Judged by outcome which the US lost, the Vietnam war was not one of conquest.
You can't loose a war and then claim "conquest"
best that can be said about the Vietnam War was it was an attempt (failed) by the USA
to prop up a South Vietnamese Regime and ideally to enable that regime to conquest
the North. Of course the North had the opposite objective: ie: to conquest the South .
The West, (mostly USA ) IMO, has been successful in Ukrainian regime change in 2013/14
the Ukraine and of course since then (with a few hiccups) the West has been successful.
That said, the Ukraine is now paying the penalty (rightly or wrongly...) for making that 180 deg
turnaround . While ideologues may maintain that the new pro-West regime is completely innocent
in this war , they, nevertheless made decisions from 2013 forward which led to this war.
Most including me would say that its decisions were simply made using former Warsaw Pact countries
had been inducted into the EU/NATO as a precedent but obviously Russia saw the Ukraine , Gerogia
and to a lesser extent Moldova as Red Lines with respect to NATO/EU indiction and Merkel astutely
saw this as far back as early 2008.
So in summary, this war is IMO a proxy US/Russia war with the US trying to "play it again Uncle Sam"
with respect to economically demolishing Russia and thereby negating Russia's Nuke threat while
Russia sees this as a continuation of the Cold War and as such an existential threat.
While Russia under the Putin Regime seems to be even a more brutal/one party dictatorship....even worse
than China, geopolitics and its ultimate which is war is all about power of which ideology is merely a minor
soft part.
Could this war be a dress rehearsal for a US/China proxy war via Taiwan?
IMO yes and this is why China has already set up economic/trade/capital flow
mechanisms to deprive the US of crippling its economy as the West has attempted to
do to Russia.
So to look at extremes from the point of view of the Ukraine, let me ask?
(a) If only 1 Ukrainian life was lost in order to drive the Russians out....would that be acceptable?
(b) If all Ukrainian lives were lost driving out the Russians ....would that be acceptable
(c) If (a) but not (b), then how many Ukrainian lives would be justified if driving out the Russians were to be successful?
(d) Would the Roman notion of "decimation" be OK?.(literally 10%)
PS: I have decided to shop as much as I can at my local Ukrainian shop which stocks a large range of Ukrainian processed foods just as a symbolic ....Their Blackcurrant Jam (although twice the price of Coles French Label) is to "die for" !!!
and of course I have donated to the Ukrainian Red Cross Appeal .
https://donate.redcrossredcrescent.org/ua/500days-ad/~my-donation?utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=cid%7C20387803660%7Csearch&utm_content=gid%7C153111371204%7Caid%7C666237209212%7Cplacement%7C&utm_term=how%20to%20help%20ukraine&gad_source=1&gclid=EAIaIQobChMIouHvyej3hAMVQ2APAh34CQujEAAYAiAAEgJT1fD_BwE
