Vietnam's Communist Revolution: The Power and Limits of Ideology by Tuong Vu (review)

What drove the North Vietnamese leadership to fight the most powerful country in the world, the United States? Did their leaders understand what they were up against and what the costs to the nation would be? While Tuong Vu's book is not about the "Vietnam War" per se, it is this puzzle that drove him to explore Vietnam's communist revolution—a rare case of a revolution that succeeded and which has stood the test of time.

Vu takes readers on a journey through the history of Vietnamese communism: from the introduction of communist ideas in the 1920s and 1930s, through to the gradual ideological integration with the Soviet bloc in the 1950s. As the author notes, "Communism was completely alien to Vietnam" (p. 59)—an obvious statement perhaps, but a powerful reminder that Vietnam's leaders prioritized self-determination before communism's global revolutionary mission (p. 12). In short, as an ideology, patriotism trumped communism. In the early twentieth century, the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) was born "out of the most progressive elements of the Vietnamese Nationalist Party" (p. 71). It is a striking contradiction with the conservative thinking of the Party today.

According to Vu, "Marxist-Leninism built on nationalist frustrations when it entered Vietnam" (p. 16). And because Marxist-Leninist theory did not oppose nationalism, when Vietnam's nationalist leaders became communists they were not required to renounce their nationalist sentiments. In return, they gained international brotherhood with fellow communists (p. 17). It is this relationship with other socialist movements that determined Vietnam's foreign policy, and arguably fate, in the following decades. The role of ideology became the leading force for the Vietnamese to stand up to the United States and China, making them believe in the seemingly impossible. After the war, ideology played a central role in the governance of the country: 1) it legitimized Party rule of the state and the economy; 2) it supported the VCP's internal legitimacy and; 3) it linked externally to the solidarity with the transnational network of communist and worker movements.

Throughout the book, Vu demonstrates how the North Vietnamese bought into the mission of internationalism, and how the pride of revolutionary success became the central driver of the country's foreign policy, especially after Hanoi's victory over the United States in 1975. "Drunk with pride" (p. 238), the Vietnamese, now united, would pursue a political path that was no longer viable in China—which deviated from Marxist-Leninism to Maoism—as well as the Soviet Union which collapsed in 1991. But the VCP persisted, and despite the adoption of economic reforms in the mid-1980s, revolutionary communism remained at the core of VCP values.

While the communist ideology was the central driver behind the success of Vietnam's military forces during the Cold War, it also proved to be a weakness. Many irreversible missed opportunities—including normalization of relations with the United States in 1977, which could have had prevented future conflicts with China and Cambodia—occurred because of Hanoi's stubborn adherence to Marxist-Leninism.

Tuong Vu disagrees with the mainstream view that Vietnam was a helpless victim and pawn of the Great Powers during the Cold War. Instead, he argues that North Vietnam was an enthusiastic participant on the ideological frontline of the Cold War because it believed that it was entrusted by history "with the duty to defend this outpost against imperialism" (p. 113). As he shows in Chapter Four in particular, between 1953 and 1960, world peace and proletarian internationalism became more important to North Vietnam's leaders than the cause of national unification. By that time, a "genuine patriotism" had been transformed into a union between "the love for the motherland with class consciousness" (p. 139). Thus, as Prime Minister Pham Van Dong wrote in 1958: "to be patriotic is to develop socialism, to develop socialism is to be patriotic" (p. 141).

It was a conscious process...