Hanoi’s War: An International History of the War for Peace in Vietnam by Lien-Hang T. Nguyen (review)

The Vietnamese specialists quoted on the back cover of Hanoi’s War rightly praise the book for offering a new perspective on the Vietnam War missing from the vast literature on what was once America’s “Longest War.” It was also a long war for the Vietnamese, but not the country’s longest by any means. After World War II, Vietnam was engaged in a nearly perpetual struggle for self-determination. On this point, Lien-Hang Nguyen makes an important argument that turns the usual narrative inside-out: instead of seeing Vietnam in the context of the Cold War, we should try looking at America’s war in the context of Vietnam’s historical quest for independence, a quest determined by choices made in Hanoi and Saigon.

From that perspective, it becomes clear that the rivals for power were not puppets or agents of their superpower allies. The strongest thread running through the book, moreover, is the story of how the “Comrades Le”—Le Duc Tho and Le Duan—became the actual leaders in Hanoi’s “War for Peace,” bypassing the most famous Vietnamese nationalist of modern times, Ho Chi Minh, and the leading military commander in the war against the French, Vo Nguyen Giap. When these two Ho and Giap raised serious questions about the general offensive–general uprising (GO-GU) strategy pursued by the Comrades Le, they found themselves outmaneuvered in the North Vietnamese Politburo, and many of their adherents were placed under arrest.

The GO-GU strategy was premised on the notion that a general offensive in the South would produce a general uprising that would topple the Saigon government. This strategy was tried in 1968 with the Tet Offensive and again in the spring offensive of 1972; it failed both times. Le Duan’s confidence in his theory of how the war would end was not shaken, however, until Richard Nixon and his chief foreign policy adviser, Henry Kissinger, manipulated superpower relations to create a serious problem for Hanoi in the form of pressure from Moscow and Beijing in 1972 to accept peace terms that did not include the immediate ousting of Nguyen Van Thieu from the presidential palace in Saigon.

How all this came about is recounted by Lien-Hang Nguyen, who offers a genuinely new perspective on the war. The book begins with the aftermath of the French defeat in 1954, when the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) attempted to shift from war to peace and failed to place the new government on a strong political footing. The DRV leaders were divided between those who argued that priority should go to developing the postwar North and those who argued for carrying on the fight in the South until the country was united under Hanoi’s leadership. The “moderates,” who favored the first option, were operating somewhat under a handicap because of a widespread feeling that Ho had not provided correct leadership when he had allowed the Geneva Conference to cheat the revolution of its full victory as a result of the epic Battle of Dien Bien Phu.

When Le Duan came north after the French war ended, he became de facto leader of the South-first cadre, and eventually, with Le Duc Tho as his closest ally, the principal figure in the Politburo. Le Duan’s leadership meant a tightening of internal security to clamp down on dissenters and intellectuals, which went along with his unbounded faith in GO-GU. Meanwhile, in Saigon, Ngo Dinh Diem cooperated with Le Duan by turning the South into a repressive regime that heightened the intensity of a growing insurgency. Le Duan pressed for more active involvement beyond “politics” in the struggle and carried the day. Those in Washington who argued for dumping Diem in 1963 won that debate, but the U.S.-backed coup that toppled the regime only encouraged Le Duan to...