The Vietnam War was fought partly to offshire/outsource US manufacturing to Vietnam

This theory was elaborated by a friend of mine, historians please correct me if this is complete ballocks.

The version most people are told is that the Vietnam War was fought because of the Truman Doctrine to contain communism and the fear of the "domino effect". Although geopolitical dominance was probably part of the reason why the US military intervened, there probably were heavy economic interests behind it, and not only coming from the military-industrial complex seeking to sell more arms . Since the end of the Second World War the American economy was booming, employment was heavily rising and technology was expanding itself, people soon started consuming a lot. Salaries were on the rise and trade unions were very strong, which lead LBJ to expand on Roosevelt's New Deal and extended welfare policies. Europe and Japan had already recovered from the war and started producing goods and started competing with US products. Costs were increasing for producers, they had to make their cost of production much cheaper in order to be more competitive: They had to outsource their production to somewhere with a large poor population willing to work for lower wages and whose government had little regulation. They found a solution, Vietnam, who in 1968 had a population of over 40 million people (around 16 million in South Vietnam). If they could get rid of Communism in the North they would have a political ally which would at the same time be the perfect factory for their goods. Then, under the false Gulf of Tonkin incident they declared war, and as the war progressed and saw that the Vietcong was a tough enemy, the jungle was a difficult terrain as well as the fact that, since the war was televised and the anti-war movement was raging back at home the government had gone down in popularity and they might lose the next election, they decided to pull out, in part under the guidance of Henry Kissinger. What did Kissinger proceed to do? He saw that Deng Xiaoping was climbing the ladder of the CCP and he was open to market and political reform, this was the perfect opportunity. Guiding the Nixon administration to "open to China", outsourcing soon started and China progressively started becoming the "factory of the world". Currently, due to China becoming too expensive to produce and complicated Chinese regulations, production has been outsourced to Vietnam and other Southeastern Asian nations, so in a way the US have won.

Tell me what you think about this and please correct me if I have done any historical mistakes

submitted by /u/lbonhomme
[link] [comments]

source https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracytheories/comments/mikogw/the_vietnam_war_was_fought_partly_to/