I find Vietnam War history to be fascinating to study for a number of reasons. It is riddled with irony, tradgedy, heroism (on both sides) and you end up learning so much about the soul of America by studying it. I was recently pondering the following: What if instead of fighting the Vietnam war, the US had spent the money we spent on war on a lump-sum payment to the people of N. Vietnam as a sort of bribe to achieve its desired outcome without a horrific war.

Obviously this alternate scenario could not have happened for many reasons, such as:

• Leaders on neither side had an accurate understanding of how dark the war would get until several yars into the conflict
• It's possible, if not likely, that the ideological power of socialism/communism at the time would have been too strong
• The US leaders wouldn't have had a good means for calculating the amount to offer given the lack of visibility into the path the war would take in terms of lives lost and financial costs.

However, I still think it's an interesting thought experiment with potential lessons to consider as we face future threats of conflict. The threat of a conflict between the U.S. and China is especially relevant given that the magnitude of potential financial impacts are staggering.

Alright, let's run the numbers. In 1968, the population of the North was ~18.7 million. The true cost of the war is a bit tricky to fully calculate, but for the sake of this thought experiment, let's go with an estimate from a NYTimes article published in 1975 that put the cost at $141B spent from 1961 through surrender. That's about $7,450 per citizen of the north.

Let's say we dropped pamphlets all over the countryside to announce to the North Korean populace that we would give each citizen of North Vietnam $7,450 if the North:

• Switched to our political system and adopted capitalism and a representative democracy
• We'd optionally offer them a favorable trade partnership
• We'd invest an additional $10B in their school system and other public works needed to pull off the transition at the government level.

The money for individuals would be held in escrow by the UN until a multi-lateral commission from the UN validated that the criteria had been met and then it would start paying out in the form of five annual cash payments. You'd also need to come up with a creative way to do the payouts that would limit the risk of fraud and government officials embezzling the money.

Adjusting for inflation, that $7,450 would be the equivalent of $42,570 in December 2022 terms. According to the World Bank, the 2021 per capita income in Vietnam was $3,694.02. So, in today's dollars and assuming today's per capita income, you'd be talking about giving each N. Vietnam citizen 11.5 years of income. It's probably safe to assume the per capita income was vastly, vastly, vastly lower.

Regarding the cost estimates, that $141B is just accounting for military expenditures. That includes things like soldiers' compensation, helicopters, bullets, bombs, fuel for ships and planes, etc. It does not include additional expenses for things like the opportunity cost of what else we could have done with that money, the cost to our government, the foreign aid we had to dump into South Vietnam over the course of the war, etc. It also doesn't include an estimate for the cost associated with almost 60k American soldiers being taken out of the workforce.