World History | Assessment | 1

World History IPE252

1
Vietnam War and its impact on the world
All the wars in the history had impact on the world history. It also had impact on
countries that were fighting the battle but also the other countries. This war has changed the
world and it has its impact on the overall world. Both Vietnam and United States faced a
huge loss due to this war. This war started at the time of World War II, when the Japanese
forces invaded Vietnam. In order to stop both the Japanese forces and French colonial
administrator, Ho Chi Minh a political leader inspired by Soviet and Chinese communism
formed the Viet Minh or the league for Vietnam’s independence. After the defeat in World
War II, Japanese forces retrenched itself from the war hence leaving the Bao Dai emperor of
France to have control of Vietnam. Immediately after gaining the control he rose up to take
the control of the northern city of Hanoi. However the major reason for the start of the war
was when U.S. increased its involvement in war in the year 1954, however the ongoing
conflict was going on from few decades back (Kocher, Pepinsky & Kalyvas, 2011).
Vietnam War was one of those wars that lasted for several years. It was long, costly
and divisive conflict that potholed the communist government of northern and southern
Vietnam and their allies like United States. This war got intensified due to the Cold War
among the Soviet Union and United States. It is estimated that more than 3 million people
which also includes 58,000 American that got killed because of this war. Out of this figure
half of them were the civilians of Vietnam. In the end communist forces ended the war by
taking the control of the South Vietnam in the year 1975 and the country was unified as the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam (Le Espiritu, 2014). However, it is also the fact that Vietnam
War is like a bad dream to the United States because it lost many of the army personals in the
war but they did not succeed in their aim to reduce the communist power. Moreover, the first
thing that Vietnam War changed is that it combined North and South Vietnam which created
a country that had more unity in it. The war united the ideologies within the nation.
The first impact of the war was on the America itself as there were large oppositions
that created within America that was against the President Richard Nixon who ordered the
withdrawal of the forces of United States in the year 1973. People of U.S. were divided on
this issue. With the enhancement cold war U.S. intensified its policies against the Soviet
Union allies (Herzog, 2017). Equipment supplies and training from CIA of America to
Diem’s security forces has strengthened them and hence they cracked down on the
sympathizers of Viet Minh which they derisively known as Viet Cong which arrested more

2
than 100,000 people, most of them were brutally executed and tortured. By the end of 1957,
Viet Cong and Diem’s repressive regime’s other opponents started fighting back with attacks
on the officials of government and others. In the year 1960 many of the opponents of Diem in
southern Vietnam both communist and non-communist constructed a National Liberation
Front for organising the confrontation to the regime. Although NLF claimed that it is
autonomous and its larger numbers of members are communist which U.S. thought that they
were the Hanoi’s puppets. There was a string domino theory that suggested that if Southeast
Asian country fell to communism, other countries will also follow. Checking the political
instability in Southern Vietnam, U.S. started to enhance its military and economic support
(Marmar, et al. 2015).
The impact of the war can be seen from the time of the war, as the bombing was not
limited to the Vietnam in between 1964 to 1973. This is because at the time of war U.S.
secretly dropped two million tons of bombs on the neighbouring nations such as neutral Laos
at the time of CIA-led “Secret War”. This bombing campaign was done to disrupt the
supplier’s flow across the Ho Chi Minh trails within Vietnam and to stop the Pathet Lao rise
or their forces. This bombing was the one of the heaviest bombing country in the world in
terms of per capita income. At the end of July 1965, Johnson allowed a dispatching of
100,000 troops and adding to this the troops of Australia, South Korea, New Zealand and
Thailand also committed the troops to fight within South Vietnam (Havens, 2014).
It was the impact of the war that larger part of the South-East Asia came out of the
control of communist forces. It has impact on the ecology in the South Eastern part of the
world as the U.S. forces dropped 20 million gallons of herbicides in between 1962-1971
mainly in the North of Saigon as well as along the borders of Cambodia and Laos for
reducing the dense jungle that concealed the Viet Cong as well as it also destroyed the crops
of the enemies so that the challenges related to the their sustenance gets created. This also
reduced the food scarcity in the region as Vietnam was one of the major contributors to the
crops grown in the region (Lawrence, 2010).
This war widened the gap between the U.S. and the Soviet Russia as Russia started to
feel that America was against the communist ideology which they wanted to spread in
different parts of the Asia. As U.S. was one of the major economic superpower in the world
that supported other economies as well but they had to spent more than $350 billion to $900
billion on this war which has led to huge burden on their economy which also included