Why didn't we invade North Vietnam during the Vietnam War?

Question

The North Vietnamese Army came to the South and when they were losing sought sanctuary in North Vietnam. Why didn't we just chase them across the border and finish the job. What I've read in the past is that we didn't want to get Russia & China involved. Well, the Vietnamese hate the Chinese and Russia was unlikely to send troops or use nuclear weapons.

Answer 1

We didn't invade North Vietnam because that would have brought China into the war. China did not hate Vietnam, it merely wanted to annex it because Chain has serious imperialist ambitions (although it is patient about it). The main animosity came when China did invade North Vietnam, after the US left.
Lyndon Johnson was a social liberal and wanted his "guns and butter policy" (war without economic hardship). This meant he needed to avoid a larger war. That lead to the real problem in Vietnam is the same problem that happened in Iraq. You had the bean counters running the pentagon and they wanted to 'win with minimum force (read: 'minimum economic cost'). In both cases this allowed time for build up of opposing force that would not have been possible if the amount of force the military wanted had been deployed in the first place. Rumsfield and MacNamara - secretaries of defense - were the real US liabilities in these two wars because they undermined effective military tactics.

Answer 2

There was two reasons. One was that China threatened to try and steam role South Vietnam with one million men. The other was that the U.S. never declared war against North Vietnam and it was a police action. It remained a police action as long as the troops remained in South Vietnam.

Answer 3

That wouldn't have helped, it would only have changed the pace.
That war was basically fought on Maoist principles. Giap publicly said as much at the beginning. We simply had leadership that didn't listen to him. Our leaders were steeped in the tradition of the Crusade that was WW II, a third-generation war, and would not accept that Vietnam was a fourth-generation fight. Mao's phase I tactics were constant, and most of the time there were phase II conflict areas, but he guessed wrong and prematurely launched phase III battles on several occasions that each nearly brought him to ruin. His tactical mistakes, though, did not matter to his strategy, because his opponent was playing a different game altogether and didn't oppose his war. If the US counterinsurgency operations had been a major thrust instead of basically local experiments, and if this had been explained to the American people, the outcome might have been quite different.

Answer 4

North Vietnam was backed by China, that possesed nuclear weapons. A full-scale invasion as far as Hanoi could have started World War III.

Answer 5

Another good question: Well, the North Vietnamese were determined and very solid as to the goals of the war. They were veterans of WWII and had defeated the French. We could have "won" but the cost would have been unbearable as the British Royal Navy said: "What is the butcher's bill". We tried to bomb them and eventually we did more at the end: joke is they knew we had "lost", they "quit, waited two years and then had the whole enchillata. Simple reasoning. JD PS the Vietnamese hated then and still hatethe Chinese, whom they have fought.

Answer 6

Please read your history books. We did invade North Vietnam significantly during the Vietnam war, notably during the Tet Offensive. While MacArthur did want to use nuclear weapons, that was never a real consideration.

The real problem is that guerilla warfare (war of attrition, Fabian war e.g. Quintus Fabius) is difficult for a modern, European-style army to beat militarily -- if not impossible.

Answer 7

We did! And Cambodia, too! It was not well-publicized, but the fact is that we did do it. And we bombed the hell out of them, too! Fact is that we would have lost the war, anyway. The majority of the people there, north and south, did not want us there.

Hmm. Sounds kind of familiar.

Answer 8

Because johnson was half retarded and didn't understand that in a war, your supposed to attack your enemies.

Answer 9

Too frightened