Inventing Vietnam: The United States and State Building 1954–1968 (review)

To the great boon of historians—but equally great misfortune of everyone else, except perhaps for defense contractors—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have made new books on the Vietnam War timely, topical, and relevant to current affairs. Although this is true for almost any new book on Vietnam, few authors will hit this target as squarely as James M. Carter does. Written with admirable clarity, insight, and concision, his Inventing Vietnam examines the U.S. project to build a viable government and society for South Vietnam, a vast endeavor he refers to as “state-building.”

Carter’s main argument is that the United States tried to “invent” South Vietnam during the period from the collapse of French rule in 1954 and the tumultuous, pivotal events of 1968, when U.S. intervention peaked and Washington began its long, painful exit from Indochina. Carter is no post-modernist: When he argues that the United States sought to invent Vietnam, he means this literally, not as a theoretical construct of post-colonial imaginings. Because of the Cold War and its extension into Asia by 1950, Americans believed they needed to build a working state in Vietnam to compete with the rival high modernist solutions proposed by the Vietnamese Communists and their Soviet and Chinese patrons. All this will seem familiar to any student of the Cold War, let alone the Vietnam War, but Carter adds to this conventional view of nation-building by including U.S. military spending and training as part of a state-building process. Carter argues that the military component to state-building was not a rival program but an integral part of state-building. On this and related points, Carter is entirely persuasive.

However, there are other aspects of Inventing Vietnam that require greater elaboration or corroboration, either because Carter overstates his case or because he exaggerates existing historiographical failings. Sometimes he simply needs to be clearer about his own intentions. For example, his analysis could benefit from a discussion that distinguishes between nation-building, the traditional term used by historians, and state-building, his preferred term. Surprisingly, Carter does not seem to have made use of Francis Fukuyama’s book State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), which examines this distinction. Although Carter occasionally uses the term “nation-building,” he makes a deliberate point of referring to U.S. efforts at “state-building”—surely an enlightening choice, but what are the key differences between the two? He never says. The overwhelming majority of historians of the war have looked to some extent at the U.S. “nation-building” project, so what does the distinct concept of “state-building” add? Quite a bit, as it turns out, but this needs more explication from Carter, especially because it is his principal contribution to the existing literature. His failure to explore this fundamental difference leaves some intriguing questions hanging in the air. Does he believe that South Vietnam constituted a nation but lacked a state? From the tenor of his book, I assume the answer is an emphatic “no,” but on such important questions that get to the heart of his subject, Carter needs to explain the difference between the two concepts, in theory and in practice.

Inventing Vietnam is oddly deficient in discussing political reform as a component of the “state-building” project—an odd omission given that it would be nearly impossible to build a state without focusing on the essentials of politics and government. We find here very little about civil society and almost nothing about governance. Even familiar episodes in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ chimerical drive for political reform are absent, such as the infamous 1967 constitution and elections (Dwight Eisenhower benefited from Saigon’s largely illusory stability in the 1950s and thus could be content with an authoritarian regime under Ngo Dinh Diem). Similarly, modernization/development theory receives only cursory discussion, and important state-building figures...