The Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949 and Chinese intervention against the United Nations in Korea made U.S.-China policy a captive of Cold War politics. The South had an anti-communist government led by Ngo Dinh Diem. The North had a communist government led by Ho Chi Minh. The country was divided into North and South. Vietnam had gained its independence from France in 1954. Led by Ho Chi Minh, a Communist-dominated revolutionary movement-the Viet Minh-waged a political and military struggle for Vietnamese independence that frustrated the efforts of the French and resulted ultimately in their ouster from the region. The Vietnam War was the legacy of France's failure to suppress nationalist forces in Indochina as it struggled to restore its colonial dominion after World War II. Some one hundred new sovereign states emerged from the wreckage of European colonialism, and Cold War competition was promptly extended to many of these newstates. The Soviet Union itself collapsed two years later, in December 1991.Īlthough the Cold War was the dominant feature of the post-1945 world, another momentous change in the international system took place concurrently: the end of Europe's five-century-long domination of the non-European world. The Berlin Wall came down on 09 November 1989, and with it crumbled the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. The last Soviet soldier left on 15 February 1989. Over 15,000 Soviet troops were killed in Afghanistan in the 1980s, not even a third of the American losses in Vietnam. In 1988, President Gorbachev announced his intention to withdraw Soviet forces from Afghanistan. The Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was an important turning point contributing to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. In 1989, the final Soviet troops withdrew from an embarrassing war in Afghanistan that was seen as a waste of lives and money. The Soviets deployed more than 100,000 troops to Afghanistan. The USSR began its invasion in 1979 to support its puppet prime minister, who failed to extend power much beyond Kabul. Some thought that Afghanistan would be the Soviet's Vietnam, but it was not. Vietnam eventually fell, but the Free World alliance system scarcely quivered, and within two decades Communism had been consigned to the ashbin of history. In Vietnam, America demonstrated to other allied countries that it was prepared to sacrifice blood and treasure in that struggle. In general however, it was clear that Vietnam itself was not worth fighting for except as a battleground in the far larger struggle against global communism. American strategic objectives in Vietnam were complex, and evolved over time as leaders in Washington came and went and as the situation on the ground matured. The extent of the American victory in Vietnam was not apparent at the time.
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