It was all the Democrats cutting off the money. Check me out. We had it won and done. It was a human disaster to erase a victory caused by a defending of the South. The defunding followed Nixon’s departing office over nothing
I followed Vietnam since 1962. Wish I’d never heard of the place.
The Peace Treaty designed by Kissinger and Nixon was part of the Vietnamization of the war. To extricate our combat troops from a war that our political leadership had no intention of winning, going all the way back to the “strategy” designed by Robert McNamara, William Bundy and John McNaughton.
Hanoi was biding their time waiting for us to quit the field. Cutting off Saigon made the process much faster for the Communists, but the defeat of South Vietnam was baked into the cake at the point when we refused to treat Hanoi like we had Berlin and Tokyo. And that decision was made in 1964.