Why a world without the Vietnam War is not one counterfactual

Would a world without the Vietnam War be virtually unrecognizable today?

It depends entirely on why the war does not happen and which later developments are caused by that change.

The panel refuses to treat the absence of the Vietnam War as a single clean historical switch. A scenario in which intervention never begins differs from one in which the underlying regional conflict, Cold War rivalry, or American political choices change earlier. Many features of the modern United States developed after the war and may not disappear merely because the conflict does. A useful counterfactual must therefore identify the altered cause and trace which benefits, problems, and institutional responses follow from it. Without that mechanism, saying the world becomes unrecognizable is too broad to test.