Did the US win the Vietnam War in any sense?

Question

As far as I know, the Vietnam War was won by the communists. But a colleague of mine, a former US Marine, insists vehemently that US won in some way or, at least, was set to win but they had an early withdrawal. Is there any criteria that could consider the South Vietnamese coalition as victorious? Did the US troops have any foreseeable chance to win before they withdrew?

Edit: Added a source of notability

Answer 1

From Wikipedia: "The U.S. government viewed involvement in the war as a way to prevent a communist takeover of South Vietnam as part of their wider strategy of containment." In that sense the Vietnam War was clearly a loss. Vietnam ended up taken over by the communist North, who remain in charge until this day. This was exactly the result the war was fought to prevent.

There are a number of ways in which the war might be considered a victory in some sense.

1. Militarily the US were not losing until they had to pull out. The basis of this argument is that militarily the US forces were holding their own and might well have won the war if they had been able to continue. The withdrawal was for political reasons, not military, and the South Vietnamese regime was intact when the US left (although the 'political reasons' were at least partly due to high losses in the US forces). It is if course impossible to say whether the US would really have won under these circumstances - the war was certainly not going entirely the US way, even discounting the loss levels.
2. The US won all the open battlefield battles, and only lost because of the guerilla war. Not much of an argument, even if it were entirely true, and there were certainly 'conventional battles' that the US lost. If you lose a war you lose it, even if your opponents used 'unconventional' tactics.
3. The domino effect didn't happen. Part of the reason for committing so many resources to Vietnam was the fear of the 'domino effect' - that if Vietnam went communist then nearby countries would follow, and eventually the whole region would be communist. This domino didn't happen. While some would argue that this was because the Vietnamese Communists were only interested in Vietnam itself, others might argue that the opposition provided by the US prevented the spread. I offer no opinion on which is the case.
4. As this article puts it: "Although the U.S. was defeated on the battlefield, two decades later Vietnam appears to have surrendered its economic sovereignty to its former Wartime enemy." That's certainly an argument, but doesn't address whether the same would have happened even if the US had sent no troops to Vietnam. Maybe "lost the war but won the peace" might be a better description.

Answer 2

The question is problematic. The nature of the war was perceived very differently by different parties.

There is a school of thought saying it was all a huge mistake, for example:

Barbara W. Tuchman, "The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam" Balantine, 1984, ISBN 0-345-30823-9.

Americans tended to see it in terms of containing Communism and avoiding the "domino effect".

Vietnamese tended to see it in terms of freedom from occupation (by the French, then the U.S.), and would get help from anyone willing to help them.

The whole idea of distinguishing North from South Vietnam was artificial.

America was definitely of two minds about it, and there were opportunities to bring peace early. There is strong evidence that the war was extended for political reasons in the U.S. Here is part of a conversation in which president Johnson is noticing that Nixon is trying to sabotage the Paris Peace Accords weeks before the presidential election in 1968.


> We have found that our friend, the Republican nominee—our California friend—has been playing on the outskirts with our enemies and our friends, both—our allies and the others. He’s been doing it through rather subterranean sources here.


> He has been saying to the allies that “you’re going to get sold out. Watch Yalta, and Potsdam, and two Berlins, and everything. And they’re [the Johnson administration] going to recognize the NLF. I [Nixon] don’t have to do that. You better not give away your liberty just a few hours before I can preserve it for you.”

So asking if the U.S. "won" or "lost" it seeems to presume that it should even have been fought.