North Vietnam's General Giap, the mastermind of both Tet and Dien Bien Phu (where he decisively defeated the French army in 1954), was one of the greatest military strategists of all time. For Tet he counted on the American generals being on the lookout for a repetition of the former battle: that was the purpose of the "escalating conflicts in the sparsely populated highlands region." (Regarding the biggest of those conflicts, at Khe Sanh, President Johnson famously said he wasn't going to preside over "another Denbenphu.") For Giap, Tet was a military defeat in a war that was a contest of power between ideologies: in that sense, a tactical defeat but a strategic victory.