Sure. I just don’t think the Vietnam experience made American leaders shy away from engaging in criminal behavior. The war itself was a string of international crimes. The administration that ended the war got caught engaging in crimes. The next President pardoned him for those crimes. You could give Carter a pass, I guess, but the next guy was right back to criming.
Vietnam was an important cultural watershed in many ways, and by the mid-seventies with the fall of Saigon there was certainly a broad sense of futility about the whole thing. I would not say though that Americans broadly felt defeated or humiliated; by that time, most had simply stopped thinking about it. Hell, during the war most Americans tried not to think about it. Of more concern by 1975 was the stagnating economy and, soon enough, skyrocketing gas prices. Amongst the policy wonks and politics junkies the whole Iranian Revolution and Russian invasion of Afghanistan double whammy made a lot of waves, but again, I would have a hard time describing the impact on most Americans as anything close to national humiliation or defeat along the lines of, say, France in 1940, China after the Opium Wars, Japan and Germany after WWII, or even Mexico after, well, a couple of centuries of being so close to the USA and so far from God.
Two big oceans, massive amounts of valuable resources, a big population, and a late arrival on the world stage combined to make the American experience different from everyone else’s. Our sin is not in saying we are different, it is in believing that difference equates to superiority. What is worse, we tend to view that superiority as God-given, inevitable, and permanent. And that goes back to the very earliest days of the Republic.
Perhaps it’s the difference between failing to conquer someone else and actually being conquered.
Could be, though in fairness we never really set out to conquer Vietnam. About the only place we actually set out to conquer was North America, taking it from the indigenous folks. Even Mexico in the 1840s we had no interest in for the most part. We much preferred indirect domination of Cuba after 1898, and with Germany and Japan in WWII we would have preferred to have gone home but figured we had to stick around because of Stalin and his merry men.
Now, delivering violent destruction 24/7, that we’re good at.
More like what happens when life never humbles you. Much as The Exceptionalism bothers me, it won’t be pretty when chickens come home to roost.
I didn’t mean we wanted to make Vietnam the 51st state (Watchmen notwithstanding), just that losing a war thousands of miles away is different from having one’s own cities flattened. As you noted, only the South can ‘boast’ of that experience. Well, there was that unpleasantness in 1814 but it doesn’t seem to have left much of a scar.
In fact, I reckon a significant portion of today’s USA population, from any and all political perspectives, would welcome the British back to burn DC again.
Why would we want to burn it? We will, of course, be happy to review your application to join the Union, some time after we finish reviewing, checks list Sierra Leone…
Nah, no thanks. After Brexit, we can fumble our own way to a third-world economy, thank you very much.
But we can do it together!!!
Cool! We’ll reprise the glory days of the wartime US/UK alliance, only this time instead of an epic struggle against fascism we can stumble along together into malaise, degeneracy, and social dissolution!
and drag, errr bring, everyone down, err along with us!!!
Surely Australia will want in.
Ok, Oz is in, but we draw the line at the hobbits over in Wellington.
We’ll call it the Malaise Union.
We leave Mayonnaise to those continental types.
…who put in on fried potatoes, which is an abomination in the eyes of God and man.
Timex
1861
I’m just going to say that one of the greatest foods in the history of mankind is deep fried potato salad, a food from a BBQ joint near me.
It’s essentially some kind of mayo potato salad dressing on deep fried potato chunks. It is insanely good, and it makes you feel like you are actually dying from coronary heart disease as you eat it.
