Rogelio Rodriguez 🇵🇷🏳️‍🌈🇵🇸🇮🇷🇨🇺⚾️🖖🖕

The Pentagon Papers. They tried to keep them secret for a reason. When their own internal documents were leaked, when the American people got to read what their government actually believed privately about Vietnam, as opposed to what they were saying publicly, what they found was this: Their own analysts knew they were losing. Knew the strategy wasn't working. Knew the body counts were fabricated or meaningless. Knew the South Vietnamese regime had no legitimacy with its own people. Knew the war couldn't be won in any meaningful sense. And they kept going anyway. Why? Because stopping meant admitting they had been wrong. Stopping meant the 30,000 soldiers who had already died had died for nothing. Stopping meant the story they had told the American public, "we are winning, we must stay, we are defending freedom," was a lie from the beginning. And admitting all of that was politically impossible. So they kept sending young men to die in a war their own government secretly knew was unwinnable, because the alternative was political embarrassment. They sacrificed their own soldiers to save face. That is who makes the rules of the international order. That is whose judgment you are supposed to defer to. That is whose threats are supposed to make you tremble. A government that fed its own children into a war it knew was lost because the paperwork involved in admitting defeat was too politically inconvenient. And they want to talk to you about governance. About accountability. About the "rules-based international order." Vietnam read the rules of that order and decided to write different ones.