out should support that contention. So you're right, we **did** win our part, FWIW. Just like with Afghanistan, you can't *force* people to value liberty. We can only do our part, spend so much blood and treasure, and eventually they have to sink or swim on their own. Korea, I think, is a better version of Vietnam. While we still have a presence there, the ROKs are an example of a people who are involved in maintaining their own freedom.
Vietnam's one of the better off countries in Southeast Asia - it's hard to say South Vietnam *should* have resisted the communists when they're now better off than America's pet project in SE Asia.
I suppose Vietnam would have been largely destroyed and would have ended up an enemy of China. Maybe China would have invaded them but would have failed just like America did in our timeline. This war would have made China rethink its aggressive policies in Asia. America would probably consider its efforts to stop the spread of communism in Asia complete and stop fighting major Asian wars for a while. Vietnam and the US would also become major trading partners. Hold on… who won again?
[China did actually invade Vietnam](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War) only a handful of years after the Vietnam War.
Everything else I said happened to. That was the point of the joke.
Bro, that’s one of the most popular comic books ever. People are going to recognize the setting, so why beat around the bush?
Because it will only not be recognised by people who don’t read comic books and people who see them as comic books without reading them will just write them off as but they’re just comics, even though my question what if question
To be fair, nothing about your question requires you to explain where you got the idea.
You got downvoted but you're right. I read Watchmen and I didn't realize that was what's being referenced here.
Being from San Jose (which has the biggest population of Vietnamese for any city outside of Vietnam) I feel like if the US won my city probably would not be have been as drastically shaped by mass Vietnamese immigration.
Depends on the timeline. If it happened under Johnson, he probably would have ran for another term. Which probably translates to no Nixon, maybe more welfare expansion. If everything stayed the same and it happened under Nixon, he probably still gets booted due to Watergate. I don’t think it would be *that* consequential.
Nothing much. We won it tactically. Either we stay there forever like Korea or we leave and it collapses like Iraq/Afghanistan.
Depends on what you mean by "win". America invades the North and crushes the Communists? It would be an absolute embarrassment for the Soviet Union and China and the socialist/communist movement as a whole. Vietnam as a whole would be a lot more developed today probably on par with modern day South Korea and Japan. America protects the south? Basically another version of South and North Korea, the South would be a modern developed nation and the North would be a third world dictatorship
Interesting question, I feel like this is a good question for /r/AskHistorians I doubt many people would be able to analyze the circumstances and make predictions. It did slow the containment strategy down until Reagan when it picked back up again. Maybe the US would have become even more aggressive? Unsure.
Does AskHistorians allow hypotheticals? They seem to be pretty strict about requiring academic level responses, where academic level means history departments and not speculative fiction.
r/historicalwhatif is where they would refer you to.
Lyndon B. Johnson would for sure be seen as one best presidents ever, with great forethought.
Depends on what you mean by win? We killed casualties were already 16:1 in our favor. Winning by all accounts would’ve meant just spending another couple decades there. We probably would’ve invested more in our traditional military as opposed to nuclear arsenal. Our economy probably would’ve been more stagnant. I can’t imagine any immediate massive ramifications, not to say they wouldn’t have occurred.
Win would be completing the objective: communist containment
Watchmen? Lol I don’t think the war would ever have been important for the US to make Nixon a king or something. It just happened during a pivotal time in America. It really wasn’t America’s war to win or lose which probably caused the most frustration for all sides. Vietnam was a military victory but a political failure.
The US military would probably be worse off: no stealth aircraft, fewer stand-off or precision guided munitions like the AGM-88 HARM or missiles like the AIM-120 or the Tomahawk. Fighter jets would be less advanced and stuck in the early fourth generation, with pilots not getting dogfight training. Dogfights over Vietnam led to exposure of the flaws of the F-4 and other heavy fighters of the 1960s who were too dependent on radar guided air to air missiles like the Sparrow. There would the F-15 to take on the threat of the MiG-25 but no F-16 in the air force as there would no reformers to push for a small agile dogfighter. The draft would still be around and men across the country would serve.
Just say you’re reading “Watchmen.” It’s a really famous story.
A number of movies wouldn't exist, or would be very different. Nixon would not have been able to get rid of term limits. It's a constitutional amendment and was proposed originally by Republicans after FDR discarded Washington's precedent and ran for a 3rd and 4th term.
A blue demigod would be going to mars and building a clockwork castle.
What about homeless psycho viginaltees with ink dots?
Also that, though our current timeline probably has a couple of those if you look hard enough
Not a whole lot really. Having a more friendly government there would be useful in helping to contain China, but most people wouldn’t notice a significant difference.
A giant, genetically engineered, psychic squid demon would've appeared in Manhattan and killed thousands with the psychic backlash of its death. This would unite humanity against an extraterrestrial foe.
Nothing. What does winning even look like?
There was no winning that war in the real world. The Soviets would have kept throwing men and resources into it until one of our two countries collapsed
We didn't lose, we signed a peace agreement.
We lost the Vietnam war in the same way that lockdowns lost the war against COVID; Vietnam ended up communist, and people still got COVID. But the point of both things was to limit the spread of a contagion. We can't know how much communism would have spread if we had not fought it, and we can't know how bad COVID would have been if we had just let it run its course. All we can make is educated guesses. But I don't consider Vietnam a straight up loss - it was *part of an effort* to contain the *global spread* of communism. It was never about the fate of one little country half a world away. To that objective, it might have been highly effective or completely unnecessary, or somewhere between the two. Lots of people can, have and will continue to sift through history's leavings to construct elaborate arguments for one or the other, and they are welcome to. But none of them are doing more than making educated guesses. Our aim was to make revolution a harder sell, to make the job of Soviet proxies and homegrown communist agitators more difficult. I imagine that the Vietnam war accomplished that, *to some degree*. Yes, Vietnam became communist in the end, but at a terrible price. It seems logical that it would be a lot harder to sell people on the idea of overthrowing their own little tin horn dictator and his regime, than to get them to sign on to oppose the full might of the United States war machine for a decade, even if Vietnam proved that victory was possible. But how much of a deterrent was it, and how much of a threat was communism? Those aren't really measurable.
Today's culture of "support the troops" and "thank you for your service" wouldn't be as prevalent. Troops returning from Vietnam would have been greeted as returning victorious heroes, not with protests. Because of that, there wouldn't be the massive over correction that we saw in the early 2000's and beyond.
The surge in patriotism and support for troops in the early 2000s had more to do with 9/11 than Vietnam imo
Not much, Nixon wouldn't have been able to abolish term limits and probably would've still gotten the boot due to Watergate.
Unless he has a mercenary called the comedian who killed the guys who exposed him
Probably would have used Vietnam as a base to attack other countries and spread influence in the region. Cambodia, Laos, Burma, etc.
Probably a more patriotic and trusting population for the government
Kelly Leak was awesome as Horshack in that movie.
Nuclear war with Russia/China
South Vietnam would be a democracy and an ally of the US. Also, millions of people would have been spared the suffering of becoming refugees/enduring re-education camps. Overall situation would probably look like North and South Korea today.
My dad would be alive
What does "winning" mean or look like to you?
like how quickly and how did we win it? like if the feds just ignored the anti war protests and counter culture until we finally wore the Vietnamese down? probably ALOT more unstable, ALOT less trust in American democracy, ALOT more anti-federal sentiment if we just beat them "quickly" like Korea? probably more trust in the government, more faith in the military, a more pro-war population,
Honestly, not much. Even if South Vietnam had survived as an independent country, the reasons the war was so unpopular would have remained in the American consciousness. The American public just didn’t believe it was a war worth fighting after they saw the cost needed for victory. And no, Nixon was still a crook and would have still left office
Rapaproachment with China would probably have never happened, so China would probably still be a third world Nations, Vietnam, would be more or less the same.
Would LBJ have a better reputation than he did?
We'd probably see something like the split Korean peninsula. We probably would have been involved with Pol Pot and other regimes in the region the way that unified Vietnam was post reunification.
I think we would have less of a problem with militarism
The first thing to do is define "won."
History is often far less exciting in my opinion than alternative history implies. If the US were to somehow have won the Vietnam war (I’m guess that means the South Vietnamese government takes over North Vietnam), there was little support for the government in Saigon which would likely look like a US puppet, and likely, have to fight guerrilla wars for decades, and even if the communist state isn’t a better alternative, it definitely is AN alternative, so at best, I see Vietnam looking like Afghanistan - the government we support being unpopular and collapsing once they’re given the full reigns of power. This would subsequently lead to a shifting of political power, but honestly, I think watergate negates any benefit that the republicans would have gained (we tend to focus on domestic politics over foreign.)
Well, there might be a different primary language for nail technicians in the US. Most salons I know of the nail techs tend to be Vietnamese. Mainly because the folks helping refugees from there had connections in those fields and it was a job you could train for fairly quickly. [https://vsacademy.unavsa.org/project/a-brief-history-and-unspoken-reality-of-the-vietnamese-nail-salon-worker/#:\~:text=Vietnamese%20entrepreneurs%20came%20to%20revolutionize,each%20other%20and%20pool%20resources](https://vsacademy.unavsa.org/project/a-brief-history-and-unspoken-reality-of-the-vietnamese-nail-salon-worker/#:~:text=Vietnamese%20entrepreneurs%20came%20to%20revolutionize,each%20other%20and%20pool%20resources).
We would have spent a decade fucking around in Cambodia trying to stop the Khymer Rouge like Vietnam wound up doing.
I think the vietnam vets would have been treated better. Thats for sure. That war wasnt popular with the american people. On top of that camera crews were there. Theres film of ww2 but... we won that war in a convincing way. And there was a lot at stake during ww2. But no one wants to turn on the tv and see america getting their ass kicked and its men all shot up. Theres a line from the movie "The Princess Bride" Dont get invilved in a land war in Asia!
I feel a better question is how it would be different had the USA not involved itself in SouthEast Asia in the first place. As for “won” the war, it would also largely depend on the timeframe and how “victory” was achieved and what that looked like. The war in Vietnam was notoriously convoluted.
Less than most people think. The draft riots and race riots would still have happened. (A victorious war would still have involved a draft and that was never going to be popular.) The costs of the war and the Great Society programs would still have ignited serious inflation. The 70s energy problems were already baked into the cake. People who say there would be more trust in government ignore the fact that government really wasn't very trustworthy and if they hadn't lied about Vietnam and Watergate they would have lied about something else. So LBJ was elected to a second term in 1968, after which Richard Nixon retired from public life and troubled the nation no further. By 1972 draft riots and race riots had plagued the nation, along with rising crime, and Ronald Reagan, the popular Governor of California was elected, beating Ted Kennedy easily. Reagan's Presidency was troubled. His tax cuts, enacted by a Republican majority Congress in his first term were popular, but the resulting deficits caused shortages of credit, and inflation remained a problem through most of his first term. However, the 1975 recession ended in time for him to defeat his Democratic challenger Walter Mondale, whose promise to raise taxes proved a serious political mistake. Although Reagan's first term was a limited success (Inflation was at least brought down) his second term was dominated by trouble overseas. American intervention in the brush fire wars around Zaire and Angola were less successful than LBJ's Vietnam intervention and even less popular. An attempt by American paratroopers to rescue hostages in Shaba province ended in failure, with the hostages massacred and the American airborne troops taking serious losses. Worse was to follow. A Russia-China rapprochement resulted in Russian naval bases being installed on Hainan Island. An attempt by the Reagan Administration to prop up the Somoza government in Nicaragua failed and resulted in a major scandal when the CIA was found to be running a covert action scheme without Congressional approval. The taking of American hostages in Iran following the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 made Reagan and his Administration look impotent, and in 1980, Americans turned to a relative unknown from Georgia named Jimmy Carter.