Why The North Won The Vietnam War

In the aftermath of the American Civil War, Confederate General George Pickett was asked to offer an opinion on how the South lost the war. Angered at those people who attributed the South’s defeat to its own failures of leadership, Pickett remarked, “Gentlemen, I think the Yankees kind of had something to do with it. In this path-breaking collection of essays on the Vietnam War, foremost scholars of the Second Indochina conflict ponder a similar question as they consider why the North won the Vietnam War. They address the diplomatic, political, military, economic, and social factors that led to the defeat of the United States and its allies in the Vietnam War by focusing as much on the strategies and forces of the Vietnamese in both the northern Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the southern National Liberation Front and Republic of Vietnam as on those employed by the U.S. At the heart of each essay is the conviction that it was the asymmetry between the goals, strategies, and sociopolitical strengths and weaknesses of the combatant societies that determined the course and eventual outcome of the war.