When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

From a strategic standpoint, the final years of the American war in Vietnam highlighted a persistent uncertainty over how the conflict would end. Both civil and military leaders wrestled with confusing estimates on the war’s progress. These uncertainties mattered because they influenced the timing of and ways in which US forces withdrew from a war that would not end once the Americans had departed. Despite arguments that General Creighton Abrams had fought a “better war” in Vietnam leading to a military victory, a sense of strategic stalemate hung over these final years. Problems remained in assessing the political aspects of pacification, the staying power of the South Vietnamese armed forces once American troops departed, and the longterm viability of the Saigon regime. By early 1969, Abrams also had to confront political decisions leading to the first withdrawal of US troops, decisions that would pit him against the Nixon administration and bring to the surface grave civil–military tensions. Despite years of effort, a key question remained unanswered as these withdrawals began – how stable would South Vietnam be once Americans departed? Ultimately, these final years left the Americans no closer to answering the question of whether they would achieve “victory” in Vietnam.

This chapter offers a synthetic overview of the range of international law issues that arose during the course of the Vietnam War, especially as Americans took over from the French after Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and moved towards massive escalation between 1964 and 1973. The chapter begins with the debate about what law applied to the conflict, which turned on the legal status of South Vietnam. The chapter then asks what claims were possible and plausible when it came to the legality of American intervention in the war. Next, the chapter addresses the different kinds of warfare in which the United States engaged, from its bombing campaigns over North Vietnamese territory and waters to the changing forms of its counterinsurgency in the South and, later, across the Cambodian border. Finally, the chapter concludes by examining the legal legacy of Vietnam: not only how it led to the most significant substantive development of the laws of war since the Geneva Conventions, the First and Second Additional Protocols, but also, and equally importantly, how it ensured that international law would play (for good or ill) a central role in debate over and analysis of all future conflicts.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

After the Vietnam War, unified Vietnam charted a twisty trajectory in search of its place in the world. This course went through five major turning points - in 1977, 1986, 1989, 2003, and 2014 – as the ruling Communist Party responded to fundamental changes in Vietnam’s strategic environment. Reflecting competing worldviews in the elites, these responses resulted from the struggle between two long-term choices: to reject the Western-led world order and oppose Western influence, or to accept the Western-led world order and adapt Western influence. At a deeper level and from a long historical perspective, this struggle was complicated primarily by Vietnam’s location vis-à-vis China and the major transoceanic routes. If the Vietnam War ended with the triumph of the anti-Western choice, the post-war period has seen Vietnam alternate between anti-Westernism and international integration. Decades of zig-zagging eventually turned Vietnam from an “outpost of socialism” and “spearhead of the world national liberation movement” to an “engaged and responsible member of the international community” and from a fierce opponent to a discreet ally of the United States, while not fundamentally shaking its commitment to denying Chinese regional dominance.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

Based on Vietnamese sources, some located in the archive of the Communist Party of Vietnam, this chapter depicts the landscape and environment of North Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1965–73). It analyzes the policies of the Vietnamese Workers’ Party (VWP) to build a North Vietnamese homefront. This chapter argues that, inspired by patriotism, and thanks to sacrifice of millions of people, North Vietnam could simultaneously successfully carry out two interrelated strategic tasks: building socialism in the North and supplying the South. Without building up socialism, there would nothing to supply the South with. And without supplying South, the construction of socialism would be impossible. In short, Vietnam came out of the war victorious thanks to the policy of turning the North into a strong and reliable homefront that served as a material as well as a spiritual mainstay for a long and brutal war.

In great depth, Volume II examines the escalation of the Vietnam War and its development into a violent stalemate, beginning with the overthrow of Ngô Đình Diệm in 1963 to the aftermath of the 1968 Tet Offensive. This five-year period was, for the most part, the fulcrum of a three-decade struggle to determine the future of Vietnam and was marked by rival spirals of escalation generated by the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the United States. The volume explores the war’s military aspects on all sides, the politics of war in the two Vietnams and the United States, and the war’s international and transnational dimensions in politics, protest, diplomacy, and economics, while also paying close attention to the agency of historical actors on both sides of the conflict in South Vietnam.

This chapter explores political developments in the Republic of Vietnam (RVN) from the coup against President Ngô Đình Diệm in November 1963 to the consolidation of General Nguyễn Văn Thiệu’s power as president in late 1968. The dominant feature of politics in the RVN during this time was the monopolization of political power by a divided military. But noncommunist civilian groups challenged military rule in the form of street protests, armed rebellion, and constitutional assemblies, forcing the military to accede to elections and the return to constitutional government in 1967. These changes created limited opportunities for competitive politics but also granted a veneer of legitimacy to military rule as Nguyễn Văn Thiệu won election and outmaneuvered his rivals within the armed forces. The chapter addresses the powerful influence that the United States, as well as historic faultlines in Vietnamese noncommunist nationalism such as religion, regionl and differing experiences of colonialism and communism, exercised on RVN politics. The chapter contends that the RVN was both an outpost of the American empire and a site of febrile postcolonial politics.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

The American War in Vietnam is often described as a struggle for the “hearts and minds” of the Vietamese people, a fundamentally political conflict in which “pacification,” the push to uproot the adversarys hold on the villages, became a primary mechanism in fighting the war. This chapter opens with an inquiry into the meaning of the terms of art, not just pacification but “counterinsurgency,” “civic action,” “nation-building,” and others. It observes this schema applies to an essential problem, the degree of South Vietnamese commitment to pacification, which remained problematic. To show this I start with a description of how pacification evolved under Ngo Dinh Diem and his successors. On the American side we see presidents, from Dwight D. Eisenhower, who took a conventional view, to John F. Kennedy, who applied counterinsurgency, to Lyndon B. Johnson, who championed the “other war,” one that privileged economic and social development. LBJ became the first to create an organizational structure to conduct pacification programs. The late-war innovations to these efforts, including measures of village loyalty, the Phoenix program attacking the National Liberation Fronts infrastructure, and the emphasis on elections from national to village level, were products of the Johnson administration. From the beginning, American pacification policy oscillated between emphasizing security versus social development before settling on security.

When, how, and why did the Vietnam War begin? Although its end is dated with great precision to April 30, 1975, there is no agreement as to when it began. The Vietnam War was an enormously complex conflict and even though any comprehensive reckoning of its causes must include the role of the United States, it did not begin as an “American War.” This volume presents the scholarship that has flourished since the 1990s to situate the war and its origins within longer chronologies and wider interpretative perspectives. The Vietnam War was a war for national liberation and an episode of major importance in the Global Cold War. Yet it was also a civil war, and civil warfare was a defining feature of the conflict from the outset. Understanding the Vietnamese and Indochinese origins of the Vietnam War is a critical first step toward reckoning with the history of this violent, costly, and multilayered war.

This chapter analyzes the United States’ relations with the Socialist Republic of Vietnam from 1975 to the present. The termination of war in 1975 brought conflict of a different sort. Washington retained the wartime trade embargo and rejected Hanoi’s demands for “reparations.” Vietnam ignored US requests to account for possible prisoners of war and missing in action (MIA) on its territory. Attitudes shifted in the 1980s. America’s détente with the USSR opened possibilities for Moscow’s ally, Vietnam. Now in dire straits economically, Hanoi’s new leaders revamped the nation’s stagnant economy and opened trade with numerous nations. Vietnam was sufficiently pressed that in the 1990s it bowed to harsh US demands for what was called normalization. Diplomatic relations and trade followed. Vietnam–US relations took an ironic turn in the new century. As China emerged the dominant power in East Asia and expanded into the South China Sea, America increased its military presence in the region and formed a strategic partnership with Vietnam. Wary of China, Hanoi needed US assistance. But it feared dependency on its former enemy. Americans still condemned Vietnam’s authoritarian government and human rights’ abuses. Both seemed content with a relationship a Vietnamese diplomat called the “Goldilocks Formula”: “Not too hot, not too cold.”

The escalation of US military involvement in Vietnam in 1965 sparked a surge in international diplomacy to broker peace, or at least open direct peace talks, between Washington and Hanoi. This chapter recounts some of the myriad (failed) attempts to make progress by third parties – from countries to groups of countries (e.g., the Non-Aligned Movement and the British Commonwealth) to multilateral institutions (e.g., the United Nations) to nonstate actors (organizations, individuals) – in the three or so years before direct US–DRV discussions finally began in Paris in May 1968. Perhaps the most intriguing of these initiatives involved the communist world (i.e., the Soviet bloc, since Mao Zedongs China strongly opposed peace talks), which had embassies in and fraternal interparty contacts with Hanoi that most noncommunist countries lacked. As the communist representative on the three-member International Control Commission, Poland had especially intimate involvement with several peace bids. The chapter examines this history and whether (or not) genuine diplomatic opportunities may have existed to end the Vietnam War, or at least start serious peace talks, earlier, potentially saving many lives. It also probes the concurrent interrelationship between this diplomacy and broader international factors such as the Cold War and Sino-Soviet split.

Throughout the long period of American involvement in Vietnam, Washington officials often justified US intervention by referring to the domino theory. Even before President Dwight D. Eisenhower formally articulated the theory in 1954, civilian as well as military analysts had set out a version of the theory, linking the outcome in Indochina to a chain reaction of regional and global effects. Defeat in Vietnam, they warned, would have calamitous consequences not merely for that country but for the rest of Southeast Asia and perhaps beyond. Over time, US officials moved to a less mechanistic, more psychological version of the theory. Credibility was the new watchword, as policymakers declared it essential to stand firm in Vietnam in order to demonstrate American determination to defend its vital interests not only in the region but around the world. But it was not only American credibility on the world stage that mattered; also at stake, officials feared, was their own and their party’s credibility at home. This chapter examines these permutations of the domino theory, with particular focus on the crucial 1964–5 period under Lyndon B. Johnson.

This chapter focuses on ways to understand the Vietnam War through the operation of race in US interventions during the 1960s. As part of the inquiry, it examines friction between the United States and Panama in 1964 and the invasion of the Dominican Republic in 1965. France’s legacy in Vietnam and the US adaptation of French racialized colonial policies provide a backdrop for the war. The Cold War, rather than territorial annexation or economic exploitation, provided the chief rationale for the US presence in Vietnam and provided a path for particularly American forms of racism to emerge there and in areas of US domestic life that were affected by the conflict. In the interim, Vietnam served as a laboratory in which various theories about modernization and development were evaluated and carried out. The experiences of American minorities in the military are documented, including officials’ efforts to control dissidence in the ranks. African Americans, Native Americans, Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Asian Americans experienced the war in somewhat different ways, but all found themselves confronted by leading assumptions and practices about their minoritarian status. The war led many to see themselves as racially defined in a struggle whose costs were disproportionately borne by people of color amidst discrimination at home and by Vietnamese combatants abroad. As a result new sensibilities led to transformation in American civil society.