This is my first shot at an effortpost; the prologue is probably too long, but whatever. It did take a lot of effort, at least, and it is a post--ergo, effortpost. Also it's a break from nonstop Biden coverage so that should at least count for something.

Prologue:

A long time ago in a peninsula far far away [from the US, anyway] there was a bit of a scuffle called the Korean War. It's not like, a huge event, but you've probably heard of it. Anyways, since the war "ended", South Korea has been frozen in a conflict with its northern neighbor, generally called "North Korea". Frozen is, of course, a relative term. Cross-border clashes and raids have been frequent occurences throughout the seventy or so years since the war ended. Of particular note are the Blue House Raid and the resulting abortive South Korean response in Unit 684 [mostly remembered for spawning an excellent--or at least highly profitable--action film,since the original idea sounded like a film pitch anyway], the Korean Axe Murder Incident/Operation Paul Bunyan, the ROKS Cheonan sinking and the Bombardment of Yeonpyeong. So, basically, South Korea is kept on a perpetual war footing, and has always devoted a significant portion of its resources to defense--a share which, until relatively recently, was actually shrinking due to the massive growth of the South Korean economy, which has gone from being pretty much the poorest country in the world immediately after the Korean War to one of its richest. I'm also going to give a rundown on some other things regarding South Korea specifically from an IGeopolitical/Military standpoint.
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Foreign Relations
By far South Korea's most significant foreign relationship is with the United States, and it dominates every other relationship it has. For decades South Korea relied on the United States for defense, and it still does, to an extent--though US Forces Korea is now greatly diminished from its height, down to around 25,000 troops, they play a vital role in Korean defense. In particular, they run/ran most of South Korea's command-and-control and signals infrastructure, and the US maintains operational control in war, though what exactly this means these days is unclear [and it almost certainly involves heavy collaboration with the South Korean government, with a South Korean general being the second-in-command of Combined Forces Korea]. Korea's relationship with the US is thus dominated by security issues, though economic issues have some modest importance.
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South Korea's relationships with its more immediate neighbors are generally speaking more complex. South Korea maintains excellent terms with China, its key economic partner, but is more than a little nervous of China's power. This has been greatly aided by the growth of South Korean cultural influence in China and a shift in attitudes in China towards neutrality, if not an outright pro-South position regarding inter-peninsular disputes, among the leadership--which views North Korea as more an irritant than anything else. China's military [particularly naval] buildup, however, is one key factor behind South Korea's rapid development of its naval capabilities in particular.
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Japan, on the other hand, looks like a natural ally for South Korea on paper. It's economically powerful, enough to offset China, is nervous about North Korea, and is even more deeply tied into the US alliance system than South Korea is. They're even both maritime powers. However, in a sad moment for those following the realist school of thought, this is simply not the case. In particular, two issues constantly cause problems in the Japanese-South Korean relationship. First is the outstanding territorial dispute over the Dokdos/Liancourt Rocks. While these rocks are, well, rocks, Japan has a tendency to get very aggressive over uninhabited islands. They are, for the record, sort of inhabited--there's a South Korean coast guard post on the islands, so they are occupied. Second are lingering sores from the Japanese colonization of Korea--in particular those atrocities committed during the Second World War, such as the Japanese use of forced prostitution of Koreans and forced labor for Japanese corporations. As a general rule of thumb, the relationship with Japan is probably the most political of any of South Korea's international relationships, with South Korean conservatives working to paper over any problems with Japan while South Korean liberals take a nationalistic stance on the issue, as can be seen by the recent souring of relations between the two nations. In addition, the United States has generally played a key role keeping South Korea-Japan disputes under wraps and quiet, but recently, with the Foreign Service gutted, has been largely unable or unwilling to do so.
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South Korea's relationship with Russia is also interesting and worthy of some note here, and largely dates back to the 1980s and 1990s, when South Korea was a major trade partner for Russia and accepted military equipment in exchange for debt forgiveness in a classic post-Soviet move. Since then, Russia and South Korea have done a decent amount of business, but the two nations have also collaborated extensively on defense. In particular, South Korea's short-range ballistic missiles use Russian technology from the Iskander, and South Korea is building/developing surface-to-air missiles based off of Russian S-300/400 technology. South Korea is also working to build submarine-launched ballistic missiles based off of this same Russian missile technology. In return, Russia has generally avoided new sales of arms or increases in trade relations with North Korea--not that the North has any money with which to do either of those things with anyhow.
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South Korea's relationship with North Korea is... problematic, and some might say nonexistent. While North Korea and South Korea have repeatedly reconciled, doing so has seldom generated practical results, as can be clearly seen by North Korea's acquisition of nuclear weapons despite decades of diplomatic efforts and North Korea's continued aggression towards the South, most recently blowing up a liason office with the North. In sum, I wouldn't expect the long-held pattern of reconciliation and breakup to halt anytime soon.
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Military
The South Korean Armed Forces are largely staffed by conscripts, numbering about 600,000, and consist of several branches, basically organized in the exact same style as the United States. There is the ROKA [Republic of Korea Army], ROKN [Republic of Korea Navy], ROKAF [Republic of Korea Air Force] and ROKMC [Republic of Korea Marine Corps]. ROKA is by far the largest service branch, with over 450,000 members, and is usually the destination of conscripts--however, the ROKN and ROKAF are where a lot of new investment is going, and the ROKMC may play a vital role in any war as well. In essence, the South Korean Armed Forces aim to stop any North Korean attack and then, with US assistance, launch a counteroffensive into North Korea. This, however, ends up being much more aggressive than it sounds.
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South Korea has invested into thousands of ballistic and cruise missile systems, more than North Korea possesses, with the aim of being able to disable North Korean artillery and ballistic missile systems in the opening moves of any conflict. This is especially important because North Korea possesses thousands of artillery pieces in range of northern Seoul suburbs. Though casualty estimates are generally exaggerated [it takes a lot more than what North Korea has to turn Seoul into a "sea of fire"] RAND has estimated that such a strike could potentially cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of thousands of casualties. Note that while RAND estimates with high-explosive, North Korea possesses a substantial chemical weapons arsenal--but it's likely to actually be less effective than high-explosive except as a terror weapon. Chemical weapons come with serious problems--mustard agents have fatality rates so low, even when used in WWI, that some questioned whether they should be viewed as lethal weapons at all, and nerve gas has... mixed results, as Aum Shrinkyo would tell you.
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South Korea has also invested billions of dollars into developing advanced ground capabilities, developing some of the world's best ground military equipment, which are now beginning to see some success. It has also been investing a large quantity of money into a massive naval buildup, an indigenous stealthy jet fighter, and other technologies.
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Other things that should be noted are numerous, but some of the most important are:

• Both Koreas, but particularly the South, place high value on the amphibious landing as a result of Inchon
• Both Koreas heavily value indirect fire, from artillery, and, in the case of the South, air support
• North Korea has essentially no or minimal air and naval capabilities
• Neither Korea has great strategic depth, which places both nations at high risk from their neighbors forces

In sum, the armed forces of South Korea are some of the world's most powerful, and they're only strengthening. By the end of the decade, my suspicion is that [barring a sudden increase in effectiveness by India, or Japan abandoning its 1% hold] South Korea will be the worlds third or fourth most powerful military. Not the UK, not France, perhaps not even Russia--no, South Korea.
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Weapons of Mass Destruction
In the early 1970s, South Korea first ventured into the area of WMDs. When the US, under Jimmy Carter, announced its intention to withdraw from South Korea, the South's security situation looked grim--and, as a result, like any sensible dictator would do, Park Chung-he decided to start researching nuclear weapons. This did end up accomplishing its goal, after a fashion. Though South Korea never got the nuclear reprocessing facility it wanted, it did, in exchange for ending its nuclear program and signing the Non-Proliferation Treaty, both ensure that American troops remained in South Korea and that the United States would offer South Korea commercial nuclear technology, an area in which it had great success. However, South Korea also devoted a substantial amount of effort to evading IAEA safeguards and bans in its Section 123 [nuclear cooperation with the US] agreement. In particular, in the early 1980s South Korean scientists worked to extract plutonium in what basically amounted to laboratory-scale reprocessing, and in 2000 South Korean scientists enriched a small amount of uranium to near-weapons-grade with lasers.
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In addition to this foray into nuclear research, South Korea is believed [to the point it's considered an open secret] to have possessed a substantial arsenal of chemical weapons, mostly nerve gas. However, it has ratified the Chemical Weapons Convention and no longer possesses any stockpiles, those stockpiles having been destroyed some time ago. In fact, South Korea officially never had chemical weapons and was only referred to as an "unspecified state party" in official records by the OPCW.
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The Buildup:

Things really started picking up around ten years ago, after the ROKS Cheonan sinking and the Bombardment of Yeonpyeong. Defense spending has grown at more than 7% some years. However, the next decade looks to be taking things to a whole new level. The next few years see spending rising by nearly double-digit percentage points. Procurement is to hit almost $20 billion a year--more than that of the UK, significantly more when adjusted for PPP. It should also be noted that South Korea builds things, by Western standards, at very low prices. The Sejong the Great class, for instance, broadly comparable to an American Arleigh Burke class [minus the knackering of the AN/SPY-1 that the US has done to Korean and Japanese AEGIS destroyers], comes in at half the price, despite having a run of three ships rather than over sixty. Major projects that South Korea is working on in the next decade include:

• Hyunmoo-4, a MRBM all but in name
• A light aircraft carrier in the 40,000 ton class, with F-35
• A new indigineous stealth fighter
• 3 new Sejong the Great AEGIS destroyers
• 6 smaller destroyers
• S-400 derived SAM/ABM systems
• SLBMs and large attack submarines
• A solid-fueled space-launch vehicle [commonly viewed as ICBM predecessors]
• Potential new SSBNs
• Iron Dome-like anti-artillery systems

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So, basically, South Korea is building an absolutely massive military, at high speed. This leaves us with two questions, having solved the what--we move onto why South Korea is doing this. There are, broadly speaking, two reasons.
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First, South Korea is trapped in one of the world's worst security situations. All of its neighbors are potentially hostile threats--Japan and China particularly in the maritime theater, and North Korea, of course, on land. South Korea's primary ally, the United States, is increasingly erratic and has serious deficiencies in its operational capability [this might be another effortpost--the US Navy has serious problems on its hands]. It's only natural that South Korea build up a massive army to deter these threats. Even though it can never hope to defend against China, for instance, it can make itself difficult enough to defeat that China is unwilling to confront it, and have enough force to convince Japan and China that assertions of military power against it are unwise. In addition, South Korea must tailor its situation to North Korea in particular, and has spent a great deal of time developing a strategy that focuses primarily on violent retaliation in case of North Korean provocation and that can destroy North Korean ballistic missiles at varying stages--for various reasons, North Korean missiles are actually fairly vulnerable to attack, and South Korea aims to destroy them, if not on the ground, then in the air. Finally, South Korea is in part building up in direct response to the massive increase in Chinese military capabilities, particularly in naval and air domains, which have begun to trigger a general arms race in East Asia that is probably the largest and most significant since the Cold War [and the largest naval arms race since before WWI, in my reckoning].
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Second, though, is more interesting. This military buildup has to do with South Korea's assertion of its position as a middle [if not great, perhaps only held back from that by its mightier neighbors] power. In, say, 2000, Korea was largely still a nobody. But now--you might routinely encounter people who watch kpop, eat Korean food, want to go on holiday to Korea, or so on. Korea has extended its diplomatic ties with virtually the entire world, having trade agreements with pretty much everyone. Its defense exports are proving quite successful, particularly in Southeast Asia and Latin America, but even in markets traditionally dominated by France, Russia, and the United States. In particular, South Korea, under more liberal governance, has seen its sovereignty abridged by the continuing legacies of the defense relationship with America, and has sought constantly to readjust that relationship so that South Korea is the superior partner.
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Effects:

Most directly, this military buildup is likely going to seriously freak out North Korea, at least if the North has any sense at all. The North has basically no way to counter this buildup, and it will likely result in a whole host of additional problems for their defense situation. For instance, North Korea will have to assume that in any war they would have to deal with a brigade or divisional size amphibious assault, that their artillery may prove itself ineffective, and that it may not even be able to launch its ballistic missile systems. This is likely to have two consequences. First, North Korea will become increasingly unlikely to use armed force to provoke the South, as was the case in 2010 with the ROKS Cheonan sinking and the Bombardment of Yeonpyeong. Doing so would invite retaliation which North Korea has no capacity to respond to. Second, though, is that if war does break out, it will become substantially more likely that North Korea decides to use its nukes in a very early stage for fear of losing that capability--but I actually have my doubts as to whether North Korea would ever launch nukes at all, because at no stage would doing so benefit their position.
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The US-Korea relationship will likely change, not necessarily for the better or worse, though. To put things very crudely and in Cold War terms, my suspicion is that in the long term Korea will play the France to Japan's UK. However, the US is going to continue to share significant common interests with South Korea, besides the significant cultural and economic ties, and I think the relationship will continue on quite healthily, and, indeed, more balanced than before. I also suspect that the US is going to become much more amicable about selling South Korea advanced military capabilities than before, largely because South Korea has yet [as far as public knowledge is concerned] to clandestinely reexport these technologies, as some of our... less friendly allies have done, and because allowing South Korea more military capabilities serves US interests. In fact, we've already seen this with the US systematically tossing every single restriction on South Korea's ballistic missile program in recent years, along with the sale of AEGIS and the AN/SPY-1.
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China is not going to be very happy about this at all, but I think that the most likely consequence of this is that China will push to expand its armed forces even further in an effort to compensate for this buildup, along with increased capabilities developed across East Asia.
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Japan is also not likely to be particularly keen on this, seeing as it's not on the best of terms with Korea of late and their armed forces have not exactly had an amicable relationship. However, I don't think that Japan will worry too much about South Korea, which, after all, is also warding off persistent problem child North Korea by doing this. Instead, it will likely grow its navy and air force [possibly passing well beyond the informal 1% GDP limit, and adopting long-range standoff weapons] to match the rapidly growing PLAN.
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The rest of the world aren't likely to notice any deleterious effects, at least not immediately--the arms race in East Asia is definitely heightening the risk of war. The most interesting consequence is likely to be a continued shift towards East Asia, away from Europe, in the rest of the world, both culturally and now militarily.
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Bonus Round: South Korea Is Building Nukes

Now, here I enter the realm of speculation, so I can't say this for a certainty. But South Korea really, really, wants all the things that one wants when you want to build nukes, including:

• Highly enriched uranium [they keep asking]
• Nuclear reprocessing capabilities [they've been desperately researching to get around this limit]
• A large domestic nuclear industry [despite continued platitudes by President Moon, who seems about as committed to nuclear phaseout as Macron, South Korea's nuclear capacity is actually projected to grow]
• Long-range ballistic missiles [already got those]
• Nuclear submarines [they have plans]
• Submarine-launched ballistic missiles [already got those]
• Air-launched cruise missiles [soon to arrive]

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In addition, South Korea already possesses a motive--they've tried to build nuclear weapons before, and as much as 60% of the population is in favor of building nukes. They are surrounded by nuclear-armed enemies [or in the case of Japan a potential adversary that could improvise something workable in a matter of months]. Now, South Korea might take the Japanese approach and go nuclear-latent, where they have the capability to build a nuclear weapon at extremely short notice but don't have one ready--but I actually doubt that they will, except as an intermediate step, because doing so just won't provide effective deterrence against North Korea, an adversary that is constantly poised to attack and could potentially use nuclear weapons first and wipe out the South's capability to assemble its own bomb. Japan sees the solution as viable for constitutional and political reasons, but also because any Chinese aggression could probably be seen months in advance, and would take months to resolve--plus, Japan can know that China will be rational and probably won't use its nukes first.
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The major thing to watch here is going to be the the Section 123 agreement that the US has with South Korea for transfer of nuclear technology. Any amendment of the deal to allow reprocessing or possession of enriched uranium would be a major step towards a South Korean nuclear arsenal. In addition, the US also may have a backdoor way of doing this by allowing pyroprocessing, a non-conventional reprocessing method, to be used by South Korea via interpretation of the agreement. Doing so would bring South Korea closer to a nuclear weapon as well. However, barring any of these circumstances, we might not see a change until 2035 or 2040 when the Section 123 agreement expires--a rather distant time for most of us here. I wouldn't expect any change before President Moon is gone, personally, in 2023, at the very earliest. All in all, I'd say that a nuclear South Korea is probably not an immediate likelihood, but that, by 2050, I'd be rather surprised if South Korea didn't have nuclear weapons.
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Conclusions:

South Korea is building a big, shiny new military for all of the geekishly inclined to gawk at, and also to menace its neighbors with. This is largely a result of the strategic environment in East Asia going down the toilet and South Korea desiring independence. You might want to keep an eye out on this in case you accidentally run into a South Korean aircraft carrier, or if you have any interest in the region whatseover [Yanks, I'm talking to you.] Also, South Korea is probably building nukes, or at least having a pretty serious think about it. If this gets a positive reception I'll probably do one on the PLAN [People's Liberation Army Navy], the USN, and the JMSDF, plus maybe the other little guys too [maybe one on the perilous situation Taiwan is in too]. Until then, though--ta!
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Citations:
Lots of them, plus my head, and too many random news articles. Nobody's really brought this all together before in one thing. Click on the links if you're really interested.

Statement by the Foreign Secretary on missed Foreign MQs

Speaker,
I today wish to address the recent session of Members Questions on the matter of Foreign Affairs. It is important that the questions of parliament are properly addressed, and that they are not ignored. I shall format this statement by stating the title of the member, lord or member of the public who asked the question, a brief summary of the question, followed by my answer.
Question by the Right Honourable List MP for the South West, asking about a comment made regarding the Republic of Korea. I must address this question by first unilaterally denying the false assertion that the Secretary of State for Defence claimed that the Republic of Korea did in any way hold “no concern” as to the safety of its people. Whilst not the most advisable sentence nor one I would personally use, the Secretary described certain attitudes as “lax”, notably expressing frustration at the RoK’s recent departure at the time from the D12 meeting. I must note my understanding as to why the RoK took such a stance given recent threats by China towards that have attempted to question its actions, and I hope the signing of the Osaka Accords tomorrow will enable the RoK to review the situation and feel that they may speak without hesitation on the matter.
Question by the Right Honourable List MP for the South West, asking about foreign affairs priorities. Whilst this term will soon come to an end, I am very much excited to be meeting with foreign dignitaries in Osaka tomorrow for the formal signing and ratification of the Osaka Accords. This is a momentous occasion and one that I will be highly eager to share with the chamber once I return with the signed agreement.
Question by the Right Honourable List MP for the South West, asking opinion on the status of the United States embassy in Jerusalem. Whilst I may not agree with the decision made by the United States Secretary of State on this matter due to the nature of the ongoing situation between Israel and its neighbours, it does remain the choice of the United States as to where it decides to locate its embassy. I do make pleasant comment upon the note by the US Secretary of State that the Biden Administration will reaffirm commitments to the two-state solution within the region, in which the UK government wishes to affirm once again as well. Peace within the middle east is something difficult to achieve, and whilst I note developments in the peace process between many neighbouring nations and Israel, there is still a long way to go.
Question by the Right Honourable Member for Somerset and Bristol, asking lessons learnt on the South Korean transcript incident. The events that led to and brought forth the incident in question are ones of deep regret, and I have noted my personal commitment to reforming processes within the government to ensure a repeat is not engaged. I do wish to once again thank the government of South Korea for giving us the opportunity to apologise for our actions, and allow us the honour of continued cooperation. Further checks have already been implemented within the government to prevent such a future incident.
Question by the Right Honourable Baron of Colwyn Bay, asking government policy towards Turkey. The government is continuing to watch the situation within Turkey closely, particularly as the nation heads towards a 2023 election, as well as reported human rights abuses and incidents on the Syrian border. Through the Osaka Accords, the United Kingdom will seek to address human rights abuses world-wide, including those within Turkey, and encourages Turkish authorities to allow investigations to take place within its borders.
Question by the Right Honourable Member for Buckinghamshire, asking potential sanctions towards Turkey. The events described by the Right Honourable member do bring great concern, the continued membership of Turkey is something that should be discussed within the organisation. I do refer the Right Honourable member to my response to the Right Honourable Baron of Colwyn Bay for a more detailed reply.
Question by the Leader of SATUP, asking Britain’s role in amplifying the voice of other nations. Britain has a significant role to play within the global stage, merely one of them is that of being a global ambassador for peace, democracy and human rights. Within these values, is a need to work with and elevate nations who are struggling as a result of colonialism and its effects, and to create a platform for assistance for them. I do wish to inform the member that this last point will be addressed keenly within the Osaka Accords, and I urge him to watch the outcome of the meeting tomorrow.
Question by the Leader of SATUP, asking ICJ rulings and international law. Whilst the United Kingdom remains an independent and sovereign nation, we are still one of hundreds of nations within the world, and it remains imperative that international law and ICJ rulings should not be violated. This is not always the easy option, but it is the duty of our nation to uphold the values of democracy and global cooperation.
Question by the Baron of Colwyn Bay, asking the status of the JCPOA. Whilst I have had brief communications with the President, due to circumstances outside of our mutual controls, a formal phone call has not been held as of yet. I intend to hold a meeting with President Biden tomorrow in Osaka, in-which commitment to the JCPOA will be one of many topics discussed.
Question by Baron Shitterton, asking the government position on the Ugandan election. I must express my concern regarding much of the conduct undertaken within the Ugandan election, particularly that as noted by the European Council of Ministers being significant levels of violence, abuses of power, the arrest of opposition members, the suppression of the media, raids upon observers and reports of mass fraud. It is incredibly disappointing to see these issues with the electoral process in place, and I urge the Ugandan government to allow international observers to conduct a full investigation into these allegations. I additionally wish to express my disappointment in the last minute abandonment of electoral observation by the United States, such an action does seem somewhat off character given the former administrations claimed commitment to fighting electoral fraud.
Question by the Right Honourable Duke of Aberdeen, asking invitations to the Osaka Accords organisation. The Right Honourable Duke of Aberdeen will be thrilled to know that as part of the D11 discussions and the organisation of the Osaka Accords, it was agreed that invitations to this new organisation will be handed out once the signing of the document has concluded. Whilst for reasons that the Right Honourable Duke would understand I can not disclose many details until the Osaka Accords are signed and made public, I assure the Right Honourable Duke that the Commons will be made fully aware of what has been achieved through a statement by myself.
Question by the Right Honourable Duke of Aberdeen, asking an alternative program to the “Belt and Road”. I can confirm to the Right Honourable Duke that talks regarding an initiative of this nature are currently underway.
Question by the Honourable member for Lincolnshire, asking government actions on Chinese influence in the Asia-Pacific region. Through the recent D11 talks, an agreement on joint military operations was reached between the United States, the Republic of India, the Commonwealth of Australia, and the United Kingdom to perform freedom of navigation cruises through the South China Sea. With French logistical assistance, these cruises will set out upon a goal of deterring attempts by the Chinese government to militarise the region, and to take a stand against attempts to claim the Spratly Islands. Alongside this, the new global organisation that will be established per the signing of the Osaka Accords will create a momentous step in the on-going fight against authoritarianism and human rights abuses.
Question by the Honourable member for Lincolnshire, asking government position on the situation within Hong Kong. The unfurling situation we have witnessed within Hong Kong over the past few years have truly been terrifying, and are not what was agreed to within the Sino-British joint declaration. It is critical that this agreement be respected and upheld, and attempts by the National People’s Congress to undermine the autonomy of Hong Kong and arrest its activists serve deeply concerning what may come towards the future.
Question by member of the public BobbyCrow, asking government position on situation regarding the Bedouin tribe in Saudi Arabia. It is important that the United Kingdom remains consistent in its quest for the protection of human rights, no matter where failures and abuses might fall. The situation described by the member of the public within the Tabuk region is strongly condemned by the government of the United Kingdom, and I do thank those within our legal profession who have chosen to defend the Bedouin and Howeitat people against these horrible actions. The killing of Abdul Rahim al-Huwaiti is an act few have heard of, and yet one that must be condemned in the strongest words, and the attempts to cover it up and frame the victim as the villian are deplorable.
Question by the Viscount Houston, asking opinion on misunderstanding of the purpose of D11. I do not wish to play the blame game regarding the choice by the South Korean government, though I do find it disappointing that the purpose of D11 and the Osaka Accords is being misconstrued by some people as a strictly anti-china endeavour, when such is simply not true. Whilst immediate actions are being taken against China due to their human rights abuses, the D11 and consequently the Osaka Accords are designed to protect democracy across the world, and uphold the values of peace and human rights. Young and developing democracies must be nurtured and led within the right direction to ensure the people of said nations have their voices heard.
Question by the Right Honourable Lord Midsomer Norton, asking duration of acting status upon the Foreign Secretary. I can confirm that I shall be taking up the position of Foreign Secretary full time, and will endeavour to represent our nation proudly alongside the Deputy Prime Minister tomorrow in Osaka.
Question by the Right Honourable member of the public NorthernWomble, asking about Britain’s interest in the Osaka Accords. I must thank the Right Honourable member of the public for this question, and I do wish to note my thanks to them for their time within the government, and the enormous contributions that they have made towards making the United Kingdom a better place. On the matter of the question, the Osaka Accords are an achievement I am extremely excited to share details upon tomorrow, however I note that these accords will build upon the United Kingdom’s commitment to democracy and human rights world-wide, and create a new force for protecting democracies worldwide. This is what our foreign policy has been leading up to, and it is absolutely essential that whoever may occupy Number 10 next term continues our leading role in this new organisation.
Question by the Right Honourable member of the public NorthernWomble, asking about the special relationship with the United States. The special relationship with the United States remains one of the most important alliances our nation holds, and entering into the post-brexit world we must strengthen our alliances and work with the world using our newly found regulatory freedom to broaden our economic prospects.
Question by the Right Honourable Lord Midsomer Norton, asking details of the Osaka Accords. As much as I would adore to speak on this matter and go into details as to the groundbreaking change it will create, I must unfortunately note to the Right Honourable Lord that most details that he would wish to be hearing at this current time must stay private until the signing of the Accords tomorrow. I will be addressing the Commons afterwards, and I encourage the Right Honourable Lord to look forward to such a statement.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Buckinghamshire, asking about the Five Eyes and the Winter Olympics. Whilst I am aware many are disappointed in certain topics not being discussed during the D11 talks, I must emphasise that these topics will not be ignored, and that the signing with the Osaka Accords. I will endeavour to discuss Japanese accession into Five Eyes with dignitaries whilst I am in Osaka, and I will indeed speak with President Biden about the topic of a Winter Olympics boycott during our meeting.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Buckinghamshire, asking about communication with President Joseph Biden. I will be meeting with President Biden tomorrow after the signing of the Osaka Accords.
Question by the Right Honourable Lord Truro, asking about comparative UK-US relations between the two most recent administrations. I have many opinions that I have expressed regarding the now former President, and whilst I do recognise the steps made within the Trump administration to enter into discussions on a post-brexit trade deal, however I must admit that I do hold higher hopes for strong diplomacy and a fair trade deal within the new administration.
Question by the Right Honourable list member for London, asking about Japanese airport rebrandings and relations with the United States. The prospective rebranding of the New Chitose Airport to the Hatsune Miku airport is certainly an interesting one, but one that I believe will drive tourism to the airport and the region as a whole as individuals flock to visit an airport with such a unique name. On the matter of relations with the new American administration, I note to the Right Honourable member that I will be meeting with President Biden tomorrow following the Osaka Accords.
Question by the Right Honourable list member for Yorkshire and the Humber, asking remarks on the Osaka Accords. Whilst I do direct the Right Honourable member to the many comments I have made upon this topic, I must emphasise how important of a step the Osaka Accords are towards building a stronger coalition of democracies, and ensuring that authoritarian regimes may no longer intimidate smaller nations into silence. It is together within these accords that we rise above the threats faced within our world and work together to build a brighter future.
Question by the Right Honourable list member for Yorkshire and the Humber, asking opinion on the situation in Venezuela. The situation in Venezuela is complex and everchanging, and such as how I have described China as not the only authoritarian regime, it can not be underestimated how the Venezuelan government has put pride over people in their attempts to hold onto power. I will be continuing to watch the situation closely.
Question by the Right Honourable Baron of Stretford, asking opinion on the upcoming expiration of the New START treaty. I must thank the Right Honourable Baron for his question, and I do note its uniqueness within the pool of questions addressed to me within this session. The expiration of New START will mark a difficult period of new negotiation in an attempt to stop an arms race, and it is important that the United Kingdom play its part in ensuring this process is fast-tracked. Whilst talks have not taken place as of yet, I will be meeting with President Biden tomorrow in Osaka, and this matter will be one of many brought up.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Norfolk and Suffolk, asking the government’s stance on the situation within Nicaragua. I am admittedly not entirely sure as to which situation the Right Honourable member is describing, however I assume he is referring to the recent proposal in Nicaragua’s criminal procedures code that would allow people to be detained without reason for up to 90 days. This is simply wrong, it is unjust, and it should not happen. With accusations already coming forward as to the arrest of political opponents without cause, this new development would greatly attack an already fragile democracy. I urge the Nicaraguan government to reconsider this move.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Norfolk and Suffolk, asking matters relating to the South Korean transcript incident. I can confirm to the Right Honourable Member that such a meeting has taken place, and measures have been implemented to ensure such does not happen again.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Norfolk and Suffolk, asking about the Osaka Accords. I must unfortunately disappoint the Right Honourable member in stating that apart from other responses in which I can refer him to, much of this matter is still private. I will be addressing the commons tomorrow following the signing of the Osaka Accords, and encourage the Right Honourable member to be in attendance of the address.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Northamptonshire and Rutland, asking about cooperation with the United States. I whole-heartedly agree with the Right Honourable member that the United Kingdom must work with our close ally within the United States to promote human rights and democracy. These are values that we both hold dear, ones that we both expressed within the D11 summit, ones that will be upheld and protected within the upcoming signing of the Osaka Accords.
Question by the Right Honourable member of the public SpectacularSalad, asking potential arms restrictions to Saudi Arabia. The government will today be placing a ban on arms exports to Saudi Arabia. It is important that human rights be protected, and the actions by the government of Saudi Arabia must not fall on silence.
Question by the Right Honourable member of the public SpectacularSalad, asking cooperation between Commonwealth countries. The Commonwealth remains a unique and special partnership the likes the world has no equal to, and it is of the utmost importance that this coalition of nations continues to work together and promote common values.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Norfolk and Suffolk, asking opinions on the Russian Federation. I absolutely agree with the Right Honourable member. China is not the only authoritarian regime, it is not the only nation committing human rights abuses, and I make significant note of recent developments in the Russian Federation regarding the continued attack upon their own democracy. The attempted assassination and subsequent arrest of Alexei Navalny is utterly dispicable, and the United Kingdom outright condemns these actions.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Norfolk and Suffolk, asking opinion on the North American Treaty Organisation. The North American Treaty Organisation has been one of the most important organisations the United Kingdom has had the pleasure of being a member of throughout the past century, and this government will absolutely commit to the continuation of this organisation and the United Kingdom's role within it.
Question by the Right Honourable member for Norfolk and Suffolk, asking on a matter of a previous asked question. I admittedly am not aware of the letter the Right Honourable member is referencing, and I urge him to contact my office so that a discussion on the matter may be arranged. I do question the arrangement of his words whilst querying me on this matter, I would certainly hope that the Right Honourable member would not try to play political games with an incredibly important meeting of democracies.
Question by the Right Honourable Baron Blaenavon, asking about the lords committee hearing on the defence review. The Lords committee that occurred last week was remarkably successful, delivering a plethora of knowledge into the other place, enabling extremely enlightening discussion on the government’s defence proposal. I very much enjoyed taking part in the committee, and I thank the noble lords who summoned me to take part.
Question by the Right Honourable Baron Blaenavon, asking on a matter of sovereignty disputes. Whilst I understand what the Right Honourable Baron is referring to on this matter, I must note that it does depend from issue to issue as to the impact of a recognition. I note that the United Kingdom’s recognition of Palestine as an independent nation as per M010, attempts at the peace process have not changed in a way that could be construed as affected by the recognition. Conversely, any potential or hypothetical recognition of a polity such Somaliland or Taiwan would risk the dissolution of peaceful negotiations, or risk significant economical backlash in their respective scenarios. Foreign policy is not a single way road, it is a highway of ideas as everyone tries to put their view forward, but it is a river of opportunities in cooperation to deliver a better world.
I thank those who have taken the time to listen to this entire speech, and I thank those who have asked a question and have graciously granted their patience in their hope for a response. I do wish to note that the new Secretary of State for Justice will be publishing a letter in the coming days addressing the missed questions within that session. If any member, Lord or member of the public feels I have not addressed your questions or concerns properly, please feel free to contact my office and I will ensure these queries are properly addressed.
This statement was delivered by The Rt. Hon. Dame Youma LT MBE PC MP, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs on behalf of the 27th Government.
Debate on this statement will end Wednesday 3rd February at 10pm GMT.

Map of the situation in Indochina, February 31st 1968

This period is an unprecedent period for our nations. The World is nearing the brink of destruction.

Cambodian Unrest

January 2nd, 1968

Saloth Sar had been all over Asia in the past two years. He was in Beijing in 1966, he was in Hanoi in 1967 and marched all over the Ho Chi Minh Trail for four months before arriving at the Marxist-Leninist Base in Cambodia at Loc Ninh where they would reorganize the communist party there into the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK). King Norodom Sihanouk referred to the group as the “Khmer Rouge” (Red Cambodians/Red Khmers) They had moved their headquarters into the Ratanakiri Province, further away from the Viet Cong.
Sar and their leaders prepared for the next few years to prepare for another attempt of armed struggle in the country while North Vietnam outright refused to assist, rejecting all requests for weapons and other arms. It wasn’t until December of 1967 that he would try again, communicating both Hanoi and Beijing. By this point, the plans and methods for armed conflict and enacting the struggle they so desperately hoped for, what they trained for, was prepared. They just needed weapons to do it. Their plans were to be enacted, anticipating another “no” from both China and Vietnam. This didn’t happen. Instead, both actually agreed in secrecy, refusing to inform the other party that they’d agree to such a deal.
North Vietnam, with the Tet Offensive vote concluding, decided that it was most necessary for an Indochinese takeover immediately. Their leadership agreed to meet Saloth Sar and his units at a location of their choosing. He sent his soldiers off to call their January attacks off (for an interim period) while they’d meet the Vietnamese. At the same time, the PLA, too, had a change of heart, their intentions completely different. They requested that Saloth Sar hold off his insurgency and in exchange, the PLA would move in to train, arm and assist the CPK in their armed struggle. This was multi-faceted, the larger goal being to delay the CPK’s attack on the government of Cambodia, allowing the tense and very delicate balance in the country to continue uninterrupted. The PLA had scheduled a meeting location as well with Sar who doubted both parties would show.
Again, he was proven wrong as the awkward engagement began with PAVN and Pathet Lao soldiers coming to a gathering where Chinese PLA soldiers were waiting for Sar’s men. “What are you doing here?” Queried the Chinese Officer in charge of the exchange, Captain Zhong Dandan. “What are you doing here?” responded a PAVN officer, Senior Lieutenant Ngô Phi Nhung. “We… are arming the CPK in exchange for them to delay their insurgency. You?” Asked Dandan. He continued before the female Senior Lieutenant could retort. “Our government was going to tell you, but… we forgot.”
As the CPK leadership arrived, both sides shared in the tense situation but agreed to give the CPK the caches they had brought over. He informs them that not all of their cells could be informed in time of their delays but they will get the message very soon. The PLA leaves an attache as they begin to train and prepare these 3,000 some guerrillas over the next several months.
As stated, there is limited conflict from the CPK against the Cambodian Government. Some 2-400 guerrillas assault police stations in Western Cambodia but are swiftly dispatched by the government with dozens retreating back into the Northwestern terrain and hillsides in the country. The Cambodian Government issues a communique to China demanding that they do something concerning the CPK as part of their 1966 Agreements. Beyond this however, the air is cleaned in Cambodia. People are content with the King for keeping them out of the war that is brewing all over Indochina. They would have no idea how close they came to the start of the worst crisis in their country’s history since the medieval era.
As for the military command of the CPK, the leadership was in protest of the stand-down order, regardless of the reasons. Without a clear method to communicate, we could see a break of the Communist Party, another fracture that seeks the revolution that had been so delayed.
 

Party	Casualties	Notes
CPK	372	Assaults in Western Cambodia Failed: further guerrilla elements retreat upon receiving the memo
Government Forces	25 police officers, 33 soldiers	Military begins increasing patrols around armories, police stations and government buildings. Next attack would have to be more coordinated.

 

Laos

Outside of these two battles that follow, the situation in Laos due to the American and Thai assistance has enabled the RLA to at least slur the Pathet Lao’s movement on their positions enough to consolidate their assets. The Pathet Lao have made great gains, significantly more with the RLA being decently crippled but what happens next is soon to be found.

The Battle of Nam Bac

The Battle of Nam Bac was one of the major engagements of the War. Despite misgivings, warnings and other labels concerning the performance, the Royal Lao Army moved into occupy the Nam Bac Valley in mid-1966; the position blocked a traditional Vietnamese invasion route that led to the Lao royal capitol of Luang Prabang.
Their defence of the region since the Siege began in late-1967 was working until late-December when the PAVN moved in heavy weaponry to open fire on helicopter and air support. US Forces attempted to strike these positions with fighter-bombers but found it ineffective. Their fire missions were muted further by the lack of forward air control systems. On January 8th, the United States gave the “strong consideration” to Laotian General Savatphayphane Bounchanh to seek a tactical withdraw from the region. On this advice, he demanded that he along with his staff be withdrawn first.
CIA forces agreed on the premise that they leave a small “shell liaison group with the radio” and that “lower-echelon officers remain to provide adequate command and control.” It was at this moment that the command structure saw their weakest links as several officers requested their units withdrawn by air along with the General. RLA Colonel Khampai Sayasith of Groupesmobile 11 reigned in dissent as, on the General’s orders, he directed all remaining assets to see adequate retreats at set rendezvous points further West, protecting the perimeter of the city of Luang Prabang.
His unit along with the 99th Paratroop Battalion (who would be repositioned alongside Mobile 11 to hold key positions) would be consolidating and reorganizing their forces together to muster a solid last defence of the valley. They would be covering the retreat of Mobile Group 27, the 26th Infantry Battalion, Paratrooper Battalion 55 and smaller irregulars from the region. PAVN and Pathet Lao forces began their push, noticing that by this point on January 10th these troops were retreating. The 41st Special Forces Battalion began to probe the RLA’s positions with small incursions while the PAVN 316th Division probed from the hillsides. Noticing the lessening numbers on the RLA’s positions, they began a massive assault on the valley.
Prior to the retreat of the main bulk of the RLA’s forces, on guidance by CIA Liaison Officers, they disabled their artillery and heavy equipment, placing grenades into the barrels and disabling most of the equipment they couldn’t bring. The forces did their best to hold off the advance but the inevitable would soon come while the PAVN swarmed the valley. They launched a rocket barrage with BM-21’s, a weapon the West had no idea they wielded. After an hour-long barrage softened up most targets remaining in the valley, the forces still present there surrendered with pockets still fighting till the last man. Colonel Sayasith was one man who took his own life to avoid capture. Forces in the region would note a massive incursion of Sikorsky H-34’s and Hueys. Without them, they wouldn’t of been able to withdraw the amount of forces they did.
This effort saved hundreds of lives at the expense of 4 out of the 50 helicopters involved as when the amount of helicopters came in to pick Laotian forces up, the PAVN moved on them to harass the crews. None was taken down with passengers aboard, luckily enough. The only losses were the crews.
 

Party	Forces	Casualties	Notes
PAVN	4,100	~450	PAVN take the Valley
RLA	7,500	~3,350	Approximately 1,000 captured, severe loss of equipment but denied it to the PAVN, ~350 desertions
RLAF	30 Helicopters (Huey/H-34s)	4 Lost (Approximately 18 crew members captured / presumed to be KIA)

 
This battle was a major defeat for the Royal Laotian Army, however it was close to a crippling situation. As forces marched out of the valley a number of soldiers would desert while the remaining forces joined in with others to defend the impenetrable city of Luang Prabang. It would take some time for the RLA to rebuild after this but again, it’s not as bad as it could have been. RLA combat effectiveness has dropped by 40%. The dependence on the remaining military forces would rest on the Air Force and forces still active.
Following this, the United States withdraws from several locations in the region that were threatened and recognized by the North Vietnamese, including Lima Post 85 which sustained some damages by some North Vietnamese An-2’s. SOG on post retaliated to the An-2’s by pursuing them in their Huey’s, downing them. This withdraw was forcibly delayed from LS85 as most of the Hueys in the area went over to assist in the direct withdraw of forces in the area surrounding Nam Bac.

The Battle of Ban Houei Sane

With limited resources and a vastly superior fighting force, the PAVN hit the compound of Ban Houei Sane from three different directions. Although the PAVN units had some difficulty in mustering the combined operation, their PT-76 light tanks would be delayed in reaching the compound while the main infantry forces of the 24th Regiment sieged the compound. It wasn’t until 06:00 of January 24th, after several hours of fighting that these tanks would show up, creating a confusing time for the defenders.
The attack began under poor weather conditions for air support while their engineers exploded obstacles in their path, leaving the U.S. in a position where there was little support they could provide. It wouldn’t be until late in the battle that the retreat order was sounded with the U.S. Forward Air Controllers being informed that they were overwhelmed. Assistance was requested from Lang Vei however none would come, forcing the soldiers of the point along with more than 2,000 civilians (families of the soldiers on the point) being forced to push out from the siege. They were successful and retreated east along Route 9 before approaching the South Vietnamese border. They arrived on January 24th at Lang Vei CIDG Camp.
 

Party	Forces	Casualties	Notes
PAVN	700	29 KIA, 54 WIA	N/A
RLA	650	~150	Forces withdraw from the region

PAVN forces take the hill, harming Western intelligence gathering operations over the Laotian-Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh trail movements in this military region.
 

The Tet Offensive

All was quiet in the month of January following the ceasefire for the Tet, except until January 20th. On this date, an armed Viet-Cong propaganda team entered Tam Quan in the Binh Dinh Province and gathered roughly 100 people for a propaganda session. In this, they discussed Ho Chi Minh, Marxist-Leninism and general communist theory as well as the need for their support. One prominent village elder objected to communism all together and created a shouting match with the VC members. It soon and quickly ended with one of the soldiers shooting the village elder, causing the propaganda team to pack up and leave.
Upon hearing the news of this just days before Tet, General Westmoreland requested to the Vietnamese President that he call off the ceasefire, on top of mounting evidence an attack was going to occur before or after it. President Thieu disagreed, stating that he had already negotiated the ceasefire to be reduced to 36-hours instead of the requested 7-day truce for January 28th to the 31st. After all, most of the South Vietnamese military had just made plans for recreational leave - if he were to call off now, it would harm troop morale.
On the 28th of January, eleven VC cadres were captured in Qui Nhon, carrying with them pre-recorded audio tapes whose message appealed to the populace in “an already occupied Saigon, Hue and Da Nang.” Despite this, most of the command staff present in Indochina stood down, or at the very least failed to properly display it to each other.

"Crack the Sky, Shake the Earth"

 
Map 1 of the Tet Offensive
Map 2 of the Tet Offensive
 
Midnight, 30 January 1968, all of South Vietnam lit up as waves of attacks began to strike. Nha Trang, headquarters of the U.S. I Field Force was the first to be hit, followed by Ban Me Thuot, Kon Tum, Hoi An, Tuy Hoa, Da Nang, Qui Nhon and Pleiku. The PAVN and VC followed a strict strategy or mortar and rocket attacks closely followed by massive ground assaults conducted by battalion-strength Viet Cong soldiers and in the North, PAVN regulars. They would join with local cadres who would guide them to the senior headquarters and radio stations. Most of them were driven out from their objectives on the first day. All U.S. forces were placed on maximum alert and similar orders were issued to all ARVN units. The allies, however, still responded without any real sense of urgency. Orders cancelling leaves either came too late or were disregarded.
At 03:00 on 31 January PAVN and VC forces attacked Saigon, Cholon, and Gia Dinh in the Capital Military District; Quảng Trị (again), Huế, Quảng Tín, Tam Kỳ and Quảng Ngãi as well as U.S. bases at Phú Bài and Chu Lai in I Corps; Phan Thiết, Tuy Hòa and U.S. installations at Bong Son and An Khê in II Corps; and Cần Thơ and Vĩnh Long in IV Corps. The following day, Biên Hòa, Long Thanh, Bình Dương in III Corps and Kien Hoa, Dinh Tuong, Gò Công, Kiên Giang, Vĩnh Bình, Bến Tre, and Kien Tuong in IV Corps were assaulted. The last attack of the initial operation was launched against Bạc Liêu in IV Corps on 10 February. A total of approximately 84,000 PAVN/VC troops participated in the attacks while thousands of others stood by to act as reinforcements or as blocking forces. PAVN/VC forces also mortared or rocketed every major allied airfield and attacked 64 district capitals and scores of smaller towns.
The City of Hue received some of the worst of it.
In most cases, the defense was led by the South Vietnamese. Local militia or ARVN forces, supported by the South Vietnamese National Police, drove the attackers out within two or three days, sometimes within hours; but heavy fighting continued several days longer in Kon Tum, Buôn Ma Thuột, Phan Thiết, Cần Thơ, and Bến Tre. The outcome in each instance was usually dictated by the ability of local commanders—some were outstanding, others were cowardly or incompetent. The National Police Force were given direct orders to During this crucial crisis, however, no South Vietnamese unit broke or defected to the communists.

The Massacres

January 1968 and Vietnam is at a turning point. With North Vietnamese attacks on the strategically important American base at Khe Sanh starting on January 21st followed by the Tet Offensive across South Vietnam starting on January 31st, anti-Communist forces quickly found themselves stuck in a belief that the North Vietnamese had taken sigificant portions of the countryside. While swift counterattacks by mobile strategic forces quickly blunted the potential of the Tet Offensive, redeployment of allied forces to better secure South Vietnam following the Tet Offensive led to a temporary spike in massacres and reprisals against the civilian population.
Hue
Upon entering and taking the city in their brief time, the worst to come of this was the Massacre of Hue by the hands of the Viet Cong, documented by a number of journalists following its four-week occupation. The killings were seen as a purge of the social stratum, collaborators and those receptive to the American presence in the region. Press reports following interviews with the ARVN stated that they had "confirmed revenge squads" following this aftermath. So far, only about 428 of these victims have been identified.
PAVN Knowledge Only:

Vietcong documents boasted that they "eliminated" thousands of enemy and "annihilated members of various reactionary political parties, henchmen, and wicked tyrants" in Huế. One regiment alone reported that it killed 1,000 people. Another report mentioned 2,867 killed.

Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất Knowledge limited to ARVN, USMC and RoK Forces
February 12th, 1968
Following the redeployment of the Korean Blue Dragon Brigade - otherwise known as the 2nd Marine Brigade - from the Chu Lai Area to the Da Nang in January, tensions between the new Korean garrison and the local populace quickly flared due to the conduct of the Korean forces. With the Koreans having a tendency of "diverting from their march and going over to completely level villages" if they received fire "or think they'd get fired from a village", the scene was set for the trigger happy Koreans. Passing the friendly CAP Delta-2 team composed (in part) by the villagers of Phong Nhị, Korean forces from the 1st Company, 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Brigade were fired upon thirty minutes from the vicinity of Phong Nhất, with a supporting LVTP-5 becoming disabled after being hit by a command-detonated mine. At approximately 13:00, or two hours after the disabling of the LVTP-5, gunfire could be heard from the area as a fire broke out in Phong Nhị. Despite assurances that ROKMC forces were not in the Phong Nhị area by the ROK BDE S-3 personnel, a request by the USMC Commander of Combined Action Company, Delta for the firing of 81 mortars into the area was denied at 13:30. Around 15:00, a combined United States Marine Corps and Popular Front patrol from CAP Delta-2 ended Phong Nhi Hamlet, finding the hamlet burnt to the ground with 69 civilians dead. Survivors of the 'incident' were soon evacuated from the scene and sent to local hospitals. survivors of the 'incident' were evacuated by CAP Delta-2 and a total of 69 civilians were found dead.
Four days after the 'incident', the Executive Officer of the Blue Dragon Brigade deposited approximately 30 bags of rice at local District headquarters as part of 'normal refuges assistance'. However, following testimony from CAP Delta-2 and survivors of the incident, calls for a war-crime investigation from CAP commanders in the region have grown, demanding that Lieutenant General Chae Myung-shin investigate the incident. While COMUSMACV has remained silent for now, the Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất Massacre has begun to spread and it would take extraordinary effort to keep it suppressed not only among the local South Vietnamese population, but American forces in general considering that two marines were attached to the 1st Company during the time that the 'incident' occurred.
American USMC witnesses forwarded their encounters on February 20th of 1968 to American General Staff.
February 25, 1968
Despite the previous massacre at Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất, the Blue Dragon Brigade still maintained operational control over the Dan Nang region as the fallout of the Tet Offensive has prevented a full scale reorganization and redeployment of the South Korean Marine Brigade to a less populated part of the South Vietnamese countryside. Approaching the hamlet at approximately 9:30, South Korean forces dismounted from their tank and armored vehicles, and marched into to Hà My from three directions. Rounding up the local populace into three separate groups, the Commanding Officer of the detachment brought forth a desk and through a Vietnamese interpreter, gave a lengthy speech to the crowd. The villagers, mostly expecting to receive food listened in to the entire speech before the Commanding Officer stood up and walked away. With a swift hand gesture from the Korean Commanding Officer, M60 Machine Guns and M49 Grenade Launchers quickly fired into the assembled crowds without warning, killing 135 civilians within two hours. By 12:00, the 'incident' had concluded, with only three combat aged men killed in the fighting as a 125 of the 135 dead were village women, elders, teenager girls, toddlers and infants. Following a brief withdrawal of Korean forces, the Korean detachment returned with two D-7 bulldozers and flattened the remains of the town and destroyed the established graves and remaining corpses.
Following the 'incident' at Hà My, the wounded survivors were transported by horseback or by a sympathetic American convoy in the vicinity of Hoa Hai. Following their transport to the local West German hospital ship currently docked in Da Nang or the Leper's Clinch in Hoa Hai, the refugees of Hà My have begun to disseminate stories over what happened, however the total lack of war correspondents in the area have limited its spread.
In addition to the 'incidents' at Hà My and at Phong Nhị and Phong Nhất, massacres were conducted at Truong Giang, Duy Xuyen, An Truong and Cam Ha by Korean forces, killing hundreds more and displacing the survivors. As a result of the Korean actions, both General Lam of the I Corps and General Cushman of the III MAF Command have requested that the Blue Dragon be redeployed back into its previous area of operation in the II Corps' jurisdiction as its presence is disrupting existing CAP programs and attracting increased Viet Cong recruitment in the region.

Ky Lai

In the city of My Tho where President Thieu had been on vacation for Tet with his wife, one son and daughter, was soon and quickly put under siege. In the city at this point, it was mostly filled with American Army and Navy personnel of the 3/47th and 3/60th Infantry Battalions as well as the 9th Infantry Division. Alongside the Riverine units are a detachment of US Navy SEALs who patrol the river. On February 1st, the Viet Cong’s 261st, 263rd and 516th Battalions pinned the 32nd ARVN Ranger Battalion outside My Tho and entered the city. It was here they encountered the 7th ARVN Division alongside the US Navy’s Task Force 117 who landed the 3/47th and the 3/60th Infantry Battalions of the Mobile Riverine Force. The US Army’s 9th Infantry Division of the southern edge of the city pushed in to keep the North out.
At the same time in Saigon, the ARVN's 4th Marine Battalion pulled some of its elements out along with Le Nguyen Khang to the city of My Tho where the President was on vacation with his family for Tet. By February 2nd, the Western half of the city had been cleared to the Mekong while the VC patrolled the delta with an armoured sampan. The US Navy SEALs attacked and disabled the sampan with LAWs while the 3/47th and the 3/60th hit the VC by the city reservoir. That night, the 4th Marine Battalion arrived where they’d take personal defence of President Thieu, issuing commands to all remaining forces in the city to link up with the Americans to clear the city out. At this point, the South Vietnamese Marines escorted Thieu along with his family out of the city against their will, holding them hostage.
Getting wind of this, American forces negotiated with General Khanh, requesting that Thieu be transferred into their custody. He quickly agreed and Thieu, along with his family, were taken on a river-boat to Vinh Long Airfield before being flown out to the Aircraft Carrier Kitty-Hawk. It is here that the President informs the Americans that he was being held against his will by the Marines and requests safe harbor for his family to the United States, again which is agreed. Thieu himself is protected on the carrier, softly couped from his government. He doesn’t know the full situation, especially in the confusion of the Tet.
All he does know is that he was forced into custody by a Marine General and taken into American hands. As far as he's aware, the Tet Offensive was a huge failure for the ARVN and most of his generals were executed, imprisoned or have deserted. He insists to stay in the region to organize a South Vietnamese rebellion, unaware of what's at play in the country. More to follow below.

The Situation in Vietnam

Across the country bases from Khe Sanh to the South were being hit. Again, most of the cities already being liberated within days, if not the month of the fighting being started. The VC in those regions have retreated to their local headquarters, exposing them for a counter attack. The only exceptions to this are the Battles for Saigon, Khe Sahn and Hue.
Following the Tet, approximately 40,000 civilians have been killed with tens of thousands more losing their homes from mortars and rocket attacks by the VC with even more losing their homes in retaliatory strikes by the West. With President Thieu out of the country, the current consensus with general command is that he was airlifted out for his safety, leaving Vice President Ky to organize the defence throughout Saigon and Indochina. There are requests to make contact with him, where ever he was to ensure he was safe and alive.
His loyalist generals back in Saigon follow Ky's orders with great unease.

The Domestic Situations

 

The United States

The Tet Offensive created a crisis within the Johnson administration, which became increasingly unable to convince the American public that it had been a major defeat for the communists. The optimistic assessments made prior to the offensive by the administration and the Pentagon came under heavy criticism and ridicule as the "credibility gap" that had opened in 1967 widened into a chasm. It offers no help with pictures such as this one, showing the execution of unarmed prisoner Nguyễn Văn Lém by General Nguyễn Ngọc Loan. Loan is reported to have said afterwards: "If you hesitate, if you didn't do your duty, the men won't follow you."
True, a picture tells a thousand words but the truth behind this picture was very darker than what the doves back home protest about. His face has been plastered on magazines with the intention of painting the ARVN as murderers, calloused and brutal; just hours before, he finished massacring a police officer's family. Lém was in civilian clothes and was alleged to have just cut the throats of South Vietnamese Lt. Col. Nguyen Tuan, his wife, their six children and the officer’s 80-year-old mother with only one survivor of the entire attack being his son who was shot three times. He was nine-years old. The reporter who would document the incident would not include this in the initial showing,
Following this, the United States has even had Martin Luther King Jr. demand that Americans of all colours take a march on Washington D.C. in direct protest of the Vietnam War right after LBJ's State of the Union Address.

We need to make clear in this political year, to congressmen on both sides of the aisle and to the president of the United States, that we will no longer tolerate, we will no longer vote for men who continue to see the killings of Vietnamese and Americans as the best way of advancing the goals of freedom and self-determination in Southeast Asia

Footage of the Tet has furthered the divide but at the same time, it has encouraged more refugees within the United States to stand by their vocal support of the United States in its war efforts. Westmoreland feels very sad, also.

Vietnam

Prior to the Tet Offensive, Vietnamese citizens in the South were split on the issue of the War. They saw this as nothing more than a situation they wanted out of and most of the country relaxed when the Tet Ceasefire was called. A number of citizens thought the ceasefire was going to be 7-days, as Ho Chi Minh declared it to be and were unaware entirely of Thieu's negotiation to make it 3-days. Nevertheless, South Vietnam was in uproar at the breach of the Tet with war-support growing in favor of Thieu's government or simply the ARVN. Despite the broadcasts of Hanoi Hannah to the Americans and Ho Chi Minh's calls for the citizens to rebel and rise up, few outside of the communist cadres really did. Most increased in their resentment for the Communists.
The North has been receiving different views; it's no help that all of their information concerning the war is extremely limited. All failures are processed through propaganda boards and all successes are doubled in their frequencies. Recruitment has standardized with most citizens continuing to be fed a "1-2 year long journey for Communism," when in reality they will be employed on average for 4-6 years. The average Viet citizen in the North is more concerned from American bombs than they are of the South pushing the DMZ but beyond that, the war support is strong between them for continued intervention in Laos and for unification soon. One great boost was the sudden recruitment of 190,000 soldiers who took to the PAVN's own uniform from more unorthodox members within the DRV.

Korea

South Koreans have been finding resounding success in their campaigns while in Indochina. They have grown to be outright feared by certain Viet Cong units that they operate nearby, not for their tactics or ingenuity but more for their brutality and tenacity. It was believed that the RoK had never retreated from a single battle. The only times that the Korean Marines had, it was always a lure to bring gung-ho fighters into the battlefield to be slain by claymores or waiting machine-gun nests.
The North has had a different story with Kim Il-Sung's messages inspiring the KPAAF Pilots flying over Indochina. The citizens on the peninsula, in both countries, support their respective leaders decisions and hope their contributions in the war effort will not be forgotten. To the North, it's an ideological fraternity that's on the line, with relations between both countries higher than ever before. They have sent over weapons, ammo and millions of uniforms to the PAVN alongside 2 anti-aircraft artillery regiments.

Australia (written by hughmcf)

Sadly, beyond South Vietnamese rural support for the VC, a growing minority of Australian and New Zealand voters are themselves voicing their opposition to their war. The anti-war movement is currently supported by less than half of the two nation’s populations, although with the devastating size of the Tet Offensive having challenged the official state narrative that VC forces are being defeated, the movement is only growing. It is therefore imperative that decisive action is taken to demonstrate success in the war, lest domestic pressure force Australia and New Zealand to withdraw.
Map of the situation in Indochina, February 31st 1968

TL;DR:

Vietnam went on as normal except for Thieu who was arrested and forced out of the country. Laos is still on fire but Nam Bac wasn't as bad as it could've been, it is still however extremely bad. Tet Offensive is hurting public support for foreigners while it is hurting domestic support for North Vietnam. Cambodia was halted conditionally with the Communist Party of Kampuchea making limited strikes as planned. There were several massacres within these two months by both North Vietnamese, Viet Cong and the Republic of Korea's Marine Corps.
Written by ComradeMoose, Panzerbirb, RubbishBailey and MiddleNI with help by ComradeFrunze, Squid, WK, Crystalid and Yacobre

In this post, I will be briefly reviewing several positions taken by Donald Trump during the COVID-19 outbreak from January 2020 to March 2020.
Before getting into the coronavirus outbreak, it can be beneficial to review some of the decisions Trump made even before the nation was aware of the details of COVID-19.
BEFORE JANUARY 2020
Following his experience with Ebola in 2014, the Obama administration set up two epidemic monitoring groups, both intended to be permanent. One would be inside the White House National Security Council, while the other would be in the Department of Homeland Security. [1] In the spring of 2018, the Trump administration all but removed these epidemic groups. Tom Bossert, the leader of the group within Homeland Security, was pushed out in April 2018. [2] The next month in May, Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, the leader of the group within the National Security Council, was pushed out, and his global health security team reorganized. Their offices would be effectively removed. [3]
 
There is an important caveat that must be acknowledged, though. The pushing out of Ziemer and Bossert was part of a standard reorganization of bureaucratic offices. While Bolton removed the heads of these offices, he also combined much of their roles into a combination of arms control, nonproliferation, global health, and biodefense. In short, their value was not lost entirely, but simply changed by a bureaucratic decision to cut bloat. [4]
 
With that caveat in mind, the question in this particular situation is what might have been different if the global health teams maintained their independence. For instance, consider Luciana Borio, director of medical biodefense preparedness within Ziemer's team. Borio's role would be reorganized, and she ultimately would leave the National Security Council in 2019. In 2020, she was an early presence warning against the spread of a virus. She published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal as early as January 28, 2020, titled "Act Now to Prevent an America Epidemic," centered on calling for more tests and hospital preparations. On February 4, Borio and Scott Gottlieb, former FDA comissioner for Trump, published another op-ed urging that private labs be allowed to develop their own tests, as well as calling for more immediate action. [5] Borio is a veteran health expert and a practicing medical doctor. In contrast, a senior leader within the team now is Anthony Ruggiero, whose focus is in national security with a focus on North Korea, not medicine or health. [6]
 
In short, it is difficult to ascertain what impact the re-organization effort ultimately had. As the virus has now spread considerably in America, it can be reasonably asserted that the current team did not do a very good job. If veteran experts on health such as Borio had still been involved, things like private labs producing tests - which she called for on February 4 - may not have taken until February 29. [7]
 
Other various administrative decisions affected projects and programs intended to prevent future outbreaks. In the fall of 2019, a US governmental research program titled "Predict" reached the end of its 10-year funding cycle and was not renewed. The program, which garnered bipartisan support from Congress, was primarily focused on setting up a continuous surveillance program on zoonotic diseases, as well as efficiently organizing a way to hunt for these threats. Zoonotic diseases well-known in public discourse include Ebola, MERS, SARS, initially AIDS, and now COVID-19. [8]
 
In February 2018, the CDC reported that it would be forced to downsize its international epidemic prevention activities because of a lack of anticipated funds from the Trump administration budget proposal. One of the countries where the CDC would have to dramatically scale back was China. Congress, however, increased the level of funding to where the CDC no longer needed to scale back its efforts. [9] In general, this is a common trend for many of Trump's budget proposals, which have often put forward massive cuts to the CDC. However, Congress has consistently either made smaller reductions, or in some cases, increased funding. While it is inaccurate to say Trump slashed CDC funding by referencing his budget proposals, it is important to remember that budget proposals often serve to indicate where a president's priority is. Trump's trend of decreased funding to the CDC in budget proposals can be reasonably viewed as a continued behavior of not seeing the CDC as a priority. [10]
 
Should Trump have had this as a priority? Perhaps. Warning signs on the US being prepared for a pandemic were not invisible. Throughout January 2019 to August 2019, the Department of Health and Human Services ran a series of war-game-esque exercises centered on responding to a pandemic scenario, titled the "Crimson Contagion", that was similar to an influenza pandemic. The mock contagion began in China and spread to the States. By the end of the simulation, 110 million were expected to become infected, with 7.7 million being hospitalized and 586,000 dying. [11] The mortality rate of 0.5 is, with the current statistics we have right now, lower than most estimations of COVID-19's mortality rate. [12] The draft report contained numerous examples of miscommunication between bureaucracies, a confused Federal response, and a struggling State and hospital system that had difficulty finding out what extra emergency equipment was available. Citation 11 contains a link to the report. [11]
 
In fact, even before the Crimson Contagion experiment in 2019, outgoing Obama administration officials participated in a similar mock scenario with incoming Trump administration officials in 2017. There, members of Trump's team were specifically warned about challenges in the test pandemic, such as a lack of medical essentials, anti-viral drugs, and ventilators. Tom Bossert, mentioned previously, reportedly took the discussion seriously. Others were less enthusiastic and outright dismissive. Regardless of genuine interest, roughly two-thirds of that Trump team - comprising of high ranking aides and officials - would no longer be serving in Trump's administration by the time COVID-19 became relevant. [13]
 
The Obama-Trump meeting in January 2017 was not the only instance where the Trump administration appeared dismissive of the previous administration's guidelines. On March 25, Politico reported the existence of a previously unrevealed White House playbook from Obama's presidency. The playbook contained hundreds of strategies and vital policy decisions relevant to fighting a pandemic. Particularly notable are recommendations such as swift action that would enable the government to fully detect potential outbreaks, considerations on the Defense Production Act, and supplemental funding - all of these options would be adapted by Trump, albeit far behind schedule. Other recommendations, such as a "unified message" from the federal government, did not really happen until just recently. Tom Bossert, who has now been mentioned three times now, supported the value of the playbook, but was no longer in Trump's administration when it was relevant. While the Trump administration was briefed on the existence of the playbook itself, former officials "cautioned that it never went through a full, National Security Council-led interagency process to be approved as Trump administration strategy." An official on the National Security Council stated that "We are aware of the document, although it's quite dated ... The plan we are executing now is a better fit, more detailed." [14] Perhaps it is accurate that the playbook is quite dated. Even so, it still recommended relatively early many of the policies that took the Trump administration rolled out after considerable delay. Another pertinent instance is that according to the playbook, the government should have been working on "coordination of workforce protection activities including… [personal protective equipment] determination, procurement and deployment." in January. These details are only being addressed now, in April, several months after the playbook recommended. [14]
 
Finally, America's intelligence community plainly warned of the danger a pandemic could present in their 2019 Worldwide Threat Assessment. The report contained statements such as "We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large-scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support." [15] A year earlier, the intelligence community's 2018 assessment had stated that "A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat." [16] As of now, the 2020 annual intelligence report has been postponed and has not yet been rescheduled. According to senior government officials, it contains the same warning that the U.S is unprepared for a global pandemic - and even without these sources, such a thought would be a reasonable suggestion given the prior warning in the 2019 report. Concerns are growing, however, whether or not Americans will see the report in a reasonable amount of time. Joseph Maguire, former Acting Director of National Intelligence, was on the calendar to present the report mid-February to congress. However, a disagreement with Trump on Russian meddling in the 2020 election saw him dismissed from his position. The position was then filled by Richard Grenell, a strong Trump ally and ambassador to Germany. Trump then nominated John Ratcliffe, a Texas representative and another staunch Trump supporter, to the position, but it remains a total unknown as to how long the confirmation process will take. Even when it is finished, there is no actual requirement for the DNI to present the intelligence community's threat assessment to Congress, nor is there a requirement stating that the DNI must publish an unclassified report. These features have been the norm since 2006, but could easily change. It is entirely feasible that in an election year, the 2020 threat assessment may be continually stalled in order to avoid revealing the unbiased intelligence warnings that the United States was not adequately prepared for a pandemic. [17]
 
At this point, it is appropriate to move into January. Before doing so, I feel that it is relevant to briefly point out the figure of John Ratcliffe. Please note: This is not directly related to the coronavirus. Feel free to scroll past.
On July 28, 2019, John Ratcliffe was announced as the next nominee for Director of National Intelligence. [18] Ratcliffe soon came under attack for various positions. He repeatedly misrepresented his role as a federal prosecutor, and worries circled in the intelligence community that Ratcliffe would bring partisanship into what is intended to be a non-partisan position. [19] For Trump, Ratcliffe made his bones during the Mueller investigation, where he was often an outspoken critic of both the investigation and Mueller himself, and was the source for statements such as ""the Mueller report and its conclusions weren't from Robert Mueller. They were written what a lot of people believe was Hillary Clinton's de facto legal team." [20] On August 2, 2019, Trump announced that he would be withdrawing Ratcliffe from the nomination. Privately, the president expressed concern that Ratcliffe would not be confirmed, following reactions from the intelligence community and Republican senators. [21] As mentioned above, Joseph Maguire was nominated and subsequently approved. Following a briefing where a member of Maguire's team referenced Russia interfering in the 2020 election to Trump's benefit, Trump pushed out Maguire. [22] Although Trump's ambassador to Germany was moved to fill the position on an acting basis, Trump nominated no other than John Ratcliffe, once again [23] Whether or not Ratcliffe will face the same opposition as before is uncertain. Others have suggested, as outlined above, that Richard Grenell can merely hold the position without oversight while Ratcliffe awaits what may be a doomed nomination limbo. How this situation will resolve is not clear, and likely will not be clear even as we approach the presidential election. What is clear, however, is that Trump has continually sought to transform what is intended to be a purely intelligence-based nonpolitical position into a partisan distortion, while media coverage remains centered on the coronavirus pandemic.
 
--JANUARY--
 
COVID-19 began in Wuhan, China, in mid-November 2019. The World Health Organization (WHO) was informed of the outbreak on December 31, 2019. The Unites States reported its first case of COVID-19 three weeks after the outbreak was reported in China. [24]
 
In January, the virus - not yet officially named COVID-19 - was circling on social media sites. Despite underlying concern that the virus could come to the US, government authorities assured the public that it would be contained. On January 22, Trump stated "We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China. We have it under control. It’s going to be just fine." [25] Later on January 30, he stated "“We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five — and those people are all recuperating successfully. But we’re working very closely with China and other countries, and we think it’s going to have a very good ending for us … that I can assure you." [26]
 
It is important to note that during this period, many health officials did not believe the risk was as significant either. For instance, Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on January 26 "The American people should not be worried or frightened by this. It's a very, very low risk to the United States . . . It isn't something that the American public needs to worry about or be frightened about." [27] Trump’s comments at the time can be somewhat excused by the fact that many medical experts had not realized the transmission details of COVID-19. Likewise, many "mainstream" media outlets did not believe the virus would be that bad. However, by mid-February most reporters and journalist would be reporting on the dangers of COVID-19, in a sharp contrast to many conservative outlets. Cathy Young, in an article for The Dispatch, wrote a detailed article showing how the media quickly adjusted their coverage when it became clear in February that the coronavirus was a significant threat. [28] I recommend you read it - see citation 28.
 
The Intelligence community appeared to have a different perception from both the media and Trump, very early on. In line with their annual assessments the previous years before, they began issuing warnings in reports to the president regarding the spread of the coronavirus by January and into February. [29]
 
Peter Navarro, a senior trade advisor to Trump, and Tom Cotton, a Republican senator of Arkansas, also warned the President. Navarro sent a memo on January 29 addressed to Trump through the NSC, warning of the coronavirus. It is yet unknown if Trump even saw the memo. Navarro, a China hawk, had his memo belittled as “alarmist” by administration officials. [30] Cotton, another China hawk, sent letters out to the secretaries of state, health and human services, and homeland securities warning about the virus on January 28. On January 29, he spoke with Trump about it as well. [31]
 
On January 31, Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services and Chairman of the Task Force on COVID-19 at the time, announced that Trump had issued travel restrictions to prevent the spread of the virus. The travel ban, as it has been called, did not actually prohibit Americans from traveling to and from China, but instead prevented foreign nationals who had traveled to China in the last 14 days from entering the US. US citizens returning to the US who had been in Hubei Province would be subject to two weeks of mandatory quarantine, while those who had been to Mainland China were told they could be screened at certain ports of entry, and were requested to self-quarantine themselves. [32]
 
The January 31 travel restrictions have been a popular talking point for Trump. He has continually pointed towards this early action as an example of him adopting prudent, cautious measures to restrict the virus' spread. To an extent, the restrictions were beneficial. Studies have indicated there is a modest benefit in travel restriction; however, they cannot actually be relied upon for strong prevention. Policies such as social distancing, early testing, and hand washing would be vital to continue to fight back against the spread domestically. [33]
 
Trump has also portrayed himself as a victim as a result of these restrictions. Consistently, he has spoken of "Democrats" angrily condemning his decision, particularly as xenophobic. This does not appear supported by the facts. Democratic leaders such as Joe Biden, Chuck Schumer, and Nancy Pelosi, while often critical of Trump's response to the outbreak, never spoke against the early restrictions. While some (D) politicians did criticize the restrictions, they are overwhelmingly in the minority; likewise, a couple (D) politicians publicly supported the restrictions, but they were also in a distinct minority. As Azar said early in February, the travel restrictions "were the uniform recommendations of career public health officials". The response from most democratic politicians was apparent ambivalence through their own silence. [33]
 
Overall, January was a slow month for coronavirus concerns. A scuffle between Iran and the US in early January, culminating in the targeted death of Qasem Soleimani, dominated many headlines in early January. The rest of the month saw Trump's impeachment and acquittal, spanning into the beginning of February. [34]
 
--FEBRUARY--
 
As February progressed, the world became more and more aware of the dangers related to COVID-19 spiraling out of control. Yet Trump continued to downplay the risk. He suggested several times it would "go away" in April, first stating this claim February 10. [35] He repeated it February 14. [36] During a White House meeting on February 27, he stated "We’re going to continue. It’s going to disappear. One day — it’s like a miracle — it will disappear." [37] Even by March 10, he was still implying the virus would just "go away". [38]
 
In the same vein, he insisted that the US was completely prepared. On Feb 23, he twice stated that "We have it very much under control." [39] In a tweet the next day, Trump wrote that "The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA ... CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock market starting to look very good to me!" [40] While at CPAC on February 29, Trump again twice stated "Everything is under control ... Everything is really under control." [41]
 
Part of Trump's rosy assessment seems to be based in the number of people who tested positive. At the time, it was quite low. In January 30, Trump said "We have very little problem in this country at the moment — five — and those people are recuperating successfully ... it's going to have a very good ending for us ... that I can assure you." [42] On February 10, he stated "We have 12 cases — 11 cases, and many of them are in good shape now.” [43] On February 26, he said "So we're at the low level ... we're going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time." That same day, he said "And again, when you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done." [44] By March 4, Trump was still touting the low numbers: "[W]e have a very small number of people in this country [infected]. We have a big country. The biggest impact we had was when we took the 40-plus people [from a cruise ship]. … We brought them back. We immediately quarantined them. But you add that to the numbers. But if you don’t add that to the numbers, we’re talking about very small numbers in the United States." [45]
 
Yet these numbers were impacted severely by a massive, unintentional manufacturing mistake within the CDC federal lab system which worked to construct the tests, as well as lagging response and miscommunication from the FDA. This topic, which has been covered in much detail by several publications such as the New Yorker and the Dispatch, is better suited for its own article than this post. (See the following citation) [46] [47] In short, the CDC's manufacturing error caused several weeks of delays in available testing. At the same time, the FDA had granted only the CDC permission to produce the COVID-19 test, meaning that many other labs could not get online to start producing their own tests until they received permission from the FDA - a complicated, regulatory process. By late February, it would be too late. It would be two months after the virus was officially revealed that the US would be able to produce tests effectively. Instead of the successful testing containment strategies deployed in countries such as South Korea, the US would be forced to switch to a far more intensive approach: "The tool kit of epidemiology would shift — lockdowns, social disruption, intensive medical treatment — in hopes of mitigating the harm." [48] Even as this became a reality, government officials pushed back on it. Anne Schuschat, CDC's principal deputy director, said on February 25 "Our efforts at containment so far have worked." When Nancy Messonnier, director of CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respitatory Diseases, stated that "Disruption to everyday life might be severe," Alex Azar, the Health and Human Services Secretary, was quick to state that it was an example of what steps "might involve. Might. Might involve." [49]
 
Is Trump to blame for either of the CDC or FDA issues? For the former — perhaps the most serious failure of America's response to the pandemic — it is impossible to blame the president for a manufacturing error in testing facilities. When we examine the latter problems, however, we are faced with a more complicated subject. As demonstrated in the paragraphs above, Trump's responses to COVID-19 during February were stream of confident messages that few were infected and that containment was all but a given. Yet they were based on faulty numbers attributed to the testing failures. The President of the United States was either clueless on the reality of his administration's response to a global virus, or he was intentionally misrepresenting statistics to make the situation of COVID-19 within America sound more palatable. In any case, the leadership was extremely poor.
 
When faced on March 6 with a COVID-19 infected ship requesting permission to dock in California, Trump publicly stated "I like the numbers being where they are. I don't need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn't our fault." [50] In an NPR interview on March 12, Politico reporter Dan Diamond stated that "My understanding is he [Trump] did not push to do aggressive additional testing in recent weeks, and that's partly because more testing might have led to more cases being discovered of coronavirus outbreak, and the president had made clear - the lower the numbers on coronavirus, the better for the president, the better for his potential reelection this fall." [51] Trump's insistence on keeping numbers low could have easily created confusion within the administration's FDA, contributing to the delay in greenlighting non-CDC test productions by outside labs. [52]
 
On a similar theme: On March 17, soon after recommending guidelines on social presence, Trump stated "I’ve always known this is a — this is a real — this is a pandemic. I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic." [53] Again, there is natural confusion over this. If Trump was aware of the dangers of the coronavirus long before it was declared a pandemic - March 11 - it seems bizarre he would constantly reassure Americans even as the virus silently spread in February, as well as intentionally withholding information pertaining to the failures in testing and how community spread would already be underway. [54]
 
At a campaign rally on February 28, Trump ignited another controversy by using the word "hoax" when referring to the coronavirus outbreak. For clarity, I've included the entire context here:
"Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue. They can’t even count their votes in Iowa, they can’t even count. No they can’t. They can’t count their votes. One of my people came up to me and said, ‘Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia. That didn’t work out too well. They couldn’t do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. That was on a perfect conversation. They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax. But you know, we did something that’s been pretty amazing. We’re 15 people [cases of coronavirus infection] in this massive country. And because of the fact that we went early, we went early, we could have had a lot more than that." [55]
 
Regardless of other actions, Trump has never described the virus itself as a hoax, or as something fictional. In fact, many of the quotes found in above paragraphs where Trump says everything is under control are followed by the president stating that his team was being watchful for the virus. Although it is proper to acknowledge that Trump did not apply the "hoax" title to the virus itself, his response to it during his rally was far from adequate. Later in the rally, he stated the following:
 
"So a number that nobody heard of that I heard of recently and I was shocked to hear it, 35,000 people on average die each year from the flu. Did anyone know that? 35,000. That’s a lot of people. It could go to 100,000, it could be 27,000, they say usually a minimum of 27, it goes up to 100,000 people a year who die, and so far we have lost nobody to coronavirus in the United States. Nobody. And it doesn’t mean we won’t, and we are totally prepared, it doesn’t mean we won’t. But think of it. You hear 35 and 40,000 people, and we’ve lost nobody, and you wonder, the press is in hysteria mode." [55]
 
By accusing the press of being in "hysteria mode", as well as accusing the Democrats of "politicizing the coronavirus" and making it "their new hoax" - referring to criticisms of the Trump administration's response - Trump again downplayed the danger of COVID-19 while also portraying himself as a victim of unfair, partisan attacks by the democratic party, a tactic he had used earlier when referring to his travel restrictions on China. Trump also compared COVID-19 to the flu, which he would repeat several times into March.
 
--MARCH--
 
For most Americans, March marked the moment where the coronavirus became a reality. Sports were cancelled, schools were moved online, public figures tested positive, and so on. However, as with the previous month, Trump consistently presented the American people with a minimizing attitude towards COVID-19 in early March. One of the ways he did this in March was comparing the reactions and statistics of the flu to the coronavirus. As early as February 26, Trump was making statements along these lines. When asked how Americans should change their behavior, Trump said "I mean, view this the same as the flu.", referring to people needing to stay at home and wash their hands when they had the flu. [56] Later, when asked about the differences in the Ebola crisis and the corona virus crisis, he made a direct comparison between the danger of COVID-19 and the danger of the flu, saying "This one is different. Much different. This is a flu. This is like a flu." [56] Finally, in the same briefing when asked about increasing testing, he stated "Well, we’re testing everybody that we need to test. And we’re finding very little problem. Very little problem ...But that’s a little bit like the flu. It’s a little like the regular flu that we have flu shots for. And we’ll essentially have a flu shot for this in a fairly quick manner." [56]
 
To an extent, this comparison was somewhat accurate. If someone has the flu, they should try to quarantine themselves and be mindful of their possibility to spread the flu to others. Unfortunately, the accuracy stopped there. In the same press conference, he directly compared COVID-19 to the flu in relation to its threat to those infected, minimizing the actual danger of the virus significantly. The comparisons continued. In an interview with Sean Hannity on March 4, he compared the coronavirus to the swine flu, stating "Well, I just say that it's, you know, a very, very small number in this country. And we're going to try and keep it that way as much as possible. I will say, though, the H1N1, that was swine flu, commonly referred to as swine flu. And that went from around April of '09 to April of '10, where there were 60 million cases of swine flu. And over -- actually, it's over 13,000. I think you might have said 17,000. I had heard it was 13,000, but a lot of -- a lot of deaths. And they didn't do anything about it ... But they never did close the borders. I don't think they ever did have the travel ban." [57] On March 9, he tweeted "So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!" [58]
 
As late as March 24, Trump was still mentioning the flu when discussing his administration's recommendation for distancing, saying "Look, you're going to lose a number of people to the flu. But you're going to lose more people by putting a country into a massive recession or depression," as well as "I said, this has never been done before. What are you talking about? But we understand it. You have hot spots. But we have had hot spots before. We have had horrible flus. I mean, think of it. We average 36,000 people, death, death. I'm not talking about cases. I'm talking about death, 36,000 deaths a year. People die, 36, from the flu. But we have never closed down the country for the flu", and "I brought some numbers here, we lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu. We don’t turn the country off, I mean every year. Now when I heard the number, we average 37,000 people a year. Can you believe that? And actually this year we’re having a bad flu season, but we lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose much more than that to automobile accidents. We didn’t call up the automobile companies, say, “Stop making cars. We don’t want any cars anymore.” We have to get back to work." [59]
 
On March 31, Trump finally rebuked the flu connection. In a press conference, he said the following "it’s not the flu. It’s vicious . . . This is not the flu." [60]
 
Another incident that quickly became a contentious topic was the decision to "close" the economy. Before addressing that topic, however, I find it extremely beneficial to suggest a helpful, brief article by David French in Time Magazine, where he succinctly outlines how the federal government does not actually have the responsibility or power to "open" or "close" the economy, as if it is some random lever you pull. [61]
 
French states "Simply put, the power to issue stay-in-place orders, ban large gatherings, and order business closings rests with state and local authorities, not with the president.
A quick constitutional primer is in order. The federal government is a government of enumerated powers, meaning that it has only the powers that the Constitution gives it. State governments, by contrast, possess a general police power. That means they have a degree of inherent sovereign authority that the federal government does not. As the Supreme Court outlined all the way back in 1824, state governments possess the power to enact “quarantine laws” and “health laws of every description.” [61]
"To put it simply" continues French, "Donald Trump cannot order New York’s businesses to close. Andrew Cuomo can. Conversely, Trump cannot order New York’s businesses to open. Only the New York state government possesses that power." [61]
 
On March 9, the Trump administration announced they would be provided "guidance" on how to stay safe. [62] On March 15, the CDC recommended an eight-week hold on public events that "consist of 50 people or more throughout the United States." The guidelines did not apply to schools or businesses. [63] On March 16, Trump unveiled new guidelines for social gatherings and general outings, recommendation restrictions such as groups of more than 10 people. The guidelines would be active until the end of March. [64] The recommendations on March 16 are what Trump often references as "closing" the economy, although several states had begun similar practices prior to the announcement.
 
Not long after this decision, Trump made several statements that suggested he was skeptical of his decision to "close". On March 22, he tweeted in all caps "WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF. AT THE END OF THE 15 DAY PERIOD, WE WILL MAKE A DECISION AS TO WHICH WAY WE WANT TO GO!" [65] In March 23, a press briefing saw Trump express a similar idea: "Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this. It was not built to be shut down ... America will again, and soon, be open for business — very soon — a lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting. A lot sooner. We cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself. We’re not going to let the cure be worse than the problem." [66]
 
In the same press conference, Trump began to declare that deaths from keeping the economy shut too long would be in “greater numbers” of those who would die to the virus, as well as similar statements to his original point against closing the economy. "So we’ll be doing something, I think, relatively quickly ... But we’ve learned a lot during this period. This was a very necessary period. Tremendous information was gained. But we can do two things at one time ... And you look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we’re talking about. That doesn’t mean we’re going to tell everybody, “No more driving of cars.” So we have to do things to get our country open. But this has been an incredible period of learning, and we’ll have announcements over the next fairly short period as to the timing ... We have jobs, we have — people get tremendous anxiety and depression, and you have suicides over things like this when you have terrible economies. You have death. Probably and — I mean, definitely would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about with regard to the virus ... Probably more death from that than anything that we’re talking about with respect to the virus." [67] The next day on twitter, he tweeted "Our people want to return to work. They will practice Social Distancing and all else, and Seniors will be watched over protectively & lovingly. We can do two things together. THE CURE CANNOT BE WORSE (by far) THAN THE PROBLEM! Congress MUST ACT NOW. We will come back strong!" [68]
 
On March 24 in a virtual town hall, Trump made a reference to opening by Easter. Some misconception has indicated that Trump said the country would be open by Easter. That is not an accurate. He suggested he would like to see it open by Easter.
 
"I would to have it open by Easter. I will — I will tell you that right now. I would love to have that — it’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter." [69]
 
However, during the same town hall, he also declared it was feasible in the first place for the country to be open by Easter: "I think it’s possible. Why isn’t it? I mean, we’ve never closed the country before, and we’ve had some pretty bad flus and we’ve had some pretty bad viruses. And I think it’s absolutely possible." Later, he returned to a familiar talking point: "And, again, the cure — it’s like this cure is worse than the problem. Again, people — many people — in my opinion, more people are going to die if we allow this to continue. We have to go back to work. Our people want to go back to work ... If we delay this thing out, you’re going to lose more people than you’re losing with the — with the situation as we know it." [69]
 
On March 29, five days after his comments about Easter, Trump abruptly reversed his course on reopening the country, stating "we will be extending our guidelines to April 30th to slow the spread." Trump briefly touched on the suggestions of others, and even referenced himself, in saying they should take the hit of the virus in order to aid the economy. "I said, “Maybe we should ride it through.” You know, you always hear about the flu. I talk about it all the time. We had a bad flu season. We’re in the midst of a bad flu season. You know, we had a bad season last year as an example. A bad flu season. And you’ll have 35-, 36-, 37,000 people die, sometimes more, sometimes less. But this is different ... it's horrible. It's really horrible. [70]
 
In a later press conference on March 31, Trump appeared to distance himself further when he referenced those who wanted to "ride it out". "What would have happened if we did nothing? Because there was a group that said, “Let’s just ride it out. Let’s ride it out.” What would have happened? And that number comes in at 1.5 to 1.6 million people, up to 2.2 and even beyond. So that’s 2.2 million people would have died if we did nothing, if we just carried on our life. Now, I don’t think that would have been possible because you would have had people dying all over the place." That said, Trump still acknowledged that he had asked similar things, at one point saying "I was asking it also", although he also referenced "a lot of people", "many friends", "businesses people", "people with great ... common sense" as asking about "riding it out". [71]
 
Much like his continued reference to flus, Trump adjusted his rhetoric on closing the economy in the last days of March and into April. Although Trump cited new statistics as having a significant factor in his decision, health experts had long been opposed to the idea of opening early, and were warning Americans that the lockdowns would need to last for a more extended period of time. [72] Other sources have suggested that Trump seeing a line of body bags near where he grew up, as well as a close friend infected with COVID-19 going into a coma, was a wake up call to the president. [73]
 
Due to a word count limit, I have had to separate this post from the conclusion. Conclusions and Citations found below!

The Vietnam War (Vietnamese: Chiến tranh Việt Nam), also known as the Second Indochina War,[56] and in Vietnam as the Resistance War Against America (Vietnamese: Kháng chiến chống Mỹ) or simply the American War, was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955[A 1] to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975.[10] It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vietnam and South Vietnam. North Vietnam was supported by the Soviet Union, China,[14] and other communist allies; South Vietnam was supported by the United States, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Thailand, and other anti-communist allies.[57][58] The war, considered a Cold War-era proxy war by some,[59] lasted 19 years, with direct U.S. involvement ending in 1973, and included the Laotian Civil War and the Cambodian Civil War, which ended with all three countries becoming communist in 1975.
The conflict emerged from the First Indochina War against the communist-led Viet Minh.[60][A 5] Most of the funding for the French war effort was provided by the U.S.[61] After the French quit Indochina in 1954, the US assumed financial and military support for the South Vietnamese state. The Việt Cộng, also known as Front national de libération du Sud-Viêt Nam or NLF (the National Liberation Front), a South Vietnamese common front under the direction of North Vietnam, initiated a guerrilla war in the south. North Vietnam had also invaded Laos in the mid-1950s in support of insurgents, establishing the Ho Chi Minh Trail to supply and reinforce the Việt Cộng.[62]:16 U.S. involvement escalated under President John F. Kennedy through the MAAG program from just under a thousand military advisors in 1959 to 16,000 in 1963.[63][32]:131 By 1963, the North Vietnamese had sent 40,000 soldiers to fight in South Vietnam.[62]:16 North Vietnam was heavily backed by the USSR and the People's Republic of China. China also sent hundreds of PLA servicemen to North Vietnam to serve in air-defense and support roles.[32]:371–4[64]
By 1964, 23,000 US advisors were stationed in South Vietnam. In the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August, a U.S. destroyer was alleged to have clashed with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. In response, the U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and gave President Lyndon B. Johnson broad authority to increase American military presence in Vietnam. Johnson ordered the deployment of combat units for the first time and increased troop levels to 184,000.[63] Past this point, the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) (also known as the North Vietnamese Army or NVA) engaged in more conventional warfare with U.S and South Vietnamese forces. Despite little progress, the United States continued a significant build-up of forces. U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, one of the principal architects of the war, began expressing doubts of victory by the end of 1966.[32]:287 U.S. and South Vietnam forces relied on air superiority and overwhelming firepower to conduct search and destroy operations, involving ground forces, artillery, and airstrikes. The U.S. also conducted a large-scale strategic bombing campaign against North Vietnam and Laos.
The Tet Offensive of 1968 showed the lack of progress with these doctrines. With the VC and PAVN mounting large-scale urban offensives throughout 1968, U.S domestic support for the war began fading. The Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) expanded following a period of neglect after Tet and was modeled after U.S doctrine. The VC sustained heavy losses during the Tet Offensive and subsequent U.S.-ARVN operations in the rest of 1968, losing over 50,000 men.[32]:481 The CIA's Phoenix Program further degraded the VC's membership and capabilities. By the end of the year, the VC insurgents held almost no territory in South Vietnam, and their recruitment dropped by over 80% in 1969, signifying a drastic reduction in guerrilla operations, necessitating increased use of PAVN regular soldiers from the north.[65] In 1969, North Vietnam declared a Provisional Revolutionary Government in South Vietnam in an attempt to give the reduced VC a more international stature, but the southern guerrillas from then on were sidelined as PAVN forces began more conventional combined arms warfare. By 1970, over 70% of communist troops in the south were northerners, and southern-dominated VC units no longer existed.[66] Operations crossed national borders: Laos was invaded by North Vietnam early on, while Cambodia was used by North Vietnam as a supply route starting in 1967; the route through Cambodia began to be bombed by the U.S. in 1969, while the Laos route had been heavily bombed since 1964. The deposing of the monarch Norodom Sihanouk by the Cambodian National Assembly resulted in a PAVN invasion of the country at the request of the Khmer Rouge, escalating the Cambodian Civil War and resulting in a U.S.-ARVN counter-invasion.
In 1969, following the election of U.S President Richard Nixon, a policy of "Vietnamization" began, which saw the conflict fought by an expanded ARVN, with U.S. forces sidelined and increasingly demoralized by domestic opposition and reduced recruitment. U.S. ground forces had largely withdrawn by early 1972 and support was limited to air support, artillery support, advisers, and materiel shipments. The ARVN, buttressed by said U.S. support, stopped the first and largest mechanized PAVN offensive during the Easter Offensive of 1972. The offensive resulted in heavy casualties on both sides and the failure of the PAVN to subdue South Vietnam, but the ARVN itself failed to recapture all territory, leaving its military situation difficult. The Paris Peace Accords of January 1973 saw all U.S forces withdrawn; the Case–Church Amendment, passed by the U.S Congress on 15 August 1973, officially ended direct U.S military involvement.[67]:457 The Peace Accords were broken almost immediately, and fighting continued for two more years. Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge on 17 April 1975 while the 1975 Spring Offensive saw the capture of Saigon by the PAVN on 30 April; this marked the end of the war, and North and South Vietnam were reunified the following year.
The scale of fighting was enormous. By 1970, the ARVN was the world's fourth largest army, and the PAVN was not far behind with approximately one million regular soldiers.[68][17]:770 The war exacted an enormous human cost: estimates of the number of Vietnamese soldiers and civilians killed range from 966,000[27] to 3.8 million.[52] Some 275,000–310,000 Cambodians,[53][54][55] 20,000–62,000 Laotians,[52] and 58,220 U.S. service members also died in the conflict, and a further 1,626 remain missing in action.[A 4]
The Sino-Soviet split re-emerged following the lull during the Vietnam War. Conflict between North Vietnam and its Cambodian allies in the Royal Government of the National Union of Kampuchea, and the newly formed Democratic Kampuchea began almost immediately in a series of border raids by the Khmer Rouge, eventually escalating into the Cambodian–Vietnamese War. Chinese forces directly invaded Vietnam in the Sino-Vietnamese War, with subsequent border conflicts lasting until 1991. Insurgencies were fought by the unified Vietnam in all three countries. The end of the war and resumption of the Third Indochina War would precipitate the Vietnamese boat people and the larger Indochina refugee crisis, which saw millions of refugees leave Indochina (mainly southern Vietnam), with an estimated 250,000 of whom perished at sea. Within the U.S, the war gave rise to what was referred to as Vietnam Syndrome, a public aversion to American overseas military involvements,[69] which together with the Watergate scandal contributed to the crisis of confidence that affected America throughout the 1970s.[70]
Further information: Terminology of the Vietnam War
Various names have been applied to the conflict. Vietnam War is the most commonly used name in English. It has also been called the Second Indochina War[56] and the Vietnam Conflict.[citation needed]
Given that there have been several conflicts in Indochina, this particular conflict is known by the names of its primary protagonists to distinguish it from others. In Vietnamese, the war is generally known as Kháng chiến chống Mỹ (Resistance War Against America),[71] but less formally as 'Cuộc chiến tranh Mỹ' (The American War). It is also called Chiến tranh Việt Nam (The Vietnam War).[72]
The primary military organizations involved in the war were the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN) and the United States armed forces, fighting against the People's Army of Vietnam (PAVN) (commonly called the North Vietnamese Army, or NVA, in English-language sources) and the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF, more commonly known as the Viet Cong (VC) in English language sources), a South Vietnamese communist guerrilla force.[17]:xli
Daniel Ellsberg contends that U.S. participation in Vietnam had begun in 1945 when it gave support to a French effort to reconquer its colony in Vietnam, a nation which had just declared independence in August 1945.[73]
Indochina was a French colony during the 19th century. When the Japanese invaded during World War II, the Viet Minh opposed them with support from the US, the Soviet Union and China. They received some Japanese arms when Japan surrendered. The Viet Minh, a Communist-led common front under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, then initiated an insurgency against French rule. Hostilities escalated into the First Indochina War (beginning in December 1946). By the 1950s, the conflict had become entwined with the Cold War. In January 1950, China and the Soviet Union recognized the Viet Minh's Democratic Republic of Vietnam, based in Hanoi, as the legitimate government of Vietnam. The following month the United States and Great Britain recognized the French-backed State of Vietnam in Saigon, led by former Emperor Bảo Đại, as the legitimate Vietnamese government.[74]:377–9[32]:88 The outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 convinced many Washington policymakers that the war in Indochina was an example of communist expansionism directed by the Soviet Union.[32]:33–5
Military advisors from the People's Republic of China (PRC) began assisting the Viet Minh in July 1950.[62]:14 PRC weapons, expertise, and laborers transformed the Viet Minh from a guerrilla force into a regular army.[32]:26[75] In September 1950, the United States created a Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) to screen French requests for aid, advise on strategy, and train Vietnamese soldiers.[76]:18 By 1954, the United States had spent $1 billion in support of the French military effort, shouldering 80 percent of the cost of the war.[32]:35
During the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954), U.S. carriers sailed to the Gulf of Tonkin and the U.S. conducted reconnaissance flights. France and the United States also discussed the use of three tactical nuclear weapons, although reports of how seriously this was considered and by whom are vague and contradictory.[77][32]:75 According to then-Vice President Richard Nixon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up plans to use small tactical nuclear weapons to support the French.[77] Nixon, a so-called "hawk" on Vietnam, suggested that the United States might have to "put American boys in".[17]:76 President Dwight D. Eisenhower made American participation contingent on British support, but the British were opposed.[17]:76 Eisenhower, wary of involving the United States in a land war in Asia, decided against military intervention.[32]:75–6 Throughout the conflict, U.S. intelligence estimates remained sceptical of France's chance of success.[78]
On 7 May 1954, the French garrison at Dien Bien Phu surrendered. The defeat marked the end of French military involvement in Indochina. At the Geneva Conference), the French negotiated a ceasefire agreement with the Viet Minh, and independence was granted to Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.[citation needed]
At the 1954 Geneva peace conference, Vietnam was temporarily partitioned at the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh had wished to continue the war in the south, but was restrained by his Chinese allies who convinced him that he could win control by electoral means.[79][32]:87–8 Under the terms of the Geneva Accords, civilians were allowed to move freely between the two provisional states for a 300-day period. Elections throughout the country were to be held in 1956 to establish a unified government.[32]:88–90 Around one million northerners, mainly minority Catholics, fled south, fearing persecution by the communists.[32]:96[80] This followed an American psychological warfare campaign, designed by Edward Lansdale for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which exaggerated anti-Catholic sentiment among the Viet Minh and which falsely claimed the US was about to drop atomic bombs on Hanoi.[81][82][32]:96–7 The exodus was coordinated by a U.S.-funded $93 million relocation program, which included the use of the Seventh Fleet to ferry refugees.[83] The northern, mainly Catholic refugees gave the later Ngô Đình Diệm regime a strong anti-communist constituency.[84]:238 Diệm staffed his government's key posts mostly with northern and central Catholics.
In addition to the Catholics flowing south, up to 174,000 "Revolutionary Regroupees" and their 86,000 dependents went to the north for "regroupment", expecting to return to the south within two years.[67]:98 The Viet Minh left roughly 5,000 to 10,000 cadres) in the south as a base for future insurgency.[32]:104 The last French soldiers left South Vietnam in April 1956.[32]:116 The PRC completed its withdrawal from North Vietnam at around the same time.[62]:14
Between 1953 and 1956, the North Vietnamese government instituted various agrarian reforms, including "rent reduction" and "land reform", which resulted in significant political oppression. During the land reform, testimony from North Vietnamese witnesses suggested a ratio of one execution for every 160 village residents, which extrapolated resulted in an initial estimation of nearly 100,000 executions nationwide. Because the campaign was concentrated mainly in the Red River Delta area, a lower estimate of 50,000 executions became widely accepted by scholars at the time.[85]:143[86][87]:569[88] However, declassified documents from the Vietnamese and Hungarian archives indicate that the number of executions was much lower than reported at the time, although likely greater than 13,500.[89] In 1956, leaders in Hanoi admitted to "excesses" in implementing this program and restored a large amount of the land to the original owners.[32]:99–100
The south, meanwhile, constituted the State of Vietnam, with Bảo Đại as Emperor and Ngô Đình Diệm (appointed in July 1954) as his prime minister. Neither the United States government nor Ngô Đình Diệm's State of Vietnam signed anything at the 1954 Geneva Conference. With respect to the question of reunification, the non-communist Vietnamese delegation objected strenuously to any division of Vietnam, but lost out when the French accepted the proposal of Viet Minh delegate Phạm Văn Đồng,[90]:134 who proposed that Vietnam eventually be united by elections under the supervision of "local commissions".[90]:119 The United States countered with what became known as the "American Plan", with the support of South Vietnam and the United Kingdom.[90]:140 It provided for unification elections under the supervision of the United Nations, but was rejected by the Soviet delegation.[90]:140 The United States said, "With respect to the statement made by the representative of the State of Vietnam, the United States reiterates its traditional position that peoples are entitled to determine their own future and that it will not join in any arrangement which would hinder this".[90]:570–1 U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in 1954:

"I have never talked or corresponded with a person knowledgeable in Indochinese affairs who did not agree that had elections been held as of the time of the fighting, possibly eighty percent of the population would have voted for the Communist Ho Chi Minh as their leader rather than Chief of State Bảo Đại. Indeed, the lack of leadership and drive on the part of Bảo Đại was a factor in the feeling prevalent among Vietnamese that they had nothing to fight for."

According to the Pentagon Papers, however, from 1954 to 1956 "Ngô Đình Diệm really did accomplish miracles" in South Vietnam: "It is almost certain that by 1956 the proportion which might have voted for Ho—in a free election against Diệm—would have been much smaller than eighty percent."[92] In 1957, independent observers from India, Poland, and Canada representing the International Control Commission (ICC) stated that fair, unbiased elections were not possible, with the ICC reporting that neither South nor North Vietnam had honored the armistice agreement.[93]
From April to June 1955, Diệm eliminated any political opposition in the south by launching military operations against two religious groups: the Cao Đài and Hòa Hảo of Ba Cụt. The campaign also focused on the Bình Xuyên organized crime group, which was allied with members of the communist party secret police and had some military elements. As broad-based opposition to his harsh tactics mounted, Diệm increasingly sought to blame the communists.[17]:
In a referendum on the future of the State of Vietnam on 23 October 1955, Diệm rigged the poll supervised by his brother Ngô Đình Nhu and was credited with 98.2 percent of the vote, including 133% in Saigon. His American advisors had recommended a more modest winning margin of "60 to 70 percent." Diệm, however, viewed the election as a test of authority.[84]:224 Three days later, he declared South Vietnam to be an independent state under the name Republic of Vietnam (ROV), with himself as president.[32]: Likewise, Ho Chi Minh and other communist officials always won at least 99% of the vote in North Vietnamese "elections".[85]:193–94, 202–03, 215–17
The domino theory, which argued that if one country fell to communism, then all of the surrounding countries would follow, was first proposed as policy by the Eisenhower administration.[74]:19 John F. Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, said in a speech to the American Friends of Vietnam: "Burma, Thailand, India, Japan, the Philippines and obviously Laos and Cambodia are among those whose security would be threatened if the Red Tide of Communism overflowed into Vietnam."[94] The end
Read full : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exVKd-x5QVc

So... I got kinda bored these past few days and, inspired in how the amazing Steel & Thunder mod adds in a 2nd Unique Unit to each Civ, I wondered if I could come up with a 2nd Unique Structure to each Civ as well.
After doing some wiki-diving, this incredibly rough list is what I was able to scrounge up:

• America
  • Homestead - Unique Improvement
    • The Homestead Improvement would represent the massive privately-owned farming and pastoral complexes that the American Government gave away to its populace.
    • +2 Gold. +1 Food. +1 Housing. +1 Food for every 2 adjacent Farms. +1 Gold for every adjacent Plantation. +1 Production for each adjacent Pasture. Extra yields with more tech and civics. Unlocked at "The Enlightenment".
• Arabia
  • Saqiyah - Unique Improvement
    • Saqyahs were animal-powered machines that uplifted water into aqueducts to irrigate arid lands. During the Islamic Golden Age, these machines were heavily used in the Arabian lands while also being constantly improved upon.
    • For reference, they could possibly look like this.
    • It could be represented as an Improvement with some inherent Production and Food (maybe +2 Production, +1 Food, +2 extra Food when near Fresh Water) that boosts adjacent farms (+1 Food) and allows adjacent desert tiles to be farmable. It would be unlocked at the Engineering Tech and get more yields and bonuses with tech.
  • OR
  • Noria - Unique Aqueduct
    • Norias were, quite essentially, hydro-powered Saqiyahs. And just like Saqiyahs, they were heavily used throughout the Islamic world during the Islamic Golden Age.
    • Here's a reference for the Noria as well.
    • It could replace the Aqueduct allowing every desert tile in that city to be farmable while giving some small food bonuses either to adjacent farms or to the District itself.
• Australia
  • CSIRO - Unique Research Lab
    • A federally funded research institute, the "Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation" has been heavily involved in major scientific and technological breakthroughs for more than a century.
    • Compared to the normal Research Lab it could grant: 2 extra Science, 1 extra Citizen Slot, and 2 extra Science Yields per Citizen working there or something akin to that.
• Aztecs
  • Chinampa- Unique Improvement
    • Chinampa was the Nahuan name given to their famous "floating gardens". They were essentially artificial farmable isles built on and around lakes.
    • This Improvement is actually already part of the incredible Aztec Rework mod by Leugi.
    • Akin to the mod's version it would get: +1 Food. +0.5 Housing. +1 Food from every adjacent Chinampa. +1 Food to every adjacent Farm. +1 Food from 2 adjacent Farms, +1 Faith if on a Lake Tile. Extra yields with more tech and civics. Can be built Coastal Tiles near 2 Grass, Plains, or Desert Tiles. Unlocked at "Engineering".
• Brazil
  • Brazilwood Camp - Unique Improvement
    • Brazilwood was a highly valued commodity due to it's multiple and rare properties. Its use as a component of red dye, velvet, high-end furniture, and musical instruments made the Portuguese incredibly rich during the Renaissance Period.
    • +2 Gold. +2 Culture. +0.5 Housing. Extra Yields with more tech and civics. Gives minor adjacency bonus to the Theater Square and the Industrial Center. Can only be built on Rainforests (maybe also on Woods). Unlocked at "Bronze Working".
• Canada
  • Hudson's Bay Company - Unique Bank
    • Founded in the 17th Century as a Fur Trading company, it worked for almost 200 years as the de facto government of the land surrounding the Hudson's Bay before selling the land to the Canadian Government in the 19th Century.
    • Compared to the normal Bank, the Hudson's Bay Company could give an extra minor Gold bonus (+1 or +2 at the most) to Tundra, Snow, and Woods tiles. In the case of a Forested Tundra tile, the bonus could stack.
• China
  • Exanimation Hall - Unique Library
    • Imperial China was famous for its meritocracy. Even as early as the Tang dynasty has the Empire used exams to appoint various governmental posts and civil servant jobs instead of just choosing people based on their social status and wealth.
    • Compared to the Library, the Exanimation Hall could grant Culture equivalent to the Campus adjacency bonuses.
  • OR
  • Tributaries' Embassy - Unique Consulate
    • Due to Imperial China's predominant power in East Asia, a network of international relations, focused on tribute gifting and acknowledging China's superiority, was organically established in order to both appease China and to access the much-coveted Chinese trade goods.
    • This Tributary System still sorta exists today, as both private companies and many nations throughout the world do their best to appease the CCP in order to either get a foot into the Chinese markets or to obtain Chinese investment.
    • Compared to the Consulate, it would also grant +1 Diplomatic Favour per City-State China is Suzerain of and +1 of the corresponding yield from each City-State it is Suzerain of.
• Cree
  • Sabtuan - Unique Market
    • The Cree term for "Longhouse". Semi-permanent residential dwellings, built to house multiple families and hold meetings.
    • It also feels like a pretty apt Unique Structure to add since the Haudenosaunee have close to no chance of being part of the New Frontier Pass, and as such, have unfortunately little chance of appearing officially in Civ 6.
    • Compared to the Market, the Sabtuan could give some extra trade bonuses. Like giving the city it is built upon a Trading Post if it doesn't have one already, doubling the Trading Post bonus for passing trade routes and granting all trade routes passing or ending in the City it is built upon an extra bonus of +4 Gold (both International and Domestic).
• Egypt
  • Nilometer- Unique Water Mill
    • A structure to study the Nile's water quality and level during the Flooding Seasons. It was essentially a column submerged in the river with various indentations to mark the depth of the waters.
    • This Structure is actually already in the game's "Gifts of the Nile" Scenario, and it would work in similar ways.
    • Unlike the Water Mill, it would be unlocked at "Irrigation" and grant: +1 Food, +1 Production, +1 Science, +1 Food and Production to Floodplains.
• England
  • Recording Studio - Unique Broadcast Center
    • This Recording Studio is meant to represent the explosion in popularity of British music through the 60s and 70s, thanks to bands like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Queen, David Bowie and of course the Beatles.
    • Compared to the Broadcast Center, the Recording Studio would grant +6 Culture when Powered, double the normal Great Musician points (+4), double the Great Work of Music Slots (+2), and grant Rock Bands the special promotion "British Invasion", making it perform everywhere as if 1 level higher than it actually is.
• Ethiopia
  • Hawelti - Unique Improvement
    • During the Classical Era, various Aksumite kings, inspired by the Nubians and Egyptians of old, raised their own funerary Obelisks, known as "Hawelti".
    • This Improvement is already present in the amazing Sukritact's Ezana mod.
    • Akin to Sukritact's mod, the Hawelti would be limited to one per city, giving Faith based on the tile's Appeal (+1,+2,+4) and boosting trade routes from the city by either +1, +2, or +4 Culture, depending on the tile's Appeal. Unlocked at "Mysticism".
• France
  • Grand École - Unique Military Academy
    • A French institution of higher education, separate from its public university system. Inspired by its own military colleges, they were first founded around the 17th century, after the French Revolution, with entries based on merit to open up higher education to the masses.
    • Compared to the Military Academy the Grand École also gives +3 Science and a bonus of +2 of the appropriate yield from adjacent districts.
• Georgia
  • Svan Towers - Unique Improvement
    • Defensive Tower Houses, of around 20ish meter of height, built in the Svaneti region of Georgia. They were usually built as complexes of multiple Tower Houses united by wooden bridges.
    • This Improvement would essentially work as a quasi-fort with inherent production, housing, and defense. It could give extra yield bonuses from being built upon hills and from being adjacent to mountains while being unlocked at "Defensive Tactics".
• Germany
  • Ordensburg - Unique Armory
    • Fortresses built by the Germanic Holy Orders during the middle ages to both house the invading knights and to aid in their colonization of the Baltics.
    • Compared to the Armory, the Ordensburg could give some extra +2 Housing, +2 Faith, +2 Religious Pressure, and maybe grant a Faith boost equal to 20% of the Production cost of non-civilian units whenever they are produced.
• Gran Colombia
  • Paisa Town) - Unique Commercial Hub
    • The Paisa region of Colombia is famous both due to its residents' unique culture and due to producing some of the most famous coffee blends in the world.
    • This District is present in Leugi's original Colombia mod.
    • The Paisa Town could synergize with Gran Colombia's unique Improvement, the Hacienda/Finca, by having a Minor Adjacency Bonus to both Hacienda/Fincas and Plantations. It could also create a copy of whatever luxury good is being worked in adjacent Plantations.
• Greece
  • Agora - Unique Market
    • Literally meaning "Gathering Place" in Greek, the Agoras served both as commercial centers and as social spaces where political, artistic, and military matters could be performed and discussed freely.
    • The Agora could grant extra bonuses to trade routes to City-States. The first trade route to a City-State from one of Greece's cities with an Agora could grant it an extra Envoy and trade routes to City-States from cities with an Agora could have extra yields, be it extra Gold, Culture or extra Yields corresponding to the City State type.
• Hungary
  • Végvár - Unique Fort
    • The Végvár were a series of border castles built in the southern Hungarian border during the 15th Century with the simple purpose of stopping Turkish aggression. Not many of these border castles still stand today however as they were either dismantled or destroyed through the 18th century.
    • These special Forts should be able to be built by workers and unlocked with the "Castles" tech. They could grant more defense than a normal Fort, plus some extra faith and maybe some adjacency bonuses to Farms and whatnot.
• Inca
  • Qhapaq Ñan - Unique Mountain Tunnel
    • While it is currently Pachacuti's Unique Improvement, the Incan Royal Road could be the perfect 2nd Unique Structure with just a few additions.
    • The new Qhapaq Ñan could, for example, grant the Mountain Tile it is built upon +1 Gold and extra Gold depending on the number of trade routes that pass through it... maybe +1 Gold per Trade Route or something like that. Plus it could get some more yields with more techs and civics.
• India
  • Mandir - Unique Temple
    • "Mandir" is the Hindi word used to reference Hindu Temples and is commonly used when referencing said Temples within India itself.
    • The Mandir could simply be represented in-game with a Gopuram model. The side Gopuram of the Meenakshi Temple Wonder would probably be a good fit.
    • The Mandir could grant more faith than normal temples and buff up Gurus by allowing them to spread India's faith whenever they heal a friendly unit and by healing one extra time.
• Indonesia
  • Candi - Unique Temple
    • "Candi" is the name given to the Hindu Temples built throughout Indonesia up until the end of the Majapahit Empire.
    • Within the game, the Candi could look like the famous Bajang Ratu, the Wringin Lawang, or any other Eastern Java Style Candis.
    • The Candi could grant an extra an inherent +2 Culture and grant +2 Faith (and maybe +1 Culture as well) to each Luxury Resource Tile being worked in the city.
• Japan
  • Kabuki Theater - Unique Tier 2 Theater Square Building / Concert Hall
    • Kabuki theatre is an ultra-stylized avant-garde and male-exclusive form of Japanese Theater that was established in the XVIIth century and popularized in the XVIIIth.
    • If you have infixo's Real Great Musician mod enabled (and you SHOULD) then the Kabuki Theater would replace the Concert Hall.
    • While not a Kabuki Theater per se, the great JNR's Dojo mod's model of said Dojo would be perfect to represent it.
    • The Kabuki Theater would grant +2 Culture, +1 Citizen Slot, +1 Great Writer Point, +1 Great Musician Point, +1 Slot to Great Works of Writing, +3 Slots to Great Works of Music, +1 Gold to all Great Works in the City.
• Khmer
  • Baray - Unique Aqueduct
    • Barays were artificial bodies of water commonly associated with the Khmer Empire.
    • The Baray is part of the great Sukritact's Khmer Rework and would work pretty much the same: +2 Housing and +2 Amenities. +1 Housing from adjacent Farms and Wonders. Adjacent Farms receive an additional +2 Food, +1 Faith. Prevents Food loss during Drought. Cannot be built on Hills. Military Engineers can spend a charge to complete 20% of a Baray’s production.
• Korea
  • Chaebol - Unique Stock Exchange
    • As giant industrial conglomerates controlled and owned by a single family, the South-Korean Chaebols are the result of a massive industrialization push, foreign investment, and major amounts of state guidance. Right now most of the richest and famous South-Korean brands are part of a Chaebol, with the three most famous being Hyundai, Samsung, and LG.
    • The Chaebol would grant extra +2 Production (+4 if Powered) and +1 Science to Korea for each Foreign International Trade Route either ending or passing through the City.
• Kongo
  • Raffia Mill - Unique Workshop
    • The Kongo Kingdom was famous for its use of Raffia filaments in its iconic luxury textile items. In-game you can see some of these Raffia textiles adorning Mvemba a Nzinga.
    • The Raffia Mill could, for instance, add in 1 Production to the city's Woods and Rainforests and an extra +1 Gold to Resources in Woods and Rainforests.
• Macedon
  • Heroon - Unique Shrine
    • Heroa were Hellenic shrines dedicated to worship fallen Heroes. Not only were there various Heroa built to worship Alexander's Argead dynasty throughout Macedon, but Alexander himself claimed to be a living god and was worshipped as such. After Alexander's death, Ptolemy founded the Imperial Cult of Alexander, placing him at the same level as the Olympian Gods.
    • The Heroon could grant extra +1 Great General Points, some extra Loyalty (+2 or something), and allow the city to buy melee units, ranged units, and Hetairoi with Faith.
• Mali
  • Mudbrickyard - Unique Workshop
    • Mudbricks have been used throughout various arid regions of the world, where timber is rather scarce, since the Bronze Age. The Mali empire possessed its own type of Mudbrick known as "Banco", which was famously used to build the Great Mosque of Djenné, the largest mudbrick structure in the world.
    • The Mudbrickyard could simply grant extra +2 Production and +1 Production to the City's Desert Tiles.
• Maori
  • Pā - Unique Fort
    • Pā were essentially stratified hillforts, built by the Maori with palisades atop defensive terraces.
    • The current in-game Pā is a unique improvement only built by the Toa unit that works as a normal Fort with extra healing properties that can only be built on hills.
    • The new Pā would be buildable by both the Toa and by Military Engineers. It would still require a hill to be built upon while granting the defensive bonuses of the Fort and it's extra healing properties, without sacrificing tile yields. It could also grant a small bonus yield of Food to represent the plantations within said Pā, plus some more yields with more tech and civics. It would be unlocked alongside the Toa with the "Construction" tech.
• Mapuche
  • Silversmithy - Unique Workshop
    • Mapuche culture is famous for its silverwork. Since the time that European Settlers brought metallurgy to the New World, the Mapuche have developed their own unique style os silversmithing. They produced a huge amount of silverware goods up until the XIXth century when Argentina and Chile mass murdered the Mapuche people and expelled the survivors from their homeland.
    • The Silversmithy could grant extra +2 Culture, +1 Gold to Mines, and a stackable extra +2 (maybe +3) Culture to Mines with Luxury Resources.
• Maya
  • K'uh-Nah - Unique Improvement
    • Literally meaning "Divine House" in Mayan, the K'uh-Nah were the now-famous Mayan temple-pyramids, which are unique in Mesoamerica due to their reliefs of mixed astronomical and mythological events.
    • The K'uh-Nah could be an improvement that grants +1 Science, +1 Faith, +1 Faith if built on a Hill, +1 Science per 2 Adjacent Rainforests, +1 Faith per 2 Adjacent Woods, needs to be built on a Rainforest or Woods Tile, cannot be built adjacent to another K'uh-Nah. Gains more yields with Tech (+1 Science at Mathematics and whatnot) and is unlocked with the "Astrology" Tech.
• Mongolia
  • Ger- Unique Improvement
    • The Mongol word for "Yurt". They were round skin-covered tents and the main dwellings of the Steppe Nomads.
    • The Ger would represent the vast steppe herds and be an improvement that grants +1 Production, +1 Food, +1 Culture, +1 Food to adjacent non-forested, unimproved Grassland or Plains Tile, +1 Production per adjacent Pasturable Resource (+2 if they are Horses), needs to be built upon a non-forested, non-hilly Plains or Grassland Tile without access to Fresh Water and not adjacent to other Gers. Gains more yields with Tech and Civics (especially more yields to the bonus given to adjacent empty tiles) and is unlocked with the "Horseback Riding" tech.
• Netherlands
  • Waag- Unique Bank
    • Waags were specialized public buildings where goods would be weighed and taxed. They were rather common through the Netherlands and Northern Germany before international weight standards were established.
    • The Waag could grant some extra bonuses to Trade Routes starting in the City with the Waag, based on the resources of the destined City, such as +1 or +2 Production per Strategic Resource and +2 or +3 Gold per Luxury Resource. Plus it could boost International Trade Routes to a city with a Waag by +2 Gold and +1 Production or something like that.
• Norway
  • Hǫfn - Unique Harbor
    • The Old Norse word for Harbor or Haven. These Hafnar would represent the many trade ports established by Norse traders throughout the North Sea, Baltic Sea, and Russian rivers.
    • Aesthetically, the hǫfn would look like a normal Harbor with some extra Norse boathouses (also known as naust), and some Norse round shields spread through its pier. Its Icon could simply be the Lögr rune.
    • These Hafnar could grant their city an automatic Trading Post, increase the yields of trade routes that pass through their city (extra gold or something), and grant a 25% Production discount for Naval Melee and Naval Raider Units.
• Nubia
  • Sim-Mk - Unique Holy Site
    • Directly translated from Meroitic meaning "House of God", "Sim-Mk" was the most common term used by the Kushites when mentioning their Temple Complexes in their hieroglyphs. The more common Egyptian term "Hwt-Ntr" (also meaning "House of God") is also found in some Kushite religious complexes that were originally built by Egyptian dynasties.
    • This Unique Holy Site already sort of exists in the "Gifts of the Nile" Scenario and in the p0nkiel's "Precinct of Amun-Ra" mod.
    • Akin to the "Precinct of Amun-Ra" mod, the "Sim-Mk" would grant an extra +1 Faith to Marshes, Oasis, and Floodplains while having extra Major adjacency bonuses from Oasis and extra Standard adjacency bonuses from Floodplains.
• Ottomans
  • Siege Foundry - Unique Armory
    • The Ottomans were famous for the development of revolutionary artillery pieces from the mid-XVth century to the XVIIth century, like the famous Great Turkish Bombard, the Darbzen, and the Abus Gun. The "Siege Foundry" aims to represent their achievement in this specific camp.
    • The Siege Foundry would essentially take on the properties of the Ottoman's UA (which would need to be slightly changed) and give a 50% Production discount to Siege Units produced in the city while granting these Siege Units an extra +5 Combat Strength.
• Persia
  • Satrap's Court - Unique District
    • Satraps were, quite simply, the governors of massive provinces within the Zoroastrian Persian Empires, which was also adopted by Alexander's short-lived Empire and by the Seleucid Empire. These Satraps were chosen by the Shah and held high levels of autonomy within their Satrapy, being reigned in only by the checks and balances imposed upon them by a group of royal emissaries that made periodic reports to the Shah.
    • This Unique District is pretty much directly taken from the incredible p0kiehl's Satrap's Court mod.
    • Akin to the mod, the Satrap's Court grants the same yields as a City Center if the city has 100% Loyalty, plus some extra Loyalty (+2 or something), some extra yields to foreign trade routes passing through the city, and it cannot be built near the City Center.
• Phoenicia
  • Tophet - Unique Shrine
    • Tophets were sacrificial precincts and burial grounds present in all the Phoenician cities and colonies. The word itself originates from a reference in the Bible of a place where Phoenician would sacrifice their children to the gods Baal and Tanit. Although the child sacrifice itself is disputed, as the child corpses found within these Tophets all show signs of dying by natural causes, the religious and cultural importance of the Tophets themselves remains.
    • Visually, the Tophet could simply look like a simple stele with the symbol of Tanit engraved upon it, surrounded by pottery and whatnot.
    • This Tophet could simply grant some extra culture (+1 or +2) and some boosts of Culture each time a unit or building is bought in the city (maybe 10% or 20% of the unit or building cost).
• Poland
  • Barbakan - Unique Armory
    • Barbicans, or Barbakans in Polish, were round defensive fortifications that preceded the entrance of castles and cities in order to fortify their gates. They were rather popular in Poland from the XIVth century to the XVIIth century.
    • The Barbakan, besides the normal Armory bonuses, would grant extra 2 Culture, extra Defense to the Encampment (maybe extra 50 Health and +2 Combat Strength) and some extra 25% combat experience to heavy and light cavalry units (stackable with the Stables bonus) to represent the Polish focus on Cavalry through the Early Modern Era.
• Rome
  • Castra - Unique Fort
    • Castrum were standardized fortified military towns designed to house, protect, and field a Roman Legion. They were always rectangular, with a gate in each wall, a forum-like administrative center, a manor for the Legion's Legate, proper houses for the Tribunes (officials), a hospital, a massive bathing complex, multiple workshop complexes, and enough barracks to field up to six thousand Legionaries.
    • The Roman Castra already has a unique model present in JNR's Castrum mod.
    • The Castra would be buildable by both the Legion unit and Military Engineers. It would have all of the Fort's defense bonuses and extra +1 Housing, +1 Production, +1 Culture, and some more yields with extra Tech. It would be unlocked either alongside the Legion unit at "Iron Working" or at "Construction".
• Russia
  • Ostrog) - Unique Encampment
    • Ostrogs were fortified Russian settlements surrounded by wooden palisades. They were used from the Medieval Age to the Colonization of Siberia in the XVIIth Century. Later, in the XVIIth and XIXth Centuries, they were used as prison camps.
    • The silhouette of the Ostrog tower could be used as the District's Icon with good effect.
    • The Ostrog, besides the usual Encampment bonuses, could grant extra Housing (+1 or +2), extra +1 Production or Gold per Tundra Tiles adjacent to it (to represent the labor-intensive conditions of the Ostrog settlements and the Yasak tribute system), and maybe even deal constant damage to all adjacent Enemy Units.
• Scotland
  • Oilthigh - Unique University
    • Oilthighean, Scottish for Education Houses or Universities, are meant to represent the medieval and early renaissance Universities of Scotland (which were the majority of high education sites in Britain, and especially in Scotland, for a good long time).
    • The Oilthigh could have extra + 1 Citizen Slot, +2 Science, +1 Great Scientist Point, and maybe some extra Science to Trade Routes passing by the city with the Oilthigh... a tad boring bonuses but I can't think of anything unique for them.
• Scythia
  • Skulatae Stable - Unique Stable
    • "Skula" is a derivation of the proto-Scythian word "Skutha", meaning "archer", and, according to Herodotus, was what the Scythian Royalty (not to be confused with the "Royal Scythian" tribe known as the Paralaetae) self-designated as. Another origin of the title is proposed by Herodotus as it being a derivation of the legendary Scythian king Scules' name.
    • Scythians were incredible horse breeders and one of the first documented people to have created a truly effective cavalry unit. This Unique Building would serve as a representation of their equestrian achievements.
    • The Skulatae Stable could grant extra +2 Faith and a 20% discount for Light and Heavy Cavalry Unit Production.
• Spain
  • Lonja - Unique Bank
    • Lonjas, also known as "Casas de Contratación", were Spanish establishments used as mercantile meeting houses that controlled trade deals, migration to Spanish Colonies, and expeditions to America. The most famous of these Lonjas was, of course, the "Casa Lonja" of Seville, which is represented in-game as the "Casa de Contratación" Wonder.
    • Aside from the normal bonuses from a Bank, the Lonja could grant: a bit more Gold (+2 or +3), an extra bonus to intercontinental Trade Routes, be them domestic or international, that either start or end in the city (maybe some extra Gold and Faith), and extra +1 Great Merchant Points if it's on the Spanish Home Continent.
• Sumer
  • É) - Unique Shrine/Holy Site
    • 'É' is simply the Sumerian word for Temple. This Structure would overlap with the already existing "Ziggurat" Improvement, but the Sumerian Temple Complexes truly are their most unique architectural achievement.
    • In-game the 'É' could either be represented as a Shrine replacement using the temple present in the top of the Ziggurat Improvement with some minor changes or it could fully replace the Holy Site with the aforementioned Ziggurat temple placed in the empty quadrant and maybe even a small elevated platform below the district itself.
    • If it replaced the Shrine then it would grant extra +1 Great Scientist Points and either +1 Science or Faith per Ziggurat in the city.
    • If it replaced the Holy Site then it would have an extra Standard Adjacency for Rivers and Ziggurats, +1 Great Scientist Points, and extra +2 Science to Citizen Yields working there.
• Sweden
  • Royal Academy - Unique University
    • The Swedish Royal Academies are independent institutions founded by Royal Charters since the XVIIIth century. They are famous for being the Prize Awarders of the Nobel Prizes in Chemistry, Physics, Economic Sciences, and Literature.
    • The Royal Academy is already present in Merrick's Sweden mod, represented by a tweaked "Military Academy" model.
    • The Royal Academy could have bonuses akin to the aforementioned mod: Extra +1 Great Scientist, Engineer, Merchant, Writer, Artist, and Musician points.
• Zulu
  • Iziko - Unique Amphitheater
    • "Iziko" means hearth in the Zunda languages (Zulu, Xhosa, and the like). It is meant to represent the gathering places where the Zulu people would bond and perform their oral traditions, such as isicathamiya music or izibongo poems.
    • In-game this "Iziko" could use the fireplace (and maybe some iqukwane huts) from the Ikanda Unique District as it's model.
    • The Iziko could take some notes from the Marae building and, instead of the normal Amphitheater bonuses, could grant a boost of Culture and Faith equal to 20% of a Unit's Production cost whenever one is produced in the city.

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And since I am just that bored here are some possible Unique Structures for the unannounced Civs I believe will be in the Pass:

• Portugal
  • Feitoria#Portuguesefeitorias(c._1445)) - Unique Improvement
    • This is the obvious candidate for Portugal's Unique Structure, so I will refrain from detailing it, but it will most likely be an improvement built near Harbors that boost production and trade.
  • Pombaline District - Unique Neighborhood
    • After the Earthquake of 1755 that completely destroyed Lisbon, the Portuguese Prime-Minister and Marquis of Pombal, Sebastião de Melo together with the Royal Engineer Manuel de Maia designed an entirely new city layout with wide, straight, orderly streets and seismically resistant buildings. As of today, Lisbon's Pombaline Downtown is one of the most popular touristic attractions of the capital.
    • Grants +2 Science and +2 Gold. Housing and Tourism based on appeal (+2 to +6 for Housing and +0 to +4 for Tourism). Is impervious to all Natural Disasters except Flooding and Comets. Unlocked at Civil Engineering.
• Ireland
  • Abbey - Unique Holy Site
    • Ireland became known as the "Land of Saints and Scholars" due to the incredibly high number of local Irish Saints and religious edifices like monasteries, abbeys, and churches built in between the VIth and XIX century, which this "Abbey" would attempt to represent.
    • The Abbey is present in EnigmaConumdrum's Ireland mod, though I do feel that it could use some tall Cloigthithe and a small stone wall around the District to sell the look.
    • Akin to the mod above, the Abbey would grant +1 Great Work of Writing Slot to all its buildings, +2 Faith to all Works of Art, Writing, and Music in the city, and it can attack and defend like an Encampment.
  • Ceíli Hall - Unique Amphitheater
    • Ceíli in Irish or Cèilidh in Scottish, are traditional Gaelic gatherings popular during the Classical and Medieval Era that reemerged in the XIXth century when Ireland tried to regain it's own cultural identity after it's independence.
    • The Ceíli Hall could focus on representing the bardic Filí and grant some extra Culture and extra Great Writer and Musician Points
• Mughals
  • Qila - Unique Renaissance Walls?
    • If the Mughals are indeed chosen (which I know it's the Civ least likely to be picked from these five, but let's go with it), then the Mughal Forts are probably gonna be picked as their Unique Structure.
    • They could either be an Unique Encampment, Fort/Improvement or Renaissance Walls. I am not sure which one they would pick...
  • Bageecha - Unique Improvement
    • The Mughals were heavily inspired by Iranian customs. They replicated their unique Friday Mosques, their Tombs and their Gardens. The Bageecha are essentially Mughal Paradise Gardens.
    • I could see it being represented in-game by a tweaked Persian Pairidaeza with a bigger focus on waterways and a Mughal Tomb instead of the palace.
• Vietnam (already leaked)
  • Water Puppet Theater - Unique Tier 2 Theater Square Building / Concert Hall
    • The Water Puppet Theater will probably be the pick for the already leaked Vietnam, though I am not quite sure how they will represent it.
    • I would personally do something akin to the Kabuki Theater mentioned above with some different bonuses, but I can see it being an Improvement, an Amphitheater replacement or even a Unique Theater Square Replacement that need to be placed near water.
  • Temple of Literature / Imperial Academy - Unique University
    • The Temple of Literature of Hanoi housed the first Vietnamese University that replicated the Chinese institutions of high learning.
    • This building could fit various niches, depending on what Vietnam ends up focusing in. It could be focused on Faith/Science, Tourism/Science, Amenities/Science, Great Scientist Points, High Citizen Yields, etc, etc.
• Babylon
  • Astrology House - Unique Shrine
    • Taken straight up from Humankind's Babylon, the Astrology house is meant to represent the Babylonian achievements in Astronomy thanks to their religion's astrological focus.
    • The Astrology House would essencially be a Science focused Shrine, that grants extra Great Scientist Points and decent Science yields.
  • Babylonian Walls - Unique Ancient Walls
    • The most likely pick for the Babylonian Unique Structure. Not much needs to be said about the Walls of Babylon. They were a massive and wondrous work of Bronze Age Masonry and it's Ishtar Gates were considered a Wonder just by themselves.
    • The Babylonian Walls will probably be stronger than normal Ancient Walls and make Battering Rams innefective.

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And that's it! Those are all of my ideas for a "2nd Unique Structures" mod/addition/whatever.
I know it's a prety imbalanced list and it will probably never see the light of day, but it was pretty fun to brainstorm it!