This is from his memoirs:
“What we still don’t understand is why you Americans stopped the bombing of Hanoi. You had us on the ropes. If you had pressed us a little harder, just for another day or two, we were ready to surrender! It was the same at the battles of TET. You defeated us! We knew it, and we thought you knew it.
But we were elated to notice your media was definitely helping us. They were causing more disruption in America than we could in the battlefields. We were ready to surrender. You had won!”
So from his own words, Giap actually WAS going to surrender. It was Walter Cronkite who convinced him to continue fighting. And while North Vietnam WASN’T occupied by us by any stretch, it WAS fighting us. Cold War paradigm, after all. And yes, it WAS in danger of losing the war regarding territory, especially when the North Vietnamese were communists and wanted a Communist South Vietnam.
You can also find it here: https://americanranger.blogspot.com/2008/04/north-vietnamese-general-giap-admits.html
I understand what you’ve posted; the best we could hope for (with a North Vietnamese “surrender”) was that South Vietnam would have to deal with its own communist problem instead of dealing with North Vietnamese interference as well.