Effects of the Vietnam War on American Policies Essay

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Lessons Learned by the Americans Experience of the Vietnam War

The Vietnam War is one infamous war in the history of America. It was the first war that America took part in an international stage and lost terribly. War statistics shows that the America lost a total of 58,000 lives and over 350,000 casualties. The war also ran into millions of dollars dispensed to finance the war. The war also injured the international reputation of the country among the peers of great nations such as the Soviet Union (Westheider, 2011). To this effect, many lessons were drawn upon which the American nation have formulated their external war strategies to date.

Lessons from diplomatic negotiations

The cause of the Vietnam War was something that could easily be solved diplomatically. Immediately after independence, Vietnam was divided into two regions: the north and the south. Each one of them operated independently with the North championing communist agenda whiles the south championing anti-communist agenda. The tension that ensued because of ideological differences between the two countries escalated when the North wanted the South to agree to a merger of the two. In retaliation of the south's defiance to take part in unification elections, the north resolved to wage an expansionist war against the south. The United States of America took sides by conspiring with the Southern part to stay put and refuse to accept unification.

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The U.S. even moved forth to provide military support to the South in the war against the north. This war was a wrong approach to the crisis. The U.S. government should have considered conducting a round table diplomatic negotiation with the two nations to come up with an amicable solution to the crisis. As a superpower, the U.S. had a chance to play the big brother role and mediate the reconciliation process (Coward, 2014).

The mistake made brought the lesson to the American leadership that diplomacy is always a good option as a first-time conflict resolution mechanism. It pointed out a failure in seeking a military confrontation on an issue that could have been ended using diplomacy. Cambodia played a neutral role initially. However, when the U.S. invaded the country with the aim of pursuing the Northern Vietnam soldiers holed up there, it complicated the situation as Cambodia began pursuing anti-war campaigns. This greatly affected the U.S. offensive in a situation where it could have easily gained a worthy ally in Cambodia had they utilized good diplomatic engagements.

Lessons on Presidential leadership

Two American presidents supervised the Vietnam War since the war started in 1945. The first president in this phase was President Lyndon Johnson. Richard Nixon later followed him. What can be seen from….....

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