Effects of Vietnam War on Cold War

Effects of the Vietnam War on the Cold War

The USSR and PRC had mostly not intervened on a large scale to aid the DRV in the war. Indeed, Khrushchev had been greatly fearful that escalating the war in a relatively unimportant region of the world (SE Asia) could wreck his attempts to achieve détente with the US, and could drag the Soviet Union into an undesirable war. China was also involved with a diplomatic struggle against the Soviet Union, as both the USSR and the PRC wrestled to gain control over Hanoi; this stopped both from participating greatly in the Vietnam War. As well as that, China and the US were beginning to show signs of more cooperation in the late stages of the war, especially marked by President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972, the first visit made to China by a US President.

The US had suffered a politically induced defeat inflicted on it by the DRV general Vo Nguyen Giap, who had variously used guerrilla tactics, underground warfare and military offensives aimed at upsetting the mood of the American populace and whiling away time as the US Army lost resources and morale. The US had spent much wealth on the war only to purchase a humiliating defeat. This greatly upset the Cold War balance. The US lost its superior position over the USSR by choosing to wage this unwise war, and sources show that the USSR reaped the profits without participating significantly in the fighting. Another sign of the changing situations was that the Soviet Union by now was spending a huge amount of its country’s resources to build weapons on a larger scale than the US, which showed the USSR’s dominance.

After their defeat, the US government received a serious blow and was blamed by people from both within and outside the country, thus the image of US was tarnished and its international prestige fell. A new communist country, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was created; Communism’s reach was further extended, and we feel containment had failed, at least in this region. The US later became less participatory in Cold War activities such as the Soviet-Afghan War, and we observe that the US depended more on diplomacy, as well as its foreign allies’ resources to counter the Soviet Union later on in the Soviet Afghan War.