It's doesn't get any more complicated than Vietnam. First, the French were pretty good colonials, so much so they considered many of their possessions as "States Of France", in other words, represented in the Chamber Of Deputies in Paris. Wars Of National Liberation became the norm after WWII, with only the Brits being successful (Malaya, Kenya) in keeping the commies out. The United States, in their infinite, altruistic, naive and downright incompetent Foreign Policy, tried to have it both ways. On the one hand we wanted to stop communism, but on the other hand we were equally (and stupidly) against colonialism.
Ho Chi Minh who WAS an admirer of the US and the Founding Fathers, turned to the commies because we half-assed helped the frogs in their colonial (anti-communist) war against Ho. France just didn't have the assets and their idiotic strategy culminating in Dien Bien Phu was the result. So what did we do? much like Bush (43) in Iraq, we went all out and supported a corrupt "democratic" government in the south, just because it was anti-communist and clearly Ho had the upper hand. What we SHOULD have done (and the same goes for Egypt and the Suez, Saudi and of course Iran) was support the Europeans in holding onto their colonies (letting them do the fighting with our financial support) instead of ostensibly siding with the Soviets against "colonialism". Instead, we began the inexorable "mission creep" and corrupted entanglement in Vietnam which would have been fine, had our armed forces been allowed to conduct a winning campaign which we clearly had the muscle to do. One would think we learned our lesson, but we did the same shiet in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nation building and "limited war" with restrictive ROEs were our demise in Vietnam yet we repeated it in SWA AGAIN. We never learn.
