Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam (review)

In 1962, French president Charles de Gaulle famously warned John F. Kennedy that America would "step by step, be sucked into a bottomless military and political quagmire" in Vietnam. De Gaulle's advice came too late to be heeded. As Mark Atwood Lawrence shows, the decisive period for America's eventual commitment of troops to Vietnam was already long past. It was, he argues, in the final years of and those immediately following the Second World War that the efforts of the French, British, and United States governments combined to construct the political, military and strategic foundations on which America's road to Vietnam would be built. "To understand America's war in Vietnam," Lawrence stresses, "one must reckon seriously with the years before 1950," for it was in that short period that America's longest war had its origins (p. 3).

This early period has not, traditionally, figured highly either in public understanding or even historical analysis of the Vietnam War. Lawrence's main purpose in this rigorously researched and carefully argued study is to correct this misapprehension not just of when America began her fateful journey to Vietnam but of how and why she ended up there. Utilising British, French, and American diplomatic, military, and political records between the final years of the Second World War and 1950, Lawrence offers a broad-based and genuinely original analysis both of the role of foreign policy within and foreign pressure on America in this period. The decision to go to Vietnam, Lawrence stresses, was not America's alone, but arose out of "a complicated transnational deliberation over the destiny of Indochina" (p. 6). In placing the United States's actions within the broader context of European involvement in Indochina, Lawrence argues that he is doing more than offering three perspectives in place of the traditional one. It is only in the interaction between the three post-war powers, he suggests, that we can fully understand "why Western policymakers extended assumptions and policies developed in the European theater to parts of the world where social and political tensions emerged from a different set of causes" (p. 11).

Lawrence identifies 1946 as a turning-point of sorts, when American suspicion of the Soviet Union's expansionist ambitions prompted Truman to declare, in January, that unless the Soviet threat was firmly met, another war seemed likely. "Under these circumstances," Lawrence observes, "it is hardly surprising that Americans would overgeneralize their fears and see dangers even in remote places like Indochina" (p. 100). Still, America saw little reason to leap off the fence on the French side, even when Vietnamese attacks on French strongholds in Hanoi and in the Red River delta in December marked the outbreak of open warfare in Indochina. Only the combination of insurgencies in Burma and Malaya and the communist advance in China in 1948–49 tipped the balance in Washington toward support of the French in Indochina. With the formal declaration of American aid to the French in May 1950, Vietnam "had become a Cold War battleground, with horrendous consequences for all concerned" (p. 235).

This study of the diplomatic "back story" of America's road to Vietnam succeeds very well in tracing the confused, confusing, and frequently tortuous route that the Western powers took in attempting to find a "solution" to the problems of Indochina. Although Lawrence highlights the persistent attempts on the part of the British to "convince American leaders to play the role written for them in London," he does not underestimate the role taken by conservative, hawkish elements in the U.S. itself to meet the French and British half-way, and in time to assume the burden as the European powers gradually faded from the scene and, largely, from popular memory (p. 213). By 1950, America was already on the edge of the bottomless quagmire that was Vietnam in...