Did the Vietnamese people win the war? No. They've been living in poverty for 50 years and most of them still are in 2021, 50 years later.
Do "the people" ever win a war? Something like 600,000 - 2 million civilians died in that war. If you're implying that people would be better off ecconomically if the other side won, that seems highly speculative with no evidence to back it up.
Would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea right now?
That's the closest comparable we have.
If the US were to have 'stayed' in S. Vietnamese, much like they did in S. Korea, that S. Vietnam would look 'somewhat' like S. Korea, but not nearly as prosperous given their agrarian history etc..
But definitely better off.
From https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview:
"Vietnam’s development over the past 30 years has been remarkable. Economic and political reforms under Đổi Mới, launched in 1986, have spurred rapid economic growth, transforming what was then one of the world’s poorest nations into a lower middle-income country. Between 2002 and 2018, GDP per capita increased by 2.7 times, reaching over US$2,700 in 2019, and more than 45 million people were lifted out of poverty"
50 years on, still in poverty.
Win or loose, live in poverty.
But you're right, it's poverty nontheless.
Such regressive thinking, that too about whole societies and nations. As if they are not human.
If left to develop its communist government by itself, it could be like China today - a superpower that's going to overtake the USA by important measures.
Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.
Would they have been better off if france agreed to decolonize instead of trying to hold on to their failing colonial empire with force (leading to everything that came to follow)? Maybe we'll never know.
But i don't think there's any particular reason to assume that if the south won they would be any better off. South Vietnam hardly seems like it was the most stable/well run of governments - they were into fixing elections and persacuting buddhists, etc. Hardly what i would call an ideal state.
Ho Chi Mihm was a puppet of china. There was no 'developing on their own'.
> Lets stop pretending that years of war against a superpower didn't come at a cost for them and the US should have left them alone.
Yeah, letting Russia and China subjugate the world would have gone SO MUCH better. What good has it done for nicaragua, cuba, north korea, afghanistan or the many noname countries in Africa? The USSR left only poverty and death whereever they went.
And once USA took control of Afganistan, how has the situation improved?
Vietnam is communist but they're not very friendly with China, nor have they been since about 1975; vietnam is certainly not a satellite of China. Starting in 1979 they fought a low-intensity border war with China that went on for over a decade, a fact you seem to be unaware of.
Oh and if you do some digging you will know that HCM sent a few letters to Trumman asking for US's aid, we could have been ally 70 years earlier, but no, the US branded him as a commie and the rest is history. Btw, the first line of our Proclamation of Independence is pretty much a paraphrase of the US's Declaration of Independence, that's to show how much we wanted the US to be ally.