I'm arguing that this is the wrong litmus test for judging the winners of war, because war is an ineffective way of achieving regime change in the first place. Even in cases where it looks like a country "wins" a war by "defeating" their opponents, they usually collapse from the inside and then the true winners are those that either take advantage of the chaos to seize power, or stay out of the war entirely. The allies were victorious in WW1 - yet the government they wanted stayed in power for barely 10 years, and then we got Hitler and WW2. Russia was part of the victorious allies in WW1, but the country collapsed and the communists took over. The communists were the official victors of the Vietnam war, but Vietnam is now one of the most capitalist countries on earth, and so politically they were defeated by economics and not war.
“If they would waste all that blood and treasure for a small country in east Asia, imagine what they would do if tanks rolled into Moscow?!”
The cultural part can't be understated. By the 1960's young men world wide would rather be a rock star banging groupies than fight for the revolution. There is a reason the Khmer Rouge killed the pop stars in Cambodia.
Notable Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Germany became wealthy by aligning closely to the US. Where commies and non aligned became poorer.
Least impressive was the CIA's skullduggery and Kissinger's Real Politic.
Also, the Korean war was clearly a victory for the US; we intended to defend SK and prevent the spread of Communism, and that’s what happened.
Nonsense. A clear victory would be if South Korea held its frontline near the Chinese border, instead of being pushed back to the 38th parallel.
The Korean war was a stalemate. It wasn't a loss, but it wasn't a win.
This might be taught in US schools, but outside the US we have a rather different take on how the Vietnam war ended - the US-backed government fell and the North Vietnamese government took over the rest of the country. And we learned that the Korean war ended in some kind of stalemate, where the government structures on both sides exist largely intact today.