I came across a wiki article on something I didn’t know about previously, the Anglo-Irish Trade War which ended with amongst other things, a payment of £10m from Ireland to the UK. It reminded me of a documentary on the Vietnam War where, IIRC, Vietnam had to make another multi-million payout to the winners.
Have any other wars ended like this, where the winners end up the losers, or paying a high price through financial measures beneficial to the loser. I don’t mean cases where debts are written off as happened with Germany post-WWI or US aid to ex-Axis countries through the Marshall Plan.
I’m afraid the question is unclear in the context of your examples:
Why would you say that Ireland “won that war”? It doesn’t sound like there was a shooting war at all. It sounds like they made a payment to resolve a trade dispute.
Didn’t Vietnam (North Vietnam, anyway) win the Vietnam War? Do you mean that they made a payment to the losers–either South Vietnam (which ceased to exist) or the United States? Why would they?
In any case, the United States defeated Mexico in the Mexican War, and then paid $15 million to Mexico in compensation for the territory ceded via the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
:smack: Isn’t it, I meant to say that the trade war made me think indirectly of the Vietnam war where, indeed, the North won. I was fairly sure that the documentary stated that the North made a pay out to the US and then saw its economy grow with US companies taking over Vietnamese ones. It was during an anniversary of the war of some sort, sort of showing how it was something of a phyrric victory.
It appears you’re correct about Vietnam: As part of the 1995 normalization of relations (pdf) between Vietnam and the United States,
The payment wasn’t for the war per se but for American property nationalized by the state after the Communists took over the South. I remember China having to make a similar payment when we normalized relations in 1979.
Along these lines, it might be noted that the United States fought a long series of wars against American Indians, the purpose of which was to force the Indians to cede their land in return for token annuities. So in almost every such case, the war was followed by payment (albeit small and inadequate) from the victors to the vanquished.
And if you think about it, such payments are an interesting psychological trick. When the loser of the war accepts they payments, they implicitly accept their own defeat, and the justice of the peace settlement. If the loser has to pay the winner, they know that they’ve been mugged. If the loser gets money from the winner then they become accomplices.