Aftermath

The Pathet Lao overthrew the royalist government of Laos in December, 1975. They established the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese officials, particularly ARVN officers, were imprisoned in reeducation camps after the Communist takeover. Tens of thousands died and many fled the country after being released. Up to two million civilians left the country, and as many as half of these boat people perished at sea.

On July 2, 1976, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was declared. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a pardon for nearly 10,000 draft dodgers.

After repeated border clashes in 1978, Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea (Cambodia) and ousted the Khmer Rouge. As many as two million died during the Khmer Rouge genocide.

Vietnam began to repress its ethnic Chinese minority. Thousand fled and the exodus of the boat people began. In 1979, China invaded Vietnam in retaliation for its invasion of Cambodia, known as the Third Indochina War or the Sino-Vietnamese War. Chinese forces were repulsed.

The dire predictions of a generation did not come to fruition. Since Thailand and other South East Asian nations did not fall to systematic Vietnamese aggression, the Domino Theory, so widely trumpeted, was said to have been an illusion. Others, however, argued that they did not fall to Communism, because the war bought time for their economic and political development.[citation needed] Vietnam, without the presence of the United States, showed itself to be of little economic or strategic value to anyone.

At home, a generation of Americans struggled to absorb the lessons of military intervention without clear motives or objectives. As General Maxwell Taylor, one of the principle architects of the war noted "first, we didn't know ourselves. We thought that we were going into another Korean war, but this was a different country. Secondly, we didn't know our South Vietnamese allies … And we knew less about North Vietnam. Who was Ho Chi Minh? Nobody really knew. So, until we know the enemy and know our allies and know ourselves, we'd better keep out of this kind of dirty business. It's very dangerous."

In the decades since end of the conflict, some have sought to portray America's defeat as a political, rather than a military defeat. The official history of the United States Army noted, however, that "tactics have often seemed to exist apart from larger issues, strategies, and objectives. Yet in Vietnam the Army experienced tactical success and strategic failure … The … Vietnam War('s) … legacy may be the lesson that unique historical, political, cultural, and social factors always impinge on the military … Success rests not only on military progress but on correctly analyzing the nature of the particular conflict, understanding the enemy's strategy, and assessing the strengths and weaknesses of allies. A new humility and a new sophistication may form the best parts of a complex heritage left to the Army by the long, bitter war in Vietnam."

Doubts surfaced as to the effectiveness of large scale, sustained bombing. As Chief of Staff of the United States Army Harold K. Johnson noted, "if anything came out of Vietnam, it was that air power couldn't do the job. Even General William Westmoreland admitted that the bombing had been ineffective. As he remarked, "I still doubt that the North Vietnamese would have relented."

The loss of the war called into question U.S. Army doctrine. Marine Corps General Victor Kulak heavily criticised Westmoreland's attrition strategy, calling it "wasteful of American lives … with small likelihood of a successful outcome." As well, doubts surfaced about the ability of the military to train foreign forces. The defeat also raised disturbing questions about the quality of the advice that was given to successive United States Presidents by the Pentagon.

As the number of troops in Vietnam increased, the financial burden of the war grew. One of the rarely mentioned consequences of the war were the budget cuts to President Johnson's Great Society programs. As defense spending and inflation grew, Johnson was forced to raise taxes. The Republicans, however, refused to vote for the increases, unless a $6 billion cut was made to the administration's social programs. The Vietnam War claimed more than just victims overseas - at home it claimed reforms aimed at lifting millions of people out of poverty.

Almost 3 million Americans served in Vietnam. Between 1965 and 1973 the United States spent $120 billion on the war. This resulted in a large federal budget deficit. The war demonstrated that no power, not even a superpower, has unlimited strength and resources. But perhaps most significantly, the Vietnam War illustrated that political will, as much as material might, is a decisive factor in the outcome of conflicts.