it wasn't all for nothing. there was time when Americans cared about advancing a free world. Free from soviet style communism. And this was an ideal worth sacrificing for. Unfortunately, Americans have been demoralized by propaganda to the point of seeing freedom as something not worth dying for.
If exporting freedom involves bombing civilians you're supposed to free and spraying their country with herbicides, then perhaps you should rethink your strategy.
The Vietnam war was a lost cause all the way from the start, just like more modern endeavours of trying to make ultra-conservative societies of Iraq and Afghanistan democracies by invading them. Pointless waste of money and lives.
Clearly, you are not a citizen of a nation who has been the target of one of the US's efforts. Crippling sanctions, extra-ordinary hypocrisy and outright lies/propaganda in the name of 'freedom', support of hard-core and insane terrorists as 'freedom-fighting' rebels, etc.
Impossible to say definitely. North Korea military spending has been around 25% of its GDP, which is said to be one of the top reasons why its economy plateaud in the 70s. Would it have needed to be so high if they had annexed the whole peninsula, and would they had closed up like they did if they had decisively won the war? Perhaps not: Vietnam certainly did better.
Around 20 percent of their population got also killed during the war.
>Douglas visited Korea in the summer of 1952 and was stunned by the “misery, disease, pain and suffering, starvation” that had been “compounded” by air strikes. U.S. warplanes, having run out of military targets, had bombed farms, dams, factories, and hospitals. “I had seen the war-battered cities of Europe,” the Supreme Court justice confessed, “but I had not seen devastation until I had seen Korea.”
And instead of Marshall help they got global economic sanctions.
The carpet bombing of North Korea was one of the great war crimes in history. 15% of the population died. 85% of the buildings were destroyed. Many, many cities were wiped off the map forever.
All this for a country that had never offered the slightest threat to the United States.
