The Search for Peace in Vietnam 1964-1968 (review)

The Vietnam War was a tragedy of epic proportions for both the United States and the two Vietnams, but was it a tragedy rooted in missed opportunities for peace and a negotiated settlement? Robert McNamara has argued in recent years that the Vietnam War was a tragedy for precisely this reason, but this excellent collection of essays definitively refutes that misconception about the war. Although the Johnson administration and the North Vietnamese regime could surely have done many things to improve the prospects for peace, this volume contains barely a single essay that provides strong support for the idea that the 1964–1968 period was filled with missed opportunities for peace. Both the United States and North Vietnam consistently put forth peace terms that amounted to little more than capitulation for the other side. A few countries worked hard to advance the diplomatic process of negotiations during these years, but they received scant support from the two combatants. The major Communist powers also did little to bring about a quick end to the Vietnam War. As Ilya Gaiduk shows in his essay, the Soviet Union backed the efforts of other states to get negotiations started but was generally unwilling to play a leading role in bringing the two sides to the table. The Chinese stance on the war, as Qiang Zhai demonstrates, was completely antithetical to the achievement of a negotiated settlement. A protracted conflict in Vietnam was exactly what Mao Zedong wanted, and he did his best to ensure that efforts by France to resolve the conflict would fail.

Like many edited volumes, The Search for Peace in Vietnam would have benefited from more dialogue and debate among the contributors. For example, Edwin Moise in his fine essay about the illusion of a diplomatic settlement to the Vietnam War argues quite persuasively that "there had never been any possibility—and please note that I am saying absolutely no possibly whatever—of a genuine compromise settlement. And where no genuine compromise is possible, diplomacy is very difficult" (p. 73). Implicitly or explicitly, some of the other contributors to this volume would take issue with the emphatic nature of Moise's conclusion. To be sure, a wealth of archival material is available on the various peace initiatives and back-channel negotiations during the Vietnam War, but a few essays in the volume tend to focus on the documents without ever really addressing the actual importance of these diplomatic efforts. Although The Search for Peace in Vietnam is the most comprehensive source on peace efforts during the height of the Vietnam War, many readers will come away with the feeling that they know a great deal about a medley of initiatives that were never all that important and never had any real chance of success. An essay that tried explicitly to challenge Moise's dismissal of these efforts would have improved the structure of the book.

The Search for Peace in Vietnam is fairly comprehensive in its scope, but like too much of recent scholarship on the Vietnam War it focuses excessively on peripheral actors and too little on truly important actors. Was France really so crucial in the Vietnam conflict from 1964 to 1968 that we need three chapters detailing its role? Is South Vietnam's perspective on issues of peace negotiations and diplomacy so insignificant that it does not merit even a single essay in this volume? One could easily reach that conclusion by looking at what topics the editors chose to include and exclude. The book includes a fine essay by John Prados on Nguyen Van Thieu's diplomacy after 1968, but it does not include any essays that examine how South Vietnamese leaders thought about these issues during the height of the conflict. Although historians of the Vietnam War should indeed take account of the international dimensions of the conflict, it is regrettable that this focus causes some scholars to put undue weight on relatively peripheral European actors...