The Vietnam War: A Concise International History (review)

Over the past decade, a growing number of scholars have explored the international dimensions of the Vietnam War. In so doing, they have managed to nudge the center of gravity for Vietnam War scholarship away from its traditional fixation on the role of the United States. In this admirably compact and briskly written volume, Mark Atwood Lawrence builds on this trend, presenting the conflict as an episode in global history. He locates its roots both in the long history of Vietnam and in the historical conjuncture between decolonization and the Cold War while emphasizing the critical contributions of Vietnamese and other belligerents to the war's key developments. The United States remains the central actor in Lawrence's story, to be sure. Yet he shows throughout how the decisions of other actors—in Hanoi, Saigon, Beijing, Moscow, and other places—"shaped, constrained, and sometimes determined U.S. choices" (p. 3).

A Washington-centric lens yields too distorted a picture of the origins, course, and outcome of what the Vietnamese, ironically, call "the American War." By the same token, decentering the United States carries its own risks. If the U.S. government had not decided to deploy hundreds of thousands of combat troops, a civil war within Vietnam would not have metamorphosed into a major international conflict. Consequently, Lawrence's decision "to strike a balance by examining the American role within a broadly international context" (p. 4) makes eminent sense—and an intelligent balance informs and gives shape to the entire narrative.

Both sides of the East-West divide contributed to the internationalization of the Franco-Vietminh conflict, almost from its inception. Policymakers in Washington feared that a victory for Ho ChiMinh's forces would constitute a major setback for the West in the ColdWar. Hence, despite serious reservations, U.S. officials began to provide military aid to the French, their North Atlantic Treaty Organization partner, in early 1950. Their counterparts in Moscow and Beijing also identified important global interests at stake in Indochina, prompting their near-simultaneous recognition of Ho's fledgling Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). DRV leaders, for their part, skillfully—and not for the last time—exploited these international tensions to advance their own interests.

Following the Geneva compromise of 1954, which Lawrence demonstrates owed much to the insistence of Ho's erstwhile Communist allies that he not hold out for a unified Vietnam, a restive calm prevailed throughout the divided country. During that period, the administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower launched an elaborate nation-building program south of the 17th parallel. Yet the superficial achievements of the program only partially hid fundamental structural weaknesses. "The result was an aura of middle-class prosperity in the cities," Lawrence observes, "but also a dangerous dependence on the United States to maintain a standard of living wildly out of line with South Vietnam's actual productive capacity" (p. 60). Nor did the South Vietnamese government ever achieve genuine legitimacy among its predominantly rural population. A southern-based insurgency against the U.S.-backed regime of Ngo Dinh Diem erupted in 1957, drawing the formal support of Hanoi two years later. By the time John F. Kennedy became president, an insurgent war was raging in South Vietnam that, in Lawrence's apt characterization "was simultaneously a civil war among Southerners and a cross-border effort by Hanoi to reunify the country on its terms" (p. 65).

Lawrence devotes four of his eight chapters to the years bracketed by the initial U.S. military escalation, in 1961, and the conclusion of the ill-fated Paris Peace Accords, in 1973. Those chapters track many of the standard treatments of that crucial period, offering a succinct and well-developed explication of the military and diplomatic stalemate that had developed by the late 1960s. The Tet Offensive of early 1968, which many scholars identify as the war's watershed, "merely changed the nature of the stalemate," Lawrence avers. The offensive confirmed the skepticism of the U.S. public toward...