[lbo-talk] The Vietnam War and the Beginning of the US Decline

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Aug 25 13:12:25 PDT 2005



> frank scott wrote:
>
> >>"Never forget that the Vietnamese spent years beating us back
> with punji
> >>sticks, tiger traps, WWII vintage weapons(The AA gun that Jane Fonda
> >>was pictured on), and sandals made from the tires of stolen US
> jeeps."
> >>Leigh
> >>
> >
> >malcolm x once said ( paraphrasing) that we had the world's greatest
> >mechanized armed force, but when the sun went down, one little asian
> >brother went out there with a blade, and it was even steven...
>
> But did the US really lose the Vietnam War?

Yes, Washington did lose the Vietnam War, which is why it didn't do another big, long, and expensive war like that till 2003. Nearly thirty years is a pretty long time to go without a big invasion in the history of an empire.

One of the reasons that US troops are dying in Iraq is that their country is run by conservatives who think that America could and should have won the Vietnam War (but for Jane Fonda, et al). :-0 Another reason is that liberals among the power elite feel that, while America didn't win the war, it won the peace afterward -- so there was no real loss . . . to them.

Still and all, the Vietnam War marked the beginning of the long decline of US hegemony:

<blockquote>The Vietnam War and the refusal of the administration of U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson to pay for it and its Great Society programs through taxation resulted in an increased dollar outflow to pay for the military expenditures and rampant inflation, which led to the deterioration of the U.S. balance of trade position. In the late 1960s, the dollar was overvalued with its current trading position, while the deutschmark and the yen were undervalued; and, naturally, the Germans and the Japanese had no desire to revalue and thereby make their exports more expensive, whereas the U.S. sought to maintain its international credibility by avoiding devaluation. Meanwhile, the pressure on government reserves was intensified by the new international currency markets, with their vast pools of speculative capital moving around in search of quick profits.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bretton_Woods_Conference></blockquote>

The hollowing out of the US economy doesn't concern either liberals or conservatives in the power elite, though -- unlike American workers, their fortune is not tied to it.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org> * Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- ahmadinejads-face.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>



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