George Friedman
When the United States entered talks with North Vietnam near the end of the Vietnam War, it hadn’t been militarily defeated, but it had failed in its mission to destroy the Viet Cong. North Vietnam had not won the war either, but the outcome of the conflict was clear: Neither side could fully subdue the other. Geopolitically, South Vietnam was more important to North Vietnam than it was to the United States. North Vietnam could not capitulate. The U.S. could.
The Vietnam War was the product of geopolitical imperatives, and the outcome was a result of the military reality. The war ended with negotiations that lasted for a very long time. The peace talks were not geopolitical in nature. Rather, they were a matter of engineering a settlement that acknowledged a geopolitical reality in which both sides had to take into account internal political circumstances. The U.S. could not simply admit to total military failure, so it demanded “peace with honor.” The North Vietnamese had to justify the cost of the war to North Vietnam’s public as a heroic defeat of the imperialist power.
The initiation of the war was based on geopolitical necessity. North Vietnam had to unite the entire country under a communist regime. The U.S. had to stop it, not because Vietnam mattered geopolitically but because Washington feared that early capitulation would cause allies to lose confidence in the U.S.-based alliance systems. The stakes were high for both sides, but North Vietnam had more skin in the game. The reality of the negotiations was about what the end would look like and the political image it generated.
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