SMITH : An international history of the Vietnam War ; Vol. 1. (fülszöveg)
Most previous books on the Vietnam War have seen it primarily as an American military "involvement" in the affairs of a small Asian country halfway across the world. The present study, planned to run to four volumes, seeks to reassess the significance of the conflict by looking at Vietnam as one element in a global power game. It is also the first serions attempt to analyze the decision-making of both sides simultaneously, relating United States policy to the strategy and tactics of the Communists.
The decisions of both the National Liberation Front and the Politburo in Hanoi are presented in the context of events elsewhere in the Communist world, particularly in Moscow and Peking. By bringing to bear his specialist knowledge of Vietnamese politics, R. B. Smith is able to avoid the simplistic assumptions of the "Cold War" debate about international Communism as a "monolithic conspiracy" and at the same time to see Vietnam in the perspective of the "world revolution."
The approach is essentially that of a historian, whose purpose is to go beyond the propaganda images of the time and to explain how the conflict developed as a sequence of moves and countermoves by opposing sides. It is not yet possible to do this on the basis of complete access to government and military archives. But some American documents have by now been declassified and the author has succeeded in bringing together a wide variety of sources among those already available in order to create a new and more coherent framework of analysis.
The first volume covers the period from the completion of the Geneva partition of Vietnam in spring 1955 down to the series of devisions on counterinsurgency taken by the Kennedy administration in autumn 1961. The central question is simple: why did the ceasefire so carefully worked out in the months following the Geneva Agreement of July 1954 break down by the end of the decade?
The answer requires us to explore the evolution of both Communist and American strategy in Asia as a whole during those years, and to consider how the Vietnamese Communist leaders were allowed by their allies to resume their "armed struggle" against a background of increasing world tension. The Kennedy decisions, seen in this broader perspective, appear not as an arbitrary American decision to inflict a new war on Vietnam but as the response to a Communist challenge which could not be ignored.
Although highly controversial, this interpretation is one which deserves to be taken seriously by everyone interested in the nature of contemporary international politics. lt does not of course explain (or excuse) everything the Americans did in Vietnam in later years, but it makes the origins of the conflict more intelligible.
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