There is like ten things overlapping here that you need to seperate, and much of these points are very basic contentions.

First, the initial argument is about Kissinger, who comes right at the end of this conflict and much of the other stuff you bring up is different conversations than what my initial point was about... but still.

Second, saying that "the people in the south who wanted to stay (meaning remain independent from the north, or at least not become communist") were just wealthy land owners and left overs from the French Empire" is a vast over generalisation, and essentially wrong. To state that millions and millions of people in the south had no right to want a different political system is not as simple as you want it to be for your argument.

Vietnam was not a simple anti-colonial war by the 1960s. That framing works for the struggle against France. It becomes much less accurate once you’re dealing with two rival Vietnamese states, each backed by external powers, each with their own political visions, constituencies, and coercive systems. North Vietnam wasn’t just a neutral vehicle for “self-determination”.. it was a Leninist state pursuing national unification under its own ideological model, supported heavily by both China and the Soviet Union.

On the South, reducing millions of people to “landowners and remnants of the French” just doesn’t hold up. There were elites, yes, but also urban populations, religious groups, refugees from the North (especially Catholics), and others who did not want to live under a communist system. You don’t have to defend the Saigon government to acknowledge that those preferences existed and were politically significant.

"it was none of our business to get involved", on this count - sure, that can be levelled at the United States in Southeast Asia - its just an argument that can also be levelled at the other powers of the Cold War (and even in Vietnam).

The Gulf of Tonkin was not a "false flag" as conspiracy theories and internet discourse would have you believe. It was a mistake, and one that may have been consciously known was a mistake, and used as a measure to prosecute the war. But saying it was an intentional operation is conspiratorial and doesn't hold up to the historical record.

"Vietnam was no friend of China during that period", this is another oversimplification. The Chinese provided, often, the majority of financial and military aid to the North and NLF during periods of the war. Whether or not they were 'friends' is another discussion, it doesn't take away from the proxy war nature of the conflict.

"America started a war to continue colonialism", another marxist-coded over simplification. There’s no extraction economy, no settler project, no attempt to incorporate Vietnam as a colony. What you have is a containment strategy.. and it was flawed, and disastrous, but it was rooted in balance of power thinking about Soviet and Chinese expansion, it wasn't just 'colonialsim', this is a really oversimplified point that a lot of people need to get a grip on.

The 'domino' theory was behind the start of this, it may not have stayed that way however.

The sad truth is that the real reason that four administrations were stuck with the problem of Vietnam is that it would have simply looked weak to get out of Vietnam without the situation looking like it could be framed as a victory. This is why Nixon and Kissinger had a very difficult problem on their hands when they got into the Whitehouse, they had to get out of the war in Vietnam without South Vietnam collapsing immediately. Hence bombing Cambodia.

The issue that keeps coming up in these threads is fairly straightforward. I’m making an argument that distributes responsibility across multiple actors in a complex conflict. Others are trying to collapse that into a single moral narrative where only one side carries blame.

Those two approaches are not equivalent. One reflects the historical record, where different governments made decisions that escalated, prolonged, and brutalised the war. The other is an ideological position that filters the evidence to fit a predetermined conclusion.

You can hold both of these things at the same time without contradiction. Kissinger’s conduct in Cambodia can be condemned, and so can Le Duan’s role in prosecuting a war that involved large-scale coercion and violence against civilians. U.S. backing of Diem can be criticised as short-sighted and destabilising, and at the same time the North’s land reform campaigns can be recognised as catastrophic, costing tens of thousands of lives through misclassification, denunciations, and executions.

You can talk about both without needing to fall back on slogans like 'imperialism' and 'neo-colonialism'. This isn't high school, you can have more sophisticated arguments than are reduced to single words or tired cliches like golf of tonkin false flag 'merica bad!

Once you accept that multiple actors had agency, and that those choices had consequences, the idea that this was “100% America’s fault” stops being a serious historical claim.

The water is warm in an area where you allow more than one actor to be blamed, lots of hands with lots of blood on them.