>>17793822 (OP)Like most nations that flipped commie during the cold war, if the U.S had been more proactive the issues would have never arose. We were busy doing a massive military buildup of both ourselves and Western Europe at the time so we considered places like Vietnam/Cuba to be a lower priority. In the case of Cuba this was a pretty significant oversight, we could have probably stopped Vietnam all together in the 1950s with a diplomatic solution or by simply helping the French more, but Vietnam was always far outside of our scope of interest. The U.S politicians of the late 40s and 50s were simply ill-equipped to manage an empire, we spent a lot of the second half of the 20th century playing catch up and then victory sort of just fell into our laps when the soviets exploded. It is unfortunate because as it stands there is really no one to take our place, but we are wholly unequipped to be an empire. Short of China figuring out a way to produce significant domestic talent they'll buckle under the weight and Russia is already an empire that can hardly afford more but regional expansion.