I'm not going to deal with so many conflations of circumstances that are not similar much less the same.
Nope, there is no valid comparison between South Korea and South Vietnam then or now.
How many more American lives were we going to spend to prop up a government that the South Vietnamese would not/could not effectively fight for?
Quote:But we may have seen something like Korea today.
Nope, there is no valid comparison between South Korea and South Vietnam then or now.
How many more American lives were we going to spend to prop up a government that the South Vietnamese would not/could not effectively fight for?
Quote:A short answer would be differences in popular support, foreign support and the way the wars were fought.
The South Vietnamese government was incredibly unpopular in Vietnam itself, and while the South Korean government was no bed of roses itself, relatively speaking it was on much better footing with its people, with some limited democratic controls via the United States Army Military Government in Korea, the former Japanese colonial infrastructure, and the benefit of having already undergone a massive purge of its rebellious elements prior to the outbreak of war in 1950.
(Exception of Jeju, which was not fully subjugated until the end of the war.) South Vietnam, on the other hand, was still rife with rebels and communists from the time of the French colonial days to the fall of Saigon, and the thick jungle geography of Indochina made it difficult to rid themselves of that threat, unlike Korea with its primarily mountainous terrain.
Vietnam had been in varying stages of rebellion for decades already, where Korea had been more peaceful under Japanese rule.
Another large difference was the level of foreign support both nations received, and in the case of South Korea, still receive. While South Vietnam did enjoy the aid and assistance of the United States and its allies, that aid ended up becoming less of something to support the regime and more of something to prop it up. When US and allied forces withdrew from Vietnam following the Paris Peace Accords, the AVRN all but fell apart in the face of the NVA's 1975 Spring Offensive.
South Korea, in 1950, could very well have been conquered itself, facing similar conditions, save for American, and later UN, involvement in the Pusan Pocket as well as the later stages of the war.
Unlike Vietnam, Korea continued to enjoy foreign support even after the armistice was signed, which was a large boon to their national security even after they developed a proper military of their own.
The nature of the wars fought also help differentiate the two nations, with the Vietnam War being primarily defensive in the case of South Vietnam, North Vietnam itself seeing few battles and primarily being the subject of bombings rather than invasions due to the protections of China and the Soviet Union, thus allowing them to still have the strength to invade the South once the allied coalition had withdrawn.
The Korean War, in contrast, was fought in nearly every part of the Korean Peninsula, with Pusan being the only major population center to not be subject to a battle of some nature.
In the end both North and South Korea were decimated by the conflict and its unlikely that without the support of the United Stated and China that either would have been in much condition by 1953 to break the stalemate that had set in.
The continued presence of the United States armed forces has likely been instrumental in the continued survival of South Korea, especially during periods of internal unrest.
My sources:
•Cumings, Bruce (2011). The Korean War: A history. New York: Modern Library.
•____________ (1981). The Origins of the Korean War, Liberation and the Emergence of Separate Regimes, 1945-1947. Princeton University Press.
•Farber, Davide (2004). The Sixties Chronicle. Legacy Publishing. ISBN 141271009X.
•Hart-Landsberg, Martin (1998). Korea: Division, Reunification, & U.S. Foreign Policy. Monthly Review Press. pp. 71–72.
•Jacobs, Seth (2006). Cold War Mandarin: Ngo Dinh Diem and the Origins of America's War in Vietnam. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 0-7425-4447-8.
•Logevall, Fredrik (2006). "The French Recognition of China and its Implications for the Vietnam War". In Roberts, Priscilla (ed.). Behind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World Beyond Asia. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. pp. 153–171. ISBN 0-8047-5502-7.
•Stokesbury, James L (1990). A Short History of the Korean War. New York: Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-688-09513-5.
•Tucker, Spencer C. (2011) The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War: A Political, Social, and Military History ABC-CLIO. ISBN 1-85109-961-1
•United States House of Representatives, Vietnam and Korea: Human Rights and U.S. Assistance, A Study Mission Report of the Committee on Foreign Affairs 5 (94th Cong., 1st Sess., 9 February 1975).
•William E. Le Gro, From Cease Fire to Capitulation. Washington, D.C.: United States Army Center of Military History, 1981, p. 28.
