Like Vietnam. I served during that war, and towards the end, we all had questions. They really didn’t want to win, but we saved a lot of French rubber trees...
“They really didn’t want to win”
I suspect that Washington was getting some pretty nasty threats from China and/or Russia and was stuck not wanting a rerun of the Korean War, where we sat on China’s border only to get rammed in the middle of winter.
So the goal was to leave and let South Vietnam try to fight it alone - but Watergate empowered the Democrats to pull the rug from South Vietnam and let their Commie friends in the North win.
But, in hindsight, we got millions of PRODUCTIVE refugees thanks to that policy, far better than virtually all immigrants from the Western Hemisphere.