The Vietnam war was an American victory. Vast amounts of Soviet, and some Chinese, resources were diverted to Indochina which was relatively underdeveloped compared to other parts of Southeast Asia. Communist efforts were metastasized onto the battleground chosen by U.S. planners. Though the true strategy was not part of Lyndon Johnson’s public rhetoric the plan was to pin down the communists in Vietnam long enough for other non-communist states to fortify themselves. The Vietnam War bought time for and relieved insurgent pressure on Malaysia, Indonesia, Burma, Thailand, the Philippines and South Korea.
In the end, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were expendable if the rest of the region could be denied to the Soviets and the Chinese. However, when Richard Nixon became president in 1969 he decided Indochina didn’t have to be conceded. After bombing the North Vietnamese into submission Nixon gradually replaced U.S. forces with RVN forces, created a policy to end the draft, and traveled to the U.S.S.R. and China to try and secure some degree of cooperation.
The events after Watergate led to Nixon’s resignation and emboldened Congressional Democrats to sabotage more than a decade of U.S. efforts and sacrifice. In 1975, led by a pro-communist cabal of senators including McGovern, Kennedy, Church and Bayh, Congress cut off all funding and U.S. military support to South Vietnam. In a few months the country fell to the Soviet-backed North Vietnamese. This led to decades of genocide and brutal repression.
I am not so sure it was actually planned that way but it sure turned out that way. It was a tactical loss in a border campaign and ultimately a strategic victory against the USSR. But, that Victory had in it the seeds of the next Long War in which we are now engaged and in which, as in the last one, the enemy is well represented here at home on the political Left.