I recently watched ‘the Vietnam war’ by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (amazing documentary which I highly recommend everyone who likes history to watch) and I learned to the great extend that the whole Vietnam was a military failure for the USA. However it got me thinking that the main aim for the USA into going into Vietnam, was to stop communism spreading into the rest of indochina and the world. And after the USA left Vietnam, communism didn’t spread outside of Vietnam and so can the argument be made that the USA achieved its goals. I’m aware that soon after Vietnam finished fighting the USA, it entered a war with Cambodia which could of been the reason communism didn’t spread to the rest of indochina, but I’m mainly curious did communism not spread from Vietnam due to the efforts of the USA or was it other factors?
That appears to be the case only because one of the primary justifications for the Vietnam War, a belief in “Domino Theory,” turned out to be unsubstantiated.
Domino Theory was the idea that states, particularly those in the “third world” periphery, could be convinced to embrace communism through Soviet support and sponsorship. If communism took root, so the theory went, other states would be more inclined to follow suit. Thus, like a train of dominoes, as one falls, so do the others. This helps to explain why a country like the United States would engage in a large-scale conflict with a much, much smaller country.
As international theorists like Mearsheimer write, however, the Domino Theory is based on a flawed, external perspective on how a state’s population views its own politics. Especially in the case of Asia, the battle to win Asian states over to capitalism or communism was fought using Western cultural assumptions and norms, which completely disregarded what was actually going on in-country. In other words, the desire for nationalistic self-determination overpowers the desire for a cookie-cutter, one size fits ideology.
In short, while you’re correct that communism did not spread in a great scale, that cannot be attributed to America’s military failure. Instead, it can be attributed to the misguided idea that communism would spread “into the rest of indochina and the world” a la dominos.