Yes, but only from the global perspective. For an average Vietnamese rice farmer, who doesn't give two hoots about the global proxy war, it had become a war for survival and the aggressor was clearly the US.
No, this is simply not true.
South Vietnamese did not generally like the notion of the North Vietnamese Communists either.
The North was invading the South, the US was upholding a fledgling government in the South, in that context it's pretty hard to label the US as 'aggressor'. And I also agree that 'Imperialism' is a stretch because US actions in Japan, South Korea etc. aren't even remotely related to classical Imperialism. Heck, the US gave Japan a constitution, democracy, and even made sure that women had the right to vote, despite Japanese objection!
Vietnam is more nuanced than most terms can capture.
The fledgling government was only “fledgling” because the CIA installed and then helped destabilize an unpopular, anti-democratic government.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1963_South_Vietnamese_coup
>And I also agree that 'Imperialism' is a stretch because US actions in Japan, South Korea etc. aren't even remotely related to classical Imperialism. Heck, the US gave Japan a constitution, democracy, and even made sure that women had the right to vote, despite Japanese objection!
Japan was a democracy prior to the war, with universal male suffrage beginning in the late 1920s. It devolved into fascism through a series of internal coups.
It’s great that suffrage was extended to women post war. What wasn’t so great was when the US government absolved, rehabilitated, and financed the former fascists and more or less handed the country back over to them to stop talking the rise of any legitimate, democratic left-wing rule of the country. And this was despite the fact that many leftists in Japan had fought, been imprisoned, and died trying to stop the war and atrocities by the fascists. Amazingly, this effort was led by the CIA-backed war criminal, Nobusuke Kishii under the guise of stopping the “socialist threat” to Japan (quite rich since he and his pals dragged the country into a war that caused untold devastation and destruction).
https://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/09/world/cia-spent-millions-...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi
In South Korea, the US backed Syngman Rhee, another fascist who killed tens of thousands of people he perceived to be his left-wing opponents. This unchecked political violence legitimized the cause of Kim Il-Sung and threw the country into a devastating civil war that has been terrible for everyone on the peninsula for the past 70 years. And in spite of all of this, the US continued to back right-wing dictators in South Korea until they were pushed out by a popular uprising in the 1980s (the true origin of South Korean democracy, not the sham the US installed).
If you want to understand the reality of US imperialism, I suggest you not blindly accept popular narratives about what the US did postwar, especially in SE Asia. There are plenty of history texts written on the subject.
I'm not blindly accepting anything; the 'popular narrative' is in fact something like 'US involvement in Vietnam is Imperialism'.
US involvement in Vietnam was not an act of Imperialism by any historical standard and it was ballpark consistent with actions in WW1, WW2, and Korea.
The US did a reasonable job of helping to rebuild Japan, a nation that had marauded the region, murdered millions and attacked America (does an Imperial power help their enemies rebuild, institute democracy and leave them better off?), and this included some things like 'getting women the right to vote'. It's ridiculous to think that the occupying Americans would 'right all the historical wrongs' of a very foreign nation levelled to the ground. 'Wrongs' which by the way you've characterized politically (i.e. 'left-wing' vs. 'right-wing') and therefore difficult to consider in a moral context anyhow.
Ironically, were the American occupiers to have intervened further, armchair historians would find yet another excuse to lament it as yet another form of 'Imperialism' or 'cultural imposition of western values' etc..
And your comments about South Korea ... yes, backing an authoritarian leader in the aftermath of devastating war in the mid-20th century is a rational and practical choice. It's not to say that all American choices are perfect, but actual unfolding of history for most S. Koreans went reasonably well by any standard.
Thanks to American involvement in South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan they are all lively, healthy, fruitful, democratic nations today.
Were the Americans to have not walked away from their victory over the VC and North Vietnamese forces, and left a contingent of forces remaining South Vietnam and continue the threat of total annihilation of Northern forces ... South Vietnam would be like South Korea - a beacon of civility and progress to the region.
Sadly, the Americans withdrew, and so I got to grow up with Vietnamese refugee friends in my neighbourhood, who incidentally, all became Dentists. Literally all of them.
> (buddhist priests killed by Diệm's army and police)/ In response, the US government was concerned about the possibility "for the Dim/Nhu government to succeed and for us [the United States] to continue to support them."
I am not talking about the Vietnamese living in Saigon under American protection. I am talking about the villagers who faced the brunt of American bombs and napalm. To them, the argument that Americans are here to protect democracy was pretty much nonsense.
Don't forget that prior to American involvement, Vietnam was a French colony. We can debate the whole day whether the Americans were imperialists or not, but the French practiced textbook definition of imperialism in Vietnam. The Americans entered Vietnam at a time of heightened anti-colonialism. Whether American actions were good or bad is another matter, but to most Vietnamese, it was again a foreign entity fighting war on their soil. The fact that North Vietnamese were communists doesn't help much because ultimately they were Vietnamese fighting for their own land.