After World War II, the view of political elites in both the United States and Western Europe was that communism was a global threat that had to be contained at any cost. More information had become available in the West about Stalin's dictatorship in the Soviet Union, and the Soviets, in expelling the Germans from Eastern Europe, had made satellite countries out of Poland, Hungary, Romania and Czechoslovakia, turning them into communist dictatorships like the USSR itself. With the expulsion of the Chinese Nationalists and the communist takeover of mainland China in 1949, the "global threat" to democracy seemed even more real and imminent.
Hence, US policy became one of explicit "containment" of this threat at any cost. Even if there was no immediate threat to the United States, policymakers decided it was necessary to intervene militarily in situations anywhere on the globe. In 1950, Korea became the focal point of the effort, and in this case, realistically so. The United States was joined by a coalition of other countries that additionally sent troops to defend South Korea. When the fighting ceased, a line of demarcation between the communist north and pro-Western south was established that still holds today. So, in some sense, this one mission to "contain communism" was successful.
When the French were expelled from Indochina (Vietnam) in 1954, a similar partition was established between north and south. But the conflict in Vietnam, which was seen in the West simply as one of communism versus democracy, was not defused. The United States made a commitment to defend the sovereignty of the south, at first sending "advisers" to assist the South Vietnamese government and then, beginning in the early 1960s, sending combat troops. However, the situation was different from that of Korea because in this case, there were blurred lines between "communist aggression" and a genuinely nationalistic movement in Vietnam that sought to remove a government in the South that was tied to the West. In its backing of the South Vietnam regime, the United States was perceived by the North Vietnamese and by many in the south as simply a successor to the French colonialists—in other words, as merely another colonial power. As US involvement in Vietnam escalated following President Kennedy's assassination in 1963, the American public increasingly questioned the wisdom and necessity of the war. With each passing year, it appeared as if no progress was being made. There were constant reports of "successful" bombing raids against the Vietcong (the South Vietnamese fighters allied with the north) and eventually against North Vietnam itself, but the war dragged on without any end in sight.
These factors need to be seen in connection with the internal changes taking place in the United States during the 1960s. Young people no longer reflexively believed what their government was telling them or believed in slogans like "better dead than red" or "we've got to fight 'em over there so we don't have to fight 'em here." The threat that the communists were going to "take over the world" didn't carry the weight it had fifteen to twenty years earlier, especially when the place they were "taking over" was 10,000 miles from the United States and had no obvious strategic importance to us.
By 1968, even many, if not most, conservative people began to view the war as a failure and to believe that the United States should withdraw from the conflict as soon as possible. This fact partly accounts for that year's election of Richard Nixon, who had campaigned saying he had a "secret plan" to end the war. Yet US combat involvement continued for four more years after Nixon took office, including the extension of the war into Cambodia in 1970. When the United States completed its combat mission in 1973, it was assumed that the South Vietnamese forces would be able to resist the continued efforts of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese, but in just two years they were completely overrun and the communists whom the United States had opposed during all those previous years took over the south.
Vietnam was a watershed in American attitudes because, to many people, it seemed that the US government was dishonest with the public, did not know how to fight wars competently, and did not have the judgment to perceive when a war was worth fighting or was winnable. In the scheme of things, the loss of life (both the 66,000 US personnel who died and the far greater number of Vietnamese) and the huge expense of the war were totally disproportionate to the importance to the United States of a tiny country on the other side of the globe, especially when half the people in the area we were supposed to be defending (South Vietnam) did not want us there and were opposed to us. It's unlikely the United States will fight such a war again in the near future. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq could not have been fought by the United States had it not been for the 9/11 attacks on US soil. It's significant that, although the al-Qaeda attackers had been based in Afghanistan, the Bush administration found it necessary, in extending its involvement to Iraq, to (falsely) claim the Iraqis were tied to al-Qaeda and that they were in possession of "weapons of mass destruction" that could be used against the United States. In other words, the American public, ever since Vietnam, is reluctant to accept overseas involvement unless there is a perceived direct threat to the United States.
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