Could the United States have won in Vietnam? If so, what would we have needed to do to make that happen?
Tactically, we did win. Strategically and politically we suffered a terrible defeat. We bombed the countryside inhumanely out of fear and wrongly spared Hanoi where the perpetrators of great evil planned their war. It would have been more humane to invade Hanoi and Haiphong, and replace the communists with a government that might have evolved into something like Taiwan or South Korea — and we could have done that I think. Barring that route, the war could not have been won, and we should not have tried to fight it. China had suffered one million casualties in Korea and was not eager to intervene, nor was Russia. Instead our military was forced to fight the war that it did not want to fight and could not be won, or at least not won without real genius. In a perfect world we still could have pulled it off, but there were no margins of error with such a flawed strategy and political land mines everywhere.
If you had to select the three most important battles in history, what would they be and could you briefly tell us why?
Entire books have been written on that and there is no consensus. Salamis saved Greece at a time when an infant Western civilization could easily have been lost for good. Cortes’s destruction of Tenochtitlan ushered in the Spanish conquistador protectorate and ensured the New World would develop in a bilateral fashion, with the U.S. and Canada on one side and all the rest on the other. A failure at Normandy would have put the Russian army into central France by the time we regrouped, and perhaps doubled the death toll of the camps — as well as discrediting Anglo-American arms for a generation.
