Learning From the Vietnam War

At the 25th anniversary of the close to the Vietnam War all sides have studied the conflict. Increasingly it is treated as a series of errors and misjudgments by the United States that could have been caught and corrected early in the conflict. But in reality the war is a case study in the effects of grand strategy. Washington during the Cold War embarked on a strategy of maintaining an alliance system. Maintaining this system fostered its own logic. And in this logic fighting the first war America would ever lose was nearly inevitable.