America, the Vietnam War, and the World: Comparative and International Perspectives (review)

Instead of rehashing the narrow cycles of orthodoxy, revisionism, and post-revisionism that dominate the historiography of American foreign relations, the contributors to this superb collection of essays about the Vietnam War offer comparative perspectives by looking at Vietnam as "America's war, as an international event, and as a starting point for historical comparisons" and by analyzing the "interconnectedness of these dimensions" (2). Several essays examine the American effort in Vietnam within a broader historical context. Michael Adas treats it as an episode in the history of colonial wars by arguing that decolonization, not the bipolar "Long Peace," represented the dominant global dynamic of the last half-century. In a similar vein, T. Christopher Jesperson compares the successful American war of national liberation against Britain in the eighteenth century with that of the Vietnamese in the twentieth century, noting that after both wars, the defeated superpowers maintained their global dominance for a time, even as those who supported the national revolutions (France and the Soviet Union) suffered economic decline.

Fabian Hilfrich analyzes the ideological hierarchies that underpinned American decisions about the Philippines after 1899 and toward Vietnam in the 1960s. In both instances, Washington policymakers exaggerated the importance of peripheral countries because of their presumed centrality to fulfilling vaunted roles, first, "as the missionaries of democratic civilization" and later as "defensive guardian[s] against the onslaught of barbaric, totalitarian enemies" (57-58). John Prados identifies "more-or-less precise analogs" between America's "peripheral" war in Vietnam and Japan's war with China after 1937—"hubris" at the outset, attempts to wage war on the side without formal declaration or full mobilization, unintended escalation to deny supplies to the enemy, and the mistaken belief that "any negotiated settlement could only be on its own terms" (101). Jeffrey Kimball utilizes the political- science literature on war termination to compare the Korean War armistice negotiations at Panmunjom with Richard Nixon's ill-fated attempts to use "mad" nuclear threats and triangular diplomacy to achieve a negotiated peace without honor or duration.

The remaining essays examine the Vietnam War from other national and transnational perspectives. In a precis of his prize-winning book Choosing War (Berkeley 1999), Fredrik Logevall traces the private opposition of Canada, Britain, and Japan to President Johnson's "Americanization" of the war in 1964/65. Preferring negotiations for a neutralized Vietnam but unwilling to break openly with Washington, America's principal allies (France excepted) offered tepid rhetorical support but no troops to the escalation process. Essays on Thailand and Australia, two allies that did make military contributions, show how both countries reassessed their own priorities when Johnson and Nixon de- escalated after 1968. Eva-Marie Stolberg carefully reconstructs the effects of the Sino-Soviet rivalry on the war, showing how Mao Zedong's militancy trumped Nikita Khrushchev's "peaceful coexistence" in the early 1960s, how Beijing and Moscow competed to supply and advise Hanoi in the mid-1960s, and how both communist giants sought to end the war in 1972 for national and ideological reasons that had little to do with socialist solidarity.

A compelling essay by Mausbach links Vietnam to Auschwitz by arguing that West German students who marched against America's war in Southeast Asia were also fighting fascist tendencies at home and assuaging national guilt for past German atrocities. Similar essays on Italy and East Germany also explore the connection between national and international politics. Leopoldo Nuti is particularly effective in showing how war in Vietnam undermined the center-left coalition in Rome despite vigorous backstage efforts to broker peace negotiations prior to 1968. Barbara Tischler's stellar contribution focuses on the nexus between antiwar activism and the emerging feminist movement. Both in the United States and Europe, shared experiences of sexist subordination within antiwar organizations ("Get me a chick to do some typing!") prompted many feminists...