[Xenephex]

By the way, you're right the that U.S. was involved in the partition of Korea, but it took two to tango, just as it did in Europe. The alternative would have been communist rule of all of Korea, just as the alternative in Europe would have been communist rule of all of Germany (for example). I'm sure that would have been ok with you, but I suspect a large number of Koreans (and Germans) would have had a problem with that arrangement.

Vietnam is a little more complicated, but the real source of the problem there, post-war, was the French insistence that they have all of their colonies returned to them, even though they had collaborated with the occupiers (the Japanese in that case).

I will concede that the U.S. violated the Geneva accords in regard to re-unification (of course they hadn't signed them), and that was not a stellar moment in our history, and our subsequent history in Vietnam (even just politically) has a lot of ugly spots. No argument.

But... what would have happened had the accords been carried out at the time? What is clear is that the majority of people in the South Vietnam of 1955 did NOT want the communists to take over (a lot of them had fled the north), and chances are that what happened in 1975 would simply have happened in 1955, with the caveat that the majority would likely have had nowhere to go and there would have been that many more executions and that much more 're-education' and imprisonment.

What actually happened in those intervening 20 years makes all of that moot, but I don't think anybody at the time anticipated all that was going to happen. Yes, we were trying to establish our 'influence' in various places around the world, but....

...what has been almost completely forgotten, or ruthlessly mocked, over the years is the fact that the communists really were out to take over the world. They made no secret of it (See Krushchev / UN ). And they were almost universally pretty bad guys. With the possible exception of Yugoslavia, virtually every communist government in the history of the world has ended up being incredibly oppressive and ruthlessly violent towards any opposition. The Che's and the Trotsky's (the 'true believers') end up dead and the Stalins and the Maos end up in charge, and it ain't pleasant for whatever countries they ended up owning. Read the history of communism FROM the BEGINNING please, before you want to discount that threat.

So, in 1955, it is not unreasonable to make a case that we were at least trying to do the right thing - not just for us but for our allies and other peoples of the world - by opposing communist expansion. You can argue the results - you can argue the tactics and methods and I would end up conceding points in that discussion.

But you can't take this incredibly simplistic view of world history since WW II as some vast American plot to line our pockets and expect anyone with half a brain to take you seriously. We got from Korea... what was it again? We got from Vietnam... forgot that one too. If we were the bad guys - who were the good guys?

It's never that simple.