The United States was a phenomenal success at containing communism after 1945, as long as one considers success as not falling to communism itself. I maintain, however, that the measure of success we should expect is the quarantine of communism to its’ component initial member, the Soviet Union. But in the years after World War II to the age of the Nixon presidency, the US failed to stop the expansion of communism to any efficiency. The whole of Eastern Europe fell to communism. The most populous nation on Earth, China, also went communist indirectly taking with it N. Korea and Vietnam, and making the countries of Cambodia and Laos quasi-communist. The United States even gained a communist satellite 90 miles out of its’ boundaries, Cuba. It is clear that American foreign policy with its’ banner of containment was a miserable failure. The end of World War II brought the redrawing of boundaries all over the world. Korea, conquered by Japan during the war, was divided at the 38th parallel then given to the USSR in the north and the US in the south. The Soviets pulled out of N. Korea in 1950, leaving a communist regime behind. That regime, funded and equipped by The Peoples Republic of China, invaded S. Korea. The United Nations (led, of course, by the United States) raised an army to restore peace and expel the aggressors. The “conflict” lasted three years and victory changed hands twice before the bloodied United States established a cease-fire zone on the familiar 38th parallel. Some might say that communism in this case was successfully contained, however, the loss of 53,000 American lives in a fruitless attempt to topple a regime is hardly a victory. A similar yet more gruesome failure of the United States would materialize in Vietnam. Vietnam declared independence from France in 1945, which the French did not recognize. A war broke and after 8 years of fighting the decision came in 1954 to split the country in two, North Vietnam being Communist and South Vietnam led by the Vietnamese who supported the French. Diem, the South Vietnamese leader was assassinated in 1963, causing the U.S. to send over American troops to try to support the non-Communist regime in the South, in accordance with the Truman Doctrine. The consequent struggle would prove to be the most agonizing and long defeat of the American military in history. Fighting a traditional war in a guerrilla setting and the insistence that we could win the war without popular support of the South Vietnamese were two key elements of our failure. The United States suffered 68,000 dead along with 400,000 S. Vietnamese allies. It was 1973 when we first started to withdraw our troops, and in 1976, all of Vietnam came under rule by the Communist North. Later, Vietnam would occupy Laos and Cambodia in part of an Asian Soviet bloc.
