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Cambridge Studies in US Foreign Relations
Vietnam's American War: A New History
The American war in Vietnam was so much more than the sum of its battles. To make sense of it, we must look beyond the conflict itself. We must understand its context and, above all, the formative experiences, worldview, and motivations of those who devised communist strategies and tactics. Vietnam's American War, now in its second edition, remains a story of how and why Hanoi won. However, this revised and expanded edition offers more extensive and nuanced insights into Southern Vietnamese history, politics, and society. It puts to rest the myth of Vietnamese national unity by documenting the myriad, profound local fractures exacerbated by US intervention. It also includes over thirty-five new images intended to highlight that the Vietnam War was, fundamentally, a Vietnamese civil war and tragedy. This new edition is as richly detailed as it is original, eye-opening, and absorbing.
- GenresHistory
460 pages, Hardcover
Published June 13, 2024
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January 21, 2025
3.5 stars. Asselin is one of the big names in Vietnam War studies who've made a name for themselves by writing about the war from the Vietnamese perspective. This trend in the scholarship has been edifying and welcome but, frankly, it makes me wish I had read the first (2018) edition of this book rather than the second (2024). With this second edition, Asselin is clearly riding high on a current (revisionist?) wave in the scholarship which seeks to emphasise the agency and legitimacy of "South Vietnam", and to recast the Vietnam War as being primarily a civil war.
Asselin clearly has a number of axes to grind and academic beefs to settle, the guy is a firebrand. From the introduction he comes out swinging, namechecking academics and using the word "absurd" no fewer than twelve thousand times. Just take this bit from page 9:
"In 2020, to illustrate, an Ivy League professor and author of a Pulitzer-winning book on the origins of US involvement in Vietnam and his less-accomplished acolyte - neither of whom speaks a word of Vietnamese not on a restaurant menu - submitted that it is largely pointless to study non-American actors in the Cold War...Based on that (absurd) contention, the pair argued...The Pulitzer-winning professor in question teaches at Harvard! With such scholars and authors as exemplars, no wonder, then, that the study of the "Vietnam War" in the West has remained so problematic, so stale, so rudimentary, so primitive for so long."
Was this a private conversation?! Jesus. (The scholar in question is Fredrik Logevall I'm guessing). So all that to say, this book could not be more different than Asselin's earlier stuff which is very much out of the archives and into the weeds. This time around the man is unchained. It makes for engaging reading, and he's an entertaining writer, but more's the pity, because the price he pays for settling these scores and hammering home his core arguments (which I'll get to in a second) is that he comes across as hopelessly biased and untrustworthy. He also decided to go light on the footnoting this time around because readers can "consult my other works for that stuff" (my paraphrasing), which is a shame, because he sure seems to have access to Ho Chi Minh's thoughts at crucial moments and I'd love to have been able to see where some of these assessments are coming from and judge their reliability for myself. For example: "Ho was confident communists would win most of the seats, if not legitimately then by rigging the vote" (p.68) or "...suggest that Vietnam intended to maintain close connections to the United States...In fact, he had no intention of doing so."(p.69) or "he was playing the Americans in the Fall of 1945; he had neither the desire nor the inclination to work with them on a long-term basis" (p.70) I'm sure Asselin has his reasons for offering up this conjecture as historical fact, but I'd like to see what the documentary evidence here actually says, or at least see where it comes from. Upon review, I see I wrote "source?" in the margins quite a few times (almost as frequently as "bs" and "biased").
More generally, Asselin's core thesis is that the conflict(s) in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975 was fundamentally a civil war, and moreover one that Ho Chi Minh started in 1945. From this point of departure emanates an effort to challenge both the received wisdom, and Ho Chi Minh, at just about every turn.
Just to pause here before going any further, I think there's something to be said for highlighting the non-Communist cause in Vietnam and the ways in which southern Vietnamese agency shaped the contours of the war. This is probably a noble effort and one which nuances our understanding in constructive ways. It's been a while since I've been so enjoyably challenged by a knowledgeable author so I'll tip my hat to Asselin for that.
That being said, I think it's possible to go so deep into revisionism that you end up missing the forest for the trees: readers with little prior background are liable to walk away misinformed. To illustrate by way of comparison: French troops from Vichy France fought against Free troops from Free France, and I'll bet a good number of leaders and thinkers in the former had aspirations for the future of their state; would it be accurate to say that a paradigm of "civil war" best captures the dynamics of France at this time? Surely, looking at things that way might reveal some interesting and under-appreciated facets of this conflict. Yet, fundamentally, there would be limits to the usefulness of this way of looking at things, because in the final analysis, Vichy France - for all the constituencies it may have created and for all the French aspirations it may have given voice to - was obviously the product of forces extrinsic to France, created and destroyed in the context of something that had little to do with internal French forces. To stretch this illustration just a little further: There are undoubtedly ways in which it would be wrong to call the leadership of The French State (Vichy France's official name) "puppets", and yet a scholarship which emphasized the autonomy of Vichy France and the civil war dynamics of France at this time while trying to prove that the Vichy leadership were not puppets of Nazi Germany would also be fundamentally missing something. And what's true for the French State is true for the State of Vietnam (the official name given by the French to the state they created in the south). Asselin invites us to overlook what is glaringly obvious: the primary contradiction which animated this conflict from 1945 onwards was not a conflict between communists and non-communists, but a conflict between local communist-coordinated forces and foreign powers.
His narrative is notable for what it omits, and his analysis is interesting for what it lingers on, and what it doesnt. Regarding the latter, Asselin dismisses the 1945 August Revolution as "in fact nothing more than a Communist power grab...an otherwise prosaic, banal, and even lucky seizure of power. The story would have been vastly different if noncommunist groups had been better organized and prepared for the end of World War II". Right. Well, to be clear, all revolutions are ultimately seizures of power (usually with a bit of luck involved), and that other groups weren't well organized or prepared is kind of precisely the point: the communists were prepared and better organized and better at winning the people to their cause than any of the other groups - that's how they came to power. Alerting us to the fact that not everyone liked the communists (a revelation to precisely no one) should not obscure the fact that the French and US ability to create constituencies (i.e. find collaborators, i.e divide and rule) was not a development in a civil war, it WAS the war.
When narrating how Ngo Dinh Diem came to power in the French creation of the State of Vietnam, I find it interesting that Asselin writes only "As the talks unfolded in Geneva, Ngo Dinh Diem accepted an offer from Bao Dai to become SOVN Prime Minister." This is interesting tome because as widely available declassified CIA documents make clear, the US was intimately involved in finding a nationalist Vietnamese to install as the leader of a noncommunist Vietnamese state, and uncoincidentally Diem's brother had been the CIA's primary contact in Saigon for years. A notable omission.
Similarly, Asselin's take on Diem's refusal for South Vietnam to participate in the elections agreed to at the Geneva Accords on the grounds that SOVN - France's creation - had not itself signed those accords, and anyways you could never expect the commies to run a free and fair election, is basically just a rehash of the contemporary US position. Moreover, Asselin's twist: that actually the Southern government was legitimate and awesome and very possibly Ho would have lost free and fair elections, seems like kettle logic: Diem didn't do the elections because he didn't have to, and actually he couldn't do them, and actually he would have won! Hard to know what the majority of people would have voted for, but Asselin's assessment about the likelihood of a communist defeat is at odds with contemporary US CIA and State Department assessments, and supposed communist duplicity on this point is doubly ironic considering A) rigid adherence to the Geneva Accords is something Asselin covers in his other book and B) if you can't trust them to have free and fair elections: why agree to them!
Asselin asks of the South Vietnamese leader: "would Diem have been so illiberal absent the communist threat to the RVN?" To invert this question: How might Ho Chi Minh and his comrades have behaved if foreign powers and their local collaborators hadn't been trying to annihilate them all the time? To take seriously for a moment the civil war dynamic, the Vietnamese Nationalists were formed in the image of the Chinese Nationalists (the KMT), as it happens, Ho was there, in Guangzhou in 1927, when the Nationalists turned on the Communists and murdered thousands of them in the White Terror of 1927. It's not as if Vietnamese nationalists weren't assassinating rivals at this time. Revolution, after all, is not a dinner party. (Not for nothing, those same Chinese Nationalists were the occupying power in northern Vietnam after the Japanese surrender.) It was far from certain in 1945 that the Chinese communists were going to win. To indulge in counterfactuals, I think it's not crazy to think that despite being a communist, Ho might have been quite a bit more chill if external powers hadn't constantly been trying to kill him and he had a chance form a government in partnership with the French (like he negotiated, before the French reneged on the deal), at a moment when it looked like China would be nationalist and the US not unhelpful.
As a final aside, I found it baffling and a real sign of where Asselin's revisionist head is at that he felt the need to explain the mitigating circumstances behind summary execution of that Viet Cong who was shot in the head in front of a rolling camera.
Asselin clearly has a number of axes to grind and academic beefs to settle, the guy is a firebrand. From the introduction he comes out swinging, namechecking academics and using the word "absurd" no fewer than twelve thousand times. Just take this bit from page 9:
"In 2020, to illustrate, an Ivy League professor and author of a Pulitzer-winning book on the origins of US involvement in Vietnam and his less-accomplished acolyte - neither of whom speaks a word of Vietnamese not on a restaurant menu - submitted that it is largely pointless to study non-American actors in the Cold War...Based on that (absurd) contention, the pair argued...The Pulitzer-winning professor in question teaches at Harvard! With such scholars and authors as exemplars, no wonder, then, that the study of the "Vietnam War" in the West has remained so problematic, so stale, so rudimentary, so primitive for so long."
Was this a private conversation?! Jesus. (The scholar in question is Fredrik Logevall I'm guessing). So all that to say, this book could not be more different than Asselin's earlier stuff which is very much out of the archives and into the weeds. This time around the man is unchained. It makes for engaging reading, and he's an entertaining writer, but more's the pity, because the price he pays for settling these scores and hammering home his core arguments (which I'll get to in a second) is that he comes across as hopelessly biased and untrustworthy. He also decided to go light on the footnoting this time around because readers can "consult my other works for that stuff" (my paraphrasing), which is a shame, because he sure seems to have access to Ho Chi Minh's thoughts at crucial moments and I'd love to have been able to see where some of these assessments are coming from and judge their reliability for myself. For example: "Ho was confident communists would win most of the seats, if not legitimately then by rigging the vote" (p.68) or "...suggest that Vietnam intended to maintain close connections to the United States...In fact, he had no intention of doing so."(p.69) or "he was playing the Americans in the Fall of 1945; he had neither the desire nor the inclination to work with them on a long-term basis" (p.70) I'm sure Asselin has his reasons for offering up this conjecture as historical fact, but I'd like to see what the documentary evidence here actually says, or at least see where it comes from. Upon review, I see I wrote "source?" in the margins quite a few times (almost as frequently as "bs" and "biased").
More generally, Asselin's core thesis is that the conflict(s) in Vietnam from 1945 to 1975 was fundamentally a civil war, and moreover one that Ho Chi Minh started in 1945. From this point of departure emanates an effort to challenge both the received wisdom, and Ho Chi Minh, at just about every turn.
Just to pause here before going any further, I think there's something to be said for highlighting the non-Communist cause in Vietnam and the ways in which southern Vietnamese agency shaped the contours of the war. This is probably a noble effort and one which nuances our understanding in constructive ways. It's been a while since I've been so enjoyably challenged by a knowledgeable author so I'll tip my hat to Asselin for that.
That being said, I think it's possible to go so deep into revisionism that you end up missing the forest for the trees: readers with little prior background are liable to walk away misinformed. To illustrate by way of comparison: French troops from Vichy France fought against Free troops from Free France, and I'll bet a good number of leaders and thinkers in the former had aspirations for the future of their state; would it be accurate to say that a paradigm of "civil war" best captures the dynamics of France at this time? Surely, looking at things that way might reveal some interesting and under-appreciated facets of this conflict. Yet, fundamentally, there would be limits to the usefulness of this way of looking at things, because in the final analysis, Vichy France - for all the constituencies it may have created and for all the French aspirations it may have given voice to - was obviously the product of forces extrinsic to France, created and destroyed in the context of something that had little to do with internal French forces. To stretch this illustration just a little further: There are undoubtedly ways in which it would be wrong to call the leadership of The French State (Vichy France's official name) "puppets", and yet a scholarship which emphasized the autonomy of Vichy France and the civil war dynamics of France at this time while trying to prove that the Vichy leadership were not puppets of Nazi Germany would also be fundamentally missing something. And what's true for the French State is true for the State of Vietnam (the official name given by the French to the state they created in the south). Asselin invites us to overlook what is glaringly obvious: the primary contradiction which animated this conflict from 1945 onwards was not a conflict between communists and non-communists, but a conflict between local communist-coordinated forces and foreign powers.
His narrative is notable for what it omits, and his analysis is interesting for what it lingers on, and what it doesnt. Regarding the latter, Asselin dismisses the 1945 August Revolution as "in fact nothing more than a Communist power grab...an otherwise prosaic, banal, and even lucky seizure of power. The story would have been vastly different if noncommunist groups had been better organized and prepared for the end of World War II". Right. Well, to be clear, all revolutions are ultimately seizures of power (usually with a bit of luck involved), and that other groups weren't well organized or prepared is kind of precisely the point: the communists were prepared and better organized and better at winning the people to their cause than any of the other groups - that's how they came to power. Alerting us to the fact that not everyone liked the communists (a revelation to precisely no one) should not obscure the fact that the French and US ability to create constituencies (i.e. find collaborators, i.e divide and rule) was not a development in a civil war, it WAS the war.
When narrating how Ngo Dinh Diem came to power in the French creation of the State of Vietnam, I find it interesting that Asselin writes only "As the talks unfolded in Geneva, Ngo Dinh Diem accepted an offer from Bao Dai to become SOVN Prime Minister." This is interesting tome because as widely available declassified CIA documents make clear, the US was intimately involved in finding a nationalist Vietnamese to install as the leader of a noncommunist Vietnamese state, and uncoincidentally Diem's brother had been the CIA's primary contact in Saigon for years. A notable omission.
Similarly, Asselin's take on Diem's refusal for South Vietnam to participate in the elections agreed to at the Geneva Accords on the grounds that SOVN - France's creation - had not itself signed those accords, and anyways you could never expect the commies to run a free and fair election, is basically just a rehash of the contemporary US position. Moreover, Asselin's twist: that actually the Southern government was legitimate and awesome and very possibly Ho would have lost free and fair elections, seems like kettle logic: Diem didn't do the elections because he didn't have to, and actually he couldn't do them, and actually he would have won! Hard to know what the majority of people would have voted for, but Asselin's assessment about the likelihood of a communist defeat is at odds with contemporary US CIA and State Department assessments, and supposed communist duplicity on this point is doubly ironic considering A) rigid adherence to the Geneva Accords is something Asselin covers in his other book and B) if you can't trust them to have free and fair elections: why agree to them!
Asselin asks of the South Vietnamese leader: "would Diem have been so illiberal absent the communist threat to the RVN?" To invert this question: How might Ho Chi Minh and his comrades have behaved if foreign powers and their local collaborators hadn't been trying to annihilate them all the time? To take seriously for a moment the civil war dynamic, the Vietnamese Nationalists were formed in the image of the Chinese Nationalists (the KMT), as it happens, Ho was there, in Guangzhou in 1927, when the Nationalists turned on the Communists and murdered thousands of them in the White Terror of 1927. It's not as if Vietnamese nationalists weren't assassinating rivals at this time. Revolution, after all, is not a dinner party. (Not for nothing, those same Chinese Nationalists were the occupying power in northern Vietnam after the Japanese surrender.) It was far from certain in 1945 that the Chinese communists were going to win. To indulge in counterfactuals, I think it's not crazy to think that despite being a communist, Ho might have been quite a bit more chill if external powers hadn't constantly been trying to kill him and he had a chance form a government in partnership with the French (like he negotiated, before the French reneged on the deal), at a moment when it looked like China would be nationalist and the US not unhelpful.
As a final aside, I found it baffling and a real sign of where Asselin's revisionist head is at that he felt the need to explain the mitigating circumstances behind summary execution of that Viet Cong who was shot in the head in front of a rolling camera.
December 26, 2024
I FINISHEDDDD. Even tho this was a textbook for class it was practically like reading a novel and I was never upset to have to read it. So thorough and informative. Plus Prof asselin was a lit teacher
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews