Originally Posted by cmac2012

If the foe you defeated would have defeated and conquered you otherwise, well yes, winning is the good side to be on. We all have in our gene pool innumerable examples of such victors.

Wiping city states from existence used to work, say in the days of Moses as no one even heard about it for a long time, and were rarely in a position to A: care or B: do anything about it. And then the victor had new territory to exploit which gave some benefit.

Vietnam was weird for a number of reasons. We had no wish to occupy and settle the nation. They did not threaten us with overthrow. They did not threaten an ally of ours as they were not going to make it to France to wage war either. It was based on the mania of commie fear, that communism was like the ebola virus of economic/cultural arrangements that would spread and destroy more healthy arrangements.

And if our reason for fighting was merely to retain access to vital trade commodities, it would seem that aligning oneself with the faction in the nation that was 70-80% likely to popularly prevail would give one the smoothest access to future trade and be more efficient than stamping out said faction and replacing it with corrupt and unpopular puppets.