Vietnam War, a classical Example of Cold War Conflict?

Sounds like an essay question, but like the Korean War it was what is known as a proxy war, where the two superpowers involved (USA and USSR) cannot fight each other directly due to their mutually assured destruction (I’ve always loved that phrase) so they use third parties, it also has the advantage to the superpowers that the vast majority of casualties and destruction does not directly affect their own country. Proxy War’s are really the only way superpowers can have conflict in the Cold War situation.

A turning point in the Cold War? I wouldn’t know, I’m not a historian and don’t know enough about the political playground in the years directly after the Vietnam War to comment I was minus one when it ended

Is this homework?

“Turning point”? No. Reagan’s decision (or bluff) to deploy an anti-missile defense during the 80s to stampede the Soviet Union into an arms buildup that it could not sustain while it pursued its own Afghan nightmare, and which combination bankrupted it, was more of a turning point. The Vietnam War was more of a milepost of “are we there yet?” along a road that would have bankrupted us instead.

Welcome to Fluther, by the way. Maybe the mods will give you a break on your first question, but they really do need more ‘meat’ on the bones.

Nah… not a turning point. It was a long war of attrition that acted in a lot of ways to give the American (and I imagine Soviet) population a tangible foothold on the cold war.

What exactly are you looking for in this question?

Also, I don’t know about others, but I do prefer properly formed sentences. Tends to make things clearer.

It was a cold war conflict in that Communist countries supported the Vietcong and the West supported the South Vietnamese government however essentially it was a nationalist war as the aim of the Vietnamese was to remove foreign interference from their country. In that respect it resembles the present conflict in Afghanistan.

America involved itself in order to prevent the so called domino effect, or stop the rot of communism spreading throughout South East Asia and beyond. People say America lost the Vietnam war, that isn’t true, America withdrew and Vietnam was left crippled and poisoned for decades. This may have helped prevent communism spreading who knows, after Vietnam Communist revolutions were few and far between. That maybe due to US effectiveness at prevention and lack of Soviet support.

The US did lose the Viet Nam war. We ran from there with our tail between our legs.
It certainly wasn’t a turning point in the cold war as much as it was a mire. The only way to refer to it as a turning point, to my mind, was how that began the cracks in the American Mindset on the Us vs. Them mentality.
Reagan had almost nothing to do with the fall of the Soviet Empire. It wasn’t any bluff that destroyed them, it was Gobachev’s trying to restructure it, matched with poor engineering that caused the USSR to fall under its own weight.
A much better example of a turning point is the USSR Afganistan war, oddly enough refered to as their Viet Nam.

@mammal Communism failed as it is a poor system and people didn’t like it and not because Vietnam was crippled and poisoned. Vietnam was crippled and poisoned (and in fact still is) because of a pointless war. If Vietnam is to be held up as a shining example of Capitalism in action then Capitalism too deserves to fail.